Vegan Critique of DxE: Direct Action Everywhere

I've been asked to give my opinion on an
ambitious new vegan movement called direct action everywhere and I don't want to sound like a jerk and I don't want to sound overly negative or overly harsh or critical however I live in a city where direct action everywhere doesn't exist they don't have a chapter here and what I know about them is simply based on the way they define themselves on their own website and some lectures and public statements made by one of their founders and leaders a guy named Wayne young now it is to Wayne's credit that he sets the bar high for himself he openly states his intellectual aspirations as well as his political ambitions he states his own sort of pedigree in terms of the books that have influenced him the professors that have influenced him and so on and as such he invites a fairly high level of scrutiny for his ideas and for the plan that he sets down and sets out as being directly informed by the conclusions of social science research so that being said it may come as a surprise to Wayne that some people such as myself who could be his strongest supporters actually have a lot of apprehension and skepticism when looking at the material he's creating that he may imagine would appeal very strongly to someone like myself my first diploma is in political science I have a serious political interest in veganism and social movements and social change of various kinds anyone who sincerely cares about the very recent history of what's called the Arab Spring basically argument from 2010 to 2015 most of the big events people remember 2011 anyone who sincerely cares about that history would be somewhat nauseated by the cynical use that Wayne makes of the history of the Arab Spring in presenting his case for his preferred method for vegan activism the history of the Arab Spring at this point has a tremendously high body count and anyone who hears what Wayne has to say about it I mean whether or not you care much about politics would have to wonder look Wayne have you read even one book about the politics of Egypt or of any other country that's been involved Spring Arab Spring covers a lot of territory and a lot of complex political histories but it's grim and of course in the last few years most of the optimism has disappeared from evaluations of what happened why it happened and what the outcomes were now that doesn't mean I'm offended in a childlike way by the idea of a vegan talking about the Arab Spring if you have a sincere interest in it and your opinion is informed by the facts with or without any sensitivity to those facts you know by all means say whatever you got to say but when I'm hearing and responding to the the manifesto like declarations that Wayne song is making on the basis of his very strange interpretation the Arab Spring I'm certainly disappointed I don't think Wayne lives up to his own hype now the other examples that he chooses to cherry-pick from the political history of the world and kind of dumb down and misrepresent and used to further his aims are slavery the civil rights struggle of the 1960's and gay rights gay marriage he ports for gay people and so on um and none of those are used in an intelligent or nuanced or well-informed way I don't really feel like harping on at length about that and most people would probably respond very negatively if I were to launch into a kind of heavy detailed critique of how Wayne song represents or misrepresents the history of the abolition of slavery in the United States however he doesn't mention it casually or flippantly or in passing he very seriously in with allusions to published work and with the weight of his own academic background as a four professor of law he really presents in all seriousness his interpretation of the abolition of slavery as setting down the framework for his approach to veganism now there's so much wrong about what he has say about slavery again I'm not offended in principle that somebody would want to pose a comparison in some specific sense somebody might be able to pose an intelligent and interesting set of comparisons between the history of the abolition of slavery and what's going on in veganism right now but Wayne's young fails to do that instead you have the sense of a self-righteous and ignorant and cynical you know misrepresented misrepresentation of a few select facts here and there that among other things completely omit to mention the American Civil War completely omit to mention the significance of violence and and leadership and executive action and so on I mean you know in terms of the misrepresentation he's making of the the abolition movement the American Revolution in specifically I mean to me what that's already a question like the way slavery was abolished in Haiti is very different for his States America in Haiti there was a real grassroots slave rebellion a rebellion from the bottom up a real revolution that was how slavery was abolished in Haiti in the United States it was a much more peculiar and contradictory balancing act you know the Union forces that fight that fought the war to abolish slavery more than 90% of them were white and you know this guy named Abraham Lincoln ended up making a coalition of all these abolitionist parties many of whom had sworn they were passivist and would never support violence but then when Lincoln started putting together his plans soon enough they did indeed support the Civil War and so on it's a very strange political history again anyone who's sincerely interested in it and was making some kind of intelligent or well-informed commentary on what this has to do with a bunch of vegans on a website trying to start a kind of in formal community and to organized street protests against foie gras or against government subsidies for the dairy industry and meat agriculture it's it's tenuous at best it's it's a real stretch but sorry coming back to what what you Swain is making of these historical anecdotes that both have nothing to do with one another and a nothing new with veganism the UC makes of slavery the civil rights movement of the 1960s gay rights movement and the Arab Spring he's using them to support his peculiar view of what used to be called leaderless resistance or a cephalus resistance but that he's here instead presenting as a social network model of protest activism and social change and I mean the parts just do not fit that model he's presenting which already I have problems with I mean if we're having a serious intellectual discussion about activism and social change already to me that's he's setting forth a very problematic and debatable set of ideas and he's setting them forth as if they were the unassailable conclusions of the social sciences as if the social sciences have conclusions that work like an objective checklist of here's what to do next or vegan activism you know whereas in reality the social science has presented us with the most murky uncertain and debatable of provisional suggestions based on events that are open to interpretation I dare not digress to say more on that you know this social network theory that he presents with the very casual example of how people on the Internet select pop music to listen to you know how they choose to listen to one song rather than another song and without even paying money for it how possibly do you connect that argument to the decision made by hundreds of thousands of people to fight to the death in the civil war to bring about the abolition of slavery now I'm well aware the abolition saver was not the only issue in that war it was not the only reason why people join the army however it was one decisive issue and I'm still I'm here speaking with brevity what what do those two ideas have do with each other in any way let alone any of these ideas like his his very facile use of what happened during the Arab Spring and this model he's putting forth that on the one hand is an idea of community reduced to people giving each other the thumbs up on Facebook which is not a community and the other hand this sort of contrived outrage of a particular type of street theater a particular type of protest that you know I'm not opposed to I don't have any agenda against this style of protest but it doesn't seem to answer any of his stated methodological concerns Korea's he stated that he was disappointed with the outcomes of the types of political protest and activism he had previously been involved with at the University of Chicago I think that for him and for direct action everywhere as an organization started a series of questions being asked and those were good questions to do what we call outcome evaluation in the social sciences to say okay what really gets results and what doesn't however it seems to me the direct action everywhere started with all the right questions and they haven't yet come to the right answers and that's fine I mean the future of the of the organization may be bright however the purpose of this video is to say when I as an outsider look at the case being presented by Wayne Siong I am turned off I'm given a negative impression of this organization and what they're about and I'm sure that's the furthest thing from their minds I'm sure they don't see anything wrong with what they're saying about slavery the civil rights movement etc and they are very proud of what they have to say about the politics of outrage but what I see is a tremendously fast silent election is honest approach to the issues and it doesn't show any since you're interested in or concern for the real history that has a real body count for the issues being invoked again to repeat myself the Arab Spring us of rights movement and slavery and it's not out of sensitivity it's not because people are easily offended that I would ask them to either research those matters more deeply or say nothing of this sort it's not it's not it of a tendency to censor it's just out of my sense that you know people at Wayans Young who seems tremendously confident the message he's delivering in my eyes he's he's making a fool of himself now to come back to this sort of twinned issue on the one hand the methodology of direct action everywhere is supposed to be a community and I've really got to put a footnote to ask what did they mean by community because it's not what I mean by the word community and then the other hand they have this whole praxis of the politics of outrage and that is ostensibly based on Wayne song's analysis although I think his analysis is worse than what you can here on CNN of how it was outrage that sparked the Arab Spring and it was moral outrage that brought about the abolition of slavery in the United States of America yes you know a civil war had nothing to do with it moral transformation well you know again as political arguments go it's certainly common debt to pick and choose but yeah in this case it's a bit it's a bit chilling to see the extent of the misrepresentation of these facts to suit his theory and then beyond that he has this whole methodology of trying to focus on beliefs rather than behaviors of saying that presenting people with facts does not bring about changes and outcome that veganism can't be a facts based movement it has to be a an ideological movement a belief space movement all right so I have a lot of problems with this and I'm sure people in direct action everywhere wouldn't expect other vegans thing that's problematic but I do not regard vegans as people who are united by their beliefs I regard vegans as people who are actually divided by their beliefs as people have tremendously diverse political beliefs religious beliefs and so on and direct action everywhere is not promising something to me that would strengthen the movement but instead promising to weaken the movement or separate it into smaller parcels with this emphasis on belief and ideology and now many parts that ideology are left unstated Wayne repeatedly alludes to and invokes a very nebulous notion of progressive politics well Wayne your idea of progressive politics may not be the same as someone who grew up Hindu and within Hinduism was familiar with the concept that animals lives are worth something was taught that cows were sacred and then at one point figured out that the dairy industry was both unethical in that exploited cows and caused suffering to them and bad for the environment and who made the move from mainstream Hinduism to veganism let's say on ecologically and ethically motivated veganism that could be the basis for a real community and for a real political impetus long term and veganism I do not think in general that public which is already significant in countries like the United States and Canada it's going to be even bigger in India but Hindus who shift to veganism they are not going to be a stereotypical progressive left-wing liberal white Americans they're going to have a very different set of beliefs from you I'm including very often on issues like gender roles gender politics marriage what kind of hairstyle you should have and so on I could insert here of course a long set of remarks about Buddhism and the status of veganism in Buddhism within the next 20 years I think there's going to be more action in Hindus becoming the then there will be within Buddhism that's my bet I think both of those Hinduism and Buddhism are going to create much more durable communities or bases for communities than teenagers on the internet who post pictures themselves wearing balaclavas and posing as armed radicals if if you're a gambling man you can place your bet - sorry coming back - what I felt with the broadest issues raised here on the one hand Wayne's young and Troy - and everywhere talk about community which is problematic and on the other hand they're talking about the politics of outrage and they don't really spell this out I mean Wayne just puts up the image of Martin Luther King jr. and invokes the history of the American civil rights movement and really what he's doing is calling up the shallowest understanding possible of what the role of outrage was the politics of outrage in the history of the u.s. civil rights movement he's summoning up an idea of what brought about legal changes and social changes based on you know still images on the nightly news the image of policemen beating protesters the images of outrage of people on the streets being sprayed with hoses attacked by guard dogs this sort of thing um you know those moments of outrage they're often featured in high school textbooks on history they're featured on the nightly news but this really does not give you any kind of insight into the substance and the body and the basis of the u.s. civil rights movement why it worked and how it worked and how they managed to combine people who had very very different political beliefs into one movement that is something that vegans should maybe look at and try to learn from um but you know anyone who's read even one book but civil rights the United States would immediately recognize that black American churches were a huge part of what made it possible for someone like dr. Martin Luther King jr. to take a lecture to from coast to coast and moved from church to church another type of institution is tremendously important were the the black colleges what we now call historically black universities again these provided real communities real units of social organization social capital if you like that term that existed before the civil rights movement away and then really provided the stage for the civil rights movement to unfold on and you know those units of social capital were not produced by outrage and also I just want to add as I was saying earlier they encompassed a tremendous diversity of political beliefs and religious beliefs obviously if you're talking about South Carolina a lot of those black churches that got involved the civil rights movement were extremely conservative and by today's standards might be considered right-wing on the other hand on some of the black campuses and in some of the big cities there were socialist organizations and communist organizations involved with the civil rights movement that were extremely left-wing and all kinds of other combinations in between and you know part of the civil rights movement was the challenge of getting those people to work together on a particular program so in the history of the civil rights movement it's very misleading to just look at this moment of outrage which is in some ways the end of the process that went on for decades if not a whole century of many small largely unseen political struggles that built up those communities that built up the levels of trust and cooperation within a church between a church and its leader within different social movements little struggles that may have included you know having a picnic and a raffle to raise money to help someone who was in the hospital and couldn't pay his hospital bills going and visiting someone in prison the community organizing to try to get the person a fair trial you know thousands of tiny struggles over decades and building up social code and trust in these types of institutions that were indeed scattered around the whole of the United States and that the civil rights movement was to some extent able to organize and galvanize partly by doing relatively fun activities you know a huge part of the civil rights movement at that time was actually having groups of musicians go from town to town town church and lecturers including Martin Luther King jr. often traveled with those musicians and then you know you know this excited people and got them even more active involved in movement okay now my first point was this whole history has nothing in common with the argument for veganism the Wayne Stephens is offering any parallel to to veganism I think is very hard to construe and there is a certain kind of lack of sensitivity and lack of sincere interest in the facts of history in this approach with that haven't been said as soon as we really pose the contrast sincerely I think what's important for us to recognize is precisely that the type of social capital the type of community building I've just described is exactly what the whole vegan movement is lacking definitely the United States and Canada we don't have church groups across South Carolina we don't have vegan colleges in Georgia we don't have that we have anything like that anywhere in the world but definitely not in the United States and Canada and again if you were gonna look pragmatically and honestly it who might have that who might have the basis for forming a community and those types of institutions and that type of trust it will probably be Hindu groups maybe in a few cases Buddhist groups that are now making a shift from one type of vegetarianism maybe more heavily based on supernatural concerns to another type of veganism maybe more informed by ecology ethics and so on so I'm not just saying this to kind of heap scorn on the frankly idiotic use of the history of slavery and civil rights that Wayans Young has made and that in my eyes gives direct attention everywhere a bad name I'm also doing it to draw attention to this peculiar contrast I see between all of the rhetoric about outrage about the politics of outrage about how moral outrage is supposedly going to transform the vegan movement transform the world and the promises that direct action ever was making about providing a community I think that's easy to boast of it's easy to promise and very hard to deliver on I think if you you really thought about it with all due humility think about how much of a struggle it would be for any vegan organization to even do what a small Protestant church and the American South does for a community in terms of community services and in terms of building cooperation and trust and so on in the community good luck I mean search all over the internet good luck finding any example of a secular vegan organization doing that and you know practically if you're looking for a community if you want a community to do for you the things that a community really does that can include helping you with day care for your children through helping you with funeral for your grandparents you can today find that pretty easily through religious organizations through some cult-like organizations in the past probably some left-wing groups would provide you with a community not lately so much I don't think vegans are doing it anywhere in the world and when I look at the promises of community being made by direct action everywhere I'm skeptical I wonder can they deliver on that promise and are they taking that seriously or is this just another website that says it's gonna conquer the world but doesn't provide you with much more than the links to a couple people's Facebook pages and encouragement to go stand by the side of the road and hold up a sign saying Meat Is Murder I want to end this by saying if I did live in a city where direct action everywhere exists I would happily go to a meeting and meet whoever was involved and just decide on a case-by-case basis are these people I can work with are these people who are trying to make something positive happen can I cooperate with them to try to do something positive and I don't assume that the actual formal definition of direct action everywhere presented by Wayans young I don't assume that it's like a constitution that everyone in direct action everywhere knows I don't assume that everyone particularly agrees with it or follows Wayne as their great leader I assume that like most websites anyone can sign up and you probably meet good people bad people and all kinds of people who happen to get involve eeeh that website and via that organization so the point of this video is not to rain on their parade but maybe if some people at DXE see this and think about it they'll start to think about how the rhetoric they're indulging in may be alienating some of the people who could be their most highly motivated supporters when you talk about the Arab Spring think for a minute about how this would sound to somebody who's a refugee from the Arab Spring living here in Canada now think about how it would sound just to somebody who really has some sincere interest in the ongoing politics of that situation which again is politics to the body count when you're making these types of very amateurish statements about the history of slavery how do you think that sounds to someone who really cares about that history