'Consistency' murmurs Garrard. 'Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Surely one can draw a distinction between eating meat and wearing leather.'
'Degrees of obscenity' she replies.
'I too have the greatest respect for codes based on respect for life,' says Dean Arendt, entering the debate for the first time. 'I am prepared to accept that dietary taboos do not have to be mere customs. I will accept that underlying them are genuine moral concerns. But at the same time one must say that our whole superstructure of concern and belief is a closed book to animals themselves. You can't explain to a steer that its life is going to be spared, any more than you can explain to a bug that you are not going to step on it. In the lives of animals, things, good or bad, just happen. So vegetarianism is a very odd transaction, when you come to think of it, with the beneficiaries unaware that they are being benefited. And with no hope of ever becoming aware. Because they live in a vacuum of consciousness.'
Arendt pauses. It is his mother's turn to speak, but she merely looks confused, grey and tired and confused. He leans across. 'It's been a long day, Mother,' he says. 'Perhaps it is time.'
'Yes, it is time,' she says.
'You won't have coffee?' enquires President Garrard.
'No, it will just keep me awake.' She turns to Arendt. 'That is a good point you raise. No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. No awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness
'To say nothing of babies,' interjects Wunderlich. Everyone turns and looks at him. 'Babies have no self-consciousness, yet we think it a more heinous crime to kill a baby than an adult.'
'Therefore?' says Arendt.
'Therefore all this discussion of consciousness and whether animals have it is just a smokescreen. At bottom we protect our own kind. Thumbs up to human babies, thumbs down to veal calves. Don't you think so, Mrs Costello?'
'I don't know what I think,' says Elizabeth Costello. 'I often wonder what thinking is, what understanding is. Do we really understand the universe better than animals do? Understanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, hey presto, you understand. It makes sense if you live inside a Rubik cube, but if you don't…'
There is a silence. 'I would have thought -' says Norma; but at this point he gets to his feet, and to his relief Norma stops.
The president rises, and then everyone else. 'A wonderful lecture, Mrs Costello,' says the president. 'Much food for thought. We look forward to tomorrow's offering.'
It is after eleven. His mother has retired for the night, he and Norma are downstairs clearing up the children's mess. After that he still has a class to prepare.
'Are you going to her seminar tomorrow?' asks Norma.
'I'll have to.'
'What is it on?'
'"The Poets and the Animals". That's the title. The English Department is staging it. They are holding it in a seminar room, so I don't think they are expecting a big audience.'
'I'm glad it's on something she knows about. I find her philosophizing rather difficult to take.'
'Oh. What do you have in mind?'
'For instance what she was saying about human reason. Presumably she was trying to make a point about the nature of rational understanding. To say that rational accounts are merely a consequence of the structure of the human mind; that animals have their own accounts in accordance with the structure of their own minds, to which we don't have access because we don't share a language with them.'
And what's wrong with that?'
'It's naive, John. It's the kind of easy, shallow relativism that impresses freshmen. Respect for everyone's world view, the cow's world view, the squirrel's world view, and so forth. In the end it leads to total intellectual paralysis. You spend so much time respecting that you haven't time left to think.'
'Doesn't a squirrel have a world view?'
'Yes, a squirrel does have a world view. Its world view comprises acorns and trees and weather and cats and dogs and automobiles and squirrels of the opposite sex. It comprises an account of how these phenomena interact and how it should interact with them to survive. That's all. There's no more. That's the world according to squirrel.'
'We are sure about that?'
