The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
by Larry L. Dill
(I was recently invited to direct a discussion about vegetarianism for residents of the Vanderbilt Apartments in Asheville where I am currently a resident. That discussion will take place in early December of this year. I will talk mainly about the practical aspects of preparing nutriitious vegetarian and vegan meals. But since vegetarianism is after all an "ism" I decided that in this issue of the New Hope Journal I would say a few words about the political and cultural issues surrounding what would otherwise be a simple discussion about cooking. Here now is a very brief introduction to the philosophical foundations of vegetarianism)
The word vegetarian is a culturally polarizing word because it implies the division of the human species into two mutually exclusive groups: those who eat meat and those who don’t. This polarization is tied directly to a larger historical debate between two competing views of human nature.
In the epilogue to his history of the last 400 years of vegetarianism, The Bloodless Revolution, Tristram Stuart makes the case that Henry David Thoreau’s experiment in simplicity and self sufficiency at Walden Pond in the early 19th century can be viewed as a confession of the struggle between the two competing views of human nature in the meditations of a single individual.
What Thoreau found by returning to nature was that both polar views of humanity’s place in nature had some truth in them. On the one hand he experienced savage hunting instincts that apparently manifested man’s rightful place at the top of the food chain. On the other, he recognized that civilization cultivated the moral feelings that tied humans into societies, and bound them to the wider community of all living things.
Stuart ties Thoreau’s philosophical struggle to the struggle played out in the French Revolution and its aftermath between the Hobbesian view of “man’s brutal instinct of self preservation in the war of all against all, and on the other side by Rousseau’s contention that humans also had a fundamental instinct of sympathy from which all social virtues sprang.”
Out of this unresolved dichotomy between what came to be known as the left and the right wings of the political spectrum we find multi-layers of ideological dialectic: left/right, socialist/capitalist/, liberal/conservative, believer/non-believer, east/west, male/female, black/white, gay/straight, and carnivore/vegetarian.
It is no wonder then that something as culturally significant and physically personal as what a human being should or should not eat has become such an emotionally charged issue in modern western societies. The idea that arguably the two most famous vegetarians of the twentieth century were the non-violent pacifist, Mahatma Gandhi, and murderous architect of the holocaust Adolph Hitler seems almost beyond comprehension.
Ironically, according to Tristram Stuart, Gandhi ,who had been born and raised as a strict vegetarian in an upper caste Hindu family, began secretly eating meat while still living at home as a form of rebellion against what he considered a British colonial plot to keep Indians physically weak and defenseless in the face of British Imperialism. Only after he went to London to study Law and became associated with British vegetarian societies and read Thoreau, did he realize that vegetarianism was more deeply aligned with his own core values of ahimsa (reverence for all living things) than any politically motivated act of defiance that eating meat could ever effect.
Adolf Hitler came to vegetarianism from a completely different direction but one that, not unlike Gandhi and Thoreau, followed a serpentine path back into the mists of dueling myths and modern ideologies. Hitler, according to Stuart’s research, evidently came to believe that meat eating ran contrary to the ancient pagan animism of the earliest Germanic tribes who saw themselves as members of an animal community rather than the human masters of all the lower animals as appeared to be the belief of the Judeo-Christian tradition (emphasis on Judeo). Whereas Gandhi had once believed that meat eating might be a way of throwing off at once the provincial superstitions of his Hindu heritage and the colonial enslavement of his British oppressors, Hitler came to see meat eating versus vegetarianism as exactly the opposite: Meat eating itself was a form of cultural oppression, Hitler thought, perpetrated upon the innocent, nature loving Nordic peoples by a demonic and spiritually impoverished aberration of natural human instincts that in time the holocaust would be designed to neutralize by what ever means necessary.
Adolf Hitler’s vegetarianism is a cautionary tale about how any belief system no matter how spiritually well intentioned or scientifically grounded can be turned into demagoguery and unspeakable terror. It is also a reminder that had Germany won the Second World War, ordinary people, throughout the world might be risking their lives if they were caught eating meat.
Though some writers today who happen to be carnivores are demonizing vegetarians as food Nazis the fact remains that most vegetarians have come to their lifestyles in the way that Thoreau and Gandhi did, by carefully evaluating the paradoxical complexities of the human condition--cultural traditions, human health, animal rights, environmental ethics and political economy.
For more information on vegetarianism go to Varieties of Vegan Experience Index
For a longer essay on veganism and contemporary American Culture see
"Death by Veganism"
October 2010 New Hope Journal "Dancing with our Scars"
Complete Site Index navigating hundreds of pages of memoirs, intimate journal entries, essays, poetry and photographs from over thirty years of the New Hope Journal
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
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copyright 2009,2010 by Larry L. Dill