I don't want to sound like a broken record on the importance of nonviolent behaviour to a nonviolent movement. I podcasted about it a bit yesterday. I have a couple of recent blogs on my views. But I read this morning that people were harassing Gary Francione because he's nonviolent. I denounce absolutely these kinds of personal attacks in the movement in general, and I oppose violence on moral and practical grounds unequivocally.
In this post, because every would-be superstar in our community likes to debate: �yes, but what really is violence?�, I am defining violence as any kind of behaviour in which unnecessary (and by unnecessary, I mean unjustified or inexcusable) harm is done deliberately to another animal (human or non). That includes property damage as well as physical and emotional harm as a general matter. This does not preclude all uses of force. Violence subjugates the interests of others to our own interests unjustifiably or inexcusably.
The difference between violence and justified or excusable uses of force is the difference between the rapist and the good Samaritan who phones the police, yells for help, tells the rapist to stop, and failing everything else, tries to pull the rapist off the victim nonviolently. It is the difference between pushing a child down on the playground and pushing the child out of the way of an oncoming car.
What's the difference between justifiable and excusable and what do these mean? Francione talks about the difference in a recent podcast on vegan cats. You should have a listen if you haven't. If someone is trying to kill you (or you otherwise face immanent harm), a limited amount of force in self-defense is often justifiable. If someone is holding a gun to your head and compelling you to take a violent action, for example, that may be excusable.
This is not a set of open exceptions for advocates to take any old action they want because they feel justified or excused in doing so. Determining whether any use of force is ever justified or excusable is a rational process that requires careful and clear thinking about what should or should not be morally acceptable based on the rights of others. Sometimes, nonviolent force may be necessary to ensure the rights of others are respected, but it does not follow from this that we all should feel free to play the school yard bully. It is equally ridiculous for those who are nonviolent to to dress up in a cape and go play Batman in ways that will all but ensure a violent confrontation that harms others.
Violence, shorthanded as an unjustifiable harm we do to others, is, by definition, morally unjustified. The day we confuse our role as the good Samaritan with some sort of self-appointed, messianic duty to play Batman, or worse, the rapist, in the name of nonhuman animals is the day we've lost all meaningful moral sense of what we owe all other persons. If there is no meaningful moral difference between us and the oppressor, between �us� and �them� then there is no �us� and �them�. If animal advocates are violent, and the oppressor is violent, if we're all violent, then there is no hope for change; there is only tyranny and we are only agents of varying expressions of that tyranny.
Those of you who read my blog know that I enjoy some amateur psycho-analysis. I do wonder whether people who don't understand that justice in a vegan sense is not just informed by, but predicated upon, nonviolence go wrong. And what I mean when I write that 'veganism is predicated on nonviolence' is that nonviolence isn't just a process that we should consider when we decide how to speak and act and solve a moral problem.
What I mean is that nonviolence is so intrinsic to veganism that one cannot be said to act violently and to act veganly at the same time. I know; veganly is not a word. But the movement's preoccupation with violence is driving me to extremely extreme extremes. In short, every vegan, to act in a way that can be said to be properly vegan, must begin with the assumption that all harms to other persons are unjustified and inexcusable and try to solve the moral problems they encounter as nonviolently as possible. To do less is to work from and to reproduce the moral problem of the current system: that others are our property to use to our own advantage when it suits us to do so.
The defining difference between vegans and nonvegans is that we embody nonviolence toward animals in our actions. None of us is perfect. We all compromise, even those who type poorly written screeds about the necessity of violence and then have a high-five and back-slapping party into the early morning hours, no doubt, from their parents' basements. I could point out that the computers involved are probably made with animal products in some fashion and/or with chemicals tested on nonhuman animals, but people who pen this kind of nonsense are always in a rush to give themselves a pass at the expense of others. Their lack of moral character and their bad faith prohibits them as a matter of habit from thinking, acting, and speaking, in self-disciplined, self-critical and moral ways. They misunderstand what it means to speak truth to power because they misunderstand fundamentally both the nature of truth and the nature of power.
That may sound overly critical. It is worth pointing out that many of us come to the movement with little moral character (at least I did). But it is critically important for each of us to build that character for nonhuman animals and for ourselves. Yet, I've found the quickest and surest way to be labelled authoritarian in the animal advocacy movement is to ask people, nominally 'anti-authoritarian' people, not to behave in authoritarian ways. I've never worked in a political community that so confused the difference between authority and authoritarianism. I find there is a strong sense that the right to free speech to say any old thing is a moral end in itself and that by encouraging others to think about what they should say, it's somehow 'divisive', 'bad for nonhuman animals', 'authoritarian', etc. This is deeply misguided.
Frankly, I wonder why more advocates aren't more concerned with their right to hold and express an educated and well-informed moral view on behalf of nonhuman animals. I wish more advocates used their right to speak to clamour for their right to that kind of speech. This is the long way of saying that too many advocates, in my experience, set their expectations on 'the system' too low. They mistake the difference between reaction and radicalism. And they content themselves with their rights to lemons when they should be insisting on their right to lemonade.
Every radical vegan wants each and every nonhuman animal to go free, today. I don't mean letting a tiger loose with your grandmother in the bathroom. I mean that we all want their property status to end, for them to be acknowledged as persons and for them to receive the care they require as refugees, as Francione describes them. I say �radical vegan� because not all vegans have radicalized. Some vegans may never radicalize. That may sound doctrinaire or dismissive, but the truth is, some vegans may never develop the sense that nonhumans are not just 'things with feelings' that we are defending from on high as a kind of saintly moral masturbation; some will simply never understand that we're all animals, that all animals have rights and that respecting those rights is not only what we owe others but also what we owe ourselves.
It is not an act of goodly charity to encourage others to lament animal suffering and give up all veal but 'free range veal.� Anything but veganism (as a set of practices that respect their basic rights) is a moral failure to pay nonhuman animals the bare minimum of what we owe them; and it is also a moral failure when we encourage others actively to pay nonhumans less than what they owe them. We are all animals. We all have the right not to be used as property by someone else. In fact, this blog is devoted entirely to just that principle: that we're all in the Ark together. That we're all trying to get free from a system of violence and slavery that harms and degrades each and every one of us.
Even as anti-slavery advocates, we cannot wholly escape the system. There is no meaningful comparison to be made between how the system harms us and how the rights of nonhuman animals are violated by their property status, by the scalpels that cut them open, by the chemicals sprayed into their eyes, by the ringmaster's whip, by the bolt guns, by the butcher knives, by the yoke of the horse, or by the harness of the seeing eye dog. Yet, many advocates are deeply, deeply confused about what the system owes us as well. It is not a right to act violently on behalf of nonhuman animals: it is our right not to use others as property.
Truthfully, it shames and lowers each of us even to walk on sidewalks made with animal products. It's morally excusable in light of the work we must do if we hope to help nonhuman animals, but it also lessens each of us in tiny ways. But to love properly is often to sacrifice. Our sacrifice is compromise, to remain humble as we patiently and diligently make change. Some advocates shout a lot about our 'right to free speech' without ever shouting about our right to hold and express a well-informed and educated moral view. We bristle when someone tries to correct us, even when it's for our own benefit and to the benefit of the cause. It's not because we're 'being anti-authoritarian', 'true to ourselves', or worse, 'true to nonhuman animals'. Thinking like this may provide a rich fantasy life, but in the end, we behave this way because we are emotionally broken people and we're not sure what else to do.
We are often so stunned by the enormity of the system that we cannot think clearly about how we can best act in response to it. We lack a vision of own authority, our own ability to make change, our own inability to see the social transformation that is already underway in each and every new abolitionist vegan and every adopted nonhuman animal. I'm not blaming anyone. This is one of the many ways in which we all remain in the grip of speciesism as a broader cultural phenomenon. Even our thinking in response to speciesism tends toward emotional reaction, but that's exactly what we must avoid.
The system is a house, and like all houses, we can change it brick by brick, wall by wall. As advocates, we should concentrate on changes that affect the weight-bearing walls, which are the property status of nonhuman animals, nonveganism, plain ignorance of nonhuman animals, and the cultural speciesism that expresses itself in all of these ways. As advocates, we must avoid focusing on the wallpaper that is the extra 1/4� of cage space, the lighter whip and the other 'changes' that are wholly meaningless to victims who will be either sent to premature deaths to be our luxuries or forced into life-long slavery to labour on our behalf.
As advocates, our work is not a matter of reaction; it is a matter of transformation. We have to struggle to avoid confusing the wallpaper for the walls. We have to struggle to avoid confusing our work pulling down the walls of the house of slavery and violence with building those walls back up again through violent and confrontational behaviour of our own. We can only �tear the house down� by convincing its other builders to join us, not with threats and idiocy, but creative and nonviolent education that calls them to join us in a life that respects the rights of other persons to be free from violence and slavery.
What we'll find in the end may surprise us all. What we may find is not that we tore the house down, but rather that we rebuilt it. We may find that we replaced the slave quarters with new rooms for nonhuman animals who cannot care for themselves and that we let the rest go free. We may find that we've taken the prison house, each of us in separate cells, some nicer than others, and built in its place a house of justice and equality that protects and binds us all in a shared home with a room for each of us. If we do, then we'll also find that it is a house that would have been impossible to build without one another, and that nonviolence is and always was the strong foundation of that house.
It is not a matter of burning or sinking the Ark; it is a matter of making sure the Ark makes it to Ararat and that when it gets there, we all get out and go free. Together. If you want that future, and you're not vegan already, the only thing I can tell you is that today is probably the best day in history for you to take the rights of animals not to be used as property seriously, as well as your own right not to use them as property seriously, and to go vegan.
No comments:
Post a Comment