This article, Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace, begins by detailing
the goings-on at the Maine Lobster Festival. A local tradition, the lobsters, once thought
to be much less of the delicacy than they are today, are once again relegated to a position
not much higher than that of a fast food meal, he says. He describes the chaotic scene of
the days-long festival before beginning his main point, brought about when PETA began
demonstrating at the festival. He draws attention to the idea that lobsters, cooked alive,
have long been commonly thought to not suffer when being prepared for consumption
(an idea most would like to believe), although he argues that this is not necessarily the
case.
The line that most stuck out to me was this: “Dick…articulates what he and his
family feel is the crucial mitigating factor in the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive
issue: ‘There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and
lobsters’ brains don’t have this part,’” which Wallace then goes on to state is not the case.
Perhaps it was because I had just spent my weekend watching movies, one of which took
place during the American Civil Rights era and the other which took place during the
Holocaust, but I saw a notable parallel in the justification of questionable treatment of
blacks or Jews and that of the killing of lobsters. In our rationalization of events, we often
attempt to dehumanize victims in order to quell our own guilty feelings. Though it can be
argued that killing lobsters is certainly less horrendous than abusing or killing humans,
our readiness to accept untrue “science” in order to make ourselves feel better about a
potential injustice still persists today. No good human enjoys seeing people suffer. Yet
good people often stand at the sidelines of bad events just because they’ve convinced
themselves that the lobster can’t feel pain, or that Jews aren’t human anyway. There is
something important about that initial instinct that something is wrong (for example,
when people run out of the kitchen so they don’t have to hear the lobster struggling to get
out of its boiling grave) that we too often ignore. If we can see the errors of our ways
with the lobsters, maybe we can avoid such occurrences in humans.