Why is a non-vegan Lithuanian chakam supremely relevant to veganism? I’ll come to that.
The Vegan Society defines veganism thus:
“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”
I’ve been into this before on here, so I’m risking repeating myself: veganism is not a diet. It’s more like pacifism. Looking at the definition above, it’s important to bear in mind what an animal is. I would define an animal as a eukaryotic multicellular heterotroph without cell walls. Two important things about that definition are that it includes humans and that it doesn’t just apply to vertebrates. Because it applies to humans, the above definition can be reworded thus:
“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, humans for any purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans and the environment.”
This definition is not veganism, but veganism implies it. Moreover, since on a conscious level the most significant bulk of interactions we have is usually with our own species, it’s this which is the most significant part of veganism to us. Hence the statement by a certain animal liberation pressure group that they were glad about a particular coach crash on the M1 because it meant the death of thirty meat-eaters is not a vegan one. It also means that when we interact with other humans about veganism in particular, we have to do it in a respectful manner. Not doing so is in any case likely to be counterproductive.
The other side of this equation is that it applies to all animals, not just vertebrates. Vertebrates are the animals many humans find easiest to interact with, and identify most strongly with, although that drops off very fast when some of them consider fish. The supposèd red flag for a psychopath that they were cruel to “animals” as a child actually seems to mean they were cruel to other mammals and birds. It doesn’t even seem to mean fish. Generally going fishing is not seen as antisocial behaviour, and people often seem to get a free pass to do this compared to other bloodsports. Well it’s not okay. Simply because it’s a working class form of cruelty doesn’t make it better or worse than foxhunting.
Some of you will be aware that the reason this is on my mind right now is that I’ve just left the “UK Vegan” group on Facebook, because I found it so very irritating. Whereas this could be put down to a bit of irrelevant social media drama, and to some extent it is, I also believe that the group reflects the current state of veganism in the “U”K. There were actually three sources of annoyance on the group: the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is common across human interaction generally, where uninformed people are less aware of their lack of knowledge than more informed people are of their own; reluctance or refusal to extend the circle of compassion widely; repeated conversations about meat and dairy substitutes.
I’ll just deal briefly with the Dunning-Kruger aspect. People don’t know that they don’t know things. This was actually the precipitating factor in me leaving, due to a conversation about digestive enzymes. This might sound tangential, but I consider it incumbent upon a person adopting a plant-based diet to research the nutritional aspects before going for it, and that would include the physiology of digestion. There are excuses for this – for instance, someone may have suffered from the use of anti-language in technical texts or they may be dyslexic – but the focus should always be not on finding reasons for not becoming vegan, but on finding ways around perceived obstacles in doing so. That means informing yourself. I would add that veganism is a personal decision which needs to be put in context. As I sit here, phagocytes in my colon are killing countless bacteria and fungi, who are not animals but are living organisms, and if they didn’t I would quickly die of immune deficiency. Life is violent by its very nature, and therefore from a strictly utilitarian perspective veganism is a mere gesture, but it’s about what one can personally do to avoid causing suffering and death intentionally or via negligence. Hence the focus is on the individual and nobody should be judged for not being vegan. However, if they’ve made the decision to do so, they need to be informed.
Now for the reluctance or refusal to extend the circle of compassion. This can work in two ways, bearing in mind the categories mentioned above regarding animals. One can be dismissive of or aggressive towards other humans or ignore their needs when considering the needs of other species, as with the coach crash incident. This doesn’t seem to happen much on the group, and I presume it tends not to happen more widely as much as it used to. What does happen is that people are dismissive of the needs of the likes of arthropods, annelids and molluscs other than cephalopods along with other animals they might encounter such as nematodes. Bear in mind that that is nearly all animals. There are estimated to be 4.4 × 1020 nematodes on this planet, which is over fifty milliard per human. The justification given for this is that the others are not sentient. This is a baseless assertion, more or less. It does follow from the premise that a complex central nervous system is required for sentience, but there is not really any reason to suppose this to be the case because the nature of consciousness is entirely mysterious. Various solutions have been proposed to the mind-body problem by philosophers through the centuries, but they all have a tendency to be found wanting, and in the process of those proposals a notable factor is to focus on just those features which are able to suggest that the person making the argument is sentient and members of a particular out-group are not. This is where we come to the Lithuanian chakam I mentioned at the start: Emmanuel Levinas and his argument that ethics is first philosophy.
Just to explain what that means, it’s been popular in the past for philosophers to come up with a total theory of everything which explains the nature of reality. This is not so popular nowadays for various reasons, such as the subservience of philosophy to science and the dominance of postmodernity in certain circles. This could be seen as first philosophy. An example of it would be Descartes and his “cogito ergo sum” – I think, therefore I am. Descartes attempted to doubt everything he possibly could before proceeding to attempt to rebuild the world, which interestingly for the purposes of this discussion he did by attempting to use the ontological argument, that is, the necessary existence of a perfect Being who would not deceive him that the world was real by making him imagine it. However, on the whole such projects have always tended to be metaphysical in nature. Levinas considers the Other as subject and the demand their existence makes on one to be obliged towards them in someway – to take responsibility for the Other. I’ve previously mentioned Jean-Paul Sartre’s example of “The Look” as a solution to what he calls the scandal of other minds. Sartre imagines spying on someone through a keyhole at the end of a corridor and hearing footsteps behind him, at which point he feels shame, based on the sudden awareness of himself as an object for another subject. Levinas appears to take this shame and turn it into responsibility, and as such makes ethics first philosophy. This corresponds to the idea of the Torah being created before the Universe.
I would take this idea of ethics as first philosophy and apply it to all the decisions we make about the nature of the world, so in a sense the world is created by the Torah, i.e. the ethical underpinnings of all reality. Metaphysics should never be based on expedience. If one adopts a position where one is aware that if a particular belief about the world is highly convenient for one, one should immediately doubt that belief and test it to see if other beliefs would be in the interests of the Other. Applying this to veganism, the statement that any particular organism is not sentient should arouse our suspicion, even if it’s based on the apparently rational premise that said organism does not have a central nervous system, or a sophisticated central nervous system, or whatever other excuse one might want to make to ignore the potential pain of others. Nor should we be ashamed of adopting a moral rather than an apparently rational stance in these situations.
In fact the beliefs expressed on this group go a lot further than simply confining sentience to vertebrates and denying it to, say, insects and bivalves. Some of them actually describe rodents primarily as, and this is my word, “vermin”. I’m not in fact conscious of their use of this word but they have definitely said “health hazards”. These would be rodents sharing living space with humans and who are not companion animals. Whereas I recognise that this situation does pose health risks for humans, I take exception to the objectifying language. The word is being used as a primary description of a sentient being, and moreover a sentient being who happens to be a close relative. Humans and rodents are in the same superorder, the Euarchontoglires or Supraprimates, who began to radiate between eighty-five and ninety-five million years ago in the Turonian or Coniacian Age. They’re more closely related to us than even-toed ungulates or fissipedal carnivores such as pigs or dogs, animals who generally tend to encourage sentiment in us. I’m not going to say there isn’t a problem cohabiting with certain rodents, but various measures need to be taken to prevent that from happening, which may of course not be fruitful, such as blocking holes to the outside, keeping undergrowth down and so forth. Likewise, the issue with parasites such as headlice or Oxyuris nematodes is that their arrival needs to be prevented, because we may like to imagine that they don’t suffer when we kill them but that’s just convenient denial. Likewise, farm animals suffer but the response to that is to avoid situations where they’re born in the first place. This is what we should be doing with animals other than our own: prevent their existence rather than have to confront them after they have come to be.
Having said all that, although the precipitating event was Dunning-Kruger and I object to the restriction of care to certain birds and mammals as opposed to all organisms, the stem of my reason for leaving is actually quite different and based on an event which didn’t even happen on the group. As a celebration of some kind a few weeks ago, I ordered a vegan takeaway pizza online. Unfortunately I misread the pictures on the website and ended up getting a pizza which was vegan, or at least said it was on the box, but had a pepperoni-like topping on it. I found this very off-putting because it resembled meat, and although I could intellectually accept that it was nothing of the kind, I strongly regretted buying it, or rather, wished I hadn’t made that mistake. There is a problem here. Meat, and other substitutes, such as for egg and cheese, are being made increasingly like their animal-based counterparts. Now I should explain my position here because it seems to be unusual. I always found meat disgusting but considered it my duty to eat it in order that the animals it came from existed in the first place, and one of my major shifts in perspective was that, as I mentioned above, it would’ve been better for them not to have been born, so I gave up meat as a transitional stage towards veganism, becoming vegan about a year and a half later. Consequently I find the recent plethora of meat mimicry personally nauseating. One of the problems I encountered with the group is that it seemed to consist largely of a stream of status updates about products found in supermarkets which were vegan, or at least plant-based and the distinction here is important for reasons I’ll go into, and often attempted to replace dairy or meat. This is not, to my mind, what veganism is about at all.
Just as a bit of a contrary note, I’m aware that there are people out there who like eating meat but who recognise veganism as a good thing, who might be encouraged to go vegan if they are able to access things which look, feel, taste and smell like meat or dairy, so there is a rôle for such products. If it’s a question of someone being vegan but eating this stuff or just not being vegan at all, then clearly this is what they should do. However, it should also be recognised that being plant-based doesn’t mean something is vegan. For instance, the recent meat-imitating burger manufactured using the hæm found in the roots of Leguminosæ was tested on animals before being released to the public. Moreover, the fact that an industrial process, packaging, transport and the like is involved in bringing these to the consumer at least runs the risk of introducing processes which are harmful to animals, not least the labour conditions of the human workers involved. This may of course not be the case, but the problem is that it introduces another headache because the responsible approach to these things would involve investigating all of this path, unless some kind of ethical certification scheme is involved, which would of course need to match one’s own values. It’s far simpler just to acquire some fruit and veg and make your own meals from them.
But is that feasible for everyone? What about food deserts, time poverty and ableism? We are given to understand that there are densely-populated areas where healthy food is unavailable, and this would of course mean that foraging had been ruled out although that is in any case likely to be adversely affected by pollution and not be sufficient to support the human and non-human population. However, the question then arises of whether plant-based composite and processed products such as these would even be available in such places. It seems more likely to me that one could get hold of a cauliflower and a tin of baked beans in such an area than a meat-free burger of the kind mentioned. Time poverty is another concern. It isn’t always possible for someone to find the time to prepare a meal and I can also see a rôle there. Finally, there’s the issue of disabilities, which means that it may make sense for someone to get their food in this form. Therefore there is an argument for such things.
What worries me, though, is that it seems to be a form of recuperation. Recuperation is the commodification of radical ideals by capitalism. The term “vegan” seems to be appropriated and turned into something which is highly profitable, and therefore unaffordable to many, and this gives people the idea that a plant-based diet is a luxury available only to the rich. This is not so, and various foods spring to mind such as rice, lentils, cabbage, potatoes, baked beans, bananas, peanuts . . . the list goes on and on. The existence and promotion of these products creates the illusion that it’s expensive to be vegan when it really isn’t.
Is this merely semantic drift though? Am I like one of those people who bemoan the use of the word “gay” to mean “homosexual” because they claim to have used it themselves to mean “happy” (but probably didn’t)? Words do change their meaning over time and nobody can control it. I would say not, because in fact the history of the word “vegan” where it means something close to pacifism rather than something associated with the star at the top of this post, starts in 1944 with the foundation of the British Vegan Society, and the definition it formulated itself has been in use since 1988. It’s almost a proprietary term, although I don’t think the Vegan Society claims any property rights over it. It has a fairly precise definition, and that definition includes but is not restricted to diet. It’s also a more politicised use, because if one temporarily disregards the exploitation of other species the word refers to a lifestyle where one cares about and fights against the exploitation of any human being and “promotes the development of” non-exploitative alternatives, for example to multinationals or companies using slave labour. I can’t overemphasise the fact that this includes all humans.
To conclude, then, I don’t like the drift towards veganism being merely about buying the right stuff in supermarkets. Some people may feel the need to do that or have a genuine requirement for such action, but that isn’t what veganism is about. Veganism is about fighting against exploitation and abuse wherever you see it, whether it’s in a slaughterhouse, a lab, a workplace or one’s own home. It has nothing to do with buying stuff, and to the extent that we are tempted to think it is, we’re distracted from capitalist exploitation and the need to defeat that.
A Box Of Chocolates 