Jamie the Gladiator - Jamie Oliver lets it (ethics) all hang out

Geoffrey Hamilton

April 25, 2006

This week's Jamie's Great Italian Escape has brought out some ethical issues for his world-wide audiences regarding the meaning of death (food). More importantly is there such a thing as a real meaning to anything. At the same time a relevant replaying of Gladiators: The Brutal Truth spotlighted another Italian era and how seemingly absolute values, like death, cannot mesh between cultures distanced by either time or space. Both shows taken together and Jamie's two epiphanies in his show (that he could kill a lamb and that he could actually do it on camera) brought up vast amounts of cultural bile for his audience.

The whole issue for Jamie came up when he decided to stay with an Italian family in Le Marche, east of Tuscany. The family hunted boar, slaughtered their own meats and didn't believe in modern farming methods. As this was an episode for his newest series Jamie was trying to find a sustainable system of living which was also healthy.

When, eventually, the family asked Jamie to cut the throat of a lamb (Silence of the Lambs might have come to his mind) he at first said, "I don't think I can kill a lamb to be honest with you." Then he tightened his thinking and said it would be hypocritical after serving hundreds of lamb dishes not to be willing to kill one.

After shocking millions of his fans by slitting the throat of the lamb and skinning it according to Italian local custom, as well as trying to shoot a wild boar, Jamie began to openly wonder about all cultural differences.

He saw two local toddlers hanging out around the lamb carcass as a cat licked from the pool of blood and saw a resemblance between these toddlers and his own two. He said it was wonderful the way local kids were exposed to the slaughter; kids should be desensitized to these facts of life and death and how food is procured for them. Never, though, does the alternative come to his mind. Now hold that thought for a bit while we go to gladiators.

Terry Jones the host of 'Brutal Truth' wondered many times during the show why old Italians, like the Romans, made the death of animals and people so common as to make it an entertainment. Of course he began with some historical time lines and developments, which for him really explained nothing because even afterwards he chose to be perplexed.

Why did norms like this come to be? Why do any norms arise? Jones might have asked. He needed to go back to the historical developments which he had rushed through and begin with the question, 'Where do all norms come from?' He shouldn't just confuse himself by taking one norm only and not, at least, also include his own norm of twenty-first century 'humanitarianism' as an equal partner in the scientific quest. Ask 'Why did they all arise?' and the developments of both norms, and other norms as well, can be seen easily within the historical factors to be essentially arbitrary games, no less so than the gladiatorial games themselves.

For example, say, one day a guy near Rome in 600 BC thinks direct human sacrifice is boring and knows it also make his slaves upset. Next, he wants to determine who his most expendable slaves are so he tells two he doesn't care much about to fight to the death during the funeral sacrifice thus solving several issues at once. Suddenly gladiators are born. Others see it as a good idea and it grows. There is no mystery as to how these things happen really. We cannot be sure of any actual history, but how anything can happen within life is usually in a simultaneous sequence of personal ideas and decisions that we can see all around us everyday of our lives. Sensitivity to animal suffering, or not, is just one of those things - no big deal - it's just the result of one more kind of game. Jamie's throat cutting and the gladiatorial games now have a context that makes sense of any value and how all historical developments have a part to play in how any value arises.

Next, when you remember how any and all people feel pleasure when they torture 'bad' people (personal enemies), it is quite simple to understand how any violence becomes accepted. All you need to do is change the norm and bad can be made out of anyone, from rivals in checkers, to unfaithful spouses, to enemy nationals.

Thomas Carlyle, for example, in 1853 generally wanted all arable land to come under cultivation because 'God' hated wasting the potential of the land. Carlyle also hated industrialization and modern work methods because it turns souls into machines. But Carlyle liked having black slaves, so when The Empire's slaves had been freed he came up with this idea for England's West Indies. "... no black man who will not work {in the sugar cane fields} according to what ability the gods have given him for working, has the smallest right {no right} to eat pumpkin {do subsistence farming} , or to any fraction of land that will grow pumpkin, however plentiful such land may be; but has an indisputable and perpetual right to be compelled {by whipping he says}, by the real proprietors of said land {whites}..." Suddenly, farming the land is an act of laziness and modern methods are fine. He twisted his own standards in order to create his wanted norm and found torture and violence desirable and pleasurable. Such feat of twisted morality are in everyone's grasp.

Violence and suffering is enjoyed when we manipulate the norm in ourselves and others. New kinds of 'gladiatorial games' surround us all the time in the norms of gangster rappers, death penalty advocates, and road rage participants, and when we confront it normally we just call it a bad day. When we take these other's norms up as issues, like Jamie, like his shocked fans, we manipulate the context in order to create or massage norms, so that we can, vitally, care about something, and secondly, still enjoy our own secreted silencing of the lambs.

So Jamie, why then didn't you consider the alternative? Why must children be desensitized to the slaughter? No Births Jamie! There is no reason for any of it. So if you want to really end suffering you should never have had children.

GRH

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