Oh holy night; on suits, churches, science and speciesism

Ola Salo taught me how to perform.

I've spent 4 nights in Tampere. I have things to explore for my book of ghosts; this city is one of the stops in the story.

I've eaten in a couple of restaurants. Only God knows why waitresses and other people often try to start small talk with me. Maybe it's because I look a bit funny. They usually realize very soon that they won't get anything decent out of me. I'm not good at talking about things that are not ridiculously big and important.

In one restaurant, I ordered ice cream after eating a cheesy pasta. Why the hell am I not a vegan? I know very well what happens in the dairy industry. I can hear the mother cows screaming for their newborns that have been taken away and left alone in little crates. It is nightmare. Why am I supporting it? I think it's because I'm tired of doing the right thing in a world where nobody else seems to be interested in doing the right thing. No matter whether it's about intelligence, morality or mathematics, being better than others is one of the loneliest things in the world.

Or maybe these are just excuses? I don't know. At least I admit that I should change.

Yesterday I entered a clothing store just to sit down on the floor of a fitting room; I just wanted to sit and breathe for a moment. I ended up bying a suit. A very cheap one, but a suit anyway. I've never really had a proper suit. For funerals I've just worn something that doesn't look unbearably disrespectful. But now I have a suit, a tie and all. I look very attractive in it.

This is a strange story.

I'm too close to the book I'm writing now to say if it really is good or not. I don't know. When I'm feeling tired and depressed, which happens quite regularly, it's difficult to believe in anything.

I'm always thinking about the book that I wrote when I was 16. Writing it was like an orgasm. Three years ago I was writing something that I felt was so incredibly good that every person on the planet would want to read it. I'm not that optimistic anymore, but I still think that it's something extraordinary. The book I'm writing now is not as heavy, but... I think it's still pretty great. Maybe I will be a revolution after all. If not, I'll try to remember to smile when I fall.

The most important thing is the soul. You have to be an interesting soul to tell an interesting story. You have to come up with souls that are interesting. We'll see if I can do that.

Yesterday I also just spontaneously entered a big church and ended up singing Christmas hymns with the Christians of Tampere. It was a happy, peaceful moment. Even for an Atheist those things matter. When we were singing, I saw a father helping a young child walk down the stairs. He's like a little dog, I thought, children are little animals. At the beginning of our lives, we've all been pigs and cows.

In the last months, I've sometimes spent hours of my life arguing (or just conversing) with people on a Morrissey fan forum called Morrissey-Solo. It is a strange place. It's not like most fan forums. In fact, it's full of individuals who spend significant amounts of their time explaining how much they dislike Morrissey. They are grown, middle-aged adults, and they seem to be painfully disappointed in Morrissey... Maybe they fell in love with the Mozzer when they were aching teenagers - maybe they thought that Morrissey would be able to save them, but in the end he wasn't, and now they've got nothing but the memory of something that once was?

Morrissey. Attacking the leg of some human.

I don't know. After all, it's difficult to hate the regulars of the site. Most of them are genuinely and exceptionally intelligent. Some of them have beautiful souls. Some of them even like Morrissey. Conversations with them are often... fruitful. Last summer, I spent days on the forum, calling myself 'Oli-ver'. Sometimes I write as anonymous. Writing as anonymous is easy; it's one of the useful sides of the Internet: you can be anyone. For a couple of times I've actually lied just to make my point easier to grasp: "Yes, I do have a child." "Yes, I do live in Norway." "Yes, I eat meat too." Shameful, isn't it. Forgive me. I won't do that again.

The last debate I had was about Morrissey's words on the Norwegian massacre; I already wrote about it here. In July 2011 Morrissey said that what had happened in Norway was murder, but that worse things happen in the animal industry every day. Not the best timing, definitely not the best way to get the message across, but still true.

So I've spent hours trying to understand why certain Morrissey-Soloists (what a word) find this statement so offensive. Interesting and deeply intelligent individuals like Johnny Barleycorn and realitybites (when you google your way to this writing - hello! keep rocking!) keep claiming that what Morrissey said was something unforgivable.

But what exactly is the crime in the words that Morrissey said? I mean, rationally speaking, as disgusting as one violent massacre of 77 teenagers is, an industry that tortures hundreds of billions of animals on factory farms every year is worse. This industry's also the number one reason for things like world hunger and the environmental crisis. (I've said all this so many times before. I'm sorry. I like to repeat things.) To me it seems irrational to condemn one massacre and then give money to a much bigger criminal.

Even I'd got the original quote wrong. These are Morrissey's actual words:

"Despite the love, we do live on a murderous planet,

as you will have seen in the last few days in Norway.

Murder, murder, murder.

Really, every single day worse things happen in Kentucky Fried Shit and McDonald's.

Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder."

These are facts. Murder, murder, murder; that's what this world is. It's a beautiful, melancholic poem, too.

What happened in Norway breaks my heart. Violence and evil in general break my heart. That's the way it should be. But usually people want to ignore the violence they themselves are somehow taking part in.

At the end of the day, the problem we're dealing with here is speciesism. It's the idea that the suffering of humans is somehow holier than the suffering of other vertebrates. Even most vegetarians and animal friends usually agree with it: to say that hurting a pig is as bad as hurting a human being is a tabu. In 2013, Morrissey must be one of the only famous people who refuse to agree with this world view. I remember watching a video where Russell Brand, a vegetarian himself, interviewed Morrissey. They started talking about the meat industry. Morrissey compared it to the holocaust. "No, no", said Russell quickly, "no, no."

You can think it - but don't say it.

Is it something religious? When Morrissey says that torturing animals is as bad as torturing humans, it is considered 'disrespectful' towards humans - but why? As if he was somehow belittling the suffering of humans. He clearly isn't. He's simply stating that as important as it is to treat humans without violence, it is as important to treat non-human animals without violence.

To someone who thinks that animals are worth nothing, a statement like this must be very difficult to understand. I mean... if animals have no moral value, is Morrissey trying to say that humans don't have any value either?

No. He's stating something that, in the end, isn't very radical at all: that we all have moral value. We are all biologically capable of suffering. That's why you shouldn't hurt us. That's why you shouldn't torture us. That's why you shouldn't stomp on us.

I think that once again, the thing that's tearing me away from the rest of the world is that my world view is pretty much as scientific as it gets. I'm usually able to stay quite rational even when it comes to the most difficult of moral questions. When pointless tabus are destroyed, I only enjoy it.

Having a scientific world view doesn't mean that you have to be a loud, repulsive moron who doesn't understand anybody's feelings. Things like pain and suffering and compassion and morality exist. As long as we are beings capable of all these things, we should give great value to them.

So, finally, the point is this: I don't see any scientifically, or morally, valid reason to think that the suffering of a pig is any less important than the suffering of myself. We are biologically equally capable of experiencing the bacic emotions that matter: pain, fear, distress. I may be more intelligent than the pig, but why should that be in any way relevant? How does the ability to do math make pain any more painful? Is the suffering of a mentally handicapped child morally less important than the suffering of a Nobel prize winner of physics?

I mean, to me it's very simple:

if you hurt us, we suffer. Don't do it.