IS EATING PEOPLE WRONG?

 

There was a once famous song, originally sung by two entertainers called Flanders and Swann in the guise of two cannibals, in which the younger cannibal, resisting pressure from the older cannibal to conform to the time-honoured practices of his society, frequently reiterated the words 'Eating people is wrong'. Perhaps it is my age, but I myself, like the older cannibal, am not able to see what is wrong with eating people. (Killing people with a view to eating them, or from some less sensible motive, is, I concede, usually wrong. It would be an exercise for a first year undergraduate to think of circumstances in which to kill people in order to eat them was right.)

  J.B.S. Haldane claimed to have eaten his own excrement to see whether or not it was bad for him, and reported that it was quite harmless. I must confess, however, that I have never myself eaten anybody, even in the interests of science. Nor, to my knowledge, had Haldane. I would like to think I had the courage to eat human flesh, if it were offered to me, as I am sure Haldane would have done. Hippophiles have been known to be sick after eating horse meat, but I do not know that I love my fellow men sufficiently for this to happen to me were I to eat one of them, or a spatial part of one.

  I would not be in favour of individuals eating people in contemporary bourgeois society, as this might well interfere with regulations for the hygienic disposal of human bodies, and offend those with a deep-seated (though irrational) tendency to regard a human corpse as something more than an inanimate object. There is little reason for killing people for food in most prosperous communities, and if someone were to do this, I should, if I were a judge, be inclined to be lenient with him on the grounds that he must have been quite desperately hungry to do it at all. It was probably once a good thing that people had an abhorrence of eating human flesh, if they did, as this counteracted a motive, hunger, which then existed for killing people.

       Eating dead bodies if one is trapped without alternative food is certainly permissible, or even commendable, and I should have thought that, in the absence of volunteers, casting lots for the honour of providing nourishment for one's companions was also permissible, if it results in some surviving, rather than all perishing. (Eating people in such circumstances would be permissible, even though it may involve the one who survives killing and eating all the others). If the alternative to eating people were the end of the world, as it might be after an atomic holocaust, not eating people would be positively wrong - provided, of course, it were done with due reverence and respect for the deceased.

       If I were to retain some remnants of consciousness after death I would rather be buried than eaten, but I would much rather be eaten than cremated. Furthermore, cremation, unlike eating people, is a wasteful habit; if we are buried, we at least feed worms, who will eventually provide nourishment for people and other animals. But making good use of corpses, say for manure, is a project not nearly as close to my economical heart as turning human excrement into compost, which is done in some places - Peru, for example - and should be done everywhere. It would avoid waste, and prevent our polluting our seas and rivers.

 In other communities and times than this men have been commonly killed to be eaten, sometimes because it has been wrongly supposed that one ingested one's enemies' virtues by eating them. Perhaps, if one really did acquire their virtues, it would have been right to eat one's enemies, as, the after life apart, one's own virtue would thereby be increased without anyone else being diminished. Whether it would be right to kill one's enemies in order to acquire their virtues is another matter.

 One would expect cannibalism to be rare in humans, because one would expect its survival value to be low. But for the same reason one would not expect it to be advantageous to a species to produce infertile offspring. It is, nevertheless, of advantage to bees to produce bees who are celibate. A queen bee can propagate her genes more effectively if she gives birth to drones than if she produces other queens, for it is more advantageous to her to produce other bees who keep her alive than to develop those attributes that would enable her to keep herself alive. I cannot see that it could not be of advantage to a species to produce certain members who are especially suitable to be eaten by other members of the same species, but they could not all live by taking in one another's washing in this way. If some members of the species lived only on others, other members of the species would have to eat something else - other animals, vegetables or minerals. Hence a species adapted to cannibalism could have the biological advantage of being, like worms, able to live on soil, a capacity that would be especially valuable in times of famine. If it happened to men that certain of their offspring were especially suitable for eating - because, perhaps, they could live on clay - the ones fit to be eaten would be so unlike other men that it is doubtful whether men would feel that it was wrong to eat them. It would not be conducive to their survival to have an abhorrence of eating such people, so they would not have such an abhorrence. But the ones to be eaten would be men, however unlike them they looked, in the same sense that drones are bees.

 The Aztecs who inhabited what is now Mexico did practise cannibalism on a large scale. It has been suggested that, since protein was difficult to obtain in those parts, an Aztec society having this practice would survive at the expense of societies that did not, and that this is how it came about that the Aztecs thought cannibalism their religious duty, though they did not consciously eat people because they realised that protein was difficult to obtain. The societies that did not have such a practice would die out, and their belief that eating people is wrong with them. It would be interesting to speculate on the question whether, if protein had been as scarce everywhere as it then was in Mexico, all men everywhere would have believed in the rectitude of cannibalism. If so Christians, who congratulate themselves upon their superior morality, should bear it in mind that had protein been as scarce in Europe and the Middle East as it was in Mexico, they too might have believed in cannibalism. Indeed, if protein were absolutely essential to mankind, and could not be obtained in any other way than by eating people, perhaps a belief in the rectitude of cannibalism would be not only prevalent, but justified.

       Dean Swift once wrote a pamphlet recommending, as a solution to the problems posed by the extreme poverty of the Irish, that the Irish poor should rear children to be sold to be eaten in London restaurants. He was wrong, of course, in thinking that this would have been a solution to the Irish question. Children, unlike pigs, do not grow quickly enough to make farming them an economical proposition - though if cannibalism really had been necessary to mankind, it is possible that some human children might have evolved to have been quicker growing. And I am sure the market for children in conservative England would not have been as good as Swift supposed. In Japan, perhaps, which is noted for the gustatory adventurousness of its inhabitants, babies and toddlers for culinary purposes might sell better. Removing and eating parts of a live monkey's brains cannot be that much worse than eating a dead baby. But Japan was inaccessible in Swift's day.

       If Swift, in his defence of cannibalism, had really wanted his measures to be adopted, he would, by pointing out their advantages, have stood no chance whatsoever of success. Had he, however, dressed up his proposals in the language of superstition (as did the Aztecs), and tried to persuade people that, by selling their children to be eaten in restaurants, they acquired extra merit in the next world and extra immunity to disease in this, he might have fared better.

 I suggested earlier that a cause of men's not having a moral code that permitted cannibalism was that it would not be conducive to their survival to have one. The second most serious problem the world has to face after the problem caused by nationalist, racist and religiously intolerant people having almost unlimited access to weapons of destruction, is the explosion in the world's population. This is so serious that it makes one wonder whether the prohibition of cannibalism that has evolved might not have been an evolutionary mistake. Since men and women cannot be eaten, they lack a value which they would otherwise have, and which animals do have. Animals that can be eaten are often better taken care of than men, whose artificially induced inedibility provides those responsible for them with no such incentive. Animals which are a source of food for some and profit for others might not have been allowed to proliferate to an extent that they became unhealthy, and so to threaten the health and safety of the world by enormous numbers of people acquiring transmissible diseases that are not kept properly under control. Perhaps in places like the Balkans men might treat other men better if they were able to eat them. Indeed, one does wonder whether when it is considered how rapidly the world's population is increasing, the prohibition on the ways of reducing the quantity of human life short of eating people - say distributing contraceptives and contraceptive information by air or by compulsory sterilisation - is not excessive.