Vegan Practically

A couple of week’s ago I gave a quick overview of my thoughts on meat-eating and the use of animals and animal products more generally as well-entrenched ideologies of privilege. Using “ideology” to mean not just a set of ideas, but a set of firmly entrenched ideas that solidifies relationships of domination and subordination, I argued that humans’ sense of dominion and entitlement over non-human animals is embraced as ideology. This week I want to say a little bit more about something I think is related to that idea, which is the phenomenon of “meat-eaters’ fragility.”

No doubt many readers will be aware of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. I have been exploring the parallels and differences between her discussion of white fragility and my observations of meat-eaters’ fragility, and want to venture into that a bit here today.

In her book, DiAngelo draws from her work as a facilitator of workshops on race and racism in workplaces to identify and unpack this phenomenon of “white fragility.” (DiAngelo 2018). Though the analysis is not (in my view) all that it could be, the notion of white fragility gets at something important. A white woman herself, DiAngelo says: “Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge to our racial world views as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense” (DiAngelo  2018 Introduction).

This insight roughly captures what is going on in discussions of food ethics, where facts about animal suffering and climate impact are raised for the consideration of ominvores. We might re-write Di Angelo’s sentence with very few changes as: “Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about human domination over animals. We consider a challenge to our speciesist world views as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of speciesism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense.”

That revision doesn’t precisely and perfectly get at the extent of the entrenched ideas of speciesism. Not to deny that there might exist racist people who are openly and unapologetically racist. But for most people it feels extremely uncomfortable to be considered a racist or to be implicated in racism. This is not the case where an attitude of superiority over non-human animals is concerned.

Most people take it as given that humans are superior to non-human animals. As a result, the heels go into the ground at the very suggestion that there is something wrong with speciesism. The “unsettling and unfair moral offense” is the claim that our exploitation and treatment of animals is morally wrong. Whereas most people who are implicated in racism feel “falsely accused of something terrible,” people who are immersed in the ideology of meat-eating feel vindicated by the social acceptability of their choices, unable to consider that something wrong could be so widely practiced.

Meanwhile, as vegan activists (or even vegans who are not activists but just exist as a reminder that there is another way) are dismissed as extremists, trillions of animals are tortured and slaughtered each year for human consumption. Countless more are exploited in other ways for human entertainment or convenience. Humans in these industries also suffer. And the climate and environmental health of our planet continues to deteriorate as a result of animal agriculture. Given the harms, meat-eaters’ fragility gets in the way of addressing a truly urgent and morally horrific state of affairs with innumerable human and non-human casualties every day. As I write this paragraph, I am aware that the average omnivore will read it and scoff.

How do we address this type of obstinate adherence to this ideology? It is not enough to label these people snowflakes and take note of their fragility; these reactions are true obstacles in the way of urgent change. As with any collective action problem, the vast reach of the ideology of domination over non-human animals means that only a collective action solution will succeed in bringing about meaningful change. As a result, it is essential that we find ways of bringing more people into the collective effort. In order to do that, the reality of meat-eaters’ fragility needs to be taken into account. As much as we don’t want to tip-toe around their feelings, alienating them is not particularly helpful.

DiAngelo offers that perhaps people experiencing white fragility might adopt a different attitude. Referencing her own transition from white fragility to an open mind, she says, “if I understand racism as a system into which I was socialized, I can receive feedback on my problematic racial patterns as a helpful way to support my learning and growth.” Instead of getting defensive, she suggests, how about responding “with gratitude and relief (after all, now that we are informed we won’t do it again)”?

It seems like a thin hope in the case of meat-eating and the use of animal products to think that people will adopt a different attitude and, upon being informed, “won’t do it again.”

A notable dimension of this phenomenon is that people get defensive because they feel falsely accused. Where racism is concerned, their self-image is of a good person, not a racist. DiAngelo’s emphasis on structural or systemic racism is meant to take the sting out of it somewhat (I’m not sure she succeeds in making that case, but that’s the idea). In the case of meat-eaters, their self-image is also of a good person. Many are even animal lovers. Many self-proclaimed animal lovers do not make the connection between the food on their plates and their supposed love of animals and rejection of animal suffering. How easy is it to think one minute, “it’s horrible that so many animals suffer on factory farms,” and then the next minute order sausage and eggs?

Where our self-image of ourselves as good people gets challenged, perhaps even pointing towards (at best) cognitive dissonance (i.e. “the meat paradox”) and (at worst) hypocrisy (i.e. claiming to care about animals but then not thinking that should change any of our choices), it’s easy for that defensive fragility to kick in. A friend once told me about a conversation she had where someone asked her to explain why she chose to avoid animal products. She explained that she had ethical concerns about factory farming that made her think supporting them by purchasing their products is wrong. Instead of engaging with her answer, the person got offended and said, “What? So you think I’m doing something wrong when I eat animals?” Well…yes.

Of course this type of maneuver deflects the conversation away from the real issue, forcing it instead onto the topic of the omnivores wounded moral character.

Next week I am going to write about possible strategies for taking meat-eaters’ fragility into account while still keeping the focus on the bigger picture of moral and environmental harm. For today, the goal was simply to outline the idea of meat-eating fragility as an obstacle to reasonable discourse about the mass atrocity in and significant environmental impact of non-human animal agriculture and aquaculture.