Adam is a graduate student and instructor of philosophy, maintains the food blog H.E.A.L.T.H., and is a film review editor for the Journal of Critical Animal Studies. He emailed me in March of this year; he’d come to my blog wanting to hate it, but found himself appreciating some of my arguments, and hoped I would discuss veganism with him. I didn’t follow up on the email, but Adam got harder to ignore once he became one of my most challenging and intriguing commenters. I’m relieved when Adam agrees with me, because when he doesn’t, it’s not an easy fight. I once took an entry down in defeat after Adam thoroughly dismantled its core point. But hey… only once.
The problem with debating Adam is that he doesn’t rely on the standard animal rights or suffering reduction arguments, both of which I believe have fatal flaws. It’s not hard to poke holes in the arguments positing an (unattainable) logical perfection though “cruelty-free” consumption, but Adam doesn’t fall into that trap. He argues for veganism from a “perspective of care,” a concept that is harder to explain than other cases for veganism — drastically curtailing its mainstream appeal — but one I’m not sure I could debunk. If anyone could convince me that I’m wrong about veganism, it’s Adam.
Many of Adam’s answers could stand alone as individual essays, which is why Adam posted longer versions of some them as entries on his blog. (Be sure to visit it if you want to see more.) But the interview is worth reading if you’re curious to see the strongest formulation of vegan beliefs that I’ve seen.
You don’t agree with how mainstream veganism is often practiced. What do you believe is wrong with the standard consumer veganism that the most mainstream advocates promote?
The mainstream discourse and practice of veganism as an individual’s (abstention from) the consumption of animal products, I believe, is problematic in three interrelated ways: practically as an economic boycott, socially as a privileged consumerism, and philosophically as an equivocation with a vegetarian lifestyle.
Practically, positioning veganism as an economic boycott is a very limited tactic given the prevalence of global capitalism. Mainstream veganism only addresses the content (i.e. animal products) and not the form/structure (i.e. capitalism) of the global market that facilitates the exploitation of animals as commodities and obstructs people from transforming society. This is evident in several ways.
First, many mainstream vegans tend to regard the very culprits of animal exploitation as the remedy. Veganism is now sold to people in the form of products (sometimes explicitly labeled “vegan”) by the very corporations (i.e. Kraft, Dean, Con-Agra, Burger King, etc.) that exist and profit off the exploitation of animals.
Second, even if consumer vegans extend their boycott from the individual product consumed to the company who profits from it, without also challenging the present political-economic order of capitalism in which the interests of corporations persistently trump the interests of the general public, vegans remain complicit in the system that entitles businesses to exploit animal others (and human others as well). If consumer vegans were able to make significant dents in the national market, all this will be reversed by the rise of the affluent animal-eating class in the developing world to whom animals raised nationally will be exported, or—in “a race to the bottom”— to where the industry will be exported, displacing farmers and wildlife and externalizing production costs upon their communities.
Third, veganism as an economic boycott does not even universally empower people to practice a wholly vegetarian diet. Since wholesome food is presently regarded as a commodity rather than a socio-political right, large populations of disadvantaged people who have little to no financial and/or geographic access to vegetarian food and goods are thus are severely disadvantaged from living a secure vegetarian lifestyle. In sum, mainstream vegan discourse and activism’s focus on economic boycott is problematic, not because it is ineffective, but because it is insufficient. Without challenging the political, economic and social structure of society, veganism as a movement will make little progress reducing and abolishing animal exploitation. If vegans are sincere about creating a vegan society, veganism ought to be a social space to which people are generously provided access. Veganism will have limited success so long as it remains a luxury reserved for those with privilege, independent of human liberation movements.
Socially, what is so troublesome about understanding veganism as primarily an abstention from the consumption of animal products is that it facilitates a number of objectionable social practices: self-righteousness, identity politics, maliciousness, colonialism, classism, and privileged consumerism. These objections to veganism, however, are not universal to all vegan practices. That veganism has been a medium for such unfavorable sociality is due to veganism being understood as a single-issue to which all other social movements are subordinated, backgrounded, or separated. For instance, consumer vegans are often content calling their food or products “cruelty-free,” even as human animals are exploited and tormented during the production. While I do think most mainstream vegans have very good intentions, the effects of some of their actions and discourse alienate potential allies. There needs to be a shift away from individual consumption to social relations. A politics of alliance that addresses the social structures of oppression in which the degradation of human and animal others are interrelated offers a more promising dialogical medium for vegan advocacy.
Philosophically, when veganism is reduced to personal consumption or political action it becomes an instrument of morality rather than an ethics itself. If veganism is primarily a lifestyle that concerns nothing other than (an abstention from) consumption, then veganism is nothing more than a proper extension of or purification of vegetarianism: veganism is simply a vegetarian lifestyle. It logically follows that, if veganism is the moral baseline, that one’s consumption is the only qualification for being vegan, then one can very well be a speciesist vegan. This may sound peculiar because it is.
According to Ida Hammer, veganism is no “accident.” Veganism is a revolutionary praxis: “an anti-oppression framework that views the abolition of animal exploitation as part of a wider struggle for social justice” and “leads to a way of life (or lifestyle) that is based on noncooperation with, and divestment from, exploitation.” Hammer’s liberation and anti-oppression discourse is notably different from Francione and Singer’s discourse on suffering and equality. Francione fails to recognize how the principles and rights he advocates have not even stopped humans from being oppressed. For instance, Afro-Americans may have been emancipated from slavery, however a new institution was created, the prison-industrial-complex, to place them back into bondage. Hammer explains that “[t]he property status of other animals… is just one piece of the structure of human supremacy, just as human slavery was just one piece of the structure of White supremacy.”
The theoretical discrepancies and historical failure of these principles can be traversed by focusing on renouncing human privilege and the corresponding institution of speciesism. “[S]ince speciesism is an ideology of oppression that legitimates the existing social order, we need to see veganism as a counter-ideology of liberation.” Removing the “-ism” from veganism, risks alienating veganism—an anti-oppression framework—from being a vegan, a “consumptive pattern that is increasingly self-interested and individualized” in contemporary discourse. Actions may speak louder than words, but veganism cannot be reduced to one’s (consumptive) actions alone. The fetishization of consumption practices misplaces the potential of veganism as a transformative social and ecological justice modality.
How would you describe the form of veganism that you advocate?
The most fundamental difference between the veganism I advocate and that advocated by others is focus. Veganism as a purely vegetarian lifestyle typically focuses on consumption practices associated with the individual, abstention, and identity; however, I’m interested in veganism as a social practice, a mode of being with others, that is relational, affirmative, and transformative.
I understand veganism as a social modality, an affiliation and solidarity with others beyond (species) boundaries. Veganism is an affirmation of our curiosity about and especially our care for the lives of nonhuman animals. It is a relationship with nonhuman animals that enables us to interact with them as social beings, not merely biological, cultural, or symbolic objects. In other words, through veganism we relate to nonhuman animals first and foremost as someones and not somethings. Through it, we care for and are curious about who animals are in their particularity not what they can do for us. Veganism as a social relation with nonhuman animals requires that we are receptive of and respect their interests and points of views, even when these interests and views are inconvenient to our own.
Veganism is like a conversation: it requires we care and be willing to listen to others’ “voices.” Like a good conversation, a vegan social modality is incompatible with asserting oneself onto and over others. If their singularity and agency are to be recognized, affirmed, and cared for in conversation, we must act least violently toward them. The predominant (social) relationship to nonhuman animals as resources to exploit requires and facilitates an “emotional deafness” to their interests and perspectives. By killing nonhuman animals, we terminate the very possibility of conversation with them. By exploiting them, we end our care for how they feel in response to our actions as soon as caring becomes inconvenient to economic, biological, and cultural ends. By baring us to the responsibility of our care for animal others, veganism is the practice of intersectional and interspecies participatory justice, not personal purity (i.e. cruelty-free, body-as-a-temple), moral pragmatism (i.e. “the best choice for our health, the environment, and animals”), or political protest (i.e. economic boycott).
A point I want to make is that care for animals is not a modern addition to our care for human beings, but a byproduct of that care and something that preceeds moral reasoning. Marti Kheel excellently articulates the direction of my inquiry into the social, cultural, and psychological conditions for veganism and the consumption of animals:
[T]he arguments for why someone should be vegetarian may have little to do with the actual factors that influence people to adopt vegetarianism…the focus on developing compelling arguments for why it is morally correct to become vegetarian may be missing the mark.
Kheel’s shift of inquiry, I believe, is of the utmost importance. Before considering why eating animals is compelling, let’s consider why not eating them is: given how few self-identified vegans are raised in vegetarian (friendly) households, how and why are people persuaded into an alternative, less convenient and respected lifestyle?
I don’t believe it is because people simply choose to be vegan by a commitment to logical consistency. To choose to abstain from animal products and the exploitation of animals may be deliberate, but it presupposes that their relationships to animals are something they are already concerned about. Rather than “choosing” to be vegan, people come into veganism—as they would a conversation—through a transformation of their previous social relationship with an animal other. Animal others becomesomeone other than a resource. Thus, people come into vegan practice through an affirmation of the care and regard for animal others that preceded the event of deliberation.
Veganism as a social modality is not something people are normally subjected to by other people. On the contrary, it is something we identify with from within our particular relationship with animal others. Veganism only has the appearance of being a threatening foreign element to the self because we live within a society in which popular opinion is on the whole antagonistic to the idea of veganism. Nonetheless, veganism is a condition—our concern for the well-being of animal others and our suffering-with them—that invites us to inhabit it more maturely when we witness the disturbing social reality of human-animal relations (i.e. debeaking, veal crates, vivisection, etc). Often, people are so discomforted by the social reality of human-animal relations that they are overwhelmed by guilt. The sheer magnitude of the guilt they feel from transgressingtheir own modality of care may move them to anger directed at the culprit or situation and/or remorse for the animals. These affections are productive and transformative; they inspire personal as well as social change.
However, more than likely, people stagnate in their fixation on their self and privilege. They try to alleviate their guilt that calls them to responsibility by either completely disavowing (i.e. “I don’t care”) or reactively asserting themselves against their modality of care for animal others (i.e. “they are just animals,” “we are at the top of the food chain”). Through a superimposed foundation of rationalizations, people can secure themselves from being vulnerable to being transformed by others. I think Chloë Tayloris spot on when she writes that
the reason that only a fraction of those convinced [by arguments for vegetarianism] transform this conviction into a practice does not correspond to the moral superiority of some or the weakness of will of others, but with the sort of selves that the individuals in question wish to be.
It is simply not the case as Francione argues that people simply eat and exploit animals because of “pleasure, amusement, and convenience.” Eating and exploiting animals is permeated with cultural narratives that give people a sense of identity, meaning, and self-worth. And this is a large factor in why people feel so threatened when they are confronted by the disturbing reality of our relationship to animal others, by the inconsistency in their professed care for animal others and their actual social relationship to them. Not only is their personal “freedom” at stake because it is in conflict with their other values, but also their self-esteem because it becomes difficult to reconcile one’s belief in the goodness of their society and self with the reality of the terrible things done to animal others that they are complicit with.
People do not like to renounce all the privileges they have accumulated in society at the expense of (animal) others’ subordination; they do not like to feel insecure about who they are and how they live; they resist the responsibility they are called to by a world that challenges their self-certainty and goodness. This is why a disavowal of their care and/or rationalizations become necessary to reconcile this discrepancy in their values. Through focusing on one’s guilt rather than one’s care for the other—a pre-condition for the guilt—, the human self becomes the subject of veganism, not the animal other.
Certainly, the same criticism applies to many self-identified vegans—like consumption-based vegans—when they dogmatically dismiss moral consideration for non-“animal” others (i.e. insects, plants) or when they attempt to secure their theory and practice as consistent by confidently excusing or simplifying very complex moral issues (i.e. the removal or killing of insect “pests”, managing companion animals’ diet and sexuality). Whatever someone’s identity or consumption practices, when they rationalize their indifference toward the existence of others, disavows their own fallibility, and disallow their own personal and social transformation, they have privileged themselves or their ideology above particular animals. This is counter to veganism as I understand it.
You wrote, “Veganism, in other words, is fundamentally an affirmation of and care for the “voices” of animal others through “listening” (i.e. receptive curiosity and regard). Since careful listening takes place between particular responsive beings, not abstract or inanimate ones, killing animals irreversibly terminates conversations, silencing animal others.”
Since humans and other animals cannot interact in the same way that humans can interact with other humans — and other animals cannot integrate into human society — most vegan solutions for ending the exploitation and killing of animals (animal liberation) seem to require a human/animal separatism. How would your idea of veganism avoid that? How would we have an opportunity to communicate with animals in any way if we did not have pets and if we did not have animals on farms?
First of all, it’s not as if all human-animal social interactions are with domestic animals. Many modern humans take for granted or simply overlook their interactions or opportunities to interact with free animals in backyards, parks, abandoned lots, the outskirts of town, forest preserves, national parks, etc. (I highly recommend checking out the work of David Rothenberg who plays music with animal others). Do these relationships typically involve the same intimacy or reciprocity as in domestic human-animal relations? No, but then again, we have no entitlement to demand they speak for or to us. To expect so is an abuse of human privilege. My understanding of veganism does not make (reciprocal) human-animal communication a right. Nonetheless, we can have a social relationship with them (vs a merely biological or symbolic one) through accepting their indifference to, fear of, or curiosity towards us because we respect their perspective and preferences as other sentient beings. One could draw the analogy to the anthropologists’ who respect uncontacted peoples by recognizing their self-determination to choose to communicate with modern peoples or not. Silence can be a powerful way to communicate not only disinterest but also respect.
If it is our relationship to domestic animals after animal emancipation that you are curious about, I would say that non-exploitation does not require the extinction of domestic animal others. As an example, sometimes I imagine new agroecological communities that include nonhuman animal partners to whom we would respect to a similar degree as the inhabitants of animal sanctuaries: no forced work, no premature death, and free housing and healthcare. This would mean much fewer animals and much more diverse agroecological systems than today’s monocrop and industrial farms. As partners, animal others would contribute to the sustainable production of plants for consumption without synthetic fertilizer and toxic pesticides. Perhaps, too, curious people from the surrounding area can socialize with these animals and even volunteer in their care taking. These systems would thus require neither human nor nonhuman animal exploitation or separation/alienation. Is this possible? We’ll never know what is possible if we don’t imagine otherwise.
Why do you refer to animals that aren’t humans as “animal others”?
The short answer to your question is that the usage is a personal preference. From my background in philosophy, “the other” is a concept for that which is never known in its totality, and that which, because it is different, insists that we respond thoughtfully and generously to it lest we do it violence to secure a false sense of certainty in our selves.
The longer answer is that I don’t use this term to avoid offending chimpanzees, tuna, and stinkbugs. It’s a rhetorical device for reorienting human understanding of and social relations to animals other than H. sapiens sapiens. Rather than thoughtlessly accepting the dominant discourse on animal others as inconsequential, I deliberately change my rhetoric because I believe it does something: it reveals an alternative understanding of human-animal relations, and this in turn changes how we relate to animal others on a social and ecological level.
Addressing those animals who are (what David Abrams calls) more-than-human as “animal others,” on the contrary, neither assumes an opposition (i.e. humans vs animals) nor a human center (i.e. a human could be an animal other to a pig); animals are referenced in their singularity, not the generality of their species or their deviation from humanity. By discursively framing “the other” as the subject and “animal” as the adjective, I’m highlighting the historical relationship whereby humans have marginalized animals as others—that this designation is a cultural construction—and that the otherness of animals, their unique differences, ought to be taken into consideration.
I’ve seen you imply that it is not necessary to have a vegan diet to be vegan in your understanding of the term. Could you elaborate?
Yes, I have written that one could theoretically be a non-vegetarian who practices veganism, however, I wouldn’t put it in the same words you do. I’m not interested in the identity politics that surround the “vegan” label and do not want veganism to be reduced to a vegetarian diet. I don’t think of veganism as a noun to be identified with, purchased, consumed, and secured, but as a relationship with others that is never yet complete. By labeling goods, organizations, or oneself “vegan,” people become complacent that they are doing enough through their purchasing power and by addressing animal exploitation as a single-issue divorced from social and ecological reality.
Several months ago, I provocatively asked an audience, Could someone practice veganism without being vegetarian? I did so in order to challenge vegans’ complicity or even dogmatic adherence to a particular understanding of veganism. Since, I’ve started experimenting with creating a more productive tension between veganism and vegetarianism. This experiment began as a result of two other aspects of mainstream veganism I felt uncomfortable with.
First, after reading The Vegan Ideal, I became dissatisfied by people who identified as “vegan” who were not allies in ending the institution of speciesism or even advocating for animal rights. The original meaning of veganism has been lost and emptied of all its historical and revolutionary significance as vegan is increasingly appropriated by yuppies and youth subcultures. Second, as I became more cognizant of food allergies and abelism, I was less confident that there was an optimal diet universal to all human bodies. Given that bodies vary in their ability to digest certain foods, it would be pretty shitty for one to judge someone for eating animal products if they were, say, “digestively disabled.” I say all this while believing that the great majority of humans can flourish or at least maintain satisfactory health on a fully vegetarian diet. My objective is simply to not see difference (where it truly exists) as a moral failure or exception to “the vegan ideal.” One can theoretically inhabit veganism without being able to be vegetarian.
One of my major concerns—especially after reading your blog—is that people simply give up on veganism because vegetarianism didn’t work for them for (presumably) reasons beyond their control. The fallacy is that if there is something wrong with vegetarianism (i.e. that it cannot be universalized to all human bodies, cultures, and ecologies), then the animal etiquette of veganism must be wrong as well. Thus, ex-vegans rationalize speciesism, adopting often an entirely new worldview and an instrumental, biological relationship to animal others. Chloë Taylor describes this phenomenon well:
It is not the case that we first determine that we are superior to non-human animals and then we conclude that we have the moral license to eat them. Rather, it is through our very eating of other animals that we constitute our superiority… Human superiority is not a fact from which the permissibility of our practices is deduced; on the contrary, human superiority is something which we construct through our instrumentalization of other species.
Taylor’s assertion is not mere philosophical drivel. Just last year, research psychologistsSteve Loughan and others found evidence that eating animals
appears to both narrow the breadth of moral consideration (fewer animals deserve it) and lessen the extent of moral concern (cows deserve less moral consideration)… eating meat might lead people to withdraw moral concern from animals, which they then rationalize via a perceived reduction in animals’ capacity to suffer.
Jonathon Haidt and other’s work in the field of moral psychology provides some explanation for Taylor and Loughan’s conclusions. They argue moral reasoning is most often post-hoc, after-the-fact. In other words, people assign reasons to their (socialized and habitualized) moral intuitions in an attempt to understand and defend their feelings and actions as reasonable. People like to feel as if they are in control of themselves, like they act for good reason (especially in modern “enlightened” societies), but the reality is that people are normally rationalizing the feeling and social structure that they find themselves “thrown” into by circumstances outside of their control.
When people find themselves in a circumstance where applying their vegan etiquette by consuming a strict vegetarian diet isn’t an option for their physiological well-being, or if they find themselves in an embarrassing slip-up (i.e. eating and taking pleasure in a burger on a drunken dare), it is disheartening that they throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is, they are so quick to rationalize their behavior in order to secure their self-esteem in a unified sense of self consistent with their practices. They lose focus on the animal other and the open social relationship they have to them, and withdraw back into self-interest. Perhaps this is something out of people’s control. Nonetheless, what is so sad is that to alleviate their guilt of transgressing their values, they abandon said values rather than simply forgiving themselves for being imperfect in an imperfect world.
Although you’ve exposed the deconstruction of vegan logic and critiqued its failure to come to terms with its inability to be at all times consistent in a violent world, many so-called “ex-vegans,” likewise, seem to be unable to deal with the irreconcilable imperfection with themselves and their former vegan worldview. Perhaps they feel more consistent in supporting “humane” animal agribusiness and DIY slaughter; however, this sense of consistency comes at the expense of foreclosing one’s previous social sympathy for animal others. Perceiving oneself as failing the all-or-nothing “vegan ideal,” one’s moral commitment to animal others, is like a second trauma—the first perhaps being a video that catalyzed their coming into veganism. One’s existence becomes a wound. One is compelled to sew it up, to not be tormented by the specter of care. However, one does so in bad faith.
One thing you wrote in your post, “Why Ex-Vegans Eat More Meat than They Must,” really demonstrates this moment of bad faith and validated my effort to re-understand veganism’s relationship to vegetarianism:
[I]t isn’t easy to recalibrate your internal guilt alarm to permit some animal products but then go off whenever you exceed a limit determined to be the minimal amount needed for health. Few ex-vegans are willing to venture back into eating animal products with guilt still being an issue, so they find a way to lose the guilt entirely… [my emphasis]
By privileging the feeling of guilt for being a hypocrite over empowering people to exercise their care for oneself and animal others as participants in our social and agroecological communities, vegans set themselves and others up for abandoning their values and the veganism movement entirely so that they can live a life without self-contempt. Creating a gap in meaning between vegetarianism and veganism, consumption and social practice, has enabled an articulation of veganism in which people who are active and sincere anti-speciesists are accepted in their imperfection—a state that no self-identified vegan has or will probably ever escape to some degree.
Let me be very clear: I’m not saying vegetariaism is trivial, only that it is inessential. Far from being trivial, vegetarianism is an invaluable performance, especially as a critical praxis. If morality is post-hoc, then a diet free of the consumption of animal bodies, their labor, their products, and products tested on them is less likely to facilitate our rationalization of their exploitation. Privileging vegetarian consumption over animal-based consumption enables the positive re-construction of our world away from one in which speciesism is institutionalized. Therefore, a vegan modality motivates vegetarian practice and vegetarian practice facilitates a maturer veganism. So I am neither condemning and othering people with digestive “disabilities,” nor am I saying vegetarian consumption is impractical or supererogatory.
Is veganism a moral obligation?
Veganism isn’t a moral obligation because of some transcendental principle like God or reason. But then again, neither are human rights and prohibitions against cannibalism. Veganism is not the application of a principle of obligation, but the phenomenon of obligation from being addressed by the animal other to respond in return as a social being. I’m not saying that a pig or salmon speak to us or voice themselves as a human might, but that we experience the phenomenon of being addressed, being called to ourselves as social and ethical beings, by recognizing the other’s different perspective, interests, and shared vulnerability. This phenomenon is with us from infancy. Just observe a child’s expression of wonder while watching the expressions of other species. It’s similar to their gaze into the face of a human. Children are not born bifurcating the moral considerability between humans and all other animals. Just recently, psychologists Patricia Herrmann and others found that anthropocentrism is a perspective acquired around the age of five, not something innate.
The veganism I advocate fits well with Ralph Acampora’s articulation of ethics as aphenomenon of the body’s existence as an ecologically and socially interrelational being in contrast to popular thought that ethics is the product of transcendental principles of pure reason or codes intersubjectively consented to. Reason may be valuable in that it exposes latent prejudices and inconsistencies in how one treats others, but only by presupposing our existence as social, caring, vulnerable, and potentially violent bodies. From an ethical paradigm of the interrelational lived body, the “burden of proof” is not placed upon veganism as an extension of ethics, but rather the “ethical isolationism or contraction” of a an ethics based upon self-interest. For example, reflect upon the times when reason has been used not as a preventative measure against violence and prejudice, but as an instrument against our sociality with and care for others (e.g. “just war,” “ethnic cleansing,” “honor killings,” vivisection etc). It is through manufacturing a code and imposing it upon the world that we can justify acting violently toward others because of the class we place them into. Arguments for fending off veganism and vegetarianism are usually no more than an elaborate game of logic to preserve one’s power and privilege over others by making violence reasonable. They defy our underlying capacity to recognize others as social beings.
On the momentous importance of recognizing and embracing our shared vulnerability, watch Brene Brown’s powerful TED presentation on “The Power of Vulnerability”.
In a comment discussion you had with Royce Drake, Royce said, “I’m just at a moment where I don’t care much for this this ever-expanding slave morality.” Do you think veganism, particularly your take on veganism, fits into Nietzsche’s idea of slave morality?
No, I don’t think so. My understanding of veganism is not founded on a “morality of good and evil,” not the kind Nietzsche critiques anyway. I’m not appealing to any metaphysical principle or value such as God, the authority of pure Reason, the “good” society or person, or “best” consequences.
I do, however, think that mainstream veganism could be argued to be founded upon a “slave morality,” if by that, you mean the metaphysical values of the Enlightenment (and modern democracy): rationalism, egalitarianism, individualism, universalism, progress, autonomy, non-prejudice, etc. I think Erim Bilgim brilliantly describes (mainstream) veganism:
Veganism presents itself as a rebellious movement, but in reality it doesn’t go against the core values of the system at all. It takes the system’s existing values, enlarges the sphere these values apply to, and then blames society for not consistently abiding by its own rules… Veganism defends these values, in fact wishes to enforce these to an even greater extent on the population, and then it goes and calls itself rebellious… they become model citizens. But then they look around and see that the very society whose values they loyally adopted don’t actually abide by those values themselves
I think his critique is limited to consumer vegans, not radical practitioners of veganism like myself, Hammer, Torres, and many others who are critical of the “civilizing mission” of neoliberalism and globalization. Likewise, I think his astute description of some self-identified vegans using the label and rhetoric of “compassion” to mask their privilege and give them an ego-boosting sense of superiority over others, doesn’t apply to those inhabiting a veganism of care and forgiveness.
I also find his claim that veganism is somehow the next logical step in “civilization” is absurd given the power of global capitalism, the animal industrial complex, the existential investment in human supremacy, and developments in biotechology (i.e. cloning, new feeds, non-sentient animals, in-vitro flesh). As I said, veganism will not prevail until the present social, political, economic, and existential paradigms are overturned.
When you first emailed me, you mentioned an interest in Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, which is a book that was influential on my thinking after I quit veganism. To me the book provides a good case for skepticism toward ideological thinking, by framing ideology as a psychological armor against death and the reality of our powerlessness. In my interpretation of Becker’s main point, the stated intention of a given ideology is not actually its main purpose; the real goal of a firmly entrenched belief that becomes an important part of who we claim to be is to build our identities and give our lives an illusion of meaning.
Looking at beliefs that way made it easier for me to discard the ones that weren’t doing anything for me or others. If a belief is essentially a mirage to give my life meaning and compel me onward, I might as well have beliefs that make my life enjoyable. Veganism, then, certainly does not qualify as a belief I would want to take on again, since it made my life worse and doesn’t seem to help anything else. However, you believe Becker’s arguments could work for veganism. How so?
I was first introduced to Becker’s work in 2007 as I was researching a paper on animal ethics. While researching moral psychology, I stumbled upon a reference to a publication by Jamie L. Goldenberg and others called “I Am Not an Animal: Mortality Salience, Disgust, and the Denial of Human Creatureliness” (PDF). In the article, two studies on humans’ perceived relationship to animal others were performed and interpreted through the lens of Terror Management Theory, a theory in personality psychology based off Becker’s ideas. Their conclusion from the data collected and numerous similar studies was that humans distance themselves from animal others in order to disavow their own animality and mortality.
After reading many TMT publications, I was compelled to read their inspiration: The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil. For those of you have never heard of Becker until now, basically he argues that people have a need for self-esteem because they are symbolic animals who are conscious of the inevitability of their own deaths. Confronted with death, humans like other animals are powerless. Death—the absolute limit of our existence—paradoxically confronts us with (what seems to be) the utter meaninglessness of our existences and projects, but is also what compels us to find and create meaning for existential security.
Although I’ve become increasingly critical of the universality of Becker’s meta-narrative, I still believe—as I did four years ago—that it explains our cultural commitment to specieisism, which is sustained by human-animal dualism, human exceptionalism, and human supremacy. The question of the animal lingers throughout Becker’s later works, particularly the will to transcend the finitude and vulnerability we share with animal others. Becker writes that
An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn’t come off second-best… ‘civilized’ society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal.
In his last work, Escape from Evil, the human-animal distinction becomes more salient and threatening. The thesis of this book is that
Men cause evil by wanting to heroically to triumph over it, because man is a frightened animal who tries to triumph, an animal who will not admit his own insignificance.
I interpret Becker cautioning us against not only false moralities, but also human beings’ capacity for evil arising from their very humanity—their existential angst, their will to power, their categorization and ranking of the world. We ought to guard ourselves against not the finitude we share with animal others, but the compulsion to insist that “we” are more significant/meaningful than those who are different, to receive esteem primarily by placing oneself above others. Where is this practiced more perpetually, insistently, and confidently than the dominant discourse on animal others? The lesson I draw form Becker’s work affirms a commitment to call into question speciesism and human narcissism for the sake of both human and animal others.
Clearly, factors such as evolutionary biology (i.e. taste), history (i.e. tradition), culture (i.e. meanings), society (i.e. identity), psychology (i.e. habit), physiology (i.e. nutrition), media (i.e. subliminal persuasion), political economics (i.e. subsidies), and geography (i.e. accessibility) all play a role in whether someone eats animals. I really want to emphasize the existential significance of eating animals to compensate for this factor that has been grossly overlooked by animal advocates and their critics.
Maybe it is because I read Denial of Death not long after leaving veganism, but to me it seems like vegans who are most blatantly denying death. Death taints meat, dairy, eggs, leather and wool - all the things that vegans shun - in a way that it does not taint vegan foods. Vegans like to talk about the “rotting corpses” that meat eaters eat. Meat eaters cause death and they consume death, and they are rewarded with death in the form of cancer and heart attacks. Veganism is an attempt to not cause death — is this not also a denial of death?
You might be right that meat eaters deny their animality in some sense by eating meat, but veganism denies animality in another way. Other animals eat each other because they don’t have a conscience, vegans might say, but humans are above all that. We are special. We have morality. Unlike animals, we have loftier considerations than survival and pleasure — and this means we should not eat animals even if animals eat animals, and even if we want to.
Meat eaters may deny death by separating themselves from animals by killing them, and temporarily feeling like it is animals who die and not rational, powerful humans. But the vegan approach seems like a denial of death in another form. For meat eaters, animals are different and expendable. For vegans, animals are like us and we can save them. If other animals don’t have to die, then maybe we can feel like we don’t have to either.
Some vegans definitely “deny death,” yes. Yet, because people eat vegetarian for so many reasons, it’s careless to generalize. For the most part, this representation of vegetarians and animal rights activists as alienated bourgeoisie city-dweller with a false ecological consciousness is nothing more than a popular motif in the arsenal of ad hominems romantic thinkers use to dismiss the moral arguments of others.
Many “ethical vegans” seem to welcome death with an open mouth, gorging themselves on mock meats with outrageous sodium levels and vegan cupcakes loaded with sugar and saturated fat. When most “ethical vegans” talk about eating rotting corpses, chicken periods, mammary excretions, and pus in milk, they do so rhetorically. I know, because I used to be one of the assholes who said these things. This rhetoric is meant to persuade people where they are most vulnerable: disgust. When vegans sound like they are disgusted by death because of the discourse they deploy, it is important to distinguish their intent from their attitude.
Empirical research carried out by Daniel Fessler and others provides support for the counter-thesis that vegetarianism is a moral response, not merely a reaction of disgust—an emotion linked with death denial. In fact, they found that “those individuals consuming the most meat were more disgust sensitive, both overall and in the food domain, than those individuals consuming the least meat.” The motivation behind many if not most self-identified vegans, I believe, is not a mere matter of guarding themselves from the question of the meaning(lessness) of their existence that their death confronts them with. As I’ve mentioned before, people come into veganism through sympathy or empathy with animal others. It would be sloppy to reduce caring for the lives of others to one’s attempt to self-interestedly fend off death.
Further, that vegans wish to avoid killing animals is not equivalent to vegans wishing to save animals from death. The moral wrong is not that animals die, but that moral agents cause their death unjustifiably. The difference between avoiding killing animals and saving them can also be understood as the difference between advocating negative duties to animals (i.e. animals have the right not to be killed by moral agents unjustly) and positive ones (i.e. moral agents ought to protect animals from death as long as possible with minimal pain).
Vegans admit that veganism is imperfect, and that we can’t really follow the ethics to where they want to take us — being truly anti-speciesist and not causing animal death and suffering. What is the point of having an ethics that we can’t actually follow?
Your counter argument is that “veganism” is idealistic— an ideal that cannot be achieved in a world that operates on death and violence—and thus is impractical and meaninglessness. However, this can equally be said of any ethics based upon principles and values, including rights. The question of who is human and what rights are given priority are questions that have no closure. For instance, rights like “freedom” and “equality” are ideals that will always be in some level of conflict, yet we don’t give up on the ideal of either.
In any case, I don’t believe there is much value in perfection. Ethics presupposes our mortality, our finitude and fallibility. An ethics that seeks perfection becomes totalitarian, a slave to its own logic, in which the moral agent no longer is a social being, but an instrument of the system it has created. When I advocate veganism, I’m advocating it as recognition of a phenomenon, not a prescription of a principle. That is, veganism is recognition of the human condition of finitude, fallibility, and meagerness in a universe shared by other finite, fallible, and meager beings. As I wrote before, veganism as a social existence with animal others is not a foreign attitude. Rather, it is a mode we are “thrown into” when we become subjected to our own curiosity and compassion for other mortal creatures. Recognizing veganism as such holds us responsible to animal others’ interests, and holds us accountable for closing off this mode for relating to animal others as “killable” instruments for some so-called higher-value (i.e. profits, “life,” “humanity”). I’ve already described how veganism as a social attitude motivates and is facilitated by vegetarian consumption. They are the means and the end of a non-exclusive social responsibility.
When I see your critiques of veganism as it is typically practiced and your own reasons for being vegan, I think, “That’s the best articulation of vegan values that I’ve seen.” Yet I still fail to be convinced that it is worth reducing the quality of my life in order to possibly extend animal lives, to exploit animals less, and to be able to call myself an anti-speciesist, and I also don’t think this vision — though well worded and poetic — does much if any actual good for the world. To me it is a beautiful abstraction that is not worth the downsides to my reality that comes with attempting to follow it. Why should I accept your vision and make the one life I have to live worse in order to say that I am against speciesism?
First of all, veganism has nothing to do with “extending life” (i.e. a biological, not a social duty) or calling oneself an anti-speciesist (i.e. an identity). Veganism is about entering into less violent and more dialogical relationships with other beings. Veganism is social responsibility.
Second, although my description of veganism is abstract in form, in practice, the reasons we assign to violence are the abstractions. Animal others are exploited under the justification that they belong to a separate race we’ve created and called “animals,” and they are institutionally exploited for the good of something we call “civilization” and the “market” for something called “capital.” Veganism is the immanent, not the abstract, relationship we have to animal others as social beings.
Third, to ask whether non-compliance with the oppression of others “is worth reducing the quality of my life” assumes that no one else is valuable except in their utility to one’s self. It is a narcissistic reasoning most popular amongst males and the affluent who have the most privilege to lose, or rather, share with others. Is this not how white middle-class males a couple of centuries reasoned against extending equal rights to blacks, women, and other minorities? Is this not exactly the argument affluent U.S. Americans use against reducing anthropogenic GHGs despite the devastation global climate disruption will have on communities across the world?
I think it is crucial to highlight that the very logic that is being used here that puts the “burden of moral proof” on veganism to make an argument against domination and violence, is the very logic that held (and holds) back recognizing the equality of the colonized, laborers, women, and other Others. For this reason, your reasoning may in fact validate veganism as a project, because veganism holds us responsible for caring for others. By resisting veganism, one is on the way to resisting other social justice causes which threaten one’s privilege and convenience as well.
Finally, even if we were to follow your logic, I’d challenge you on the fact that somehow veganism would significantly reduce your quality of life, making your life worse. As I said before, it is possible to remain socially and politically committed to veganism without the guilt you might otherwise derive from eating animal others (so long as it is necessary for your physiological well-being).
Why should people become vegan despite the ineffectiveness of becoming vegan on an individual level?
A TED speaker put my thoughts on this matter very well. To paraphrase this speaker, it’s not that I’m optimistic about the future, but that I must do something (see Courtney Martin’s talk on “Reinventing Feminism”). I am inspired by another TED speaker, Robert Sapolsky, who asserts that what makes us most human is “to take the impossibility of something to be the very proof that it must be possible and must become a moral imperative. The harder it is to do that, the more important it is.”
Let me address a couple thing you seem to misunderstand about veganism, at least as I am advocating it. First, if everyone thought this way—“poor me, what am I ever going to do, I am one person”—, no social movement would ever begin and the world would be a much more awful place. I’m reminded of Cypher from the Matrix who is conscious of reality, but a reality that is so insurmountable that he becomes complicit with oppression for the comfort of ignorance.
Second, it’s naive to critique veganism as if it were not a social movement, but a matter of independent lifestyle activism, especially given my continual critique of consumption-based veganism. Veganism demands institutional change, not merely personal change. The movement is a collective political force organized to raise consciousness and oppose exploitation through campaigns and policies. It’s not comparable to changing one’s light bulbs or inflating one’s car tire.
Third, veganism as interspecies and intersectional social justice is not just about animal others; it is also in support of ecological and global justice. That the animal industrial complex is amongst the worst culprits of global ecological injustices is just one example of the intersections of animal exploitation and the exploitation and destruction of fellow humans and biocultural diversity. The best example I know of the intersectional veganism that I advocate in action is The Food Empowerment Project, which addresses interspecies, environmental, workplace, and food (access) justice all together. I hope the FEP, signals a new wave of veganism that further inculcates veganism into social justice, in which human rights and animal rights meet in ever more powerful ways.
A project a friend and I are working on now is envisioning institutions where human and animal other well-being can be cultivated simultaneously in what we call “trans-species cooperative living.” Research has shown the therapeutic effect contact with animal others can have on autistic, elderly, and imprisoned people. Imagine a system of restorative justice where criminals cared for domestic animals and learned a valuable skill for after release such as cultivating plants instead of picking up street litter and being locked up in cages like animals. Imagine children playing outside and cultivating the virtue of care as part of the school curriculum. Restoring our relationships with other species is not irrelevant to restoring our relationships and caring for humans. One of the themes in Philip K. Dick’s classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is precisely this point: our empathy, care, and relationship to animals is what makes us “human.”
It’s my hope that my re-articulation of veganism will attract more people from other social movements to veganism and attract more self-identified vegans toward social and ecological justice work. By working together, activists motivated by care and social responsibility will discover the relevancy and value of each other’s work in-and-of-itself and also in its support of their own causes. The greater solidarity these interrelated social justice movements have, the greater the numbers and creativity we will have in dismantling institutionalized oppression. I hope transforming the definition can transform vegans, their potential allies, and the precarious world we all must share.
