Chomsky Takes a Strong Stand Against Factory Farming

He agrees that it's one of the worst things ever

Noam Chomsky, a man who has revolutionized linguistics and is the most cited living author, replied to my email. This is in one sense not extraordinary; Chomsky responds to all of his emails—a pretty breathtaking act of generosity given that he is now 94 years of age and no doubt gets enormous numbers of emails daily. Chomsky is also one of the harshest and cleverest critics of American foreign policy—having seemingly an entire book dedicated to any particular example of U.S. aggression. Rationally disagreeing with Chomsky is always a difficult task, for he’ll bury you under a nearly infinite number of footnotes—citing world experts, refugee reports, internal state department reports, and more. You can watch Chomsky’s debates—they always go incredibly poorly for the other guy (see here and here in particular).

I’d only heard Chomsky talk about animals occasionally, and mostly I’d been a bit disappointed by his statements. For example, here, when asked if animals have rights and Peter Singer is right, he replies by asking the speaker if he swats mosquitos. Now, this is not dispositive—it could be that Chomsky thinks animals don’t have rights but do have interests, and thus it is wrong to eat them, but this seemed like an unnatural reading. So I decided to sent him an email. Here is our email exchange—reproduced with his permission, in which Chomsky takes a strong stance against factory farming, not just because of the horrific harms it causes to humans, but also because of the harms to animals. (I’m in block quotes—he’s not).

I'm a huge fan of your work, and you've significantly influenced my view of foreign policy, helping rid me of the fanciful illusions that U.S. planners are generally benevolent but occasionally blunder.  You are one of the five or so people who have most shaped my worldview, but I think you're wrong about animals.  

You've rarely talked about animals, but your general view seems to be that eating them is at least generally fine.  Now, there are two questions that have to be distinguished.  First is whether eating humanely raised animals living on fanciful green pastures and so on is fine.  I think that's a difficult question, but I'm inclined to think it's permissible.  

But the second is whether eating actually existing meat is fine.  And the answer here is no.  Around 99% of meat comes from factory farms, where the animals are brutally tortured and mutilated, forced to live in feces and ammonia, unable to turn around.  Half a million birds boil alive every year--but of course, that's ignored by the mainstream press which doesn't want to make people feel culinary about their horrific dietary habits.  Around 80% of pigs get pneumonia because they're forced to live in feces and ammonia.  

It's very plausible that every few years, factory farming causes more suffering than has existed in all of human history.  So it seems worth speaking up about, especially given the utterly devastating ecological consequences that you highlight, that threaten to end developed civilization.  We know that consumers increase the amount of factory farming goes on with their purchasing 

The Causal Inefficacy Objection is Provably Wrong

.  

Given this horrific fate, and the time you spent devoted to highlighting the plight of the otherized unpeople, reduced to rubble by U.S. bombs or tortured and mutilated by U.S. backed forces, it seems worth speaking up about the horrific atrocities that most of the people who follow you actively perpetuate, especially when you have much more influence over them than over, for example, the criminals that bombed Laos.  

Sorry to clog your inbox with more emails, and thank you so much for reading this.  

All the best, 

Matthew 

Chomsky: Read your letter with interest, but I don't see any disagreement.

I'm glad!  But then wouldn't it make sense to speak about it publicly, given the vast number of people that read your work?  

best, 

Matthew

Chomsky: I do. I constantly condemn industrial meat production, not only the vicious torture of animals, but also what it's doing to humans -- creating antibiotic resistant bacteria that already make hospitals dangerous places and may do us all in -- to enhance the profits of a handful of megacorporations

That’s great!  It seems I have not perused your work carefully enough; sorry for bothering you.

Chomsky: Probably my fault. Not enough emphasis.  Thanks for calling it to my attention.