Mad Memes and Crazy Beliefs – it’s just not Kosher!

British PM, David Cameron, has this week been touring Israel and Palestine. So, with typical political timing, he has taken advantage of an opportunity to say a few rare things of which, both his hosts, on either side of the Wall, will no doubt approve. The timing of his announcement that the ancient practice of the religious slaughter of animals under Jewish and Muslim custom (so its kosher and halal) will be “safe” in the UK for as long as he is British prime minister, comes just after Denmark said it would be banning this practice. Nice safe one, Dave.

Setting aside the obvious political opportunism of the moment, this has raised much larger questions though, namely where to draw the line between ancient religious or cultural practices and what is legal and/or sensible in this day and age.

To back track for a moment; Denmark has recently banned the killing of animals under these ancient rituals as this inflicts unnecessary pain and distress. These animals have to be conscious at point of death under these religious customs – the animal is killed by slitting its throat while it is alive and letting it bleed to death. Suppose that was about the best that could be done several thousand years ago - but perhaps its time to move on a bit. Not so, thinks Dave.  

Well done Denmark though. Instead the animals must first be stunned before being slaughtered. I guess all Denmark's goats must have bleated with relief.   However, what Denmark's decision does do is challenge that annoyingly frequent and quite irrational convention that a practice, irrespective of its merits, should be respected if it's part of someone (or is that anyone's) religious belief system.

That these respective faiths should rely upon a dogma that is ancient, and it must be said, pointless in terms of practical worth, to justify inflicting pain and cruelty on harmless animals, is something that should be stopped everywhere, not just in Denmark. One measure of our civilisation is how humanly we treat animals, which must ironically include how we kill the beasts we eat. Against much of what else we do as a collective race, it's probably not a bad measure for us to choose (although right now elephants and rhinos could be forgiven for wondering why they shouldn't be included is some equivalent form of consideration).

To be clear, I don't object to this practice on the grounds of its religious significance. I really don't mind what prayers, incantations or other words the devout or the crazy want to chant over their food before they eat it or slaughter it. However, there is no need for any cruelty to be involved in the killing of animals intended as food. Defendants of the practice will say this is hypocritical. Denmark's record on killing of whales is a case in point. However, it would be churlish to argue that, just because all wrongs cannot be righted, none should be where ever possible.

What this issue does raise though, is another more difficult question to confront. It's the conflict between custom, tradition, belief and the evolving views of society as a whole. Ancient dogma and custom is frequently viewed as something unique and valuable; some kind of especially important heritage that speaks to where we came from and of our cultural roots. Sometimes it is, but where it speaks to these origins in ways that are cruel, repugnant and barely legal by today's standards, then they should be eradicated or reformed. Often these customs are powerful memes*, defying logic and driving behaviours across the ages, perhaps based in semi religious belief systems or still practised rituals surviving from ancient times.

These powerful memes could perhaps be described as the equivalents of mental or psychological software programmes from which the users cannot depart. They are transmitted down the generations through inflexible dogma and sustained by ways of life where tradition demands the unthinking obedience of its adherents.

Consider female genital mutilation (FGM) for instance and the hold that this barbaric tradition still exerts over people.  Imagine, just for a moment, how powerfully embedded, even hardwired into a parent's cultural outlook such a meme / tradition  must be that it compels a presumably loving mother into forcing her child to be subject to what can only be described as barbaric, horrific physical and mental torture. Sometimes this young girl will die. This is a classic example of how people become subservient to and prisoners of their cultural traditions and belief systems. They appear to have completely lost their capacity to rationalise their way out of these situations – to say, “Whoa, stop, this is just crazy – I won’t do it”.

Our way of life is evolving at an ever accelerating rate; our lives becoming ever more transformed. Very often though, when we try to drag ancient beliefs and ways of life into this modern context, then conflict and all too often, violence result. This applies at an individual level, as with FGM, and at international levels too. Take Syria as a case in point. There, extremist religious armies possessed by ancient, competing ideologies (memes) from out of the Dark Ages, do their best to exterminate each other in subservience to their brainwashed, unassailable view of a terrible world of mad Gods and great Satans. They are beyond reason, beyond rational thought, obsessed with and imprisoned by their mad ideology where bloody murderous martyrdom is the gateway to an eternal paradise.

We are in the age of genomics, of artificial intelligence and machine sentience, of space stations, iClouds and Nanotech. Yet, just as we have one foot in this age, so we remain trapped by these ancient memes, rooted  still in a place of shadow, slaves to our obsessions with the supernatural, the plainly impossible and the down-right, bat-shit crazy.....

 * A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures