Week 4 - Koyel.

In chapter three , Shame, of Eating Animals , Foers touches a raw nerve of everyone opinions that makes them conflicted within themselves. The concept of shame being formed a dual force - social and personal arcs. However , when and how does that shame come when we eat of certain sort of animals , and why does it not come when we eat other types of animal meat? Is guilt ans shame socially constructed? Or is sometimes shame created within , despite the majority around you not feeling guilty on eating up other lives? The words that particularly stood out for me in the third chapter were :

 Shame is the work of memory against forgetting .Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely- yet not entirely- forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favour of our immediate gratification . Fish ,for Kafka, must have been the flesh of forgetting  : their lives are forgotten in a radical manner that is much less common in our thinking about farmed land animals.  

I found it so interesting the way in which Foers makes this point and sort of makes the readers self reflect amongst themselves. It's almost like our choices of which sort of animal to eat and which sort to preserve becomes a mirror reflecting the typical hypocrisy inherent in humans . How the minds of humans have the power to judge and categorize which sort of meat to eat is a taboo , and which sort of meat to eat is habitual . It exercises these human made concepts to the level that these prevalent judgments suddenly seem to be the normal way of life . We don't realize to what level we have created this entire universe of moral yardsticks that carve out an illusion of truth. Sometimes the most commonly forgotten animals due to social expectations around us , are not registered in our guilty consciousness because they are a reflection of the aspects within us , that we want to forget. I agree so much with this proposition to the extent that it makes me want to rip off all my self made moral yardsticks that I have lived with all this time. The fickleness , fallacy and the conceit within all of our self made rules seems to be looking back at us , formed in this mirror in front of us created by Foers. And it's scary. It's scary as hell. Foers literally makes see the things about yourself with this paragraph that you don't want to see. Memory presents to us as a convenient handy tool here. It's the things that we don't want to forget whenever we do something because to us it is morally right, and moral yardsticks , especially within yourself , can never be disobeyed. Therefore we conveniently make our own memories of what to remember, for example , Indians remembering to never have beef of Muslims remembering to never have pork , and what to forget , such as eating fish . Foers draws a stark picture of human fallacy in front of its human readers, that petrifies them and enlightens them at the same time and makes them realize in dismay , how inconsistent and shallow they are.