Agreement isn’t the aim

When we’re promoting Animal Rights we’re trying to make our arguments non-judgemental and present them non-violently to the yet-to-be-convinced. But people aren’t accustomed to moral matters being delivered in a mild mannered way; important issues aren’t usually presented with both sides of the argument. In today’s world we don’t believe we can get ideas across unless we speak polemically. But that’s what rankles, the unsubtlety of that approach - propaganda, spin, indoctrination, they’re all unattractive and yet that’s still the way new ideas are put forward. On an emotional level it’s thought to be quite effective. When we’re selling an ethical idea, we don’t usually adopt a reasoned approach but instead choose to exaggerate its virtues and then denigrate the opposite view. The approach is often aggressive, in order to force people to think about what they are doing and make them agree. We’re often reluctant to admit this approach doesn’t work well because, in matters of personal morality, especially concerning our use of ‘food and research’ animals, people hate being told what to do. In consequence they dig their heels in. And once that happens we’ve got real communication problems.
To prevent this happening we might need to bend over backwards (to show that we realise how difficult these issues are for people) by presenting the pros and cons of ‘the argument’, the aim being to have our arguments critically assessed. With animal rights we aren’t looking for plain agreement, we’re wanting people to think about issues and arrive at their own conclusions.
Often, in the flush of wanting to be in agreement with an idea, we act and then, later on, forget the reason we agreed. It’s like coming out of a movie feeling pumped by the whole emotional impact of what we’ve seen, and then later on, as the details fade, we can’t remember quite why we were so carried away. With new opinions, if we don’t examine and digest them thoroughly enough, the power of them fades too quickly and we revert back to our earlier opinions.
As animal liberationists, if we can inspire change we need that change to be permanent, and that means arguments have to be introduced carefully, that is non-violently and non-accusingly, so that they come across clearly and stick in the memory. We should promote liberation for what it is, not just welfare reform or incremental stages of granting rights or fiddling at the edges of our omnivorous diets but as a clear cut abolitionist attitude from which all other arguments flow. It’s much the same as the great opinion change that took place with the end of human slavery. It was always about outright abolition, so there would be no sliding back into old habits.