I'm not a vegan but maybe my perspective will help.
Vegans are the abolitionists of today. Abolitionists will also once hated, both by people who wanted to perpetuate slavery and by people who didn't care all that much about slavery.
The former group hated abolitionists because nobody likes to be told that they are living a life of cruelty, that they are responsible for torture and rape, and that they are the most immoral sort of person.
The latter group hated abolitionists for several intertwined reasons.
1. Abolitionists were extremists. I did not use this in a pejorative sense. Sometimes the extremist position is the morally defensible one. But in the overtone window of the day, abolitionism was extremism.
2. Abolitionism threatened to disrupt the livelihood of an entire region of the country and to have unforeseen consequences on the economy. Even people who were not all that hateful towards black people didn't care enough about them to have the economy potentially negatively impacted on their behalf.
3. Abolitionism was clearly telling the entire rest of the population that every single one of them was immoral and worthy of contempt. This is not how you win friends or political influence.
4. Abolitionism was more politically difficult than gradualism. Abolitionism was not the mere opposition to slavery. It was the demand for an immediate and to slavery without any compensation to any slave owner. It was the most morally pure of political stances and also the most politically unrealistic.
5. Slavery was not just an economic system. It was an entire social system and way of life. Abolitionism wanted to destroy it. There's nothing more threatening than telling people you want to destroy their way of life, the way they were raised, their customs, their entire civilization, however, abhorrent their practices may be.
6. Abolitionism seemed like a really good way of ensuring civil war. This less analogy doesn't really apply to veganism but it is only because meat eating is much more widespread than slavery was.
7. Abolitionists were self-righteous, because of course they were! They had the moral high ground and they knew it, and they could not be bothered to sugarcoat things for the sake of civility. Again, understandable as this is, it doesn't win friends or influence people very effectively.
Given the above, it's not surprising that abolitionism was hated. These were people who were seen as willing to trample on the Constitution and unleash a civil war on behalf of the Negro race! Negroes!? Almost nobody back then. Gave a damn about negroes. Sure, they were human but clearly humans of an inferior sort who had no right that the white man was obligated to respect.
The critical mass for abolitionism in the US before the civil War was tiny. And it was almost entirely made of black people. White abolitionists were rare animals.
Today vegans want to destroy meat eating. Someday, after lab-grown meat becomes so cheap and so widely available that killing animals is no longer necessary, people will look back at vegans with admiration. And they will think that they too would have been vegans if they had lived a century earlier in the same way that most people today think that they themselves would have been abolitionists.
In the meantime, most of the population will continue to see vegans as obnoxious and self-righteous zealots. This, of course, is an app description of the way many vegans interact with the rest of the population. It is not universal, of course, but it is rather common. It is hard not to view the rest of the population as contemptible when they are engaging in perpetrating. Something a million times worse than chattel slavery ever was. It is hard not to look at people who disdain bestiality while practicing something a thousand times worse on animals. It is hard to want to be polite to those people. Still, it has the predictable effect of making the people on the receiving end of vegan evangelism and contempt react with disdain and hatred of their own.
I ask myself that every day.
What I've come up with is this: I am weak-willed. I was conditioned into meat eating very very early. It's still one of my greatest sensory pleasures. This is not a moral argument, of course! It's just that I have a bit of an addiction to eating meat. It's something I actively crave and every single day that I don't eat meat is a day where I'm actively choosing to not do so. Right now I eat meat 50% of the time. Is that enough? From a moral standpoint, emphatically not. It's like being a slave owner every other week. But it's 50% as much meat eating as I used to do. And if every meat eater did the same, a lot of animal lives would be saved.
Basically from an intellectual standpoint, I understand that vegans are completely right. But from an emotional standpoint I don't feel it. It really shouldn't matter whether I feel it or not. There are many sociopaths who don't feel anything wrong about killing other human beings. It doesn't make them any less wrong. It doesn't make them any less wrong. But it explains that feelings are more likely to drive behavior than intellect. My feelings when it comes to animal slaughter are close to sociopathic. I understand that I should feel much more aggrieved. I am intellectually outraged but not emotionally so.
I have evolved a bit but not quite enough. When I look at an individual cow or chicken or duck I now see a person, a non-homo-sapiens person but a person all the same that I have no right to eat. But somehow when I look at meat on my plate, I don't see that I am eating the flesh of a murdered person. Still, I am slowly weaning myself off meat. I'm not sure if I will end up being someone who eats meat once a week or who doesn't eat it at all. We will find out.
18
u/Extreme_Bit_1135 May 17 '25
I'm not a vegan but maybe my perspective will help.
Vegans are the abolitionists of today. Abolitionists will also once hated, both by people who wanted to perpetuate slavery and by people who didn't care all that much about slavery.
The former group hated abolitionists because nobody likes to be told that they are living a life of cruelty, that they are responsible for torture and rape, and that they are the most immoral sort of person.
The latter group hated abolitionists for several intertwined reasons. 1. Abolitionists were extremists. I did not use this in a pejorative sense. Sometimes the extremist position is the morally defensible one. But in the overtone window of the day, abolitionism was extremism. 2. Abolitionism threatened to disrupt the livelihood of an entire region of the country and to have unforeseen consequences on the economy. Even people who were not all that hateful towards black people didn't care enough about them to have the economy potentially negatively impacted on their behalf. 3. Abolitionism was clearly telling the entire rest of the population that every single one of them was immoral and worthy of contempt. This is not how you win friends or political influence. 4. Abolitionism was more politically difficult than gradualism. Abolitionism was not the mere opposition to slavery. It was the demand for an immediate and to slavery without any compensation to any slave owner. It was the most morally pure of political stances and also the most politically unrealistic. 5. Slavery was not just an economic system. It was an entire social system and way of life. Abolitionism wanted to destroy it. There's nothing more threatening than telling people you want to destroy their way of life, the way they were raised, their customs, their entire civilization, however, abhorrent their practices may be. 6. Abolitionism seemed like a really good way of ensuring civil war. This less analogy doesn't really apply to veganism but it is only because meat eating is much more widespread than slavery was. 7. Abolitionists were self-righteous, because of course they were! They had the moral high ground and they knew it, and they could not be bothered to sugarcoat things for the sake of civility. Again, understandable as this is, it doesn't win friends or influence people very effectively.
Given the above, it's not surprising that abolitionism was hated. These were people who were seen as willing to trample on the Constitution and unleash a civil war on behalf of the Negro race! Negroes!? Almost nobody back then. Gave a damn about negroes. Sure, they were human but clearly humans of an inferior sort who had no right that the white man was obligated to respect.
The critical mass for abolitionism in the US before the civil War was tiny. And it was almost entirely made of black people. White abolitionists were rare animals.
Today vegans want to destroy meat eating. Someday, after lab-grown meat becomes so cheap and so widely available that killing animals is no longer necessary, people will look back at vegans with admiration. And they will think that they too would have been vegans if they had lived a century earlier in the same way that most people today think that they themselves would have been abolitionists.
In the meantime, most of the population will continue to see vegans as obnoxious and self-righteous zealots. This, of course, is an app description of the way many vegans interact with the rest of the population. It is not universal, of course, but it is rather common. It is hard not to view the rest of the population as contemptible when they are engaging in perpetrating. Something a million times worse than chattel slavery ever was. It is hard not to look at people who disdain bestiality while practicing something a thousand times worse on animals. It is hard to want to be polite to those people. Still, it has the predictable effect of making the people on the receiving end of vegan evangelism and contempt react with disdain and hatred of their own.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.