The judgement trap

Just about everyone knows how vegans view the world but how do vegans view themselves? Perhaps we think being vegan is pretty much how everyone should be, morally speaking and health wise, but the danger is that vegans will seem as though they’re looking down from a height, perhaps boastfully, as if we are better than others. And if we think that way we might feel entitled to judge others who don’t think that way. And if we can’t get people to agree with us voluntarily we may use value judgement as a weapon against their complaisance. If we resort to this sort of moral force, it can be seen as a subtle form of violence or aggression. It’s as if we are violating the freedom of choice, when that choice is regarded by almost everyone, the law included, as acceptable.
From an outsider’s point of view there’s something about a holier-than-thou person that is distinctly unattractive and needing to be ‘brought down to size’. Anyone who thinks themselves better, whether cleverer, wealthier, better looking or more righteous, is unattractive, simply because they seem so self satisfied.
If vegans refuse to be judgemental it changes everything. They have a quality which others can admire, mainly because it isn’t in their face. And that counts for a lot, despite it seeming to us as being too passive. Vegans often feels that if they aren’t up front that they’re being apologetic about being vegans. We’re more used to the stridency of putting our arguments into circulation, causing a disturbance to attract attention, laying it on the line. But that’s been done, and it hasn’t had enough of the right sort of impact to build momentum amongst the general population. Animal rights has a reputation of exposing the truth but no acceptable currency in the public’s mind, and we have to ask why. Is it perhaps that the vegan extreme is more than people can take on board? And are we giving people a ready made excuse to avoid the truth we present by letting them think badly of us as judgmental evangelicals?
For us there are two positions to think about here: can we afford to be a benign presence and yet still an activist who isn’t a threat or an embarrassment to others? And can our self image be acceptable to us as a vegan activist who knows our own strengths and doesn’t need to prove our self by using judgement? We are surely stronger all round, to us and to others, if we have a completely non-violent image. As low as we might be on society’s ladder, we must know that our vegan principle is an inner strength. It doesn’t let us down, it is there to support us when we don’t seem to be making an impact, and it can only dissolve if we have to boast about it. In other words we remain positive and strong as long as we never think of others as being ‘below’ us.

Exploding the myths

Vegans will always have their work cut out, persuading people to change radically. But for us it’s not just about persuading reluctant people, it’s surely also about caring for them and being useful to them as they are, even if they don’t appear to listen to what we say. Underneath all our anger and frustration and aggressive thoughts towards our adversaries, we have a job to do, to break the myths people are attached to and help them see things as they really are, and go on from that point, always keeping it simple and clear.
We need to stress the same things over and over, until the penny drops – that some home truths are not as true as people believe. Many people still believe meat (and therefore animal farming) is essential for human survival, and that testing drugs on animals is the only way to have safe pharmaceuticals. People are so locked into these beliefs that we, as vegans, need to explain a different view of safety and survival, all the time emphasising compassion and the reliability of instinct. We have to persuade them to do what instinctively they know they should be doing, always within a context of non-violence.
But whatever we can get across we have to make sure we aren’t preaching, just advising. We are all hypersensitive to being criticised or being judged.

World problems

There are plenty of other idea-schools contending for attention on the great issues of the day - global warming, environment, world hunger, animal welfare, and each is significant so none of them can be sidelined. Are we overwhelmed by the extent of world problems, each of which need to be solved, one by one? Do we say, “Too hard, too hard” or “Another day, another day”? Is there a feeling today that we won’t find the answers we need? Are we reluctant to go beyond our mindsets to find answers? Is it all too big and too difficult? If we do think this way, nothing will change and we’ll head straight for our own destruction.
We can’t expect politicians to fix things for us. We need to lead the way and make our own step forward. Small changes won’t help. Radical changes may help.

Stepping out

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice goes looking for something. She finds a bottle inviting her to drink. She follows the instruction, she takes the risk and steps into the unknown. She enters another world, and her first instinct is to make friends with the beings she meets there, but they don’t reciprocate because they accept their own dimension and can’t change (their superficial nature). They don’t see the point of befriending Alice or taking her advice. They see no way to improve their life by following her example, which may be a metaphor for human obstinacy towards taking notice of obvious answers.
In our world all the opportunities for change exist, changes for our own benefit and for other’s. So what prevents us stepping out from what we’re used to? What stops us following the “drink me” instructions and entering a radically new world to find a new slant on our problems? I guess we’re reluctant because the other dimension seems unrealistic, incomprehensible or even ridiculous. But for people like vegans, we are forced to take something from beyond the familiar dimension (in this case, step away from our familiar violent world) and then apply what we find there, to our whole life. To us there must be some obvious answers, we look beyond the present world which we know is fundamentally flawed. And we find a simple principle of non-violence which seems highly significant. But to non-vegans, who haven’t looked that far, it isn’t such a universal principle. It doesn’t appear significant enough to apply it universally. And there the great difference lies.
No one wants to waste time on trivial matters and veganism may seem utterly trivial in the greater scheme of things to non-vegans. So, vegans need to communicate why vegan principle is linked to the universality of non-violence, and therefore why it is so important. Although we know what we’ve found has transformed our own lives, for others nothing like that has happened to them, nothing has been transformed and there remains a belief that no one simple principle is capable of making transformatory changes.
Vegan arguments, logic and statistics can help to convince but we need to translate everything into a language that can be understood by anyone. We have to continually return to basics, to emphasise the importance of not being cruel to weak beings or destructive or wasteful. That anti-bullying, anti-exploitative principle, combined with the example of our own behaviour, is what we have to convince with.

Self focus

An obstacle to success might be self obsession. So we put some energy into things outside self interest. Maybe we do charity work, become an environmentalist or a vegetarian. But the bottom line is how much self focus there is in what we do - my development, my road to enlightenment, my happiness. It shouldn’t rest there, and perhaps that’s what veganism tries to point out. To be fully rounded, to see beyond self-improvement, we need compassion, namely the ability to ‘be with’ another’s problems, to represent another’s interests as if they were one’s own. It requires a particular type of self discipline - thinking about others before thinking about ourselves. And that, by including animals, brings us back to vegan principles.
If we decide to become a vegan we have to see it not as a restriction but a liberation – it’s not just about abstaining from eating certain foods, it’s about developing something better. Food-wise it means healthier food, ethics-wise it means compassion. The route to success is having responsibility to do the right thing and having enough energy to keep it up. With good nutrition and clear conscience we can make resolutions that we know we can keep.

Lambs to the slaughter

Today is Australia Day or Invasion Day, call it what you will. It’s a day where celebrations often take the form of roasting meat over flames in the tradition of the Great Ozzie BBQ. A popular victim of these celebrations is sheep meat (well, in fact a lamb that has been executed at a very young age because it’s flesh is tender when cooked) and humans like the taste of cooked young flesh. This very salivating thought makes Australia Day a day to-be-looked-forward-to.

Australia Day is celebrated by a back-to-nature fire ritual, roasting lambs over open flames. It’s a disgusting habit but ‘everybody does it’. ‘Nobody’ has to think about it, since they’ve always done it – eaten lambs and other baby animals – and they like doing it, and have done it so often they can’t stop. They’re addicted to the taste and excited by the smell of it cooking.

And this is just one of the many ugly habits that have become part of our life, which now we can’t contemplate giving up.

What troubles some of us is our own lack of self-discipline. We can’t give up smoking, can’t kick the bottle, can’t stop eating those cutlets, and if we meet people who’ve kicked their addictions it makes us feel twice as bad. We might call them ‘the self-improved’, and when ‘they’ don’t seem likeable as people, we dislike them and it’s likely we’ll come to dislike the whole idea of ‘self improvement’.

But that’s not to say we don’t want any sort of self-improvement - improving our circumstances brings certain advantages. We’d all become self-improved if it meant becoming famous, rich or well thought of. But why waste time on being disciplined about not eating animals, especially if it only means saving lambs from being executed!

Their eyes glaze over

Vegans are familiar with that look. Often too polite to tell us, but to themselves it’s “I don’t have to listen to this crap”. Most people are alert to the lead-up vegans use to get to a point across. Subtle means whereby we edge round to talking animal stuff, but to the listener it’s not difficult to spot – when someone mentions something that will establish the difference between one viewpoint and another. “…but should we be eating animals?” That question in its many guises is often weedled into a conversation, sometimes thrust at unsuspecting listeners, rather like a Jehovah’s Witness introducing themselves as representitives of ‘The Lord Jesus Christ’. One knows what’s coming. We suss them, ignore them, shut the door and forget they ever knocked.
Certain things we learn to ignore. My grandparents lived on a train line, and when I was young I sometimes stayed with them and the noise of steam engines passing the window was deafening, but after a while I could sleep at night as they roared past. This switch-off ability is the same one that’s used to avoid hearing what we don’t want to hear, in this case what a vegan might be saying.
So, for us, trying to get our message across, is infuriating. All we see is a blank look, a resistance. We try to get through it but often fail … and what happens next is understandable but may be the reason why we are having so little impact on people, because we are not as battle-hardened as we could be.
It’s so frustrating that so many people simply tune out …so, we become exasperated … we try to barge past their defences …go for the jugular … dig right into people’s guilt or fear, in the hope we’ll bring them around by force. If only!
Health talk and fear of personal illness works on some level, but it doesn’t magically lead to a respect for vegan principles or an enthusiasm for animal liberation. Trying to change people’s attitudes by making them feel guilty or afraid is a sure fire way to make them run. It’s a tactic that might have worked a hundred years ago (if there had been vegans around then, which there weren’t) but it won’t work today … because there is such an overwhelming number of omnivores, amongst whom, especially the young, few seem to be suffering from the foods they’re eating. Nor are there many who seem to be consumed by guilt. No fun living with guilt! For them, things seem to be working and …if it works why fix it? People identify with their peers and people with attractive personalities, and with what they do. It’s easy NOT to identify with animal activists, who sometimes seem ‘frustrated’, ‘exasperated’ and the ‘aggressive type’. Amongst any group of people, of any age, the norm is still meat eating, with no particular problem with animal food or in switching off compassion when food’s on. What they do have a problem with is confrontation, especially over moral issues, where their own ethical values and self-discipline are being questioned. Free-willed people don’t take kindly to being told what to do or what to eat.