Harmlessness

79:

Talking is something you need confidence for. A shaky voice denotes uncertainty, a cocky voice something worse. Personally, I try to aim at somewhere in between.

            I know inside me that I need confidence to say the things I want to say. But I’m talking about Animal Rights and why people shouldn’t be eating some of the things they eat, so an essential ingredient for talking about all this is non-violence. I want people to pick that up straight away. And I use it too, to push me forward yet pull me back, so that I’m sensitive to how I think someone might be feeling (when listening to what I have to say).

            It would be the same if you were explaining the facts of life to a fertile teenager or if I were touching my ninety year old dad’s most sensitive nerve, when  urging him to “lift his legs and not shuffle”. Confidence is needed in such situations. Tricky subjects these are, to bring up. Talking-vegan is tricky, like that.

            It isn’t just about the food. Food is the symbol, almost. As a symbol it covers lots of daily habits, like eating, shopping, thinking and talking, and our food affects us in so many ways. Our confidence is often based on how we deal with food. But symbolically, I think it suggests what our overall approach might be, namely to talking confidently, about it. It reflects one’s approach to living life generally. For me, with my specific interest, it’s the basis for a lot of my talking, when talking ‘deep and meaningfully’.

            Vegans are always in a tricky position over ‘approach’. I’ll always want to represent harmlessness, so the touch of  anything I say must be both gentle yet powerful.

            Whilst power can be violence-based, as a vegan any power must be non-violence based. Take altruism for example, as a great motivator. It is powerful when it shows that one can be motivated by being useful when it combines with something we enjoy doing. If talking is my ‘enjoyment’ I want it to serve some useful purpose and to enjoy doing it at the same time. I want to enjoy it, be useful with it and to be a confident, non-violent talker. I take my lead from what I observe and admire in others. I’m impressed with what I see amongst some of the younger generation, because they don’t seem attracted to acquiring the trappings of conventional power. I can see the germ of harmlessness in them. They seem to exude something much gentler than most of my own generation. Perhaps that’s because they know there’s been too much power gained through killing, especially during the past century. I think that non-violence is the new power which is, I suspect, why it is becoming ever more attractive to them.

            In the talking trade there’s a need to be assertive, but not too much so. We don’t need to be indecisive but we do need to temper everything with non-violence, ultimately to be effective in what we do or say. It’s not that we need to be passive, but more that we need to be un-needy. We really don’t need feedback, approval, admiration or even encouragement, especially if it’s coming from people who are probably not in any position to give it, since they don’t agree with our ‘abolitionist vegan’ views. We do need to be strongly motivated though. And so perhaps that’s got to come from within. I’m sure that my own needs have to be met by being useful, even if it’s a usefulness that has to be laid up in cold storage for the future.

            The way I see it is that if usefulness can be enough to motivate me, then there won’t be a desperate need for me to condemn my adversaries. Which brings me back to judging others’ values and my own need to ease up on that. Being useful and being effective may rest on how good I am at observing the human phenomenon, which takes me back to talking, and being open to opposition. I need to learn about my fellows and how they think if I am to influence anyone, and that’s why I should welcome disagreement.

            I say this because the Animal Rights movement doesn’t have a good track record - we’re notoriously deaf to opposite arguments. Listening to them and considering them, without agreeing with them, may well be the key to effective communication.

            Most of us (vegans) still have a lot to learn about ‘non-violent approach’. I suspect that’s because we all might hate violence but still have it in us. Some days I am the biggest doubter of non-violence - “Nice idea, but too ineffective”. “It’s too slow”.

            Vegans observe their own ‘rules’ concerning eating habits. But I suspect we break the rules and aren’t too different to omnivores, in certain respects. Which is why listening is useful, to find out how current thinking and rationalising helps to unravel why some of us are and why some of us aren’t sensitive, firstly to each other’s feeling and secondly to the plight of farm animals. So if I can learn to listen instead of only practising my speeches on people, I can learn from others how I should conduct myself in their eyes, and subsequently get them to listen to what I have to say (mainly about what they should eat).

            In our society non-violence is practised by every one, at certain times of the day. Violence is practise at other times of the day. We change from one to the other in a flash. We let our auto-pilot take over the controls when we conduct our unthinking-doings of the day. At times we are in danger, when non-violence isn’t taken seriously and thought to be inappropriate. In certain situations (like eating a steak for dinner, or belting the kids when they annoy us), non-violence is thought to be a bit wimp-ish and ineffective.

            When I have my doubts about non-violence, as soon as I begin to doubt it I emasculate it. And then it’s no longer useful. It becomes a sort of duty, a political correctness, and no longer a pleasure.  

            People may think that non-violence is regressive and weak, and leading to submissiveness. You and I probably detest the cowering, weak person. A ‘veegn’, perhaps?

            That isn’t how I see vegans. I see them as people who want to re-form their values, even to learn from the animals themselves. We’ve all been, at some stage, fascinated when watching animals. With animals, they don’t sense things as intellectually as we do. They don’t have to fill their heads with as much junk as we do. They retain abilities we’ve lost. Their approach (to each other) shows how in touch they are with their inner self and the ‘selves’ of others. They are in touch with their senses - for instance, they smell things a thousand times better than we do. And they have a talent for discerning peaceful intention. They know affection denotes trustworthiness and an at-eased-ness. They aren’t judgmental. They, having suffered so badly from human violence throughout the ages, you’d think they’d show how they hate us, but no such thing. They are arbiters of good taste in the matter of harmlessness. From that, and with that, we humans can imitate their general approach in order to build non-violence into our attitudes and behaviours. Perhaps that’s what we love so much about animals. They teach us things no human could consistently teach us.