Fauxmage
01-19-2006, 10:34 PM
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The Rhetoric of Plants
Vegans clearly need to be more savvy in their justifications for eating plants to avoid simply justifying eating animals. Instead of trying to counter the idea that plants suffer, we should just accept this premise because the best way to reduce both plant and animal suffering is to stop eating meat since animals are fed dead plants. Additionally, meat-eaters typically don't like to acknowledge animals suffering, yet when they raise the plant question they are admitting this since their underlying assumption is that since plants and animals both suffer, there is no unique reason to avoid eating animals. Meat eaters raise the plant question not because it is an indictment of veganism, but rather to deflect attention from their own shame caused by eating animals--they are trying to show that vegans are not perfect either. But rather than getting defensive, sarcastic, or belittling the person, we must admit our own shame from harming plants. Sociologists point out that "Conflicts escalate, according to Thomas Scheff, when there is no mechanism for individuals to express shame and shame is transmuted to anger and pride, which, in turn, can lead to more shame. To block this 'feeling trap', as Scheff calls it, it is necessary to reduce alienation between groups and find ways to offer apology and restitution" (Groves 189). True dialog can only occur if both sides accept their shame. Until then we will be left with the pride, anger, and deliberate attempts to redirect shame as revealed in this 30 June 1998 post to the Vegan-L:
The proper response to the "You're killing/hurting plants" argument is to laugh in their face and not even entertain such a ridiculous notion. By taking them seriously, you're legitimizing their argument--and that's what they want you to do. This whole angle was obviously dreamed up by meat industry propagandists. Their aim is to engage vegetarians in a silly debate that will end up making the vegetarians look ridiculous by revealing us to be utter and outrageous wimps--so wimpy we actually care about a plant's feelings. Think about it--do you think these argumentative meateaters give two shits about a plant's feelings? Of course not; they're just trying to make us look silly. So, if you want to win the debate, laugh in their smug meateating face and make THEM look silly.
Digging Deeper
Outside the context of a discussion with a meat-eater, there are real implications to the plant question. It points to an inadequacy in the theory of animal rights. Even if we succeed in no longer having a world based on the exploitation of animals, it will still be a world based on the exploitation of plants on a massive scale. We want to eliminate the property status of animals--should we also consider wanting to eliminate the property status of plants? That is, would we rather have mass exploitation of the whole of nature, or limited usage of both wild plants and wild animals?
Plant exploitation parallels animal exploitation. There are factory farms with monocropping, cloning, genetic engineering, pesticides, herbicides (!). Agriculture is a constant battle against the plants, insects and other animals that initially lived on the land. Beyond plants as food, plants are kept in houses as "pets," used for entertainment (Christmas trees, Jack-o-lanterns), people wrap themselves in dead plants, and doctors are always experimenting on one plant or another looking for the next "miracle" drug.
One can say that individual plants are not aware, but they are alive and try to remain that way, which differentiates them from, say, rocks. Plants have all kinds of chemical defense systems that go in to action when the plant is damaged. Plants have ways to avoid being eaten--thorns, phytoestrogens (found in over 300 plants), poison, taste, growing high off of the ground. As Barbara McClintock, a Nobel laureate geneticist who worked with corn for over 30 years, said, "Animals can walk around, but plants have to stay still to do the same things, with ingenious mechanisms....Plants are extraordinary. For instance,...if you pinch a leaf of a plant you set off electric pulses. You can't touch a plant without setting off an electric pulse.... There is no question that plants have [all] kinds of sensitivities. They do a lot of responding to their environment. They can do almost anything you can think of. But just because they sit there, anybody walking down the road considers them just a plastic area to look at, [as if] they're not really alive" (Keller 199-200). If anyone should be at least open to the possibility that plants have some level of awareness, it is vegans since we continually chide others for not acknowledging animal awareness.
But whether or not plants are aware is not really the issue. There are clearly two levels to concern about animals--the immediate suffering of individual animals and the fact that animals are exploited at all. While one can certainly object to the treatment of animals simply because of the suffering they endure, most vegans object to the inherent exploitation of animals. That is, they are not animal welfarists who believe it is acceptable to exploit animals as long as their suffering is minimal, but rather animal rightists who believe, on face, that it is wrong to own animals and systematically exploit them. It might be possible to raise animals for food who are unconscious the entire time--that is, they are just as unaware as plants might be. But vegans reject such idealized scenarios because no matter how "kindly" animals are treated, they are still slaves.
In fact, vegans may not simply be animal rightists, but environmentalists who believe that all of Nature deserves consideration. This is why it is not necessary to resolve the thorny issue of whether or not plants are "aware" in order to give them consideration. The dominionist mindset that Nature is here for humans to exploit applies to animals, plants, and even rocks. Just as environmentalists so often fail to see how eating animals is the embodiment of the dominionist mindset, vegans seem to want to ignore the fact that agriculture is simply another aspect of that worldview.
The ideal way to give plants consideration is to eliminate agriculture in favor of foraging. We tend to think that it is impossible to return to a forager lifestyle because agriculture has been around for 10,000 years. (Even Jim Mason, who highlights all of the negatives brought about by the beginning of agriculture, simply states that we are stuck with it and that we should only rid ourselves of animal agriculture.) But if the whole of human existence is compressed into a calendar year, we have only been farming for the last 8.5 hours. Furthermore, most of the forager cultures in the Americas were destroyed beginning only 500 years ago. And most importantly, there still exist numerous forager cultures. Foraging is not some romantic notion out of the past--it is a reality even as you and I sit at our computers.
A forager diet need not--and should not--include hunting. There is no nutritional requirement to hunt. Organized hunting "began only about 20,000 years ago--some 25,000 years after the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens" (Mason 72). Prior to that, our ancestors met their nutritional needs by foraging, which sometimes included insects, lizards, and maybe scavenged meat. Hunting developed mainly as a response to female power (women gathered most of the food and bore children, in which the male role was not known). "The hunt, in other words, was not so much about nutrition as it was about acquiring power--the animal's power" (Mason 86). "Hunting also gave men some role, and hence some status, as food providers" (Mason 87). Furthermore, humans are not required to live in extreme environments. Humans chose to live in the Arctic because they were exploiting animals. This certainly does not entitle humans to live there anymore than Nike is entitled to continue to use slave labor because they built their entire business on it.
Is it possible to return to a forager lifestyle? At current population levels, clearly not. Absent foraging, is it possible to develop a sustainable agriculture not based on the domination of nature? Perhaps. The bottom line is that plants deserve consideration; we must figure out what that means.
The Rhetoric of Plants
Vegans clearly need to be more savvy in their justifications for eating plants to avoid simply justifying eating animals. Instead of trying to counter the idea that plants suffer, we should just accept this premise because the best way to reduce both plant and animal suffering is to stop eating meat since animals are fed dead plants. Additionally, meat-eaters typically don't like to acknowledge animals suffering, yet when they raise the plant question they are admitting this since their underlying assumption is that since plants and animals both suffer, there is no unique reason to avoid eating animals. Meat eaters raise the plant question not because it is an indictment of veganism, but rather to deflect attention from their own shame caused by eating animals--they are trying to show that vegans are not perfect either. But rather than getting defensive, sarcastic, or belittling the person, we must admit our own shame from harming plants. Sociologists point out that "Conflicts escalate, according to Thomas Scheff, when there is no mechanism for individuals to express shame and shame is transmuted to anger and pride, which, in turn, can lead to more shame. To block this 'feeling trap', as Scheff calls it, it is necessary to reduce alienation between groups and find ways to offer apology and restitution" (Groves 189). True dialog can only occur if both sides accept their shame. Until then we will be left with the pride, anger, and deliberate attempts to redirect shame as revealed in this 30 June 1998 post to the Vegan-L:
The proper response to the "You're killing/hurting plants" argument is to laugh in their face and not even entertain such a ridiculous notion. By taking them seriously, you're legitimizing their argument--and that's what they want you to do. This whole angle was obviously dreamed up by meat industry propagandists. Their aim is to engage vegetarians in a silly debate that will end up making the vegetarians look ridiculous by revealing us to be utter and outrageous wimps--so wimpy we actually care about a plant's feelings. Think about it--do you think these argumentative meateaters give two shits about a plant's feelings? Of course not; they're just trying to make us look silly. So, if you want to win the debate, laugh in their smug meateating face and make THEM look silly.
Digging Deeper
Outside the context of a discussion with a meat-eater, there are real implications to the plant question. It points to an inadequacy in the theory of animal rights. Even if we succeed in no longer having a world based on the exploitation of animals, it will still be a world based on the exploitation of plants on a massive scale. We want to eliminate the property status of animals--should we also consider wanting to eliminate the property status of plants? That is, would we rather have mass exploitation of the whole of nature, or limited usage of both wild plants and wild animals?
Plant exploitation parallels animal exploitation. There are factory farms with monocropping, cloning, genetic engineering, pesticides, herbicides (!). Agriculture is a constant battle against the plants, insects and other animals that initially lived on the land. Beyond plants as food, plants are kept in houses as "pets," used for entertainment (Christmas trees, Jack-o-lanterns), people wrap themselves in dead plants, and doctors are always experimenting on one plant or another looking for the next "miracle" drug.
One can say that individual plants are not aware, but they are alive and try to remain that way, which differentiates them from, say, rocks. Plants have all kinds of chemical defense systems that go in to action when the plant is damaged. Plants have ways to avoid being eaten--thorns, phytoestrogens (found in over 300 plants), poison, taste, growing high off of the ground. As Barbara McClintock, a Nobel laureate geneticist who worked with corn for over 30 years, said, "Animals can walk around, but plants have to stay still to do the same things, with ingenious mechanisms....Plants are extraordinary. For instance,...if you pinch a leaf of a plant you set off electric pulses. You can't touch a plant without setting off an electric pulse.... There is no question that plants have [all] kinds of sensitivities. They do a lot of responding to their environment. They can do almost anything you can think of. But just because they sit there, anybody walking down the road considers them just a plastic area to look at, [as if] they're not really alive" (Keller 199-200). If anyone should be at least open to the possibility that plants have some level of awareness, it is vegans since we continually chide others for not acknowledging animal awareness.
But whether or not plants are aware is not really the issue. There are clearly two levels to concern about animals--the immediate suffering of individual animals and the fact that animals are exploited at all. While one can certainly object to the treatment of animals simply because of the suffering they endure, most vegans object to the inherent exploitation of animals. That is, they are not animal welfarists who believe it is acceptable to exploit animals as long as their suffering is minimal, but rather animal rightists who believe, on face, that it is wrong to own animals and systematically exploit them. It might be possible to raise animals for food who are unconscious the entire time--that is, they are just as unaware as plants might be. But vegans reject such idealized scenarios because no matter how "kindly" animals are treated, they are still slaves.
In fact, vegans may not simply be animal rightists, but environmentalists who believe that all of Nature deserves consideration. This is why it is not necessary to resolve the thorny issue of whether or not plants are "aware" in order to give them consideration. The dominionist mindset that Nature is here for humans to exploit applies to animals, plants, and even rocks. Just as environmentalists so often fail to see how eating animals is the embodiment of the dominionist mindset, vegans seem to want to ignore the fact that agriculture is simply another aspect of that worldview.
The ideal way to give plants consideration is to eliminate agriculture in favor of foraging. We tend to think that it is impossible to return to a forager lifestyle because agriculture has been around for 10,000 years. (Even Jim Mason, who highlights all of the negatives brought about by the beginning of agriculture, simply states that we are stuck with it and that we should only rid ourselves of animal agriculture.) But if the whole of human existence is compressed into a calendar year, we have only been farming for the last 8.5 hours. Furthermore, most of the forager cultures in the Americas were destroyed beginning only 500 years ago. And most importantly, there still exist numerous forager cultures. Foraging is not some romantic notion out of the past--it is a reality even as you and I sit at our computers.
A forager diet need not--and should not--include hunting. There is no nutritional requirement to hunt. Organized hunting "began only about 20,000 years ago--some 25,000 years after the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens" (Mason 72). Prior to that, our ancestors met their nutritional needs by foraging, which sometimes included insects, lizards, and maybe scavenged meat. Hunting developed mainly as a response to female power (women gathered most of the food and bore children, in which the male role was not known). "The hunt, in other words, was not so much about nutrition as it was about acquiring power--the animal's power" (Mason 86). "Hunting also gave men some role, and hence some status, as food providers" (Mason 87). Furthermore, humans are not required to live in extreme environments. Humans chose to live in the Arctic because they were exploiting animals. This certainly does not entitle humans to live there anymore than Nike is entitled to continue to use slave labor because they built their entire business on it.
Is it possible to return to a forager lifestyle? At current population levels, clearly not. Absent foraging, is it possible to develop a sustainable agriculture not based on the domination of nature? Perhaps. The bottom line is that plants deserve consideration; we must figure out what that means.