“Cruelty plays a fundamental role in the vegetarian’s argument inasmuch as the principal reason the vegetarian does not want to eat meat is that she does not want to kill animals or cause them to suffer. The vegetarian sees cruelty in purely negative terms; she believes that its complete eradication is a realistic goal that she ought to pursue actively. The carnivore, in contrast, considers such a pretention to be neither realistic nor desirable. To be fully animal we must openly acknowledge that life, even if we cannot place a price on it, is certainly not without its costs. In other words, when I eat animals, I accept the fact that my animality demands an inherent compromise rather than permit myself the luxury of supposing that I stand above animality and that I can detach myself morally from what amounts to a fundamental characteristic of my condition. Eating an animal amounts to sharing the burden of animality with other animals.

By being willing to eat animals, I acknowledge in particular and in an intimate manner that there are no “free lunches” in the world—that is, that one cannot want to be an animal and at the same time not want to be implicated in the cycles of life and death that are essential to being an animal. I kill in order to live, just like all other animals. The vegetarian succumbs to the illusion that all this can be easily avoided. She wants to believe that human beings can be an exception in the world by living in a completely selfsufficient manner, without ever killing or harming another living being. This seemingly sympathetic vision is utterly unrealistic and downright pathological in that it refuses to acknowledge the role that death and harm play in the dynamic of the living. When I refuse to kill in order to eat meat, I assume that such an activity is morally reprehensible even though a great many animals live by means of predation and we ourselves have survived in part because of hunting. Can practices that are so widespread and that have played such a significant role in the dynamic of species really be considered immoral?”

The above passage comes from French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dominique Lestel’s book about ethical carnivorism. It’s a good book and, contrary to the initial impression one might get from the title, Lestel’s dietary ethic has much more in common with various vegetarian and vegan practitioners than with, say, the typical mindless American consumer of Styrofoam packaged supermarket meat; i.e. Lestel’s book functions as a challenge to both those who hold to a rigid, ethical vegan/vegetarian position as well as those who unconsciously drift through life not thinking or worrying much about where their food is coming from or caring about or acknowledging the creatures/plants that sacrificially provide it.

Up until now (as I’ve written before) I have thought of myself as a “selective omnivore” who was pretty convinced that a non-mammillian diet should be my next move at some point, and I’ve recently been making an effort to adhere to a more plant based diet and am now sticking pretty strictly to that non-mammillian food ethic. It’s a decision that was a long time coming for me. I made the decision for a bunch of reasons, but one illusion I was not under was that by not eating mammals I would somehow be doing something to end killing, suffering or cruelty in the World. To say this another way, I don’t think killing mammals for food is morally wrong and I didn’t stop eating mammals because I can’t stomach the gruesome thought of having to cause suffering or to kill something to stay alive. On the contrary, although I haven’t done such a thing personally, I think I’m perfectly capable of hunting wild game (whether or not I’d be good at it is another story!) or personally killing a domesticated cow or chicken in order to sustain my life and the life of others close to me.

Because I still eat seafood, and occasionally eat chicken or other poultry freely offered to me, some vegetarians might not consider me one of their ilk. And I’m fine with that, I get it. And to be honest I’m not looking for acceptance into the ethical vegetarian or vegan club because, although I don’t eat mammals for a mixture of ethical and political reasons, I would not consider myself an ethical vegetarian for the reasons that Lestel points out in his book.

Lestel distinguishes three types of vegetarian: the political vegetarian, who rightly lobbies against the shame of factory farming (I’m closest to this variety I suppose); the “personal” vegetarian, who doesn’t eat meat because she simply doesn’t like the taste; and the ethical vegetarian. Lestel directs his criticism primarily toward the latter type of vegitarian. The problem with the ethical vegetarian’s position, according to Lestel, is that (aside from positing an explicit hierarchy of beings; i.e., the ethical vegetarian assumes that a vegetable, an earthworm, or the insect that she kills when she cultivates her garden is less important than a cow) it rests upon the old humanist thesis of human exceptionalism and human separation from nature. Lestel posits that the ethical vegetarian (who is often afflicted with “Bambi syndrome” and embraces an ideal of complete peace with animals) mistakenly “believes that human beings can place themselves above the evolution of all other species.” Moral philosopher and animal rights activist, Gary Steiner, remarks in his book that for Lestel the ethical vegetarian that believes humans can evolve beyond their animality are “representing human beings as essentially different from non-human animals, which are enmeshed in the eternal cycles of predation and are unable to entertain the prospect of a life without violence, the standpoint of the ethical vegetarian amounts to a ‘politics of apartheid between human beings and other animals.'” Lestel makes an interesting claim (which is quite convincing to me) with regard to the ethical vegetarian’s unique brand of human exceptionalism, he writes that “In contrast with the European humanist, the vegetarian does not conclude…that she may treat animals any way she likes; she instead reasserts in a novel form the doctrine of human uniqueness by refusing to let herself become intoxicated by the animal and by assuming that the metabolic relationships between human and animal should be reduced to a minimum, if not completely suppressed. Here eating meat can be viewed as a form of the animalization of the human being, animal flesh becoming transformed into human flesh.”

Lestel rightly brings to light the anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism that underly the ethical vegetarian’s philosophy. Lestel astutely points out that humans seem to insist on the fact that we know what’s best for non-human animals, and we tend to take it on unquestioned faith and assume that animals wish to never be hunted and/or eaten. But the person who takes pleasure in eating meat can rightly ask the question: how do we know that? The clever omnivore might say that being killed for food is only an ethical scandal to humans, it’s a human concept after all, and perhaps we’re merely projecting that onto the non-human animal world, therefore, if animals themselves don’t necessarily consider being killed for food to be an “ethical scandal” then why should we? This point is hard to argue with, in my opinion. Realistically, I’d wager that no living thing wants to be killed, but unfortunately, as Lestel writes, the “world is inherently a world of conflict and…the interests of different beings, far from being mutually compatible, tend to clash with one another. In what sense is a prey animal’s interest in not being eaten superior to the predator’s interest in eating its prey? […] The vegetarian refuses to grasp the fact that permanent conflicts of interest constitute a fundamental characteristic of the living.”

In the book, Lestel’s radical claim (which has already sort of been touched on) is essentially that it’s not the carnivore who doesn’t love animals but the ethical vegetarian. Because the ethical vegetarian would like to forget that life is fundamentally inseparable from violence, cruelty and suffering, what the ethical vegetarian purports to love is actually “a highly idealized animal, an animal that is ultimately no longer very animal.” Steiner (who, again, is vegetarian and a prominent animal rights activist) agrees with Lestel and says this: “The ethical vegetarian engages, to use Nietzsche’s terminology, in a denial of life.” Lestel puts it succinctly this way: “To be fully animal we must openly acknowledge that life, even if we cannot place a price on it, is certainly not without its costs.” One of my other favorite philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead, has made similar observations: “Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery.”

Acknowledging that life is robbery does not, however, mean that the person who eats meat is somehow now free to live a life without a guilty conscience. On the contrary, for Lestel, the ethical carnivore does not take meat eating lightly but undertakes this practice with “full appreciation of the infinite debt that we owe to the animal. ” To eat meat ethically is to “consume it with [a] mixture of pious reverence and anxiety.” Summing Lestel’s concepts up again, Steiner writes: “To consume meat in such a ritual fashion is not to do so as part of one’s everyday practices but instead to do so with the specific intention of celebrating our own animality and the sacrifice that the animal we eat has made on our behalf.” Lestel’s is an ethic of reciprocity, much like that of indigenous cultures like the Algonquin that he references. Meat-eating, for Lestel and the indigenous philosophies he draws upon, has less to do with compassion or equality but with shared life, the purpose being to foster a cosmic kinship with non-human animals. In other words, a “spiritual ecology” comes into focus and it entails an ethics of reciprocity between human and non-human animals whose terms can be fulfilled only through active and conscious participation in the cycles of generation and destruction that define life.

All of this said, Lestel agrees with the ethical vegetarians and vegans who would, by all accounts, agree with all that’s been said and simply end up saying something very Buddhist like: “Look, all I care about, in the end, is doing my best to reduce the suffering of non-human animals.” I agree with Lestel that reducing unnecessary suffering is a “legitimate moral imperative.” Even though suffering is indeed part of life, causing Divinely created, sentient, spirit-filled non-human animals to suffer unnecessarily is NEVER OK. I think in the end this is why my lax form of non-mammilian, lacto-ovo-pesco-vegetarianism would fall under Lestel’s “political vegetarian” category because I do care a great deal about reducing the in-humane abuses and horrific suffering found in our mechanized, industrialized, profit-driven food and agriculture  systems, which, in my mind, is largely a product of our suicidal economic structure (along with, yes, certain long and commonly held philosophical and/or religious beliefs regarding the subjectivity of animals, or lack thereof). So vegetarians and Lestel and I are on the same team as far as wanting to reduce unnecessary suffering and eliminate the scandalous crime of factory farming. Where Lestel and I part ways with the ethical vegetarian is beliving that this problem is purely moral. It’s not. It’s largely political. Lestel writes that vegetarians “are convinced that they can solve the problem within the context of contemporary societies (in broad strokes, within socioliberal, materialist, atheistic democracies—“atheological societies”) when in fact these societies are themselves part of the problem. The strategy of inspiring compassion and fundamentally criminalizing the carnivore has failed; we need to pursue more radical measures.” Lestel’s solution is radical politics and being courageous enough to foster the will to imagine new forms of socio-political and economic organization. Drawing upon the Iroquois Nation, Lestel suggests we give something like a nonreligious, constitutional, federal anarchotheocracy a try, which apparently would operate similarly to constitutional monarchies but, like the Iroquois, feature shamans or “spiritual intermediaries” who communicate with “disembodied minds.” The advantage of or appeal of shamanism, for Lestel, is that “it has always been hostile to violence perpetrated specifically against nature and animals.” I personally think something like this, i.e. having spiritual intermediaries speaking for nature, would temper the greed and pride of our current system a great deal. Reiterating this point and succinctly capturing both the horror of meat factories and the workings of our capitalist economic system, Lestel cites German philosopher Günther Anders: “the human is what he [sic] eats, and mass humans are produced by making them consume mass products.”

All in all, my main take-away from Lestel’s work (which also weirdly and coincidentally enough happens to be my take-away from other disciplines within which I study, like Confucianism and process-relational philosophy) is that we all exist inter-dependently, and because of this, because there will always be conflicting interests, we are constrained and restricted by each other. But we also bring each other into existence and depend on each other for life. In Lestel’s words, “Assuming one’s role as a predator…amounts to recognizing that one’s existence depends on that of others–and that the existence of others can depend on one’s own existence. All animals are predators, even herbivores such as cows, who feed on grass. It is equally true that plants, such as certain African acacias, alter the chemical composition of their leaves when they are attacked by antelopes, thereby becoming toxic to their attackers. This clearly shows that the acacias perceive the actions of herbivores to be acts of aggression. There is no need for me to be delighted by this, but it would be absurd for me to view it as a metaphysical scandal.”

BA-RUCH A-TAH A-DO-NOI
ELO-HAI-NU ME-LECH HA-O-LAM
SHE-HA-KOL NI-H’YAH BI-D’VA-RO

(Blessed are You, L-rd our G‑d, King of the Universe, by Whose word all things came to be.)

Tags:animismcapitalismDominique Lestelecologyethical carnivorismGary Steinerspiritual ecologyveganismvegitarianism