No Utopia, No Vegan Revolution.
03 February 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey I get questions from time to time
and I just got another question today asking me about veganism in terms of a utopian project in terms of the objectives of veganism being utopia and this is actually an issue that I feel I have spoken about in the past although perhaps it came up in passing and perhaps the depth of my sincerity in the matter wasn't really clear in contrast to many of the over-the-top save the world messages that some vegans broadcast in contrast to the revolutionary claims sometimes including violent claims and terrorists type claims that a lot of vegans indulge in my pragmatic down-to-earth approach to veganism instead insists on comparing it to the struggle to abolish cigarette smoking the use of tobacco and it is interesting and significant that in the history we've all lived through even if you're only a teenager today you're old enough to have seen some of the social change surrounding this we haven't abolished cigarette smoking by making cigarettes illegal by some kind of sudden or violent overnight change there's certainly nothing utopian about it there's nothing revolutionary about it but step-by-step cultural attitudes have changed personal habits have changed and scientific research and its findings have become more and more broadly understood and taken more and more seriously the morality of smoking cigarettes the cultural consensus on that has shifted indescribably and dramatically in the space of a hundred years even in the last fifty years so much has changed for a pregnant woman to smoke cigarettes is now considered evil and there are good scientific reasons for that but actually the science was already established basically around World War two it took a very long time for that to become widely understood accepted and kind of appropriate into the culture as something people care about the perception that as a smoker you are a bad person is now very real there's a stigma attached to it I'm sure many smokers suffer for that reason like I don't say that without some sympathy more and more jobs now if you want to smoke cigarettes well you definitely can't smoke in the office you probably can't smoke anywhere in the office building you've got to go downstairs and go outside you can just barely manage to smoke while holding down the job and your employer isn't supposed to fire you for being a smoker that would be unfair discrimination but probably everyone's looking at you funny when you disappear for 15 minutes and you weren't really supposed to be having a break but you felt you need to cigarette it's a drag and I'll if society step by step is more and more heavily slanted against tobacco consumption and meanwhile it hasn't disappeared I just checked the stats for making this video in Canada where I happened to be living the rate of smoking has dropped over the last five years approximately from twenty one percent to about eighteen percent so it's not a sudden or dramatic change some of that change is just because older people who smoke cigarettes are dying of old age and some of is because younger people are actually making the effort to quit smoking I have no reason to think that that will ever reach zero percent and even if it did reserve percent that wouldn't be a utopia that wouldn't be a revolution that wouldn't be anything else but on a really deep level of cultural values how do you feel if your daughter tells you she's got a new boyfriend and she wants to get married to him and he's a chain smoker whether it's fair or unfair you probably regard that as a bad thing and you may be biased and regard him as a bad guy simply because he smokes or maybe the first thing you notice about him the first thing you learn about him is that he's a chain smoker he's smoking all the time same with the genders reverse if it's your son who's got a new girlfriend and he tells you hey I want you to meet my girlfriend we're gonna get married but first thing you see is that she's a chain smoker this has a powerful social significance a moral value attached to it that it didn't have it all 100 years ago this has changed and to some extent all of us have witnessed the change and even though there have been you know changes in government policy changes in laws changes in the way to back oh it's packaged and sold I think the most profound and important change is at that level of ethics and of cultural values surrounding the ethical decisions we make I did already use this one example in an earlier video today even if you smoke yourself you do not want your children to smoke you're not proud if your son and daughter start smoking even if you yourself are still a smoker it's a huge and fundamental change and it's very difficult to imagine that within my lifetime you would see a lot of people already say well you know I still eat meat I still eat beef I still eat bacon but I recognize it's not good for my health I recognize it's not good ethically recognize it's not good at illogically and I'm not really happy to see my kids picking up the same bad habits i had that would be meat-eating coming into the same realm of questions as cigarette smoking etc and again so i just mentioned cigarette smoking canada dropping down to eighteen percent of the population it's quite possible that it's going to reach some kind of stasis at maybe ten percent maybe it'll never drop below ten percent of the population maybe there will always be a minority of people who are smoking tobacco despite this kind of stigma it carries ultimately I'm comfortable with that I'm comfortable living in a society where people the freedom to choose to smoke tobacco because we all know the reality is all the people around us have the freedom to use cocaine heroin and so on even though they are illegal right heavy questions but for me this is very far removed from utopia ironically by the way I'm currently in the running to go and deliver an academic paper at International Conference on thomas more's utopia on the philosophy of utopia on utopianism in the strictest sense as a philosophy and as an asst phenomenon I don't know if I'm going to be able to go to that academic conference or not nice to be invited as they say at the Oscars nice to be nominated um so I do not think of veganism in these utopian terms and I would warn anyone who thinks of utopian utopian fantasies very positively some people imagine that a utopian vision for the future is a good thing because it motivates people to cooperate to work together that unified unifies people with diverse interests and I've got to tell you the exact opposite is true give you a real quick example if I put together a coalition here at my university of all kinds of different people who think it's immoral to carry out vivisection on Apes because I find out there are some monkeys with experiments being performed on them here at the University so we're all different people but what unifies us what makes us work together bring this complaint to university board of directors to the Dean to the provost and to Parliament to the government maybe we do some protests or whatever it is what unifies us is our moral concern over this that group is going to include some people who support vivisection on rats but not on Apes it's going to probably the majority people were really interested will be science students in that department who are not vegan and you don't share my values but praxis is what unifies us political praxis the actual difference you can make is what unifies us now if we get into utopian visions of the future like what would you do when the revolution comes then we r divided much more deeply then all of a sudden were fragmented into a whole bunch of different ideologies that are not concerned with what can be accomplished here and now but are instead concerned with something hypothetical in the far-off future um I actually had more to say on this subject but I'm going to try to wrap this up right quick be great to have a video less than ten minutes long on this channel for a change revolutionary change is not the most important kind of change in this world many of the most profound and important changes in human has have not been revolutionary in any way including for example the Industrial Revolution that we only describe as a revolution for that reason because it's so important but there's really nothing revolutionary about it the other thing to remember is as veganism moves closer towards that goal of just making meat and dairy carry some stigma for these reasons to be somehow in the same category of cigarette smoking then we're also going to see the mainstreaming of veganism in the same way that you know if you were really a big fan of the Lord of the Rings books before it got made into a movie you would suddenly feel confused and disappointed with all these people getting involved once the movie is released who weren't interested in it before if you are reading the books for Game of Thrones song of ice and fire and then the TV show happens maybe you're happy that it becomes mainstream more people are involved but also now you're going to the same conferences and they're all these other people there who weren't like the people the movement isn't now what it used to be veganism will also go through these sorts of growing pains
and I just got another question today asking me about veganism in terms of a utopian project in terms of the objectives of veganism being utopia and this is actually an issue that I feel I have spoken about in the past although perhaps it came up in passing and perhaps the depth of my sincerity in the matter wasn't really clear in contrast to many of the over-the-top save the world messages that some vegans broadcast in contrast to the revolutionary claims sometimes including violent claims and terrorists type claims that a lot of vegans indulge in my pragmatic down-to-earth approach to veganism instead insists on comparing it to the struggle to abolish cigarette smoking the use of tobacco and it is interesting and significant that in the history we've all lived through even if you're only a teenager today you're old enough to have seen some of the social change surrounding this we haven't abolished cigarette smoking by making cigarettes illegal by some kind of sudden or violent overnight change there's certainly nothing utopian about it there's nothing revolutionary about it but step-by-step cultural attitudes have changed personal habits have changed and scientific research and its findings have become more and more broadly understood and taken more and more seriously the morality of smoking cigarettes the cultural consensus on that has shifted indescribably and dramatically in the space of a hundred years even in the last fifty years so much has changed for a pregnant woman to smoke cigarettes is now considered evil and there are good scientific reasons for that but actually the science was already established basically around World War two it took a very long time for that to become widely understood accepted and kind of appropriate into the culture as something people care about the perception that as a smoker you are a bad person is now very real there's a stigma attached to it I'm sure many smokers suffer for that reason like I don't say that without some sympathy more and more jobs now if you want to smoke cigarettes well you definitely can't smoke in the office you probably can't smoke anywhere in the office building you've got to go downstairs and go outside you can just barely manage to smoke while holding down the job and your employer isn't supposed to fire you for being a smoker that would be unfair discrimination but probably everyone's looking at you funny when you disappear for 15 minutes and you weren't really supposed to be having a break but you felt you need to cigarette it's a drag and I'll if society step by step is more and more heavily slanted against tobacco consumption and meanwhile it hasn't disappeared I just checked the stats for making this video in Canada where I happened to be living the rate of smoking has dropped over the last five years approximately from twenty one percent to about eighteen percent so it's not a sudden or dramatic change some of that change is just because older people who smoke cigarettes are dying of old age and some of is because younger people are actually making the effort to quit smoking I have no reason to think that that will ever reach zero percent and even if it did reserve percent that wouldn't be a utopia that wouldn't be a revolution that wouldn't be anything else but on a really deep level of cultural values how do you feel if your daughter tells you she's got a new boyfriend and she wants to get married to him and he's a chain smoker whether it's fair or unfair you probably regard that as a bad thing and you may be biased and regard him as a bad guy simply because he smokes or maybe the first thing you notice about him the first thing you learn about him is that he's a chain smoker he's smoking all the time same with the genders reverse if it's your son who's got a new girlfriend and he tells you hey I want you to meet my girlfriend we're gonna get married but first thing you see is that she's a chain smoker this has a powerful social significance a moral value attached to it that it didn't have it all 100 years ago this has changed and to some extent all of us have witnessed the change and even though there have been you know changes in government policy changes in laws changes in the way to back oh it's packaged and sold I think the most profound and important change is at that level of ethics and of cultural values surrounding the ethical decisions we make I did already use this one example in an earlier video today even if you smoke yourself you do not want your children to smoke you're not proud if your son and daughter start smoking even if you yourself are still a smoker it's a huge and fundamental change and it's very difficult to imagine that within my lifetime you would see a lot of people already say well you know I still eat meat I still eat beef I still eat bacon but I recognize it's not good for my health I recognize it's not good ethically recognize it's not good at illogically and I'm not really happy to see my kids picking up the same bad habits i had that would be meat-eating coming into the same realm of questions as cigarette smoking etc and again so i just mentioned cigarette smoking canada dropping down to eighteen percent of the population it's quite possible that it's going to reach some kind of stasis at maybe ten percent maybe it'll never drop below ten percent of the population maybe there will always be a minority of people who are smoking tobacco despite this kind of stigma it carries ultimately I'm comfortable with that I'm comfortable living in a society where people the freedom to choose to smoke tobacco because we all know the reality is all the people around us have the freedom to use cocaine heroin and so on even though they are illegal right heavy questions but for me this is very far removed from utopia ironically by the way I'm currently in the running to go and deliver an academic paper at International Conference on thomas more's utopia on the philosophy of utopia on utopianism in the strictest sense as a philosophy and as an asst phenomenon I don't know if I'm going to be able to go to that academic conference or not nice to be invited as they say at the Oscars nice to be nominated um so I do not think of veganism in these utopian terms and I would warn anyone who thinks of utopian utopian fantasies very positively some people imagine that a utopian vision for the future is a good thing because it motivates people to cooperate to work together that unified unifies people with diverse interests and I've got to tell you the exact opposite is true give you a real quick example if I put together a coalition here at my university of all kinds of different people who think it's immoral to carry out vivisection on Apes because I find out there are some monkeys with experiments being performed on them here at the University so we're all different people but what unifies us what makes us work together bring this complaint to university board of directors to the Dean to the provost and to Parliament to the government maybe we do some protests or whatever it is what unifies us is our moral concern over this that group is going to include some people who support vivisection on rats but not on Apes it's going to probably the majority people were really interested will be science students in that department who are not vegan and you don't share my values but praxis is what unifies us political praxis the actual difference you can make is what unifies us now if we get into utopian visions of the future like what would you do when the revolution comes then we r divided much more deeply then all of a sudden were fragmented into a whole bunch of different ideologies that are not concerned with what can be accomplished here and now but are instead concerned with something hypothetical in the far-off future um I actually had more to say on this subject but I'm going to try to wrap this up right quick be great to have a video less than ten minutes long on this channel for a change revolutionary change is not the most important kind of change in this world many of the most profound and important changes in human has have not been revolutionary in any way including for example the Industrial Revolution that we only describe as a revolution for that reason because it's so important but there's really nothing revolutionary about it the other thing to remember is as veganism moves closer towards that goal of just making meat and dairy carry some stigma for these reasons to be somehow in the same category of cigarette smoking then we're also going to see the mainstreaming of veganism in the same way that you know if you were really a big fan of the Lord of the Rings books before it got made into a movie you would suddenly feel confused and disappointed with all these people getting involved once the movie is released who weren't interested in it before if you are reading the books for Game of Thrones song of ice and fire and then the TV show happens maybe you're happy that it becomes mainstream more people are involved but also now you're going to the same conferences and they're all these other people there who weren't like the people the movement isn't now what it used to be veganism will also go through these sorts of growing pains