Beneficial structure

265:

If killing animals to eat them is condoned by the majority, then as vegans we need to be upfront about our boycott - that we don’t condone violence and specifically violently-extracted foods and commodities. In that way it makes us different to almost all other people. Our decisions are coloured differently in so many ways, not just by the food and clothing we use but in the very way we see our world – we don’t relish the role of human-the-dominator but that of being of equal importance with other species.
Anyone who is part of a particular discipline, whether it’s in sport, religion, academic study or personal relationships, abides by their own self-imposed rules. We devise and adopt them not just to BE different or to make life more difficult for ourselves but because they provide a structure which could prove of benefit to others. So a ‘discipline’ is a show of strength, a proof that something can be done if it’s seen to be necessary.
Take the Quakers. They avoid war and don’t let themselves be conscripted. They believe disagreements can best be handled by dialogue rather than confrontation. For many years in the eighteenth century, in Pennsylvania, they maintained friendly relations with the indigenous Americans and governed a whole state on the basis of non-violence. Their government eventually collapsed, because the use of violence and force was more popular for solving problems … but maybe the Quakers were doomed by their own inconsistency. It wasn’t that they’d gone too far but that they hadn’t gone far enough. They didn’t embrace the idea of being non-violent towards animals, since they still killed and ate them. But they still represent today a precept of acting non-violently and perhaps also non-judgementally, and we can all take something from that and appreciate its value. I’d like to see them become vegan because of the valuable groundwork they’ve laid towards the idea of regarding all humans as being on an equal footing.
Vegans and Quakers each offer an important principle to the world. One discipline from one group could perhaps benefit the other group … in a sort of principle-exchange.