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hebinekohimeOK, this post is all over the place: I'm trying to refine a few theory-twinges of late, feel free to criticize.
It seems to me that something in human nature doesn't jibe with human culture. And that something is a growing, unconscious awareness of our own herbivory.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part. However, I'm really starting to doubt the whole "overcoming our savage natures by becoming vegetarian" narrative that has traditionally defined us ethical veggies. You know... we're more advanced, we're spiritually enlightened, ascetic, intellectually developed, all that crap. I can't claim that I ever really felt that way. Because it seems to me that my savage nature... is vegan.
When we take off the layer of conditioning we have about nonhuman animals, we start to question thoughts like "it's my right to eat animal products". Or "animals have a better life as our property anyway." Or "animals aren't like us, so they don't really have a say". We question, because like characters in a rubber-reality movie, we know something is a little too perfect, a little too clean about those justifications. We stop and think "is this really necessary?". Because underneath the hierarchal, competitive premises we've built up through our history, we're designed to stop and think about how our actions affect another. Evolutionary biologists call it a theory of mind; laymen call it empathy. We are wired to understand animal feelings, smart enough to know that we're all animals, and compassionate enough to have qualms about killing.
It's not clear to me that morality, the human social construct, enters into the choice to be vegan. If anything, "morality" as we understand it hurts animals by placing the inventors of morality, humans, at the center and non-humans on the outside, recipients of our charity. It's not charity not to swing your fist at someone. But our culture has made not eating an animal into an act of charity: a supra-ordinary display of morality, rather than the challenge to morality it actually is. We vegans upset the apple cart. We deface temples, set bombs under pyramids.
And we create existential unease at the same time as we ease consciences. Eating the Other resolves the tension between multiplicities, puts subject and object in their proper place, and (in a profoundly ritual sense) gives humans a role to play in the drama of life and death. If we are not the subject that eats the object -- if we do not have a fixed role in our conception of Nature -- then what are we? I think it is for this reason that so many environmentalists eat animals. The alternative is the uncertainty of being something never before seen on planet Earth: the ethical vegan.
It seems to me that something in human nature doesn't jibe with human culture. And that something is a growing, unconscious awareness of our own herbivory.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part. However, I'm really starting to doubt the whole "overcoming our savage natures by becoming vegetarian" narrative that has traditionally defined us ethical veggies. You know... we're more advanced, we're spiritually enlightened, ascetic, intellectually developed, all that crap. I can't claim that I ever really felt that way. Because it seems to me that my savage nature... is vegan.
When we take off the layer of conditioning we have about nonhuman animals, we start to question thoughts like "it's my right to eat animal products". Or "animals have a better life as our property anyway." Or "animals aren't like us, so they don't really have a say". We question, because like characters in a rubber-reality movie, we know something is a little too perfect, a little too clean about those justifications. We stop and think "is this really necessary?". Because underneath the hierarchal, competitive premises we've built up through our history, we're designed to stop and think about how our actions affect another. Evolutionary biologists call it a theory of mind; laymen call it empathy. We are wired to understand animal feelings, smart enough to know that we're all animals, and compassionate enough to have qualms about killing.
It's not clear to me that morality, the human social construct, enters into the choice to be vegan. If anything, "morality" as we understand it hurts animals by placing the inventors of morality, humans, at the center and non-humans on the outside, recipients of our charity. It's not charity not to swing your fist at someone. But our culture has made not eating an animal into an act of charity: a supra-ordinary display of morality, rather than the challenge to morality it actually is. We vegans upset the apple cart. We deface temples, set bombs under pyramids.
And we create existential unease at the same time as we ease consciences. Eating the Other resolves the tension between multiplicities, puts subject and object in their proper place, and (in a profoundly ritual sense) gives humans a role to play in the drama of life and death. If we are not the subject that eats the object -- if we do not have a fixed role in our conception of Nature -- then what are we? I think it is for this reason that so many environmentalists eat animals. The alternative is the uncertainty of being something never before seen on planet Earth: the ethical vegan.
