Philosopher and critical social theorist John Sanbonmatsu joins me, for the second time, on Sentientism episode 244. Find our conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.
John is a writer, philosopher, cultural critic and magician. He is best known for his book, The Postmodern Prince, and for his more recent work in Critical Animal Studies where he edited the collection “Critical Theory and Animal Liberation“. Also in that field his book “The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and the Nature of Moral Life” was published by NYU Press in 2024.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”
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00:00 Clips
“What I conclude in the book is that our violence against animals, the way we treat animals, the meat question, the food question, these are not trivial matters.”
“What I argue is that this is the most important issue of our time. We kill about 80 billion land animals every year in agriculture and up to almost 3 trillion marine animals in the oceans.”
“Industries intentionally don’t show us the violence and suffering and filth that goes into the production. You’re only going to see the commodity in its processed form.”
“There’s no such thing as ethical exploitation, ethical violence, mass extermination of beings. Whether the animals are killed in factory farms or on smaller farms, they’re still being subjected to manipulation, control, surveillance, sexual violation, and finally a violent death.”
“My message is simply that we have to show a kind of courage and resilience in the face of what’s happening. And we just can’t give up. We do the work because it matters and it’s the right thing to do.”
01:11 Welcome
John on Sentientism episode 171
John’s new book The Omnivore’s Deception.
JW: “I loved the book… It was so refreshing… so much of the debate around these topics is gentle. It’s meeting people where they are… trying to find some middle ground and persuade gently… it’s almost patronizing… Your book respects the reader… it’s clear, it’s direct, it tells us how things are… It just felt like a tour to force.”
03:06 John’s Intro
“I’m a Professor of philosophy at Western Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts… a critical social theorist more than a philosopher…
“My second book is an edited collection called Critical Theory and Animal Liberation.”
“This book, The Omnivore’s Deception, or ‘what we get wrong about meat, animals, and ourselves,’ is the culmination of decades of reflection and thought about how we treat other animals, primarily in the food system.”
“What I conclude is that… our violence against animals, the way we treat animals, the meat question, the food question, the these are not trivial matters, which is how I think the public views this.”
“… if they [the public] think about vegetarianism or veganism at all… they’re hostile to it. And… they don’t understand it in a political sense.”
“I argue that this is the most important issue of our time. It’s connected to all these other problems that we’re having in the world as humans. We can’t seem to get along with one another. We’re wrecking the earth. And in some sense, all of this comes back to the kind of primal and primordial relation we have with other beings which is one of domination, aggression and violence.”
“… it’s a deep dive into these issues of our exploitation of animals… it tries to give the reader a picture of the totality of this system.”
“… we kill about 80 billion land animals every year in agriculture and up to almost three trillion animals, marine animals in the oceans… Leaving aside the fur industry and hunting and fishing and scientific experimentation on hundreds of millions of animals.”
“… we’ve organized our entire existential identity around this mass violence…”
“… people don’t even know… they don’t understand it in those terms… people would politely ask me about my work… I said I’m writing this book about our violence against animals… people would often look very confused and they’d say ‘what do you mean like uh dog abuse?’”
“… the largest cultural artifact ever produced by homo sapiens is animal agriculture. It dwarfs our cities and towns and road works…”
“Animal agriculture alone is the second leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, dwarfing even the emissions of cars and trucks and trains and ships…”
JW: “But when you mention it, people think you’re talking about like a football or a soccer player kicking a puppy, right?… That’s where their mind goes when you talk about violence against animals.”
06:34 Deceptions
“It’s hidden… on the one hand it’s in plain sight… Hiding in plain sight because you go to any supermarket and there’s all the meat products and all the animal products.”
“But this is true of capitalism in general… capitalism sunders the relationship between production and consumption… So that we don’t see where the shirts on our back come from…”
“Some poor woman in Bangladesh or Indonesia… sewed the shirt on my back and I don’t know the conditions of her labour. I don’t know anything about her life as a human being… the market mediates my relationship with her and obscures and sunders that link…”
“In the same way if I go out and buy a hamburger, which I don’t, but if I did, I would not see the destruction of the Amazon… the burning down of the rainforest to graze cattle. I wouldn’t know that there was an individual being or a group of them, in fact, who had feelings and thoughts and experiences. Who were brutally killed in order for me to get that burger.”
“Part of the problem for us, this is the same work that you do too, is what I think of as disocclusion. When something is occluded, it’s obscured. It’s hidden from our sight.”
“I think that we’re engaged, both of us and others, in the work of disocclusion… revealing the truth about these systems. And to be honest, people don’t want to know the truth.”
“We have this idea that humans want to know the truth… in reality, not if it’s going to make us uncomfortable… in which case we’ll just slip into self-deception to avoid it.”
JW: “…often most humans are willing participants in that deception. It’s one of those weird deceptions where many people actually want to be deceived… what are the types of deceptions that you’re trying to reveal to us?”
“… the most overt or obvious level is the meat, egg, dairy and fishing industries… which intentionally don’t show us the violence and suffering and filth and so forth that goes into the production.”
“… you watch a McDonald’s ad and the last thing you’re ever going to see in a McDonald’s ad is a living animal. You’re only going to see the commodity in its processed form… that’s the obvious deception.”
“It’s not just about hiding the reality. It’s creating a false reality… of a kind of universe of happy animals dancing their way to the barbecue…”
“But a lot of my book is about the kinds of deceptions that critics have been engaged in for a couple decades now… this is the Michael Pollans, Temple Grandins, Barbara Kingsolvers… who argue that we can have our meat and our conscience too through smaller scale pastoral forms of animal agriculture.”
“It’s this romantic conception of the little family farm where the animals are well treated and they only have one bad day, which is a euphemism for killing them… I go into that at great length to show why this is preposterous.”
“There’s no such thing as ethical exploitation, ethical violence, ethical mass extermination of beings, which is what we’re talking about.”
“Whether the animals are killed in factory farms or on smaller farms, they’re still being subjected to manipulation, control, surveillance, sexual violation, and finally a violent death.”
“And none of it is justified because, of course, we don’t need to eat animals at all.”
“And this brings me to the last form of deception, which is self-deception.”
“People don’t want to know what’s going on. And so it becomes very easy for a writer like Michael Pollan, whose book The Omnivores Dilemma came out in 2006… for a critic like that, an accomplished writer, to weave this web that traps the reader into thinking that we can have humane farming and kill animals in a way that’s in keeping with their own nature as beings.”
“And the reason that people go along with that is because they want to go along with it.”
11:27 Bad Faith
“I’ve been teaching ethics for over 20 years… I think this is really the biggest impediment to any kind of moral reasoning… what the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre calls bad faith.”
“Bad faith is basically the idea that our freedom is a burden. Our freedom to think for ourselves or our freedom to define our values for ourselves and to take responsibility for those values and actions. That’s tough.”
“And so we slough off that responsibility to others and we say, ‘Oh, well,’ and we come up with these bad faith rationales.”
“… for eating animals… ‘Well plants are alive, too’ or ‘Well, the Native Americans used to pray to their animals’ or ‘Well, if we didn’t have animal agriculture, there wouldn’t be enough land to grow plants on.’”
“There are these ridiculous arguments, but they’re just thrown out there by the meat-eating public, not because they take these issues seriously, but to ward off any kind of self-examination, anything that might trouble them.”
“… the fact is that vegans… we’re often depicted as a threat to civilization. And in a sense we are. Because we’re questioning the very premise of human dominance, human supremacism, which is the structuring principle and ideology of life on this planet.”
“… it doesn’t just structure our own daily life institutions of higher learning and values and religions because we’re the boss on the planet. We’re the master class that shapes life for all the other beings.”
“… what has to be guarded against is any kind of self-knowledge by society that would threaten that principle.”
JW: “…this bad faith way of thinking is deeply insidious… But you can see how people would do that in a somewhat innocent way where they’re not really engaging in it. They’re just sort of looking for a convenient excuse and drifting by… that’s where most people are… So it’s bad faith, but in a neglectful way rather than a deliberate way.”
13:43 Michael Pollan, Temple Grandin, Barbara Kingsolver
JW: “For the people like Kingsolver and Grandin and Pollan… Do you think they are deliberately and explicitly framing something in a bad faith way, or do you think they are seeing a problem in industrial animal agriculture and genuinely trying to find a path that they really do think is a better way forward?”
“… it depends on the person… but yeah, it’s bad faith all the way down.”
“… bad faith, when we think of it in colloquial terms, we think of it as an attempt to deceive others. So, I’m not saying that Pollan and Grandin and these other people are intentionally lying to the public, although that may happen.”
“It’s more like they have a certain commitment to a worldview and they’re going to stick to it regardless of the facts, regardless of contrary evidence, and they’re going to come up with ridiculous rationales for what they do…”
“…in Pollan’s case he actually seems to enjoy hurting animals to be honest… he brags about it in Omnivore’s Dilemma. He gets his rifle and goes out and kills this mother pig who’s out peacefully foraging with her piglets. And he boasts about it.”
“… elsewhere he talks about how he tried keeping chickens in his garden, but they made ‘a mess of things’ as he describes it, and he couldn’t wait to kill them when the time had come.”
“There’s aggression and sadism that’s involved in all of these kinds of practices.”
“I don’t necessarily want to psychologise people, but I think it’s important to recognize that there’s no good faith in going out of one’s way to harm others.”
“… most consumers, they go to the store and they buy their hermetically sealed ground beef and they don’t think about it. Is that bad faith? Sure it is. Because they don’t want to see the videos…”
“…I like the way you put it’s neglectful bad faith… mindless bad faith… still bad faith.”
“But it’s something else… it’s something really perverted for someone like Pollan, who’s a privileged millionaire… to go out and intentionally seek out animals to kill on Joel Salatin’s farm… he visits there to lionise Salatin’s Polyface farm. He goes out of his way to harm others.”
“And as I point out in my book… this insight came to me from Emily Moran Barwick… she runs the Bite Size Vegan platform… the argument that these people make is that it’s a more authentic relation.”
“Rather than go and get the commodity from the store mindlessly, you’re going to look that chicken in the eye and cut the chicken’s throat.”
JW: “You’re facing the moral responsibility directly.”
“Yeah… because otherwise you’re a hypocrite. And I’ve heard people… locavores say this… ‘the reason I chose to shoot the pig in the head myself is because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite.’”
“But there are worse things in the world than being a hypocrite. And seeking to actually commit violent harm to a defenceless sensitive being is one of the things.”
JW: “… There’s also an implication in the human world that taking a hit out on someone is somehow disingenuous whereas actually murdering someone yourself is honourable and authentic and something to be admired.”
JW: “… authenticity is only good if you’re a good person. Otherwise, you can be an authentic fascist or a dictator or a sadistic murderer and have extreme levels of authenticity…”
“So much violence and injustice gets smuggled in under the terms of authenticity.”
“Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, made a big deal of authenticity. Of course, he was a Nazi… he thought of Hitler and the Nazi movement as putting Germans in touch with their authentic selves and their authentic connection to the land.”
“I’m not saying there isn’t something worth holding on to in the concept of authenticity. In fact, Jean-Paul Sartre sees authenticity as the opposite of bad faith.”
“But in order… to get at genuine authenticity, you have to be really sober about yourself, you have to really understand and be able to look honestly at your own motivations and your own behaviour and values.”
“… all of these critics, when they when they write about defending animal agriculture, they’re playing to the mob. Because the mob, which is to say the vast majority of people, believe that humans have a natural right to dominate and kill other beings.”
“… it’s hypocritical and contradictory because they have cats and dogs who they would never want to harm… But they’re defended against any criticism of that or of their values and behaviour.”
“So, they’re going to create this jargon of authenticity or self-empowerment… I talk about femavorism in my book… women who are going out of their way to harm animals in a quest for self-empowerment as women.”
19:50 Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Carnivore Dieters and Fascism
JW: “There’s actually a group that aren’t deceived… they see these things directly and clearly and they still like it… a group of people who weirdly seem to be more and more accepted into mainstream discourse, who are openly happy and proud about dominance, about the glorification of violence, about the oppression of others, about might makes right, about will to power.”
JW: “And their view of non-human animal agriculture and exploitation naturally just fits into that worldview… some are explicitly sadistic… you might think of Andrew Tate or the carnivore dieters or a remarkable number of people who actually have political power these days who actively seem to enjoy the hierarchical dominance approach as long as they’re at the top of it.”
“I still think that there’s bad faith there… you’re talking about fascists… people on the far right… and even fascists want to believe they’re doing the right thing by their lights… the SS were going to sacrifice themselves because they ‘had to’ commit these horrible crimes, but that was their duty…”
“It is hard to imagine but… there are people who simply are shameless about supporting what they think of as natural hierarchy and animals are central to this…”
“… going back to Aristotle, his view of natural hierarchy… masters were meant to dominate slaves… men were meant to naturally dominate women… parents were naturally meant to dominate children… stronger city states were naturally meant to dominate weaker ones and turn their prisoners from those wars into slaves…”
“But underneath all that is also then that humans are meant to dominate and make use of weaker other beings – animals.”
“… in the culture wars… meat has become this this unexpected flash point in our national politics in the United States.”
“… whether it’s Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan in the manosphere or Ron DeSantis in Florida warning against a global conspiracy to turn people into vegans… ‘they’re taking our burgers and steaks away!’”
“… there’s this embattled masculinity that is being shored up, but it’s part of this other fabric… of misogyny and anti-environmentalism and anti-empathy.”
“That’s really what it comes down to… a kind of contempt for those who suffer, those who are vulnerable.”
“Orwell in 1984 nailed what the essence of totalitarianism is… when George Winston… is told finally what all this is about. He told, ‘Picture a boot stamping on a human face. Stomping on a human face forever.’”
“… The cruelty is the point, the sadism is the point.”
JW: “There’s a performative angle to it as well… white nationalists chugging quarts of milk to demonstrate their genetic superiority because they’re lactose tolerant or the people attacking vegans on Twitter and saying ‘I’ll eat twice as much raw steak to offset what you do’”
JW: “… The cruelty is the point, the performance is part of the point and the dominance and the hierarchy is central”
25:22 The Femivores
JW: “The femivores… in the human space you can find surprising groups of people who seem to be complicit in things that actually oppress them… the tradwife movement where ironically the tradwife, particularly if they’re an influencer, is probably making more money than the husband they’re supposed to obey. And apparently her only place in the world is in the bedroom or the kitchen, but actually she’s running a YouTube empire”
JW: “But there are these people, in that human context, who seem to be actively participating in this patriarchal hierarchical structure that actually dominates them.”
“… around 2010, the journalist Peggy Ornstein wrote a short article in New York Times magazine called the femivore’s dilemma… Pollan had written the Omnivores Dilemma in 2006… there’s all these women who have been flocking, for lack of a better word, to animal husbandry, hunting, fishing… butchering.”
“Forms of practice that involve violence against animals as a way of achieving ‘feminine empowerment’ and in some cases ‘feminist empowerment.’”
“… taking up the gun or the knife against animals is somehow a feminist project.”
“So I began reading dozens and dozens of books, memoirs by women who leave their six figure jobs in New York or Chicago, as literary editors and food critics, to buy an animal farm and then write about their experiences.”
“And it was Barbara Kingsolver in her book Animal Vegetable Miracle in 2007 who really set the tone…”
“Kingsolver, in that book, talks about ordering turkeys, baby turkeys or chicks from a hatchery… she refers to them as her children and her babies… she gets them partly as an experiment in maternalism for her daughter.”
“Her daughter gets this experience of mothering the chicks and then, of course, they can’t wait to kill them when they’ve matured enough to begin developing their own autonomy and independence…”
“There are dozens of these books… these are not incidental books. These are books that have been reviewed in the New York Times… gotten to the bestseller lists and been talked about on NPR. Hugely significant.”
“Millions of people, mostly women, read these books. Well what is it about these books that people like?”
“The Bildungsroman novel… this mostly 18th or 19th century novel where the protagonist goes through certain kind of struggles and then comes out having had an education of some kind and having grown… David Copperfield…”
“… the narrative structure of all these books is the same. The women are at a loss. They don’t have a sense of purpose or meaning or direction in their lives and they feel alienated from the corporate world.”
“And so they get into this ‘authentic mode’ of digging through the manure and learning how to be a tough farmer and so they confront these roosters who are supposedly mean and then they kill them… and they learn to dominate horses, these large animals.”
“… there’s this whole undertone of violence and aggression, throughout these books, which was completely not remarked upon by literary critics who love and continue to love these books… These books are still bestsellers and there are always new ones coming out all the time.”
JW: “It’s bizarre… because you can see that… on the one hand there’s using the animals to find purpose in maternalism and care… that then becomes a path of finding meaning in oppression and dominance and violence to the same beings.”
“… In a way, it’s an expression of what has always been the case in human culture, at least arguably for centuries, which is the idea that God… nature gave us these beings for our purposes and we should care for them and not ‘abuse’ them, but also make use of them.”
“… the first bill of rights in North America, which was right here in Massachusetts in 1641, the Puritan colony, the Bay Colony of Massachusetts. Believe it or not, in this bill of rights, it specified that there should not be brutality or tyranny against the animals kept for human use.”
“So there you have the dialectic of care… you make sure they’re watered and fed and and then off with their heads when the time comes.”
JW: “So you can care and kill.”
“… this phenomenon of the femivore and especially the maternalist theme and the natalist theme… something else going on.”
“… part of it is… that the meat industry itself, because of the challenges that have been waged by animal advocates against the animal industry and the brutality of it… that the meat industry has been searching… for a kind of language, a new language to rationalize and justify what we do.”
“So, if you can put a ‘feminine’ spin on mass murder, and talk about compassionate killing… through these gendered lenses that have become encoded in our culture for thousands of years, you have a powerful leverage there.”
“I would give the example of Temple Grandin… the perfect example… Temple Grandin is is a hero. Why? She’s devoted her whole life to getting millions and billions of animals to go to their doom uncomplainingly. That’s what she does for a living.”
“It’s to make sure that the animals don’t know they’re about to be killed. To deceive them into thinking they’re safe when they’re not safe. So that they can be liquidated. And she’s held up as this model of morality.”
“And in fact, she was even described in some circles as an ‘animal rights activist,’ believe it or not.”
“The fact that she’s a woman is not incidental to her success… society is eager in its desire for self-deception, eager to find excuses for its murderous behaviour.”
“Grandin, who by the way is the biggest promoter of gas chambers for animals, like putting pigs into gas chambers, it’s not an accident that she’s become as famous as she has.”
JW: “And with some of them, that carrying out the violence themselves, becomes framed as an act of feminist empowerment in its own right.”
33:45 Wellness, Conspirituality, New Age and MAHA
JW: “…the wellness, yoga, ‘natural is good’, ‘circle of life,’ crowd… they had a really interesting trajectory… historically they were thought of as being quite animal friendly, quite empathic, in touch with emotions, caring about others. Quite a lot of vegetarianism and veganism in those worlds… they were tied into ideas of spirituality and animism and ahimsa… also broadly left-wing coded… being against oppression and caring about each other…”
JW: “It feels like a lot of people in that group have shifted… partly through the crucible of COVID to becoming quite strongly aligned with the far right… drifting into conspiracism and then to extreme libertarianism… and the conspiracism always ends up with ‘it’s the Jews!’”
JW: “That seems to have been playing through in their attitudes towards flesh products and animal products… as well… one of their leading exponents is now running the United States Department of Health and Human Services… this is not a niche cultural movement anymore.”
“It’s important that that we, in this movement of animal advocacy, understand that this whole animal system is part of this wider social structure… that has to do with political economy and the nature of the state and capitalist relations.”
“That shift that you’re describing, has to be put in the context of the rise of… right-wing populist authoritarianism, fascism, a backlash against feminism, the incel movement… it’s all part of the same gestalt…”
“… people are having their psychic needs and emotional needs met in some way through these discourses.”
“… the viewers, the people who consume this media… it’s often young boys… there was a study… among I think eighth graders in Britain, Andrew Tate was the number one most favoured male role model.”
JW: “I’m hoping it was a phase that’s somewhat passed with him individually, but the values and the themes are [still] there. I ran a workshop with a group of teenage boys a few months ago and some of them started chanting his name in a workshop that I was running about world views and compassion… were they trolling me? How serious are they? I don’t know. But they’re very familiar with his content and his way of thinking.”
JW: “it’s one of so many… dangerous slippery slopes where people start from a vaguely reasonable position like ‘young men are feeling a bit rootless and they need some sense of responsibility’ and you don’t have to go many clicks before you’ve gone from Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and ‘you need to make your bed in the morning’ to ‘young men should take responsibility for themselves and their families’ and that means ‘women should stay in the kitchen and the bedroom’…
JW: “I think this happens a lot in this conspiracy minded group where ‘we can’t trust big pharma because they’re commercially minded and they’re just trying to sell us drugs and things are overprescribed’ all the way through to ‘I’m going to turn down my chemotherapy because this guy on YouTube sold me a crystal’”
JW: “… this group in particular seem to have just slid all the way down into some really dark places.”
“… some of the interviews I’ve done about my book have been on wellness programmes… there was always a real vulnerability there politically because the wellness message is first of all ‘look out for number one… it’s what you put in your body that matters… what you consume that matters… being a consumer is what matters… being a smart consumer and a healthy consumer is what matters… there’s a discourse of purity, authenticity and especially the ‘natural.’”
39:10 It’s Natural!
“The natural is just not the friend of the good.”
“… historically… whenever anyone says ‘well it’s natural…’ always be on the lookout… ‘it’s natural for women to be in the home’, ‘it’s natural for some races to do better than others,’ ‘it’s natural to eat meat…’”
“… the people who say, ‘Well, it’s natural to be vegan…’ I’ve had people say in some interviews that it’s natural, that humans are herbivores… they come up with some kind of pseudoscience to explain why that is. It’s just not helpful.”
“… The question is what’s truthful, what’s ethical, what’s compassionate. Those are the things that we should be talking about and not what’s ‘natural.’”
“We’re operating in an environment where it’s just this tidal wave of misinformation… AI is already worsening this… It’s accelerating these trends of irrationality…”
JW: “Yeah… It doesn’t seem to be helping with our public epistemology much yet, does it?”
JW: “There’s a bunch of other groups we could go through… environmentalists… and then… the average person on the street. The normal person who wants to believe that animal agriculture is humane and sustainable.”
40:50 Our Civilisational Error
JW “… the story of how we made this civilizational error in the first place… telling that story can help us understand how these systems link to our evolved way of human thinking, to ideas about communalism and urbanization and industrialization and capitalism and religion and colonialism… and how did these systems play a role through human history to get to where we are now?”
“Well, even in my book, I barely touch on this in a certain sense because it’s a long, ugly, complicated, interesting history.”
“… if you think about the fact that we started out on the planet as a small tree dwelling mammal with a tail, apparently omnivorous, eating insects… we got from there to now where we are… So, what happened?”
“The reason I refer to what we do to animals as a civilizational error is at some point it became possible for some humans to step outside the common sense wisdom of killing and consuming other beings and to come up with a critical perspective on that.
“Now at that point that’s where we begin to have a choice about how to behave… 50,000 years ago… humans are doing the cave drawings… we were very much like other animals.”
“Now even then, by the time we developed language and complex symbols symbology and semiotics we’re already dissociating from the present… That’s the power of the human mind is we can abstract from context… And imagine all sorts of things.”
“And that is wonderful, but it also gets us into a lot of trouble.”
“So, about 2,700 years ago, Pythagoras became one of the first people to embrace vegetarianism. And then the vegetarian cults that developed after him seemed to take an ethical view of killing animals.”
“It was a little complex. But… there have been figures throughout history, Porphyry and Plutarch and others who condemned what we do to other animals. Leonardo da Vinci in the Renaissance.”
JW: “Al Ma’arri is one of my favourites”
“In Jainism and Buddhism… they’ve been within those traditions, certainly the Jains, it’s been an embrace of veganism for thousands of years.”
“So the naturalized status is what I would say of human violence against animals. The idea that it’s natural to do these things, beginning with the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago when we began to keep animals prisoners, to manipulate their sexuality, to keep them for labour and milk and meat and so forth.”
“That’s the beginning of this relation of domination because then you have these ideologies that develop, of natural dominion and that becomes the basis of human slavery.”
“… most archaeologists, anthropologists think that human slavery was based on what we call animal domestication, which is really just animal enslavement.”
“And the same ideas, ideologies that were used to justify what we did to non-human animals that we were exploiting are then applied to exploiting human beings as slaves.”
JW: “The parallels, as I understand it, are pretty shocking in terms of technology, processes, even the language… ‘chattel’ and ‘cattle’…”
“Marjorie Spiegel and ‘The Dreaded Comparison’ and Charles Patterson and ‘Eternal Treblinka’ go into some of this history…”
“I understand that some people, rightly so, they’re concerned that, we not demean the experiences of the enslaved, particularly in the African slave trade.”
“Because Africans, black Americans have been figured as animal-like and bestial for centuries and that is how they were ended up being dominated and killed.”
“But as you say, the parallels are just there. The connections are there. They’re ideological and technical and it’s not just racial slavery… which begins in the early modern period with Europeans… slavery goes back thousands of years as an institution.”
“Aristotle refers in his book ‘The Politics’… to the enslaved as animals… there’s a kind of shared status between domesticated animals and slaves…”
JW: “One of the Bible commandments talks about not coveting thy neighbours slaves, wives, possessions and donkeys… here are a bunch of things that you can own… the pattern and the echo is there pretty directly.”
“The Hammurabi code which is the oldest legal code in existence… 6-7,000 years old, it describes how you’re supposed to treat domesticated animals as well as slaves, and what the penalty is if you kill someone’s ox or their slave… So, again, similar statuses to some extent.”
“If you’re talking about the modern meat industry, you have to look at the history of European colonisation and settlement and genocide in the Americas and the rise of the cattle industry.”
“The conquistadors brought cows to the Americas to use as a mobile food supply during the wars against the native peoples.”
“And that eventually gets consolidated into the modern cattle industry in the US.”
JW: “How much of the need for more land was driven by animal agriculture in the first place?… that’s one of the fascinating facts that is deeply misunderstood or just not recognized by most people today… the sheer amount of habitable land that is used for animal agriculture directly or through feed crops… that must have been one of the main reasons why there was such a colonial land hunger in the first place.”
JW: “You don’t need much space for humans to live or to just grow plants for human consumption. But as soon as you’re farming animals, you need continent-sized chunks of land… If you don’t have them, then maybe that’s one of the reasons you go get them.”
“… Every year I teach Plato’s Republic, which is a conversation among friends depicting a kind of utopia… a perfect society… Socrates is talking to his friends and he says… it’s going to be a vegetarian or vegan utopia… but then someone says… ‘what about having like meat… we need our meat!’… Socrates says ‘if you’re going to have cattle, then you’re going to have to have a huge amount of land. And that means you’re going to be at war with your neighbours.”
“So the origin of war, according to Plato, through Socrates, is in fact meat consumption… precisely for this reason, the vast amount of land.”
JW: “Plato was more up to speed with feed conversion ratios and land usage than the average environmentalist.”
“And Jordan Peterson for sure.”
“… When these issues come up in my classroom I’m just astounded that… everyone says this… ‘if everyone became vegan or vegetarian we wouldn’t have land to grow crops on,’ when as you know it’s the exact opposite.”
“Raising animals in order to kill them and then eat them is wildly inefficient.”
“… we could terraform the earth and geoengineer the earth in a positive direction and end global warming if we simply reforested pasture lands.”
“My friend [Troy Vettese (Sentientism eposide 191], the historian, has made this argument”
“… we have every incentive… other than habit and tradition… to stop these practices… this mass violence. And yet we’re just running over a cliff.”
“It seems as though, in fact, that the trajectory or the force is going the other way… people are eating more meat than ever. Veganism is more attacked than ever.”
“I heard this from my own nephew… he saw on YouTube somewhere that you can’t live on a vegan diet. Just like as a scientific fact.”
JW: “It’s amazing we’re still alive to be honest. John.”
51:28 Fixing the Error
JW: “On the one hand the facts seem pretty clear… there’s at least some latent values that humans care about that we can tap into… some degree of compassion for nonhuman animals and some concern for the environmental impact and inefficiency… there are so many arguments and so many reasons… when you see the facts clearly it’s overwhelming… and the practical technical solution is pretty easy, at least for agriculture because we already have way more plant agriculture than we need to feed even 13 billion humans… so on that one side… this should be easy and obvious and a no-brainer… humanity can just switch.”
JW: “On the other hand is everything you’ve written about and laid out. You have these enormously powerful entrenched industrial interests and their lobbyists and their friends and everyone doing the direct disinformation. You have Pollen and others spinning this story that ‘yes there are problems but you know here’s this better path’ which largely is imagined and is just an excuse for carrying on with the industrial large-scale stuff that grows anyway. It’s just a feint, it’s not actually put forward as a real solution. It’s just another aspect of the branding.”
JW: “And then you have this bad faith challenge in general where you have bad faith actors, but you have bad faith humanity as a whole wanting to be deceived and going along with it.”
JW: “So we have this weird balance where technically and practically it seems pretty obvious what we should do and how we should do it but psychologically and socially and politically it’s an extremely hard problem… in a way your book is a diagnosis of the problem… more than a prescription for the way forward. But how have you come to think about the way forward?”
JW: “It’s quite obvious how we can respond to the bad faith stuff… it’s enormously powerful. So it’s very hard.”
JW: “But you’re also quite critical of some of the responses that I think are probably good faith… There are people who are saying, ‘look, because of these social and political challenges, we need to pull all of the levers we can. We need to look at incremental welfare improvements and incremental regulatory shifts and alternative products that we can encourage people to switch to even if they haven’t had some ethical transformation.’”
“I’ve spent my life struggling against and trying to raise awareness about various wrongs in the world, war and militarization among them… I mean look at the state of the world and the genocide in the Middle East.”
“There are problems that are deeply rooted in human civilisation that have defied easy remedy forever.”
“This was the most obdurate, most deeply rooted, of all the issues. So, it’s daunting.”
“… we need to do a better job shining a light on what Marxists call the totality… the whole structure…”
“The way capitalism works is it fragments consciousness and chops it up and silos us. So, people only see the little points. It’s like an impressionist painting… If you look up close… whatever you’re looking at… the little dots… it’s only when you take a step back that you can see the landscape or the tableau.”
JW: “That and the disconnection is part of its power… because that’s how unseen millions of people can collaborate to make this pen that I can buy from a shop… but at the same time you only see a tiny piece.”
“And so feminists and critical race theorists have talked about intersectionality and the way these different forms of power and ideology intersect… that’s important as long as that’s put in the context of shining light on the structure and how it works.”
“Antonio Gramsci… what he points out is that what a movement needs to do is see itself as educative… you start out where people are at… in terms of what they know and don’t know, you want to make them into a community of knowers. You want to give them the tools to understand what’s happening.”
“In my country, the Democratic Party, for example, they don’t try to educate people. They try to manipulate people into going along with their program, whatever it is.”
“They don’t change the way that they view the world… they don’t see that as part of their job.”
“Someone like Bernie Sanders who’s an independent socialist in Vermont who allies with the Democratic Party, he takes a different approach. He tries to give people the facts of the corporate welfare state and about inequality.”
“Once you equip people with knowledge, it’s very hard to take that away from them.”
“But the challenge of our environment is that people know facts that aren’t facts anymore… they watch some YouTube influencer and then they think they know what’s going on.”
“So, our goal, our task has to be to educate people about the totality of these relations.”
“It has to be to form and nurture alliances with all of these other movements that are trying to defend democracy at a time when it’s being dismantled, to the extent we ever had democracy.”
“… the animal issue has to be seen as tied to this larger structural civilizational reform because humans are miserable on the earth.”
“… most people live on $2 a day or less [Latest World Bank data show ~10% of people live on under $3 per day]. They live in poverty.”
“Their labour’s exploited mercilessly… Women… children are subjected to to sexual violence in every community in the world… we all know all of these massive problems.”
“We need a joint social movement that’s capable of imagining a different planet and animals have to be part of that imagining.”
JW: “Their oppression and their exploitation is caused by some of the same underlying root causes that are causing all of the problems for intra-human relations.”
JW: too. “… part of the reason I work on worldviews is because I look at every human caused problem and you keep asking ‘why is that happening? Why is that happening?’… to me, it either comes down to a failure of facts or values at the root… People either aren’t caring about the right beings, they’re excluding them or discriminating against them in some way, or they’re maybe good faith, ethical people who are just wrong about reality in some way that leads them astray.”
JW: “So, education or engaging with people, respecting them, helping them to form their own worldviews… hopefully well-grounded in epistemology and ethics… to me feels like a really deeply foundational, robust sort of intervention that would then ripple through all of the rest of society and fix all the world’s problems…”
JW: “But even as I’m saying that, that also sounds breathtakingly naive because we know how hard it is to achieve any sort of genuine moral transformation… You and I, that’s really what we want to see. We want to see humanity individually and collectively, radically shift our direction and our perspective and our worldview to take on this, for once, a positive role in the universe with respect to wider sentientity or sentientkind…”
JW: “Moral transformation is hard and that’s partly why people will say to me and probably say to you ‘look but this is a really tough problem… by insisting on this foundational ethical transformation… and maybe an epistemic transformation… aren’t we making it even harder for ourselves?’”
JW: “That’s why they go back to… all these other levers… we need the welfare improvements… we need the cultivated meat we need the increments here and increments there…”
JW: “Some of those activities might be bad faith because they end up being co-opted by the industry and they become a dead end. But I think a lot of them are actually motivated by people who ultimately have the same end goal as you and me…”
JW: “They want to end these systems… abolition… but they think there are incremental or technological or transition things we can do to enable that… that can dodge the risk of ethical bypassing, but maybe free humanity up, you know, to bring our latent compassionate ethics to the fore.”
JW: “Are we making things too hard, even harder for ourselves than they already are by insisting on this deep transformation?”
“Since Peter Singer [see Sentientism episodes 156 and 218] wrote Animal Liberation 50 years ago, that set the tenor for the movement… The movement has been largely welfarist since then… with an emphasis on reducing suffering.”
“If you’re saying that the goal is to reduce suffering on factory farms, first of all, that has failed, completely failed… and secondly, it misnames the problem.”
“So, I’m personally not against single issue campaigns or even welfare reforms as long as it doesn’t mystify the nature of the problem.”
“The problem is the violence. It’s the exploitation – that needs to be named. The suffering is a consequence of the exploitation and the violence. It’s a consequence of capitalist relations. It’s a consequence of human supremacism.”
JW: “… that’s a really important caveat… Because when I look at things like introducing in ovo sexing in egg production, which… has the potential to end the maceration of male chicks… that’s made real progress and I think that will continue through the industry. I struggle to say that isn’t a good thing… Because just the sheer countless billions of beings that won’t go through that… it could have been so much worse.”
JW: “But I think your caveat is important… fine, if we make these changes, we have to do it in a way that doesn’t obscure the core problem… it doesn’t obfuscate the core problem we’re trying to address…”
“Exactly… if that kind of reform is referred to as ‘humane’ or… it gets everyone off the hook and they think, ‘Well, yeah, I’ll just get my cage-free eggs…’ and my pasture blah blah blah…”
“And the thing is… people don’t even have to eat the cage-free products… they just think, in the back of their minds, that that’s what they would like to do if it wasn’t so expensive or if it was convenient… So, it’s enough… It just has to exist.”
“What it does is it’s getting back to bad faith. It gets people off the hook. It allows them an out. And what I tried to do in my book is to take away that out.”
“I work as a magician sometimes… at every event all you can get is chicken and steak and ham sandwiches and it doesn’t even occur to people.”
“We’ve made so little progress on these issues that it does not even occur to people who organise these events. Does not even occur to them that there’s any ethical or political or any problem with what they’re doing… none at all.”
“… maybe they’ll think, ‘oh, we should have some option for the weirdos like the diabetics and the low sodium people and the vegans…’ that’s as far as it goes.”
JW: “As far as it gets is a momentary compassion or consideration for the dietary preference of a weird identity group.”
“I don’t mean to be so hard on us and our movement because people are courageous and they’ve worked for years… as you say, a lot of good faith people.”
“… but I think it’s important that we take a step back and understand… this approach that we’ve been taking is absolutely not working. Talking about factory farming is just the wrong approach.”
“That is not the problem… because there’s been critique of raising and killing and eating animals for thousands of years. It didn’t begin with the factory farm.”
“If you look at the Brethren of Purity in the 10th century in Bosra, Iraq… [The Case of the Animals versus Man] this is a story about all the animals of the earth sending a representative to the king of the genies, the djinn, to complain that humanity is enslaving and brutalizing them.”
“It’s amazing… It’s so detailed about all the cruelty, all the violence, all the suffering that was over a thousand years ago. So, it’s not factory farming.”
“You’re going to have factory farming forever. Why? Because under capitalist relations, with billions of people, that’s the only way to efficiently get mass-produced food, is in industrialized conditions.”
“So… it’s the wrong thing to be talking about. It’s not the problem. The problem is the underlying relation of domination and contempt for the lives of other beings. That’s the problem.”
“So when people talk only about the factory farming, they’re undermining the movement.”
JW: “The positive story about focusing on factory farming, which I’ve heard from many people including many of my guests, is… loads of people say they’re against factory farming so let’s start there…”
JW: “But the difficulty is… as soon as you focus on factory farming as the problem, it implies the non-factory farming is okay… it’s ‘humane’, it’s ‘sustainable’… and immediately you’re back into the bad faith space… and that’s the difficulty. If you don’t really name and identify the core problem, you’re not going to fix it.”
JW: “I will often say to people, well, it’s wonderful that you’re against factory farming and let’s explore how successful you are at cutting that out of your consumption because ‘good luck’… Particularly when those things are ingredients in other things… It’s much easier if you want to avoid factory farming just to go vegan anyway because cutting out factory farming products is almost impossible unless you’re in a very bizarre situation.”
JW: “But, putting that to one side, when you ask people, what don’t you like about factory farming?… What’s the worst parts of the process from the animals’ point of view? The very worst parts of the factory farming process… are standard practices in non-factory farming… the sexual abuse, the mechanical masturbation, the artificial insemination, the family separation, the mutilation without anaesthetic… the eventual slaughter. These are not factory farming processes. These are just standard animal agricultural processes.”
JW: “One of my guests was Molly Elwood, she runs this fake dog meat farm [Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat]. But she plays on this really clearly… she takes her social media verbatim content from ‘humane’, ‘ethical’, ‘family farmed’, ‘happy cow’ stuff and just switches the species and plays it straight.”
JW: “The conversations she ends up in are absolutely amazing… it really exposes that core.”
JW: “And I think that’s what’s so refreshing and powerful about your work is you’re going back to the core problem and doing what we should all do which is genuinely consider the other… that has to be the core of ethics. You talk about the idea of the ‘thou’ and just embedding that into the way we try aspire to lead our lives.”
“If we were in the 1940s and the Holocaust was unfolding, we wouldn’t say ‘well we need to decrease the suffering of the Jews… the problem is that Jews are being killed with these industrialized techniques… they need to be killed in batches.’”
“It’s Orwellian the way that our own movement has come to naturalise and reinforce the dominant narrative that animals’ lives just don’t matter… What matters is ‘their suffering.’”
“How can you care about my suffering if you don’t care about me? If you don’t care about what happens to me, if you don’t care about my well-being… and being killed violently is the worst thing that anyone can do to me.”
“… Part of the problem is too much influence of utilitarianism in our movement because it’s emphasized suffering rather than violence and death-dealing, which is the core of the thing.”
01:09:44 Closing Messages
“My message is simply that we have to show a kind of courage and resilience in the face of what’s happening… we just can’t give up. We have to keep this fight going. And even if it seems like the odds are against us, which I think right now, no question, they are, you know, we do the work because it matters and it’s the right thing to do.”
“I do think we need also a more strategic orientation. And I think that as a movement, we need to have kind of critical reflections and conversations on what works and what doesn’t. And I don’t mean in an effective altruism way. I mean in terms of chipping away at the fundamental narrative that other animals simply don’t matter.”
“And how do we change the way we talk about these issues where we don’t fall into that trap of saying, ‘Oh, well, only 30 billion chickens will be killed each year instead of the 50 or 40’ because of the male chicks that are brought into the world only to be killed instantly.”
“That’s not the world we want, actually. The world [we want] is zero… we can’t lose sight of that.”
JW: “And maybe that’s part of the resolution… being open-minded about tactics and paths and things we can do, but being relentlessly clear about the core problem and the end goal we’re trying to move towards.”
JW: “And one quick thing I’ll say in favour of effective altruism, they had a conference recently in London with 1,700 people there and the entire catering was 100% plant-based. there was not an animal product in sight.”
“We’ll talk about effective altruism sometime.”
JW: “I was encouraged… there aren’t many conferences that aren’t about veganism that have 100% plant-based catering. So, I give them some credit.”
“One cheer… I’ll give them a cheer.”
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop. Sentientism is proud to now be part of the iRoar podcast network – go check out some of the other wonderful podcasts there.