By My Fault
Seriously considering human cruelty to animals makes it hard to not go looking for Satan. Otherwise it is hard to understand by whose fault the present state of affairs could have come about. For most of my life, like most people, I have tried to reckon with this question by simply not thinking about it, including for most of the five years during which I have not eaten meat, first as a vegetarian and then as a vegan. I did not change what I ate and bought because I wanted to think about consigning animals to severe deprivation and violent death for my sake, or sending male chicks through meat grinders and keeping laying hens in tiny cages so that I could have eggs, or any horrors of that sort, and about how I could justify my response to a world where this was happening. I changed my way of living precisely because it seemed like that was the fee I could pay to not have to fill my head with these nightmares, which I could not avoid when I was filling my stomach and building my body with the flesh of these animals, binding myself to their fates in an encounter as intimate as any could be.
It is no fun to go looking for Satan. It never ends up well in the end. But sometimes something happens, and it leaves you with no other choice. For me, shrimp welfare brought that moment on.
I have to credit a certain Twitter user for being the proximate cause of my trials and tribulations. It was because I was binge-reading her tweets late at night—partially because she seemed aligned with me on several fronts, partially because I felt severely rage-baited—that I learned about the Shrimp Welfare Foundation, which I then began to look into. What I learnt was that 27,000,000,000,000 shrimp are killed for human consumption every year, which is close to a million every second; divided equally between every human on Earth, your share is nine a day. I learnt that shrimp display behaviour strongly indicating avoidance and alleviation of pain, though really I had no doubt about this—having spent time watching bugs closely, it was easy to intuit that it was possible to treat them kindly or cruelly. And I learnt that shrimp are subject to hideous treatment, including being killed through hours-long asphyxiation or hypothermia, while conscious, and having their eyestalks cut off or burnt off so that they don’t perceive their extremely cramped conditions and become less fertile.
These are extremely difficult realities to consider. I don’t find them particularly harder to consider than other forms of animal suffering—the dairy cow whose child is taken and slaughtered, the broiler chicken bred to a size unsustainable for her organs, or just how incredibly young farmed animals are when they face their deaths. But it was the shrimp that broke me, because I could not help but think of the quadrillion of these creatures that my species is liable to kill over the course of my lifetime as a quadrillion Christs. I thought of Isaiah 58, practically every word of which seems directly applicable. “He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.” What comeliness, what beauty, does a shrimp have, to prevent us from unflinching cruelty? “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” What ability does a shrimp have to not be mute in the face of affliction? “He was taken from prison and from judgement: and who shall declare his generation? For he was cut out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.” By whose fault are a shrimp’s eyestalks burned off, and which people asphyxiates trillions of shrimp each year, except my own? And if that is the case, who shall declare anything on the shrimp’s account, when my people are given over to hatred?
The answer was God. If no one would speak, then God, who is love, would speak. How can love be silent in the face of torture, a quadrillion times repeated? If they could speak, could they not say with total assurance: “For we fear not your terror, neither are we troubled, for God is with us. And they that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, hath seen a great light, for God is with us.” Of course God would have to be with those who are without all other comfort—and if I am to have God, God is nowhere except there, at Olivet and Golgotha and Calvary. In other words, I am one who beliefs that everything in this life is wasted without love and nothing in this life is wasted by love, and that love is divine, and not an object, never possessed or comprehended but always chased after. And it struck me in that moment that if I was to follow God, I could only follow to where God must be, and realizing this, if my heart did not follow, it was totally wasted, spiritually dead and mortally sinful and loveless. To have love instills the power to delight in creation, to be increased by the increase of other creatures, to be created together with them. It is the life and beauty of this world. But I do not see where it can be found except in the bloodied corpse of my neighbour who is put to death and crucified. “Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away? Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go?” John 6:67–68
What I was seeking was God. But that meant letting animal suffering occupy a greater position in my thoughts than I was comfortable with, and doing so, I was quickly faced with Satan. The event that precipitated my mental breakdown was the same event that faced many people with Satan: Trump’s second inauguration. The US President’s first 100 days were a Hell-gate to many human atrocities, from the cancellation of PEPFAR to mass deportations to the scapegoating of oppressed minorities. All this has been justified under a Christian veneer: I was particularly infuriated by JD Vance’s cooption of ‘ordo amoris’ to justify the worst kind of outgroup hatred. I was strongly moved by all of this, but also by the more obscure torture of non-human animals abetted by this administration. Being inclined to view all these cases as directly pertaining to Christ, I promptly broke down under the weight of my God being crucified quadrillions of times and resurrected, at best, just once, and developed for a few weeks an evangelical rapture-fever devoid of all optimism. I became convinced that Satan ruled the world and was becoming incarnate via human industry, and that the church was not only AWOL but was actively summoning him, and that God had vanished until the last act, if not completely.
I have since calmed down, a bit. I have managed to avoid the appearance of paranoid psychosis by becoming more skeptical of the ability of AI to act as a literal portal into Hell. On the other points, however, I cannot help but be convinced that my assessment was right. Unfortunately what I really needed as consolation was to rely more thoroughly on the Resurrection through the sign of the Church—sadly I still cannot break the feeling that the empty tomb is largely the intellectual property of the Antichrist, however much I would like to feel otherwise. Hope has always been the virtue I find myself pitifully distrustful about. But I carry on as best I can. I have been haunted by the words of William Blake, taken out of context: “And was the holy Lamb of God,” “Among these dark Satanic Mills?” I see the relics of the Lamb of God placed into the temples of the Devil—and not only the relics, but the Lamb’s own likenesses. And so I have been tempted to Blake’s response as well: “I will not cease from Mental Fight, / Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand.”
A fight is certainly required. It is necessary for me to do something, not just, like Pontius Pilate, wash my hands of it. Insofar as this sentiment motivates me to donate to the Shrimp Welfare Foundation, or to similar charities, or to take part in The Humane League’s campaign against battery cages, or even just to not shut up about the fact that something horrible is ongoing, I am glad to feel the way I do, because I have to keep doing that, I absolutely cannot stop. But I am also suspicious. It is convenient to find Satan in the world, and to say that you will fight him. How delightful that the Devil is somewhere other than in you! As though just because I have put some years between my thirty-two teeth and flesh, it is not my own flesh that does evil and not my own heart that is hardened, as if that is there and I am here, and I can say, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
The point is to see it, even if there is nothing to see. ... So that one speaks with a mouth ready to swallow the bitterest heart of failure, beginning with the horrible fact that your so-called innocence is full of guilt, your so-called goodness full of evil, and your so-called love full of hate. Such is the infernal deeper fault, the openly hidden fissure in our world, that we secretly desire what is wrong with things, for starters as a seductive distraction from our own wrongfulness, another war to blind you from the inner one.
That quote is from an article called “Everything Is Your Fault” which made me quite upset for a moment and which I quickly realized was exactly right. It cannot be that Satan is out there and not in here, or else I have taken the evil of this world and made it into something to be glad about, into the pleasure that Satan, wherever else he may be, is not in my heart. But to take pleasure in the evil of the world like that would be to enthrone Satan in my heart in the first place. One absolutely must divide oneself from the practices of a fallen world, yet to divide oneself is to use its fallenness as a claim to superiority and so profiteer off of it. The avoidance of transgression is edged with sin. There is no way out: no innocent stance to take toward the horrors, no alternative route by which one gets to wash one’s hands clean. Because there is only “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,” and no other body—because “Am I my brother’s keeper?” never gets to be rhetorical—because the garment of the high priest has no seams—one cannot avoid being party to everything, and finding evil to be indivisible. “Yea, and a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also” Luke 2:35.
Yet there is still hope, because if there is no dividing of sin, neither is there dividing of repentance. I have heard it said in one conversation that a person’s obligation is simply not to eat shrimp, and that having not done so, they are free from any further obligations, and so all further steps are superfluous. That would be a lonely fate: thankfully it is all my fault. That which is done by another truly is my own sin, and their hell is the hell I have chosen. It is enough to justify any attempt to mitigate the sin of this world as repentance for oneself, because we can no more avoid each other’s hells than a shrimp can avoid the razor that cuts across her eyestalk. It is always appropriate to repent for my fault, for my own fault, for my own most grievous fault—actively, by any means necessary.