Star-tling Thoughts

I don’t know where to start with this one! The reason for this picture will eventually become clearer.

You probably know I’m panpsychist, which is linked to my veganism. I suppose the best place to begin is to account for this connection and the reasons for this belief, and also to describe what that belief actually is first of all, so here goes.

Panpsychism is the belief that matter is inherently conscious. In fact I’m not so sure about this definition because it might also be that space itself is conscious. I should point out further that my own version of panpsychism might differ from the usual version, and that it isn’t the same as hylozoism or pantheism. I usually employ an analogy with ferromagnetism, thus. Many elementary particles carry an electrical charge, including in particular quarks and some leptons. All such particles have magnetic fields, and a north and south pole which means they can be lined up by applying a magnetic field to them. However, most materials, though they’re largely made up of such particles, are not magnets. Only certain arrangements of matter are, the most familiar of which are lumps of iron whose magnetic domains are aligned. In this situation, the essential magnetic character of most matter comes to express itself in a macroscopic way which can be observed easily. There are other arrangements which are also magnets, such as the rare earth pickups used in electric guitars.

Consciousness is, in my view, similar. At least many and possibly all elementary particles are conscious, and in fact possibly all of space because of virtual particles. However, most materials, though they’re largely made up of such particles, are not minds. Only certain arrangements of matter are, the most familiar of which are wakeful humans with their particular bodily form and functions. In this situation, the essential conscious character of most matter comes to express itself in a macroscopic way which can be observed easily. There are other arrangements which are also minds.

There may also be a need to contrast this with pantheism and hylozoism. Hylozoism is the belief that everything is alive. This is not the same thing as most people would probably say that not all living things are conscious, such as bacteria and plants. It’s more like the belief that the Cosmos is an immense living organism, which to some extent I can get on board with because it’s a bit like the very liberal definition of acid which interprets almost all chemical reactions as reactions involving the action of an acid. It’s fine, but it’s not panpsychism. The other thing panpsychism isn’t, although I have some sympathy with it, is pantheism, which is the idea that God is everything. One issue with that belief is that it can be a kind of squeamish version of atheism which is afraid to call a spade a spade. I am personally not pantheist because God is unlike and not dependent upon any created (or sustained) thing. That doesn’t mean the Universe isn’t worthy of respect or that God is more like a human than the Universe. I don’t want to dwell on these distinctions, but it’s important they be made because many people think this is the claim I’m making.

Okay, so why do I believe this? Because there’s no other way of accounting for consciousness. All the other models – behaviourism, physicalism, psychophysical dualism, functionalism, idealism and anomalous monism – have massive flaws. I don’t want to go into them in depth right now because although I’m staking out a vague claim here, this isn’t the main point of this post. The claim that panpsychism isn’t a solution to the mind-body problem either is also fair, because it attempts to solve the problem by assuming what it’s trying to account for. Why would matter be like that?

This belief of mine has certain consequences. For instance, it makes me vegan but in a way my veganism is more extreme and sadder than most people’s because I accept that plants are also conscious and suffer. Hence veganism is just a kind of utilitarianism where suffering is minimised rather than a particularly positive way of life where no avoidable suffering and death is wrought upon the world. I constantly destroy bacteria too. We cannot be entirely non-violent but we should still strive to be as non-violent as possible, and partly for that reason it’s not my place to judge others. The world is a practically endless cycle of carnage in which we are all complicit. I’m vegan because eating animals or dairy products would involve an unnecessary extra step which would involve the death of more plants than just eating plants.

All this doesn’t generally occupy my mind much. However, a couple of things have come to light in the past week. One was that I met up with my ex and was presented with a first draft of an essay I wrote for my Masters:

I’ve already talked about my time at Warwick. The above essay is a reaction to a comment made by Christine Battersby near the beginning of that year. The reason I did my MA was to further pursue radical philosophy and help to provide a theoretical basis for progressive politics, and as I must surely have said elsewhere, it turned out that Warwick University’s primary activity seemed to be manufacturing excuses for why the political state of affairs was inevitable – capitalist realism in other words. I hoped that the Women’s Studies contingent would be better but although I very much liked their transphobia, they were also speciesist. Battersby claimed that consciousness depends on language use, so in other words if you don’t have a voice it doesn’t matter what happens to you. She was utterly focussed on humans and didn’t care about anything else. I’m not going to rubbish everything she says, because for example ‘Gender And Genius’ is a very interesting book, but there were a number of problems with her belief system, not least its incompatibility with more than a very limited anthropocentric version of veganism. If you can’t see what’s wrong with that, you need to check your privilege. Yes, I know that’s a cliché.

So that’s one. The other one is more widely interesting but no less personal. It starts, as so many things do, with Olaf Stapledon, “W.O.S”, whose name is associated with the works ‘Last And First Men’ and ‘Star Maker’. The second is more relevant here. Neither of these books is really a novel, and in fact this statement is made at the beginning of the first. They are, however, both science fiction. The first describes the two thousand million year-long future history of the human race from 1930 onward. The second covers the entire history of the Multiverse, focussing mainly on our own Universe. Yeah yeah, big canvas, vast scope, origin of the adjective Stapledonian, but that isn’t what I want to concentrate on right now. The relevant bit at the moment is the way stars are portrayed. And I quote:

It isn’t clear whether W.O.S. actually believed this, but then again it isn’t even clear whether W.O.S. considered himself the author of these words for reasons I can’t be bothered to go into here, but there are two ways of looking at this taken at face value. One is hylozoism – stars are living organisms. In fact, in ‘Star Maker’, various things are living and sentient organisms which might not be considered so by most earthlings. The other is something close to panpsychism, at least if the star itself is considered a world. The outer layers of the star are conscious. The chapter goes on to claim that the voluntary movements of stars are identified by astrophysics as their normal movements as predicted by scientific laws and theories.

This sounds fanciful and outlandish, not to say unscientific and perhaps even superstitious. We don’t generally look at the stars at night and think of them moving around deliberately. In fact, apart from the fact of Earth’s rotation, most of the time non-astronomers don’t think about the stars’ proper motion at all. Eppur si muoveno – pardon my Italian. The formation and rotation of galactic arms is confounding in various ways. The most obvious of these is the one dark matter is evoked to explain. The velocity of objects in the outer margins of galaxies does not compare to those further in according to the mass of the visible portion of those galaxies, so it’s claimed that there must be invisible matter causing them to rotate faster than they should. Moreover, the spiral arms of galaxies are more like the bunches of vehicles in traffic jams, separated by sparsely-populated stretches of road, through which individual motorists move, than a kind of “formation dance” arrangement. Finally, and this is a more significant fact than may at first appear, stars of different spectral classes move at different velocities around the galaxy. At this point I should probably fish out the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram:

By Richard Powell – The Hertzsprung Russell Diagram, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1736396

It can be seen that stars are not randomly distributed by these criteria. There are, for instance, no small hot stars other than white dwarfs and there’s a general correlation between brightness and heat, the hottest stars being on the left of the diagram – O-type stars like Rigel. Hence their size and mass can be taken into consideration if need be. The cooler stars are on the right, and these are the interesting ones from the viewpoint of the very peculiar statement that has been quite recently been made about them by a respectable astrophysicist.

So here’s the thing: cooler stars move faster around the Galaxy than hotter ones at the same distance from the centre. This is called Parenago’s Discontinuity. More specifically, stars of spectral type F8 and hotter “orbit” faster. A few explanations have been offered for this apart from the rather obvious one I’m going to mention in a bit. One is that stars might be shining more brightly on one side than the other, and although light has no mass, it does have momentum and therefore can be used as a method of propulsion:

Another “sensible” explanation is that the stars emit jets of plasma which have the same effect, and there seems to be a third one that it’s to do with stars being slowed down as they move through nebulæ.

Okay, so another explanation has been offered by one Gregory Matloff. Matloff is a pretty respectable guy. He has a doctorate in meteorology and oceanography, a Masters in astronautics and aeronautics and a BA in physics. He’s authored various books, such as one on solar sails with Eugene Mallove – this is the very real technology of using reflective mylar sheets as a form of space propulsion by sunlight pushing on the “sail” thus formed, because as I said above, starlight has momentum which can be used as a power source. He’s currently a professor of physics. So this guy is not exactly like a Sasquatch chaser or UFOlogist – he has been involved in SETI but in a very dry, scientific kind of way – but has some respectable credentials. It should also be said that just because someone is an expert in their own field, it doesn’t mean their opinions are worthy of respect in other fields about which they know less. Immanuel Velikovsky seems to have been a competent psychiatrist but his claims about the recent origin of Venus as a comet are completely ridiculous and seem also to be motivated reasoning. Matloff is not like that so far as I can tell.

So why am I going on about this bloke then? Because he’s a panpsychist. Not only that, but he reckons panpsychism is a testable explanation for why cooler stars circle around the Galaxy more quickly than hotter ones. He believes that such stars are conscious and move around of their own volition. They don’t obey the laws of physics as we know them as precisely as they’d be expected to, but the extent to which they don’t is only like someone running for a hundred years and changing their velocity over that time by a couple of centimetres a second. This minimal degree of involvement reminds me of the Steady State Theory, which saw matter as continuously springing into existence at the rate of about two hydrogen atoms a year in a volume the size of the Empire State Building. Although, so far as I can tell, Matloff is open to the idea that the stars in question are adjusting their speed and direction using jets or changing their luminosity, he’s also open to the much more controversial idea that not only are they doing it deliberately but that they’re doing it by psychokinesis.

There comes a point in certain conversations where the “argument by incredulous stare” is deployed. This happens in a couple of philosophical areas, one of which is panpsychism and another of which is modal realism (the idea that the Multiverse is real). However, mere outlandishness doesn’t make something false and doesn’t constitute an argument against it. This is the fallacy of the argument from incredulity, much beloved of flat Earthers and Apollo mission deniers. It is, though, true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

A relatively good piece of evidence that this is in fact going on is found in the fact that only cooler stars do this. There are a number of ways to account for consciousness, one of which is the behaviour of the rings making up some of the molecules in nerve cell microtubules. These are part of the cytoskeleton, and it’s been suggested that quantum events associated with the p orbitals in aromatic moieties within tubulin, the protein they’re made of, is what consciousness is. If this is so, only similar phenomena would be able to manifest consciousness, although this could be functionally equivalent and not be made of the same stuff. If it actually does require that stuff though, stars couldn’t be conscious. Maybe they aren’t. Actually this needs restating: even if panpsychism is true, it doesn’t mean that consciousness would be manifest in stars, though stars could still be impotently conscious.

Matloff prefers to evoke the Casimir Effect. An example of this is the tendency of two metal plates very close to each other to pull towards each other. It’s an example of zero-point energy, which is the “free energy” supposèdly present in empty space. Whereas this energy undoubtedly exists, it doesn’t follow that it can be extracted and used, or that if it can that that would be a good idea – my naïve mind suspects that this would cause collapse of the false vacuum and the end of the Universe, but that’s just me and I might be catastrophising. If that’s true, though, depending on the size of the Universe and how common technological cultures are within it, it seems guaranteed that that can’t happen because we’re still here. Matloff claims that the Casimir Effect’s contribution to molecular bonds makes cooler stars conscious.

This next bit is going to sound like W.O.S. again. Stars are often too hot for chemistry. Atoms as such have trouble existing in many of them because they’re too hot for electrons to stay in orbitals around them, so the idea of microtubule p orbitals being associated with consciousness is a non-starter here. However, the upper layers of stars are cooler than their interiors and molecules can form in the cooler stars, i.e. those of spectral class F8 or below. Hence the proposition that consciousness becomes operable at the energy level below which molecular bonds exist because they are involved with certain molecular bonds implies that volitional behaviour in entities below that temperature would not be found in similar entities hotter than it. In a very crude sense, all living humans have body temperatures below 6300 Kelvin, or 6000°C. This is actually true. A human running a temperature above 6000°C would not be conscious but be superheated gas. Or would she? I don’t know. It’s counterintuitive that she’d be in good mental health.

Okay, so the idea is that stars cool enough to have molecules are conscious and have volition. They act deliberately. Evidence for this is that cooler stars travel through the Galaxy faster than they should. Incidentally, this also means the Sun is conscious, because it’s a G2V star, well below the threshold where consciousness is extinguished at this stage.

Now, unfortunately I have completely forgotten how I came to this conclusion but three dozen years ago or so, I realised that if panpsychism is true, psychokinesis must also be possible. I have racked my brains about this and cannot for the life of me recall my train of thought regarding this. It isn’t to do with anything like psychophysical dualism, although that would also strongly suggest psychokinesis in the most straightforward version of that model (bodies and souls). So I apologise for this irritating omission. This also means that my reasoning can’t be examined for this belief. I might just have been wrong. Also, it makes panpsychism testable: if it could be shown that psychokinesis is impossible, it would also refute panpsychism.

Stars being conscious isn’t the same thing as panpsychism being true or psychokinesis being possible. It could be that one of the other methods of transportation they could use is under their voluntary control, and that an alternative arrangement of matter found in cooler stars also confers consciousness, but merely in functional terms like a human being is often conscious.

The problem I have with all this is that I can’t decide if Matloff is serious, or if he is, whether he’s sensible. It’s true that I am panpsychist and nowadays I take it on faith that this implies that psychokinesis is possible even though I can’t remember why. However, there is a problem with this set of claims. There’s a thing called “God Of The Gaps”, which is the idea that God is simply used to explain anything we don’t understand. Thus before the theory of evolution was popular, people believed God created all species more or less as they are in historical times. This is not a good way to believe in God. Likewise, panpsychism could be evoked to explain a lot of things we don’t have good scientific theories for. For instance, dark matter is the usual explanation for why galaxies rotate faster than the visible mass in them suggests they should. Another one is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND). I don’t like the first explanation because it seems to me that dark matter is a conveniently inactive substance which has just been made up to plug the gaps in the model, although I am open to the idea that it might just be ordinary matter which can’t be seen such as rogue planets, dust, neutrinos and so on. However, it would be equally possible to say that stars simply move around galaxies faster than the ordinary laws of physics suggest because they’re using psychokinesis. In fact, maybe I’ll just decide that’s what I believe.

I can’t imagine these views being taken seriously in the astrophysics community. However, it is interesting that they are the same views as W.O.S. expressed in ‘Star Maker’ in 1937. ’Star Maker’ is a work of fiction. It gets certain things about astronomy and astrophysics completely wrong. At the time, it used to be thought that planets were formed when stars came close to each other and pulled elongated cylinders of gas out of their photospheres, which then condensed into gaseous or solid bodies, and that red giants were young stars in the process of forming. There’s clearly no omniscient authority telling W.O.S. what to write, or if there is it’s an unreliable narrator. W.O.S. does, however, portray himself as the true author of neither ‘Last And First Men’ nor ‘Star Maker’. He also narrates his own experiences in the third person in some stories, and the continuity between ‘Last Men In London’ and ‘Odd John’ suggests that he is not who he says he is. Is it possible, then, that certain ideas arrive in fiction from another source? Did W.O.S. somehow intuit that stars were conscious and did their own thing? I do have a very good reason for suspecting that this is true because of a certain paragraph in his ‘Odd John’, but because it suggests an ontological paradox and would cease to be useful as a message if I said what it was, you’re just going to have to trust me on this.

Leaving all that aside, I find it very hopeful to think of stars as living organisms, or as conscious beings. If that’s true, it means that whatever happens to this planet’s life because of what humans are doing to it, mind will continue to exist in the Universe, and in fact life, at least until the end of the Stelliferous Era, roughly one hundred million million years from now. After that, W.O.S. suggests other ways in which life and consciousness might survive and there are other suggestions about what might be possible in the very long term, but for now, if I can persuade myself that stars are conscious, I find the future to be very bright indeed.

Veganism And Racism

Jamaican curried tofu with chickpeas. From here . Will be removed on request.

I knew it’d come in handy!

I went vegan nearly three dozen years ago. Things have changed a lot in the intervening time, as might be expected, and the popularity of plant-based diets has grown considerably. Another trend which seems to be almost a universal law of human behaviour, or perhaps society, is that as movements become more popular they also tend to get watered-down and corrupted. Maybe it’s a form of entropy. It should probably also be borne in mind that as individual organisms, we also age, and there’s a tendency for us to think things were better in the old days, when we were younger, and since then it’s all gone wrong. I wouldn’t say this was entirely true. For instance, racism is less socially acceptable, people recognise sexual harassment as a bad thing, the police get involved in domestic violence cases and homosexuality is almost generally accepted nowadays. In that particular area, which might be described as identity politics, things are usually better.

Conceptually speaking, veganism is kind of on the edge of identity politics for a couple of reasons. One is that veganism can be legally seen as a protected characteristic, in that people are not supposed to be marginalised because of their veganism, although it isn’t quite the same as an immutable property such as disability or sexual orientation. It’s closer to political affiliation or religion. Another is that veganism is an attempt to support a group, actually the largest of all by far and not in any way a minority, which doesn’t have its own voice. People just do speak on behalf of other species because it’s impossible for most of them to speak for themselves. Unlike anti-racism and feminism, veganism could be said (although it isn’t entirely true) to consist entirely of allies, and as such it’s probably worth considering what people in the other movements regard as being a good ally.

The way veganism is constructed nowadays is influenced by commodification, recuperation and capitalism more generally, and we should therefore be wary of this. There’s a strong tendency to think of veganism as simply plant-based, and this can have undesirable consequences in, for example, the production of plant-based meat substitutes which are extensively tested on non-human animals during their development, and it can turn veganism into slacktivism, because you can end up feeling that all it takes to be vegan is to change your diet, use different cosmetics and toiletries and so forth, without, for example, thinking of the perhaps very distant and unsustainably grown sources of your food or other ingredients. Another consequence of this restriction on veganism’s scope is that it can lead us to ignore the treatment of the animal most of us have the most to do with socially – human beings. There is a sense in which nothing developed or produced under capitalism is vegan because it involves capitalist exploitation, and therefore exploitation of the animal known as Homo sapiens. To be fair, I can remember so-called “vegan” groups in the 1980s CE celebrating a coach crash because it meant the death of carnists. This is not veganism, although it is consequentialist because the idea is that the meat eaters dying would result in the deaths of fewer cows, chicken, sheep, pigs and others, something which could equally be achieved by persuading the same number of people do go vegan as crash victims. Hence it doesn’t even work from a consequentialist angle. This, then, is not veganism.

It’s true that mass media tends to present veganism as primarily White, and many people’s images of a vegan will be of a White person. In fact, Afro-Americans are twice as likely to be vegan as White people in the US and RastafarIan diets tend towards veganism. It also makes sense physiologically for most of the world’s human population not to eat dairy as adults due to the fact that White people are unusual in being able to digest dairy as adults, but this has no influence on carnism.

Some manifestations of so-called “veganism” have also been overtly racist. Two White people in Los Angeles started a blog originally called ‘Thug Kitchen’ in the ‘noughties which appropriated Afrikan-American Vernacular English, and there’s also the question of the word “thug”, which apparently has a controversial history due to having become associated with Black people. I can’t tell if this is a primarily American usage or not, but I would expect it to filter over if not. My understanding of the word “thug” is that it was originally an Indian word for a member of a gang of assassins who used to garrotte their victims, then became associated with people, regardless of ethnicity, in organised crime who commit acts of violence to the end of promoting and maintaining the reputation of the organisation or to extort money from victims. This meaning seems either to have changed or to have been different in American culture. It took several years for it to become clear to the general public that the people responsible for the site, and also apparently a book, were White people in California, after which they were accused of “digital blackface”. I would, however, say that all of this went on without me every becoming aware of it, and this makes me wonder if it’s symptomatic of commodification of a relatively ineffective and diluted version of “veganism” which is based on people hopping onto a trend, which perhaps also explains the use of something else which might be perceived as “cool” without thinking much about either.

PETA are, unsurprisingly, another offender, appropriating the notion of slavery without having any recent heritage of that form of oppression. In an ad said to have been banned by the NFL but which was supposèdly intended for the Superbowl, various animals were shown taking the knee in an attempt to draw comparisons between speciesism and racism. Although I don’t understand why this would be considered offensive, people took issue with the idea that Black people were being compared to members of other species. Now as I said, there’s a sense in which the vegan movement consists entirely of allies, so there’s a problem with understanding the nature of that comparison. Species are equal, but there is a history of denigrating humans in general and ethnic minorities in particular with non-human animals whose connotation is extremely negative, and this is a typically hamfisted and crass attempt by PETA to make a point regarding animal liberation which is not informed by this perception, or at least comes across in this way. Alternatively, maybe PETA’s strategy is to generate publicity in a Benneton kind of way by getting people to talk about their ads without regard to how it reflects on them, and more importantly on the animal liberation movement. However, I hope we can agree that PETA is not a good ally in the animal liberation movement due to other activities, which I won’t go into here.

Then there’s the question of the likes of quinoa, chia seeds and avocados. I first heard of chia seeds about seven or eight years ago and they have never been part of my diet. I’m not aware of ever having eaten them, although I may have inadvertantly done so chez someone or in a restaurant or café. The lauding of particular plant species in this way as superfoods reminds me strongly of the distortion of value in herbal medicine where more “exotic” remedies are perceived as more effective than local or indigenous species, which like so many other things is created by the alienation of use and exchange values in capitalism. It’s extremely harmful to any community which is not rich and relies on one or more of these species as a staple, because it can inflate the price out of their financial reach.

Chia seeds are from two species of Salvia, the genus containing sage and also the psychotropic Salvia divinorum. The Lamiaceæ (grrr, Labiatæ!), their family, probably contains the majority of culinary herbs such as mint and rosemary, and it’s unusual for a species in that taxon to be used for its seeds. I would imagine therefore that the process of harvesting chia seeds is quite labour-intensive compared to cereal harvesting, for example. They’re native to Central America and southern Mexico. The concern with cultivation of plant foods novel to the market in the developed world is that they may be grown unsustainably and raise the price of the food for the people who traditionally eat them. There’s also a kind of sense of exoticism about them which is fickle and rather like cultural appropriation, or may actually be cultural appropriation.

Quinoa I did used to eat. This is in the Amaranthaceæ, along, unsurprisingly, with amaranth itself. Unsurprisingly, its price has been forced up in Bolivia as a result of its popularity in the developed world, and is now less affordable to the poorer people of that country. In Perú the price is now higher than chicken, meaning of course that it has probably increased meat consumption in that country. But in both these cases, there is an issue of it bringing money into the countries in question as well, although economic diversification is also important because the problem with trends is that they can change rapidly. However, looking into this in more detail, quinoa is not a staple in the Andes, so it isn’t necessarily as big a problem as has been thought in the past.

I could continue to list questionable plant foods, but I’ll mention just two more. One is the avocado. These are, incidentally, remarkable in having been preserved by early agriculture and used to rely on giant ground sloths for their distribution, so they’d probably be extinct were it not for us. The same price increase as seen with the other species has affected avocados for the same reason, but in their case drug cartels are also involved, meaning that there’s a fair bit of violence in their production, although perhaps similar violence occurs with the cultivation of the other two plants. They apparently are a staple.

The final, notorious, species is unsurprisingly soya. My own consumption of soya is not negligible because I eat tofu although I don’t drink soya milk. There is what I regard as an unsupported rumour that the phytoestrogens in soya reduce male fertility which I can’t accept as true because of its long history of traditional consumption in East Asia. Another issue with soya is that it is largely fed to farm animals, which offsets its environmental impact considerably because it means that carnists will sometimes be contributing to any problems more than vegans who eat a lot of soya are. However, it has a significant rôle in the deforestation of South America although there has been a soya moratorium in Brazil which banned export of soya grown on newly deforested land, which, again however, may simply have meant that cows are now grazing on newly deforested land instead while the soya is grown on the older land, and Bolsonaro will presumably have done a lot of damage in that area. This may sound vague and dismissive, but here’s my point: if you eat distantly-grown food, it introduces ethical complications which you may not have the energy or access to accurate information about.

You might also object that this is not to do with racism, but when you consider that most of the countries involved are subject to colonialism, there is a historical legacy of racism here, although since the European countries took many of their resources it could also be argued that this is partly returning the money to the people affected, assuming some kind of economic equity between ethnicities now exists there.

The trouble is, of course, that to me and many other people this is not “veganism as we know it”, but some kind of trendy convenience thing which may be about image. It feels like some other lifestyle which has been taken away from what I know as veganism, and is in fact very similar to the commercialisation of what’s been labelled as Yoga. That doesn’t seem at all similar to what I think of as Yoga either, and there are racist tendencies in how Yoga is presented commercially in the West too.

As I mentioned above, Afrikan-Americans are more likely to be vegan than White Americans. I think it’s twice as likely. They’re also a lot more likely that White Americans to have reduced their meat consumption recently. Plant-based diets reduce the incidence of chronic conditions that disproportionately affect Black Americans such as hypertension, obesity, type II diabetes, heart disease and certain forms of cancer. However, they may not call themselves vegan, and I’m wondering if this is because the label is often associated with a White face. It is true that they may not be motivated by animal liberation, but there are many Whites with plant-based diets who do call themselves vegan when this is not what that is. On the other hand, they’re also more likely to live in food deserts. Since I lived for most of my life in a city with a particularly good open-air market, I don’t have experience of food deserts and am not commenting from an informed position, but I’m also in the process of writing a book entitled ‘Corner Shop Herbalism’, which is about using easily available and identifiable plants from, for example, corner shops, to improve and maintain well-being, and it would be interesting to know how applicable this is to the food desert problem. But food deserts are a much bigger problem for non-Whites. In the US, White majority neighbourhoods have four times as many grocery shops, and they also stock a wider variety of food. In order to make it easier for ethnic minorities to pursue veganism, this problem must be solved.

There is a claim that the word “speciesism” appropriates the term “racism” in a similar way to phrases like “the rape of the wild” do for rape. I find it difficult to accept this idea because of words like “sexism” and “ableism”. It doesn’t seem to me that the word “racism” stands out as something which can be owned as a reference to marginalised ethnicities. If a newly-recognised form of prejudice came to the fore, it would seem to make sense to add the suffix “-ism” to the end, and this also feels Quixotic in the wider context of how language change works. So, maybe I am speaking from a position of privilege, but it seems to me that not using the word “speciesism” fails to name the prejudice which dwarfs all others in our societies in its seriousness.

There is another, similar linguistic phenomenon I’ve already alluded to. Humans are of course hominids. Consequently, there is a sense in which we are apes. Cladistically we’re also monkeys, more specifically terrestrial Old World monkeys. However, the words “ape” and “monkey” have been used as racist epithets, and are therefore likely to trigger some Black people. It’s also important to erode the false distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, and this particular distinction is particularly instrumental in maintaining this false superiority. However, long before I went vegan, I used to consider great apes as human rather than the other way round, and this may go some way towards remedying that problem. However, we are then left with the problem of how to refer to our own species, and we do need to do this in the same way as we need to use the term “whiteness”. But there is a possible solution to this along the following lines. There is a plant popularly known as “Mother-In-Law’s Tongue”, which I always call Sanseviera because the Latin name comes across as more neutral. The same could be done with hominids and simians.

Another aspect of carnism in ex-patriate Afrikan communities and their descendants is that they may use meat of particular kinds and prepared in particular ways as part of their cultural identities. If a plant-based diet is perceived as substantially White, adopting it could feel like giving up part of that identity. Consequently, it’s important that we do what we can to ensure that such diets are not perceived as White. And in fact they really aren’t, for the reason stated above and also because of I-Tal, although not every Black person would want to identify with RastafarIanism. Interpretations of I-Tal diet vary. It isn’t compulsory in all mansions and it often includes fish, but the tendency is towards veganism and many people do interpret it as veganism. However, it doesn’t seem to be mentioned much in vegan circles for some reason.

There are also some areas I simply don’t know how to address, and these primarily involve indigenous people. It’s for this reason that I have in the past said that if veganism is racist, so be it. The issue is that there are some groups of hunter-gatherers whose lives intrinsically involve the killing, eating and other use of animals. It is often true that the people involved treat these animals with reverence, that they are not farmed but live in the wild for all their lives, and that their bodies are used efficiently once they’ve been killed, and also that if the communities concerned didn’t do this it would completely alter their lifestyles beyond recognition. It’s also known that these kinds of disturbances in the lives of indigenous peoples lead to major social and mental health problems including an epidemic in decisions to end their own lives. To be honest, I don’t know what to do about this. I am aware, though, that applying veganism to my own life benefits others and the biosphere, and the same applies to the lives of most or all people living in industrial societies.

To conclude, the takeaway from this is that the kind of “veganism” criticised as racist is actually heavily commodified and recuperated by capitalism. It focusses very much on the plant-based issue rather than the fact that veganism entails compassion for all and is therefore necessarily anti-racist. That is, if your version of “veganism” is racist, it isn’t pure veganism, although environmental, structural and institutional aspects of racism mean that real veganism is therefore very difficult. At the same time, even focussing entirely on other species, an attempt to look at veganism in an anti-racist way also reveals how there is not only structural racism but also structural speciesism, a word I make no apologies for using, for instance in the form of food deserts and the lie, yes, the LIE, that plant-based diets are expensive compared to carnist ones.

110 Possible Blog Posts

Or, if you prefer, nine dozen and two.

I don’t know if any of you blog using WordPress, but one of the things you get after a while of using tags (I only started doing that fairly recently) is a list of the ones you use most often. Probably because of the decimal bias of our cultural hegemony, it lists the ten. In my case, this is probably not a good guide to getting more readers but then I’m not particularly interested in doing that, except maybe as a kind of game in which I hope I wouldn’t become emotionally invested. It makes me want to draw a diagram, or rather a pattern:

Apparently this is called a “complete graph” and is described as a simple undirected graph in which each pair of distinct vertices is connected by a distinct edge. The above image shows a K₁₂ , apparently. Because of the decimal bias, my ten tags can be linked up in a similar diagram with rather fewer edges. I used to have hours of “fun” getting computers to draw ever more complicated complete graphs. The distinction also ought to be made between undirected and directed complete graphs of this kind.

There is bound to be an equation which tells you how many edges are needed for a given number of vertices, and in fact there is. It’s:

w_n+2=n!e_n

. . . where “e” is Euler’s constant. No, hang on a minute, that isn’t it apparently as it isn’t necessarily an integer and these obviously will be, so it’s:

(n(n-1))/2

Okay, so plugging in my ten tags gets me (10(10-1))/2, which is forty-five. So much for my title then! I’d worked it out at a hundred and ten but it seems it’s smaller. So then: ninety blog posts.

Here’s what I’m thinking. I have ten tags listed. A fairly crude way of generating blog post ideas would be to combine pairs of them, perhaps in both directions. They are: Philosophy, Ethics, Christianity, Judaism, Veganism, Racism, Evolution, History, Star Trek, Politics. Most of the time, if I blog on one subject on that list it’s likely to involve more than one of the others, which adds to the number of possible combinations in the graph, but it would also be interesting to see what I’ve missed, using those as major foci for a post. For instance, veganism and racism is something I’ve written about before, but not in a “pure”, more focussed sense, and there’s also racism and veganism, which could be something quite different. In pursuit of that combination, there is a lot to be said. For instance, veganism is perceived as a very White project even though, for example, I-Tal diet in its most complete form is RastafarIan and there’s also the question of the growth of supposèdly vegan products in the Third World as cash crops for export and forcing up the prices of something like quinoa, putting it out of reach of the communities which have traditionally eaten it. All very fruitful subjects. There are apparently forty-five pairs of tags in one direction and another forty-five in reverse. Judaism and Christianity is another interesting subject which it would be very easy to write something about, but writing something original and respectful might be a lot harder.

Thinking about writing in this way links mathematics and composition, but as a fairly naïve mathematician I may not be the person to do that. I often find that when I try to connect mathematical activity to something usually considered non-mathematically, I come up with a lot of mind game-type ideas but not much which is particularly applicable, or sometimes something which fits quite well into a particular mathematical activity but is also amenable to common sense. The question in my mind right now is, how useful is it to think of pairs of blog tags as a complete digraph? Is “evolution and Star Trek” a different topic to “Star Trek and evolution”?

Incidentally, the reason “Star Trek” crops up in that list is that I’ve reviewed every episode of “Star Trek TOS” and written several other more general posts on the series. It’s the kind of thing you might expect to generate a lot of views, or maybe not because so many people must be writing about it. I feel, unfortunately, that although it’s a major cultural phenomenon it’s also quite naff to write too much about it.

The above graph apparently also forms the net of an eleven-dimensional simplex, because every complete graph is a projection (the way it’s represented here, in two dimensions) of a simplex of K_n-1 dimensions. Hence this image:

is the net of a tetrahedron. And it clearly is: you can see the faces at the front and back, paired off and seemingly at right angles to each other. Each vertex connects to each other by three edges, and that gives the essence of the simplex in a way. My K₁₀ graph would presumably have each vertex joined to the other nine, each edge forming a polygon enclosing a face, each such polygon enclosing a tetrahedral cell, each tetrahedral cell forming the solid limiting a four-dimensional simplex, and so on. Each one of these encloses a possible combination of tags, more than one this time, and we’re in the realm of factorials and the possibility of more than three and a half million possible blog posts which can be appropriately tagged in various ways from that list, and will be found in the depths, if that’s the right word (it isn’t). This, then, is the hyperspatial approach to blogging. Each tag is located at a precise location relative to the others in hyperspace and since the links between them need not be mere edges but triangles, each blog post can be considered to be written on one of the faces of this nine dimensional simplex, either tapering towards the bottom or getting longer and longer lines as it goes on. You can hold this cluster of blog posts in your nine-dimensional hand-things and turn it this way and that to read each one of the ninety posts, all of which are on the surface of the polytope. If you happen to be a nine-dimensional entity, that is. Some of these are probably already written but I don’t know what they are.

This suggests a way of viewing blog posts via a virtual tesseract, merely four-dimensional and with each face of each of the eight cubes having a post written on both sides, four dozen in all, manipulable via one’s viewing device while wearing 3-D glasses or a VR headset. But all of this is fanciful and it isn’t clear how it would help one blog.

Leaving all that aside, it’s also possible to use the same old AI as I’ve been using for a lot of other things to finish my list of tags with others. It’s quite interesting what happens when I do this, because it fills my list in with the subjects I deliberately avoid on this blog, such as gender identity and trans stuff. InferKit just now gave me this:

Harry Potter
Animals
Politics
Military
Religion
Science
Food
Smart People
Animals and Animals
Writings
David Icke
Family Values
Hot Car Deaths
Holocaust
Asian-American

“Animals and Animals” is a little like “Vulcan And Vulcan” even though it hasn’t seen it. I don’t really want to blog about Harry Potter, although “Hot Car Deaths” is a depressing but possible subject. “Asian-American” strikes me as something you really should be in order to write about it, except that it is interesting how America sometimes seems like the extreme Far East even beyond Asia, so that has possibilities. DeepAI gives me “Science, Education, Welfare, Vacation, Innocent and Damn Law,”, then it seems to turn into a government form of some kind with things like “Pregnancy”, “Birth Year” and the like. This is not very useful and probably reveals the kind of text it thinks I’m writing.

I’ve done all this before, of course.

This blog is naturally a meandering mess of brain dumps, and consequently these two methods vaguely reveal some topics I might want to write about but they’re unlikely to get much readership, and that’s fine. However, I would say this. I suspect that if you’re serious about blogging and already have a blog which has a direction, a focus and a significant readership, you could do worse than to use these techniques. Maybe you’ve written about every combination of tag pairs. Finding out which ones you have and haven’t and colouring in the edges on the resultant complete graph would probably reveal where the large gaps are in your coverage, although some might be nonsensical. I don’t think any of mine would be though, so I suspect yours wouldn’t be either. Just two tags is rather limited, and if you open it up to all combinations, unless you’ve automated the process in some way you just will not have written hundreds of thousands of blog posts, meaning that some of the combinations will be stimulating and novel. As far as predicting tags is concerned, I found it tended to fill in things that I was genuinely interested in but hadn’t blogged about. This would also seem useful. You could also take all the AI-completed tags and build your own complete graph from those. It seems to me that there are likely to be other applications of graph theory to blogging which I have yet to become aware of. Worth investigating maybe?

Cobalt

Many names of the chemical elements are monotonous. Some have a system imposed on them, such as the halogens, which all end in “-ine”, and the noble gases excluding helium, which all end in “-on”, but other elements also have that ending such as boron and silicon. Oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen seem to have the start of a system, but it turned out to be flawed with oxygen, which is so named because it was thought to be responsible for acidity, Greek οξυς, but that turned out not to be so.

Element names with no classical component were usually discovered a long time ago because they are both easily observed and occur in their pure form, such as gold or silver, or because they’re easily extracted, often by heating with carbon. Hence there’s iron, copper, zinc, tin and lead, and among the non-metallic elements carbon and sulphur. Further afield, there are some elements with names derived from German or Swedish, such as nickel, bismuth and cobalt, and of course it’s this last which I’m going to talk about today.

Around five centuries ago, miners in present-day Germany came across an ore which appeared to contain a metal. However, it wasn’t possible to smelt it by the usual means and when they attempted to do so it gave off toxic fumes which killed a lot of the people doing it. Consequently they named it after their word for “goblin”: Kobold. “Goblin” isn’t an exact translation due to differences between English- and German-speaking folklore, but it’s more or less right. The next element in the row, nickel, has a name with a similar history, being a shortened version of “Kupfernickel”, “the devil’s copper”, because its ore failed to yield copper. Nickel as in “Old Nick”.

Being an odd-numbered element, 27, Cobalt is rarer than its even-numbered neighbours, particularly iron. It’s only the thirty-third most abundant element in Earth’s crust, and there are no common minerals which are specifically high in cobalt, so in a way it’s surprising it was sort of discovered so long ago and therefore isn’t one of the “-ums” or “iums”. It has the peculiar feature of being both highly toxic and essential to life, although it’s by no means unique in that way. For animals, cobalt is an essential element, but only as part of vitamin B₁₂ or cyanocobalamin, a compound quite similar to the hæm of hæmoglobin fame but with a cobalt atom at the centre of the molecular ring rather than an iron one. Because I’m vegan and didn’t carefully watch my diet in the late 1980s CE, I have experienced B₁₂ deficiency, which tends to manifested differently if you follow a plant-based diet. Folic acid tends to be high in such diets. Being named after the Latin word “folia” for “leaf”, folic acid is high in green vegetables and is involved in DNA synthesis, and therefore tends to mask the anæmia caused by the other deficiency, meaning that for people who don’t eat animal products the neurological features are more prominent or can even become fatal before there are any signs of anæmia. I found I got paræsthesia along the medial sides of my hands, which I did not get when I had previously had iron-deficiency anæmia fifteen years earlier (long before I was even vegetarian), I felt depersonalised, found my memory was impaired and had mild signs of Lewy Body dementia in that I mixed up dreams and waking life. I also hallucinated the smell of mint constantly and had no actual sense of smell, accidentally set fire to the bed due to that (couldn’t smell the smoke) and made some poor life decisions, which may not have been connected. Cyanocobalamin maintains the health of the myelin sheaths in the nervous system. I would say the psychosis resulting from its deficiency is more like ethanol-related psychosis than anything like schizophrenia or paranoia, and in fact I’d say it was closer to dementia than psychosis. I have not experienced the problem recently in spite of being vegan for quite some time, but I suspect I don’t absorb the vitamin as well as some other people due to my gastric lining being impaired in some way. It should also be noted that most cases of the deficiency have nothing to do with veganism, being related to malabsorption or the presence of intestinal parasites consuming the host’s food. No animals are known to produce their own cyanocobalamin, it being produced by bacteria. Its most prominent rôle in the human body is in red blood corpuscle synthesis. I won’t dwell on this too much because, as is so often the case, it belongs on one of my dormant blogs. I’m just saying that as a vegan who may have a less-than-ideal stomach lining, I’m acutely aware of the function cobalt has in my body from a practical perspective.

It’s also toxic. Although it’s unusual to be poisoned by cobalt in the usual run of events, some hip implants contain it and this is a significant cause. It can lead to mood swings, rashes, PTSD-like symptoms, problems with vision and tinnitus. If it comes in contact with the skin for protracted periods, it can cause a rash, and if particles of it are inhaled it can lead to pulmonary fibrosis and lung damage. Most of the last two routes describe a fairly common kind of reaction. Swallowing it will lead to nausea and vomiting, which is the elimination reaction to things which are not meant to enter the internal environment but still can, and because of this reaction cobalt poisoning by ingestion is often self-limiting. The same does not apply to implants such as hip replacements, which can’t be eliminated by the body and will therefore continue to provoke reactions and cause direct problems.

The metal is probably best known in the form of one of its compounds, cobalt blue. This is actually cobalt (II) aluminate, and is shown at the top of the post. As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t understand colour physics or chemistry but I’m aware that like some other transition metals, cobalt can form ions at different oxidation states and this influences the colour. The fact that this happens with chromium is the reason for its name – χρομα – colour. Consequently some cobalt compounds are a rich blue and others are purple or pink. Cobalt glass is of course blue:

As has been done here, herbal and essential oil bottles for use in dispensing are sometimes blue because blue is said to be a healing colour. In practical terms it may make sense to give patients blue glassware because it will be more likely to be returned rather than recycled, but all the glass bottles I’ve used have been brown. Cobalt glass is made by adding a cobalt compound to softened glass, nowadays often an oxide of cobalt or cobalt (II) carbonate, which tells you which oxidation state is blue, although older glassware would’ve used cobalt aluminate, which is quite ancient and was also used in pottery. Cobalt blue is the pigment our pottery teacher warned us about at school and explained why food and drink were banned in his classes, and was used in Tang dynasty glazes in Chinese ceramics. Its toxicity is not relevant when used in glass or finished ceramics, but it’s still interesting that blue is often seen as the antithesis of edibility, as in “there are no blue foods” (in fact there are, but they’re rare). This is also hard to reconcile with the idea that blue is a healing colour. The forger of Jan van Vermeer paintings van Megeren used cobalt blue paint in some of his reproductions, which enables those to be detected as fake.

Incidentally, a quite remarkably blue pigment was discovered about a dozen years ago consisting of yttrium, indium and manganese:

By Mas Subramanian – Mas Subramanian, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49854366

Apart from also being composed of transition metals, this has little to do with cobalt but it’s worth a mention.

Cobalt is a useful catalyst, which in fact is how living things use it in cyanocobalamin. The not very nice sounding cobalt arsenide accelerates the electrolysis of water and becomes more efficient as it ages, making it useful in the production of hydrogen as fuel. This increase in efficiency is due to it becoming more porous as it goes on, increasing its surface area for reactions. It can also be used to convert syngas to liquid automotive fuel.

Cobalt chloride is quite interesting. It changes from purple or pink to blue depending on hydration. Cobalt atoms can bond by electrostatic attraction, meaning that they can link to up to six water molecules at once. Without water, cobalt (II) chloride is blue:

By W. Oelen – http://woelen.homescience.net/science/index.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15356483

When hydrated, it looks like this:

By W. Oelen – http://woelen.homescience.net/science/index.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15356482

This is the hexahydrate – six molecules of water per cobalt ion. Cobalt chloride paper is used to check for humidity and moisture because of this colour change. The compound is also one of several chemicals which can be used to make a chemical garden, although with copper sulphate, hydrous and anhydrous, and alum. These can be “planted” in a bath of aqueous sodium silicate, when they will proceed to sprout long projections:

This works because the silicates of the metals involved are less soluble than the original compounds. Unfortunately it’s hard to imagine circumstances where this could happen without intelligent intervention.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

A very sinister and unpleasant aspect of cobalt is the cobalt-salted nuclear weapon, conceived of in 1947 by Leo Szilard. It’s called “salted” because it resembles the ancient practice of salting the land by an enemy to prevent the production of food and cause famine. The idea was to surround a nuclear fusion weapon with a shell of cobalt which, when detonated, would spread cobalt-60 (having previously been cobalt-59 but hit by neutrons from the chain reaction) around a wide area, which has a long half-life and is a strong gamma ray emitter, gamma radiation being the most penetrative form of radioactivity from nuclear decay. This was to show that there was an apocalyptic risk from nuclear weapons, but it was not suggested that such a weapon would be built, merely that the technology being “out there” was an existential hazard. As far as is publicly-known, this has never been done. Salted bombs are kind of similar to dirty bombs but the fallout would be scattered over a much wider area, which would be uninhabitable for more than half a century afterwards. A small number of such bombs could wipe out the human race. The point was not that they actually be developed but to encourage nuclear disarmament, although there are rumours and leaks of something similar such as an underwater bomb to produce a radioactive tsunami.

Cobalt is also used in powerful magnets, although this function is largely superceded by rare-earth magnets now. The most powerful magnet of all, though, seems to be samarium-cobalt, whose other component is a rare earth element. I don’t understand magnetism in detail either, but I do know that apart from iron, only cobalt and nickel are ferromagnetic among the transition metals although several rare earth metals also are. Cobalt-samarium magnets retain their ferromagnetism at higher temperatures than other magnets with rare earth elements and are used in guitar pickups.

To close this off, this post was written in response to an AI program which suggested this title for a blog post among a list of about twenty others, all of which were for recipes. I have no idea why it was there but I hope it made for an interesting post. And this is cobalt:

By Alchemist-hp (talk) (www.pse-mendelejew.de) – Own work, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11530303

Veganism And The Mind-Body Problem

Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com

First of all, I must insist that veganism is not “just about the ‘animals'”, but as I’ve said so many times, primarily focussed on human behaviour and interaction. Of course it is about how we behave towards members of other species, but it’s misleading to confuse veganism with the idea of vegetarianism which avoids honey, dairy and eggs, which is a very different. That in itself is fuel for a long blog post, but not this one. This one is about how consciousness exists. I’ll probably do this off the top of my head, which of course contains the thing in the image above.

It’s important not to confuse people who sound off on vegan groups online with actual vegans. Many of them would self-identify with vegans, to be sure, but the psychology of online interaction will tend to skew the view of anything if that’s all one goes on. However, it seems to be very common for people who present themselves as vegan online to consider insects to be outside their circle of compassion and baldly assert that they’re not conscious. This is of course often because it suits them to do so, although it may also be due to having absorbed a particular kind of dogma about consciousness, which they often feel should be based on scientific evidence. There is, however, a major problem with using scientific evidence to back up a view of consciousness. There isn’t any.

Okay, so that was a bit glib. Clearly if there were no evidence for consciousness or its absence a lot of patients would be in serious trouble when their level of consciousness was assessed, and in fact we do do things like whisper “are you asleep?” to our recumbent partners in the middle of the night when the argument isn’t over yet, but that particular argument is poor. In fact a dreaming partner is conscious, although not demonstrably so by another, and likewise someone who is awake but concentrating hard may well not respond to attempts to converse with them. Hence that particular probe may not succeed, and even shouting at a deaf person, for example, may not elicit a response. Locked-in syndrome is a particularly horrifying instance of how consciousness can exist in the absence of easily observable evidence. Likewise, there’s no reason to suppose that there are no species who are constitutionally “locked-in”, such as plants and bivalves.

The appeal is usually to the idea of possessing a complex nervous system, and sometimes much more specifically to the notion of structures like the cerebral cortex. This is suspiciously convenient, and it’s not where I’m going to start.

I would say, though without particularly rigorous evidence, that the earliest attempt to solve the mind-body problem is psychophysical dualism. That is, that there is a physical body accompanied by a non-physical seat of consciousness interacting with it. This is, for example, what the Ancient Egyptians believed, and many indigenous people believe the same thing. Simply because it’s an apparently primitive belief doesn’t make it incorrect, but there are philosophical problems with it. For instance, how does the soul interact with the body when they are so fundamentally different? Two possible solutions offered here are that of pre-ordained harmony and the idea of a go-between of some kind. Pre-ordained harmony is similar to “correlation is not causation”. The idea is that there is no interaction but that it’s more like having two clocks which happen to tell the same time, because they’ve both been set to do so. Likewise, the events of the physical and spiritual worlds happen in step with each other, but are not directly connected moment to moment. The problem with this is that it means that our sensations and will are merely coincidentally the same as events in the physical world, and therefore that the physical world itself could be completely dispensed with without having any influence, because that’s the premise, on our consciousness. Hence this collapses into what’s called idealism: the idea that all of reality is simply mental in nature and there is no physical reality. It also seems to require some kind of creator, although not necessarily because, for instance, karma could be evoked as an iron law of nature which causes this to happen. After all, there is an ultimate causal connection between two clocks which tell the same time even if it’s just the cultural convention of measuring time in that way, and the connection between the soul and the body could be equally indirect. The other solution is the existence of some kind of intermediate medium between the two. This doesn’t work because it doubles the problem rather than solving it, since there would then have to be answers to how both the physical and the mental interact with that intermediary.

Note that I’m not saying any of these views is untrue, simply pointing out their problems. Dualism makes it easier to explain things like past life memories and near-death experiences, for example, although of course many would choose to explain those by denying their existence. Abrahamic religions are often seen as tied to dualism, but in fact so far as I can tell only Sikhism, Islam and possibly Baha’i are. Judaism and Christianity can be physicalist with respect to humans, which brings me to physicalism.

Physicalism is the belief that there are only physical entities, i.e. there is no spirit, soul, supernatural beings or anything similar. It’s close to being the default scientistic position and that which tends to be advocated by people who see themselves as skeptics with a K. In terms of the mind, it would have to account for consciousness. Statements about physical processes in the brain, for example, cannot substitute for statements about experiences. For instance, I think that for most people yellow is the brightest colour, that is, the most like white, so I could say that “the wavelength of light which stimulates the red cone cells maximally produces a similar state in the visual cortex to the maximal stimulation of rod cells”, but this is not identical in meaning to “yellow is the brightest colour” even if it’s necessary and sufficient for that to be the case. This is of course to some extent so because when we first used language we had no idea how the brain worked, but there’s still a problem with being that brain but not saying the same thing to mean the same thing. Subjectivity is no closer to being explained through this kind of physicalism than it was before, although to some extent this is a straw man.

From the viewpoint of veganism, physicalism doesn’t seem to allow any kind of let-out for justifying carnism because it strongly suggests that similar brains will also be conscious and therefore capable of suffering. And this is the point where it becomes possible for people who are keen on continuing to be party to the exploitation of other species to seek to identify structures or processes which only take place in the human brain, or perhaps apes generally, which are the basis of consciousness. However, to be fair to them it certainly appears to this conscious mind that there are parts of the nervous system which are not conscious at all and also events which can slip in and out of our awareness, such as breathing and pain. The existence of distraction does suggest that this is so, and that consciousness is not a property of the entire brain. However, we only have our own word for that. By this I mean that we may always dissociate as part of our essence. Dissociative personalities, also known as multiple personalities, are usually associated with trauma in childhood by the psychiatric profession, and there’s a secondary issue regarding iatrogenic dissociation similar to false memory syndrome. However, some dissociative personalities embrace the view and seek to de-medicalise it, and it may be that for all we know, we are always accompanied by silent personalities coexisting with us within the same skull. Certainly the severance of the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two cortical hemispheres, appears to produce two identities. In cases where conjoined twins share a head, with two faces and bodies, there appear to be two people involved rather than one. Other phenomena are also of interest here. For instance, if you ask someone to judge the gradient of a slope by gesturing and speaking, their gesture, i.e. the slope of their hand, will often be more accurate than what they say orally, and there’s also “blindsight”, where someone blind due to brain damage will always be able to guess what they can see even though they’re not conscious of seeing it. It’s also been shown that we are better at guessing objects situated in our blind spots even without context and when they have only ever been in that location in our visual fields, which is very hard to account for as there are no visual receptors there. We are stranger beings than we imagine ourselves to be, and we may always be in a sense “possessed” by other versions of ourselves.

This, of course, is hard to test for and is a little like non-baryonic dark matter in that it’s a claim that there is a non-communicating consciousness inside everyone but it’s made to fit the bill exactly while being non-falsifiable. However, our own consciousness is so hard to test for that there’s no absolute reason not to be solipsistic, although we generally aren’t. Clearly we assume others to be conscious but the mere fact that stimuli lead to relevant and appropriate responses doesn’t mean there is associated consciousness, which can’t be directly observed except within ourselves. This is one motivation for the idea of logical behaviorism, which I think of as an American idea hence the spelling. This is the theory that there is nothing to consciousness but that which can be observed by others. Thoughts are simply sotto voce vocalisations, anger nothing but the likes of raised heartbeat and acts interpreted as aggressive or violent, and so on. This sounds like the kind of theory of consciousness which only people with no inner life could take seriously or think up. Methodological behaviourism acknowledges the existence of internal mental states but considers them outside the scope of scientific investigation, and perhaps less important than that which can be observed. It may be worthwhile to approach a specific domain of psychological activity in this way, and it doesn’t aim to be a theory of consciousness in its methodological form, but the question arises of what could be the “companion” thesis to methodological behaviourism, and also whether it’s actually helpful to separate the two in this way. It does make sense to try to place mentality outside a special realm, and we learn about each others mental states partly based on our observation, but it seems to miss something important. There are theories of the emotions that we label bodily sensations as feelings based on the context in which we feel them, which is very similar. I subscribe to this to a limited degree. For instance, I don’t believe a robot would be able to have humanoid experience of the world unless its “mind” provided visceral sensations such as a hammering heart and blushing to its consciousness. However, that isn’t all there is to emotion. I also think most of us are instinctively predisposed towards empathy, meaning that we aren’t merely learning from observation in the same way as we might learn that rain never falls out of a clear sky, but are born with the potential for that knowledge.

Behaviorism portrays the mind as a “black box” with inputs and outputs without regard to what’s going on inside it. A somewhat more sophisticated model of the mind is functionalism. This is the idea that the mind is a network of modules with functions and connections forming inputs and outputs to a whole system, with stimuli and responses on the outside. Although this happens to be made of brain cells in our case, nothing rules out it being made of something else, such as hydraulics or electrical circuitry and it would still count as having consciousness and mental states provided those states were functionally equivalent to a real wakeful person having experiences. To my mind, the biggest problem with this idea is that it could be done by committee. You could have a room full of people, say 1728 of them, each tasked with passing pieces of paper around and modifying them according to the instructions on the pieces of paper they receive, each doing exactly the same thing as 1/1728 of your brain was doing (which is a little under a millilitre of brain tissue). Each of these people would have their own identity and consciousness and yet we’re asked to believe that the entire activity of the room of people also has the consciousness of a individual in their own right. This is counterintuitive. However, as a panpsychist, maybe I have to believe that this is so, and that individual parts of the brain are themselves conscious, not just the brain as a whole.

Functionalism is quite relevant to the question of plant consciousness. A mimosa, insectivorous plant and a forest can all be thought of as networking internally or externally in this way, in such a way that they have internal states observable from outside but no brain cells as we would understand them. In fact many plants engage in gradual movements, such as flowers opening and closing with daylight, sunflowers following the Sun and the “sleep movements” of legume leaves. And I’m afraid that I am one of those cartoon vegans who do believe plants are conscious (and use the appropriate conjugation in relative clauses, which may be connected). It still makes sense to be vegan though, because it minimises suffering through the destruction and injury of living plants.

The next stage along from this is anomalous monism and the associated concept of supervenience, which I like to imagine is some kind of futuristic portaloo and is the subject of my MA dissertation. This is an example of losing control of the creative process because I’m actually panpsychist and although supervenience applies to other areas of philosophy than just the nature of consciousness, it is quite significant for it and is also at odds with the idea of panpsychism. Supervenient properties are basically emergent. That is, they depend for their existence on a subset of a number of other properties in a system or situation but not specifically on any one of them. This is where the “anomalous” bit comes in. There can be laws describing mental states, such as the duration of short-term memory or the number of items one is able to think of at once, or the fact that yellow is the “brightest” colour and indigo the “darkest”, and laws describing physical brain states, but there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the two sets of events and states. The “monism” bit is about there only be one fundamental kind of “stuff”, so there aren’t physical and mental substances, just one kind of substance with two manifestations, one physical and one conscious. Psychology is irreducible to physics but both psychology and physics have the same basis. Because supervenience has things in common with dialectic, upon which Marxism appears to be based, although it’s not at all clear that Marxism actually needs it as a philosophical basis, the idea of supervenience and by extension possibly also anomalous monism could have political significance. For instance, due to the Marxist view that religion and belief in the supernatural only exists because of political exploitation, it would reject psychophysical dualism because there is in its view no such thing as a soul. This could have practical consequences. For instance, it may be that consciousness can only exist dynamically – it never emerges in the instant – and dynamism and viewing things in their historical context are central to dialectical materialism and therefore Marxism.

Beyond this is probably a fairly well-defined approach to consciousness which is nevertheless difficult to pin down. It originates in existentialism and phenomenology and is also linked to Marxism because that’s simply the way Western philosophical thought went. Derrida and others attempted to centre reality on language, and since humans alone are seen as capable of language and therefore thought, this view would also tend to reject the idea that other species are conscious. That said, such works as Carol Adams’s ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’, which is in this tradition, looks at vegetarianism and by implication veganism in a post-modern way, drawing parallels between the exploitation of women and that of other species. More recently some vegans have equated feminism and veganism because female animals are disproportionately exploited due to the consumption of dairy and eggs. I disagree with this because it would entail that men could not be vegan because they can’t be feminist. They could only support veganism at best, and this seems like an absurd position which makes the word “vegan” meaningless. To me, Adams’s book tries to answer the wrong question, namely “why are so many feminists vegetarian or vegan?”. My perception of the situation is that remarkably few feminists are vegetarian or vegan and the real question is “why are there so few vegan feminists?”. I think the answer to that is that they are influenced by critical theory and therefore centre consciousness on the use of language and other cultural aspects unique to humans, or at least only initiated by humans. For instance, non-human primate use of language allows individuals into the inner sanctum of consciousness but rejects all others, so Koko and Washoe were conscious but not a chimpanzee or gorilla living in the wild, who can presumably therefore be slaughtered without it being murder according to them. Possibly one cause of this attitude is the suspicion of grand narratives, which however allows conservative values to colonise the space which is not being defended and supported in a radical way. Their approach reminds me of Descartes’ assertion that dogs were not conscious simply because God had not provided them with souls, despite the fact that their bodies were significantly similar to ours down to minute details.

Vegans often seek to support their position rationally, and that’s the right thing to do to some extent although many of us arrived here by emotional means, such as by watching ‘Earthlings’ or ‘The Animals Film’. I didn’t. I got here, so far as I can tell, through concluding quite coldly and dispassionately that it was morally required of me. I don’t now, that is as an adult, feel any horror at cruelty to animals. It’s a simple logical equation that it’s wrong to cause avoidable suffering. However, those who, like me, believe their veganism to be based on rationality often assert that consciousness is confined to vertebrates and perhaps cephalopods and some arthropods rather than being universal, and therefore seek to base consciousness in specific structures and functions of, for example, the vertebrate brain or see it as an emergent property of a complex nervous system or something functionally equivalent to that.

Consciousness is referred to as the “hard problem”, and some believe it’s beyond human capabilities to solve. Others are not so pessimistic, if that’s the word. The issue has been divided into “easy” and “hard” problems, although the so-called “easy” problems are still not actually easy. The hard problem is how it can exist at all and the “easy” ones are to do with how the brain actually works in various conscious processes such as learning and perception. It’s sometimes claimed that the “hard” problem is just a collection of all the “easy” problems. There’s also a similar precedent in the nature of life. It used to be thought that there was a fundamental division between living and non-living matter, so that for example olive oil was fundamentally different from crude oil. This ended when urea was synthesised in the early nineteenth century. There could, likewise, be a similar spurious division between conscious and unconscious matter. It may not be that all matter is conscious, as I think it is, so much that the difference between conscious and unconscious matter is yet to be ascertained precisely. But I have to say that it really doesn’t feel like that, and that there’s something about consciousness that’s irreducible. Idealism, the belief that everything is mental, would solve that problem while introducing others, such as the problem of not everything being known, which is where Hegelian dialectic and German idealism comes in with its gradually unfolding reality.

Anil Seth, a neuroscientist, divides consciousness into three aspects: level of consciousness, sense of self and intentionality. Intentionality is “aboutness”. He considers these to be separately explicable. Of these, sense of self has been questioned as rather nebulous by various philosophers and religious perspectives, notably Buddhism and David Hume, because there seems to be no “I” we can actually point to, but rather a stream of consciousness happening together with nothing identifiable to link it. On the other hand, it does seem that there is some kind of consistent label attached internally to successive experiences happening in the same brain, if indeed that is where they’re happening, or how they’re happening. Intentionality is one of the classic properties of mental events considered to be the most distinctive features of them as opposed to anything else. However, I think that the state of samadhi can involve consciousness without intentionality, which raises questions for that being an essential feature of it, and would therefore need a different explanation. Level of consciousness is illustrated by becoming subject to and coming out of general anæsthesia. Consciousness can seem to be absent when the brain is most active, as with dreamless sleep as opposed to wakefulness, and waking and sleeping can exist independently of consciousness as in persistent vegetative states, so it seems that consciousness exists when different parts of the brain are relating to each other in particular ways. There are brain regions associated with consciousness but this doesn’t explain how this happens. From a vegan perspective, Seth believes that other species are conscious although he also seems to think there is a degree of consciousness depending on the species. On the other hand, because he also notes that some people see any kind of integrated information as equivalent to consciousness, which is pretty close to panpsychism, and this would extend consciousness considerably, possibly even to plants and particularly to various manifestations of information technology. He’s also concerned with the ideas of embodiment and prediction, that is, that consciousness is embodied (out of body experiences seem to involve having a kind of astral body) and involved with prediction and expectation. We find it much easier to be conscious of what we expect to perceive. It’s possible to swap bodies using VR devices and cause people to have embodied cognition of each others’ bodies, such as shaking hands with themselves.

I feel that this simply defers the problem of consciousness to activity in certain brain regions and functions without actually explaining it. That said, as a viable position recognising non-human consciousness, Seth’s position does support veganism. It also supports, as do some other positions, the idea that computers or perhaps the internet are conscious, which is another question veganism might need to take into consideration.

To summarise then:

• Psychophysical dualism is often associated with theism and the idea that some animate entities are simply endowed with souls and others not in an arbitrary fashion. Whereas it is a respectable position as such, which explains, for example, ESP if you accept that that exists, the arbitrariness is irrational.
• Logical behaviorism situates consciousness outside the apparent mind in a kind of social, observable realm. My position on this is that it’s just silly and denies an incontrovertible fact of experience.
• Functionalism would seem to require entities entirely unlike individual bodies to be conscious, but this is not problematic and would allow, for example, an anthill or termite castle to be a single mind. This could, however, lead to treating individual social insects as expendable.
• Anomalous monism has the merit of being potentially reconcilable with progressive views of the world and the social analysis of metaphysics, which is unfinished work on my part (and will probably always remain so), but ultimately has the potential of expanding the circle, as Peter Singer has put it, by other means.
• Critical theory type approaches are similar, but being language-centred rather too conveniently allow us to deny consciousness to anything which doesn’t have a voice, such as a child brought up in a neglectful environment which never acquired language (relative pronoun choice deliberate there).
• Anil Seth’s position is surprisingly sympathetic to veganism, probably because of his recognition that we are all animals.

This survey therefore shows that veganism tends to be supported as an ethical position from most of the perspectives mentioned, provided no special pleading is involved such as the unsupported idea that only humans are endowed with souls, that entities without language are conveniently unconscious or that there just are no internal mental states. The position that most enrages me is the Critical Theory one, because instead of aiming for liberation it merely doubles down on prejudice and excludes the oppressed while having quite shocking consequences for beings most people would regard as human and deserving of rights. But then veganism is at least as much about treating other humans well as it is about avoiding cruelty to other species.

Soya And Veganism

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

It’s very common to do two things when veganism is discussed. One is to associate it strongly with soya. The other is to criticise it on that basis as environmentally unsustainable. Further down the line is a common equation between soya and phytoëstrogens (how do you spell that?), leading to a whole gender politics thing about “soyboys” which is a load of b0ll0x. Today, or whenever this sees the light, I’ll be talking about this stuff.

In a way, I should be saying “plant-based”. The reason I didn’t is that veganism is not the pursuit of a plant-based diet. Rather, it’s an ethical position akin to pacifism with practical consequences. A plant-based diet is merely one which eliminates the intentional consumption of animal products, and as such the term is a misnomer as it may include fungi. It’s arguable that a plant-based diet including soya is optimally vegan, although I personally eat soya products and I am going to defend their use as well as criticise them. This is somewhat similar to the palm oil situation, which was declared non-vegan by some although it seems to me that a whole load of other foods could be equally seen in that way.

I’m going to start with a similar kind of botanical breakdown of what soya plants are. Soya, 大豆, Glycine max, is a member of the Leguminosæ along with lentils, peas, clover and so on. This family is “green manures” because they contain nodules in their roots with symbiotic bacteria which can fix nitrogen. Hence they are extremely useful in agriculture and horticulture. Some of them are also high in hæm, which is the porphyrin found in hæmoglobin, which they use to bind to oxygen, I think increasing the nitrogen concentration around the roots and therefore the efficiency of this process, and as an aside this hæm is used to make more convincing veggie burgers, which may however not be vegan because they have been safety-tested on animals, although don’t quote me on that – do your own research. Soya is unusual among plant protein sources because it contains large amounts of all essential amino acids. In general the sources of bulk protein in a plant-based diet are either low in sulphur-containing amino acids or low in others, but soya has an unusually high quality. That said, the idea of quality in amino acid content is now somewhat passé for reasons I don’t fully understand, although it is true that you needn’t combine protein sources in a single meal and also, I haven’t investigated this but it’s long seemed likely that digestive enzymes from further up in the gastrointestinal tract would end up being digested and absorbed further down, so I’ve long had my doubts about that idea. Soya is also the source of a fixed oil used in cooking and to make margarine, and in the manufacture of soap (which I have done incidentally), plastics, paint and biofuel. This last in particular is ecologically significant and I’ll be returning to it. The Latin name seems to be the origin of the name of the amino acid glycine, which is the only non-chiral and simplest of that family of compounds and is found in the interstellar medium, unlike all other amino acids as far as I know. Glycine is also a neurotransmitter, like some other amino acids. Maybe the name is just a coincidence. Soya sauces are also derived from it. It seems to have originated from southwestern Asia, although its traditional use has been greatest in the Far East. However, today something like four-fifths of the world’s production is in the Americas, including North America. It cannot be grown in the British Isles because it’s susceptible to frost, although climate change might mean it will be possible at some point. It grows from four dozen centimetres to two metres high and produces pods containing three or four seeds each up to around seven centimetres in length.

Like Cannabis, soya is one of those species which tends to get focussed on in a biassed manner due to its social position, and information on it can therefore be seen as fairly obfuscated. There are two main sources of criticism. One regards environmental impact and the other influence on the reproductive function. This of course edges yet again into herbalism, but I’ll cover it here anyway. Soya is œstrogenic on account of its isoflavones, genistein and daidzein, and has been blamed for increasing the risk of breast cancer and reducing male fertility. This is potentially part of a narrative where plants are problematised rather than seen as nutritious and beneficial, which is also rife in anti-herbalist rhetoric. In fact, considering that soya has been high in diets in east Asia for centuries, this is almost certainly baseless unless the processing of soya as an ingredient in more Westernised diets does something significant. There are also elements of sexism in this, because it portrays œstrogen as something foreign to the human body which is likely to cause problems. In fact I can testify that there are much stronger œstrogens elsewhere in the plant kingdom and that soya is extremely weak in this respect, and that xenoestrogens, that is, compounds organisms have not encountered until recently, are far more significant in this respect because the liver is less able to deal with them and they are lipid-soluble. Having said this, it is true that the processing of biological matter can change its profile and action, so it really depends on whether there’s a significant difference between industrial and pre-industrial treatment of soya.

For a long time. soya didn’t constitute a significant part of my diet, even as a vegan, because I tried to source my food as locally as possible and I simply had no need for it. Whereas there certainly are hidden ingredients in processed food, very little of my diet was in this form. Probably the main heavily-processed item would’ve been pasta. There is an issue with abrogating responsibility when you hand over the preparation of food to strangers, particularly if they are part of large organisations. I have generally tried not to do this, though not so much recently. I also didn’t take the approach of substituting æsthetically similar products for animal products, so for example when I gave up milk and cheese I didn’t replace it with anything that seemed similar although I did research the nutritional value and replaced it in that sense. Hence soya milk hasn’t played much of a rôle in my life, for example. Tofu and tempeh, however, have, so it has had an indirect rôle in that way since both are involved in the production of soya milk. It is, incidentally, possible to prepare a similar food from peanuts, since like soya beans, peanuts are pulses. I’ve never done this though. All that said, nowadays I do eat a fair bit of tofu, for my sins, which is an æsthetic choice rather than a nutritional one. Therefore in the following, I am as culpable as anyone else, but probably less culpable than carnists who eat farmed meat.

Since 1970 CE, soya production has increased four dozenfold. Almost one and a quarter megaäres of land is devoted to soya farming, much of it in the Americas. Brazil, Argentina and the US are the leaders here, the Argentine being a distant third compared to the equal production of the other two. It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that one of these countries is known for a certain biome. Therefore, unsurprisingly, soya farming is associated with deforestation. Soya plants are annuals, so the ground needed for them constantly increases. It is true that the conditions for soya are better in savannah areas than rain forests, but the area of Brazil used for the plant is still special and unique in terms of biodiversity. Farming it has resulted in soil erosion, as it often does.

Although it’s true that soya farming is environmentally destructive, this cannot be used as an argument against vegetarianism and veganism for two important reasons. One is that five-sixths of global soya production goes to feed farm animals. This is where the bulk of Brazilian soya bean exports go. The other is biofuel. Soya can be used to make both biodiesel and ethanol, so it’s actually a source for two different fuels. The biodiesel produces a by-product which can be used for farm animal feed. The oil itself is reacted with methanol and the glycerol is extracted and fed to farm animals along with the beans themselves. Most American biodiesel is from soya oil. China imposed a 25% tax on American soya for this reason, which will have driven up the cost of soya as food generally. Hence much of the world’s soya production goes either to feed farm animals or to produce biodiesel and by-products thereof, including farm animal feed, and since tropic levels mean that soya for meat production is hugely inefficient, carnists are in no position to point at non-carnist consumption of soya unless they also intentionally avoid meat which comes from animals who have been fed on it. That said, soya doesn’t deserve a halo and it is better to avoid it, not least because you’re supporting an industry that profits from animal farming, although I’m not sure what you could do to avoid that, bearing in mind that self-sufficiency involves having enough money to own land and where did that money come from?

To conclude, then, although soya is by no means wonderful, it isn’t riskier to the health than most foods and carnists can’t use consumption of it as a stick to beat vegans and vegetarians unless they too make efforts to avoid meat fed on it. And to be fair, some of them do, and ecologically there is a difference between eating road kill, for example, and having a Big Mac. But on the whole the argument is invalid for the vast majority of carnists. At the same time, we should all probably be making some effort to reduce our consumption of soya, directly or indirectly.

The Veganism Of Prehistory

By Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com) – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19459226

Every organism is a creature of its time and humans are no exception. Nor are individuals. However, people can be anachronistic and so can species. Living fossils, for example, and Lazarus taxa, such as the allocaudata, an order of salamander-like amphibians who are, however, not closely related to them and seemed to vanish at the Chicxulub Impact but then appeared again millions of years later. However, these are exceptions, and on the whole we don’t do things out of time. For instance, the issue of Jacobitism doesn’t now seem like the kind of thing anyone would take up in earnest in this country, although the Royal Stuart Society and Royalist League, and the Richard III Society, do seem to have elements of an anachronistic nature. It’s hard to see their wider relevance nowadays.

This applies to diet in a couple of ways. There’s the kind of diet we and our ancestors would habitually eat, and there’s the kind of diet we could eat, in the past. In the West, vegetarians used to be called “Pythagoreans”, after the vegetarianism of the followers of Pythagoras, who lived (if he was a real historical figure) twenty-six centuries ago. Carol J Adams’ 1990 work ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’ points the way to a gender-based understanding of attitudes towards diet which may have skewed perceptions of history and evolution in a carnist direction which are worth bearing in mind, but I have to leave this to one side because of the focus, or lack thereof, of this blog. Incidentally, I can’t really mention Adams’ book without commenting on a statement she made in it which has always struck me as peculiar. She says there must be some significance in the fact that “so many feminists are vegetarian”, when in fact it’s always seemed odd how few feminists are vegetarian.

There are really two ways in which this can be considered: the diet of our ancestors and the possibility of making that choice in the past. Human history itself is the realistic application of these two, but it’s also fun and informative to take it back further to consider how we could’ve eaten if we hopped in a time machine and went back, say, to the early days of the dinosaurs or beyond.

Adams makes the point that through much of the history of Christendom, most people, and those in religious orders in particular, would’ve spent much of their time eating a practically vegetarian diet, because of the lack of food generally and also due to holidays which required partial fasting and the avoidance of meat. Dairy production was also far less efficient and it would’ve been difficult to transport dairy into cities without it going off. It also didn’t have the later veneer of being a healthy food which it later acquired. In the modal Western diet, dairy stands out as the oddity rather than meat or vegetables. Egg consumption was also for a long time not accompanied by the consumption of chicken, who I think weren’t considered edible although I couldn’t swear to that. On the other hand, the perception of fruit and vegetables was quite negative compared to meat, because they were considered cold in humoral terms. Culpeper, for example, expresses surprise that cucumbers are not poisonous because they’re so cool. The idea was that they should be eaten only in moderation and that meat should be the staple fare, along with bread. I’m obviously talking about Europe here. There’s also the issue of scurvy, which used to be much more loosely defined than it is today. Although people were aware of the value of Citrus fruit in preventing it, as its understood now, from Mediæval times onward, they thought this was connected to the acidity of the fruit as such rather than any more subtle principle within it, which is why they went for limes. It also meant that any kind of acid food would be latched onto as a cure or preventive. The actual experiment which established the use of Citrus scientifically occurred in the early modern era and was a good example of an early scientific experiment, which incidentally also showed the value of cider as a source of vitamin C. By that time, however, scurvy was mainly a mariners’ problem because potatoes were effective in warding it off onshore. This probably marks the start of the idea that vegetables and fruit could be healthy, although Pythagoras had thought of them in these terms millennia earlier. It isn’t clear to me whether this is primarily European, but there seem to have been no recorded herbivorous cultures. The closest are probably the Jains, but they preferred dairy to root vegetables, which they forbade. More recently, RastafarIans have tendencies towards plant-based diets but it doesn’t actually seem very common among them so far as I can tell.

As I’ve said, it’s the consumption of dairy which is the oddity, not that of meat or plants. This seems to have appeared among nomadic pastoralists who followed bovines, letting their blood and squeezing milk from their udders. For Europeans, in conditions of poor sunlight, it’s difficult for the skin to synthesise vitamin D₃ and therefore we retained the ability to digest milk as adults, as have some other populations. Egg-eating makes more sense because taking eggs from birds’ nests is a form of foraging. There is a question regarding how much of a contribution meat and plants make to a hunter-gatherer diet, and if there’s a gender-based division of labour there. This is where we get into the question of whether vegetarianism is “natural”, bearing in mind that that’s a dodgy concept in the first place. My position on this is that the human body is adapted for an omnivorous diet, but that this has two consequences: it means we have great flexibility in what we eat, to the extent that we can eliminate animal products entirely, bearing in mind that we are also capable of discovering and remedying any problems with that; and, in the case of mammals, most omnivores mainly eat plants with a few animals. In fact even some herbivores eat animals and it’s quite rare for a mammal to be truly herbivorous. Deer, for example, eat chicks.

There are a couple of arguments for the idea that meat-eating was a factor in the growth of the human brain and sophistication of our culture. These come down to two factors: nicotinamide (vitamin B₃) and fat. Considering the first, nicotinamide is vital in the Krebs Cycle, which is the way oxygen-breathers release most of their energy from glucose and is therefore central to ærobic life. To me, nicotinamide is a vitamin found in seeds, nuts, pulses and grains, like many other micronutrients. The final category is the most difficult to obtain in quantity as a forager, and this is what would be missing from a hunter-gatherer diet. The growth of the human brain from infancy on is very energy-intensive, taking up three to four fifths of the energy from food, and since the Krebs cycle depends so heavily on nicotinamide, a good source of that is required, which would be offal. The standard narrative also includes the idea that hunting involves strategy and competition with other predators and therefore selects for intelligence. However, this ignores the fact that gorillas have human-like intelligence and are largely herbivorous, and the frugivorous orang utan are also. There is only a very slight difference in intelligence between us, and although a slight advantage can add up over millions of years, have we been separate from other the Afrikan apes for long enough to make that big a difference?

The other theory involves fat, taken from the bones of animal carcasses and a major component of the central nervous system. Meat consumption itself relies on cooking because the energy taken in chewing raw meat doesn’t lead to a break-even situation regarding energy extraction, but scavenging bones is easier. Bones are also easier to remove from exposed sites where potential predators might lurk or themselves be attempting to scavenge. The savannah theory sees us as changing our diet about 3.7 million years ago when large open spaces became available to us. Bones could be broken open using stones, and sharpened stones would make that easier. However, this is another area influenced by gender politics because it’s based on what the men were doing, at least as projected into the past from recent years in the West. Elaine Morgan’s aquatic theory, which takes women into account more, sees us as living on the shores of the Horn of Afrika and eating molluscs and fish, venturing into the water to escape threats on land and escaping from the harsh environment of the Sudan and Sahel, Sahara Pump Theory notwithstanding, because to an animal adapted to rainforest conditions this would still be inhospitable.

It’s difficult to discuss human evolution and diet without getting bogged down in matters of gender. This would normally be fine, but because I’m quite strict with myself separating the subject matters of my different blogs, I can’t really do that here. Therefore I’m just going to say that regardless of how we evolved and the extent to which we depended on animal products, it’s no longer necessary to do so, in the same way as it’s no longer necessary to wear animal skins, hunt for food or make stone tools.

There may be a carnist bias in how palæontologists view human evolution. For instance, I’ve seen Australopithecus boisei described as a “vegetarian dead end”. Apparently this is now known as Paranthropus boisei, or rather this is the more robust of the two, and the genus Paranthropus may be synonymous with Australopithecus. They lack tooth fractures, suggesting that they ate fairly soft food, and the levels of strontium were higher in their milk teeth, suggesting that the children ate tubers more than the adults. Strontium isotopes also indicate that the women left their birthplaces but the men stayed local. The problem with working out how they lived is that they were savannah apes, but not as specialised in that kind of niche as our own species, and there are now no other savannah apes. It is known, however, that they ate termites. They were able to eat the dried up plant food during a long dry season, unlike their contemporaries Homo habilis. Although these did eat meat, they were more threatened by climatic extremes. However, the success of Homo as opposed to the other, or other two, genera, may rely more on their generalism and versatility than their diet. Also, there are other herbivorous species on this planet with human-like intelligence, such as elephants and parrots.

During the Miocene, the period preceding the emergence of identifiably human apes in the Pliocene, there was much more diversity and great apes other than the yet-to-evolve humans were found in Eurasia, including Europe, which by that point did exist but the North European Plain was underwater and the Mediterranean was open to the Caspian with a couple of inlets in Mitteleuropa. Diets can be reconstructed by patterns of wear on their teeth, and they seem to have begun eating hard-shelled food such as nuts and fruits and later evolved to add soft fruits. They then died out as subtropical vegetation was replaced by deciduous trees. At some point during the Miocene, between eighteen and thirteen million years ago, the Afrikan and Asian great apes diverged. Ramapithecus and Kenyapithecus are two very similar Miocene great apes, one found in Asia and the other in India, which may be the common ancestor of all surviving great apes. These had thicker enamel, meaning that they probably ate tougher food, once again vegetation with high cellulose and lignin content. A famous simian from the Oligocene, dating from before the apes and Old World monkeys diverged, is Ægyptopithecus, found in Egypt and dating to around thirty million years ago, ate fruit. There are other simians from this epoch too. They arose from tarsier-like animals found in the Northern Hemisphere referred to as omomyids, whose earliest forms are fifty-six million years old. Tarsiers are carnivorous, or more strictly speaking insectivorous, not eating much in the way of plant matter, but compared to them omomyids teeth suggest they also ate fruit because they were blunter than the more recent animals. They were all less than half a kilo in size. Accompanying the omomyids in the Northern Hemisphere, including North America like them, were the lemur-like adapids, who lacked the combs found in lemur dentition, and whose mandibular musculature suggests they ate leaves. Going further back still, there was a split between the ancestors of the colugo and the primates 80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous, and about five million years before that we have ancestors in common with rabbits, rodents and tree shrews. Most of these are primarily herbivorous, but the tree shrews are omnivorous. Before that, our ancestors are shared with a much wider range of placental mammals, many of whom are now carnivorous, diverging 107 million years ago, and so forth back into the Mesozoic. But you have to go back a long way before you find even insectivorous ancestors, let alone ones usually seen as carnivores, i.e. predatory animals who hunt, bring down and eat live animals around their own size.

All this, though, is a mere appeal to nature. Just because none of our ancestors were biologically committed to eating meat evolutionarily doesn’t in itself constitute an argument for not eating it. Also, if you push back far enough into the Jurassic, things change quite drastically in terms of what our ancestors could possibly have eaten, because the slow drift of plant evolution comes into play. Changes in animal life are often provoked by changes in plant life, because ultimately that is what we all depend upon. Plant life had to exist on land in order for herbivores or carnivores to live here long-term, the alternative being fungi, which were here for longer but don’t seem to have been accompanied by animals. The first herbivorous dinosaurs could not have existed without ferns and cycads. Pollinating insects and flowering plants co-evolved, apart from the wind pollinated ones. And primates also, and their ancestors, needed soft fruit to exist and evolved to exploit the new niche of frugivore. The question then arises of what we as human beings would be able to find to eat if we travelled back in time.

In order to eat a modern Western diet, we would need gluten. Even if not, cereals are likely to form a large part of our diet, and that applies to most people not following palæo across the planet. For that to be possible, grass must exist. Grass has a somewhat peculiar history because although it evolved a long time ago, for quite a long interval, it was just one plant among many. There were grasses in varied meadows, so to speak, but no grassland. Wheat fields, rice paddies and the like are really just artificial grasslands. These didn’t become common until the Neogene, i.e. the Miocene onward. Our ancestors didn’t appear on them until the Pliocene, after the world had become dry enough for them to spread. Grass acts as a food source for us in various ways. We have rice, barley, wheat, rye, maize and millet, whose seeds we eat, but there’s also sugar cane, bamboo shoots, bamboo flowers and the simple practice of picking up a grass stalk and sucking it, and more generally but applicable to grass is the production of leafu, which is a kind of strained, compressed curd made from almost any edible leaves. I used to eat blades of grass as a child and it cut the inside of my mouth quite painfully. Any sensible person needn’t be told that grass is too fibrous to be chewed safely, and I presume the species who eat it on a regular basis either have tough mouths or eat the softer bits. A large portion of the meat humans eat is specifically from grass of course, an ecological relationship which has largely arisen in the Neogene. In a nutshell, grass is pivotal to life as we recognise it today. Nonetheless, it isn’t really feasible to avail oneself of cereal grains without farming in the quantities required to make flour and the like, and everything that leads to.

I first came across the palæo diet before it had that name, I’m guessing in the later 1980s, from the. It seems to make sense at first, in that we evolved without access to milk from other species as adults along with processed food and cereals in bulk. However, much of the palæolithic diet, and of course there wasn’t just one, is unknown, and the original idea for the palæo diet was based on a few hunter-gatherer communities in marginal environments such as the Kalahari and the Arctic. These may not be typical of what we used to eat because we weren’t living in such mean circumstances. There are reasons why hunter-gatherers who still survive today live where they do. It would also be necessary to wildcraft food from non-cultivated varieties. I don’t know if they pursue this, but most brassica, for example, is ruled out because it’s so far from its wild states. Agriculture has also existed for about ten millennia now, and this will have influenced our evolution to some extent. As mentioned before, we are also omnivores – our diets are varied and we are able to eat a wide variety of foods without harm. That said, I do believe dairy and some processed food is unhealthy, and also much farmed muscle meat. This is now edging into herbalism territory, so I’ll step back from this.

Attempting to make a moral choice regarding diet, or perhaps one based on cultural preferences, shouldn’t meet with the kind of stonewalling and excuses it often does. If there’s a deeply held principle involved, the answer is not to abandon it but to seek a way in which it can be done safely and healthily. It’s very common for people to object to a plant-based diet by saying there are people it won’t work for because of their health or perhaps that it won’t work for anyone, but if that’s true, it actually means there’s a moral imperative to pursue research or take steps so that it does become an option. If there were genuine vampires who could only survive on blood drunk from a living human subject and this was considered an unethical practice, measures would need to be taken to ensure that vampires could continue healthily without violating other people’s rights. For example, it would be worth investigating why only a living subject was suitable and trying to duplicate those conditions, or looking for donors willing to undergo the process. It wouldn’t be acceptable just to consider vampires a basket case and abandon them to their fate. Likewise with veganism. It’s always a question of how to facilitate it, never whether one should do it at all for any particular group. The same applies to halal and kashrut.

Fruitarianism would probably fare rather better, particularly considering that climates were more amenable to soft fruit back in the day, and of course it is what our ancestors were actually doing at the time. There are B vitamins missing or almost absent from soft fruit, but fruitarianism isn’t just eating what we conventionally think of as fruit but any fruiting body of a flowering plant, and with that broader scope, which includes nuts, and pulses unless it’s raw food veganism which would restrict pulses to peanuts, it’s a lot more balanced. The B₁₂ question is easily resolved, as gorillas also get deficient when captured and only given washed food – it’s simply in the environment in bacteria, though perhaps not in sufficient amounts. In plants today, although there are similar compounds to cyanocobalamin, there are no exact equivalents. That, however, doesn’t mean there aren’t extinct plants which did have that exact compound, although this is clearly speculation. Vitamin D, though it can be synthesised in the skin, is also present in an Afrikan plant in sufficient quantities for ungulates to overdose on it. It’s also found in fungi when they’re exposed to sunlight, and perhaps the key in general here is to look to fungi as a source of nutrition.

The question of scurvy arises here, but pine needles are high in vitamin C and conifers have been around a lot longer than flowering plants, dating back to the Carboniferous. What I don’t know is whether conifers generally are high in vitamin C. Before the evolution of flowering plants, a possible source of carbohydrates would be cycads, which are however also high in toxins which are irritant and damage the liver, and would therefore need to be leached out. It seems that the relatioships which now exist between animals and flowering plants weren’t present between gymnosperms and their contemporaries before their appearance. This has the consequence that the further back in time you go, the harder it gets to acquire the foods humans would need to survive, and whereas this is partly because the plants in question had yet to evolve, it also underlines the significance of the web of life within which we live. We can’t be separated from our environment. The very fact that we’re susceptible to scurvy is only because our ancestors spent so long eating fruit that we lost the ability to make our own. There is a pseudo-gene still there which is found elsewhere in mammals as a functional gene, but it doesn’t work in humans.

Carnists would to some extent find it easier than vegans, because meat would be available aplenty, as would insects, and this goes back a long way. However, there is still hope for a time-travelling vegan in the Palæozoic. Seaweed is a good source of minerals in particular, but also other nutrients, although it’s also notable that if you go back far enough there seems to be less energy-rich food, which may be linked to the absence of “warm-blooded” animals. What is available, apart from seaweed, is single-celled algæ and there are also fungi. Algæ contain carotenoids which can be converted to vitamin A, lipids which include essential fatty acids, and some blue-green algæ even contain B₁₂. What I’m not sure about is the evolution of yeast. Although there are commensal yeasts on animal bodies and also pathogenic yeasts, I think probably the yeasts we’re familiar with depend on flowering plants just like many animals today do. As far as fungi more generally are concerned, the fossil record is unsurprisingly very poor, and the question of toxicity arises. Would toxins in fungi be absent before animal land life due to the lack of pressure to avoid their fruiting bodies being eaten, or is it more that the compounds in fungi which happen to be toxic satisfy other functions in the organisms and they’d just be poisonous anyway?

Once one considers a world where the only land life is fungal, the planet is almost alien in its conditions. There wasn’t enough oxygen to support human respiration in the atmosphere and ultraviolet radiation wouldn’t have been filtered out of sunlight due to the absence of an ozone layer. Whereas it would be possible to survive in dietary terms as a vegan in the early Palæozoic, it involves quite a lot of research only really possible on living organisms and also a high-tech approach to food production.

To conclude, this is not just an abstract exercise. Not only does it reveal the close connections between us and the plants with which we have co-evolved, but it may also become more relevant when one considers that one of the influences we have on the biosphere is to push it back into prehistory. Jellyfish, one of the first animals, are much more common than they used to be due to our influence on the oceans, and “algal” blooms are also more common. Perhaps we will end up having to survive on a planet once again devoid of complex land life, flowering plants and the like, and in such circumstances a plant- and fungus-based diet may turn out to be the only option.

The Prehistory Of My Veganism

Photo by Ella Olsson on Pexels.com

Hindsight is not always 20/20 because of Whig history. Whig history, or Whig historiography strictly speaking, tells the story as one of progress from a terrible past to a wonderful present, heading in the direction of current affairs. It isn’t true. For instance, just to pluck a random example out of the air, before the imperial period, the republic of Rome was more democratic and only achieved its expansion by dispensing with the “fairer” characteristics of its polity, and it almost goes without saying that after 1979 CE everything went to shit and has been doing so fairly steadily ever since. Therefore, I’m telling this story from the position of how my diet is now and how it changed in October 1987. Although it seems unlikely that I’ll ever deliberately eat meat again, you never know, and if I do I may be able to tell another story about how I got there which, nonetheless, I manage to make look like steady progress. Also, you could probably look into the past of a lot of people who are still carnist and could tell of the same kinds of things in their childhood and early adulthood as I would, and also people who temporarily went plant-based or vegetarian before returning to eating meat. Maybe, then, these are not the real causes of my veganism, but have nothing to do with them and I’ve just rationalised them into a narrative.

I want to say one more thing before I launch into this. Although I consider veganism to be both a good thing and inevitable if the species is going to survive, or rather a plant-based diet is, I absolutely don’t judge others for not being vegan. If you think of veganism as not intentionally causing suffering or death to members of other species, the vast majority of individual organisms’ injury or death, when caused by other organisms, dwarfs the number inflicted on behalf of humans, and therefore from a utilitarian perspective it makes no sense to judge anyone for the proportionately minute part they play in contributing to this. It’s about my will and not being part of causing that pain. Other people have their own perspectives and stories to tell. I absolutely do not judge them. This is my own story. Also, although I’m talking about veganism here, for the purposes of this post I’m defining it more narrowly than I usually do because I’m only really thinking about being a party to the avoidable intentional killing and inevitable causation of suffering in non-human animals, which is not what veganism really is. I do think the wider definition of veganism is relevant, but I don’t want to define it out of existence.

In fact I will start with something wider. Going back to quite early childhood, I was very concerned about conservation, endangered species and environmental damage. One story which stuck in my mind was the treatment of American Buffalo by White settlers, officially but confusingly known as American bison. There are also Eurasian bison of course, and they interested me but I didn’t know much about them. My understanding, and I’m doing this from memory, was that in the nineteenth century CE, White people used to travel out to the Plains by train, shoot them, take their hides and tongues and leave the rest to rot. In the books I read about this, this was contrasted with the Native American attitudes towards them, where all of the carcasse was used for something and they were treated with great reverence. This issue of treating prey animals with reverence – I also remember Inuit with seals – made a lasting impression on me.

Another notable aspect of my childhood was my choice of reading matter. I used to read a lot of books on the subject of such animals as skunks, dogs and cats. For instance, I devoured ‘A Skunk In The Family’, ‘Incredible Journey’, ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘The Travels of Oggy’, ‘Charlotte’s Web’, ‘All Creatures Great And Small’ and its sequels, and ‘Watership Down’. A couple of these are probably less well-known than the others. ‘A Skunk In The Family’ by Constance Taber Colby is an entertaining non-fiction book about a skunk whose scent glands were removed kept as a pet by a New York family, published in 1973 and sufficiently obscure that it has no reviews on Goodreads. ‘The Travels Of Oggy’, a 1976 book by Ann Lawrence, is surely better-known but again I can find no reviews there. It’s about a hedgehog and is fictional. I haven’t read ‘Plague Dogs’, ‘Shardik’, ‘Tarka The Otter’ or ‘Vet In A State’, which I suspect is just an attempt to cash in on James Herriot’s success. I don’t know if I’m unusual in focussing on “animal” books as a child, but basically my reading matter apart from the likes of popular science books before I got into science fiction consisted very substantially of stories about animals aimed at older children, so far as I can tell. There was never a point at which I was into fantasy or mainstream fiction, and I find it a huge struggle to read most of that. If this is unusual, it might indicate a kind of proto-vegan approach.

Another couple of incidents I remember as a child included watching a show where someone attempted to drown puppies – you probably know this, but as far as I’m aware it used to be normal to drown kittens and puppies, and in the former case just keep one, because they were surplus to requirements. Another phenomenon which seems to have disappeared is that nobody would dream of actually buying a cat because there were just so many kittens around that they couldn’t be given away. I presume this didn’t apply to purebred cats or any dogs. Anyway, I found it extremely distressing that anyone would simply drown puppies and kittens. Another companion animal related incident which stuck with me was of a man who took a dog to be put down because it’d be cheaper to buy another one than put him in kennels while he was on holiday in Spain. This probably would appal most people though.

As for members of other vertebrate species who passed through our house, these would include four cats, a rabbit, two mice and three hamsters who were regular residents, a canary after I left home, and a number of others of whom we took care while people were away, including a parakeet, two gerbils and a dog. I remember getting very upset when the first cat developed a kidney problem and had to be put down, and missing that cat terribly until my parents relented and acquired another one plus a hamster. Most of the time there were two cats. And yes, my mother did indeed tell me the cat who was put down had “gone to live on a farm in Wales”. I think children remember these things and find it hard to trust their parents later. I also took some flatworms and leeches from the river and kept them for about six months, which distressed my mother because she thought they needed feeding. Flatworms actually benefit from fasting as it causes them to rejuvenate, but I used to feed them on scraps of meat. There was also a series of fish from the river, including minnows and a bullhead. There’s a possibly quite formative incident connected to the last. With some friends, I took the bullhead from a faster-flowing part of the Great Stour along with some loaches and took care of the former in a washing up bowl. This was also, incidentally, the last time I saw my elder brother, who happened to visit on that day. I still remember his Afro and attempt to bond with me over the fish, which that last time was rather successful. The next day, my “friends” poured the bowl containing the loaches off a high bridge into the river, which would’ve killed them, and threw the bullhead as far as they could up the river off the same bridge. They seemed completely oblivious of the animals’ suffering, and this along with several other incidents is the reason I don’t believe that cruelty to “animals” during childhood is a reliable marker of a psychopath or sociopath because it was just so very widespread. I lost my temper with them and tried to ‘phone the RSPCA, although my adult self realises that the RSPCA wouldn’t have cared one jot about it as they were, at least at that time, excessively focussed on mammals and to a lesser extent birds. I gained some notoriety at my school for losing my temper at their cruelty. I had another friend who used to take fish out of the water and leave them to suffocate, and on one occasion I put them all back when he wasn’t looking. He became a keen angler and proceeded to kill fish humanely after he’d caught them. It always mystified me, even back then, that people just seemed to accept angling as if it was a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

I wasn’t above capturing animals myself. I did this with water boatmen and backswimmers, and also freshwater shrimp. On two occasions I kept frogspawn and waited for it to mature. The newly-hatched tadpoles reminded me of human embryos. Most of them died but it isn’t clear to me even now whether this was due to a high mortality rate or the conditions I kept them in. They tended to fall prey to leeches, not the kind I was keeping, since they were very separate, but ones which had already been present in the water. Looking back on this now, I wonder if they were in fact nematodes. I also used to look at stream and river water through a microscope, in which there were protists such as Vorticella and Amœba. I don’t know what to tell you about this phase of my life. It shows a burgeoning interest in wildlife, biassed against mammals and birds which persisted for quite a while, but there’s also a sense of entitlement there, that I simply assumed I could take animals from their habitats and keep them captive. I also did this with a number of privet hawk moth caterpillars and one other species of butterfly whose name escapes me, and also earthworms and snails. Come to think of it, there was a long sequence of animals I caught out of interest and simply observed. The only tetrapod I remember doing this with was a slow worm. On another occasion, my mother rescued an injured house martin who died after a few hours, possibly an RTC or a victim of a cat.

This is a rather ambivalent set of activities from my now-vegan perspective, and I think it also opens up a wider issue about the ethics of childhood and parenting. Thinking about the natures of the various nervous systems involved, and the nature of the environments they’re accustomed to living in, some of these seem entirely acceptable and others don’t. For instance, the flatworms and leeches would have been accustomed to living in stagnant, low-oxygen water and that’s how they lived when they were in my jam jars. I don’t have an ethical problem there. The water boatmen and backswimmers simply flew away, which is fine. I captured them and they escaped. The shrimp died, and that’s not good. So did all of the fish, and I think this may have been because the water wasn’t suitable for them and hadn’t been left to stand to reduce dissolved air, which may have formed into bubbles in their gills and suffocated them. This is not good. The slow worm also escaped. The hawk moth flew away but I was planning to release her into the wild near some privet, which didn’t come together because she escaped into the house and ended up mating and laying eggs on the double glazing, which hatched out and then I was unable to care for the caterpillars of the next generation because they were nowhere near any vegetation and too fragile to move without killing them. My mother found the lives of the hawk moths depressing since they seemed to consist simply of reproducing and eating, and at the time I thought the adults didn’t eat, which for her made it worse. I sometimes wonder if this reflects on her perception of her own life.

I was of course also surrounded by cattle (nameless beasts) and sheep, whom I saw shorn and giving birth. My secondary school had its own sheep on which we were supposed to practice various things like inspecting for parasites. I never actually did this. I would also say that there’s a link between gender rôles and cruelty to animals or indifference to their suffering, so the fact that I wasn’t may be significant. There also seemed to be a markèd change at secondary school age in a number of ways which I would characterise as a layer of bigotry and intolerance which is maintained among boys of that age. Broadly, this issue belongs on another blog of mine, but with respect to cruelty this was also encouraged by my peers and I had the mickey taken out of me for not wanting to cause them suffering. There was also quite a lot of attachment to gore, with many boys looking forward to dissections.

At some point during my childhood, and I really cannot place this, I asked my mother if I could become vegetarian. I may have been motivated by my interest in Yoga, which would probably date it to about 1980, when I was twelve to thirteen. I remember thinking that the problem would be difficulty giving up bacon and bizarrely my mother assured me that I wouldn’t have to give up bacon to be vegetarian, an assertion I really don’t understand to this day. However, nothing came of this while I was still a child. Apart from bacon, I actually didn’t like meat and only ate it out of a sense of moral obligation, because I believed that it was better for the animals concerned to exist than not to do so. You can probably see that I was very oriented towards the idea of the interests of entire species rather than individual organisms.

As was normal for someone of my generation who did O- and A-level Biology, I dissected various animals including mice and frogs. I didn’t feel even slightly squeamish about this and didn’t consider it problematic that the animals had been killed. I may, however, have been less involved than average in doing this kind of thing because many years after I’d left school I learned that one of my Biology teachers was vegetarian for ethical reasons, and tried to minimise the use of animals in his lessons. I also became aware that there was an opt-out available for pupils who had ethical objections to dissection on some syllabi, but had no interest in pursuing this. Generally then, in my late childhood my interest in vegetarianism could have been just a phase.

At a point which is difficult to date, I read an article in, of all places, the ‘Reader’s Digest’ which discussed how to reduce one’s risk of cancer, and pointed out that vegetarianism would make a major difference. In fact I no longer think this is strictly true but only if one gets one’s meat from wild animals and eats the offal, which few people do. At the time, the idea of going veggie seemed a massive and undesirable step I was unwilling to take. I think I was twelve at the time, so the period between this and taking up Yoga more seriously must have been quite brief.

I became aware of veganism when I was twelve but believed it to be largely fatal because that’s how it had been presented to me. Therefore I ruled it out for many years to come. I was probably about ten when I learned of the Draize Test, which led to a long-term hostility to cosmetics and a sense of outrage that this was done. I’m not sure when I became aware of LD₅₀, although I knew about drug testing on other species in general. The fact that I didn’t use cosmetics at a time when they were quite popular, for instance among punks, goths and New Romantics, is probably connected to my opposition to the way they were tested and not due to gender stereotyping pressures, although I also disapproved of women wearing makeup because I considered it to be an excessive focus on personal appearance rather than character. Remember, these are the views of an adolescent and there is an element of envy in them too.

It wasn’t until I left home and went to university that I began to think seriously about becoming vegetarian. This went through two phases. In my first term, a school friend at another university decided to go veggie because of tropic levels, i.e. that it’s inefficient to produce food in this manner. Oddly, although I’d been aware of tropic levels since the age of seven, I hadn’t made the connection with animal farming before. He exhorted me to do the same but I persisted in eating meat, and crucially made the point that it isn’t in the animals’ interests that they exist given the nature of their farming. I accepted the tropic levels argument on an intellectual level but it didn’t change my diet. In the second term, I began to study animal liberation in philosophy, particularly the works of Peter Singer, Tom Regan and Mary Midgley, and was persuaded that there were pressing ethical reasons for giving up meat, and also that veganism was a necessary step in the long run. I was just about pescetarian after that, in that i ate fish on one occasion and scampi on another, my justification being the phosphorus bottleneck as popularised by Isaac Asimov, but this only persisted for a few months. I actually went veggie on 9th March 1986, when I was eighteen, and regarded it as a transitional phase into veganism. Personally, I never saw lacto-ovo-vegetarianism as a justifiable permanent state. My actual precipitating event was to annoy a friend when we were about to eat out. I went vegan in October of the next year, when I accidentally ate some chilli con carne and wanted to get something positive out of my mistake.

I suppose I would describe myself as an animal lover as a child. I don’t know think of myself in that way because I simply see it as morally incumbent upon me not to be involved in their suffering and death, and I can watch a film like ‘The Animals Film’ or ‘Earthlings’ and it completely leaves me cold. This probably makes me unusual among vegans and animal rights activists, as nowadays I completely lack passion about it. I simply see it as wrong and therefore something I need to avoid doing. But the purpose of today’s post is not to examine the rights and wrongs of the position, but to look at my past and try to work out whether the events of my childhood have any link with later becoming vegetarian and vegan. It’s hard to say really. I certainly think my rage at discovering animal cosmetic testing and the behaviour of my friends towards fish are quite unusual and didn’t seem to be anticipated by others. It was enough to get me ridiculed, which strongly suggests it was abnormal, and there may also have been some gender politics involved there.

So, in yet another attempt to get some kind of reponse from my readers, I have a question to ask you, bearing in mind that this isn’t really a post about the ethics of veganism so much as the relationship between childhood and adulthood. If you eat meat, and I’m not judging here, can you recall events in your childhood which were particularly similar or unlike mine? If you chose to become vegan or veggie at some point, can you see aspects of your life as a child which pushed you in that direction or prefigured it? Are there other aspects to your value-based decisions whose seeds you can see in your childhood?

Monkey Hate

Major trigger warning for cruelty to members of other closely-related species and possible connections to human child sexual abuse.

I wanted to get that in first, before even the picture credit, but to give her her due, the above image is credited thus: Photo by Rachel Claire on Pexels.com

This is about something which currently manifests as an internet phenomenon but may have existed in human nature for longer than we’ve even been human. Before I get going, I’m going to become a bit “sciency”, but the bulk of this post isn’t about that. There is a point to this outline, relevant to the subject of this post.

Cladism is the classification of organisms into groups of genetically related populations with common ancestry. This has led to some confusing descriptions of animals in particular. For instance, there’s a sense in which all mammals, reptiles and amphibia are fish, because our common ancestor is a Eusthenopteron-like species of fish, so we form a clade with bony fish, and in which birds are reptiles because they’re dinosaurs and dinosaurs are descended from reptiles. Likewise, there is a sense in which all humans and other apes are monkeys, in particular Old World monkeys. It’s like matroshka dolls. There’s a large doll called “simians” containing two smaller dolls called platyrrhines and Catarrhines. The platyrrhines are native to South and Central American only. The catarrhines originated in Afro-Eurasia and include hominoids and cercopithecids. Hominids include gibbons and their relatives, and great apes including humans. Everything is inside the big doll called simians. In other words, we’re all monkeys. This doesn’t sound right because there’s a lot of insistence on distinguishing apes from other monkeys, for instance emphasising our larger bodies, less arboreal nature, lack of long external tails and dorsoventrally compressed trunks, but we are still monkeys, and there was a time when we were all competing on a level playing field, as it were. It’s enlightening to bear this in mind in what follows.

This is where it starts to get exceedingly distasteful.

There are a very large number of channels on YouTube dedicated to torture, accidental death and serious injury to various species of simian other than ourselves, and apparently also excluding other apes and New World monkeys. I’m having to do this by hearsay because if I seek out these channels or videos myself I will be rewarding them with views and advertising revenue and thereby boosting their profile. This, in fact, is in itself a major issue because it means that if one wishes to hear from a contrary viewpoint to one’s own, one risks boosting that for the general public without foreknowledge as to the nature of the content, which encourages one to stay in one’s own reality tunnel. Nonetheless I do have secondary sources for this and so far as I can tell it is uncontroversially extremely cruel.

It’s in the YouTube creator content guidelines that causing suffering or death to animals deliberately for purposes other than food preparation or hunting (because our society perversely considers that acceptable) is not admissible content and will lead to the channel uploading it to be closed and demonetised. Closure and demonetisation of channels by regular users happens very often for apparently minor infractions, in the latter case often without informing the user. These monkey hate channels are often old and still monetised. YouTube is also aware of them, since they receive numerous complaints about them, but they simply persist, in a similar manner to how they do with Elsagate videos. This is rather baffling, since the videos don’t seem to be submitted by any of the big players, so one would expect them to be held to the same standards. This, though, is not the focus of this post.

As far as online manifestations of monkey hate are concerned, this might be traceable to a site set up in 1996 CE called http://www.ifihаdаmоnkеу.соm (obviously not that but again, I’m trying to avoid page impressions – that’s kind of a phishing link). This was just a bad-taste humour website set up in response to PETA, and although I’m vegan I’m no fan of PETA because they are no friends of animals other than humans, have an anthropocentric view of animal liberation and aren’t above rather appallingly sexist campaigns, not to mention their startlingly crass approach to publicity. For whatever motives, the person who started the site was at first rewarded by various bad-taste jokes, which however rapidly got out of hand and were hard not to believe were actually serious. The search engine result brings up the description “the Best Source for Metaphorical Violence Against The Monkey You Don’t Even Have in the Whole Wide World!”, and I’m not sure whether that description has been there since the start or not, but it was there in 2001, which is as far back as the Wayback Machine goes with it. Even back then it was hard to tell whether or not to take the submissions as jokes or not, which is of course a common online problem. It’s also hard to discern the motivation for annoying PETA, since it could be similar to mine or it could just be carnism.

You needn’t be vegan not to be disturbed by these videos though. There’s a focus on adult monkey sadness and baby monkey suffering and death, all the victims seem to be Old World monkeys, and there’s a wider context of cruelty, as with fake animal rescue channels, where YouTubers endanger or injure dogs and cats in order to film themselves “rescuing” them.

I think at this point I owe it to Cambodia to post something more general, and I hope more positive, about the country because of what I’m about to say: a large number of monkey hate videos originate from that country. Some of the channels posting them from Cambodia also post dramatised videos about underage girls being raped, which suggests a possible link between child sexual abuse and monkey hate. However, the commenters on these videos are usually either bots or apparently White Anglophone males, whose profile pictures are unique to the channels. Hence there is a hypothesis that monkey hate is a proxy for child abuse and sadistic pædophilia. There’s a further hypothesis which I don’t accept that the videos use steganography, which I shall now explain.

Steganography is a method of hiding something in plain sight. One of the rookie mistakes in using ciphers is that they are not concealed and stand out as obvious codes. Guvf, sbe rknzcyr, vf na boivbhf pvcure. It makes a lot more sense to hide the message imperceptibly in something which looks routine and ordinary, such as a jpeg or online video. This is done by altering a small portion of the data slightly, resulting in a video which is indistinguishable from the original but contains encoded data. However, I don’t think this can be done on YouTube because I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work. This was a few years ago now and things may have changed, but the videos are considerably altered by the time they’ve been uploaded, or at least they used to be, and I don’t think they could be relied upon to preserve the data. In fact I doubt they ever would. Therefore I’d reject this out of hand, and in any case it doesn’t make sense to submit videos which violate the terms of service to do this. It’d make more sense to submit innocuous videos with steganographic content, and for all I know it can be done now due to improvements in video quality. I might try it again soon on YT.

There could have been incidents of monkey hate before the internet became popular, but most people wouldn’t know about them and there wouldn’t usually have been much of an audience. As such, the phenomenon may have things in common with the Targeted Individual community, where people with a sensitive cognitive style and feelings of persecution find each other online and reinforce each other’s beliefs.

A number of hypotheses have been suggested regarding this. They include:

• People who live in areas where monkeys are common regard them as pests and celebrate their suffering.
• Germphobia.
• Addiction.
• Sadism.
• Sublimated or encoded child sexual abuse.
• Phobia.
• Disgust.

The first hypothesis might explain how the videos appeared in the first place but doesn’t explain the fact that their audience largely consists of English-speaking White males. They also tend to use the kind of language employed by the American Right, such as calling people “snowflakes”. This suggests a further thought, which is that it’s sublimated or encoded racism.

Germphobia is similar to the first, and in this case one must be careful not to accuse people who are germphobic of being into this too. However, the species involved are not particularly unhygienic compared to others, such as bats for example, and although there is phobia of bats it doesn’t lend itself to sadistic videos of bats being tortured, although that might be difficult to achieve.

Regarding addiction, clearly the videos are likely to be addictive whatever the appeal is, because that’s a common happening on the internet, as with pornography for example.

Sadism is very likely to be involved in one way or another. It may also reflect a lack of legislation against cruelty of this kind in Cambodia and other countries from which these videos originate, or difficulty in enforcement if they do exist. Cultural relativism may also make the subject matter seem worse to Westerners than it does to people in Southeast Asia. Also, the chances are that the financial “reward” for getting views on such videos is a motivation for the people posting them, so they may themselves not be specifically sadist although they are likely to be sociopathic or psychopathic, and the former condition may have arisen due to their upbringing. The videos appear to divide into three categories: voyeuristic, home made and what I think of as “found footage”. Voyeuristic videos involve chance recordings of monkeys suffering from events not instigated deliberately by humans, such as predation or accidents. Home made is deliberate cruelty to captive animals, actually acquired for that purpose. This can involve attempts to instigate hostility between monkeys. Finally, found footage involves recordings made surreptitiously of humans being cruel to monkeys of other species, something which is obviously a lot easier nowadays than it used to be.

The question of encoded child sexual abuse is another matter, blending into sadism. It could be that the unacceptability of child abuse videos on the internet, not to mention the personal risk in viewing them, leads people to watch or make videos which don’t attract that kind of unwanted attention from the authorities. This is of course speciesist, and there could be popular support for clamping down on them to the same extent, but the situation may not be as black and white as it appears.

I’m going to deal with the last two together, as I think they may be the most significant. Monkey haters have been interviewed and for the ones who have come forward, these two seem to be the explanation. For some people, individuals of closely related species may occupy an uncanny valley between the utterly non-human such as cats on the one hand and humans on the other. This similarity seems to be interpreted by most people as cuteness, but for some it seems to evoke disgust and horror like the undead might do for many.

This is what was revealed, or at least reported, by monkey haters who have been interviewed. One of them recounts a visit to a zoo when he was eight. Up until that point, he’d considered monkeys to be cute and cuddly, but he found the actual experience of seeing them – he mentions mating in public as an example of what triggered him – disgusting and shocking, and this stayed with him into adulthood, eventually manifesting as monkey hate. Significantly, he not only has no urges to be cruel or watch cruelty to other animals, just monkeys. He admits he became obsessed and that it was an addiction, and he feels very guilty and disgusted with himself about it. He also specifically hates baby monkeys, the reason given being that they have tantrums, although this sounds like a rationalisation. His own theory is that it’s instinctive, and surfaces sporadically in some people, but used to be widespread, and also that it’s more common than it seems. It might, in his opinion, also be an outlet for people who have underlying violent tendencies towards humans.

I have to admit this makes a lot of sense. Back in the Miocene, our ancestors were one species of many apes, to the extent that palæontologists can’t identify who they were, but sometime between 24 million years ago in the Oligocene when the first monkeys came into existence from the tarsier-like omomyids and the emergence of Proconsul, the first known ape, 21 million years ago, we would have been monkeys surrounded by possibly competing other monkeys. Since Proconsul is close to the ancestor of all apes, not just us, this raises the question of whether other great apes, and also the various gibbons, also engage in cruelty to tailed monkeys in particular. The Gombe chimpanzee community in particular is known for its violence and this is sometimes manifested in the killing of tailed monkeys such as the red-tailed monkey, although they do eat them. Bonobos and orangutan would, at least prima facie, be considered less likely candidates but this is not scientific of course.

To most people living in European societies, the tailed monkeys are unfamiliar, unlike in the places where they’re likely to live. This unfamiliarity means there is no obvious “bridge” between them and the rest of nature, and this may lead to a sense of the uncanny to a greater extent than it would for humans who live alongside them. As such, the introduction of monkeys as a novelty may come across as an affront to their distinctive identity and might also constitute a threat if they are used to the idea of human dominion over the rest of the animal kingdom. I don’t think it can be mere coincidence that the main audience for these videos is White and English-speaking, and I wonder also if it’s a manifestation of xenophobia which extends to overt and active racism, hence the use of alt-right language. The people who live with wild monkeys from day to day might see them as an economic resource such as for food, tourists or these videos, but they don’t seem to bear them animosity. They’re just doing White people’s dirty work for them. On the other hand, I’m guessing here, but I would expect some of them to regard them as “tree rats”, as the term has it, similarly to how many people in cities see rock doves.

The interviewee thinks there are probably a few dozen hard core monkey haters, which makes it sound like a trivial matter, but there are also thousands upon thousands of casual monkey haters, who watch the videos for entertainment regularly without commenting or engaging. Some of them clearly do get sexual gratification from it, and interestingly despite their apparently homophobic attitudes are very zealous in their defence of their right to do so. There are also two kinds of target. Babies are one, and tend to mention the kind of characteristics often attributed to human babies, such as clinginess, dependence and spoiltness. The other target is the grief of the mothers who witness the death and injury of their children. The former is particularly reminiscent of child abuse and the latter, I think, gives a clue as to the possibility of it being to do with opposition to feelings of tenderness and love. Some fans go so far as to say they’d like to kill all humans who feel positively towards monkeys in any way, and a link is also made between monkey behaviour and neurodiversity as a “justification”.

I want to close by making two observations. Most of the videos are made in Cambodia in spite of the fact that non-human primates are found all across Asia and Afrika, and also in South America. Old World monkeys are more closely related to us than New World monkeys are. In fact, cladistically we are Old World monkeys. These would’ve been the monkeys, or similar ones, with whom we would’ve been in conflict in the Oligocene and Miocene, but this fails to explain why Cambodia specifically would be the source. Could it be that in that country in particular, the terrible trauma seen as inflicted by Pol Pot has brutalised the populace and led to this tendency? Or is it more a question of economic necessity: people in particularly severe hardship will seek any source at all to support their dependents and themselves? One thing this has brought home to me is how little I know of Cambodia, and I would like to explore this on here in the near future.

Fibres Part 1

Steve made a most stimulating comment yesterday which I plan to go on about at length today regarding textiles and veganism. However, today’s post isn’t primarily about veganism so much as textiles, to a limited extent since there’s something of a gap in my knowledge there.

My mother-in-law once asked Sarada whether there was any area about which I knew nothing. The answer is of course that there are huge gaps in my knowledge, and it may be more that I’m good at sounding like I know what I’m talking about, an observation another in-law once made of me. If you remember those venerable institutions called libraries, you may also recall the Dewey Decimal Classification System, rather awkwardly named because it sounds like “duodecimal” but isn’t. It’s probably good evidence that I’m in the autistic landscape that I find it very appealing and reassuring, but my ex had problems with it because she couldn’t decide which aspect of a subject rendered it sufficiently important to place in a particular category, and she makes a good point, which however should not be entertained if you’re a librarian because then nobody will be able to find anything. Anyway, the answer is yes. There is in fact a huge hole in my knowledge in the 600s and 700s, not consistently through the whole range but in the area of things like ceramics, architecture and in particular textiles. This was particularly ironic, since my mother-in-law was a needlework teacher who had also gone so far in her education regarding embroidery that she couldn’t in fact go any further without doing it at a university, although she’d done a City & Guilds in it and had exhibitions, and she did value her knowledge but somehow didn’t recognise that for me, this was one of the biggest gulfs in my education. It wasn’t through want of trying on my part either. I enjoyed needlework at primary school and was very disappointed at not being able to pursue anything like that once I got to my secondary school due to the gender segregation of subjects. Consequently, much of what I have to say here is going to be quite naïve and it’ll probably be in the “obvious” category for many of you.

I may not know much about textiles, but I know what I like. On the ethical side, nothing I’m wearing right now corresponds to depeche mode, but all too often it does. As far as I can see, fast fashion very often seems to involve polyester, which is definitely not a Good Thing environmentally. It isn’t significantly biodegradable right now, and to some extent that’s a plus because it means it lasts longer for the consumer, but it’s also one of the worst offenders as far as shedding microplastics is concerned because it’s brittle, or so I believe. Polyester textile is the same stuff as is used to make disposable plastic water bottles, one of which happens to be sitting on this table right now although I hasten to add it isn’t mine or Sarada’s, and the mere fact that the shape of the item formed from it is very thin and cylindrical doesn’t alter its physical properties per se. In an average six kilo wash, garments containing polyester shed something like a million and a half particles of microplastic, which of course end up in the sea and elsewhere on the planet, including in food destined for human plates. We now contain plastic, all of us, and polyester’s, and therefore fast fashion’s, contribution to that is considerable. That said, as I’ve mentioned before a microörganism evolved recently capable of breaking down polyester and using it as an energy resource, and this is likely to happen, or has already happened, with many other synthetic fibres simply because as a species we are creating vast amounts of substances which are an untapped resource for other life forms and therefore new ecological niches. There is hope for the future there because the biosphere may provide to some extent. Not that this should be used as an excuse for what capitalism is putting that biosphere through, and for all we know it may have unforseen or undesirable consequences. For instance, whereas synthetics may be broken down by organisms, we don’t know that the waste products won’t turn out to be toxic, and the same materials may form part of important structures such as roads and buildings, or prosthetic parts inside human bodies keeping them alive, so do we really want these to evolve?

The picture at the top of this post is a poster for the excellent Ealing Comedy ‘The Man In The White Suit’, starring Alec Guinness. I won’t spoil it for you much although if you want all the surprises, stop reading until the next paragraph, but it’s basically about a man who invents a new textile which is incredibly tough and durable, but finds the industry won’t use it because it will put them out of business, since people will stop needing to buy new clothes. It’s also remarkably fair-handed. It portrays the trade unions and management as equally opposed to the innovation for the same reasons. Apart from the prominence of the unions, the film could be remade to day with few basic changes, and it illustrates a basic problem with capitalism: it disincentivises the production of durable goods. In fact, if the ‘White Suit’ scenario happened in real life, the problem would probably have been resolved by accelerating changes in style and fashion, and it’s notable that the fabric couldn’t be dyed because if it could, the problem would’ve been solved that way.

It’s probably fair to organise types of textiles into the following big categories: organic synthetic, organic biological, inorganic synthetic and inorganic mineral. Biological fabrics could be further divided into protein- and cellulose-based. In terms of materials which are not heavily processed or modified by industrial methods, all widely-used vegetable fibres are based on cellulose. They’re all variations on a theme, and off the top of my head they amount to cotton, ramie, canvas, bamboo, jute and sisal, with an honorable mention for rayon, which is cellulose in solution extruded through a nozzle. Among protein fibres, again practically all the widely used ones are either silk or α-keratin, unless you count leather, which is substantially collagen. Feathers are β-keratin, which is more wont to form sheets than the other form, and allows it to be iridescent, blue or green due to structural colour effects, but it isn’t really a textile and no mammals make it. Keratin, leather and silk are obviously not vegan, but they’re still interesting chemically. Keratin, being a protein, has a primary, secondary and tertiary structure. The primary structure is simply the chain of amino acid residues from which it’s made and for which the animal’s DNA codes. The secondary structure is the low-level form of small parts of protein molecules, and in the case of α-keratin is an α-helix, a spring-like shape where every amino group bonds to a carboxyl group four amino acids away from it along the chain. Two such helices bond together through the sulphide bonds on the large number of cysteine molecules. Cysteine and methionine are the two essential sulphur-containing amino acids, and their existence is crucial to the shapes of protein molecules. Cysteine’s structural formula looks like this:

Into the tertiary (largest scale) structure, these paired helices are then bonded further with others through more sulphide groups. This is why burning hair smells awful. Wool, camelhair, fur, angora, any mammalian textile you care to mention, is made of this stuff.

Silk is somewhat different. It’s produced by arthropods including silkworms, but notably also spiders and a large number of other species in that phylum. It’s made from two proteins, sericin and fibroin. Fibroin molecules are sheets described as β-sheets because of the way they’re linked together, through hydrogen bonds. Incidentally, the formation of similar sheets of amino acids occurs in Alzheimer’s disease, and since it’s difficult to break down it interferes with the metabolism of brain cells, although there are other hypotheses such as τ protein. I’m guessing this contributes to the toughness of silk. The other protein, sericin, is by amount about a third serine:

The high serine content glues the silk together and increases its strength. Silk is of course several times stronger than steel and can be used to make bulletproof vests. Unlike keratin, and therefore wool to pick a popular textile form, silk does not rely on sulphide bonds.

There is a third, little-used, animal protein thread secreted by many bivalves to anchor them to surfaces. Mussels use it to prevent themselves being dislodged from rocks by pounding waves. This is the byssal thread, and consists of collagen. It’s used to make sea silk, when secreted by pen shells, which are endangered, and although it used to be employed throughout the mediterranean it’s now only worked with by a small number of people, possibly only one, on the island of Sant’Antioco off Sardinia. Hence it’s rare and very expensive.

Getting back to wool, by which I mean generic keratin-based fibres, I’m interested in this particular column of the periodic table:

The bottom two are highly radioactive and therefore irrelevant in a universe whose strong nuclear force has the ratio it has here to electromagnetism, but the two below sulphur do sometimes occur in amino acids, substituting for it. Selenocysteine does exist in animals, and is involved in antioxidant activity. Tellurocysteine crops up in fungi occasionally. There’s also selenomethionine, which is occasionally randomly substituted for methionine, and is the form in which selenium as an essential trace element occurs in some nuts and pulses. In the crust, selenium is only about a ten thousandth as common as sulphur and tellurium is ten times rarer than that. However, there is a DNA codon which codes for selenocysteine, so in theory it would be possible to produce a sheep whose wool was based on selenium instead of sulphur, although the diet would have to be very specialised and artificially manufactured. Selenium-based wool would be somewhat denser than real wool, and tellurium-based wool denser still. However, such a concentration of selenium would be toxic to the animals concerned, so it probably wouldn’t work.

There are also plant-based protein fibres, but they’re not as successful as their animal equivalent and have to be synthesised from plant protein as they don’t exist in the living organisms themselves. Peanuts are one example, a slightly confusing one because there is also cellulose fibre in the husks. They can also be made from maize and soya. The peanut version is called ardil, and is almost forgotten. During the Second World War, there was a wool shortage for uniforms and ICI invested in developing it. For a while after the War, the wool industry was concerned about the competition, as ardil is similar to wool. However, the Groundnut Scandal put paid to it along with difficulty in competing with synthetic fibres made from petrochemicals, so it didn’t happen. However, it is technically possible to produce a wool substitute from peanuts. This is because, as is so often so, peanuts are not botanical nuts but beans, and are therefore high in sulphur-containing amino acids. Due to the random substitution which occurs in sulphur-containing amino acids in plants, ardil would have some selenium content but I won’t harp on about it. The point to bear in mind, ultimately, is that it’s entirely feasible to produce vegan “wool” from plant sources and not oil.

As they come, most plant sources of fibre are extremely monotonous. They’re basically all cellulose, although they do have different qualities. This makes them harder to dye than wool. Cotton and linen are the most obvious and until recently the most familiar. Cotton is a mallow, like marsh mallow and hollyhocks, and has an historical association with the slave trade. There was also some kind of controversy about its production in India in the nineteenth century. Today, nine-tenths of Indian cotton is Bt cotton genetically modified to produce its own insecticides as found in a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, and is banned in several other places, although it may not actually reduce the use of pesticides or increase yield. It’s been blamed for an increase in Indian farmers ending their lives triggered by economic difficulties. I perceive cotton as the default plant fabric. However, this has not been the case historically. Flax, the source of linen, was widely used in the past and has the issue of its fibres being covered in wax, which makes it even harder to dye. Canvas, made from hemp, is a heavier fibre similar to the related ramie, made from stinging nettles. These are traditionally “retted”: left in water for the non-cellulosic matter to decompose. After that they’re rinsed and ready for cloth. Sisal and jute are more like sackcloth and not really suitable for clothing. A newcomer is bamboo, which deserves its own section.

Bamboo is, crucially, a monocotyledon rather than a dicot. Among the distinctive features of monocots is that they never have secondary thickening, that is, they are never trees. The plants referred to as trees among those plants, such as bananas and palms, are in fact not. This is important because it means they don’t take so much time to grow and can grow in smaller spaces, such as steeper slopes, than trees can. Bamboo only takes a little over three years to grow to a usefully harvestable form. It can also be grown in temperate regions such as Canada, although of course most bamboo is from China. This means it has a longer supply chain and is harder to audit ethically than more local products, and the reason most of it is from China is that the working conditions there are worse. Although the fact that bamboo can potentially reduce deforestation because it can be grown in terrain unsuitable for forests, its popularity means that forests, including ancient woodland, are cut down in order to grow it and biodiversity is reduced due to the fact that this is then a monoculture. Moreover, wild bamboo is also “mined” unsustainably due to this pressure. However, it produces 35% more oxygen than trees and has a lower carbon footprint than either European conifer forests or FSC certified tropical hardwoods. Talking of certification, however, this doesn’t exist yet for bamboo because its use in the West is a recent development. Bamboo products generally have a much higher carbon footprint than their wooden analogues because they’ve been transported here from China. Although bamboo can be retted, it’s usually just rayon, which makes the comparison with trees particularly relevant, and at this point I should discuss rayon as such.

Rayon is cellulose dissolved in a solvent and then recovered back from it (people know this, don’t they? Help me out someone: I think this is common knowledge but I’m not sure). There’s an older method which was used in the nineteenth century and a newer one which began in the 1920s. The newer method produces a textile referred to as viscose rayon because the solvent used is viscous. This method is also more convenient because it can cope with lignin, the main constituent of wood, meaning that a cotton-like fibre can be made directly from wood as a raw material. The original idea was to make a cheaper and easier silk substitute, although it doesn’t seem very similar. It has the advantage over cotton of not pilling so easily because the fibres are basically homogenous smooth cylinders, and it’s smoother and shinier than cotton. A more recent form is modal, which unlike rayon can be tumble-dried and can also be stronger generally.

The last fibre I want to cover today is Vinalon or Vinylon – 비닐론. This is associated strongly with North Korea and is made from anthracite and limestone, minerals available in the country. Whereas I am no fan of North Korea, it’s worth noting that it was invented by the Japanese some time before the country came into existence, and the ingenuity is admirable as such. It’s a rather stiff fibre used for most clothing in the country and clearly its Green credentials are other than marvellous. It forms part of an attempt by the country to achieve economic self-sufficiency, and whereas Juche – 주체사상 – cannot be described as in any meaningful way communist, it is true that in order to avoid economic leverage or sabotage, it might make sense for this to be an aim in a country attempting to oppose global capitalism.

Since this is getting rather long, I’m going to break off at this point and continue tomorrow.