I don't generally talk about being vegetarian, beyond actually mentioning it. I don't think I've ever tried to convert anyone to vegetarianism. Yet often I find people offended or irritated by the fact that I have chosen to be vegetarian.
As a matter of fact, I even find myself wishing to distance myself from what I see as extreme or militant animal rights activism, and from the attitudes surrouding such activism. I'm not a joiner. I'm not into movements and political groups.
However, I also occasionally wonder if there's anything wrong with being extreme. After all, it would be easy to put a case that the conditions obtaining in the world are themselves extreme. To be an extremist might well be simply to react to something. If for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, then for every extreme action, surely there is an equally extreme opposite reaction.
The difficulty in living is to exist among such actions and reactions, with the swinging pendulums, the see-sawing balances and counter-balances and to make your way without being locked into permanent war with someone who happens to be opposite you at some time. Because someone will be, at any time.
Anyway, just in order to swing a little in the other direction, here is the kind of thing I have been distancing myself from, because it deserves consideration wherever you are in relation to it at the moment:
Perhaps the extremists are the cause of these extreme conditions; namely, certain extremely greedy industrialists, and certain extremely intolerant religious groups.
Yes, I think that’s a succint summary, but I wonder what was the first cause of their extremism.One way or another a kind of madness seems to have come out of nowhere. I think many see this as a result of human consciousness itself, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. In other words, I wonder what the very essence of this extremity, or extremism, is. I don’t think that people generally experience life as something harmonious (perhaps I’m wrong). Very ancient texts make reference, one way or another, and seemingly independently, to a fall from grace. But no one has ever really explained where the serpent in Eden came from. How does disharmony arise from harmony? Perhaps there has always been savage disharmony of one kind or another, or conditions similar to those we now experience as disharmonious, but a particular kind of consciousness of them has led to ideas of things either being balanced or extreme. Perhaps this consciousness has exacerbated the extreme aspects of existence.For instance, it’s fairly clear that killing has been part of nature since there were things to kill and be killed. With the development of agriculture, however, leading to expanding settlements, the division of labour, unequal distribution of wealth, and so on, civilisation has formed in such a way that the killing that is a part of most people’s lives (in war, in abbatoirs and so on) nonetheless takes place out of sight. These are perhaps the conditions under which extremism arises, since the thing that is out of sight is also unchecked, and, with people generally now being unused to it, is all the more shocking when it is uncovered.