Shamefully late, as usual, some feedback on my March 16 “exceptionalism” piece.

(1) There’s a contrarian point of view for everything, especially for notions so commonly held we repeat them without much thought. So it is with the “dethroning” business: Copernicus, Darwin, Hubble, etc. having removed humanity from the center of things in some way.

In the matter of Copernicus, a friend directs me to Chapter 15 of Rémi Brague’s The Legend of the Middle Ages. You can sample it for yourself here, though with several pages “not part of this book preview.” From what I could read there, I don’t see that Brague has really demolished the “dethronement” notion. He seems to be confusing centrality with supremacy. However low a creature we may have been in the medieval imagination, the universe was still about us. Perhaps it’s unfair to judge without reading the whole book though.

(2) A different reader:

Hi Derb. Enjoying your article on exceptionalism and when I read this: “I now gaze across the pond glumly at a ‘nation’ in which the national flag is shunned as ‘racist’ …,” I couldn’t help but think of the news today that our President has said that our troops must not fly our flag in Haiti while helping out there because we don’t want to be thought of as an occupying power. I think you and Conrad [Black] are on to something.

(3) I got a multitude of e-mails on how very little guidance (according to me) the Abrahamic scriptures — OT, NT, Koran — give us on the right treatment of animals.

Most of these e-mails missed the point, quoting the innumerable OT and distinctly more numerable NT verses (no e-mails from Koranic scholars here — where’s Robert Spencer when you need him?) on rules for eating various kinds of meat. As guidance on, say, the right way to treat dogs, telling us not to eat them doesn’t really go very far. Confucius did better than that (§202).

From Judaism, this website is pretty comprehensive, though the injunctions against cruelty to animals seem to be Talmudic rather than Biblical, and not really firmly declarative even then. Which is what you’d expect: The Abrahamic religions are essentially and necessarily human-centered, all about us and our standing with God. The animal-centric view fundamental to “animal rights” activism is a very modern sort of thing; people in Antiquity just didn’t think in those categories. Even those non-Abrahamic religions that posited reincarnation in animal form, presented the matter in terms of human essences . . . so far as I understand them, which I’ll admit is not very far.

Could the Jewish Vegetarian Society really do any better than Isaiah 11:9? Several readers pointed me to Proverbs 12:10: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast . . . ,” but that doesn’t really seem to meet the case.

I wonder in fact where the JVS is coming from. Seeing the OT as a vegetarian tract is one heck of a stretch, it seems to me. A reader in Kazakhstan (no kidding) gives a long list of counterexamples, including:

Abraham prepared lamb for his angelic visitors. . . . Isaac asked specifically for wild game from Esau before giving his blessing. . . . The instructions for the first Passover meal explicitly included roasted lamb.

Similarly with the NT:

In the Acts of the Apostles the story of Peter’s vision of a feast being prepared is told, and Peter is give the command by Christ to “kill and eat” of the game [Acts 10.xiii]. Of all the passages used, this one is probably the closest in relevance as it is presumed by Christians that Jesus would not command someone to do that which is wrong.

And then of course there is that whole tricky business in John 6:51 et seq. where Jesus urges the disciples to eat his flesh and drink his blood . . . But while hardly a call to vegetarianism, that’s even further from the topic of human-animal relations.

Bible-wise, about the best you can do is point out that the Garden of Eden was apparently organized on vegetarian principles, suggesting that in the ideal, sinless state that we ought to aspire to, we wouldn’t kill animals. That’s not the state we’re in, of course.

(4) On an unrelated matter: In a Corner post at about the same time, I posted a map showing state deficits, by state. Several readers chid me for not having posted this one, which shows per capita state deficits. They are of course right; but my point about the upper midwest looking good still stands. (Though I guess Montana and Wyoming are not so much upper midwest as upper west.)