Soy Calculus? Hypocrisy and Ethics

Do you ever feel like your vegan or vegetarian friends are a little touchy sometimes? Ever feel like someone is being curious, and your friend is acting like they are personally under attack?
Well, one of the reasons is that we are constantly bombarded by bad faith arguments, that are laughably bad, and that we are expected to take seriously. Here is an article that I recently saw on my facebook wall.
In the article, the argument is made that after America, soy production is the highest in Brazil, and that it often involves destroying rain forests to produce land for soy production. And that further, vegans and vegetarians eat a lot of soy, so our dietary needs are not pure and innocent. All true.
But the article itself is totally absurd. It admits that only 6% of all soy produced is consummed directly by humans. Only six percent. The article admits that most of the soy produced is feed directly to livestock. Indeed, in the same article that claims 6% is consumed directly by humans, it points out that 85% is consumed by livestock. So, in an article when all of the facts points to a strong pro-vegetarian/vegan argument, somehow the article furthers an anti-vegetarian/vegan. Straightforwardly the argument should go: Soy production sometimes destroys rain forests. 85% of soy is produced to give to livestock. We should become vegans to significantly lower soy production and demands. But rather somehow this becomes an argument is the opposite direction. This is perplexing, until you realize that these sorts of arguments have absolutely nothing to do with figuring out hard ethical truths, or advancing a vision of a better world, or even figuring out reality. Rather, these arguments are about alleviating guilt, about creating the thinest form of excuse for someone to give in to their addictive and harmful life habits. Once we understand this, the arguments make sense. They are a game of ethical tag, in which the person advancing them is able to prove that the vegan or vegetarian are not pure. It matters not at all if purity or innocence has ever been brought up in these discussions. This is because the arguments being advanced are not concerned with attacking vegetarianism or veganism per se, but rather with attacking the vegan or the vegetarian. They are aimed at delegitimizing the vegan and vegetarian as ethical actors, aimed at erasing our being. This is why vegans and vegetarians are so defensive when arguments are being made, because almost all of the arguments being advanced are meant to be attacks on the vegetarian or vegan as such. It is about turning us into hypocrites so the one attacking can feel better about themselves.
I know I am an hypocrite. My guess is that you (whoever you are) know you are, too. One of the great evils of systemic violences is that those of us who are privileged from such violence (whites with racism, humans with speciesism, men with sexism, straights with heterosexism, etc, always the etc). To care, to give a damn, to try and be ethical or political, requires being a hypocrite. Because the individual cannot singularly overcome the contradictions of the systemic. While we cannot overcome the contradictions, our twinned tasks of short circuiting the systemic violences while building alternative communities and worlds are still left to us.

(h/t to Robert S. for the title of the blog post. But I really liked Dianne B's suggested other title: What are my shoes made of? Why don't you bite me?).

Plants, Again (or, ethics, still). Part I

Planted, An Introduction.

This post tries to think issues of veganism and vegetarianism alongside issues of the active nature of plants. The first part of the post will respond broadly to this question, and lay out my general ethical framework for these issues. For those of you have diligently read this blog for at least a few years, you might find part one repetitive (also, wow, thank you). The second part of the blog post (which will be posted another day) engages theorists forwarding these arguments, particularly Ian Bogost in his Alien Phenomenology, and Michael Marder in his Plant-Thinking, his article "Is it Ethical to Eat Plants?," and his debate with Gary Francione (Marder also has a forthcoming book I haven't read, The Philosopher's Plant).

Plants I:

This is not the first time I have addressed our ethical relationships to plants. See this post, and this post (and several more asides in other posts). This most recent post is immediately caused by a new scientific study that shows that "Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewing." This has caused a variety of news sources to frame this recent discovery as being some sort of unique challenge or cause of concern for vegetarians and vegans. See, for example, this Gizmodo article which actually ends with this line, "Either way, we do know one thing for sure: The world just got a little less smug for the vegan set." Okay then. So, here is the relevant question, why? Why is it each time that some new study comes out expressing the idea that plants are more active and intentional than previously considered, there are a flurry of articles that seem to see this as somehow an argument against vegans? If you are concerned about plants, and any sort of suffering that may come from consuming them, wouldn't adopting a vegan diet be a first step to lowering that suffering? This is true because it takes from more plant protein to produce animal protein, and because that much of animal agriculture includes polluting and destroying lands. And of course, some people concerned with our ethical obligations to plants have made this very point. Near the end of Matthew Hall's Plants as Persons, he makes this very argument:

A third very significant driver of harm to individual plants, plant species, and plant habitats is the unnecessary, unthinking use of plants. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the use of plants to feed massive numbers of animals for the world’s wealthiest nations to consume. Recent estimates suggest that humankind farms and eats over thirty billion animals each year. In a plant context, this live- stock rearing is important because it accounts for more than 65 percent of the total global agricultural area. It also accounts for large volumes of grains and soya beans which are used as feed. In 2002, approximately 670 million tons of grains were fed to livestock, roughly a third of the global harvest. They were also fed 350 million tons of protein-rich products such as soya and bran. The areas cleared to rear animals and feed them on such a huge scale are natural plant habitats such as tropical forests, savannahs, and grasslands. The rearing of livestock on such large scales is one of the major drivers of habitat loss. Basing diets on meat consumption excessively inflates the area of land that is put under human cultivation. Reducing the amount of consumed meat is a direct way of reducing harm done to plants, animals, and human beings. Not least because this large industry is also responsible for generating 18 percent of global carbon emissions—which to provide an idea of scale, is more than all forms of transport combined. (p. 165)

So, rather than seeing plant sentience as a unique challenge to vegans, it seems vegans are already doing something to limit harm to plants. Rather than making the vegan set less smug, wouldn't this make the vegan set more smug? Actually, wait a second, don't you assume that the author of the Gizmodo article probably eats plants herself? So, there is no reason that plant sentience is at all something particular to vegans. This argument could be used against literally any social justice movement. For example, imagine this conversation:

Person 1: Would you like to help out to end genocide against X human population?
Person 2: Did you know plants might be sentient? So, I can't help you.
Person 1: Uhm... okay...?
Person 2: Well, see you are trying to expand our ethical obligations to X human population. But there are still groups you haven't expanded our ethical concern to. And until you figure out a way to respond ethically to all beings, you really haven't done anything yet, have you?
Person 1: I'm pretty sure that's not how ethics work. 

Okay, I hear your objections. This scenario ignores that maybe there is something particular combining our thinking about eating ethically. In other words, the failure to create a completely harm free eating experience negates trying to reduce harm in other ways. But again, if we aren't talking about veganism, would that objection really hold any water? Imagine this conversation:

Person 1: No thank you, I try to avoid X product because I try to avoid products produced by slave labor.
Person 2: Well, all capitalist labor comes from a system of exploitation (surplus value is theft), so there is no need to fight against products produced by slave labor.
Person 1: ... . So are you doing anything to stop either slave labor or capitalist exploitation?
Person 2: What? No, I am just saying stop being so smug, I don't have to feel guilty for using slave labor because of capitalist exploitation.
Person 1: I'm pretty sure that's not how ethics work. 

So, plant sentience is not an argument against veganism because (1) veganism already reduces harm against plants, and (2) if plants present an ethical call, it is an ethical call for all of us, not just vegans. There are, of course, other arguments we can explore. For example, while the research that plants are active beings seem undeniable, what that means in terms of how sentience is expressed seems to be a fairly open question at this point (see this article by Oliver Sacks, and this blog post from Scientific America). And even if sentience was answered, it would not always be a guide about what interests plants have. For example, I am concerned about voting rights being denied felons, but I am not worried about getting voting rights for my cats. And while I am concerned about what Lori Gruen calls the "ethics of captivity" in prisons and zoos, I have trouble believing there are similar issues in botanical gardens. But let us, for now, bracket these broader questions about our ethical obligations toward plants.
So, if there is no reason that vegans are uniquely implicated in the ethics of plants, why is it that we are constantly bombarded with arguments that plant sentience undermines ethical veganism? First, as I have long contended, there is a confusion between ethics and innocence. If there was the possibility for innocence, we wouldn't need ethics. Ethics exist because we have to try to figure out ways to live a good life out of a bad life. What are the ways we can live and act in a world where innocence is impossible? And as in the conversations above, the argument that there is no way to eat without harm is a way of removing responsibility. Universal guilt becomes its own form of innocence, a way of avoiding ethical calls. People don't want responsibility, so they figure out a series of ways to push ethical obligations away. Problems are seen as systematic, so individual change is not called for. Because no solution will be perfect, we know that any change and tactic can be co-opted, so we don't do anything. You only want to help these individuals who are in pain and suffering, and because it focuses on individuals, it is neoliberalism and we don't have to help those in pain. Because there is no innocence, we might as well go ahead and do what we wanted to do anyway. And suddenly, enough excuses pile up so that we somehow have managed to be radical and ethical without ever having to change who we are. It is hard, after all, to be responsible (even just for those lives in front of you). It is confusing to know that we will have politics that will be tainted, that we will communications that fail, and that we will have actions that will cause harm. Spinoza defined conatus as the striving to preserve oneself, and he called that joy. So, perhaps it is sadness to be haunted by others, perhaps it is despair to have to change for others. No wonder we want to create excuses to not act and still pat ourselves on the back. So, maybe we need some other definition of joy. One that finds in our vulnerability the basis of sociality, of laughing together, and of mourning. Perhaps we can find joy (as well as frustration and love) in the difference of others, and with the creative impulse to build a different world. To yearn, and to act, together.

Becoming-vegan as ethical transformation.

Adam Kotsko recently had a post over at his place, "Why am I not a vegetarian?". This will not be a direct response to all his concerns, excuses, and explanations. I will mostly be talking about vegetarianism and veganism here in its ethical dimensions. There are, of course, environmental reasons, labor reasons, etc. that one might want to be a vegetarian or a vegan. However, I do want to highlight a couple of his points:

Another reason: a distrust of ethical consumer choices. Yes, factory farming is an abomination. If there were laws proposing to outlaw it, I would support those laws, regardless of their effect on the cost or availability of meat. In the meantime, I purchase organic meat when possible. Yet I just don’t have it in me to make a big deal out of it or insist on it, just like I don’t have it in me to move heaven and earth to make sure my garbage is recycled. I make my token gesture, but systemic problems have systemic solutions. I’m part of the society in which I live, and no amount of ritualistic keeping my hands clean is going to change anything. [...] For me, it seems like becoming a vegetarian would mean changing into a different kind of person, and I don’t want to make that particular change. Maybe something will happen to make that change plausible and even urgent at a gut level, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I want to say that his rejection of personal responses to systemic issues is a legitimate critique. Though, of course I am not sure I want to go so far as Adam does in his rejection of the ability of personal decisions to change the conditions for other animals. But, in general, the factory farm is exactly the sort of thing that individual consumer choices will most likely not have dramatic effects. Indeed, it would be important, particularly in relation to abolitionist discourses, to consider the limitations of voluntarism and vanguardism. So, if the idea of vegetarianism and veganism as boycott is not functionally sound, why promote it? And I think this is where I also, even more strongly, agree with Adam, when he states that "becoming a vegetarian would mean changing into a different kind of person." Veganism and vegetarianism in this sense is a kind of askesis, a practice of self-production. This pretty clearly drawing upon the work of the later Foucault, and I am by far not the only one to make this argument (you might want to look at Tanke's "The Care of the Self and Environmental Politics," Taylor's "Foucault and the Ethics of Eating," my "Towards a Dark Animal Studies," and Dean's "You Are How You Eat?"). One of the things I find interesting in Foucault's argument is that the cartesian understanding of how a self changes is challenged. Under the usual, what we will call cartesian, view, first you understand the world correctly, and from that correct understanding, you will do what you should do. Right knowledge precedes right action. Under this view of the world, the biggest hurdle to societal arrangements and policy decisions is that people don't know what is true. In other words, the biggest reason we haven't confronted global warming is global warming deniers. Not, you know, that even if we somehow all agreed that global warming was happening and bad, we might still have right action. In Foucault's turn to classical philosophy, we get a different understanding against the cartesian view. In his view, we have to have certain practices that then produce the ability to access certain truths or understandings of the world. Action precedes knowledge, or at least understanding. So, if we want to mitigate the unthinkable suffering of the factory farm, if we want to divert the environmental global suicide pact that is being driven by the expropriation of animal labor and lives, then I think vegetarianism and veganism is going to be key. It will be key not just as an end reality (the end result of challenging the systemic violence to animals will probably be vegetarianism and veganism), but also as a way of producing the sorts of subjectivities that bring about systemic change in the first place. In other words, we need vegetarianism and veganism not because of a consumer boycott, but because we need a different kind of persons.

This gets to a different part of Adam's post:

I also don’t want to be a pain in the ass for hosts. I don’t want to constrain the choice of meal someone can prepare me in their home or the choice of restaurant. This is one key principle from Pauline Christianity on which I will not budge: always be a good guest, always accept what’s put before you. I don’t want them to experience my dietary preference as a moral judgment on them — which will likely happen at least sometimes, whether I intend it that way or not. It’s not as though they or I can do anything about the system of food production, so why create bad feelings?

While not a direct answer, it reminds me of Leela Gandhi's excellent book, Affective Communities. In her chapter "Meat"she recounts the story of Mahatma Gandhi's vegetarianism. When he left for England to study law, he made a promise to his mother to be vegetarian. He had not particularly been a vegetarian before that promise, and felt it was a superstition. He was often made fun of in England among his peers, but he kept his promise. In so doing he found himself in different communities than he would have otherwise. He became radicalized on issues of socialism and anti-colonialism. Along with being a different kind of person, there is always the chance that our vegetarianism and veganism will put us in different communities, perhaps produce different kinds of communities (I take it as a sort of given that host/guest relations are constitutive of community).

Now, none of this is given as a good transformation.  Along with her story of M.K. Gandhi, Leela Gandhi also replays another story happening at the same time, the story of the first animal welfare law passed in the West, and the animal welfare support of James and John Stuart Mill. Gandhi shows how both the Mills and the animal welfare laws come deeply from places of colonialism, and the policing of of the underclasses (I address some of this in a little more detail in this old blog post). Even with those risks, I still feel we need changes.  I do think we need new kinds of persons, we need new relations to other animals, we need new communities. And all of this means that the issues of veganism and vegetarianism are sorts of attempts at Humeian political problems, that is to say, they are attempts at extending partial sympathies.

Guest Post: Was Communard Louise Michel a vegetarian?

Was Communard Louise Michel a vegetarian?
By Jon Hochschartner
[This is a guest post. If you are interested in writing a guest post, please email me at james.stanescu@gmail.com]

Since I'm interested in both socialism and animal rights, historical figures who managed to reconcile the two ideologies fascinate and inspire me. That's why I find the question of whether the French communard Louise Michel was a vegetarian so interesting.

During the Paris Commune of 1871, she served the working-class uprising as an ambulance worker and militia member. When the rebellion was overrun, Michel was captured and tried. She dared the court to execute her, but ultimately was imprisoned in France for almost two years before being deported.

In her memoirs, Michel wrote that she traced her progressive politics to animal-protectionist feeling. "As far back as I can remember, the origin of my revolt against the powerful was my horror at the tortures inflicted on animals," she said. "I used to wish animals could get revenge, that the dog could bite the man who was mercilessly beating him, that the horse bleeding under the whip could throw off the man tormenting him."

She wrote that from an early age she rescued animals and that habit continued into adulthood. "I was accused of allowing my concern for animals to outweigh the problems of humans at the Perronnnet barricade at Neuilly during the Commune, when I ran to help a cat in peril," she said. "The unfortunate beast was crouched in a corner that was being scoured by shells, and it was crying out."

Michel believed there was a link between the subjugation of animals and the subjugation of humans. "The more ferocious a man is toward animals," she wrote, "the more that man cringes before the people who dominate him." In fact, she credited her opposition to the death penalty to witnessing the slaughter of an animal as a child.

She raged against vivisection, writing, "All this useless suffering perpetrated in the name of science must end. It is as barren as the blood of the little children whose throats were cut by Gilles de Retz and other madmen."

According to the International Vegetarian Union website, one Louise Michel attended the 1890 International Vegetarian Congress in England. The report of the meeting states she "expressed her views on Vegetarianism. The eating of flesh meant misery to the animals, and she held that it was impossible for men to be happy while animals were miserable."

And yet, search her memoirs for the term 'vegetarian' and you will find nothing. As a very young child, Michel was traumatized by the sight of a decapitated goose. "One result was that the sight of meat thereafter nauseated me until I was eight or ten," she wrote, "and I needed a strong will and my grandmother's arguments to overcome that nausea." This of course suggests she consumed flesh and her memoirs do not immediately mention a later-in-life change in practice.

She also wrote, "Instead of the putrefied flesh which we are accustomed to eating, perhaps science will give us chemical mixtures containing more iron and nutrients than the blood and meat we now absorb." This could be interpreted as anticipating the in-vitro meat now being developed. But it could also be read as a reflection of her belief that animal-derived foods were nutritionally necessary or superior in her era.

While it seems clear where her sympathies were, I'm unsure if Michel was a vegetarian.

Is being a vegetarian worse than being a flesh eater? (The vegan edition)

The short answer is no. Here is a slightly longer answer:

I figure while I am making certain subsets of the vegan community unhappy, I might as well continue. Gary Francione, as many of you know, has argued that there is zero moral distinction between someone who eats animal flesh and a vegetarian. More importantly, he often argues that a vegetarian might even be worse than someone who eats meat, ethically speaking. Which is a bit like this moment from The Simpsons. Anyway, to get a sense of his argument, you can listen to this podcast and/or read this blog post. Francione's argument is that (1) there is no moral distinction between eating an animal's flesh and eating the products of their bodies, (2) vegetarians will end up supplementing their lack of meat eating by increasing their eating of other animal products, (3) and that there is more suffering in a glass of milk than there is in a steak. These are all fairly good arguments, but it is the second one that has some real weaknesses.

After doing research on other things, I came across this article. This article is the only one that I have found to get data on what vegetarians actually eat. The article also pretty clearly points to two truths (1) Vegetarians (who eat no meat, not those self-identified vegetarians who also eat meat) consume far less milk, yogurt, etc than other categories. They consumed slightly higher rates of cheese. Overall, a vegetarian is likely to decrease her consumption of dairy and eggs by 15% compared to the normal meat eater in the US. So, in addition to decreasing their meat consumption to zero, the average American vegetarian will decrease their consumption of other animal products by 15%. Hard to argue that vegetarianism does not entail a net decrease in animal suffering.

Now, this does not address Francione's larger arguments of tactics and strategies. Francione's follow up argument would be something like, it doesn't matter if vegetarianism represents a net decrease in animal suffering, we should advocate for veganism only, and there will still be people who choose to go vegetarian, but there will be more vegans. I don't have any data to back up my next statements, but I find that unlikely. I just don't buy that animal movements are failing because we lack a clear message of veganism and only veganism. With that said, we should always strive to make clear that while vegetarianism might be ethically superior to flesh eating, it is just a small step on a broader becoming-vegan. I have written before against arguments that see ethical vegetarianism as being good enough. But in general I believe one can see vegetarianism as insufficient without seeing it as worse than flesh eating, morally incoherent, or useless.

Next up, Is being a vegetarian worse than being a flesh eater? The localvore edition. (The short answer, again, hell no).

Eating Grass-Fed Animals Will Not Save Us: Part 2 of 3

This is part 2, feel free to read part one on the environment, here. You can also read part three, here.  [Also, keep in mind this was written a few months ago, before the most recent series of ethics posts].

The Ethics

Let’s begin with what the author gets right, there is a real issue with the production of agricultural products. Lots and lots of animals are killed, and often killed horribly, in such circumstances. And for those of us who want a more just and kind world for other animals, this is surely something we need to pay attention to. One of the reasons that I tend to purchase CSAs (Community Supported Agricultural) is in order to decrease this effect. Furthermore, I certainly agree to the idea that we all have blood on our hands, that we are not innocent. Of course, innocence is not the point. The reason we need ethics is not because we need to learn to be innocent, but because innocence is foreclosed. And unless we want to face our post-lapsarian world with relativism, quietude, and inaction, we must learn to exist without innocence. However, the idea that not being vegetarian/vegan is somehow better or even just a wash as being a vegetarian/vegan, is simply not workable.

Much of the ethical arguments in the original article are mostly based around some sort of calculative consequentialist ethics. So, first I would point out that from that world, the environmental arguments from before are fairly important. A world that is inhabitable to most life will certainly be a world with a lot of death and suffering for all sorts of animals, including human ones. Also, on a more particular note, the grazing of animals on rangelands has resulted in a devastation of biodiversity. Moreover, there is always a cost-benefit analysis we have to engage in when we talk about land to have animals graze on. The article author would have us believe that this land will not usable for anything unless animals are grazing, but, as I said before, that seems doubtful. So, we can graze animals, we can let the land alone and have some biodiversity and natural carbon trapping return, or we can use the land for wind farms and solar farms. The single worse environmental use of the land would be to graze cattle with that, and therefore arguably the worse decision for animals.
Also, it isn’t as if grazing cattle doesn’t also entail a lot of direct killing of animals besides the cattle. “Ranchers have a long history of exterminating animals who could prey upon cattle or otherwise threaten their health. Just about any animal with a spine is considered a varmint and is liable to be shot, trapped, or poisoned. Ranchers have carried out a well organized and far-reaching extermination of wildlife. Over the past century, ranchers have killed billions of prairie dogs, as well as uncountable numbers of wolves, coyotes, and even bear. America’s indigenous cattle, the buffalo, have been nearly wiped off the continent to make way for beef cattle. Ranchers don’t do all this killing alone. The USDA’s Wildlife Services division exterminates animals likely to prey on livestock. In 2002, this division killed 86,000 coyotes, 5000 foxes, 380 black bears, and 190 wolves.” (Marcus, p. 198).
The original article author states and blames agricultural monoculturalism for feeding humans, which is, well, completely false. With the exception of certain sugar monoculturalism produced by slavery and colonialism, much of monoculturalism’s history is tied fundamentally up with eating land-based mammals.
It was not just the states that grazed cattle that were affected. Because people were paid by the poundage of the cattle, rather than each head of cattle, it made sense to make the cattle as fat as possible. It is also worth noting that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, it was uncommon for Americans to desire fatty cow flesh—what we now call the prime cut—however, that type of meat was desired in Britain and many other parts of Europe. This distinction matters because scarcity of meat in Europe shifted European demand to the United States. As Fernand Braudel put it, “In the modern period then, Europe’s privileged status as a meat-eating area declined, and real remedies were only found in the middle of the nineteenth century as a result of the widespread creation of artificial pastures, the development of scientific stock-raising, and the exploitation of distant stock-raising areas in the New World.” British money was invested heavily in building the American beef industry in the mid-19th century. Because of their desire for fatty beef, grass-fed beef became increasingly supplanted by corn-fed beef. The rise of corned beef created heavy demand for corn, and farmers realized that beef became a far more profitable way to convert their corn to money than selling it directly to people. States such as Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, western Kentucky, and others developed a monoculture based upon corn.
Meanwhile, fattening the cows with corn necessitated replace grazing with a different mechanism of feeding cattle. This was when the first feedlots were created. Cows were fenced in, fattened up, and taken to slaughter. In the old days of grazing, cows had between five to seven years to live, which was necessary for the cows to reach a profitable size and poundage. The corned-fed cattle not only meant that it was faster to fatten up the cows, but the rise of feedlots fundamentally shifted the contours of breeding cattle in the first place. Specialized breeders became common, and cattle became bred for certain genetic qualities, such as speed by which they could be fattened up, the size they could get to, and docility. These new, custom-made cattle fenced into feedlots had roughly two years to live, significantly increasing profits.
As the historian Revivel Netz put it:

The bison were now dead, replaced by railroads and farmers. As the Indians retreated to their pitiful reservations, the cow began its trek north of Texas, eventually to introduce there an economy based in Chicago. And this, finally, was the culmination of American history in the nineteenth century. Texas led to Mexico, which led to Kansas, which led to the Civil War, upon whose conclusion America could move on to destroy the Indian and the bison. The final act in the subjugation of the West was under way: the transition from bison to cow. This was the immediate consequence of the Civil War: the West was opened for America --- and America filled it with cows. (Netz, Barbed Wire, p. 10). 

And nothing about any of this has changed! “In 2006, more than a third of all grain produced in the world entered the mouths of animals destined for the abattoir. In the United States, an astounding 80 percent of all grain produced went toward animal feed” (McWilliams, p. 127). The idea that if we just ate more land-based mammals we would see less monoculturalism is absurd, to steal a phrase, it’s nonsense on stilts! And if we eat grass-fed animals, that would certainly be better than eating factory farmed animals, but we are not dealing with this problem because of vegetarianism/veganism, which is actually just as good (if not better) attack upon such monoculturalism.

But all of this talk in terms of a certain kind of utilitarianism does not address something else about the ethics of purposefully eating another being. Okay, time for a long quotation from Cora Diamond on this issue:

“We do not eat our dead, even when they have died in automobile accidents or been struck by lightning, and their flesh might be first class. We do not eat them; or if we do, it is a matter of extreme need, or of some special ritual--and even in cases of obvious extreme need, there is very great reluctance.  […] Anyone who, in discussing this issue, focuses on our reasons for not killing people or our reasons for not causing them suffering quite evidently runs a risk of leaving altogether out of his discussion those fundamental features of our relationship to other human beings which are involved in our not eating them. It is in fact part of the way this point is usually missed that arguments are given for not eating animals, for respecting their rights to life and not making them suffer, which imply that there is absolutely nothing queer, nothing at all odd, in the vegetarian eating the cow that has obligingly been struck by lightning. That is to say, there is nothing in the discussion which suggests that a cow is not something to eat; it is only that one must not help the process along” (The Realistic Spirit, pp. 321-322, emphasis in the original). 

As Lori Gruen notes on this passage, “Humans are not food. Imagine how our interactions with one another might be different if we saw humans, or at least some humans, as consumable. If we saw each other as edible and, in fact, ate humans on occasion and really enjoyed it, this could lead to a breakdown in respect for one another and for humanity as a whole.” (p. 102). [Additional note, this passage should be thought alongside Matt Calarco's work on us as being possible subjects to be eaten, and Karl Steel's work on cannibalism].
There is something disturbing beyond belief about treating a life as pure instrumentality, as a being to be raised for us to slaughter and eat. I have trouble believing that the sort of relations necessary to alleviate the suffering and end the violence against other animals is going to come from a cycle of raising, slaughtering, and eating animals.

Part 3 here.

Eating Grass-Fed Animals Will Not Save Us, Part 1 of 3

I wrote this a while back, but I never got around to posting them (there are, shall we say, several posts like this). I wanted to write about this post in something I was working on, and realized I never had posted these, so, all three parts today. Enjoy. Part 2 here, part 3 here.


This is in response to this article. Here is part one of my response, focusing on the environmental impacts of eating grass-fed cattle. The ethical issues will be addressed next. [This article was brought to my attention from one of my colleagues, and he was told to bring it to my attention from Cameron. This part, and the next part, are developed from emails I sent in response].

I am going to address the concerns of the article in two sections. The first is going to be the environmental reasons that grazing land-based mammals is worse, and the second one will respond to the ethical questions about grazing land-based mammals [There will be a surprise third part!]. I will be cribbing pretty hard from James McWilliams’ Just Food, Erik Marcus’ Meat Market, Howard Lyman’s Mad Cowboy, Lori Gruen’s Ethics and Animals, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. Whenever I quote directly from a source, I will cite it, but otherwise I will not be giving proper credit in terms of “I was first alerted to this in so-and-so’s brilliant etc etc”. But all of those are books worth reading.

Also, the author I am responding to is specifically talking about Australia, which I know very little about in specifics. So, I will just have to talk about what I know, and assume it applies to Australia.

One other general remark: The idea that eating animals that have been raised in a grazing situation, and from a “beyond organic” situation (no hormones, no antibiotics, no gmo stuff) is clearly better, both environmentally and ethically, than eating all your meat from CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations)/Factory Farms. But this author is disingenuous in the extreme for not pointing out that in order to do so, and to do so consistently, will require an extreme decrease in animal flesh consumption. And just because it is better than factory farms, doesn't even make it closely comparable to vegetarianism and especially veganism on both the environmental and ethical fronts.

The Environmental Issue

Let’s put the conclusion ahead of the rest of the argument. From McWilliams:

The specialized approach might be environmentally sound, and even profitable, for a few small-scale ranchers making grass-fed beef for privileged eaters worried about their omega-3s. However, this approach cannot […] produce enough grass fed beef to replace the conventional beef consumed in dangerous quantities[.] (p. 147)

In other words, as McWilliams further argues, “the major problem is that the sustainable scenario works well only as a boutique endeavor. Scale is everything when it comes to raising animals to feed billions of people" (p. 147).

If the whole world was to eat land-based mammals (what I will occasionally refer to as meat, despite its inaccuracy) at the same rate as we do in America, Canada, and Europe we would create, with no exaggeration, an apocalyptic hellscape. To the numbers!
“Between 1961 and 2002 the worldwide consumption of meat rose from 71 million metric tons a year to 247 metric tons a year—almost a fourfold leap” (McWilliams p. 124). This assumes, even with feedlots and CAFOs and other horrible but land-saving strategies, that “if the world’s growing population decided to eat the same amount of meat as the world’s affluent now consume, we would need 67 percent more land than the earth has” (McWilliams p. 126). Of course, the land itself is not well-treated by keeping lots of cattle on it.
“In Uganda, as a result of overgrazing in its drylands known as the “cattle corridor,” soil compaction, erosion and the emergence of low-value grass species and vegetation have subdued the land’s productive capacity, leading to desertification.3 In the Gambia, it is reported that fallow periods have been reduced to zero on most arable lands.4 Between 1950 and 2006, the Nigerian livestock population grew from 6 million to 66 million, a 11-fold increase. The forage needs of livestock exceed the carrying capacity of its grasslands.5 It is reported that overgrazing and over-cultivating are converting 351,000 hectares of land into desert each year.6” (from the UN’s Economic Commission on Africa, Africa Report on Draught and Desertification 2008, ch. 2).
Furthermore:

Because livestock have degraded rangelands worldwide, water has been unable to replenish itself as it woul in ecosystems left ungrazed. Because cows, sheep, and goats press on the land with the same weight as a tractor, watersheds have altered to the extent that precipitation cannot do what it would normally do in a properly functioning hydrological cycle.
Under ungrazed conditions, rainfall is held by soil vegetation and gradually spread across a watershed, infiltrating and replenishing groundwater at a relatively slow pace. When this happens, erosion is kept to a minimum and the soil’s fertility is continually enhanced. With intensive livestock grazing, however, the infiltration process is drastically undermined. Surface flows increase, run-off leaches minerals from the soil and deposits them in oceans, and, most critically, the physical health of the soil is degraded.
With the basic physical alteration of the soil, the preconditions for persistent animal manure contamination of downstream freshwater sources are well established. What we’re left to endure is therefore a kind of double whammy: more manure than the soil can accommodate hitting soil so damaged that precipitation carries that manure, as well as the microbes and chemicals in it, into the water supply we drink (McWilliams, pp. 143-144).

This is what reveals the fundamental misconceit of the original article. There is land that is so destroyed and degraded that we cannot grow crops on it because of the over-grazing by animals! “Many grazing areas are so desolate that, at first glance, it seems they might as well be stocked with cattle, since it appears that few other animals could survive in these areas. But the truth is that America’s rangelands have become inhospitable precisely because they are grazed by cattle. Take away the cattle, and in a surprisingly short amount of time, most ranching areas become revitalized. Within just a few years, plant life makes a strong recovery, and this regeneration attracts wildlife to return” (Marcus, p. 197).
This brings us to global warming, and another long quotation from James McWilliams:

With some estimations attributing about 20 percent of all global warming gases to ‘land use change’, of which desertification is a major component (deforestation being another). […]Making matters worse, the inability of destroyed vegetation to capture carbon dioxide ultimately leads to what scientists call a ‘desertification-global warming feedback loop.’ In this scenario, carbon that’s released from desertification causes global warming, and then in turn global warming exacerbates desertification. […].(McWilliams p. 129)

According to the The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) report Livestock’s Long Shadow, livestock is the single largest contributor to global warming gases. Now, while some of that will be answered with grazing issues, there are still problems. “Even if cattle and vegetation coexisted in harmonious ecological balance, though, the respiratory impact of livestock would continue to be an issue. Livestock give off 86 million metric tons of methane a year. Methane is twenty-one to twenty-four times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Moreover, it can linger in the atmosphere for as long as fifteen years. […] When it comes to methane emissions from cows, buying grass-fed hardly lets the consumer off the hook: grass-fed cattle actually produce four times more methane than feedlot cattle, when measured on a per-cow basis. (McWilliams, p. 130).
This is why I talk about increased global meat eating as producing an apocalyptic hellscape. If the world were to eat the amount of meat that people in the US do, even if we were to shift to an entire grass-fed—and no hormone and antibiotic—livestock diet, we would still be eating a diet incompatible with future human life. It would be a world of deserts. It would be a world of manure flowing streams, water basins, and oceans. It would be a world of a rapidly heated globe, with all the environmental and weather related awfulness that occurs. The consumption of other animals is a direct move to poisoning our water, destroying our soil, and wreaking the climate of the globe.

Next Up, the Ethics! here.

Tim Morton's interview

Normally I would save this for another post of links, but the interview was too delightful and interesting of a read. John Protevi is doing great work in these interviews, and Tim is a wonderfully disinhibited and thoughtful subject.

A take away point for people who read this blog:

I remember one meal—I was a heavy vegetarian at the time, and I was invited to do an interview, which included a meal at High Table. All these Oxford types sitting there telling me how ridiculous vegetarianism is. And I write about it, and I am one! It was like being eviscerated by intelligent insects. They are in eternal attack mode. In the USA I realized that some humans had endoskeletons and soft skin, as it were. Now when I go back I feel like Gulliver among the Lilliputians—“Why are you stinging me? That's really annoying! Do you think you're being clever? What is that?” Schivelbusch was important but it was also a lot of Deleuze and Guattari combined with Braudel. When you look at capitalism as forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization you start to see food not simply as symbolic or “meaningful” or whatever but as an actual material substance that circulates around. I was also fascinated by Žižek as he had just produced The Sublime Object of Ideology, and it seemed to me that food directly was ideology. In other words, a McDonalds Happy Meal doesn't signify comfort: it is comfort, directly. “The Truth Is Out There.” This was very clear to me and very boring for everyone else, who wanted food to fill the gap left by the “death of the Author.” University of California Press flat refused to publish my stuff because it had philosophy in it—that was their actual stated reason! They wanted to replace The Fascinating Story of Charles Dickens with The Fascinating Story of the Potato. Kind of like that movie The Red Violin. After a while I stopped writing about food because I just ran into a lot of walls with my demystification approach. Instead, I started writing about ecology. Vegetarianism is obviously about ecology and all food involves thinking about ecological stuff. That was woven quite explicitly into the first projects.

JSF vs. Bourdain part I: Ethics is hard to do, Ethics is easy to do.

In my last post of links, I linked to this debate between Jonathan Safren Foer and Anthony Bourdain. I had started this post talking about that debate in more depth, but sort of decided not to finish writing. But after this post by Dr. J, and also with the comments from AnPac, I think it is probably a good idea to finish this post. So, here it goes. There is a lot that could be said about this discussion, but I want to talk about the issues of community.

Bourdain argues that meat is fundamental to community. He goes so far as to say: "To me, the human experience, human communication and curiosity, trump any ethical concerns one might have with killing and eating animals" I really love this in the debate, because Bourdain has this revealing pause between ethical concerns and the rest of the sentence. As if to some degree, Bourdain sort of believes that experience, communication, curiosity trump ethics as such. And on some level Bourdain certainly doesn't believe that ethics takes a second seat to experience, communication, and curiosity. On the other hand, I'm sure he does. We all do. We all have moments where those three seem far more important than the well-being of our fellow travelers.

Ethics is remarkably isolating.
I'm sure we have all felt this way (or at least, I kinda hope we all have). We've been around someone who tells a horribly sexist, racist, and/or heterosexist joke and everyone else around us laughs. It's an utterly debilitating moment. We are suddenly left with several choices: Do we give in? Do we play along? Do we laugh, or at least sorta smile and wince? Do we wait for that slap on the back of camaraderie, and whispered voice, "I always thought you were a stick in the mud before, I'm glad to know you're just like the rest of us"? Do we instead speak out? Do we confront people? And we know, we know we will be that person again. The predictable one, the one who always brings up these issues. So, instead of having the backslap of camaraderie, we get the disgusted tones of "Why can't you take a joke?" But we know why, we know what is at stake, we know how important it is to change. So, we have these moments where being ethical means shutting off culture, means shutting off communication. It is profoundly isolating.
Sometimes it isn't just a moment, though. Sometimes we experience a whole culture that is dedicated to destroying a livable life for those around us. Sometimes we see not just a small group of people, but we see people we respect and love and care for engaging in actions we also know are terrible and wrong. And because of the very way society is structured, you know you cannot get through the day without in some part taking advantage of a system that systematically exploits other beings. All of this can be true without ever talking about animals. Being ethical is hard to do. As Derrida puts it in "Eating Well", "responsibility is excessive or it is not a responsibility."
This is one of the brilliant and honest things that J.M Coetzee does in his lectures/stories "The Lives of Animals" (.pdf). In them the main character Elizabeth Costello carries with her a wounded nature (the phrase comes from Cora Diamond's reading of it in Philosophy & Animal Life), part of which is the way in which she is often separated from others. This happens twice in the stories around the table. The reader can be under no illusion that Costello's attempt at living a more ethical life is one that divides her many of the people around her.

Ethics brings us together.
Coetzee is honest to depict that wounded nature in "The Lives of Animals". At the same time, it is only half of the story. I'm sure we have all felt this way (or at least I hope so), the moment of being around a group and realizing they get me. They get what I think is important, where I come from. Being at a conference and coming back energized and refreshed. Going to a rally, protest, or other event and despite what you are opposing being so horrific, feeling the profound high of being part of a community. Again, all of this can be true even without talking about animals and vegetarianism. However, it is interesting to note one vegetarian story.
As Leela Gandhi relates in her wonderful book Affective Communities, Mahatma Gandhi came to England without any strong anti-colonial desires. He was a vegetarian not out of personal ethical or religious reasons, but out of a promise he made to his mother. However, being vegetarian often forced him into marginal associations, groups that were more at the fringes of British society. Particularly, he fell in with Henry Salt and the Vegetarian Society by eating at their restaurants. It was while he was with them that he became radicalized. He embraced vegetarianism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. Gandhi's promise to his mother first isolated him, and then gave him a community. It fundamentally changed the way he would have experienced British culture and society, it fundamentally changed his life.
In this sense, ethics is not about isolation, but it can often cause that. Ethics is about changing and shifting where we find our community, where we find our energy and joy and connections. Vegetarianism has not been a deprivation for me, it has only opened up new vistas for experience and experimentation that I could not have found while my desires were rooted in the eating of flesh.

Vegan Weddings

There is a recent article from the NYTimes on vegan and vegetarian weddings. It would hardly be worth commenting on if, you know, I wasn't currently planning my own vegan wedding. The whole article is a little confusing to me. Why would anyone expect vegans and vegetarians to serve flesh at their wedding? The line that bothered me the most wasn't a quotation, but from the article itself:

Which decision a couple makes depends largely on their philosophy of weddings: Is it really all about you, or does the comfort of your guests come first?

Wtf? The biggest single price item for our wedding, by far, is paying for the food. We spent a lot of time finding a dynamic, creative, and talented caterer to make the food. The food is going to be good, and plentiful. We have spent a lot of time thinking about the comfort of our guests. Just because we don't want a time of love and celebration to be tainted by the flesh and juices of other animals, doesn't mean we aren't doing everything in power to put on an awesome party for our friends and family. As a matter of fact, why would an amazing meal that just happens to be free of animals and animal products somehow be at the expense of our guests? Why would an amazing meal without flesh be a discomfort for the guest, unless of course, they are addicts? In which case this is the same as choosing a venue where they would have to smoke outside.

Though in other good wedding news, we recently chose to have a 17 piece big band play at our wedding. Here is a video with them performing and some stills of the band and singer.

Arguments for Eating Animals: Bad Faith, Disavowal, and Addiction

This post is immediately inspired by a comment Tim Morton made in this post by Levi, but I've been planning on writing something like this for a bit.

Those of us who argue for vegetarianism and veganism hear a wide plethora of arguments for eating animals (or against vegetarianism and veganism). Frequently they are delivered in the form of questions. Occasionally there are questions given by the genuinely curious, but usually these are questions meant to delegitimatize the veg position. These questions tend toward gray areas, morally complex areas, in order to legitimate a whole host of behaviors that are not particularly morally complex. It is like if I said I'm against killing people, and someone goes, "Well, what about to protect yourself from immediate harm?" And then I go, "Okay, I mean against killing people who aren't attacking you." Then the person responds, "Well, what about Hitler? Wouldn't you have killed Hitler?" And then you go, "Okay, I am against killing people who aren't mass murders". And then the person goes, "Well, say you have a chance to kill Hitler before he became Hitler, wouldn't you kill Hitler." And then, with all those exceptions, the other person goes out and kills the first person they run into. This whole argument is bollocks, and obviously bollocks. The philosophical argument is less about if you should or shouldn't be vegetarians and vegans, and more about why people don't buy the arguments. This is a major point made by Bill Martin in his Ethical Marxism, and I am in full agreement. So, what drives these arguments for eating animals?

Well, one argument is that these arguments are based in bad faith, in the way that Sartre describes in Anti-Semite and Jew. However, rather than anti-semitism, we are dealing instead with speciesism. John Sanbonmatsu makes almost this exact argument in his paper he delivered at ICAS. In this case, the same fears that drive one to hate the Jew also drives one to hate the Animal. It is an argument that comes out of a great deal of insecurity, a great deal of personal hatred turned outward against animals, and it is by destroying animals that the one with bad faith manages to reassure oneself.

A related but different argument can come from the psychoanalytic concept of Verleugnung, of disavowal. This is a major argument advanced by Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am. In this case there are two major disseminations of disavowal. The first is a disavowal of that there is no such thing Man on one side of the line, and Animal on the other side. The second disavowal is of the violence we do to other animals. As Derrida puts it,

Neither can one seriously deny the disavowal that this involves. No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide[.] (pp. 25-26)

This passage also hints at a third disavowal, a disavowal of disavowal. A forgetting of forgetting. We'll return to this point.

I've gone rather quickly over the issues of bad faith and disavowal. There are long and complicated philosophical histories and theoretical nuances I've jumped over. But I wanted to move into another point, one that doesn't seem to be out there. This is something I've been thinking about for a while, but the way that Morton/Bryant say the following point is nice:

Moreover, as Morton likes to put it, the Big Mac is not comfort food (a semiotic determination), but rather the Big Mack is comfort. That is, the Big Mac interacts physiologically with our bodies in a variety of ways that produce particular Stimmung.

What does that mean? Well, it means that particular kinds of food don't make you feel better just by nostalgia or magic. Rather, it chemically alters your mood, like coffee in the morning. Particular foods are remarkably addictive. It is from this perspective I can understand that I can understand something from Pollan that has never made sense. At one point he argues that saying we can eat without animal flesh is like saying we can reproduce without sex. That has always floored me, because who in their right mind believes that eating an animal is the same as having sex? Well, an addict would go there. That gives the particular logic of the flesh eater an entirely other dimension: these aren't the domination of the speciesist acting in bad faith, this isn't the psychoanalytical disavowal, rather this is the incoherent, and rather lame, excuses that one hears from addicts all the time. Anyone who has ever hung out with people who feel the pressure to stop their addiction has probably heard variations of these excuses. "You aren't so pure yourself", "I play the lottery to help the schools and children", etc. Now, there are some draw backs that some people might have with the rhetoric of addiction to talk about flesh eaters. One is that it seems to turn the flesh eater into victim. Not only are animals victimized, but those who eat animals are also victimized in their eating of them. The reductio ad absurdum of this is something like, "Why do you make me eat you by tasting so good?". Of course, part of the issue is taste has nothing to do this (whatever you may feel now; coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol didn't taste so good the first time. And parenting advice often features long discussions and how to get children to eat flesh). But the other point is that oppression and domination are seldom so easily one sided. While the animal is not oppressing the addict, the addiction certainly is. And like with many addictions, this one is certainly causes us all sorts of harms. Do I really need to engage the long laundry list of the ways that cheap animal flesh and products are causing rampant health issues and environmental issues? This shit (often literally) is killing us, but very few of us are even willing to cut back, much less get off the sauce entirely. Another objection in talking about addiction is it makes veganism sound like a hard thing to do. Many of you have read or heard Francione make the arguments that we need to present veganism and simple and easy step. Except... you know... it usually isn't for most people. Many people have trouble going vegan, and many of them relapse again and again (just like addicts). I'm not sure which is strategically a better idea, presenting veganism as a hard but important thing, or presenting it as an easy thing. But the truth is that for most people going vegan won't be easy. Lastly, an objection in talking in terms of addiction, it lets many people off the hook. They can say, "I can't help it, I'm an addict." Well, that just sounds like another lame excuse. More importantly, if it is an addiction then that means different steps need to be taken to combat this issue.

Now, I'm not sure it is addiction. And I am certainly not sure if it is addiction over bad faith and disavowal (it's probably all three and then some). Earlier Derrida hinted at the disavowal of disavowal. In many ways that is what we are stuck with in the present discussion. Vegetarians and vegans are forced to basically take arguments for eating animals as legitimate. Any discussion on what propels to keep eating meat is taken as an illegitimate discourse because it assumes that vegetarianism and veganism are won arguments. That means that the sort of theoretical discourses that exam other forms of systematic violence are not usually or publicly brought to the issue of other animals. However, I find this discussion to be both more useful and philosophically rewarding than to deal with the "So, if you were a life boat and you had a Picasso, a horse, and your mother..." one more time.

Dark Animal (Studies)

I recently received a rather odd email from someone who came across my blog, and the response to this email is something I feel the need to post here, as well. Mainly because it deals with some misconceptions of vegetarianism and veganism that seem very common. So, here's the response:

***

It seems to me that your email misunderstands what is at stake with trying to create ethical relationships with non-human beings (in particular here, those beings we call animals). There is an indictment against vegetarianism and veganism that it is motivated by a naive escapism and utopianism. In this argument, vegetarianism and veganism are conceived not as ethical responses to violence, but rather as a way of being unable to think through violence. The ethical equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalalala over and over again. Under this view vegetarianism and veganism is about keeping our hands clean, about purity and innocence and the sacred. This is the mistake that Derrida makes in his interview with Nancy, "Eating Well." In it he argues that vegetarians have yet to sacrifice sacrifice. Well, no duh. Now, I've hung out with plenty of vegetarians and vegans, and in general they are crowd less congratulatory on their innocence as consumed by their own guilt. The blame they lay at the feet of those who still consume animal flesh and products is meet by an almost Newtonian response of equal and opposite blame upon themselves. This is the guilt that Adorno describes as a "guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life". Indeed, the escapist and utopian drive that seeks to ward off this guilt is to be found just as often (if not more so!) among those who deride vegetarianism as utopian. If you look at Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Jose Ortega y Gasset you see again and again a desire to expiate this guilt by sublimating their violence into a sacred ritual. It's like something straight out of Durkheim or Mauss.
Vegetarians and vegans are seldom Hegel's beautiful soul who faces the "silent fusion of the pithless unsubstantial elements of evaporated life," but are instead the other side of the dialectal coin, a damaged soul who has seen the face of the gorgon. This is exactly what I have tried to address in my discussion of vegetarian vampires and vampiric vegetarians. The vegetarian vampire is the liminal figure that exists on both sides, both beautiful soul and damaged soul. On the one hand the vegetarian vampire uses vegetarianism as a marker of innocence (this is one way to understand Hitler's propaganda around his non-existent vegetarianism, and also a way to understand the British National Party's Land and People campaign for animal welfare). On the other hand, the vegetarian vampire is a brooding, reflective creature; a guilt-ridden being. We need to escape these economies of innocence and guilt, of purity and pollution, of the sacred and the profane (this is a difference between myself and Agamben, who embraces the profane as a way out). What we need might be less of a critical animal studies, and more of a dark animal studies.
The critique, as Kant explains to us from the very beginning, has a policing and tribunal function. The critique distances and judges. I think that ground has very little to offer us, at least now. So, a dark animal studies repeats Tim Morton's move towards a dark ecology. The point isn't for innocence, the sacred, or distance. At the same time, it isn't for guilt, the profane, or redemption. It is, rather, to exit from these economies entirely. This is the point of ethics -- it is only because innocence and purity cannot exist that ethics can. As I have said elsewhere: Ethics is not about finding innocence, but about living after innocence. Ethics is about thinking and living in our postlapsarian world without alibi. It is from this position that we can begin to think about vegetarianism and veganism, or at least the vegetarianism and veganism of dark animal studies-- a becoming-vegetarian, a becoming-vegan.
As with all becomings what is at stake are alliances, packs, relations. Vegetarianism and veganism are practices of the self (a la late Foucault). As Foucault teaches us; following the return to certain Classical philosophical schools like the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Cynics; we need to reverse the Cartesian moment by which right knowledge produces right action (this is, in some ways, most explicit in Badiou's theory of revolution). Rather, certain practices allow us to access certain truths. These practices and productions of the self are not simply of the self. Rather, they open us to alliances with other beings, beings that may have existed for us before these practices as "sub-ontological" (to borrow a phrase from Nelson Maldonado-Torres). The navigation of these alliances; the force and diplomacy involved; are not automatic or always obvious. There are complex and rigorous philosophical questions involved. This is another reason to think of a dark animal studies, as an invocation of a double sense of opacity against comprehension. We need to both recognize the opacity of other beings, but also the greyness, the opacity from ever knowing fully ahead of time how such relations are going to play out. Becoming-vegetarian, becoming-vegan, are practices of self and other, pacts we make to packs.

A Post of Links

First up, Peter is right, and the Bennett discussion is moving here. If you write on Bennett during the week, make sure you drop me an email at thescu@gmail.com. I plan to be taking memorial day off, so I might not be able to get my opening posts on chapters 2 and 3 up until Tuesday, but I am aiming to have them done for Monday regardless.

Second, a really fascinating study on the brains of omnivores, ethical vegetarians, and ethical vegans (the terms are the study's, not mine). The study showed images of human and animal suffering to these three groups, and used fMRI to see how the brain lit up. As had been predicated based upon similar emotional quotient (EQ) studies, vegetarians and vegans display higher levels of empathy than omnivores. This is true for both images of human and animal suffering, but far more true for on the question of animal suffering. Also, there is part of the brain that lights up for if the empathy, but also a part that lights up if that empathy is also considered self-relevant. All three groups self-relevance centers lit up when showed images of human suffering. Whereas the vegetarians and vegans both had high degrees of empathy for animal suffering, the vegans were the group whose self-relevance also lit up. There is also other interesting stuff, too. Like, vegetarians and vegans frontal lobe (the part of the brain that controls abstract thought) comes on when shown images of animal suffering in order to calm the amygdala (the part of the brian associated with fear, and to a lesser degree disgust). This has broader implications for the field of neuropsychology, and helps support certain controversial theories. You can read more about this part in the discussion section. Anyway, I'm not a scientist, much less a neuropsychologist, so I could have made a mistake in my reading. And moreover, you should treat this for what it is, one scientific study with all the limitations that entails. Help with figuring out what this study does say, comes from my wonderful fiance, whose masters comes from MR research, and knows a bit of neuroanatomy from her current time in med school. Any mistakes, of course, remain my own but I am sure I can figure out a way to blame her.

Third, Levi has a smart post up on Cary Wolfe's What is Posthumanism?. My favorite line is,

In discussing “different perceptual modes” of humans and animals, Wolfe is simultaneously quite close and exceptionally far from object-oriented ontology.

That is exactly how I felt when I first started blogging and ran across all this discussion from people calling themselves speculative realists and object-oriented philosophers. Except what they were both close and far away from is critical animal studies (or at least what I understand by that term). And while I still think the two groups have more intellectual in-roads to be made together, at some point we might hit internal limits where such a dialogue has to come to an end. But both of us can only benefit from the downfall of anthropocentrism, and as long as anthropocentrism is the default position in philosophy I hope we continue to be allies and fellow travelers.

Forth, here is another in-depth and interesting article on the Humane Society and their political opposition (h/t A Thinking Reed). It is worth noting that the opposition doesn't seem to offer reasons to support the worse abuses of factory farming, but rather sticks with attacking the Humane Society. Another thing worth noting is that the attacks tend to be that the Humane Society doesn't plan to stick with eliminating these worse abuses, but is after a dismantling of the animal agricultural system, that they are vegan abolitionists. Anyway, worth a read.

I like adding music to my random posts of links, so I think I will keep up this new tradition. The new LCD Soundsystem album, This Is Happening, is one of those albums that start off alright, but gets better with each listening. "I Can Change"

Important Links

First up is the continued travesty and absurdity that is going on with Middlesex. I've not spent a lot of time blogging about it, because I feel that people with much larger audiences are doing great jobs. However, after the resent suspension of three faculty members and several students for protesting this crime against thought is simply too big of an atrocity. So, if you haven't been following what is happening, go to Save Middlesex Philosophy and find out what you can do to help.

Following up on the posts about Zamir on the question of veganism, Kazez has an interview up with Zamir. Highly worth reading. He certainly displays more ambiguity in this interview than I saw in the article. I still think his case for how the market will work is naive at best. I would find it more convincing if he could cite some historical examples where the market has responded the way he suggests.

Lastly, this article from National Journal lays out the ground of legislative battle being waged on behalf animal welfare very well. It's long, but I found it quite interesting and smart.

They Make Comments

I had two comments from my last post on Zamir and veganism.

The first from Adam, whose arguments are timely to say the least:

It's frustrating that so many critics of veganism believe that farmed animals can only be sustained in existence through consumption by humans. Farmed animals in "traditional" agricultural systems often had multiple "uses" including labor, fertilizer, fuel, and clothing, "recycling" food scraps, eating "pests", etc. Today these animals are no longer integrated into ago-ecological systems but rather pure production units, completely alienated from their labor and "species being," as Noske (1989) notes.

It is quite concealable that farmed animals remain participants in ago-ecological communities with some minor management by humans (as is the case with stray cats) that neither involve killing them nor managing them for our consumption. Eggs can be fed to other animals or fed back to chickens and the calcium form milk is better left in a mother cow's bones. Perhaps, humans could consume these products or wear them but that wouldn't be the purpose of their existence since the provide many other ecosystem services.

Further, the whole idea of not letting farmed animals go extinct is problematic. Most birds raised for flesh today are so mutated that they can barely flourish beyond adolescents because they are so plagued by monstrous growth (the same with pigs). These, in my opinion, are not animals we ought to keep in existence. Perhaps there is a case for heritage breeds, but even many of these are modern products of eugenics.

And the market is not going to solve this problem, in my opinion. Mainly because neither animals nor food should be commodified. If farmed animals are to exist they must exist in some niche other than as mere flesh or mere "child/ornamental pet;" in other words, they ought to be community members in food systems or otherwise transition into ferals. This requires social and cultural changes, not market changes, which is exactly why IOs and NGOs promotte technoscientific "solutions" such as changing feed content and capturing methane--it's less threatening.

So even most vegans, I think, get it wrong by seeking an elimination of any "use." This is why I actually like Haraway's treatment of animals more than Francione: it's less condescending and not a projection of social atomism, acknowledging that nonhumans are fellow participants, not merely victims. Personally, I think veganism needs to be re-conceptualized as something other than abstention/privation--but I'll save this discussion for a later time :)

He then clarifies his position on Haraway in a follow-up post:

Scu, I think Haraway has rightly been criticized on her conclusion about the permissibility of animal experimentation and her insufficient analysis of training and breeding dogs, I do think her major premises are correct. Unfortunately, I think she comes to unsound conclusions due to her emphasis on the interestingness and playfulness of things rather than engaging deeply with her critics.

Then EJ wades in with his own useful take:

Wow, I hadn't heard of this Zamir character before, but now I've quickly familiarized myself with the paper you're responding to and your response to it, and it's all pretty infuriating stuff.

I think what's wrong with Zamir and with any proponent of more humane forms of animal food production is that there is something terribly naive about thinking that a system in which animals are controlled by humans (whether or not they are legally property) will ever be one in which the interests of those animals will be respected in the way that is morally required (i.e., that animals' interests will not be neglected or "traded off" for supposed benefits for humans).

There are, as I see it, many reasons for thinking that human control of animals will never meet that ethical demand. There is a pretty strong conflict of interest between the human seeking to profit from animals (that is, profit either monetarily or just in terms of goods received) and the animals themselves. As long as animals are farmed on commercial farms in a capitalist society, the pressure to push animals to produce more food to their own detriment will be insurmountable. And even if it were conceivably surmountable, what kind of draconian system of inspections and regulations would need to be in place to make sure farmers were in compliance with the array of regulations to which they would be subject?

There is also, of course, the problem that humans just don't know as much about animals as they like to think. While it might be obvious to someone like Zamir that the relationship between humans and cats is some great ideal to which we should aspire, I am less and less inclined to believe that. Having lived with two indoor/outdoor cats, it is really amazing to see the difference in behavior between cats when they're inside our quiet, static indoor environments and when they're in an environment with rustling leaves, chirping birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and a vast world of odors that we are oblivious to. So much of what we think of as signs of contentment, laziness, happiness or fatigue in house cats may just be a manifestation of crushing boredom. Or it might not. The point is I have no way to settle the matter.

As time goes on, I think that concepts of humane ownership or humane use of animals is nothing more than an ideology, a myth we tell ourselves to quiet our consciences. It seems more and more like the myth of the edification of African slaves through their exposure to christian society or the ideal of domestic, material bliss that justified making housewife the all but obligatory occupation of generations of women. While people tout the ideal of the human-dog relationship, millions of dogs are put to death every year for lack of available homes, millions of others suffer through lives of neglect or abuse, and still more are members of breeds that are predisposed to all sorts of health problems.

In sum, I just don't see much potential for ethical use, ownership or control of animals. While such a relationship might be conceivable (and even there I'm doubtful), it would be extremely difficult to achieve and probably impossible to maintain.

Why I disagree with Zamir: Or why ethical vegetarianism isn't superior

I never know what do with Tzachi Zamir, the author of Ethics and the Beast: A Speciesist Argument for Animal Liberation. Sadly, I have still only read selections from that book, rather than in toto. One of the arguments he advances in that work is that ethical vegetarianism is superior to ethical veganism. In order to exam that argument, we can turn to his article on veganism. And this post will seem at times harsh to Zamir, and I don't mean for them to be. He is obviously insightful and dedicated. In the end, though, I just find his argument unsustainable.
I guess before we go further, I should say a few things about my current stances on these issues. I'm not sure I believe in an absolutely ethically vegan position. Which is to say, I am not sure that every production and possible consumption of an animal product is always and forever wrong. I do believe, however, that I could be wrong about this one. But, from a practical standpoint, I believe that ethical veganism is almost always going to be necessary. There just are not many times when most of us will have access to eggs, milk, etc. that did not depend upon systematic violence and exploitation of other animals (from the genes of their birth to their eventual death). I am, however, not one of those people who believe there is no moral distinction between vegetarianism and eating animals' flesh. And I am certainly not one of those people who believe vegetarianism is somehow worse than that of flesh eating. Now that that is cleared up, let's get into the meat of the argument.

Zamir divides up pro-animal welfare people into three categories: vegans, tentative vegans, and vegetarians. Vegetarians are people who don't eat animal flesh (of any sort) but who do eat eggs and milk from 'progressive sources'. Vegans believe that all use of animals and their products are equal to exploitation of animals. Therefore, we can never eat an egg, wear wool, live with a companion animal, that does not entail violence and exploitation to other animals. Tentative vegans (a phrase I don't particularly care for), believes that in some idealized or utopian situation it might be possible to use animal products, but for practical purposes we have to be vegans currently.

Jean Kazez provides a good overview of Zamir's arguments along with her objections to his argument here, and I suggest reading it. But I am going to focus on my objections to Zamir's work. He spends a lot of time trying to argue that vegans get it wrong, and that it is possible to have a non-exploitative relationship with animals, that includes digesting animal products. Again, I think he is right, but I don't think he meets his burden of proof here. First of all, because I think the concept of exploitation remains fundamentally under thought in the article. Now, there are limits to article spaces, and I don't know if he gets more thoroughly into this question elsewhere, or if he plans to do so. However, I am not sure the most luxurious pet environment isn't coercive in some way. Zamir feels that I would believe this only if I anthropomorphed the other animal into an autonomous individual. Rather, according to Zamir, I should see the pet as as a child. I think this is a good situation to understand Deleuze and Guattari's objection to the pet in A Thousand Plateaus. Particularly, they argue against the oedipalizing nature of pets, the threat is to see them as children (and I would add that part of that threat is naturalizing paternalism, and that we should be uncomfortable with paternalism, even to children). I worry about my relationship with my cat, and I am often raked by moments of existential doubt on being a pet owner. And it isn't because I anthropomorphize my cat, but because I am frequently confronted by both the cat's alienness and similarity. That the cat's desires and thoughts remain fundamentally opaque, and the power I wield over that being is so casual and absolute. How can any sane person not have moments of moral vertigo in such situations? Owning a life that has its own desires, capacities, and goals should always provoke unease, no matter how much I love that life.
I would agree that good pet environments are usually superior to letting them survive in the wild, particularly the urban wild. However, that doesn't prove that we should be in the business of reproducing animal life. Just because my cat's life is better off than the alternative doesn't mean that not existing is a better alternative (for the record, I think my cat is better off existing), and that requires more philosophical work than Zamir gets to his article. In order to follow this point means getting into his arguments about why vegetarianism is superior to veganism, so let me bracket this discussion briefly to make a few other points.
In Zamir's discussions about there being animals who can be well treated and still exist as pets or producers of milk, eggs, and wool, it is striking how often these examples are filled with some of the shocking and regular forms of violence we bring to bear on other animals. Some of these are things that Zamir supports or finds acceptable, some feel him with unease and it is unclear how he comes down on these issues, and some he completely objects to. To give examples, he completely objects to having the vocal cords of dogs cut (good for him), he is filled with unease over debeaking of chickens and declawing of cats, and he finds forced and constant impregnation of cows acceptable and spaying and neutering of cats and dogs to be supported. All of these things, with the exception of spaying and neutering which I am uneasy about but support, I find objectionable. I am particularly horrified that keeping a being constantly impregnated against their will is something he doesn't even seem uneasy about. Furthermore, Zamir doesn't bring up two forms of systematic violence that would still plague animals in a purely vegetarian world: one is that of genetics and the other is animal sociality. The issue of genetics is that we have breed many animals into the walking dead. Zamir objects to bringing a being into existence whose teleology is determined, but we have created many animals whose teleology is determined genetically and violently. Moreover, Zamir either doesn't seem to believe that breaking up animals from the societies and families they exist in is a problem, or that his vegetarian ideal will somehow not cause this to happen. While we are unsure of different species's levels of bonding and sociality, it is not to say that it doesn't exist. This goes back to my point about the opacity of the animal and my unease in casually wielding power over their lives.
Now, to unbracket the earlier point on vegetarianism vs. veganism. Zamir believes that we have a duty both preserve species, but also to keep a large quantity of species around. Now, I have written before about my problems with this obviously biopolitical species logic. However, the entire question to if we owe duties to non-existent beings, or at least not yet beings, is a complicated question (random question for any of the OOO people who might still be reading this. Harman doesn't think potentiality or the virtual are correct ontological determinations. Does that means his version of ontology excludes the ability to plan for future generations? I don't mean this flippantly, but seriously, if not particularly thought out). However, Zamir's belief that we owe not just a species the right of reproduction, but that we must be on the side of quantity is a move I honestly did not understand in his article. Is it a responsibility to the species, or to each potential life? If the former, is there a cap or some amount that is properly paid off that after which we don't have to increase that species' numbers? If the latter, does that mean every time we practice birth control I am doing a violence or morally suspect act? I am not trying to be intentionally dense, I honestly did not follow his argument or its implications. Regardless of feeling that these arguments are not fleshed out, let move on. Zamir argues that a vegan world means that some species might go extinct, or at the very least many domesticated animals would see large reductions of numbers to morally unacceptable levels. In order to make sure this doesn't happen to chickens, cows, and sheep we should practice vegetarianism. Now, you might object that even eggs, dairy, and wool bought from progressive sources still practice horrible and unforgivable actions. The mass slaughter of male chicks when they are born, the selling off of male calves to become veal, and the like. In short, one assumes that the logic of ethical vegetarianism might lead one to ethical veganism. However, Zamir argues that we should nudge and support progressive sources for the welfare of animals, otherwise we are left with the pure factory farmed conditions of the non-progressive sources. Moreover, that withdrawing from the market doesn't drive any market forces. Well, the number of committed vegetarians in this country, much less vegans, is small enough to make one weep. I think we have very, very little influence on market forces. But even outside of that issue, Zamir doesn't confront what I call, following the term greenwashing, humane-washing. Because, for the most part, increasing the humane conditions of animals decrease profits market logic dictates that people don't increase humane conditions. But, one might object, isn't this why it is important that we demand more humanely raised animal products? Well, just as with greenwashing, humane-washing involves selling the image and myth of more humanely raised animals while not fulfilling this promise. Which makes far more market sense really. And we have seen this, over and over again. We have seen this with so-called cage free eggs, and we have seen this with humanely raised meat. Increased demand in both these cases didn't lead to better conditions, it frequently led to companies decreasing standards in order to gather the profits of higher demand. Market forces just don't seem to work the way that Zamir presents them as working, which makes it hard to depend upon this argument for moral superiority. And, while I cannot prove this, my gut feeling is that large scale production of animal products just cannot be achieved without unacceptable living conditions for animals. To give one example, Zamir says that he was informed that cannibalism among chickens doesn't just happen with factory farm conditions (indeed, factory farm conditions can often minimize issues of cannibalism by controlling for diet and light), but happen outside of factory farmed conditions. My understanding is that this is true, and that even a medium size fairly free roaming group of chickens can often lead to cannibalism (especially if issues of feed, spaces for mating, etc, are not properly attended to). This means that debeaking is common even with many free-roaming chicken farms. We need totally free roaming and very small numbers of chickens given a great deal of attention to prevent cannibalism. Which is just not a model for large-scale egg production. People can have pet chickens that they can have relatively guilt free eggs from, but not be able to operate a large chicken farm from without issues of debeaking and/or cannibalism.
Finally, I think Zamir intensifies the idea of combining vegetarianism and veganism with economic rationality. I find this move troubling, and problematic. Especially because economic rationality seems so implicated in some of the most vicious relations to animals. When I talk about becoming-vegan, or becoming-vegetarian I mean partially developing a concept outside of models of economic rationality. Vegetarianism and veganism means confronting basic questions of political economy. And being a vegan or a vegetarian is not, despite what Peter Singer says, the model of the boycott. It's relationship to the boycott is like the relationship of the general to the particular strike, the forms may be similar, but the stakes are entirely different.
Now, part of my concept of becoming-vegan and becoming-vegetarian is to get away from our rituals of innocence and our protocols of purity. So, this post is not some sort of attack on vegetarianism. But I know, and you know, that vegetarianism isn't morally superior to veganism, that no matter how attractive the argument is, it's bunk. I wish it were true, I wish I could have relationships with pets that were not filled with moral vertigo, and I enjoyed dairy and eggs and wish I could consume them guilt free. And while I see Zamir as an ally in struggle, and I think he is a clear thinker and a sound writer, I don't find comfort in this article.