MEAT, VEGANISM AND THE WAY OF ALL THINGS

Life is not life

And death is not death. 

The way makes no such distinctions. 

Things are not as they appear;

Yet neither are they otherwise. 

So you should only cease to cherish your opinions. 

Take a look around the world in some places today and you will find an increasing desire for veganism. This is often among those best described, in the ideological, partisan West, at least, as those with a bee in their bonnet. They will talk about the horrors of factory farming, the pollution caused by farming that takes place on an industrial scale, the fact that propagating meat on such a large scale is actually a misuse of the land and the terrible conditions the animals are often kept in and, in very many of such things that they say, they will actually have a point. I am not here to tell anyone that vegans have got it all wrong or that what they say bears no resemblance to what goes on in the world. What vegans have done is come to the conclusion that industrial meat production [and, by extension, any meat-eating or farmed products such as eggs or milk and cheese] is so bad that they refuse to take part in it and so they stop eating meat, regarding its production as a cruel and intolerable process. Some, if not many of them, will then go on to tell everyone they meet that if they are meat eaters they are “violent murderers” as I was myself told today upon opening my social media and reading it through bleary eyes. This may sound incontrovertible in the ears of some convinced vegan but I received it as one-eyed hysteria which, to say the least, condensed the issues into a very convenient rhetorical accusation. I replied back to my accuser, as I often do, by pointing out that their comfortable Western life is almost certainly supported and maintained by many such “violent murderers” and left it at that. I did this because the fact is that, even if you don’t eat meat yourself, the majority of people you know probably do and most of the people who are keeping you alive and enabling you to go about your daily life in the relative comfort of Western civilisation likely are meat eaters too. And is it just about meat? I haven’t done a great deal of research into it, but I’m pretty sure a lot of medicines come from animals too. Are vegans against medicine we get through animals or animal experimentation? Perhaps they are and, if so, they are allowed to be. Then it occurs to me that there are “animal products”, a vague and probably surprising category of things that ultimately derive from animals and turn up in the strangest of places. Let’s round all this up by saying that human beings have for millennia seen animals as things they can use to further their own outcomes and serve their purposes. Have they been wrong to do this? By what measure?

Of course, I am going to tell you that there is no measure even as I recognise that human beings are those who measure everything as a habit they cannot get out of. Yet one thing I did look into thinking about the issue of veganism was sentience in plants and this, it seems, is not so far-fetched an idea as it might once have been. Plants, no one will deny, are certainly alive and, for me at least, this is already enough to take such organisms seriously. What’s more, plants, as we know, are the basis of ALL life on earth. No plants, no animals: its that simple. Yet even as far back as 1973 researchers were writing books which argued that plants can recognise things, predict things and even communicate [The Secret Life of Plants by Tompkins and Bird]. In short, they act in response to their surroundings in a way we would call sentience and perhaps even consciousness. Subsequent research, a growing field of science, has suggested plants can hear, smell, make decisions, have memories, cognition and the ability to learn, feel stress and pain and have social lives. Is this surprising in something which no one would deny is alive? I don’t think it should be. Being alive, being an animate object, surely implies certain faculties or abilities even carried out in ways other than the ways in which we carry them out. One vegan I spoke to recently laughed off sentience in plants because “they don’t have a brain or a nervous system”. This person apparently believed that any sentience or consciousness must, as a rule, be like ours. Thus, they fell into exactly the anthropomorphic trap which honours that which is tolerably like a human being but regards everything else as alien and different - and so as something we can treat differently. This, I think, is not a very compassionate or understanding way to proceed. Yes, we will always be able to sympathise most with forms of life we can see as most like us but we should never turn this into a prejudice. Life is not constrained to be like us and there is no reason to think that sentience or even consciousness must, a priori, exist only in things like us. It should not at all be surprising if it turns out plants have sentience or consciousness too. After all, human beings have even speculated on machine consciousness. Next to that, plants being more than green things which just grow should not be so controversial.

But for some vegans, at least, it is controversial for they have planted their vegan flag on the notion that meat-eating is cruel and that meat eaters are “violent murderers”. Deciding that killing something sentient for food is horrific is all well and good but what happens when it turns out your carrot or potato or rice was once sentient too? Are such vegans now going to include themselves in the “violent murderer” category? Are they going to refuse to eat plants too and so commit suicide because they now refuse to eat at all? If my brief and pungent interactions with vegans are any measure [and they probably aren’t] then the answer is “no”. They are, like Neo in The Matrix, going to try and dodge the plant sentience bullet or make excuses for themselves. Yet such people kill and eat things that were once alive every bit as much as any meat eater does. Even they do not deny plants were once alive so harvesting and eating them must be akin to killing them. Seeing plants in the light of the developing science of how plants exist [as sentient, social organisms] only makes things worse for exactly those vegans who have decided that to eat a sentient thing is a moral crime of the worst kind. For now they are doing exactly the same thing. No doubt some such people will complain that an apple is not the same as a pig and, superficially, it may not appear to be. But convenient superficiality is no way to proceed here. We should be dealing in reality rather than in that which is rhetorically convenient. If plants are sentient or conscious, if they feel stress or pain, if they react to attackers as it has been suggested in peer-reviewed scientific literature that they do, then everyone, even the vegans, need to acknowledge this.

As I have already suggested, I do not find any of the emerging science about plants very surprising. If things are alive that surely makes a difference compared to if they are dead. [Here, in this argument at least, I set aside the notion that alive/dead is entirely a human distinction that the universe itself does not make. There are ways to look at life and death which don’t make the distinctions it is customary for us to.] We would all of us say that alive things do not act or operate or have the same functionality as dead things and so we would also all of us see alive things as in some sense different to dead things. Animate objects are not the same as inanimate objects. But we must always be careful about these distinctions for they are always contextual distinctions rather than absolute distinctions. They are also not always distinctions we consistently adhere to. Has a vegan ever killed a fly, a wasp or a spider, I wonder? I’ve never personally known a vegan but I would find it hard to believe they had not. Perhaps some vegans have even killed lots of such insects. Do vegans use pesticides, I wonder? Oh, and by the way, who decided that the things pesticides kill are “pests” exactly? From what mentality is such a designation coming? Very quickly, thinking in such ways, we come to realise that even vegans must surely be culpable for many deaths. Do insect deaths count less? Is there some table of vegan virtue to which I can refer which tells me which deaths are a death too far and which deaths are acceptable collateral damage? Death, it may be observed, is a staple of life. It is a natural occurrence. And, what’s more, it is no less the case that one animal may kill another, either deliberately or as a consequence of some other action. It seems to me, then, that if we value life we must value all life. I would find it very hard to start picking and choosing between which lives have more value and which lives have less. Life, in a statement I hope no one will dispute, is actually one big continuum anyway. Life depends on life for it all survives together in symbiosis. Even where it depends on one life taking another life.

In my discussions with vegans, however, it has been suggested to me that comparing human life with other life is an error. Human beings, I’m told, are moral and all these other forms of life are not. They are just performing various virtually autonomic functions. They don’t know any better, in effect. So if I were to compare a lion killing an antelope with a human killing a pig I might be mocked, as I have been, because to such people this is a stupid comparison. But is it? The lion’s ways seem just as unquestioned to it as any human being’s. Might we imagine that all lions are the same? Might not some have different habits or tastes to others? Is a hunger pang in one species not the same as a hunger pang in another? All life needs to feed on a source of energy to survive. In one way of viewing the entire universe all it is is the motion and transformation of forms of energy anyway. From this viewpoint, human distinctions are as nothing. All is just energy transference and transformation. That is all we and the lion are: energy. That is all the antelope and the pig are: energy. But the vegans will insist that, actually, our invented morals are the important thing here. I find this somewhat exceptionalist, as if the moral centre of the universe resided precisely somewhere in the human psyche. Why, uniquely in the universe, is it somehow the case that we humans have been blessed [and uniquely so!] with such moral clarity of insight? Does this make any sense at all in a randomly evolving universe? It doesn’t and as even our human science expands it increasingly finds ways in which other animals [we humans are an animal too please don’t forget!] have things we might describe as morals or ethics. Such things are essentially behaviours and behaviours which would tend to lead to benevolent outcomes. But, in saying that, have you ever noticed how no two people ever seem to have exactly the same moral code? Morality, it seems, gives wide scope for what billions of people will find acceptable or unacceptable. And that is before we ask what the morals of other animals and plants might be.

I interacted with morality, and things to do with morality such as interpretation, a great deal in the second of my three books in my There is Nothing to Stick to trilogy. That book was called The Fiction of Morality for it is my belief that morality, like any human narrative, is itself a fiction. It is human produced and, at its best, is the articulation of good reasons for certain behaviours and further good reasons against other, ill thought of behaviours. That is really all it is as may be seen when nature and the universe themselves allow untold horrors without passing a single comment. Death, murder, the preying of the stronger on the weaker, these are all means by which life, considered generally, progresses. If we ask, in general terms, if it is wrong for one creature to kill another and eat it then I do not remotely see how it can be as, if this so, nature itself is “wrong” and “immoral” whole and entire. Nature proceeds as a general principle by consuming itself. That which is alive eats other things which are alive in innumerable ways. Even plants eat meat as in the case of the venus fly trap, a plant which innocently minds its business until a juicy insect lands in its jaws, at which point it clamps them shut and slowly digests its live meal. Imagine the suffering! The only moral this plant has is its own survival. Certainly this form of life has no concern for any other that may perch in its jaws. If nature had a morality it would have to include accounting for this. 

But, of course, nature does not have a morality for it is the amorality of the universe which has given birth to the moral impulses in human beings. Yet can we now say that human beings are the moral measure? That you have a faculty says nothing about its use nor that it mandates that its use is binding. In short, if you feel something is a moral action that does not bind anyone else to agree with you. The state and scope of morals and morality are, to say the least, matters of debate. And what is the penalty for being immoral or amoral anyway? It may be the case that, in some cases, human beings take action against you but this only reveals that human behaviour, generally considered, is nothing other than a game of actions and consequences. Actions, or inactions, have consequences, and consequences that we may not always see, and there is not much more to be said about it, moralistic narratives notwithstanding. That someone or some group has a moral does not mean anything other than that they do. It is not clear it does, or should, mean anything for anyone else. What is more, the universe’s apparent amorality, that which birthed our own apparent moralities, stands there, inert, as the ultimate context and condition of those very same moralities. We humans can always say something is right or wrong but we can never say so in an absolute way, or, rather, we can ONLY say so in a very conditioned and inabsolute way. We can only protest and give reasons for things. We can never make the universe so. For it, and how it operates, is forever beyond our control. It is the context for us. We are not the context for it. I personally find this to be a very powerful influence on what I may refer to as morals or virtue for how can you ignore that which stands as the context for everything, that which is everything in its manner of operation? I think you do so at your peril. I think this stands as a marker of authentic reality. I think that human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism, the deciding that human beings are the measure, is more often than not a crass act of narcissism and egocentrism, an unjustifiable speciesism and an act of self-regarding.

Yet none of this means that I want animals to suffer. None of this means I look on with a smile as animals are mistreated. In general terms, I would wish that all living things interact with each other with peace, compassion and respect. This may certainly mean that some human practices should be altered or even stopped. I am the last person to tell you that everything we do should carry on as it is. There are undoubtedly consequences of much human behaviour which impact other forms of life in negative and exploitative ways. Yet I am not sure, from my researches, that life is actually always so peaceful, compassionate and respectful. These, after all, are only HUMAN values and life is not always, as so many unrealistic humans seem to want it to be, so fluffy and cuddly. It is still the case that life rolls on by preying on other life. It is not clear that it could do any other. Whether you are eating living plants or animals which are made of living plants you are still life consuming other life. Even within our own beings life exists, in the form of bacteria and microbes, which are not “us”. Life is parasitic on life whole and entire. Microscopic bed bugs in your bedding eat your dead skin even while some other insects, in some tropical part of the world, are born inside a living creature from which they proceed to eat their way out, life preying on life. This is natural and normal, the regular, everyday existence of life which seems to operate only on the principle “if it can happen then it will happen”. This is how life proceeds. Realism should recognise this much more than it should moralise it. It seems to me that if we want to pronounce on life it would assist us greatly if we spent some time considering how life actually exists and how it proceeds before we decide that our self-important and sometimes masturbatory pronouncements are actually the last word on the issue. Calling people “violent murderers” is all well and good but if such moralists opened their eyes a little more they might then realise that such “murder” probably happens tens of millions of times a day in ways quite natural and unreflective. We live in a murderous world where murder is one of the most natural things in it. That murder is, in fact, survival which might be the only actual “moral” that is universal throughout life in the universe.

I see this position as one which takes the reality of the universe and the natural world into account. I do not believe that human morality has some special insight into the nature of things which other life is not privy to and so which we are inevitably mandated to defer to. I do not believe that the argument “but pain and suffering” trumps all other arguments. Such notables as Nietzsche argued that life itself is suffering and whilst this is not then an argument for causing suffering it is, perhaps, a realisation that in life it is unavoidable. To be sentient is not to be borne on fluffy clouds and soft cushions throughout one’s existence. It is, in fact, to be subject to damage and decay from its very inception. We might, in fact, do well to stop and ask ourselves where things come from and to what they return before we insist on the inviolability and integrity of the identities that we accord to things, things which, in each case, exist for microscopic amounts of time in the grand scheme of things. It seems to me that when human beings get too moralistic they do become rather precious. Can we really say that individual examples of anything are really that important? Am I, a human being, of universe-changing significance? I would find it hard to believe so. I find it more realistic, and less egoistic, to think that random chance caused me to be and inevitable decay will cause me to disappear again. In that, I would have lasted for not even a veritable eye blink of time, an event that nothing took note of and which has no special reason to be remembered. It is not the case, I think, that every breath, feeling and emotion matters, regardless of how difficult I or other people might find that to accept. We have got so used to telling ourselves how important everything is that it is now difficult for it to dawn on us that, actually, none of this really matters at all. This planet some of us find so important is just one of billions and, newsflash, it was never intended that it last forever anyway. Destruction was on the menu of everything from minute one of day one. And no one’s feelings were taken into account. 

Nevertheless I would myself also urge compassion for, as my spiritual and philosophical resources in the There is Nothing to Stick to project and in my next book both largely agree, the “uncaring” nature of the natural world is actually the very thing which provides for the life and existence of all things. This can, as some do, be seen as a benevolence and a compassion. Live and let live, all things considered, is not the worst motto one could live by. That we go through life causing as little harm as possible is a good attitude to take in my view. It will also be seen, if one considers this issue more widely in the concept of my other “anarchist” views, that the world as I imagine it would make much of the apparatus of a machinery that treats animals as raw materials for human existence much more difficult to maintain. This, in fact, is where my worldview and the worldview of those who consider themselves vegans would coalesce. I imagine a less civilised, less centralised, more natural world. This, in many respects, would be a more agrarian and less technological world. In such a world it would seem to me that people took more care of and responsibility for themselves and relied less on corporations and economic enterprises to do so. In other words, I see “civilisation” as the problem and it is civilisation which, in most cases, amplifies any problems, such as industrial scale meat eating, which already exist. True, people ate meat before civilisation but it is civilisation and its centralising organisation which turns sentient beings into factory goods. Animals, I agree, are not and should not be regarded as factory goods. Yet that is a value I hold rather than a dictate of the universe. 

In the end, however, we can only see as we see. Eating meat is not a crime and neither is it immoral. I can only assert that and I can never make it so. Morals and beliefs are only ever rhetorical and it doesn’t matter where they come from. Yet even believing that we can still have an eye to the wider context of human practices on earth. It is clear that farming animals carries huge consequences when done to industrial levels. Human beings may want to consider that if they do not want to suffer from the consequences, foreseen or unforeseen. For actions always have consequences and life is a matter of surviving them. Or not. Yet it is also the case that human narratives about things are fictions, hence the short verse at the head of this piece on veganism which came from Zen and Taoist sources. We are told in it that life is not life and death is not death, at least not as we conceive of them. I believe this is so for life and death are merely two more invented human fictions, states seen from one human point of view. Things, so we are then told, are not as they appear, a statement which warns us that all human ways of seeing are only human ways of seeing. But, we are then reminded, neither are they otherwise. Replacing a fiction with another fiction does not make things any better. We have only swapped one illusory imposition for another. What we must do, in a piece of Taoist wisdom, is cease to cherish our opinions. This, ironically, is the very thing that most human beings, myself included, struggle to do. And so they get caught up in the net of their beliefs, desires, wants and narratives about the world which things like Taoism, Zen and Greek Cynicism tell us is the real problem. We want to fix the world when, actually, it should be the world that is fixing us. 

But do we have ears to hear that or will we egotistically continue to plough on regardless as if we could create some equation that balanced everything out better than the actionless action of existence does all by itself without goal, or end, or purpose?

Only cease to cherish your own opinions.


You can read the books in my anarchist trilogy There is Nothing to Stick to HERE!