Retrograde Humanism, Golf, and Coetzee

How to be good?

I recently spent a week at the National Humanities Center for a summer institute lead by Robert Pippin (philosophy giant at the University of Chicago) on form and politics in the works of J. M. Coetzee.  Ok, so I have to give mad props to the NHC, an entity that I didn’t even realize existed until a colleague placed a flyer for the institute in my mailbox during the fall of last year.  I applied and was accepted, but I wasn’t really sure what I was in for until I got there.  The seminar consisted of 14 scholars, all of whom, as per the NHC’s stipulation, had completed their phds in the past 10 years.  As is not unexpected for any group of people who consider Coetzee’s work in terms of its ethical implications, I was one of several vegetarians in the group – the only vegan, to be precise – and I was the oldest member of the cadre, attending for the first time in my penultimate year of eligibility, which was a strange and enlightening experience for me.

An aside: it’s an increasingly unfriendly world for those of us in the humanities, as was apparent in the job search narratives of the newly minted phds attending the institute.  At one point during the seminar, Robert asked, “how much longer will they let us teach literature and philosophy before they stop us?” and then answered – rightly, I think, “maybe a generation or two longer.”

Yeah, we've all seen this, but it's worth watching it again, if you have any aspirations in this direction.

The deal was awesome: we were paid $1500 to be there, to attend five, three hour seminars over the course of the week, to talk about the work of J. M. Coetzee.  The institute fed us two meals a day, reimbursed us for travel, provided us with office space for the week, and provided us with transportation to and from the Chapel Hill Inn – a place that’s so full of its old south charm as to be offensive in a self-satisfied, not at all ironic sort of way (I rode up on the elevator with an African American family, the father of which looked at me and said, “well, this is like going back in time, isn’t it?”  I said, “yeah, maybe a time we’d rather not go back to”).   

That building in the background is the Inn.  OK, not really.

We covered a lot of material during the week, starting with Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K and ending with Coetzee’s most recent work Summertime.  On Wednesday, we discussed Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello (specifically the “lessons” that comprise The Lives of Animals), and I found myself, quite to my surprise, on the verge of both constant outbursts of anger and on the verge of tears – tears!! – for most of the discussion.  Here’s why (with apologies to Robert Pippin): I have a deep investment in both of these texts, having written about them extensively,[i] and I realized that day that I clearly have a sense of propriety over them.  Actually, I felt this way about most of the texts that we were covering during the course of the week: that they were somehow mine – mine because they changed my life in ways that are activist and NOT intellectual, and most certainly in ways that have left me stunned and speechless when I see them not changing the lives of others.  By and large, our discussions of these works had situated Coetzee’s literature as philosophy – and that’s an approach that I both appreciate and understand, coming, as it obviously was, from our seminar leader, a philosopher who is not a literary scholar.

But what was bugging me – what had worked its way beneath my skin – was what had started to feel over the course of the week like a systematic dismissal of the ways that certain works of literature perhaps require both an analysis of their engagement with real sociohistorical instances of institutionalized and normalized racism, sexism, and speciesism and – and this one is all me – a defense of our action or inaction in the face of such injustices.  When I say that Disgrace and The Lives of Animals changed my life, I mean that reading these two texts constituted part of a transformative process that I underwent around 2000, when I decided, first, that I would write my dissertation on Coetzee rather than pursue my original goal of the study of women’s literature and, second, that I would become vegan.  To be clear: reading Coetzee didn’t cause me to become vegan, but reading Coetzee did contribute to that decision.

Some brief background on Coetzee, if you don’t know his work and are still reading at this point: most, if not all of Coetzee’s novels end with characters having changed only through their acquisition of negative knowledge, or, perhaps even more problematically, by virtue of their realization that they haven’t changed.  At the end of Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate finds himself on “a road that may lead nowhere” (156); at the end of Life & Times of Michael K, Michael imagines subsisting on teaspoons of water taken from the earth.  Disgrace is Coetzee’s most famous work, a novel that details the life of white South African former literature professor David Lurie’s downfall after his questionably consensual sexual relationship with a female student, his daughter Lucy’s subsequent gang rape by three black men, and David’s “service” in the disposal of the corpses of unwanted euthanized dogs.  The novel ends with David, burned, robbed, and jobless, “giving up” a crippled dog to the needle.

The Lives of Animals, published in 1999 – the same year as Disgrace – is often read as a kind of companion piece to that novel.  Lives is complex in terms of its metanarrative import, consisting of two lectures on animals given by the (fictional) aging Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello at the (fictional) Appleton College.  Coetzee read Lives as his 1997-1998 Princeton Tanner Lectures, and critics have endlessly tried to ascribe Costello’s animal rights position – that the treatment of livestock animals in industrialized societies is synonymous with the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust – to Coetzee.  Whether Costello’s opinions reflect Coetzee’s (and I suspect that they do on some accounts and don’t on others) is of little concern to me.  What is of concern is what we, as readers, teachers, scholars, and, yes, activists, do with the dialogic debates engendered by her opinions.

Within the context of Lives, Costello’s assertion generates outrage among members of her audience at Appleton, as such an assertion, in any context, is apt to do.  At the end of Lives, Costello says to her son John, “I no longer know where I am.  I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relationships with them.  Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participating in a crime of stupefying proportions?  Am I fantasizing it all?  I must be mad!  Yet everyday I see the evidences.  The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me.  Corpses.  Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money” (114).

When she mentions the “crime of stupefying proportions,” Costello is, of course, speaking of the treatment of animals in the industrialized world.  The question is, what do we do with the information Costello provides us?  Do we interpret what happens to animals as “crime”?  Do we conscience a comparison of that “crime” to the “Holocaust”?  If so, then what allows us to keep participating in such a crime?  And if not, how do we make sense and how do we narrate what is happening to animals in our midst? 

Pippin asserted that Coetzee’s work constitutes an act of preparing the way as opposed to bringing about a change.  He further offered that human beings can’t make themselves find important things that they don’t find important.  I can buy both of these things, to a point.  With regard to a kind of inherent inability to find important that which one does not find important, I turn to the subject of golf.  There are days when I am completely aware of the fact that I should find it important, that I should learn to play it even, because doing so would allow me access to a largely male cultural practice that embodies and enables access to certain modes of power.  But I don’t care about golf, and I have no interest in playing it, and no amount of knowing that it might be in my best interest to do so is going to change the utter lack of interest that I feel with regard to golf.  But I’m relatively certain that there’s not an ethical component to my lack of interest in golf in the same way that I feel the same degree of certainty that there is an ethical component in, say, not being interested in the suffering of animals.  Or maybe you could counter that, as a woman, it is my ethical obligation, no matter how interested or disinterested I am, to learn to play golf in order to further women’s chances as ever being anything other than second-class citizens.   If that was your counter, then touché.

Yes, this image exists.

How about this as a counter argument to the claim that we can’t make ourselves care about things that we don’t care about: to begin, I gather, first and foremost that we’re working with a tautology (“I don’t care because I don’t care”).  A colleague who has researched and written extensively about the horrific suffering of factory-farmed chickens continues to eat chicken (he’s also repeatedly told me that I’m a “better person” than him for not eating chickens, a statement that sounds laudatory but is ultimately dismissive – and lets him off the hook).  His knowledge of the suffering of chickens is not enough for him to find their plight important, at least not in the sense of refusing to participate in it.  To write about it, certainly.  To think about it, likewise.  Further, if an awareness of animal suffering is not important enough for most people (and it isn't), neither is the environmental toll of meat: the meat industry is already responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions – and global meat consumption is predicted to double by 2050 (McHugh 185).  But what if the counter argument to “I don’t care because I don’t care” is “despite not caring, you can – and should – do X anyway.”  Bad logic?  Well, so’s the original argument, so I’m working with what I’ve got.

* Look at me!  I’m philosophizin’!

OK, so back to the seminar and Pippin’s other claim, that “Coetzee’s work constitutes an act of preparing the way as opposed to bringing about a change.”  Coetzee’s work does do that.  It does get the reader to the point just prior to a potential (but highly unlikely) shift in a way of thinking or acting.  But I find that assertion just another cop out – and I said so, right at that moment when I couldn’t sit quietly by any longer.  I mean, good for us to sit around and analyze what Coetzee’s works say about the horrors of what’s done to animals, and good for us to pat ourselves on the backs for figuring out the true nature of Coetzee’s fictions . . . and then proceed to lunch and eat BLTs.  Coetzee has prepared the way; we don’t have to change.  And I realize that change, particularly with regard to the act of not eating animals, is always a fraught prospect, even among the most enlightened of folks.  After discussing Disgrace and Lives, I ate an ALT (avocado, lettuce, and tomato) and admitted to being vegan, and much of the discussion over lunch was about vegetarianism.  Over lunch, I got these questions from the same person:

1.  What about Hitler’s vegetarianism?

2.  What about abused children?  Hey, for that matter, what about plants?  Didn’t I know that plants have feelings, too?

I’ve addressed the red herring of the Hitler issue elsewhere in this blog, and I don’t want to waste another word on the subject.  In response to the second issue, I offered up Carol J. Adams’s notion of “retrograde humanism.”  Adams notes, “”when people learn that I’m a vegan . . . they react with such vehemence and accuse me of not caring for (1) abused children, (2) the homeless, (3) the hungry, (4) battered women, (5) the environment, and (6) workers, among many other things. . . .  Sometimes I laughingly claim that my veganism has prompted more people to announce their concerns for human suffering than my activism ever did.” Retrograde humanism, she notes, happens when people who aren’t vegetarian assert their own humanism in the face of feeling confronted by what feels like, well, a dietary confrontation: “finding out they might be doing more, they accuse vegans of doing less” (127).   In such a construction, animal activism or vegetarianism or veganism functions to lead one into an infinite ethical regression: the only way to be “genuine” or “good enough” in such a formulation is not to do anything, because as soon as you do something, you’re held to a standard (to which others don’t hold themselves) that immediately assumes that you’re not doing enough.

So at the end of the day – and at the end of the seminar – I’m still, despite lots of evidence to the contrary, of the belief that thinking is good, but doing is better.  And if anyone out there does become a vegetarian after reading Coetzee (or reading this blog), I’ll learn to play golf.  Swear it.

Notes

[i] “Displacing the Voice: J. M. Coetzee’s Female Narrators.”  African Studies 67.2 (2008):  11-29. 

“‘Does He Have it in Him to be the Woman?’ The Performance of Displacement in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.”  Ariel 37.4 (2006): 83-102.

“In Defense of Elizabeth Costello: Rants from an Ethical Academic on J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of 

           Animals.”  J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual.  Ed. Jane Poyner.  Athens: U of Ohio P, 2006.  193-216.  

Writing ‘Out of All the Camps’: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement.  New York: Routledge  

            Press, 2006 and 2009.

Works Cited

Adams, Carol J.  “What Came Before The Sexual Politics of Meat: The Activist Roots of a Critical Theory.”  Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory.  Eds. Marianne DeKoven and Michael Lundblad.  New York: Columbia UP, 2012.  103-138.

Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 1999.

---. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking, 2003.

---. Life & Times of Michael K. New York: Penguin, 1985.

---. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1980.

McHugh, Susan.  “Real Artificial: Tissue-Cultured Meat, Genetically Modified Animals, and Fictions.”  Configurations 18.1-2 (2010): 181-197.  

Coetzee, the Nature of Likeness, and Animals

I have not been blogging, and here’s why: I’m teaching a graduate seminar this summer on the works of South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, the writer about whom I wrote the dissertation that later became my first book.  It is keeping me busy.  My initial interest in Coetzee occurred in a PhD graduate seminar – my first PhD seminar, actually – on the works of Nadine Gordimer and Coetzee.  The course was taught by Stephen Clingman, who later directed my dissertation.  Mad props to Stephen.

 

I took the class because, as an MA candidate, I had read Gordimer and liked her.  I had never heard of Coetzee.

Nadine Gordimer...

...and J.M. Coetzee

While my work has always focused on the African literature of one type or other and on the ways that postcolonial authors and literatures speak back to colonial power (disseminated via not only violence but also through language – often English – religion – always Christian – and education), Coetzee’s work, at least in terms of my reading of it, is more about the politics of refusing to engage with, well, politics.  Initially he was a perplexing source of interest for me, as I had always been inclined to think of myself as a champion of the marginalized (yes, arrogant...I was younger then) and as someone who was in possession of a feminist agenda that required me to be sincerely dedicated to writing about literature by women.  My MA thesis was on Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, and Tsitsi Dangarembga; I had every intention of furthering my work on Nwapa when I went to UMASS.

But my interest in Coetzee and my decision to write about him was based in large part on reading Disgrace, the 1999 novel for which he won his second Booker Prize (he was the first author to win this prize a second time), and The Lives of Animals, his 1997 Princeton Tanner Lectures, which were published the same year as Disgrace.  In essence, his fictional explorations of animal and human interactions, and his philosophical and dialogic musings via the character of Elizabeth Costello about animal rights, vegetarianism, and the limits of the empathetic imagination led me to formulate one of the key tenets of my study on Coetzee, that while we may never be able to “imagine” the interiority of the other – whether that other is animal or human – we should never cease to try to do so.  And, in trying and failing, we should nonetheless respect the alterity of that which cannot be imagined.

I love this poster for the film. Dog collars across the South African flag.  Perfect.

In other words, while I can’t really think my “way into the life of a bat” (77), as Costello claims that, as a writer, she can, I still think that I should respect the bat – * and even go as far as to consider that the bat and I are of the same order of being, deserving of the same ethical considerations.

* That’s my position; I have no idea if it’s Coetzee’s.

Coetzee’s texts engage with – and never firmly state a position – this idea in both Disgrace and The Lives of Animals.  His characters engage dialogically, raising issues but not handing down dictates and truths of any kind.  When Elizabeth Costello claims in The Lives of Animals that “we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them” (65), we get all kinds of outcry from the other characters in the story.  Her daughter-in-law Norma accuses her of rambling, of being confused.  Abraham Stern, a Jewish poet, refuses to have dinner with Costello after her statements, claiming “you misunderstand the nature of likenesses; I even say you misunderstand willfully, to the point of blasphemy.  Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of man.  If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews.  The inversion insults the memory of the dead.  It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way” (94). 

And this sort of dialogue – the unanswerable (to my mind) question about the nature of “likenesses” – spills out into a classroom when one is teaching these texts, as was the case with me last night.

I’ve taught Disgrace many, many times since first reading it; my copy is falling apart, full of notes, a complete mess.  You’d think that I would have said, at this point, all there is to say about the work.  And if I haven’t, surely someone else has, as there is so much literary criticism out there on Disgrace that it’s hard to believe there’s anything new to discover.  That being said, I found myself focusing on this question of “likenesses,” and that’s something I’ve never really done before in all the times I’ve read or taught the novel.  There are several reasons, I think, why I went with that lens and not some other.  One is the notion of context again, something that’s been with me since ASLE and the disappearance of Lauren Spierer.

On an intellectual level, ASLE was about presenting on contextual moral vegetarianism.  On an emotional level, it was about processing the narrative of a 20 year-old female University of Indiana student who had vanished, seemingly into thin air, right before I landed in town.  I’ve already written about my academic presentation, and I’ve already talked a bit about Spierer, whose ubiquitous image, appearing all over campus and town, on fliers, on billboards, in the windows of all the local businesses, is burned forever in my mind.  I still search the internet everyday for news about her.  But context is important in her case as well: she’s from a wealthy family, she’s white, blonde, pretty, which is not to say anything other than the media attention that her case gets and that the family can afford to give it is constant.  And I’m all too aware of “missing white woman syndrome,” which is my point exactly.

On July 5, a little over a month after she disappeared, there were numerous stories about a woman’s body found in a creek in Indianapolis, a body that was not Spierer. Several days later – and to find any follow up, one has to scroll through pages of headlines about the body that isn’t Spierer – the woman that was not was identified as Shaneice Nicholson.  And that was that.  Nothing else.  Mostly Nicholson is not Spierer.  Context matters.  But what do we make of such circumstances in terms of an examination of likenesses?

But back to class: we were discussing Disgrace and I brought up Lucy Lurie’s assertion to her father that “there is no higher life.  This is the only life there is.  Which we share with animals. . . .  That’s the example that I try to follow. . . .  I don’t want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us” (74).  I confess that I sort of share this sentiment; I pointed to this passage because it’s how I think as well: since I can’t know that there’s a higher life, I’d like to live assuming that this one is the one that matters and that I have an obligation to live it, at least insofar as I’m capable, in a way that, as Lucy says, “shares some of [my] human privilege with the beasts” (74). 

One of my students countered, “I like David’s comment better.”  David responds to his daughter by saying, “yes, I agree, this is the only life there is.  As for animals, by all means let us be kind to them.  But let us not lose perspective.  We are of a different order of creation from the animals.  Not higher, necessarily, just different” (74).  So this student’s ideological positioning countered mine (as both were expressed in Coetzee’s novel) and led me back to the question of likenesses yet again.

Disgrace plays with the concept of likeness; the narrative is filled with pairs of words that are similar, yet different – compliant/pliant, moderate/moderated, demand/command – as both the narrator and David Lurie weigh which is appropriate in any given context.  But the novel most clearly presents the philosophical difficulty of establishing likeness via the violence done to the bodies of two racially different women – not unlike Lauren Spierer and Shaneice Nicholson – and in white professor David Lurie’s (possible) realization that the “undesired” sexual intercourse that he forces upon his racially mixed student Melanie is something for which he must seek forgiveness.  This realization comes, if it comes at all, after his white daughter is raped by three black men.  And it comes, I would argue, after he feels empathy for two sheep destined for slaughter by Lucy’s black tenant Petrus. 

If we see Lucy’s rape as more violent – of a different order – than David’s “not rape, not quite that, but undesired” (25) “seduction” of Melanie (which the narrator describes as an event during which she “decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of a fox close on its neck” (25)), then that may be because the narrative’s free indirect discourse is focalized through David. His white male ego is that which orders the fictional world, but his is a position with which Coetzee is not necessarily comfortable.

And if we’re able (as David may be) to see, ultimately, the likenesses between the slaughter sheep, Melanie (the rabbit being slaughtered in the above metaphor), and Lucy (who describes her experience as a kind of slaughter: “you’re a man you ought to know.  When you have sex with someone strange – when you trap her, hold her down . . . isn’t it a bit like killing?  Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards . . . doesn’t it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?” (158), it is through our ability to empathize.  And it’s through our willingness to accept that beings that look very different – in terms of their races and species – are actually very much alike indeed.

**********************

In other news: Russell Brand and Kristin Wiig have been named PETA's sexiest vegetarian celebrities of 2011.  I love both of them, so I guess that's ok.  Right?  This past weekend, I downloaded -- and have been listening incessantly to -- the soundtrack from Get Him to the Greek, which is a fake album by Aldous Snow's (Russell Brand's) fake band Infant Sorrow.

I am totally serious.

Harold Fromm

Since I mentioned his piece in my previous post, here it is, in its entirety: Harold Fromm's Vegans and the Quest for Purity

And here's my response, some of which was published in the Chronicle:

In response to Harold Fromm’s “Vegans and the Quest for Purity” (4 July 2010):

Ah, the othering, via sweeping generalizations, of some presumably homogenous entity known as vegans – and from someone who should know better.  I have to wonder first at The Chronicle’s reasoning for publishing this piece: what is the connection between this fallacious anti-vegan rant and higher education?  And second, I am concerned that such a completely unsupported argument, devoid of any concrete examples, dependent upon the stereotyping of various groups (vegans, vegetarians, and meat eaters) passes muster with the editors.

As I read through this piece, I could not help finding myself in composition instructor mode, knowing that any good first-year writing teacher would return this piece for revision, given its hasty generalizations (“Unlike vegans, who are enlisted in an open-ended but futile metaphysic of virtue and self-blamelessness that pretends to escape from the conditions of life itself, vegetarians have more limited goals and have marked out a manageable territory with fewer cosmic pretensions,” “Behind their beliefs is the hopeless longing for innocence”), its faulty analogies and slippery slope hyperbole (“But even larger creatures like cockroaches and rats, do they enter into the purview of animal-rights activists? And the HIV virus, the swine flu, tuberculosis? Do I want to eschew antibiotics and vaccines that help my life out of respect for theirs?”), and its argument from tradition: “We're compromised from the start. Evolution favored meat-eating primates, enlarging their brains and enabling them to live in more and more complex and survivalist societies that today extend our life spans, provide genteel habitats, and produce philosophers who have the wherewithal to object to the very components of their own existence.”

Who are these vegans of which Fromm speaks, these ethereal, “grandstanding,” self-righteous creatures, these judgmental and friendless beings, alienated from society (“Veganism, while perhaps harmless enough, especially if you don't care about being part of society or alienating potential friends who may find you more trouble than you're worth…”)?  I’m afraid that I don’t know these folks.  And I’m doubting that Fromm knows them either.  Since concrete example is always preferable to nameless, faceless stereotype (like vegans, blacks, gays, women…), I’d like to introduce you to a real life vegan: me.

Since The Chronicle sees fit to entertain the subject of veganism via Fromm, it seems fair that there be a counter narrative out there as well, one straight from the mouth of a creature whose existence must be the product of selective biological evolution and the evolution of intellectual choice: a female, vegan animal.  The reasons that Fromm lists for why vegans are vegan are somewhat alien to me; indeed, most of them are not my reasons.  I was vegetarian first – because I didn’t want to participate in an industry responsible for what I view as so much needless suffering.  I visited a sausage plant on a school field trip when I was 13.  And that was that.

Veganism came later, when I was working on my dissertation on J. M. Coetzee, an author whose work Fromm and I both admire.  But my decision wasn’t based on reading Coetzee, or even on a much more influential text that I read at the same time, Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat, a text that made manifest for me the connections between the subjection of animals and women.  I chose to be vegan because I could make that choice, because it wasn’t going to hurt me to do so, and because, in a much larger sense, doing so forced me to come into direct and engaged contact not only with what I eat and wear, but with the capitalist economies responsible for such commodities; for me, being a vegan requires my vigilance, my attention, my focus in ways that make it impossible for me to consume anything – from food to politics to fashion –without at first considering its source.  As the result of that decision, I am healthy and strong, a distance runner, scholar, teacher, and fully realized member of society.  I am a person who feels a sense of internal consistency, at least in one aspect of my life.

I know that I am lucky – privileged – to be able to make the choices that I make.  I never take the ability to make those choices for granted.  I am fortunate to be able to take a considered approach to my evolutionary history and my biology, and to decide that simply because something has been the case in the past, it does not necessarily need to remain the case.  I get to choose not to eat certain things, not to wear certain things, heck, even not to have children – a choice that clearly flies in the face of my biological “purpose” – and for the ability to make these choices, I am supremely thankful.  I have never found myself hopelessly “longing for innocence” as the result of my life, but, then again, I think that the longing for innocence of which Fromm speaks is probably the same longing that accompanies any quest for meaning or truth, any attempt to make sense of one’s place in a world that is filled with suffering.

Choice is an interesting concept, if we approach it from the evolutionary standpoint that Fromm seems to embrace; if we are biologically and historically predetermined (because our evolutionary history would suggest that we are) to do such and such, how do we account for the evolution of an intellect that allows us not to?  If, as Fromm states, “to be alive is to be a murderer. Or to be murdered,” then isn’t the decision not to go outside and kill your neighbor for whatever reason just as suspect as the decision not to eat a cow or wear leather (or, for that matter, kill a spider)?  We all make choices with regard to what we will and won’t allow, what we privilege and what we exclude from consideration.  We are all, vegan and non-vegan, involved in both destructive and creative processes.

There are many reasons for why I made the decision to become vegan; they are my reasons, and I have never tried to impose them on anyone else (although the very act of my being vegan is enough to threaten some people, like Fromm, for instance – but that’s not my problem).  I am happy; I have friends – from raw foodists, to vegetarians, to full out carnivores – who eat all kinds of different things.  I live in a world where there is room for differing systems of belief, different reasons why people make the choices that they make.  And I’m a vegan, Harold.  Now you can say that you’ve met one.