Why I Don’t Write More About Veganism
Principles and the sanctity of feelings.
While I don’t have a regular beat, as most writers seem to, I do have a range, one whose parameters might vaguely be summed up as “ideas” and related subjects. There’s a reason why I don’t write about ice hockey, or cooking, or kung fu films, despite my interest in them — because they fall too far outside that range. And yet, I have interests well within this range that I have rarely touched on. Foremost among them is veganism.
I’ve been vegan for six and a half years. I was vegetarian for three years prior, and something akin to what we would now call “flexitarian” for four years before that. A proverb writers lean on is “write about what you know.” Given my experience in this area, plus how well-versed I am in the arguments, this seems an obvious trove of material to mine. And yet, I have mostly opted not to. Why? No one has ever confronted me about this, but it’s a question my conscience asks me. I have only publicly written about veganism once, for Areo Magazine, in which I argued that leading by example is more effective than evangelizing people. This has become my philosophy regarding how (and how often) I speak about veganism. But while I stand by that view, I did not arrive at it from a purely logical utilitarian calculus. The truth is, I felt more or less bullied into a corner from which that path was the best available option.
Long before I became a writer, long before I went vegan, years before I was even vegetarian, I became convinced that consuming fewer animal products would be beneficial on multiple fronts. I argued this case anonymously, in mostly left-leaning spaces. I can’t recall ever getting more blowback than I did in those comments.
My younger self was baffled. I was being attacked as though I were some kind of radical authoritarian extremist, but I wasn’t even vegetarian. I was simply open-minded enough to consider other perspectives and interested in discussing them with others. I naturally (and naïvely) expected that others should be too. Instead, I witnessed commenters by the hundreds essentially lose their minds before my eyes. Many of these were people I had gotten to know in the internet-acquaintance sort of way; people who were, in some cases, old enough to be my parents; people who were more educated than me; people with whom I’d had many reasonable conversations, even on controversial or contentious subjects. I watched them suddenly devolve into a pack of frothing, rabid wolves, committing the same obvious fallacies and incivilities that they were so quick to point out in other areas. A deluge of personal attacks, bad faith arguments, logical inconsistencies, non sequiturs, red herrings, and false equivalencies.
From time to time, as the months and years passed, I dipped a toe back in those waters, experimenting and A/B testing with different approaches and in different settings. I tried out the brazen in-your-face approach. I tried holding the audience’s hand and gently guiding them toward my points. And everything in between. The angry/passionate style drew the most blowback, unsurprisingly, but my experience was that they all drew blowback. Critics of the angry style would vault to the moral high ground and tisk-tisk my tone, but those very same people would show up in the comments of my gentler posts with a whole different set of objections.
Over and over, the signal I received was not that there’s a right or wrong way to advocate for veganism, or anything related to animal ethics that goes beyond protecting pets or endangered wildlife (worthy but cost-free issues that ask nothing of the average person). The signal I was sent was to shut the fuck up. It wasn’t how I was speaking about the issue; it was the fact that I was speaking about it at all. After so many years, I became conditioned to keep my mouth shut. It just wasn’t worth the shitstorms. This was how I eventually arrived at my “lead by example” stance — it was the best thing I could do while shutting up. But I resent that I was made to feel that I had no other choice.
Are there overly aggressive and obnoxious vegans? Of course. There are overly aggressive and obnoxious meat-eaters, too. There are annoying and off-putting people in every conceivable movement, community, and category of humans. What’s less evenly distributed are the standards by which we evaluate them. To be seen as an obnoxious meat-eater, one needs to be some kind of “manosphere” caricature — ranting and raving about “soy boys”, going out of your way to antagonize people, and extolling the fictional manliness of a mythical past. To be seen as an obnoxious vegan, however, one merely needs to be a vegan who ever opens their mouth on the subject. To be one of the “good ones”, one must ensure that no meat-eater who occupies the same planetary system is ever made to feel judged in the slightest degree.
When I was hired at my first real job out of college, my boss gave me the orientation spiel about sexual harassment. He told me that while various things I could say or do would obviously be harassment, what constitutes harassment was ultimately up to what the other person feels. I could scrupulously refrain from saying or doing anything inappropriate, but if the other person feels uncomfortable around me, for any reason, I could be accused of sexual harassment — which is to say, punished for it. I could control my actions and words, but how could I possibly be expected to control what someone else feels? The only advice I was offered was to engage in wholesale avoidance beyond what was strictly necessary.
One should avoid being sanctimonious, insulting, and judgmental. The problem is, the very fact of being a vegan is an implicit judgment on the practice of eating meat, and by extension, those who participate in it, hence the irrational rage one faces. At the end of the day, “judgment” is determined not by my actions, but by how you feel — and feelings are sacrosanct. That’s an unworkable, illiberal, and unfair standard. At a certain point, a rigged game just isn’t worth playing anymore.
Whatever their dietary/lifestyle choices, most people tend to recognize that the way we treat animals will one day be looked back upon with shame, condemnation, and disbelief. How surreal, that there should be an accepted practice where most of its partakers seem to suspect that posterity will not judge them kindly for it. We’re all products of our time, but I know of no other people with enough moral foresight to have a decent idea of how history will regard their deeds, but who were yet unable or unwilling to change.
Psychologist Paul Bloom, an omnivore himself, attributes this not to sadism, malice, or hypocrisy, but rather “akrasia — it’s weakness of will.” Similar assessments can be made about our failure to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, or to abolish poverty, or to join the rest of the developed world with some form of universal healthcare. We don’t lack the means; we lack the will. If we could do these things effortlessly and with no significant tradeoffs by simply waving a wand, most of us would. But few things worth doing are effortless, everything has tradeoffs, and inertia is a powerful force. Easier to put it out of mind and tell anyone who brings it up to fuck off. No, I don’t think I will.
See also: “How To Go Vegan (If You Want To)”
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