problems with some common vegan arguments

The strategy that vegans employ for their cause has bothered me for a while.

1. Vegans often use weak arguments to justify their position.

I am not saying this in defense of animal consumption. I do believe that the ethics of food is more complex and subtle than vegans often portray it. Consider the blog, http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.com/2009/06/plant-sentience.html . In this article, we see many of the same tired arguments that vegans always use. For example, the criticism that considering plants sentient goes against common sense and science. Here the argument is one based on authority (the same authority that the vegan will later on use an emotional argument to supersede). Perhaps the vegan should read articles on plant intelligence, memory, communication, information centralization, risk analysis, by botanists such as Baluksa, Mancuso, Trewavas and others before making claims on behalf of science. Perhaps the vegan should consider more deeply what sentience is, how it might more likely be a property of a sensory-motor being, such as any cell, and look into the theory of autopoiesis a little more. The problem is this: the vegan chooses what to eat or not eat based on sentience. In order for the vegan to live, he or she must clearly eat. Therefore the vegan must draw an absolute dividing line between what is and isn't sentient. Because humans cannot eat rocks, the vegan must erect this great divide between living beings. They then blind themselves to the vast similarities between kingdoms, and promote speciesist norms, while projecting the belief that they alone maintain a truly ethical position.

Another common vegan argument that the author of the stated blog also replays for us is the famous argument that animals require 10 times their weight in vegetable to produce their own weight. If we all eat just plants, the argument goes, we end up saving 10 (I guess actually 9) times as much plants, so even the non-scientific believers in plant sentience will be more effective in saving plants by eating them directly. It is not often considered that, by killing the animal, the non-vegan is actually preventing it from further consumption of plants. And we gradually realize that the vegan's argument only really works if those animals stop existing!

What is particularly distressing about the said author's arguments are his confounding sensitivity with computational power, his placing computers as ethically closer to humans than plants, and his strange application of the law of parsimony to plant sentience. Applying the law of parsimony leads behaviourists to deny feelings in all living things not just plants. Occam's razor is not a fact about the universe. It is a method to achieve simple scientific theories. There is no metaphysical reason why a simpler theory is a more accurate representation of the universe than any other. But more importantly, there is no reason to assume that there even exist two different theories that have precisely the same explanatory power and effect in the world. There are a lot of studies that would never be conducted and therefore knowledge not produced were we to ignore the possibility that plants are sentient because it is simpler to just consider them reflex machines. What is most disturbing though is the assumption that a tool to produce scientific theory can be used as a tool to make ethical claims. I sincerely hope vegans do not follow this lead.

I repeat: I have nothing against veganism. I just think many vegans use arguments that are not only problematic, they are also actually counterproductive to their own motivations, which are at bottom (I hope) ethical.

2. The manner in which vegans promote their cause often immediately closes off others.

I also believe that many vegans do injustice to their cause because they have such a firm conviction that what they are doing is "right". It is much more attractive for a would-be convert to sense that the vegan is struggling with their own ethical dilemmas, as unsure and falliable and open as anyone else. Ultimately the invitation is to explore morality not to impose specific morals.

Are any of us really sure that we are doing is "true"? Even Gandhi, who put his life on his line repeatedly for what he believed, always proclaimed that the ethical truth was not attainable by mortal humans, and the closest we could get to it was by seeking truth. The act of struggling to find something is what keeps us ethical, not the act of finding it, worshipping what we have found as fundamentally real, and condemning those who aren't in line with what we have found. Vegans might find more supporters if they stopped putting everything in absolute categories and continued trying to figure out what they should do in the world. They often think that they should model their practice and convictions and that they can be a force of change in the world because others will learn from their modelling. Others do learn. But they don't often learn to be vegan. They learn what the vegan is REALLY modelling: fundamentalism, close-mindedness, self-righteousness. And it is with these same three bricks that the nonvegan closes him or herself off to the vegan.

Finally, I want to apologize if you are a humble, open-minded vegan who does not fit the description or use the arguments I have put forward in this blog post. I have nothing against vegans and I actually want to see them educate more effectively. Hopefully by identifying some of the weaknesses in their approaches, they can work to establishing a more ethical and educationally inspirational movement.

Gathering Days

Gathering days are days when one can only eat things that one has gathered. The concept first came to me at my school in Laos, where I noticed many of my students were becoming increasingly accustomed to the market-bought veggies and meat constantly available. I realized how our school was inadvertently unhinging students from a living connection with the land, despite teaching the importance of this connection in class. Upon returning to Canada, I became aware of how much less I knew about the wild beings that live here compared to those that surround me and my hut in Laos. I could only identify a handful of wild edibles and didn’t really have an understanding of when and where they grow. I’ve decided to institute “gathering days” here in Canada. I will start by doing them once every lunar-month, two days before each full moon. This practice will connect me with the lifeforms around me, with their changes throughout the seasons, and with the presence of the moon (which immediately becomes unnoticed upon entering a city). Down by the lake, I’ve noticed a great deal of chicory, touch-me-nots, and wild carrots, which will serve me well with the crabapples and mullein tisane next Sunday. I will have to begin making preparations for the winter too.

a paradigm shift on the concept of paradigm shifting?

Metaphysical, ontological and epistemological frameworks destroy not simply by their being lived out as false beliefs. None of them are believed fully enough to be internalized into the workings of the body that completely. Rather, they destroy through the compromise they reach with the body, and by the incongruence between belief and action that ensues. This is another reason why “paradigm shifting” and some of the presumptions of “transformative learning” based on thought-down experiences are along not enough. To illustrate this with a simple example: when the paradigm of determinism swept over us as a culture, it did so incompletely, for even its staunchest allies acted out their daily affairs without ever really doing away with the causal “I”. Nevertheless, as a cultural phenomena, determinism became accepted in technological, futuristic and economic spheres, and in ethical considerations generally, to the extent that our actions based on abstract and reasoned modes of thought were lured by determinism’s enthralling logic. The assumption that changing thought alone is sufficient is erroneous for the same reason that ideal is generally: solitary power is placed on thought, which is in fact but a recent player in the game. The body, the heart, and the context have their own modes of being which, although interactive with thought, are certainly not subordinate to it.

eteragogy?

“Pedagogy” and “andragogy” are both inappropriate terms for an ecological perspective on our learning and teaching relations with others. First of all, there is no separation between ways of educating adults and children. More importantly though, these terms mislead us into perceiving education as a uniquely human affair. They cut us off from the rich and continuous learning interactions that go on between us and other life forms. Terms such as these have a self-validating nature about them: once we internalize that learning relationships do not occur between us and other species, then we go about our daily lives ignoring those very beings that would be in dialogue with us were we open to it. I have been toying with new sorts of words and think that something more like “eteragogy” or “heterogogy” (or perhaps even “biogogy”) would be more inclusive for reorienting education to being about all humans, all life forms, all interactions. "Etera" is Greek for "other" or "another". It refers to the interactions one has with every other interacting being -including with oneself. I accept that we often live our day to day affairs in a curious dialectic with ourselves: always within us one who leads and the one who is led. What is always at issue is the fact that I am in interaction with someone else, something "other" than the "I" who is conscious of this interaction.

I think it is suitable enough to keep the suffix “gogy” for now - when we interact with others, we really do lead them to believe or act in this or that way, whether we do so consciously, willingly, or otherwise. This leading may be in directions unanticipated than our original intentions.

the difference that makes a difference

When Bateson writes “the interaction between parts of mind is triggered by differences”, what are we to take this to mean? The first thing that would likely leap to you is the thought of an axon firing once it had acquired sufficient stimuli to cross its threshold. There is a line drawn such that passing it is considered a “difference”. It works in this on/off way, translating what is only a difference in degree into a difference in kind. The nervous system also codes differences in degree, but only after the signal has proved important enough to be coded in the first place. Variations in intensity are thereafter indicated by the frequency of firing. From Bateson’s point of view, it is that initial threshold that is crucial though, it discriminating the “difference that makes a difference”.

Bateson claims that that which occurs within the nervous system is but a minute fragment of what we should consider “mind” and that triggering by recognition of difference can occur at various points, not simply those within neurons. For example, a flock of animals may choose to migrate after the food supply has dipped below a threshold and any changes before that point are not deemed by them as relevant. In playing a musical instrument, the difference in the sound of the note just played leads one to play the next note.

Teaching may also be thought about as trying to create a “difference that makes a difference” -a pedagogical experience that becomes impactful enough to distinguish itself from the amorphous slurry of experiences that occur in every person’s life. As cultural workers, we also hope to make this difference when aspire to cross beyond a threshold, or a “tipping point” in our activism or advocacy. Our options and our strategies can be informed by the implications of this wider view of mind.

For instance, take the neuron firing as a negative example: all mental systems seem to have built-in mechanisms that prevent such differences from occurring as well. This is evident by the very fact that a threshold exists in the first place. If these mechanisms are gauging "relevance" too high, that part of the system becomes insensitive. Habit forming drugs, to which the body quickly acclimatize, require increasing doses to “make a difference” and thus desensitize the body to the substance. However, these mechanisms can operate as negative feedback as well as positive feedback. For example, humans within cultures become insensitive to experiences that question the cultural framework, and this insensitivity may itself be a part of the cultural framework itself. For these people, it may require a great deal of repeated stimuli to actually reach a threshold that is significant.

bateson's block

Gregory Bateson insisted that developing our aesthetic sense through the arts was necessary for us to get in touch with our more-than-rational selves. He pointed out that the workings of our “mind”, which he understood as the information circuits that pass through and beyond us into the ecosystems within which we are embedded, does not operate in a linearly causal manner. The conscious/rational mind is a rather recent invention in this system, and one that often disrupts the larger mind that our body and non-rational selves have evolved to gracefully inhabit. It does this by positing very short-term and local goals for itself, goals which appear linear, but only because the conscious mind is incapable of grasping all the implications and chains of pathways that come out of the action. When engaged in art, we allow ourselves to influence and be influenced by our artwork in a continuously recursive, albeit non-logical way. This provides a miniature feedback loop that compares with the larger one that we are also continuously engaged in. It also shows how a process of perpetual non-logical adjustment creates beauty, the same sort of beauty that has emerged in organisms and landscapes. However, it is clear to me that developing our aesthetic sense, on its own, is not sufficient to make our larger mental circuits sane. Many artists are known to be self-absorbed and hardly considered socially or environmentally sensitive in their actions. Bateson is therefore correct in attempting to teach the importance of his ecological perspective along with his claims that we develop our aesthetic senses, undoubtedly recognizing that either one, on its own, is likely to cause a great deal more damage than good. But here lies the paradox that so chilled him: this plan, is it not... planned? And if I deliberately don’t plan it, then isn’t that also, in an important sense, a ... ?

the ultimate pragmatist

Some indigenous explanations of worldly phenomena were accurate enough to not be abandoned over centuries of belief. These same explanations, through an important sort of self-validation, ended up maintaining the very truth of their claims: to the extent that humans living under their belief came to act in certain ways, the natural world expected it and indeed acted back in turn. It is in this way that Joe Sheridan says indigenous myths complete ecosystems. The level of accuracy demanded by modern science, which by its nature must perpetually revise itself and lead believers to successively new and unforeseen ways of living, is unlikely to be necessary for the existence of life on earth. In fact, one might say that there is an optimal level of accuracy that leads to a perfect combination of predictability, while simultaneously creating patterns of human behaviour that complete the ecosystem. Myths probably hovered about this level, as the stories changed themselves over generations of re-telling. Nature is the ultimate pragmatist here: the validity of a “truth”, to paraphrase Dewey, is judged by the consequences of the actions that lead from it –and an absolutely accurate prediction that causes the destruction of our life support system just can’t be considered “true”.