Getting good and judgmental

Monday 30th August 2010

In 2010 there are many decision-making people acting irrationally, worsening the mess we’re in instead of improving it. Vegans must address the rationally-intentioned, having faith in them, having faith in the effectiveness of en masse boycott to end the Animal Industries.
Vegans are proposing a straightforward solution … and, of course, either non-vegans are unaware of it or they’re continuing to ignore it. For us it’s frustrating. We know people have the intelligence to grasp the logic of our argument but something is not connecting. So we wait. During which time we hope to find out why it isn’t happening. After all, some ordinary people, stimulated by the horror decide to act. Other ordinary people aren’t similarly affected by the same stimuli. Why?
There’s trouble in the ranks down at the Vegan Detective Agency. Some want to look for clues to the crime, others just want the culprits punished. Some of us never give up our appeal to the average omnivore’s intelligence, others just get annoyed and judge them negatively. I’d say this is the major divide at the Agency, between one type of vegan and another, between those who issue “fatwas” on people they don’t like and others who want to educate them.
The first sort of vegan gets angry – it makes them feel good to get it ‘off their chest’. They judge “the animal eater”. It sounds good, strong, decisive and empowered. A very amateur attempt at shifting the paradigm, but by condemning others, directly or by implication, we separate from them. We see ourselves ‘apart’, even ‘better-than’, and that ends up in tears, especially when we quarrel with people we’re close to. The gulf between vegans and non-vegans grows deep and wide very quickly; within seconds, we can separate from someone, just by ‘making a stand’, just by getting a bit personal about it.
In post-quarrel land, it’s an uphill slog in trying to restore balance. ‘Angry’ goes to judgement goes to unnecessarily complicating issues between us. First up we need some mutual respect, then comes some imparting of information.
The reason our ‘mutual separations’ occur, over this animal question, isn’t just because of food, health and cruelty issues, it’s also about our attitude towards judging. Value judging, the negative sort, concerning the non-vegan’s “contempt” for animals. Nothing makes a vegan angrier quicker than hearing the phrase “They’re just animals”. It implies that animal are dumb and we can do as we please with them. Let them suffer. And vegans do passionately care about the suffering of animals. We want to let non-vegans know how deeply outraged we are.
But usually our arguments do no good because reasonable discussion is made almost impossible by their reading our ‘outrage’. Judgement clothed in a show of sensitivity on the vegan’s part. The atmosphere is never clear enough to shift the dark cloud hanging over proceedings; you can almost smell the value judgment in the air. It’s always more threatening than inviting. We vegans just can’t seem to resist the temptation to knee jerk reactions of shock and disappointment … in that reasonable people can be so unreasonable. But the feeling is mutual – they see us as “self-righteous do-gooders”. Both myths need to be exploded. Partly true, partly untrue.
The more we learn about animals, the greater the gap grows between the perception-world of the average omnivore and the average vegan. As outrage deepens amongst us, we begin to take umbrage, offended by the dismissiveness of animal eaters. And anger brings on the ‘knee jerk response’ of disliking. If we don’t like our ‘adversaries’ we show it.
If there’s no anger we won’t waste precious moments when we might be using that time to assess the sort of person we’re talking to. It’s important to spend these few microseconds to gauge where to pitch our remarks, and decide which (if any) facts we going to bring to their attention … avail them of NOT assail them with! And that gets us past wanting to be judgemental.