Why is there still no vegan revolution?

Against a local and relative morality

First, a story.

Two guests are seated together at a large dinner party. One, an elegant woman, is eating the vegan menu option. The other, a rather uncouth looking man, is eating the pork.

“Why don’t you eat meat?” asks the man.

“I don’t believe in eating animals. I think it’s wrong,” the woman answers.

“You think I’m wrong?” The man looks concerned and puts down his fork.

“Er, no,” the woman stammers. “What I mean to say is, I personally think it’s wrong — for me. You have to follow your own conscience.”

“I see. I’ll follow my own conscience, then.” The man begins eating again.

Later that night, after all the guests have been drinking, the two guests cross paths again in a dark hallway by the restrooms. The man pulls out a switchblade and accosts her. He brandishes the blade at her and demands she hand over all her money and jewelry.

“What are you doing?! You can’t do this! It’s wrong!” she protests.

The man shrugs. “It’s wrong for you. I follow my own conscience.”

Can vegans coexist with non-vegans? From a non-vegan perspective, the answer would obviously be yes. I’m here to argue, from the perspective of people who have chosen to become vegan for moral reasons, the only logical answer is “no.” Strangely, most moral vegans don’t behave that way.

Let’s narrow down what I’m talking about here, though. We’re talking about moral vegans. Not health vegans. Not cultural vegans.

Health vegans don’t count. There’s a trend of people who are interested in veganism for alleged health benefits because somebody on Instagram does it. This is just a peculiar manifestation of the tendency to form strong opinions on food. Every millennial has several ridiculous food superstitions founded on some barely-scientific research which was repeated 20 times until it passed the p=.05 test for statistical significance. Maybe fat is good and carbs are bad, except fruit somehow — fruits are different because complex sugars are — hey look a blimp! Dairy is good now because it’s high in fat, but don’t forget milk is a scam by the Big Milk industry. Eat extra flax and avocado toast with your 7 supplement pills and smoothies. Coffee cures cancer and makes you smarter. Coffee causes cancer and makes you dumb. Eat truckloads of kale because it’s high in nobody remembers what. Avoid added sugars but down 8 craft beers a week. Examine every food label for the 1–2 evil ingredients you have personally chosen to avoid, but ignore the other 17 suspicious sounding chemicals because who cares, nobody demonized those yet. And for some people, not eating meat is good for your health because that’s just the first article they read when they were vulnerable to the power of suggestion. There is so much health and wellness research out there that nearly any opinion can be supported or disputed. It’s easy to convince people to believe in certain health facts, but nearly impossible to de-convert their established beliefs.

Why do people come up with random foods to pursue or avoid? There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that humans are hardwired to make up arbitrary rules about what they eat and not eat. People subscribe to random health advice while still doing all the other unhealthy things. This might be rooted in the same “food opinion” instinct which over time can turn into an aspect of a religion, such as how Jews and Muslims avoid pork but not most other meats, or how westerners won’t eat canine while others will. Health vegans might be shockingly similar to cultural vegans.

But cultural vegans also don’t count. So Hindus don’t count. Indians still live in a world where culture, religion, and morality are all intertwined into one thing. That’s how religion/culture/morality have worked in most places on Earth for most of human history, despite it being a paradigm completely unimaginable from the fleeting perspective of western and American thought, where people think religion is an internal matter of faith, and culture and law and morality are totally separate. It’s out of my scope to explain the finer points of orthodoxy vs. orthopraxy, but if you’re an American accustomed to thinking of religion as a matter of personal faith, you might want to read up. So it’s difficult to say that the vegetarian/vegan tendencies of Hindus are cultural or moral or religious; that’s all the same. But it is clear that it’s a very different question for them than for an American vegan. An Indian who abstains from meat is embracing and perpetuating the societal norms and the moral values shared by their society and set forth by their ancient ancestors. Being vegan is, in a sense, polite. Staying true to that precept, many Indians who move to America split the difference and decide to start eating chicken and/or sausages or ground meat — they compromise their food taboos just as they combine their old culture with a partial assimilation of new culture. Morality isn’t only about personal conviction but also about establishing shared traditions and values with the rest of society. An American vegan is doing precisely the opposite — rejecting cultural norms, values, tradition, and the economic underpinnings of the society they share with their neighbors. The essence of this vegan is that of a rebel.

What I’m really talking about here is moral veganism. Vegan converts. Not the millennial vegan converts who think they’re going to lose weight by shotgunning a pound of soybeans for lunch. (Note: it will cause gas.) Not anybody who never ate meat because their parents never ate it, and what would the neighbors think? I’m talking about the vegan converts who can’t eat meat because they looked a fun and cool Labrador in the eye and decided they couldn’t eat it, nor for some reason spicy chicken wings. Moral vegans.

You greet me getting the mail. You sit next to me in a meeting. I eat meat and have no plans to stop. Are we just supposed to act like you don’t, every single day, make conscious moral decisions which implicate me, a barbecue-loving carnivore, as morally inferior? How can we get along? How can you act like I’m your peer? How can I act like we’re peers? Am I supposed to act like you’re not judging me? Because you should be.

If you were at all consistent, you could never view me as your peer. I’m morally inferior. You should, at the very least, believe people like me should occupy a lower caste in society reserved for morally repugnant-but-still-necessary lower lifeforms. Just above a farm animal, appropriately.

I think what most moral vegans would say is “It’s just my personal choice that I don’t want to impose on others.” But like the strange parable from the opening, that sort of “localized morality” — a morality bounded on each person’s preferences — isn’t the basis of any sound ethics. Morality is not about a personal choice. There are things I reject for moral reasons, ranging from theft to assault to human trafficking. Do I simply abstain from these activities and leave it to other people to make up their own mind about whether to engage in them? Of course not. I ascribe an approximate level of severity to different crimes and then expect that society can craft and enforce penalties commensurate with the crimes.

If vegans really think eating animals is wrong, they should think it’s wrong for everyone. The next question becomes that of magnitude. Not all crimes are equal. Littering is not equivalent to murder. Where would meat consumption rank?I would think it would rate rather high on severity, because it entails not just the consumption of animals, but the violent act of mass slaughter.

Actually, it’s more sinister than mere killing. I’m not a vegan, so maybe I have this backwards, but to me, the ethical qualms about meat production are ranked according to reverse chronological order. Eating the meat doesn’t matter. Killing the meat isn’t really a big deal. Rearing the meat in poor living conditions is unfortunate. It’s the breeding of the animals which gives me pause. To create the life for my own selfish means, that’s ethically questionable. It’s not the death, it’s the birth. But for moral vegans who even have problems with just the death part of it(they would likely object to hunting as well,) I don’t understand how you can go on living life like everything is normal, even sitting down for lunch with people eating hamburgers and bologna sandwiches.

How severe a crime should meat consumption be considered? We know that on one end of the spectrum, there are vegans — ones who are often considered extremists — who believe animal life should be equally valued as humans. But we can’t group all vegans together. Nonetheless, because of the violent nature of the meat industry, one expects the average attitude for vegans would rank the criminal severity of meat somewhere in the middle: greater than petty theft, but less than human murder.

Yet there’s almost zero effort toward trying to literally criminalize meat, except for the so-called “extremists” who are treated as a form of madness outside the bounds of social discourse. The numbers don’t add up. In my experience in middle-class white America, it seems like 1 in 5 people I meet is some kind of vegan or vegetarian. Yet there’s no political action. Meat prohibition is not discussed in election cycles or on the news, except to sneer at the madness of PETA and other fringe groups. Why are they “fringe” or “extremist”? Vegans, you’re everywhere.

We know that people are willing to fight and die for something they believe is wrong on moral principals, even when they are not the direct victims. We have an example in the primary narrative of American history, which is the narrative about slavery and the civil war. As we grow from a young age, we pass through different levels of understanding of this narrative. In elementary school we’re taught the civil war was about slavery. At some point, as teens, we’re exposed through side-channels to the revisionist history which claims that the civil war was really about some type of abstract political power struggle, not actually slavery. But in the end, most or all of us read some book or long-form article teaching us that, yes, the civil war was always about slavery, on both sides. The soldiers on both sides thought it was about slavery, and the states that seceded said it was about slavery, because it was. This means that the abolitionists, for purely moral and ethical reasons, were willing to put their money where their mouths were and fight and die because they couldn’t close their eyes and go about their business while their neighbors went on perpetuating a systemic evil.

I would like to think that if I were to take my current brain, and transport it to slavery times, I would be a vehement abolitionist. I’d like to think I would be willing to fight for it and die, and maybe even join people like John Brown in his terrorist acts of rebellion. I believe it’s reasonable to think I’d be willing to act back then, because I am livid about inequality and injustices I see in the world today, most of which aren’t of comparable magnitude. I can get pretty worked up over not only racism, but class-ism, old money, nepotism, tax cuts, freeloaders, even bloated and bureaucratic middle management. So I think if I lived in a slave society I’d be willing to at least, like, vote or riot or something.

So, too, I would expect the vegans of the world who believe meat is murder to take more political action. Instead, most of them sit back and mutter something about “to each his own.” They will rarely even protest or even vote on vegan lines. Most moral vegans will never rise above a passive aggressive indignation about a lack of cheese-free menu options.

You see, the extremist vegans who do outlandish stunts, illegal protests, or even acts of terrorism, they’re not the crazy ones. They’re the only moral vegans who are acting consistently. ‘Crazy’ is refusing to eat animals because it’s wrong, but then turning around and associating with all the animal eaters like everything is normal.

I’ve thought about it, and I’ve come up with only 3, non-mutually-exclusive reasons why there’s no vegan revolution:

1. Hypocrites whose deeds do not match their beliefs
2. Don’t really believe in their own ethical values, but only continue them as social posturing
3. Cowards

These are all rather insulting conclusions, admittedly. However, I can see no other resolution. For something to be morally wrong, it must be morally wrong for everyone. Any other belief is nothing short of an indefensible contradiction.