Are Veg*ans Oppressed?

Nosnowhere mentions the phenomenon of veg*ans who see themselves as being oppressed on the basis of their diet. This is strange, she says, because veg*anism is really about the oppression of animals. In the comments, Elaine Vigneault offers a list of the hardships that veg*ans face.

I've long agreed with nosnowhere's side -- I think it doesn't make sense to think of ethical veg*ans as an oppressed class. To explain why, I look to the contrasting aims of tolerance versus universalization, and an analogy with feminism. To be oppressed is basically to be treated as if you or your activities are less valuable, and to suffer added costs and harms, on the basis of some characteristic. By this standard, women constitute an oppressed group in our society -- in a variety of ways, women and feminine activities are treated as less valuable than men and masculine activities, and women face higher hurdles in their lives. When someone recognizes oppression, their desire is for what I'll call "tolerance" (admittedly a word troublesome history). Tolerance means that people oppressed on the basis of a certain characteristic want to be able to live their lives free of the oppression that disadvantages them relative to people without that characteristic.

When enough people recognize a form of oppression, they can form a movement with its own name -- in the case of oppression of women, "feminism"*. The goal of a feminist with respect to women is to end the oppression and achieve the above-mentioned tolerance. But the goal of feminism with respect to feminists is not tolerance but universalization. Feminists don't want society to tolerate feminism, allowing feminists to do their feminist thing on an equal basis with anti-feminists. They want to win, converting everyone to their views about the existence and badness of oppression of women -- aiming at tolerance of feminism undercuts its ability to achieve tolerance of women.

Feminists do face hardships for being feminists, over and above the hardships they may experience as members of the movement's intended beneficiary class (i.e. women) -- for example, being stereotyped as unattractive and humorless, and having their views discounted as coming from an irrational fringe. But these hardships take on a different meaning because of the different status and desired end goal of feminism versus womanhood. Since feminism is a movement aimed at changing the prevailing social system, it is unsurprising that the system would -- passively or actively -- throw up obstacles. So while it's entirely reasonable to work to reduce those obstacles so as to enable feminism to achieve its goals more easily, there is a real difference between the first-order oppression perpetrated by a social system and its derivative resistance to people who challenge the first-order oppression.

The analogy here, I'm sure you've figured out, is that animals are like women in being first-order oppressed, and veg*anism is like feminism in being a universalizing movement encountering resistance in its quest for tolerance of the first-order oppressed group. To call veg*ans oppressed, then, is to conflate two different sorts of relationship to an oppressive social system. (Though the situation is muddied by the fact that even many ethical veg*ans adopt a posture of seeking only tolerance for veg*anism as a way of avoiding unproductive conflict with omnivores.)

The hitch, though, is that this analysis applies only to "ethical veg*ans" -- people who take up veg*anism as a way of advocating for the interests of animals. But there are other reasons to be a veg*an -- because it's cool, as a personal spiritual practice, because you think it's healthier, because you hate the taste of or are allergic to animal products, etc. Such "non-ethical" veg*ans adopt the same diet as ethical veg*ans, but because their aims are not built on achieving tolerance for animals, they can consistently advocate for tolerance, rather than universalization, of veg*ans. And because of that, I think non-ethical veg*ans -- who face the same hardships qua veg*an as ethical veg*ans -- can lay a claim to being victims of a first-order oppression (in somewhat the same way that a lack of accommodation for kosher diets is an aspect of first-order anti-Semitism**).

*For convenience, I'm using "feminism" in the very broad sense that covers anyone opposed to women's oppression, though I recognize that some people dislike that term because they see it as referring to a specific and problematic diagnosis and program for action.

**I found this post interesting because an Orthodox Jewish friend once told me -- and I don't know how widely this theory is held -- that the whole point of the kosher laws is that non-Jewish society will be unlikely to tolerate people who practice them, thus encouraging Jews to maintain a close-knit autonomous community rather than blending in with their neighbors. And while I'm tangenting, I also wonder whether, given that AFAIK all vegan food is kosher, an attempt to tolerate both Jews and vegans with the same meal would actually fail to fully tolerate Jews because it would impose added dietary restrictions (e.g. "if you don't want to be forced to eat a cheeseburger, you have to give up hamburgers too").

Language Footprints and Individualism

Navel-gazing aside: I do most of my blog reading these days at work, but I've made a commitment to never post to this blog from work. So I have a tendency to have post ideas floating around for a while before I get around to actually posting them (if I even do at all -- in a large part, blogging is for me a way of getting ideas to settle down in my head by fixing them to a page, but if I wait long enough they settle on their own and writing them out becomes just a chore), by which time the conversation I'm responding to has often moved on.

Lauredhel mentions the idea of a "language footprint." Patterned after the common idea of an ecological footprint, your language footprint is the extent to which your activities negatively impact the survival of other languages.

Raising awareness of the problem of language extinction, in which a few global languages drive out other languages spoken by smaller and less powerful groups*. But I think the "footprint" metaphor tends to frame the problem in too individualistic a way. The description on the language footprint site lends itself easily to being thought of as a matter of individual choices of language, a la a rude tourist asking the waitstaff for "water" rather than "agua" or "yaku." And indeed, the comment section of the above-linked Hoyden About Town thread is full of people proudly professing that they study a phrasebook before travelling internationally.

The issue here is not that learning the local language before traveling is unimportant**. It's that it addresses only a small aspect of the problem of language extinction. Language extinction is fundamentally a structural problem. English is not encroaching on other languages because Anglophones are ruder than speakers of Pitjantjatjara or Saami. English is encroaching on other languages because our world is becoming more and more globalized and the global political-economic system is dominated by English-speaking countries.

Ecological footprint calculations can break down this sort of structural responsibility and apportion a share of the blame to individuals to a limited degree, because it's possible to distinguish differential environmental impacts of different lifestyle and consumer habits -- driving a Prius vs an SUV, being a vegan vs a meat-and-potatoes person, etc. (I forget where I found this first, but it's interesting to note in connection with the structural factors in environmental impacts that even Buddhist monks in the USA have twice the world average ecological footprint.) But with respect to language dominance, the negative structural effects on smaller languages are a result of the system as a whole (i.e. the level of global integration and dominance of Anglophone countries), making it next to impossible to talk about more or less "language-friendly" practices beyond the small potatoes of learning the languages of your tourist destinations. Certainly one could engage in activism aimed at changing these structures (either at a global level or in more locally-focused projects), but factoring that in as an element of your individual language footprint seems to warp the metaphor beyond utility.

*This can be a complexly multi-scalar process. If I recall my freshman-year class on Peru correctly, English is encroaching on Spanish at the global level, while within Latin America Spanish is encroaching on indigenous languages such as Quechua, and at the same time Quechua is actually encroaching on less-popular indigenous Andean languages as the region's Indians consolidate a new form of native identity in the face of globalization.

**Although it is interesting to me the different motivations involved. I've only traveled once to a non-English-speaking area, and while I did study my German phrasebook en route to Bonn, it was less out of a desire to be conscientious about my impact on German speakers or a desire to get a real experience of local culture, than it was because I was afraid I might get hurt and not be able to tell people "Rufen Sie die Krankenvagen!"

Disability And Moochers

Meep writes something that I think is very revealing about how our society handles disability:

Apparently AT&T assumes that the only people who would want an iPhone would be hearing people. Now AT&T has announced that they're going to offer a data only plan, but if you check the Text Accessibility Plan page, the PDF form explicitly states that you have to have a certifying agent in order to even get the plan. Why should anyone have to prove they are disabled? I suppose this is their way of separating hearing from deaf so that only "deaf" people can have this option.

We tend to think of accommodating disabilities as making special concessions or exceptions to the rules for disabled people. We think that disabilities constitue an extra burden on some people, so we'll give those people a sort of bonus subsidy to make up for it. Thinking that way sensitizes us to worry about moochers -- people who feign or exaggerate disability in order to get the subsidy without suffering the burden that it's supposed to offset. (Elizabeth Anderson wrote a good article some years back taking to task all the liberal political theorists from Rawls onward for using this sort of "equality defended from moochers" framework.) I would suspect it also *generates* wanna-be moochers, by effectively telling people "hey, there's a special bonus here you could be getting."

The alternative to this is to think not about subsidizing disabled people so that they can be on a level playing field with the normals, but rather about rearranging the options so that suitable options are available for everyone, given the diversity of human brains and bodies. There may be limits at which we'd have to fall back on subsidies-plus-mooching-safeguards, but we're far from reaching them. AT&T's iPhone plans, as described by Meep, could be a good example of the second strategy -- offering various appropriately-priced combinations of voice and data, so that people can pick the one that suits their way of being in the world. In this context, a person who can hear but buys the data-only plan would not be getting some sort of illegitimate bonus. But AT&T is so deeply buried in the subsidies perspective that it assumes that it has some sort of nonsensical need to protect the data-only option from hearing moochers.

This is also a reason to be leery of the argument Harry Brighouse mentions at the end of a long post on whether parents should be allowed to deliberately "design" their children, picking and choosing their genetic endowments. He suggests one possible rule would be that design is OK for correcting defects, but not for giving children extra excellences (e.g. you could take a kid who was going to end up 3'8" and make them 5'4", but you couldn't make them, or their naturally 5'4" sibling, 6'3"). This type of scheme would force the government to officially promulgate a blueprint for what constitutes a "normal" body and mind, and labeling variations from that blueprint (at least in one direction) as defects which is is permissible -- or even potentially mandatory -- to correct. If we had a social system that fully accommodated the breadth of human variability, we wouldn't need to either fix so many genetic "defects" (shortness would no longer be a "defect" if we ended height discrimination), nor to worry that people were going to exploit that fixing process in order to get an unfair advantage.

Resilience

Tim Haab notes that it's becoming increasingly popular to talk about "resilience" as a goal in environmental policy. Resilience refers to the ability of a system to withstand crises. He finds resilience to be a somewhat preposterous proposition, because a resilient system is meant to be able to withstand even unforseeable crises. How, he asks, can we be expected to plan for things we by definition don't know about?

The trick to resilience, and what makes it an important concept, is that we don't need to know the specifics of a crisis in order to know some general things about what will help us deal with it. By looking at what things have been helpful for withstanding past crises (including ones that were major surprises at the time), we can deduce generalized crisis-handling capacities.

For example, one such generalized crisis-handling capacity is resource buffers. A crisis is likely to demand additional resource expenditures to handle, or even to directly attack and reduce the resource base itself -- whereas the reverse is highly unlikely. So if a system limits its resource use to something less than what would be optimal in a crisis-free world, it will, ceteris paribus, be able to weather the crisis better than if it had been straining its resource base to the max.

Democratic information processing is another generalized crisis-handling capacity. It would be easier to handle any crisis -- whatever its nature -- if the system gets an early warning and full information, which we know from past experience is more likely to happen when hierarchies don't restrict the flow and sharing of information.

Diversity -- genetic, cultural, psychological, etc. -- is another useful generalized crisis-handling capacity. An un-diversified system may be optimized for the pre-crisis conditions, but a crisis necessarily changes those conditions. If the system is diverse, there is a greater likelihood that the answer to the crisis is somewhere to be found within the system already

Resilience is always a matter of degree -- no system is perfectly resilient to every possible crisis (though Haab seems to think such a thing is being demanded), and increases in resilience often come with costs (e.g. in the form of foregone profits from leaving a resource buffer). That leaves us with an eminently political question of how much of various types of resilience we want to build into our social system.

PSA

I've gotten several hits recently from people searching for "What to do if your wife uses VAWA." So as a public service announcement, I'd like to recommend that your first course of action should be to stop being violent towards her.

A Real Tro(u/o)per

Here's something non-political for a change. A little while ago loree_borealis linked to a copyediting quiz. I got a perfect score -- luckily, since I earn a living as a copyeditor. But one item stuck out as worthy of further comment. The quiz asked you to find the error in the following sentence:

My hard-working nature and get-it-done attitude inspired a former boss to remark several times that I was a real trooper.

The correct answer was that it should be "a real trouper." But I think "trooper" is an "error" only in the sense of "if the person reading your resume is anal about this kind of stuff, they'll throw you on the reject pile for it." But it's quite likely that "trouper" is an error in the sense of "accurately representing the speaker's meaning."

The expression originated as an analogy to a member of an acting troupe, with their "the show must go on" ethos. But the alternate spelling is, I think, being eggcorned into acceptability. When most people who aren't usage mavens hear the expression, they interpret it as a metaphor for a military trooper. And that interpretation makes sense, since members of the military are also known for their perseverence, as they, well, "soldier on" in the face of adversity. And when such a person -- and I include myself in this group -- turns around and uses the expression at a future date, the military analogy rather than the theater one is what's in their mind. So in that sense, when I (and I assume most other people) utter that set of sounds, what I'm really saying is that someone is a "real trooper," not that they're a "real trouper." My expression just happens to sound the same as one that's spelled differently.

USA! USA! USA! ... no, that's not right

Lauredhel has a roundup of reports on the negative mental health implications of Australia's immigrant detention policies. After a few months, detainess manifest progressively more severe symptoms of depression and self-harm. It's pretty sobering stuff.

Even more sobering is the fact that from what I can tell, Australia's detention conditions are objectively better than the US's. The reports Lauredhel links to call for the demolition of the "jail-like" Stage I building at Villawood -- but in the US, all of our detainees are kept in actual working jails in the same conditions as the convicted murderers and drug dealers (except for the ones in Sheriff Joe's tent city in the Arizona desert). One report comments positively on the improvements in internet access for detainees -- but in the US, detainees are lucky if the jail will let them recieve letters in envelopes. And there are concerns about policies on letting detainees have "excursions," for example when a loved one is hospitalized -- but in the US, detainees are lucky if they get to leave their dozen-cell "pod."

Voices from Detention II

I mentioned Part I of this story when it came out. Here's Part II.