I've also been called fundamentalist, dogmatic, unreal, ideological, aloof, close-minded, and so on. Oddly, I've never been called �divisive�. In some respects, these are more sophisticated. �Bad for veganism!� has always struck me as predictable and boring. By turns, the melodramatic oversensitivity and the �now, now!� paternalism of the animal advocacy movement frequently surprises me. And for what it's worth, I'm not even a public figure in the movement. The majority of those of you reading this blog will have either never heard of me or only just heard.
I can only imagine how this kind of petty attempts to bully other advocates affect people like Gary Francione, a distinguished lawyer and professor at Rutgers, a world renowned author, and a much nicer person than I am, who has been responding to the same questions by tweets, email, phone calls, blog posts at presentations, on discussion boards and in waiting rooms and for 30 years. Questions are wonderful (and I do my best to answer a lot of them), but when someone asks the same questions over and over expecting a different response, it makes me wonder a little.
In some ways, being bad for veganism is the new black. Anyone who has any thoughts at all that run counter to the received wisdom of the regulationist olligarchy that dominates the movement and dares to voice them is being bad for veganism. In my experience, advocates of regulation promote censorship and silence at almost every turn and when they can't have that, they settle for obfuscation, misdirection and confusion. Still, apparently, it's what the regulationist movement has to work with when addressing their critics: no arguments, just epithets. Nevertheless, I wonder what someone means when they say I'm bad for veganism. What are they really saying? It took me a long time to puzzle the various meanings out, but what follows is the treasury of wisdom I've uncovered!
Some of them are saying, �The best I can do is an ad hominem argument and a personal attack in the face of the clear articulation and sound reasoning of your views!� I don't blame anyone for this. Dealing with my formidable rhetoric would be a challenge for just about anyone. But the day I started basing my views on things like reality, evidence, logic, rather than just what I wanted to imagine about the world, it's like someone supersized my mack. Arguing with reality is just a no win situation.
But what's with the name calling? That kind of behaviour is a little passive aggressive. If you can't win an argument civilly and thoughtfully, why go dirty? If you're going to go dirty, why go dirty in such an obviously unintelligent and predictable way? Why not just be honest? Indeed, honesty is always humbling, since as Kant reminds us, honesty requires that we acknowledge others as ends rather than means, but perhaps honesty is too humbling; and more important, it probably requires too many correctly spelled syllables.
Some of them are saying: �Shhhhh, we have to trick people into veg*nism [sic!] and you're making that more difficult by being forthright!� or �OMG, ur alienating all the people hu r considering eating free range veal!� Frankly, I think this is probably one of the most ineffective angles of outreach put forward by the regulationist movement (and ineffective is a euphamism). Tricking people into veganism by misrepresenting it, pretending like honey is vegan, that avoiding animal use, even when it's very easy to do so is not morally imperative but a personal choice and so on, is confusing, morally reprehensible and just plain ineffective.
Some of them are saying: �Nonhuman animals really shouldn't have rights...�. This, I find to be the most deeply troubling. The idea that veganism should ever be promoted on any basis but for the rights of animals not to be used as property is practically, rationally and morally problematic. But saying that vegans who take animal rights seriously are bad for veganism is like saying Rosa Parks was bad for Civil Rights because she stood up for her rights and the rights of others unequivocally.
Seriously, can any reasonable person imagine King saying �Keeping African Americans in slavery but whipping them a little less is a great victory! Anyone who takes a strong stand for African Americans is bad for Civil Rights!� Completely and utterly unimaginable. And yet, countless animal advocates say the same every day all across North America by participating in regulationist campaigns that promote the regulated use of animals rather than outright abolition of their slavery. Worse, they try to silence anyone who thinks differently and acts according to their consciences. Sad, sad, sad � and that took a great deal of generosity to write.
Some of them are saying: �Do you always have to be such a condescending jerk?� Dim the lights for a second while I get introspective. Perhaps it's true. I can admit it: I take the lives of nonhuman animals seriously enough to encourage other advocates to think for themselves and act maximally on behalf of those they claim to represent. I encourage them to behave like adults, to think and to show some discipline in their work. I shudder at my own enormity.
Of course, there are moments when Dear Abby might politely quibble with the way I interact with others. Sometimes, my appreciation of the sensitivities of all those who didn't get enough attention growing up, and whose self-esteem rests on what some stranger posts on the Internet is simply lacking. But taking the rights of nonhumans not to be used as property seriously sometimes means calling it the way you see it.
So, am I bad for veganism? I can't honestly answer yes. What I do think of as being not just bad, but unremmitingly terrible for veganism (worse than the third season of The OC bad) is the resistance to thinking in the movement. If I had a dollar for every regulationist response to an abolitionist argument that I knew was little more than a cut and paste from regulationist propaganda, I could retire.
Honestly, cracking a book never hurt anybody. And the outright rejection of thought that is required to refuse to engage someone with ideas and instead resort to name-calling is deeply unfortunate but emblematic of the animal advocacy movement today. Political Movements for Adults (trademark pending, and no offense to children) don't grasp at straws and they don't apologize for taking a firm stand, nor do they call names and rely on ad hominems. They behave politely, clearly articulate their values and ideas, and take unequivocal stands about the justice they seek on behalf of others. That's what we owe nonhuman animals, period. If that makes me bad for veganism, well, I guess in that case, the canvas shoe does fit.
But whether you like me, or don't like me, I'm asking you to be less divisive, to be less hurtful in your personal attacks on me (and other advocates); they keep me up at night thinking about blog posts to write! I'm calling on you to give thinking a chance. More important, I'm here to stay; I think you should take the rights of animals not to be used as property seriously, go vegan if you're not already, and engage in creative nonviolent vegan outreach that eschews racism, sexism and violence and promotes an end to the property status of nonhuman animals as the pratical, ethical, and effective way to end their slavery.
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