Cannibalism, Nudity and Philosophy of War

Let us imagine that you are a predator of some sort, a predator that is blessed, and cursed, with a forebrain capable of sophisticated neurolinguistic programming. This is a blessing, because it allows you to coordinate your predation with other predators. This is a curse, because it also makes it possible for predators trying to eat you to make you believe two things.

The first thing they may try to make you believe is that if they are trying to eat you, you must let them eat you, because you require a sort of linguistic argument to “justify” why they ought not eat you. The second is that they may try to make you believe, if you are trying to eat them, that you may not bite them without proving that you are justified in biting them.

The Christian worldview, taken ironically, deals with this handily. Justification is by faith alone. What this means is that justification is a faith-based entity. A system of justification is, essentially, a hope for things to come. It is a hope that you can get out of being eaten by brainwashing the animals that might eat you into believing they are only allowed to eat you if their appetites fall within a verbalized taxonomy which divides the set of all possible eating into permissible eating and impermissible eating. This sort of division is fundamentally invented—it is a narrative.

It is also a hope that if you wish to eat animals, or perhaps milk them, they are only justified in refusing to be eaten, or milked, if certain conditions, expressed verbally, are met. The mere desire not to be eaten or milked is insufficient: one must argue within some formal system that one ought not be eaten or milked.

These sorts of word games are beneficial, but they are dishonest. An honest person admits he is made of meat and edible. A dishonest person says he is not edible because there are linguistic concerns about edibility that transcend the physical capacity to eat. This distinction is raised very early on by Antiphon the Sophist, which is recounted in

“the laws are imposed, whereas nature is necessary; and the laws are not born but agreed upon, whereas nature is not agreed upon but born.” (Antiphon, Fragments, F44(a). Pendrick, Gerard J. trans. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2002, p. 158)

Thus we see that, by nature, all animals are edible. But by law, some animals are exempt from eating, for reasons. This is a form of censorship, and if we look into the root of ratio and censor we find a linguistic similarity. And thus we see the cannibalism taboo expressed as a sort of censorship of the truth that humans are edible. This does not mean it is mandatory to eat them; it simply means that the only sense in which it is “unthinkable” is “according to law,” not “according to nature.”

This brings us to nudity, which is quite similar. By nature, it is quite possible to be naked. By law, it is censored in certain places and at certain times. But this law is simply a dishonesty: it is completely possible to be naked. And thus comes the intertwining of custom, habits of behavior, with costume. But it is a custom to wear a costume. Costumes are not born but agreed upon, whereas bodies are not agreed upon but born.

The issue is whether one is going to be honest about this, or, for a variety of reasons, one is going to lie about it. The only thin argument for lying about it is that if there is no natural costume, a contradiction in terms, then there is no natural reason that one cannot be dishonest. And this is very true. So there is no requirement that anyone admit the truth, but that is different from whether it is the truth.

All arguments about costumes will be of a sort of if X then Y type. If one wishes to avoid being attacked by the fashion police (they don’t necessarily care what fashion one wears, only that one wear a fashion) then one must wear clothing. There is no natural necessity to wearing clothing, just as there is no natural necessity to not eating people. Both are customs, or habits.

The issue is the naturalization of habit, as though we were vassals to the habit of wearing costumes, or of not eating people. That is servile. There are all sorts of strategic reasons to wear clothing (for example, when it is very cold) or not to eat people (one might get eaten oneself). But this does not in any sense create a natural necessity to either behavior: they are simply goal directed behaviors predicated of a certain set of desires. The naturalization of a certain set of desires is akin to orthorexia, an obsession with pure and “healthy” eating habits.

Certainly there is also a sense in which many will desire to be kind: this is not an article defending the eating of people, as a compulsion, nor of nudity as a compulsion. The issue is dishonesty. And dishonesty comes in two forms: dishonesty with self, and dishonesty with others.

Antiphon covers this in the same fragment, where he says, paraphrasing, that in public, one should always wear clothing and avoid eating people, but, in private, if one is not at risk of being caught, one should be naked and eat people, if one wishes it. There is simply no natural reason to be subordinated to costumes, or customs, or nomos. This is especially true because every system of nomos is only enforced by phusis, that is, by physical power, which is the capacity to push and to pull.

Only you will know if you are honest with yourself, and dishonest with others. If you are honest, I fail to see how you could not agree that there is nothing naturally wrong with eating people, or being naked: because nothing is naturally wrong, right and wrong are nomos not phusis. The most phusis reveals is that “if you want X, then do Y,” in the sense that if you want a bucket of water, you must dip it in the well and draw it up.

Of course, one could say “if I tell people I think nudist cannibalism is not wrong, it is merely not my bag,” they will think I am quite strange. And that may very well be true. So, again, this does not change the truth, it simply changes whether or not one wishes to be honest about it. The truth is, it is not most of our bags, but even if 999/1000 people dislike nudist cannibals, that is merely a habit they have acquired, it is not a natural truth, it is merely a system if metaphysical cobweb stuff that has been imprinted upon their nerves.

Now, one may say “well, primitive, savage people eat people and fail to be modest, I am not like them.” The problem with this view is that there is no evidence that this is a product of any genetic or hereditary disposition: at most the hereditary disposition is that you are trainable and have been trained to think this way about “primitive” peoples. If one is ashamed of eating meat and being naked, one must tend to be proud of it, as though the manifest disability (that is, restricted capacity for physical action) is not just a consolation prize, it is a sign of some “spiritual” development.

One route that many will take on this path is to say that these sorts of taboos or customs allow for greater development, pacific trade, resource extraction, etc. etc. The problem with this view is that, unfortunately, multi-cellular life is never going to outlive single celled life: the single celled organisms that inhabit our bodies will feast on us after we die. And this is true both at the individual level and the community level, barring something like the sun exploding and eradicating all multi and single celled organisms all at once.

So we are already the losers in the race, if the goal is survival. So then what is the consolation prize? A cloth prison, and dietary restrictions? Now let us consider that some people will lack the physical capacity to eat others. They will, for example, have had their canines removed, or their jaws are weak, etc. etc. Or like Alex in a Clockwork Orange, they get tummy pains at the very thought of eating one of their brothers. But as the Principia Discordia reminds us,

Test Question from Topanga Cabal The Twelve Famous Buddha Minds School: If they are our brothers, how come we can't eat them? (http://www.ology.org/principia/body.html)

So, “how come we can’t eat them” will for some people be a neurological block, which is clearly learned behavior. People who want to aggrandize themselves will try to turn this into some sort of spiritual enlightenment, but, at the end of the day, honest people will realize that meat is meat and that there is nothing better, and also nothing worse, about eating any particular piece of meat.

The dishonest people will bray and crow that this is “dehumanizing,” that humans are more than meat, but this is simply a spiritual narrative, a sort of nomos that they assert to defang those who might eat them. Also, in the process, they also give themselves a sort of supernatural set of fangs—most people who assert this narrative do not have a sense of fair play. They will not say “well, neither of us want to be eaten, so we will try to work together to avoid it.” They will simply assert that eating people is wrong, they are the fortunate, blessed Priestly Class who know this, and they have a special spiritual mission from God, to stamp out the evil custom of eating people. They are fundamentally dishonest.

Consider Hugo Grotius in THE RIGHTS OF WAR AND PEACE:

II. In treating of the rights of war, the first point, that we have to consider, is, what is war, which is the subject of our inquiry, and what is the right, which we seek to establish. Cicero styled war a contention by force. But the practice has prevailed to indicate by that name, not an immediate action, but a state of affairs; so that war is the state of contending parties, considered as such. This definition, by its general extent, comprises those wars of every description, that will form the subject of the present treatise. Nor are single combats excluded from this definition. For, as they are in reality more ancient than public wars, and undoubtedly, of the same nature, they may therefore properly be comprehended under one and the same name. This agrees very well with the true derivation of the word. For the Latin word, Bellum, WAR, comes from the old word, Duellum, a DUEL, as Bonus from Duonus, and Bis from Duis. Now Duellum was derived from Duo; and thereby implied a difference between two persons, in the same sense as we term peace, Unity, from Unitas, for a contrary reason. So the Greek word, πολεμος {polemos} commonly used to signify war, expresses in its original, an idea of multitude. The ancient Greeks likewise called it λυη {lyê}, which imports a DISUNION of minds; just as by the term δυη {dyê}, they meant the DISSOLUTION of the parts of the body. Nor does the use of the word, War, contradict this larger acceptation of it. For though some times it is only applied to the quarrels of states, yet that is no objection, as it is evident that a general name is often applied to some particular object, entitled to peculiar distinction. Justice is not included in the definition of war, because the very point to be decided is, whether any war is just, and what war may be so called. Therefore we must make a distinction between war itself, and the justice of it. (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46564/pg46564-images.html#Page_17)

This definition of war is completely natural: it describes a natural state of affairs, and even if one surrenders, it still describes that state of affairs. The merely means one has been conquered and unified with one’s attacker. And there is nothing wrong with this, surrender is often times a strategic imperative. Much of the rest of Grotius’s work will focus on the justice of war, that is, in the context of this article, a sort of nomos or censorship of contention by force.

For example, when the tax man comes to take a bite out of you, as it were, it is unjust to kill him and bury his body in a ravine. That is simply unjust, anti-government evil. You must allow him to eat you: justice decrees it. Conversely, you must not if you are hungry take a bite out of him, that is called robbery. Most people who support the dishonest imposition of nomos will be the tax collector when they are hungry, and say it is robbery if someone else is hungry. They will eat you if they are hungry, but they will say “no no, as hungry as you are, you may not eat me.”

To tie this together, if one is to effectively prosecute a war, one may do so honestly, or dishonestly. It is dishonest to say that one may not eat one’s opponents, and that one must fight in uniform. The argument might be made that “if I do not wish to be eaten by soldiers not in uniform, I will agree that it is a principle of comity or a peremptory norm that soldiers must be uniformed, and must not eat their opponents.” This is the same premise on which most international arms treaties are entered into: you will agree not to use chemical weapons, so we will agree not to use chemical weapons.

The difference is that these treaties are obviously agreements between powers that know very well they could use chemical weapons: they simply agree, mutually, that to do so would be in neither of their strategic interests. It is not, and cannot, for the military strategist, be out of some neurotic sanctimony that says “of course, gassing my opponents is physical possible, but I am a highly evolved spiritual being that recognizes there is more to war than victory. I must secure the victory in the right way.”