Viable Vegan Theory
Planting veganism on more solid moral ground.
There’s a lot of confusion regarding the theoretical basis of Veganism. There are many different metaphysical, philosophical, and historical explanations regarding why humanity is moving back to a sustainable plant-based existence.
But the point of this short essay is to introduce a theory of veganism in much simpler terms.
Veganism is a theory of viability that rejects killing and, instead, promotes life.
This may seem overly broad at first. Vegans eat plants, and plants are lifeforms. Isn’t that killing?
It is.
So, how does a theory of veganism justify the killing of some lifeforms, and not others?
Plants DO Have Feelings
The typical way vegans justify killing plants is that plants are qualitatively different lifeforms than animals, and hence, that it’s totally OK to eat plants.
There are many arguments that vegans give to support this position, including: (1) plants don’t have a central nervous system; (2) plants don’t have feelings; (3) veganism actually promotes plant life; (4) etc.
But the core conundrum remains: eating plants kills them. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Each spoonfool of rice we eat could have grown up to become a thriving field.
Saying that it’s OK to eat plants on moral or “scientific” grounds is no different from saying it’s OK to eat horses, but not dogs, on “moral” or “scientific” grounds. At the end of the day, both are forms of specism: the conscious or subconscious preferences for some lifeforms, over others.
Denying plants agency or worth by anthropocentrically declaring plants as “devoid of feelings” or “central neural processing” is really no different than killing cows while cuddling up to our cat overlords. It’s specism. Pure and simple.
This uncomfortable realization leads to a major moral conundrum for many vegans, in that the plant-based theory promotes the same exact type of specism that veganism is supposed to reject.
Fortunately, there’s a much better alternative.
Theories of Viability
There’s are many theories of veganism that successfully transcend specism, in all of its forms. One of the most compelling is a theory advanced by a Russian philosopher, Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945).
Vernadsky was one of the founders of the theory of the noosphere. He “put forward the idea that people will stop killing living beings, not only of the animal but also vegetable world, and mankind will turn to eating anorganic substances.”
Anorganic substances? Like the yucky porridge that Neo & crew were eating on the Nebuchadnezzar?
This doesn’t sound tasty at first, but humans are hard at work engineering all sorts of “single-cell protein, combined with synthetic aminos, minerals, and vitamins — everything the body needs.”
Much if not most of the food we consume is already heavily genetically modified and chemically enhanced/fortified.
At this point, the discussion typically steers off track, as people rush to defend this or that diet or these or those preferences.
But let’s maintain focus on theory. Instead of immediately jumping to your preferences, let’s perform a simple thought experiment. Here’s why it’s so important:
Embracing a total shift to aorganic food sources as a thought experiment allows us to envision a theory of veganism that is far more internally coherent than many of the best animal-welfare, environmentalist, or nutritional theories of veganism in circulation today.
Life > Death
A theory that restores agency and worth to plants alongside animals and alongside humans is a theory that reifies life over death. It is a theory that marvels at the magical complexity of life, and stands humbly before the compendiums of secrets that Nature has yet to share with us.
Can anorganic diets be achieved in practice? In some futuristic asymptotic sense, of course. We may never fully get there, but as a theoretical and moral ideal, it’s not only worth pursuing; it is the only truly sustainable theory of humanism possible.
True humanism calls for the minimization of the human footprint from the Earth, and nothing minimizes the human footprint more than the abolition of killing of all lifeforms, not just animals with a humanly-descernible “central nervous system.”
Think of this as a moral ideal and a core theoretical premise, and it clicks into place.
Even though humans will continue killing billions of living organisms each day, this theory of viability gives us a clean ideal to strive for. It allows us to become reducitarian in impactful ways, rather than continue on our clearly unsustainable path.
With this theory of viability, we can actually begin to measure how much less of the biosphere we are destroying in more complex systemic ways, rather than continuing to preference some life forms over others — further fragmenting the moral and material landscape into pockets of isolated relative cruelty.
We are natural born killers; but we don’t have to be.
Veganism = Life
Does this mean we can’t take antibiotic or antiviral medicines to kill billions of microorganisms that are eating away at us, nonstop? Of course not!
The theory of viability is a theory of life, first and foremost. And it is most natural to do whatever it takes to protect oneself and one’s loved ones from death — whether in the form of HIV or a charging bull.
This theory does not place plants and animals above humans. Instead, the vegan theory of viability places plants and animals alongside humans, and alongside all the other lifeforms in our rudimentary classification schemes.
Not Only Human
We should remember that humans are animals. Not in some atomistic way, as distinct from plants, mushrooms, or colonies of bacteria. But in a compound sense, each human being is literally a walking tree of digestive bacteria, insects, fungi, viruses, and so on.
Billions of people walk around as hosts to colonies of microorganisms — often for life, and without detection. When you eat raw or undercooked beef or pork, you may ingest tapeworm species like Taenia saginata (beef tapeworm), Taenia solium (pork tapeworm), and Taenia asiatica (Asian tapeworm).
We don’t even know how many other lifeforms we host in our bodies. Yet we have given ourselves license to say that some lifeforms are good and useful, that others are good and tasty, and yet others are bad plagues.
Your craving for steak may actually come from a bunch of beef tapeworms, eager to reunite with lost brothers and sisters, and literally eat you alive.
This is a brutal realization, but the solution isn’t more sterilization. We cannot sustain human life by moving wholesale to hospital-like “clean rooms” — not least because hospital clean rooms are veritable petri dishes for super-bacteria.
I am Groot!
To live sustainably, humans must realize that we are brute Groots — sentient tree-like creatures who walk around like bulls in the proverbial china shop. Yet as unbalanced as we are, we constantly strive to mind our manners and improve our individual and collective postures.
The desire to be better is the defining human trait.
We are not more “intelligent,” more “sentient,” or more “woke” than any other species. Those are just the lies we tell ourselves to aid digestion.
When you see a broader view of humanity’s carnage, intelligence is the last trait you’d ascribe to homo [wannabe] sapiens.
Our survival depends on maximizing the probability of survival of the maximum number of other lifeforms. When we drive other species extinct, for instance, we only heighten our chance of extinction.
Trees also elbow one another for dominance, and sometimes kill one another. But take a look at any old-growth forest and you see the future as it can be: pluralistic, vibrant, vivacious and rich. With deep roots and groots.
Bio-humanism
So, where do we go from here? To start, we move away from the argument that plants are cool to eat because they lack nerves and other similar pseudo-scientific rationalizations.
Yes, many plants have co-evolved with mammals (including humans) to the point where some plants want to be eaten as part of a larger evolutionary strategy.
[Cherry Tree] Let a billion flowers bloom, let a million blooms bear fruit and seed. Get eaten! But if this means more seeds are spread, then on-sum, you remain viable.
For some seeds and nuts, passage through an animal digestive system is the only known way to activate germination.
But that does not mean that humans have dominion over plants, any more than humans have dominion over animals.
Humans are already synthesizing life, creating bouquets of organic and inorganic matter that can sustain us, and that promote life. Yet even with these God-like powers of creation, we continue to kill on vastly greater scales, each year. These two positions are irreconcilable; together, they are not sustainable.
The vegan creed that wholesale transition to a “plant-based” diet will save the world is flawed. Plant-basedism is a necessary transition to a more sustainable future, but it is still not fully sustainable.
The plant-based theory of veganism shifts the burden away from animals we can see and touch to those we deem incapable of feeling, or those too small or “too numerous” (like bacteria) to empathize with.
As a transition tactic, plant-basedism is fine, but so long as that is the goal, we will keep missing our targets.
The Vernadsky thought experiment is no longer just a thought experiment.
100 years ago it was inconceivable that humans could replace animal fibers (fur, wool, silk, leather, etc.) with fully synthetic alternatives. And yet today’s synthetic textiles outperform their “natural” counterparts in every conceivable performance measure.
The same is true for food.
Anorganic Substances
Synthetic food isn’t just coming; it’s already here.
Your breakfast, lunch, and dinner are already selectively-bred and genetically-modified to the point where calling it “natural” only makes sense in some super-abstract sense.
Over the coming century, synthetic nutrition will account for the overwhelming majority of our caloric and nutritional intake; plant harvests and plant sacrifices will be celebrated again; and slaughterhouses will be shut.
To get to this future, we need to embrace a moral theory of life that rejects killing — of any kind.
Mindful that natural processes embue us with an insatiable craving for life, sex, and multiplication, we must base our actions on theories of viability that give the highest likelihood of flourishing to the highest number of lifeforms.
The first step towards this ideal is recognizing that we are natural born killers. But we don’t have to be. And we cannot afford to be.
Go Vegan!
