You see I’m part of the vast mushy middle-ground that considers themselves “spiritual but not religious”. I feel somewhat squeamish about this, like I haven’t thought it through. But actually when I examine this it turns out I have pretty strong views, I just acknowledge the ambiguity between positions. Why subscribe to one school of thought so dogmatically when so many religions have good (and terrible) ideas? The same thing with philosophy: while I frequently battle existential dread-driven insomnia (with a Hitchens-like Scotch of my own) I don’t feel aligned with that school any more than I do any other.

I believe in God, sure, kind of like, well, The Force. I don’t think there is one human-like deity hovering above us in some celestial image. Whatever God is I think it’s beyond human comprehension. People’s attempts to organize themselves around holy texts are really no more than folk songs that have been passed around by different tribes, most telling variations on the same story, and reinforcing divisions that cause us to kill and hate each other. People across the world understand the idea of good and bad (even in China), and everywhere there exists a code of morality (even in Pakistan). We don’t really need religion for that.

I confess that I think that religion really seems to me a short-cut to thinking. This is driven in part by a close friend in high school who I “lost” to born-again Christianity. I have always felt like he gave up on life and just chose that path because it gave him some kind of answer to questions that frightened him but he couldn’t quite bring himself to grapple with. But maybe that’s what he needed. And I know that religion offers a great deal of comfort for people during trying times.

I have equally strong feelings about proselytizing as I do about freedom of religion. I can’t stand people trying to convert me and I deplore athletes, politicians and other public figures talking about God. It seems to me that your faith is something intensely private, I resent someone intruding on mine (usually in the form of the Lubavitchers ambushing me when I get out of the L train: “excuse me, are you Jewish”?) and I think it’s crass to put your faith out on display for everyone to see. But I also feel that someone’s right to worship as they want is a fundamental human right. That’s one of the reasons I get so worked up about the ethnic genocide that the Chinese government is perpetuating on the Tibetan people.

This leads me to another point: the relationship between ethnicity and spirituality. I’m Jewish but I have little or no feeling for the texts and orthodoxy of the religion. But I feel a strong identity as a Jew and an affinity for the history. I think these feelings merge into the spiritual domain when I look inside, at least in terms how I relate to the world and any sense of God. So while a government interfering with my right to worship (as the Chinese do in Tibet) might not change my day to day life, it would interfere with my spirituality and identity.

When I’ve mentioned the topic of the next Junta to people a few have asked me “do you pray?” The answer is yes. Every night before I go to sleep I remember those close to me, I think of those I know who are struggling, I think of global disasters and pray for those suffering, and I reflect on what happened to me that day and almost inevitably my mind turns to thanks to God for how fortunate I am. I don’t need a temple to do that or a holy text to remind me of it.

So a friend of mine came through NY during those first months I was back in NY and he wanted a steak. I called Wolfgang’s on Park Avenue and asked if their meet is organic to which the hostess replied “what?” She passed the phone to the manager and he said, in a thick Balkan accent, “yes, yes, it is the best”. I was a bit wary, but made the reservation. My friend I sat down to eat and as the busy Balkan waiter told us about the menu I asked him if their meet was organic and I again got “what?”. So I said, “you know, the cow ate grass, wasn’t confined to a pen its whole life, moved around, etc.” And he replied, “no, no, cow never move, whole life.” I was disappointed, but still got the steak; I was trying to be a conscientious eater, but I wasn’t ready to go with the vegetarian option at a steak house.

That’s the heart of the matter for me: how to eat ethically as often as possible. Jonathan Safran Froer had a short essay on the Huffington Post after his book Eating Animals came out basically saying that you don’t have to be a vegan to try to be a more ethical eater, much in the same way you don’t have to swear off riding in a car if you identify with environmentalism.

But what really started me thinking about this was my time in China. I started researching a story on animal welfare when I saw something about a Chinese woman being ostracized after she was identified in a video crushing a kitten with stiletto heels for a Japanese fetish website. The story I read noted that there was no animal welfare law in practice. It was interesting that this woman was found and essentially disciplined through vigilante justice through the power of Chinese flash-mobs, and others have followed that story closely and what it means to Chinese society, but I started thinking about animals and China. It was interesting to me that the Chinese, as they acquire more wealth, are starting to have pets and become more conscious of animals. But it isn’t a straight shot from simply having a dog to respecting animals, in fact there are a lot of problems associated with increased pet numbers in China, some of which I touch on in my story (PDF). The story took me in many directions: traditional Chinese views towards animals and how they were influenced over time by Taoism, Confucius, Communism and Capitalism; the attitudes towards animals in the various regions (in the south, in Guangdong, they are fond of saying they will eat “anything that flies except for a plane and anything with four legs except for a table”); the rise of intensive farming in China as the Chinese demand more meat with their disposable incomes.

I also had the good fortune of spending some time with Professor Peter Singer as I was working on this story. Singer is a Professor of Bioethics at Princeton and the author of, among many others, Animal Liberation, considered by many to be the bible of the animal rights movement. He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, my ex-employer, and I met him once in his hometown of Melbourne, where we had lunch at a Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant.  That conversation, corresponding with him since then, and most importantly reading his books (The Ethics of What We Eat is also excellent) and essays helped me think outside the box. It’s not just about what we eat, but how we treat animals. For example, Professor Singer is a part of a movement to extend a modicum of human rights for great apes. He refers to the bias we seem comfortable with against animals as speciasm. Sometimes he is dismissed for these claims, but he backs up his views with strong research and convincing arguments and approaches the questions as a philosopher and not a polemicist or self-promoter.

Ultimately, for me, the question of how we eat is essential. It’s about our health and also about how we can shape the world we live in. You can vote with your dollars by patronizing restaurants that serve organic meat and make a bit of a difference by even asking if they have any organic options on the menu. Making big changes in the world – ending hunger, peace in the Middle East – seem daunting. But it seems like a small victory each time I find a new restaurant or grocery store that offers ethical eating options.

I thought this was a particularly interesting point on how Krugman really made a name for himself:

One implication of Krugman’s theory was that, contrary to economic orthodoxy, industrial policy might have its benefits. If the location of a new industry was essentially arbitrary, then a government, by subsidizing and protecting its emergence, could enable it to gain such a lasting advantage that other countries would find it difficult to catch up.

It goes on to point out how he found the arbitrary nature of the location of industry “deeply disturbing and troubling”. What it made me think of what some people are calling China’s Green Leap Forward. I mostly complain about China, but I admire them in this respect, if they can apply Krugman’s theory to what they are trying to do, and leverage their advantages in engineering, cheap labor, and infrastructure, they could corner the market on what will (hopefully) be one of the biggest developing industries of the 21st century.

Today one of the news items out of China is on the fate of the Rio Tinto executives that have been held in China since the summer on charges of espionage. They are reducing the charges in a slow diplomatic climb-down, but the facts seem largely the same. It looks like China, unhappy with the status of negotiations with Rio Tinto and others on global pricing for steel decided to send a message and essentially hold one of the big companies hostage.  

The other thing I’m thinking about today’s is the value of China’s Renminbi and how disagreement over that is potentially building to a climax. It was one thing before the financial crisis for China to artificially keep its currency low to fuel export-driven growth. At that time consumers in the US and Europe were buying up cheap Chinese goods and everyone was winning, even if economists were warning about dangerous and unsustainable balances that resulted. And right after the economic crisis started policy-makers in the west were just trying to save their financial systems, Chinese currency manipulation fell off the agenda. And no one knew how China would be affected by the crisis. A huge Chinese stimulus package has played a big role in keeping China moving at roughly the same 8% annual growth it had predicted prior to the crisis. But China has retreated from slowly letting its current appreciate against the dollar and now economists are saying that this is hurting the global economy, further warping trade balances when the rest of the world can no longer afford it. Forget the US for a moment, many third world countries are hurt by this beggar-thy-neighbor fiscal policy as they can’t compete with warped business margins manipulated by Chinese technocrats.

China’s years of economic growth and America’s woes have led to more and more destructively hostile behavior from China as it tries to throw its weight around. It reacts with petulant anger and robot-like defiance to reasonable requests from the rest of the world to discuss a range of issues. For years people have talked about US exceptionalism, and you can knock the US if you want, but the idea of that exceptionalism was that the US would intervene to try to right wrongs, help the oppressed, and generally steer the world in a postive direction. Chinese exceptionalism is about telling the rest of the world to go to hell and come kowtow to ”The Middle Kingdom” when we’re ready. The Chinese belief that they are somehow above the rest of the world and shouldn’t have to held to its rules is nothing new. I hope that like Lord Macartney in the late 18th century, the world will refuse to kowtow to China’s unreasonable ways.

I’m the benefactor of a smart colleague who is a voracious reader and, like I occasionally do, leaves magazines around the office for others to read after he finishes them. Among the mags I got today was Foreign Policy, just read Walter Russel Mead’s excellent piece that has gotten a lot of attention this past week for really exploring the comparison between the foreign policy of Obama and Carter.