Veganism as Cultural Imperialism, Neocolonialism, etc.

almost any form of political action or
political intervention it's susceptible to a critique as cultural imperialism when you're questioning whether or not something is cultural imperialism you're basically asking is one group trying to impose set of alien cultural values on another group and veganism is no exception this question has lately been put to veganism and it's going to be put to veganism and animal rights again and again that's not because cultural imperialism is such a vague and poorly defined concept that it applies to all things equally I think it's because it's a meaningful sort of challenge in question for all of us to face up to whether we're talking about white people in Canada trying to eliminate seal hunting for indigenous people that's within Canada but two different cultures having a debate about the morality of one form of fur production you may also be talking about urban white people in Canada trying to eliminate fur production out of mink caged mink growing it raised in captivity living their whole life in a steel cage and sometimes the defense for that that's offer it is oh well you're wealthy white people from the city and you don't understand these poor and downtrodden rural farmers and their culture so again this is sort of defense mimicking these questions of cultural imperialism in other cases I mean you can look at something as direct as Christian missionaries who go to a foreign country and say look now you're going to convert to Christianity and you're not going to eat dog meat anymore because good Christians don't do that Christians eat cow and not dogs because that makes sense if you believe in Christianity um there's something about it in the Bible somewhere we promise in my own reading of history you know I have my own biases and I'm not Christian and I'm also someone who's really keenly aware of the evils that have been brought about through Christian cultural imperialism so I generally read history with the presumption that the Christians are the bad guys and that my role as the pious reader of history looking back with hindsight is to condemn them and disagree with them and imagine to myself that I would do something so much better and so different if I were in the position of these people whether centuries ago or decades ago or still today however you know the history of indigenous peoples colonized by Christianity has included human sacrifice ritual violence of various kinds I remember one of the habits common that's never been explained to my knowledge man through pology among the indigenous peoples of Australia was of actually cutting off one finger of a young woman and what i read nobody ever really figured out what the religious significance of that was but it was for some ritual reason that a lot of young women were were missing a finger that had been removed intentionally uh on the island of taiwan prior to the arrival of the Chinese so these are the indigenous people of Taiwan who are not Chinese their language is not Chinese their culture their ethnicity their their non Chinese people when the Christian missionaries arrived there they had the most gruesome tradition of compulsory abortion imaginable if you read about this it'll give you nightmares and it's almost kneel to say we're not talking about surgical abortion we're not talking about a modern medical abortion and when you read about some of these extreme examples you have to realize or at least I have to realize that despite my bias against Christianity as one of the cultural genocide enterprises of human history as one of the most despicable lamentable and regrettable aspects of Western European civilization that was unleashed on the world with the you know the whip and the sword despite my own bias I often have to recognize yeah you know what if I were alive at that time the cultural change I would be advocating for would be the abolition of slavery would be the abolition of rituals where you cut off a human finger would be the abolition of you know in Taiwan this gruesome ritual Ian forced abortion and so on um all kinds of superstitious reasons for infanticide it's it's a bitter pill to swallow we would like to prefer we might all prefer to imagine ourselves as having a perfectly egalitarian view of all cultures but if we're interested in cultural change if we're interested in political intervention to bring about cultural change then we are necessarily admitting to ourselves that sometimes culture is wrong when I lived in France I had to pick out baby food for my newborn infant daughter the shelves in France are dominated with veal there's some cultural conception in France that the natural thing to feed a newborn baby like three months old six months old is a dead baby cow like to me this is like vampire mythology I mean you imagine that in evolutionary history the way human beings evolved millions of years ago was that a newborn baby with no teeth would leap from its mother's breast attack a cow kill it and eat it like you know obviously this is so much the product of you know an industrialized culture that's capable of killing these animals and processing them into baby food into some unrecognizable muck in a glass jar you know cost ten dollars so that the parents can convince themselves that their newborn baby is I don't know getting enough protein and iron I mean no I don't feel bad at all in interrupting French culture and saying hey guess what evil I think this is sick and twisted and demented and I want your culture to change because I'm a self-righteous vegan and I think I know better than you and I would never feed my daughter veal and I would never reveal as an adult and blah blah blah I'm a white male and my last name is mazhar I can pass for French don't ask me if I can speak French my French is terrible nevertheless people seem to regard that form of cultural imperialism cultural contest Asia in a pretty relaxed way when i was living in southeast asia in a country called laos that you've heard mentioned on this channel before if you're a regular viewer i was in the capital city in VN 10 i read about and i spoke to some government officials about a local practice there which is cultural of women starving themselves during pregnancy especially during the third trimester and these women fast they intentionally eat almost nothing and to make themselves feel full to help them with this they eat a lot of bamboo soup so that's just in water salt a little bit of oil and chopped up bamboo shoots and the result is among other things brain damage to the unborn child if the mother intentionally deprives herself of nutrition during the third trimester reduced brain development is a well established scientific fact this is not the only horrendous thing I could mention about Lao culture they have a cultural habit of adding a nail polish thinner to fruit juice especially mashed up sugar cane juice if I were to try to convince my lotion colleagues that it is wrong and bad and evil for them to continue in these cultural traditions that are harming themselves and harming others harming future generations does that make me a cultural a cultural imperialist yeah maybe maybe I'm a jerk but maybe some things are important enough that you've got to take the risk and be a jerk and maybe it'll turn out well for you and maybe it'll be a disaster I remember a sex advice columnist I don't read advice columns in newspapers intentionally or anything but I remember sitting around in an airport killing time so you know you end up reading kind of every page in the newspaper even if you didn't mean to um and someone wrote to this advice advice columnist saying look you know I have a big crush on this person who's a coworker at my office and I don't want to make things awkward and I don't want to be a jerk but she's arranged I think she had given notice she was going to quit the job in the next three months and you know if I don't try to talk to her now I'll probably never see her again and the advice columnist wrote back and said look you're right if you talk to her and you try to start a relationship maybe it'll be awkward maybe you'll be a jerk being an adult means sometimes you have to make tough decisions sometimes you have to take the risk that it'll be awkward and it'll be your fault and you'll be a jerk so you have to decide if the risk is worth taking and the advice columnist says I think you should be a grown-up I think you should take the risk I think you should go ahead and be a jerk