[华人文化] The Future of Veganism Ain't Nostalgia for Feudalism.

some people were shocked that I so
directly and aggressively said look arguments for veganism that are based on superstition arguments for veganism that are based on Buddhist tradition basically have to go it's game over that has nothing to do with what we're doing now in the future in the vegan movement this is nothing to do with political veganism ecological veganism ethical veganism or even health based veganism you know the plant-based the head people or you know reducing your chances of heart attack reducing your cholesterol we have to draw a very clear line between past present and future and the future of veganism in China the future of veganism for Chinese people living in Canada California and Australia the future of veganism is not going to be nostalgia for the superstition of the feudal past - addition you may know Fujio - tomliboo churro dr. Tom and Julia chunky decision Fanta Joshua Fong Jia to do the tree Tracy and I crochet Jia Jiang Ming woman who she out with the shanty Chan Khong sure damu Dom see die go die random [ __ ] ow Taman coo coo coo non-church ensue in way woman's hands I Dow mckernon ETA yo J girl Shampoo function sweep jiggle only 20 bian Zhong eager young Joshua doing I'm a Lucien that's my my new best friend in the background there you see that all with the dough hook the dough hook on that's what we call a stand mixer in the baking industry anyway it's my new robot friend taking up the back way up in the in the in this video I got some fan mail from a sport or on patreon and he's an english-speaking guy who's currently living in China he wrote to me about the difficulty of being vegan in China and the inspiration he took from my channel in different ways so I'm guessing he's partly inspired by the stuff about vegan activism and veganism as an ethical cause and partly just the videos that talked about coping with life in China learning Chinese as a language and that sort of thing anyway he wrote to me I wrote back to him he's supporting me on patreon for $1 a month you should too I'll answer your emails and I'll make videos respond to your questions he wrote back again with a question basically he seemed to be asking me about how optimistic he should be about making a positive impact through community activism in Chinese with Chinese as the language when he returns to the the Western world he asks me how optimistic I am in effect about my ability to make a positive difference in promoting veganism in the Chinese language for a Chinese speaking audience here in Canada we could say Canada or the United States for that matter so this is an interesting topic and I was tempted to discuss it just two or three videos ago the video about can Saviour and responds to this satirical take on vegan activism on the continent of Asia um why was I tempted to do it there the interesting thing is I mean you have a bit of a coals to Newcastle phenomenon if you're preaching veganism in Asian cultures that already have a set of expectations attached to vegetarianism if not veganism right so to talk about veganism in a Hindu context to talk about veganism in a Buddhist context to talk about veganism even just in a context where culturally people are already familiar with some of these core ideas because of many centuries of Buddhist or Hindu background it is a very different thing from introducing it as an original idea I don't know to people in Northern California where it doesn't have these these expectations attached to it so it in a lot of ways you know if you're a white Western person presenting veganism to a Chinese audience you have a more difficult task then I think if you were arguing for veganism let's say in a in a Muslim setting it would be very very different conceptually I mean this is a real example when I was in Taiwan Taiwan is the strongest vegan culture of any country in the world it really does it's amazing just how much veganism there is there but when you tell people you're vegan in that part of the world they assume you believe in ghosts it's very common in Taiwan if you tell people that you're vegan they believe you're the sort of superstitious person who goes and venerates the ghosts of your your ancestors you know your deceased grandparents and the sort of thing you know that you're someone who actually makes decisions in your life that are based on um you know in two words hocus pocus and in Taiwan that is incredibly commonly seen I lived surrounded by people making burnt offerings to the ghosts I I could say burnt offerings to the gods but I think in most cases it was this sort of animism stacking up huge piles of fake money to venerate the dead you know elaborate rituals most of which involve lighting things on fire sometimes they involved hurling things into the ocean this kind of symbolic sacrifice these are mainstream powerful beliefs and cultural assumptions in Taiwanese society and the Sheep the conceptualization of veganism and the reception of veganism now look how easy is it to instead argue for veganism in Iraq in 2018 I have zero experience living or working in Iraq but I can say that you're at least starting from a blank sheet of paper and you're starting from the assumption that veganism is a new modern predominately Western idea and it's then an idea you're probably gonna debate or discuss largely in terms of science in terms of ecology you know ecology is ultimately rooted in the sciences in terms of health and in terms of ethics but a very modern and scientistic form of of ethics you know the appraisal of the against of you know animal suffering or animals being put through these terrible situations on factory farms for you know to produce food that's unnecessary an unhealthy etcetera etcetera that's very very different from stepping into a conversation with somebody for whom the core message of veganism is something they're already familiar with or something they think they're already familiar with and you know where they probably feel about it the same way an American person would feel about jehovah's witnesses the same way you know you might feel about Street Preachers at the airport or you know going through the door or standing on the standing on the street corner with a Bible preaching to you that the end of the world is going to come in a Chinese context mainland China the Chinese from places overseas Chinese is the call from places like Malaysia and Taiwan really veganism in that sense you start off with it sounding tired and overly familiar for the wrong reasons it's something that people in general are not going to be eager to hear again and you presenting the case for burdens expectations now above and beyond that there's maybe an expectation I mean so in my case it's very peculiar i I was a scholar of Buddhism for more than 10 years I actually do have tremendous expertise in in Buddhism I have peer-reviewed publications to prove that I have a long strange track record of travel and lectures have delivered and so on to prove that I can present arguments for veganism in a Buddhist context or in a uniquely Chinese cultural context that you know addresses for us to make use of that that situation and I choose not to look I do not argue for veganism as a scholar of Buddhism you can watch a lot of videos on this channel discussing why that is on the contrary you know the only video on this channel where I'm talking about veganism in Chinese in my own voice you know it's not translated by someone else where I'm making the case for it I instead try to really disambiguate modern Western ecological and ethical veganism veganism as I know it because my preach it I try to completely disambiguate that disentangle it from the Chinese superstitious tradition so I've a couple of videos now talking about that we say look you cannot think of this in terms of the old religious ideas that separate spiritually clean food from spiritually unclean food that are based in ideas of spiritual pollution covering these foods no it's not about spiritual pollution it's about actual pollution it's about ecological pollution it's not about whether or not you will be reincarnated as a in a good situation or a bad situation it's not about the ghost of your dead ancestors I really have to strenuously argue for the idea that veganism is something important in itself and of itself and again if so if you're talking about a Chinese market a Chinese audience the question you have to ask is why would they want to hear it from me why would I be the guy to deliver that message why would I have any credence or credibility why would my voice matter and by the way I can answer those questions really positively about but a scholarship it's actually very easy I've done this it's very easy for me to walk into a room it's very easy for me to walk into a Buddhist monastery and get an audience on my wavelength and say hey you know I'm a white person I was born outside of Buddhism and this is how I got involved this cell became a scholar of it here's the message I have to deliver to you I really am quite capable of being a charismatic preacher for Buddhism as a philosophy if not Buddhism as a religion and you know explaining to people why it is I have a unique and well-informed message that they should pay attention to when they as Chinese people already have access to a wealth of Buddhist preachers you know it's not like I'm the only person who they could be listening to or paying attention to on these matters so yeah it's a it's a very very tough sell and the other thing you have to remember is we're talking here specifically about the overseas Chinese they are not a random sampling of the people you won't meet in mainland China the people who choose to leave China and come to Vancouver who choose to leave China and come to Canada have very specific motivations for doing so have very specific opportunities for doing so you will have a much more positive experience dealing with say the average man in Kunming in mainland China basically any normal city in mainland China you're not looking at this peculiar self-selected minority who pack up their lives and get on an airplane either expecting to never go home again or to go home only for brief visits so growing up in Canada and growing up in Toronto I didn't realize the extent to which the Chinese people I was meeting in Toronto were not in any way representative of the normal China or of the the broad spectrum of Chinese culture that I was meeting a very particular type of Chinese person who migrated the Toronto and who also was successful afternoon my girl because some people migrate and fail and and they go back of course this is a very peculiar self-selected minority and they will often have you know very shall we say hardened attitudes towards the culture they chose to depart from you know they may have come to really negative conclusions about Chinese culture in terms of modern politics they may have chosen to leave China because they're really dissatisfied with the government and politics as they exist today they may have chosen to leave China because they're very dissatisfied with the traditionalism put it that way traditional Chinese culture traditional Chinese religion which is true of many people who choose to leave a Western country and migrate to another country also it may be in part a rejection of the values and norms that they've grown up with you know in that country and then on the flip side of that you also have Chinese immigrants who are hyper traditionalist who left China hoping to recapture those roots or hoping to preserve them who hope who go to Canada and who actually very much want to recreate an idea they have in their own mind of what traditional Chinese culture is supposed to be and who are really hoping to inculcate those values in the next generation although that's a minority they're a highly visible minority especially to go to the suburbs of Toronto if you go to a Chinese community center or Chinese Buddhist temple you do meet that vocal minority of Chinese who've left the country but you've resolved to in a sense be as traditional istic as possible so in all of these situations I have to say the questions you need to ask yourself are the same fundamental questions I tell my colleagues can again to ask yourself when doing humanitarian work what do you have to offer people ask me for Vice all the time no not every week but often enough people ask me for advice about buying an airplane ticket and going to do humanitarian work somewhere in Asia normally it's Asia they ask me about whether it's Thailand Laos Cambodia or other parts of Asia and one of the first issues I have to press them is you need to sit down and ask yourself what do you have to offer if you're a dentist the answer may be very simple you're going there to provide dentistry to people who otherwise wouldn't have access to dentistry I remember meeting a guy he had quite an interesting humanitarian career simply as a plumber his area of expertise was in plumbing and he went to disaster zones where hurricanes had just destroyed all the plumbing and infrastructure any humanitarian work providing plumbing to refugee camps that kind of thing I think also repairing plumbing for normal cities this er thing that was his form of humanitarian work so we had something very specific to offer but why does your voice matter how can you actually help people what do you have to offer and then how are those people going to perceive you you know if you're something like a dentist or a plumber if there's something specific there you have to offer they may perceive you in those terms for better or worse right whoo-hooo naturally is going to care about their dentists opinion about veganism animal rights ethics and ecology they could be more dismissive of you for that reason even though they respect you as a dentist who is necessarily going to care about the Plummers opinion about veganism it's a very strange province we're into here in terms of public morality public intellectual discourse in politics why is it that some voices emerge in a way that's respected and not others but I can tell you one thing for the Chinese market I maybe I'm wrong but here's my bet you are never going to make progress by being emotionally anguished over the top the way Joey carb strong sometimes is in the street the way earthling ed is you are never gonna make progress but walking up to a stranger and telling them on the street that they're wearing a you know a fur coat or that they're hood is over you are never gonna get there through showing how emotionally overwhelmed you are by the suffering of animals by making pleas for compassion of course it's interesting because both on the Buddhist side and a different sense of the Confucian side you can argue that the whole edifice of Chinese civilization and culture the whole religious tradition really is about compassion in many ways but in the same way that if you grew up Christian it doesn't make you more susceptible to hearing those Christian tropes it makes you more off but you know standoffish and Leary Anika if someone walks up to you in the street and it's telling you stuff that's familiar from your whole childhood experience growing up Protestant in a small town in southern United States you're probably more reluctant to hear those moral arguments when they're applied to veganism in the same way you have what I call the coals to Newcastle phenomenon where the Chinese broadly speaking because they're familiar with a lot of these tropes and these ideals they're even more reluctant to think of them as something novel and new they should maybe consider or reconsider as possibly having a very positive role in their own lives and a positive role in the future of society so guys I'll give you a link below this video and you can see my attempt to deal with this in my earlier video some people were shocked that I so directly and aggressively said look arguments for veganism that are based on superstition arguments for veganism that are based on Buddhist tradition basically have to go it's game over that has nothing to do with what doing now and in the future in the vegan movement this is nothing to do with political veganism ecological veganism ethical veganism or even health based veganism you know the plant-based diet people or you know reducing your chances of heart attack reducing your cholesterol we have to draw a very clear line between past present and future and the future of veganism in China the future of veganism for Chinese people living in Canada California and Australia the future of veganism is not going to be nostalgia for the superstition of the fetal past evolution