The cage

The first cage system was built to house the egg-laying bird, thousands of them in one shed in batteries of cages. The hen was now going to be kept encased and immobilised for the whole of its adult life the length of which was to be determined by its egg productivity rate alone. She always had been the complete victim of her own menstrual cycle and now was to lose the last vestiges of her animal nature by becoming no more than a living machine for the mass production of her egg, her powerful protein package for human consumption. Flock numbers were greatly increased and each individual animal was locked into a tiny cage with one or two others, in which she would lay. She would produce as many eggs as any free ranging hen could, and even more. This cunning idea was about to revolutionise food production techniques.
The cage became an essential component of the application of industrial mechanised process. By caging birds, the cage itself came to represent one of the most cynical suspensions of compassion ever contemplated by humans. In order to guarantee food supply, we decided to become thoroughly pragmatic. After the war food was short. It was rationed. During the war the caging system was an emergency measure designed to feed many people with a high protein food. The advent of battery hen farming came at a time when many other horrible things were happening. Its introduction was barely noticed.
By the end of the war, "battery farms" were already established. The system, involving batteries of cages in rows, tier upon tier, produced eggs very cheaply at the cost of cheapening the hen’s life to the point of condemning each hen to life-imprisonment. Now, the hen had been reduced to a biological function.
Far from caring about all this people looked away and soon enough what went on behind closed doors was forgotten. Almost no protest arose for nearly thirty years. No one seemed to care about the welfare of these long time friends of humans, who had been abandoned to their fate. Very few objected to hens being made into machines working for the egg industry. This caging system is perhaps the most anti-altruistic thing humans have ever done and it has given rise to a whole new awareness in the form of a vegan philosophy. Our crimes against animals, especially the millions and billions of animals used for food has given rise to the concept of "speciesism". This now is a major divide between one person of one attitude and another with the opposite speciesist attitude.

A touch of history

Saturday 30th May
By looking at the extraordinary events of the mid 1940s, we see human nature in all its extremes. We see bravery, altruism, waste and cruelty, all the big building blocks from which the future was to be built. And I think this was a major turning point in human development, especially with us in the West, and it wasn’t necessarily a progress we can be proud of.
When I was just a twinkle in my parents’ eye, three near-simultaneous events took place. First there was a war grinding to a halt, millions of humans dead, millions of humans dying of starvation, and in the middle of it all a man who scared the living daylights out of people (and when he shot himself, it gave my parents and many others the confidence to enlarge their families). Next, some hundred days later, an atom-splitting device exploded over a Japanese city. That showed how it was now possible to kill a whole planet by just pressing a button. These two events marking the close of one war gave rise to another war of fear, a precursor of what could happen one day.
The third significant event around this period didn’t get much publicity at the time, but later it was to become the very symbol of humans who’d become monsters. Perhaps it grew naturally out of the first two. Certainly it was a forecaster of what was to come. A new grim reaper had appeared in the form of a mindlessness combined with a clever idea that was to revolutionise food production. It was as if a new age were proclaiming itself: “the cage man cometh”, “the cage age has arrived”, “we can do the unspeakable”. And we did it, we threw away the last vestige of compassion - the circumstances had come about where cost effectiveness was going to rule everything. We started to use cages to entomb and enslave animals, en masse, for human gain.

Learning from the past

Repairing the earth means repairing ourselves at the same time. The most productive way is by learning to put ourselves ‘out’ a bit. But we need to learn from our collective past mistakes, the social habits we’ve adopted unthinkingly, things we do because others do them. Now, since we can’t know what is up ahead (any more than we can reach out to the stars) we have to actively bring the future into present reality by finding significance in past events. At first we see the mistakes, then we see the simplicity of (probable) solutions. Maybe we see one simple sparkling idea that stands out from the rest, which can rearrange the connections in our synapses to allow us to think differently. As soon as we change our thought patterns, we can change our whole nature, to what we want to be. I suppose I’m referring to doing lots of things altruistically, where we’re no longer constrained by the tight confines of self interest. Altruism is doing ‘unto others’ what we would have them ‘do for us’ or where we want for ourselves what we want for others.
This might be the greatest lesson to come out of the war torn twentieth century. Looking back on what happened it is hardly believable that so many humans could have participated in such barbaric behaviour, how they could have allowed things to turn out the way they did. And yet, albeit in different forms, the same barbaric behaviour exists today. And in the future others will look back and find it all unbelievable, that it still happened in the twenty first century. And yet at the same time they too might not be able to see what they are involved with, perhaps something equally barbaric. How do we, in the middle of this particular era of barbarism, stop, take stock and consciously alter course?

Reaching for the stars

When we look up at the stars in the sky (which presents no problem for us at all, it’s like watching the cat sitting on the mat - it’s there, it’s alright) and we feel a yearning, part of that is a frustration of seeing something we can’t reach. We may gaze at stars but we always have to return to the here and now, to appreciate what we have at home. We have our own star, the sun, we have our own planet and our own companions. We are very lucky and yet we don’t appreciate it as we might. We look up at the stars. They shine down on us just as they shine down on their own orbiting planets, and that reminds us of our future, which we can’t possibly see because it hasn’t happened yet. But we can project probabilities by referring to the past, by listening to the stories which have made us what we are and moulded our social attitudes. It’s where we find out what has happened, and perhaps learn things about human history we’d rather not know about - like the many humans who have been exploited and the many lives wasted.
The age of the machines has arrived and machine minds are responsible for a lot of damage. We’ve even turned animals into machines and we have them producing goods for us from the confines of cages and concrete pens. In this respect things couldn’t be worse, and yet we can look up at the stars and imagine that other civilisations have been through this too. They’ve had to get to know who they are by seeing the very worst in themselves and then repairing the damage and coming, perhaps battered by their experiences, out the other side, thus getting to know the true nature of who they are.
Our treatment of animals is perhaps the nadir of our own civilisation. It symbolises not only what we are capable of doing to advantage ourselves but what we are capable of ignoring. Instead of wanting to know, to know who we are, to know what we must do. All of which is an essential stage in our development, that other civilisations, on other planets, must have been through or are going through or are yet to go through. Star gazing for us is no doubt much the same as it is for them, a reference point for reaching out beyond our own experience, to something better than we have here and now. Star gazing stimulates the imagination to design future trends based on probabilities, optimistic, vegan, non-violent probabilities.

Order and chaos

I worked on a little harbour island once. It was a mess, it needed a gardener’s touch. It was a chaos of weeds and grass and when I planted out new trees I wondered whether they stood a chance of surviving. A friend of mine has small children, they seem wild and out of control sometimes, and they remind me of those trees. Parents have to make decisions about how much freedom they give, how many rules to impose – they face the meaning of altruism every day I reckon. A child screams for attention and the parent comes to the rescue, using altruism to help them make the best decision for the child as well as their own sanity. Altruism is the reference point, especially when parents have to draw a line between indulging the child and denying them. When bringing order to chaos, we need to know why we do what we do. Take a weed for instance. Is it a weed because it’s an unwanted plant? When pulling out weeds to make room for a sapling, we consider the greater good and yet we also want to avoid destruction. It’s a dilemma and a challenge. Our decision might not resolve everything to our perfect satisfaction, but then relative altruism is really all about compromise.
It isn’t about the ideal, it’s simply about doing a job that needs to be done, urgently and thoroughly. Perhaps it involves nothing more than smiling when we don’t feel like smiling or saving animals’ lives by eating plant-based foods, but it might be no less than a rescue bid for both planet and human nature. If we can restructure our own habits, recognise strangers, respect the sovereignty of an animal, act as a true guardian to children, just by readjusting a few of our attitudes we’ll surely be helping to re-balance the earth. And if that’s obvious, why are we waiting?

The ant in the sink

Altruism usually means putting in the first spark. Initial energy needs some effort and that usually means some inconvenience. But what we put out will surely come back to serve us if we move away from the demeaning type of moral altruism and move towards a more relative altruism. It is just a matter of putting it into practice, being impartially and randomly altruistic and for it to become as unconscious as breathing air. It mustn’t be too carefully planned or so casual that it goes unnoticed. Perhaps it has to be performed in such a way that the 'cards may fall where they will'. If we would obviously choose to act unselfishly in the best interests of our own child, then that’s the way we should do everything. When making our next decision, say finding an ant in the sink; it’s up to us to decide its fate. Perhaps we don’t want it there, perhaps we don’t like ants, perhaps we think we could easily drown it; but in resisting the temptation to turn on the tap, we switch from self interest to the interest of the insect. We save it and we learn to deal with the situation another way. By choosing this way, we don’t so much solve a problem (of the ant in the sink) as we learn a lesson in non-violent action. Every situation that might tempt us into making a selfish decision is a chance for opposite-thinking, of not taking the line of least resistance. If choosing to take the altruistic route means treating the ant with the same consideration as we’d show a child, we draw closer to the ant’s world. We don’t do it not only to be kind to the ant, but also for our own sake. It opens our imagination, it gets us closer to the "other universe" and the ant’s own world. It brings us closer to an unknown world.

Motivation and altruism

In our minds we, as individuals, don’t see that we have any direct power to slow today’s destruction and we don’t know how to acquire the resources to directly repair the damage that’s been done already. We can’t see past our present society whose structures seem so set in concrete. Nor can we feel excited by the promises given by our leaders, because of their obvious self interest. Cynicism and pessimism block our way forward. And yet without a hopeful, realistic future-vision nothing much can happen. Without some sort of blueprint we can neither repair nor rebuild the structures that need changing. To jolt us out of our black dog view of the world, we need to transform the way we think.
To be altruistic and forward-looking, without being evangelistic about it, we don’t need to keep the moral baggage. The optimistic component of altruism comes with a different kind of motivation; reward is the driver and motivator. Ideally the reward is coming from actually wanting to do things for others. It doesn’t have to be particularly special to attract us, it just has to be creative enough to allow for the unexpected. Reward is that much richer because of the surprise of it.
Perhaps we have to re-examine what motivates us. By helping human nature turn around for the better our pessimism automatically weakens. By thinking optimistically we weaken our focus on personal safety and security, putting greater faith in altruism. The more we dare to trust in it the more we’ll see what it can do; just by putting ourselves at the service of others and being graceful enough about it, we might then be able to accept any positivity someone else might be directing towards us. If the world were a more altruistic place, we wouldn’t be so much thrilled by the notion of being altruistic, we’d be thrilled instead by the climate of unselfconscious altruism around us and the little need we’d have for any sense of an expected reciprocation. But we have a long way to go. In our present world things aren’t like that. So at first we have to stir some conscious motivation into the mix, to get altruism up and moving.

Altruism and optimism

Although altruism isn’t about getting egotistical like a Boy Scout doing good deeds, we should never ignore its significance when we go into the outside world to meet social and political challenges
Importantly, altruism is a central ideal for the future. When we start observing it in our own private lives and then start to apply it in the service of some great cause, it becomes integral to everything we do (for that cause). It adds something important to the image and reputation (of that cause). It’s at the heart of our repair work. Activists and advocates of all major causes who understand the importance of non-violence, need to be strong on altruism.
The old way of winning campaigns is over - where we clobbered the opponent so hard that he/she had to concede. Maybe today we have learnt to consider both sides of the argument, come to a conclusion based on the greater good and stuck with it until something better comes along. Whatever we do, we must stand against violence and put self interest behind us. This isn’t easy or straightforward and yet this is the kind of approach Ghandi describes as "soul-force" - using the soul part of us to deal with major problems, by way of non-violence and unselfishness.
Many people believe the world is doomed. They say we’re caught up in our own misdeeds and must atone for them. For many others though, it’s a matter of holding out for better ideas. Looking forward to a better world, dreaming of better things to come and yet is it because it is "just a dream" that we don’t really believe it will happen? We have to disprove that by creating the reality we want.

A better world to come

The sort of world we’d like to have already has a working model. It’s here and in very ordinary ways it’s coming into existence all the time, unselfconsciously. A cat is sitting on a mat, so when I stroke the cat she starts purring. She shows satisfaction. Maybe she purrs to get more affection. Maybe her own purring feeds relaxation back into her own system. This sound-vibration (about the most reassuring sound a cat can make) is important and satisfying to her and it also affects me beneficially. The satisfaction is mutual. A contented human stroking a contented cat - neither is being entirely selfish nor selfless.
These moments remind us that in very small ways all’s right with the world - by being in a state of familiar satisfaction at home. However, the significance of being with a beloved cat or a child we’re close to, is that these home values may be taken outside the home, to work, even to the big end of town. We can employ the same altruism in any issue-deciding situation, where making ‘the other’ feel valued makes for the best outcome.
Altruism, in whatever form it takes, has a magnetic quality. It stands out. People feel it there even though they don’t mention it. So what is altruism? Is it a method of making others feel good? Well, perhaps not entirely. But it is attractive to others. It gets noticed. It gets us noticed and it feels satisfying too - that’s hardly selflessness. So perhaps pure altruism doesn’t exist because it is contaminated by our own desires. But so what? The main thing is that we are inspired by what is everywhere anyway; a greeting on the street, a helping hand, dropping a coin in a charity box. It is already practised by almost everyone, but largely unselfconsciously. By bringing it into a fuller consciousness, as veganism tries to do, altruism takes on a usefulness with a very practical purpose. For vegans their altruistic boycotting of animal products is the beginning of a whole process we hope to be useful to the eventual liberation of animals.

Altruism is often innocent or at least unselfconscious. It may not be directed at anything because we are not using altruism particularly. Vegan altruism may be different. We have an agenda. We’re aware of the part altruism plays in the eventual success of our ‘mission’. Vegans have become disciplined enough to start things moving – towards a very conscious social revolution. Our job is merely to make a spark. Not much more is needed if we allow altruism to take over. It’s the beginning of a new attitude of being with ‘the other’, where we have empathy, compassion and respect. When we acknowledge someone else even by just saying “Hi” in passing, or if we retrieve a cat stuck up a tree. Any action, big or small, is making a statement about how things could be and probably should be. We initiate altruistic acts and know each act counts. It’s as if each act is a blow for freedom, defying a tendency we all have for self absorption. These acts of altruism, whilst not needing to mean very much at all, oil the wheels of our involvement with other people. Obviously, if we did them merely for the sake of doing a good deed we’d become greasy and disingenuous. But in a modest way each of us can do important things and do them well: like being affectionate or being useful. We are capable of being altruistic in any social setting by showing we care about others and we can almost draw the future into the present, by sketching the shape of a new type of humanity.

Mutual support

People who aren’t vegan are often dismissive of it, to keep it from growing in popularity and thus endangering their food- and clothes-buying habits. With zero encouragement, vegans have the hardest cause to fight. We therefore have to rely on other vegans for essential support. But there are thin pickings here because other vegans, suffering from the same adversity, have little support to give out. Motivational energy must come largely from a developed sense of altruism. It’s hard in one way, but useful in another since this is how vegans can develop empathy for the most marginalised beings, the exploited animals themselves. Nevertheless, energy is where you find it.

So maybe we need to look at motivation in a slightly different way. The more profound the work we do, the more of a spiritual dimension it has, the more we may realise that motive-force must come from inside ourselves. The scale of the changes we are trying to bring about always reminds us that the work we do is for a grand purpose. And in the face of being unnoticed, unrecognised and unsupported this sense of purpose has to be our main reward. If we don’t operate on this scale then we’ll always be looking elsewhere for motivational energy and be constantly disappointed when we can’t find it. Then altruism won’t work and we’ll revert to a catch-what-you-can mentality.
Energy. We need so little back, but we do need some, because we don’t come free. Our engines need just a touch of this good grease - a mere smile of recognition, and admission from someone that we aren’t talking nonsense, etc. If we are vegan then our support for another vegan is of greatest value. Whatever cause we are fighting for, part of that cause has to include the giving of support to others who are giving their time and energy for the same cause. Most of us are content with very little, not because we’re good (for having such strength of character) but because in this way we won’t run up gratitude debts. It means if we haven’t got much to give, it’s okay - small can still be effective. It isn’t really about the amount we do but the spirit in which we do it. We aren’t trying to build with bricks here but with a sort of magic that can conjure up a better world for all concerned.

Altruism

If we are vegan and can’t understand why others are not, it may be worth looking closely at altruistic impulse. Is it altruism that initially drives someone to give away a lot of the ‘benefits of life’ for the sake of saving animals? To think so seriously about animals and bring that concern into our daily lives is simply being altruistic. But is that selflessness or is it something more interesting? What does the idea altruism involve?
No one actually criticises altruism as an ideal. It is beyond reproach because it’s meant to be about selflessness and considering others’ interests before one’s own. But like Nietzsche, I believe this definition is demeaning. More particularly, it’s unrealistic because it is the kind of purity no one can keep up. We are survivors and therefore have to be selfish and self-interested. We love to look after our own first and others afterwards. Perhaps that is relative altruism; one that we can enjoy unashamedly because it feels good to be doing something for others whilst doing something good for ourselves. There’s a lot of giving-out needed today; yet we shouldn’t neglect our own interests or our own need for reward. If we are brutally honest with ourselves, it is the reward we think about. Not necessarily being paid money for doing something helpful or winning praise or getting thanked. The reward is more like incoming energy – the buzz we get from being useful.
At its heart, altruism must be self rewarding. If it isn’t, why deplete yourself for it? Doing good without getting some recognition back, makes us become resentful. It’s only natural to expect something back. We give a birthday present, we expect a thank you. And if it doesn’t appear, we notice that we’re less inclined to bother next birthday.
Whatever we do, even if it’s a paid job, we need something extra, a recognition, because it makes what we do run smoother, which encourages us to give our all. This is much better than being pinched into giving the bare minimum expected. If just small recognition is shown it makes us feel energised. We all like the feeling of giving, whether it’s quality of service or a quality in our relationships. By being vegan we give quality to our own life and at the same time to the lives of the animals we help save from being reared and killed and eaten.

Give and take

If we want to develop a better world and gain some personal happiness in the process we have to inject wisdom and compassion into our daily decisions. Vegan principle embodies both. Being vegan is a major statement of compassion and as the years roll by the wisdom of being vegan becomes more apparent. So, it’s no wonder that long time vegans leap at the chance to introduce the idea of vegan principle to whoever will listen. Trouble is people aren’t wanting to listen, but when you find someone genuinely wanting to find out, then vegans can tell them. But it’s important to note that we shouldn’t do it evangelically or boastfully but simply because we want others to gain from what we know about it. Behind vegan lifestyle there is a principle which is both sensible and kind.
If there were one force that combined both wisdom and compassion it would be altruism. Not the idealised notion of it that gets so much bad press but a quiet, personal, utterly satisfying drive; that when one initiates good for others it’s also good for oneself. By putting the pursuit of one’s own happiness on hold for a while one may pursue the much less self-interested goal of looking out for others. Not necessarily easy, but by being altruistic we deliberately avoid living a self indulgent life and make it more robust and adventurous.
The one very practical central start is vegan principle. A few times every day we makes choices about our daily foods, clothes and commodities. According to vegan principle we choose commodities basic to our needs but which don’t steal from the needs of others. Once we get that right we’ve the grounding for self-respect, and from there we gain confidence and fulfilment.
Maybe it seems a rather roundabout route, making our lives seem so edgy, but this way we’re more likely to understand the mysteries of life and the subtleties of altruism. The give and take lets us realise that we can benefit ourselves whilst benefitting others.

Setting the example

Today, we are so conscious of violence (largely through stories reported in the media) that we think most humans are violent, which of course they aren’t! These media stories bring (what passes for) interest into our dreary lives, giving us something to talk about. So we discuss violence and say how we dislike it, but as we become more interested in it, it sucks us in. Then we become disgusted by our own attraction to it and swing right over to the opposite side, into the idea of non-violence, sentimentally attracted by it’s being so politically correct. We escape into that sort of non-violence when things get tough. We use it to deny reality. But we forget to think about it deeply.
If the legend is true about the Lemurian civilisation and they abhorred violence, their undoing was that they were incapable of dealing with it realistically. They eventually died out because they tried to deny the very existence of violence. Perhaps they hadn’t thought deeply enough about the co-dependence of the two elements or given enough thought to the dynamic side of non-violence.
Today we can be far more dynamic about it, by boycotting violent activity wherever it is found. As consumers we can avoid using violent goods. We can encourage cruelty-free and environmentally friendly commodities. That’s a really good start. As more people act in this way so the fashion will take off, and violence and coercion will not be considered useful. And no one need ever notice the transition or identify what it was that changed our society, as long as those with a strong interest in non-violence set the example.

Keeping our violence in check

Take the violent world. In it, we always try to get what we want. We bend the rules and hope we can fix things up later. But there’s another violent world in Nature, where forceful events like storms, epidemics and earthquakes happen and destruction occurs on a massive scale. But this sort of violence isn’t the same as the human variety. Ours is damaging because it is so coldly administered - driven by our sense of insecurity and ambition. Only by implementing the principles of non-violence can we keep our own violence in check, whether it’s our own violence or it’s in our children, in our partner or in the collective consciousness itself. By checking ourselves and our closest relationships for violence, we can keep non-violent principles in touch with reality. Then we can watch it grow, probably first at home, in a relatively safe atmosphere.
At home we can test and trial non-violence before taking it into the outside world. At home, between familiar people, where we’re known, we can learn valuable lessons via praise, mockery and criticism. The impact on our ego may be softened by our intimacy with people who know us. And with them we can work through our differences, perhaps more slowly than we’d like but more thoroughly. Hopefully at home we can watch out for each other, test each other and have as our basis an implicit promise that we’ll never leave each other behind. That building of mutual care leads to a feeling of safety, and that can give us enough confidence to go into the outside world with strangers and be more truthful in our communications with them … which includes the vilified public figures whom we love to hate. It would be good training in non-violence if we could observe what they do without automatically aborting on them or bringing out the hate bugs to hurt them. Non-violence is strengthened when we stop being so predictably judgmental!!

The heated argument

Sunday 17th May
The most attractive feature of non-violence is that it is only interested in the bigger picture. That’s why it has no sense of timing. It can pop up at the most inconvenient times, like in the middle of a heated argument which is verging on a quarrel – someone outside breaks in to suggest that we “calm down”. We push them aside because we are convinced that the importance of our ‘good idea’ outweighs any need for good manners. But as time passes, if things escalate into a personal slanging match, it’s only that call for calm which might have averted disaster. Only by applying the brakes in time, can we let the calming factor do its work. If we exclude it, violence ups the ante until an explosion is inevitable. After that it’s a long up-hill struggle to bring things back into balance. The calming element brings high emotions under control. It’s a sort of count-to-ten principle which is not meant to spoil our fun but to keep our dynamic emotions under some sort of control. So, how dynamic should our non-violence be? Certainly we must never let it act as a dampener or for us to be afraid of robust interaction.

An ancient idea for the future

Non-violence is no new kid on the block. It’s as old as the hills and the very bedrock of all wise philosophy. But it always steps back and allows violence to pass by - remembering that we exist in a world where violence still rules. As activists, we won’t get our views across by gate crashing – we can only do it by suggesting another way - no more. How careful is that? Perhaps it’s careful enough to stop us being pushy.
By checking this and worse, by stopping any tendency we might have to use emotional blackmail, we let non-violence grow in friendlier soil. We have to believe in people coming around, but slowly. The idea is that non-violent actions come into their own at the best time, when they can be most effective, becoming more powerful the longer it is kept waiting. It doesn’t need a supporting act to make it more valid or effective. In other words it doesn’t need us trying to sell it. Well it does, but with subtler sales pitches than the ones we use today. And even then we can’t expect results quite yet. Non-violence can stand on its own feet but at present it acts simply as a badge of the future. If any of us feel a bit ahead of our times then we’ll probably adopt a less pushy approach in everything we do. Which is convenient later on, when our approach is assessed and the rest of the world catches up.

A non-violent world

Is a no-weapon world (where we trust our neighbour) just pie in the sky? Can a planet of humans exist without resorting to violent confrontation? A non-violent world is something we can’t yet imagine. Even if we could, we don’t really know how individual effort can get us there. We only know that if it can exist it will act as all the security we could want. Individually it’s safety-first, first. Only after that to build a better world.
It could be suggested that we need less security than we think. The sooner we seek less protection the sooner we realise there’s nothing to be protected from. If we trust life to be safe there’s no need to ensure (or insure) anything. It’s all comes down to trust - in this case, trusting non-violence. A dynamic form of it. A whole other way of looking at things.
Non-violence is never ambiguous, it is a simple clear principle guiding behaviour, and in a practical day-to-day way it serves as a perfect shopping guide too. This is where each of us has the power of the spending dollar. As we take time to look for ethical goods (buying cruelty-free and environmentally-friendly products) we send a powerful message of encouragement to the people who sell them. In turn this changes the market and affects the way goods are produced. It’s the first step towards a peaceful world, a no-weapon world.
As we draw non-violence into our daily life, we have to be prepared to be scrutinised by others who would love nothing better than to have us all barbecued. If we don’t want to give them any success we have to be squeaky clean in terms of our own non-violence. And that standard, once set, must be kept up, because as we improve our game so our inconsistencies show up more vividly. Even worse, if we begin to evangelise about doing the right thing, soon enough we will hoist our selves with our own self righteous petard, letting our adversaries have a field day with us. Somehow we must find a non-boasting way to say all we have to say whilst remaining in close touch with people.
A good comedian, always knowing how to keep the audience sweet, balances everything with self deprecation. Similarly, when we do the talking, when we start to go on about animals, what we say about animal rights should be gauged carefully. Subjects like veganism or non-violent action are sensitive enough to require great imagination to keep them as "light" as possible. At all costs, whatever we say must be kept strictly non-personal. We must never be accused of aggression or of using our subject as an excuse to make a speech. A good comedian educates by way of entertainment. Preachers on the other hand, miss the point of entertainment in their haste to get their message across.

Two opposites dancing together

Non-violence has always seemed a bit passive, as if it isn’t effective enough to eliminate violence. But perhaps that’s the point – we shouldn’t want to kill off anything and that includes violence itself. Instead we should accept that one lives alongside the other. It’s the nature of the planet. Alongside disease there’s an immune system; the disease is the attacker, the other the defender. During one of Nature’s violent gales the stalk of wheat bends but doesn’t break. It’s built for wind - the tension on the stalk brings about the strength the stalk needs. This is the tension between opposites, the push-me-pull-you of our own thinking and all human-made ideas.
Non-violence confronts and then withdraws. It dances with violence. It lets the violence-based world make its impact, all the sooner to burn itself out. Then a period of non-violence starts to make a different sort of impact. At this point in time, after the violence of the twentieth century, we’re in transition, clinging to violence because it’s been passed-down to us as a method for getting things done … but wanting it gone. Now, in a new era, non-violent values are beginning to solve some of our problems. But, like veganism itself, these values still make small impact. For most people they go largely untested. So for non-violence enthusiasts, patience is golden. Especially in helping us to come to terms with the violence of our world. If non-violence is to be the modus operandi of our new age, it would seem fairly urgent to recognise how violent we may be personally. In big ways or in little routine ways. Non-violence: we shouldn’t run with it before we can walk with it; we shouldn’t preach it before we can practise it.

Planning for the far future

Needless to say, animals are different to us. No hubris, no superiority and (mainly amongst wild animals) innate understanding about how dangerous humans can be. Their senses are impeccable. But they can’t judge everything about us because we are so very different to them. Unlike animals, we are aware of a future and we try to plan for it and improve things, and with that comes the violence of maintaining our position of dominance over nature and especially over animals. That’s what has brought us unstuck. The damage we’ve done has come from trying to improve things by wit, strength and cruelty. We’ve never learnt to ‘be content with our lot’. And now, at the eleventh hour, our manipulation and bullying have brought us to the brink of catastrophe. Now, some of us want to turn in a completely different direction. But it’s like steering an ocean liner 180 degrees. It has so much momentum that to swing it around is a slow process. So we have to see far ahead, beyond our own lifetime, to future generations of responsibility-takers who, we might hope, will be warriors of non-violence. For us here, today, our job is to set the ground work and try to solve the eternal conundrum – when is dynamic too aggressive and when is non-violence too ineffective?

Harmlessness

Our aim should be to encourage confidence in the things we say. And for that we need non-violence in our voice and as the basis of everything else about our daily life, our eating and shopping, thinking and talking. We need to be assertive and we don’t need to be indecisive, but we need to be open to suggestion from ‘outside’ even when it contradicts us. If we once become closed off we lose whatever advantage we may have had. The Animal Rights movement doesn’t have a good track record on effective communication because we aren’t too good at the complete non-violent approach. Is this because we say we hate violence but still allow it into our lives? Those of us who are the noisiest about our dislike of violence often don’t notice the way we practise it. To make matters worse, if we doubt non-violence itself, we’ll move forward far too slowly in winning people over. If we merely observe veganism in our eating habits but aren’t so very different to our omnivorous friends in other respects, we won’t be taken seriously.
We need to be sure about non-violence. We certainly give it a tick of approval when we become vegan, so we need to feel right about it - that it’s neither weak, nor leads to submissiveness. It may be a weak-looking characteristic of submissive animals but that’s because they’ve been driven to it by having their lives and living conditions continuously under threat. In wild conditions animals are far from submissive or weak.
If we can adopt non-speciesism we can then let the animals show us the values they represent. They do things differently to us. Think of any farm animal that hasn’t been driven insane and you’ll picture a peaceful being, utterly non-violent. Their disposition is something we can all learn from.
We all know humans are superior to animals because they can build houses and read books, but animals have a few tricks up their sleeves. They can sense things! They smell things a thousand times better than we do and often have an uncanny understanding of what’s going on. Just think of how prescient our cats and dogs are. They don’t have to work everything out before they do it. Their non-violence shows up in their completely non-judgmental behaviour.
When our companion animals know us, they can often tell us truths about ourselves that we can’t rely on humans friends to tell us. They can give us an accurate appraisal of how we are doing in our progress towards non-violence, since they are masters of it when it comes to spotting a peaceful person. They are attracted to an affectionate nature because, to them, it denotes trustworthiness. To cats and dogs and many other animals we get close to, this is value number one. It’s genetically encoded I suppose. Having suffered so badly from human violence throughout the ages, animals, wild or domestic, have become arbiters of good taste in the matter of harmlessness.

The unthinking approach

The original principle of non-violence is behind everything Animal Rights stands for. With that in place and agreed to, it follows that the sovereignty of animals is secure. To us it’s obviously impossible to justify hurting them, and yet they are attacked and hurt and murdered daily, en masse. Humans in authority let this happen and presumably most people can justify this.
Since people haven’t thought much about non-violence their behaviour continues, unquestioned – they eat meat knowing the animals they eat met a violent death. Eat them we do, because we want to taste it.. We can’t resist the T-bone steak. And what is this ‘resist’? We’re not used to resisting things we want. That’s a given.
And so we have a society involved with daily mass murder of innocent animals and consequently there is a chaos in both human ethics and health. There could be worse chaos if we didn’t have laws to prevent certain crimes, so rape and child molestation is outlawed because we can’t have a society where there’s a free for all, where women and kids are exploited.
But there are no laws to prevent the crimes against animals, so we have true chaos when it comes to them. Because these animals have never been protected by law, the consumer thinks it’s okay to prey on them. When we’re out shopping for food, we forget that we’re interested in non-violence and we take the easy way out. “Hang it, I’ll do what I’ve always done”! “Everyone else does it so why shouldn’t I?”

Straight talking

Sunday May 10th
When we’re giving our opinion or giving out information we should come across as genuine but also pay attention to how we sound. Given the potential for this subject to ignite passions we should be straight-talking but leave lots of space for other people’s opinions.
It’s likely that some of us amateur communicators don’t see ourselves as others see us. We talk as if people want to take our side, whereas most people simply want information from us, if that. We have to be careful with details and facts. Behind everything we say there must be a backup, for example, all animal products may be unhealthy and cruel but behind this must a reference to support the association between these products and certain ailments; the same with cruelty - behind the cruelty we need to give details of animals treatment: the sow stall, the cage, the biology of a cow’s lactation, what happens in abattoirs. It’s the story that counts. It’s the story and the verifiable facts behind our stories that convince. Us having this background knowledge also gives us the confidence to speak out.
Whatever we say is likely to contradict what people have been led to believe, but our conclusions are likely to be provocative anyway - we’re commenting on and questioning the morals of ordinary people who, being consumers, won’t take kindly to what we say or any fingers we are pointing. No one feels too comfortable agreeing that they’ve made mistakes regarding the healthiness of their foods let alone hearing us talk when there’s a moral principle at stake, which makes them feel really guilty.
To a certain extent people will accept what we say about nutrition on the basis that they can go away and check the details for themselves, but the cruelty side is more difficult to escape from. It’s something already known about and already swept under the carpet. Animal advocates, who are ‘straight talking’ about animal torture and public compliance, are dealing with delicate matters. If we want people to listen to this sort of disclosure we need to show them we’ve done our homework at the very least. But whether we have or whether we get caught out, it only matters that we are trying to be objective. We need to come across as sincere and entirely non-violently.
If we are promoting veganism in public, advocating total abolition, animal rights and non-violence personal sincerity would seem to be pretty important. If we look a bit fake, however wise we sound, people will always turn away. Things may even turn nasty. If we are saying how things should be done we’re also saying that they should be done as beautifully as possible, and to do that we mustn’t sound ugly! If we show any hardness in our words they will seem empty. Value-judgments and heated disagreements are guaranteed to lose us support. Instead of trying to convert people in the old fashioned, tub-thumping way, we need to listen a lot more than many of us do, and not be afraid of opposite opinions. Until this is established getting to first base is all up-hill when it needn’t be. When there’s no balance in a conversation or in fair debate it’s easy to lose sight of the issues and the central point of difference.

An ancient idea for the future

Non-violence is no new kid on the block. It’s as old as the hills and the very bedrock of all wise philosophy. But it always steps back and allows violence to pass by - remembering that we exist in a world where violence still rules. As activists, we won’t get our views across by gate crashing – we can only do it by suggesting another way - no more. How careful is that? Perhaps it’s careful enough to stop us being pushy.
By checking this and worse, by stopping any tendency we might have to use emotional blackmail, we let non-violence grow in friendlier soil. We have to believe in people coming around, but slowly. The idea is that a whole heap of non-violent actions lets us harvest a bumper crop when it’s fine and ripe, when it can be most effective. It bides its time, becoming more powerful the longer it is kept waiting. It doesn’t need a supporting act to make it more valid or effective, so in other words it doesn’t need us trying to sell it. Well it does, but with subtler sales pitches than the ones we use today. And even then we can’t expect results quite yet. Non-violence can stand on its own feet but at present it acts simply as a badge of the future. If any of us feel a bit ahead of our times then we’ll probably adopt a less pushy nature in everything we do. Which, so the argument goes, is very convenient later on, when the rest of the world catches up.

A non-violent world

Is a no-weapon world, where we trust our neighbour, just pie in the sky? Can a planet of humans exist without resorting to violent confrontation? A non-violent world is something we can’t imagine. Even if we could, we don’t really know how individual effort can get us there. We only know that it’s security we want. Individually we want to feel safe first, and only then begin to build a better world.
It could be suggested that we need less security than we think. The sooner we seek less protection the sooner we’ll realise there’s nothing to be protected from. If we trust life to be safe there’s no need to ensure (or insure) anything. It’s all rather down to trust, in this case trusting non-violence. Unless we tread the virgin ground of dynamic non-violence, we’ll never see how different it is as a whole way of looking at things.
Non-violence is never ambiguous, it is a simple clear principle by which to behave, and in a practical day-to-day way it serves as a perfect shopping guide. This is where each of us has the power of the spending dollar. As we take time to look for ethical goods (buying cruelty-free and environmentally-friendly products) we send a powerful message of encouragement to the people who sell them and that changes the market and affects the way goods are produced. It’s the first step towards a peaceful world, a no-weapon world.
As we draw non-violence into our daily life, we have to be prepared to be scrutinised by others who would love nothing better than to put us down. If we don’t want to give them a signal that they’re succeeding we have to be squeaky clean in terms of non-violence. And that standard, once set, must be kept up, because as we improve our game so our inconsistencies show up more vividly. Even worse, if we begin to evangelise about doing the right thing, soon enough we will hoist ourself with our own self righteous petard, letting our adversaries have a field day with us. Somehow we must find a non-boasting way to say all this and yet remain in touch with people.
A good comedian always knows how to keep the audience sweet and on side, by balancing everything with a heap of self deprecation. Similarly, when we do the talking, when we start to go on about animals, what we say about animal rights might have to be gauged carefully. Subjects like veganism or non-violent action are sensitive enough to require great imagination to keep them as "light" as possible. At all costs, whatever we say must be kept strictly non-personal. We must never be accused of aggression or of using our subject as an excuse to make a speech. A good comedian educates by way of entertainment. Preachers on the other hand, miss the point of entertainment in their haste to get their message across.

Two opposites dancing together

Non-violence has always seemed a bit passive, as if it isn’t effective enough to eliminate violence. But perhaps that’s the point – we shouldn’t want to kill off anything and that includes violence itself. Instead we should accept that one lives alongside the other. It’s the nature of the planet. Alongside disease there’s an immune system; the disease is the attacker, the other the defender. During one of Nature’s violent gales the stalk of wheat bends but doesn’t break. It’s built for wind - the tension on the stalk brings about the strength the stalk needs. This is the tension between opposites, the push-me-pull-you of our own thoughts.
Non-violence confronts and then withdraws. It dances with violence. It lets the violence-based world make its impact, all the sooner to burn itself out. Then a period of non-violence starts, to make a different sort of impact. At this point in time, after the violence of the twentieth century, we’re in transition, clinging to violence because it’s been passed-down to us, as a method for getting things done. Now, in a new era, non-violent values are beginning to solve some of our problems. But, like veganism itself, these values still make small impact. For most people they go largely untested. So for non-violence enthusiasts, patience is golden, especially in helping us to come to terms with the violence in the world. If non-violence is to be the modus operandi of our new age, it would seem fairly urgent to recognise how violent we are personally. Non-violence: we shouldn’t run with it before we can walk with it; we shouldn’t preach it before we can practise it.

Planning for the far future

Needless to say, animals are different to us. No hubris, no superiority and (mainly amongst wild animals) innate understanding about how dangerous humans can be. Their senses are impeccable. But they can’t judge everything about us because we are so very different to them. Unlike animals, we are aware of a future and we try to plan for it and improve things, and with that comes the violence of maintaining our position of dominance over nature and especially over animals. That’s what has brought us unstuck. The damage we’ve done has come from trying to improve things by wit, strength and cruelty. We’ve never learnt to ‘be content with our lot’. And now, at the eleventh hour, our manipulation and bullying have brought us to the brink of catastrophe. Now, some of us want to turn in a completely different direction. But it’s like steering an ocean liner 180 degrees. It has so much momentum that to swing it round is a slow process. So we have to see far ahead, beyond our own lifetime, to future generations of responsibility-takers who, we might hope, will be warriors of non-violence. For us here, today, our job is to set the ground work and try to solve the eternal conundrum – when is dynamic too aggressive and when is non-violence too ineffective?

Harmlessness

Our aim should be to encourage confidence in the things we say. And for that we need non-violence in our voice and as the basis of everything else about our daily life, our eating and shopping, thinking and talking. We need to be assertive, we don’t need to be indecisive but we need to be open to suggestion from ‘outside’ even when it contradicts us. If we once become closed off we lose whatever advantage we may have had. The Animal Rights movement doesn’t have a good track record on effective communication because we aren’t too good at the complete non-violent approach. Is this because we say we hate violence but still allow it into our lives? Those of us who are the noisiest about our dislike of violence often don’t notice the ways we practise it. To make matters worse if we doubt non-violence itself, we’ll move forward far too slowly in winning people over. If we merely observe veganism in our eating habits but aren’t so very different to our omnivorous friends in other respects, we won’t be taken seriously.
We need to be sure about non-violence. We certainly give it a tick of approval when we become vegan, so we need to try it to feel right about it; that it’s neither weak, nor leading to submissiveness. This is where we need non-speciesism to show us the values animals represent to us and how they do things differently to us. Their disposition is something we can all learn from.
Animals sense things! They smell things a thousand times better than we do and often have an uncanny understanding of us, as our cats and dogs at home show us in their approach to us. They don’t work everything out before they do it. Their non-violence shows up because they are not judgmental.
When they know us, they tell us truths about ourselves that we can’t rely on humans to tell us. They can give us an accurate appraisal of how we are doing in our progress towards non-violence, since they are masters of it when it comes to spotting a peaceful person. They are drawn towards them. They are attracted to an affectionate nature because, to them, it denotes trustworthiness. To cats and dogs and many other animals we get close to, this is value number one. Having suffered so badly from human violence throughout the ages, animals, wild or domestic, have become arbiters of good taste in the matter of harmlessness.

Straight talking

When we’re giving our opinion or giving out information we should come across as genuine but also to pay attention to how we sound. Given the potential for this subject to ignite passions we should be straight talking but leave lots of space for other people’s opinions.
It’s likely that some of us amateur communicators don’t see ourselves as others see us. We talk as if people want to take our side, whereas most people simply want information from us. We have to be careful with details and facts. Behind everything we say there must be a backup, for example, all animal products may be unhealthy and cruel but behind this must a reference to support the association between these products and certain ailments. The same with the cruelty argument - behind the cruelty we need to give details of animals treatment: the sow stall, the cage, the biology of a cow’s lactation, what actually happens when animals go to an abattoir. It’s the story that counts. It’s the story and the verifiable facts behind our stories that convinces. Background knowledge also gives us the confidence to speak out.
Whatever we say is likely to contradict what people have been led to believe but our conclusions are likely to be provocative - we’re commenting on and questioning the morals of ordinary consumers who won’t take kindly to what we say. No one feels too comfortable agreeing that they’ve made mistakes regarding the healthiness of their foods let alone hearing us talk when there’s a moral principle at stake, which makes them already feel guilty.
To a certain extent people will accept what we say about nutrition on the basis that they can go away and check the details out for themselves, but the cruelty side is more difficult to escape from. It’s something already known about and already swept under the carpet. Animal advocates who are ‘straight talking’ about issues concerning animal torture and public compliance, are dealing with delicate matters. If we want people to listen to this we need to show them we’ve done our homework and that we are trying to be objective. We need to come across sincerely and entirely non-violently.
If we are promoting veganism in public, personal sincerity is essential. If we look a bit fake, however wise we sound, people will turn away. Things may even turn nasty. If we are talking how things should be done beautifully, we mustn’t sound ugly! If we show any hardness our words will seem empty. Value-judgments and heated disagreements are guaranteed to lose us support. Instead of trying to convert people in the old fashioned, tub-thumping way, we need to listen, and be unafraid of opposite opinions. Until that is established we can’t get to first base, to a position to offer our own solutions. In the absence of balanced conversation and fair debate we lose sight of the issues and the very point of debate.

Straight talking

When we’re giving our opinion or giving out information we should come across as genuine but also to pay attention to how we sound. Given the potential for this subject to ignite passions we should be straight talking but leave lots of space for other people’s opinions.
It’s likely that some of us amateur communicators don’t see ourselves as others see us. We talk as if people want to take our side, whereas most people simply want information from us. We have to be careful with details and facts. Behind everything we say there must be a backup, for example, all animal products may be unhealthy and cruel but behind this must a reference to support the association between these products and certain ailments. The same with the cruelty argument - behind the cruelty we need to give details of animals treatment: the sow stall, the cage, the biology of a cow’s lactation, what actually happens when animals go to an abattoir. It’s the story that counts. It’s the story and the verifiable facts behind our stories that convinces. Background knowledge also gives us the confidence to speak out.
Whatever we say is likely to contradict what people have been led to believe but our conclusions are likely to be provocative - we’re commenting on and questioning the morals of ordinary consumers who won’t take kindly to what we say. No one feels too comfortable agreeing that they’ve made mistakes regarding the healthiness of their foods let alone hearing us talk when there’s a moral principle at stake, which makes them already feel guilty.
To a certain extent people will accept what we say about nutrition on the basis that they can go away and check the details out for themselves, but the cruelty side is more difficult to escape from. It’s something already known about and already swept under the carpet. Animal advocates who are ‘straight talking’ about issues concerning animal torture and public compliance, are dealing with delicate matters. If we want people to listen to this we need to show them we’ve done our homework and that we are trying to be objective. We need to come across sincerely and entirely non-violently.
If we are promoting veganism in public, personal sincerity is essential. If we look a bit fake, however wise we sound, people will turn away. Things may even turn nasty. If we are talking how things should be done beautifully, we mustn’t sound ugly! If we show any hardness our words will seem empty. Value-judgments and heated disagreements are guaranteed to lose us support. Instead of trying to convert people in the old fashioned, tub-thumping way, we need to listen, and be unafraid of opposite opinions. Until that is established we can’t get to first base, to a position to offer our own solutions. In the absence of balanced conversation and fair debate we lose sight of the issues and the very point of debate.

Talking to people about veganism

Why are we so keen to talk about all this? Talk about new ideas, altered attitudes and changing habit patterns? Perhaps it’s not as facile as wanting something new to chatter about but more a genuine wish to implant a sense of optimism in others. "Optimistic veganism" is a light on the future. We’ve discovered a jewel and simply want to share our good fortune with others.
If we can see the potential in this idea, it’s likely we’ll be busting to talk about it. We figure ‘once seen never forgotten’. But instead of this jewel being widely admired, something unexpected happens. We hit a hurdle. A barrier drops and we don’t understand why. No one actually wants to know about it.
Maybe this is our first taste of rejection over a point of principle, the first time we’ve been cold-shouldered. This rejection feels real because of the energy it sucks out of us. It hurts and it’s intended to hurt or at least bring us up with a jolt. Almost everything will be thrown at us, not only in words but in unspoken feelings of disapproval, in order to bring us back into the fold of how things have always been done (‘anything to bring you home’). At bottom, it’s a suspicion the majority have about minorities - that not only are they deluded but are less clear in what they are saying than they realise. There’s a suspicion that animal rightists who speak about kindness to animals, are often not really kind people at all - people who can only show love towards "creatures" but not to their fellow humans. Whether this is true or not, the rejection or misunderstanding vegans often feel make them feel a bit desperate. They try all the harder to come across as sincere people. People who have thought hard about something important and setting aside self interest have come to some difficult conclusions. And ultimately that is not such a bad thing, to have to go through being misjudged by others, toughening us up for the struggles that lie ahead of us.
Vegans may have to deal with this the best way they can, and wait for others to catch up. This matter of being utterly sincere, living by principle, not having ulterior motives, all that is something we want to establish. It is, after all, central to our credibility. And eventually our effectiveness.

Promoting vegan, continued ...

“Vegan”. An idea. A new attitude. Does switching from one attitude to another, one diet to another, mean a long and painful transition or something shorter, even as enjoyable as falling in love? Progressing into it depends on how much we want it, how we come upon it and if we are coerced into it. But assuming we were free agents, inspired by the idea, and we took up the ‘good idea’ of going vegan, and went from idealistic theory to comfortable habit - that is one huge journey. We can remember where we started it and how it ended up; it started as a very conscious change and eventually became jsu something we just ‘do’, unselfconsciously.
That’s how it may have gone in our own private lives, but almost certainly it is going to be more complex when it comes to swinging others around. To be successful at that is almost as important, for many of us, as it was to become vegan ourselves. Meat eaters seem so obstinate, they just won’t budge. We see that people are just carrying on regardless as if asleep, and every time we see that a wave of despair sweeps over us, because, it saps our energy.
Perhaps we should realise what we are dealing with here - this one idea can transform our species, get us all back on track, give humanity a chance to become healthy, creative, benign and friendly. It could make us far more non-violent. Imagine the worth of that! Taking that into consideration, then any amount of hard work and patience on our part, any amount of exasperation, would seem a mere nothing.

Here’s the parallel scenario: how it might go with me - the aim is to establish a vegan lifestyle into my own life. I’d start my day by doing certain new things and not doing certain old things, forming new habits, making deliberate, assured changes. This, on the private side, is what I want for myself. But when all that is in place, then maybe I want to get political. I feel an urgency and want to speed things up ‘for the world’. I want to break down barriers. I want to keep a ‘high’ so I don’t lose my advantage. I want to promote veganism, start a revolution in my corner of the world. It’s as if I’ve been transformed from a wannabe vegan to vegan warrior, ready to take on the world.
And yet this isn’t reality. We’re not hardened politicians with a tough reputation, ripping into our adversaries in the bear pit, we’re just ordinary people talking with other ordinary people, like ourselves, about issues. Our ‘adversaries’ are sensitive free-willed beings, who will decide things for themselves, no matter what we say or how forcibly we say it. Once we start actively advocating animal rights, it’s hard not to get pushy. We forget how easy it is for people to simply walk away from us, in their feelings anyway. However good we think an idea is, it shouldn’t be forced onto others. Any uninvited contributions we make can be seen as intrusions into other peoples’ private space, especially when we call their morality into question - “You still eat meat?” … our good idea is ‘fired’ at people (aiming at their values) and they, sensing something uncomfortable, are put off. Perhaps they swear off both the good idea and us - for ever. And none of us would want that. That’s anti-promotion.