Harold Fromm
University Associate in English
University of Arizona
http://hfromm.net/professional
Vegans vs. Evolution
[For an exact duplicate of the printed
version click here.]
In “Animal, Vegetable, Miserable,” an
op-ed piece in the New York Times on
Steiner provides a sample list of everyday
products derived from animals, but a complete list, extending far beyond even
what he seems to imagine, would stun the average reader. Leather shoes,
gelatin, and Band-Aids are the least of it. Reading the insightful letters that
the Times chose as replies to Steiner’s essay, I was struck more
by what was missing in this controversy than what was actually said. The
unspoken concept behind his reverence for mice and his cat was “biocentrism,” a
hoaxing notion that I have contended with in my own writings about ecocriticism
over the past 25 years. (See The Nature of Being Human: From
Environmentalism to Consciousness, Johns
Our survival came about through
evolution—our own adjustment to the planet—often ruthless, requiring millions
of years (billions, in the larger purview) of both planetary nurturing and
destroying of its inhabitants. When life starts out again from residual
survivors of catastrophe, now in a new ecosystem, those most attuned (“adapted”
is the word) to the reconstituted environment produce offspring that can
survive. Our prehistoric hominid ancestors were aided in this by animals, their
flesh as food, their skins as clothing and shelter, their bones as raw
materials for weapons and artifacts. Instead of devoting their days to
gathering low protein fibrous plants rather like pandas who spend most of their
lives chewing bamboo, they were gradually habituated to hunting in
addition to their gathering, thereby benefiting from more nourishing and
quickly digested high protein food that, according to Richard Wrangham[1], became even more digestible and
nutritious from cooking, which eventually even altered the architecture of our
jaws and gut, making us look less apelike and more “refined.” Since survival
itself is ruthlessly victimized by other predators in the struggle for
resources in changing ecosystems, meat-eating contributed to brain enlargement,
which in turn abetted the outwitting of less evolved enemies.
As one of the more keen responders to his article observed, Steiner's
tenderness for his cat is not very different from the “anthropocentric”
nurturing of animals in the zoos that he reviles as disrespectful of the rest
of the creation. And since I have never met a cat that ate butternut squash or
tomatoes, even his cat needs to eat meat and fish (unless Steiner can
justify cruel deprivation as a form of moral consideration.) But
Steiner's respect is very selective indeed, an example of what used to be
called the Bambi Syndrome. Only animals beautiful and large enough to be
registered by the senses of Homo sapiens figure in this tender concern.
E.O. Wilson some time ago alerted us to the millions of microscopic life forms
found in a square inch of earth he cut out from a rainforest. Life is everywhere.
I squash millions of organisms, micro and otherwise, with each step
and wash down the drain unnoticed multitudes with each shower.
Brushing my teeth kills innumerable bacteria (it’s them or my gums!). With
every swallow I destroy some of the bacteria in my gut that keep me alive by
helping to digest my food. But even larger creatures such as cockroaches and
rats, do they enter into Steiner's purview? And the AIDS virus, the swine flu,
tuberculosis? Does he want to eschew antibiotics and vaccines for his
life out of respect for theirs? Would he deprive his children of
(animal-derived) drugs and let them die, in the manner of extremist
faith-healing religions?
Steiner's grandstanding for carefully selected life forms, which makes
his friends suffer for the presumed benefits of his friendship, as they expend
effort to subserve his sensitivities—his meat and
dairy-free diet, his avoidance of leather and other animal products—doesn't
produce much besides a sense of his own virtue. Does eating or not eating
certain foods contribute to one’s so-called “spirituality,” or does it in fact
reduce one’s life to a trivial materiality, sniffing out traces of animal DNA
in increasingly minute particles, like a teenager in front of the mirror
searching his face for new zits to agonize about? The biggest source of
animal DNA is one’s own animal body. The imputed viciousness starts right at
home, permeating every aspect of one’s life. Know thyself—an animal among
animals!
As the “ethical vegan” constricts his
diet, social life, and everything else, in a futile attempt to make his
footprint smaller and smaller, will he soon be walking on his toes like a
ballet dancer? And if so, what is the step after that—pure spirit (a euphemism
for bodily death)? If existence is the problem—which it is—then only
nonexistence can cure it. The supreme biocentric act
is not to discover yet one more animal product to abstain from (an
infinite list). The supreme biocentric act is dying,
returning the planet’s finite matter and energy you have appropriated for
yourself and giving them back to the creatures from whom you stole them by
being alive. And what makes them so pure? Are they shedding tears as
they tear you and each other apart? The real “crime” is existence, not being or
using animals. The Original Sin is life itself. To be alive is to be a
murderer.
My own diet is very high on plants and low on meat and my carbon footprint is
small indeed but mainly out of concern for my own health and the planet
that keeps us alive. Beyond that, I'm an admirer of Peter Singer,
Michael Pollan, and J.M. Coetzee and I well
approve of their abhorrence of the brutal treatment of animals. But Pollan is not a vegetarian and Singer, even as author of
the influential book Animal Liberation in 1973, is not a vegan. But by
1999, when J.M. Coetzee’s novella The Lives of Animals appeared (a
curious but typically ambiguous Coetzee production), the author invited
four philosophic replies to be included as a postscript. One of these was by
Peter Singer. In a little short story of his own, Singer has his
philosopher-protagonist raise objections to the extreme egalitarianism of
Coetzee’s main character, Elizabeth Costello, who equates human and animal
consciousness and condemns the killing of animals for food as the equivalent of
the Holocaust. Singer’s philosopher tells his own vegan daughter, a propos of
the famous Thomas Nagel essay on human and bat consciousness that so engages
Costello, “The value that is lost when something is emptied depends on
what was there when it was full, and there is more to human existence than
there is to bat existence.”
Since Singer’s 1973 shot heard ‘round the
world, both environmentalism and Darwinian sciences have become two of the
leading world-views of twenty-first century culture. Organic growing of
vegetables and animals and the Darwinian Modern Synthesis that provides a
theoretical framework for today’s neurosciences have influenced the matter of
killing and eating animals to the point where restaurants increasingly have
vegetarian sections on their menus. But the philosophic issue has hardly
been resolved, which brings us back to practice vs. theory.
I think vegetarianism is admirable. I
would recommend it, even though farming takes its own toll on the animal
creation. And everyday practical veganism
seems as defensible as vegetarianism, if somewhat extreme. It’s so-called ethical
or philosophical veganism that has preposterous pretensions of
ascetic piety. Unlike ethical vegans, who are enlisted in an open-ended but
futile metaphysic of virtue and self-blamelessness that pretends to escape from
the conditions of life itself, vegetarians have more limited goals and have
marked out a manageable territory with fewer cosmic pretensions. They are
concerned about their health. Or they don’t want animals to be raised expressly
to be tortured and killed—especially in factory farms and slaughterhouses—for
their dinner plates. Or they don’t want to ingest the dead bodies of fairly
complex creatures with varying degrees of consciousness, which is apt to make
them feel queasy. No doubt they would prefer all animals (whatever that might
include) to be treated humanely (in the mode of
At least vegetarianism—though it can’t
solve the moral dilemma— is more or less possible in both theory and practice.
It can turn its attention if it wishes to ameliorating the conditions of
animals in factory farms and brutal slaughter house conveyor belts, with still
living animals hanging from hooks. It can try to convince the general public
that feeding ten pounds of grains to cows for one pound of beef is
counterproductive in a world soon to face shortages of food from population
growth and global warming. It can stress the deleterious effects of saturated
fat and cholesterol on human health. It can do good to both ourselves and the
planet.
“Ethical Veganism” fails on all
counts. For behind such a belief is the hopeless longing for innocence. Except
that there is no innocence. However delicate our moral sensibilities, it still
remains that to be alive is to be a murderer. Tip-toeing through the
tulips (we might be killing the bees inside) won’t solve the problem. And since
we are carnivores (“omnivores,” if that makes you feel better) from the
moment of conception, we emerge from the womb already “guilty.” Our animal DNA
is everywhere in our lives. Even if our parents eschewed meat, to have been
born at all we must have been eating our mother during gestation, and after
birth we need her milk, which is just another dairy product from animals.[3]
We’re compromised from the start. Death is the only form of purification.
Alive, we have no choice but to accept our complicity, because life is a
product of death. Do as much as you can to minimize the damage and suffering
from the savagery of existence, because the “environment” is us. But as long as
we are among the living, we should stop pretending to virtues we can't possibly
have.
[1] Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human,
Harvard U.P., 2009.
[2]
[3] Months after I had written this sentence, Nicholas
Wade, the brilliant New York Times science writer, refers to Bruce
German, a researcher at the