The Intelligent Way To Go

1846:

We, at least we in the West, seem to be gradually moving away from the human-dominant model to a subtler, gentler type of character, moving towards valuing kindness and compassion.

I’m not suggesting some sort of slushy emotional revolution is taking place. It’s just that there are more young people realising that violence has got to stop somewhere since harmlessness is the more intelligent way to go.

Today, people are much better informed about the ugly and the unintelligent lifestyles, and are therefore better able to make a better choice. We begin to see the emergence of a loyal, mature, gratitude-centred approach to life. And whether we’re talking about relating to animals and how far we move towards a plant-based food system or how we relate to each other, there’s a certain sensitisation taking place. For us in the West especially, this period will surely be remembered as the ‘age of relationships’. We are learning how to relate to things, to people, to the disabled, to minority groups, to farm animals, to forests, etc.

I suppose we’re beginning to see the advantages of acting more interactively, symbiotically and altruistically. But the upshot all this is our gaining better clarity. Once we are clearer about why we feel as we do, then we will want to be ‘doing the right thing’. But there’s something else here too. It isn’t just a new morality creeping in. It isn’t a throw-back to doing our duty or observing greater strictness. It’s something much easier. What was once a discipline is now becoming an enjoyment. We no longer need to earn merit points or get other’s approval for what we do. We are quite capable of following our own life-guidance systems.

Maybe it comes with the territory, but vegans use intuition as a life-guide, since other humans might not be impartial enough to be clear about their own behaviour, let alone reliable enough to argue the merits of humanitarianism. We live in a carnivorous and violent world. By being empathic towards animals we are more sensitive perhaps, but also more resilient. Perhaps the greatest advantage of veganism, to us, is our needing less outside encouragement. Carnivores like to invalidate our non-violence principles in order to continue practising violence on animals.

If we are about to rescue our species from ignominy, it will surely be by way of voluntary, independent choices being made by many individuals. It will be a willing change, an attractive change, a shifting of one’s own ‘conceptual framework’ regarding right action. We’ll be able to see the move towards vegan principle as a mixture of helping to repair the damage (we humans have done) and seeing it as the most fulfilling thing we could be doing for ourselves - enjoying doing things for the greater good, enjoying work-as-play-as-work.