There’s an article written by Angel Flinn and Dan Cudahy that’s called Opposition Confirms My Purpose and it’s published here at GentleWorld.org. On Facebook, I said of the article that it is “Self-serving, self-righteous, factually incorrect, willfully ignorant, grossly oversimplified, anemic and pathetic” and I thought I ought to explain why I said each of those things. Here goes.

Self-serving: In effect they say “We vegans who write blogs while we live in relative comfort and luxury further from harm and danger than any human beings who have ever lived are just the same as those people who actually risked life and liberty to combat human slavery”. And they say this while they disparage real activists who are alive today actually risking life and liberty fighting injustice. Self-serving doesn’t really describe this outrageous co-opting of a historical tradition in blatant attempt to wrap oneself in the cloak of righteousness while denying the lived struggles of real revolutionaries.

Self-Righteous: They didn’t say it, but they may just as well have said “We are the noble few who can tell all you poor and corrupt others exactly what you are morally required to do”. They present themselves as the holders of the Truth, as if there is a Truth that one can hold. They deem it their task to educate the rest of the rabble (over decades if necessary!!) until the unenlightened see their light. And this they do while all the while they wield their vacuous invocations of non-violence like a club.

Factually incorrect: When speaking about social change, they write that a “change in our society will only be brought about by a radical moral paradigm shift similar to those which resulted in the abolition of human chattel slavery.” However, the “moral paradigm” did not shift such that, only after that supposed shift, was slavery then abolished. Indeed, to even say that the “moral paradigm” did shift is an affront to ever lived experience of hatred, death and destruction that followed from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to Emmett Till in 1955 through to Trayvon Martin in 2012. Slavery – as an institution legally sanctioned – ended. That is a fact. But the “moral paradigm” didn’t shift first, if it ever shifted at all. How blinded by ideology does a person have to be to get these glaring facts wrong? (By the way, what is, in the context of the world at large, a moral paradigm supposed to be anyway? Outside the rarefied air of the ivory tower, is there any such thing as theoretical framework of morality to which all people ascribe their views? Is there even one framework which predominates? Do those words even mean anything at all? No, like almost every other word written in this article, of course they do not.)

Grossly oversimplified: The gross simplification follows from the authors’ factual errors. As they tell it, it is as if the abolition of slavery (assuming that it’s even meaningful to talk about such a thing) happened as the result of only the efforts of white abolitionists who saved the ‘poor black man’. Is there any mention at all in this useless piece of 6th grade level bullshit writing that acknowledges the lived struggles and real resistance of the enslaved to their enslavement? No, there isn’t. Instead, this article leaves one with the impression that it is as though, in the struggle for freedom from slavery, the enslaved themselves did not exist. The writers did worse than grossly oversimplify the complex lived experiences of millions of people just to serve their ideology, they committed the lie of omission. Little wonder then, that these “abolitionists” can so easily ignore the lived experiences of those other animals who are doomed to live and die within the systems of exploitation. Like the invisible and ignored human slaves absent from this article, the other animals don’t matter. All that matters to these pseudo-abolitionists is their persistence through the struggle, all that matters to these noble warriors is themselves. I’ll use again the word Pathetic in a moment, but it is certainly appropriate now.

Willfully ignorant: I would excuse a 6th grader for not acknowledging the pivotal twin role that the industrial revolution and the expansion of capitalism played in the changes in the conditions of slavery in the Atlantic region of the 1800′s, but there is no excuse for these modern day pretend “abolitionists” to not know their history. Willfully ignorant is perhaps not a strong enough term, perhaps duplicitous would be more apt. And to write a sentence such as this “Indeed, William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator, a weekly anti-slavery newspaper, in 1831, and it wasn’t until after 34 years and the bloodiest war on United States soil that slavery was finally abolished in 1865″ is as if to say that the cause for the abolition of slavery had not been going on in America, for 200 years, since before it was even America. To ignore the role that the fatally flawed debate over slavery played in the very founding of the Union is beyond laughable. It’s negligence of the worst kind. But the actual historical timeline and the facts contained in it don’t fit their narrative. After all, one of their favorite (non)arguments against animal welfare reforms is that those reforms have been going on for 200 years with nothing to show for it. How inconvenient for these revisionists then that the abolitionist movement went on in America for 200 years with nothing to show for it either. How embarrassing for these internet “abolitionist” that the facts don’t agree with them; how much easier for them to oversimplify them instead.

Anemic: Because these “abolitionists” are blind to the facts of history, they propose a solution to today’s problem that is anemic and weak. To misunderstand the role that active resistance – which included not only actual resistance from slaves to slaveholders, but also the threat and use of violence from members of the free society – and then to extrapolate from that misunderstanding to a prescription for change in today’s world is like thinking that yesterday’s vegan cupcake was actually a burrito and then trying to make a soymilk smoothie today with yesterday’s misunderstood recipe. I expect no one will be satisfied with what they’re preparing so the “abolitionists” might as well just sit this one out. All sentient beings would be far better off.

Pathetic: The article is pathetic because the authors have been able to attract somewhat of a following and so their bankrupt ideology is actually being seen as worthwhile. It’s pathetic because in their minds, self-serving, self-righteous moralizing is an adequate substitute for actual activism that works towards changing the conditions in the world for the benefit of the conscious beings who live in it. Make no mistake, this so-called “abolitionist approach” is a useless and dead-ended waste of time.

The world doesn’t change after people wake up to some great moral reckoning, after which they start anew, with love in their hearts and peace on their minds. When the conditions of the world become such that change does come, then people change their ways of thinking. Think about it for a moment. Did the Green Revolution happen because suddenly everyone on the planet decided to love the Earth, or did the destruction of our lakes, rivers and skies become so intolerable that no one could afford any longer to pay it no attention? The answer is simple to see, or at least it is simple enough to see for anyone not blinded by allegiance to an ideology. People change their most deeply held beliefs when they have no choice but to change them.

Finally, to top off all of their already worthless efforts, the authors of the article resort to banality: “Over time, the irrepressible power of justice will prevail…” Really? It will? I suppose that we ought to tell that to the millions of children who die from preventable poverty and disease every year. I suppose we ought to tell that to the tens of millions of people who are right now living in conditions of slavery and the worst kinds of exploitation. Justice will prevail! What bullshit.

What are we supposed to believe, that if we believe, and if we believe hard enough, that justice will come? Please, save me the platitudes.

There is no “irrepressible power of justice” in the world. Where would it be if there was? There are only things and conscious beings in the world. Change happens, that’s the nature of reality, nothing is permanent, nothing is static. From the Big Bang up until the present moment, everything has been in a constant state of becoming. But that becoming is simply the matter of being – it is just “stuff” – it has no purpose, it has no end, there are no “irrepressible” powers, of love, of justice, of Truth, or of anything else that will prevail, as if the matter of becoming was on some irrevocable march of progress. The only values in the world are the values created by conscious minds and as Kierkegaard said “no generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any point other than at the beginning” – we must create our values. But here’s the rub: There is no way to get inside another’s conscious mind such that we can change their way of thinking. We can ask them to change, but no one will change except on their own. And now we may be able to understand the real problems that are facing the “animal movement” and perhaps find real solutions.

It is not a lack of knowledge: It is not the case that if only most people understood animal rights theory then most people would adopt an animal rights ethic and become vegan. Anyone who believes that it is the case is either mistaken or a hopeless dreamer. Remember, it is not the case that there was a “shift in the moral paradigm” that preceded the end of slavery (and slavery hasn’t ended anyway). Whatever the changes that have occurred with respect to the moral consideration of people who were previously held as slaves, those changes did not cause the end of slavery. In the same way, racism was not the cause of slavery, but slavery was the cause of racism. That is, it was because that some people wanted to exploit other people that other people became subject to racism. Racism justifies the exploitation of others, racism does not cause exploitation. And so it is with speciesism. Speciesism is the social construction of a world view that justifies the unjust exploitation of nonhuman species by humans. Speciesism doesn’t cause exploitation, is the manifestation of it, as the justification for it. We can no more eliminate the exploitation of other animals by eradicating speciesism than we could eliminate lightening by silencing thunder. Causes cannot be eliminated by eliminating their effects.

Since it isn’t the case that, after at least two hundred years of moralizing about human slavery, that human slavery was ended as a legal institution as a result of that moralizing, and since it is the case that it was, in large part, the twin events of the industrial revolution and the expansion of capitalism that brought down slavery, why should anyone hold onto the fantasy that there exists a moral argument that will bring about an end to the exploitation of other animals? No one should hold on to such a fantasy. Whatever the merits of the moral argument against human slavery, slavery ended in large part because the costs (social, political and especially economic costs) of maintaining the system of legalized and institutionalized slavery became too great in relation to the benefits derived from such a system. The history of slavery is irreducibly complex, but it isn’t the case that the moral argument alone would ever have brought about an end to slavery and the moral argument had absolutely nothing to do with the economic realities that were in place at the time. The causes of slavery were almost entirely economic, and the causes of the end of slavery were almost entirely economic as well.

Is there an answer?: The question we must ask and answer, therefore, if we ever hope to achieve a substantial reduction in the use and killing of other animals is: How do we change the conditions of the world such that it becomes too inconvenient or too costly (in economic as well as non-economic terms) for most humans to continue exploiting other animals? Perhaps Steve Best is right and we are already at the point where our current exploitation of everything and everyone in the world is beyond the point of sustainability and we just don’t know it yet. I don’t know, I don’t have that answer, and I don’t know what will change the conditions on the ground such that the exploitation of other animals by humans will come to an end. But this I do know: Those conditions won’t change as the result of any more self-serving, self-righteous, factually incorrect, willfully ignorant, grossly oversimplified, anemic and pathetic 6^th grade level bullshit like that contained in Flinn and Cudahy’s useless article. I do know that.