The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  It was from the counter-vegetarian naturalist tradition of Buffon, Brückner, Erasmus Darwin and Malthus that the modern understanding of the human place in nature eventually emerged. Their recognition that mass death was essential for sustaining the greatest possible biodiversity was an essential ingredient to Charles Darwin’s discovery that it was mass death that created the variety of life in the first place. It was on reading Malthus’ theory of mass death in 1838 that Charles Darwin had the epoch-making flash of realisation that natural selection was the driving force of evolution. This eureka moment is preserved in Darwin’s notebooks, which reveal that it was the passage in which Malthus addressed the potential for population increase under the Godwinite vegetarian utopia that triggered Darwin’s discovery. In his Autobiography, Darwin explained that ‘I happened to read for amusement Malthus’ Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence …[it] at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result would be a new species. Here then I had at last got hold of a theory by which to work.’ When he finally published this theory in The Origin of Species (1859) and in The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin acknowledged that his theory of evolution rested on Malthus’ observations on the ‘struggle for existence’. The mass deaths that afflicted every generation, Darwin pointed out, were the pressures that drove natural selection and were thus responsible for creating biodiversity in the first place: ‘It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage.’ The co-discoverer of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace, also credited Malthus with having triggered his breakthrough.36 Species evolved because great swathes of each generation died before maturity. The survival of the fittest depended on the death of the less fit. Attempting to cleanse ecologies of that dynamic would rupture the entire system of nature. The exoneration of mass deaths had always been a defence of predation against the ideals of the vegetarians. The theory of evolution sprang from the naturalist tradition which had traditionally been articulated against vegetarian idealism.

  Modern preconceptions have led scholars to search among eighteenth-and nineteenth-century vegetarians and ‘nature lovers’ for the pioneers of ecological philosophy. If the anachronism of ‘ecology’ is to be used at all, it is vital to distinguish between the ‘idealist’ ecologies of the vegetarians and the ‘realist’ ecologies of the counter-vegetarians, as well as between the political implications of both. The confusion between these variant positions persists in modern thought, and underlies some of the paradoxes in the animal rights and environmental movements, as well as in the assumptions of those who oppose them. It is true that vegetarians helped to formulate the idea of valuing non-human creatures in their own right, and to drive home the realisation that humans were related to the apes. They were therefore crucial in the construction of modern sensibilities towards nature. The vegetarians nurtured the value of life, but this invariably led them to regard violent death as a destructive force. They focused on the value of individual animals. But this was broadly antithetical to the perspective of the ecological naturalists, who saw the death of individual animals as the prerequisite for the life of others. This was a fundamental axis of difference between the vegetarians and the counter-vegetarian ecologists.

  These divergent traditions can be traced back to the seventeenth century. Hobbes used his theory of the ‘war of all against all’ to attack the idealist dream that nature was originally peaceful. Hobbes in turn was opposed by vegetarians like Thomas Tryon who idealised interspecific harmony. This was part of the ongoing dichotomy between an ‘idealist’ and ‘realist’ view of nature, and it was frequently deployed in the political debate between egalitarians and laissez-faire defenders of political hierarchies. This debate crystallised in the spat between Buffon and Rousseau, and it was carried forward into the Romantic era by Shelley and his friends on the one side and Lawrence, Smellie and Erasmus Darwin on the other. It subsists today in the ethical disputes between animal-lovers who attribute rights or value to individual animals, and ecologists who care more about the equilibrium within ecosystems. Idealist vegetarians, by and large, stood on the other side of the line from the ecologists. It was the counter-vegetarians who valued ecosystems in their own right, and who saw humans as an integral, dependent part of them – even while they participated in the brutal act of eating meat.

  * * *

  *Dr Pangloss, the satirised teacher of Leibnizian optimism in Voltaire’s Candide (1759).

  EPILOGUE

  Vegetarianism and the Politics of Ecology: Thoreau, Gandhi and Hitler

  In 1845 Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) renounced his comfortable metropolitan existence and moved into a log cabin at Walden Pond near his hometown in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau’s solitary two-year experience in the wilderness, which he inscribed in his best-known work, Walden, went down in history as the archetypal realisation of the American dream. But although in modern America Thoreau is universally hailed as the quintessential man of nature, his idea of man’s relationship with nature was chronically ambivalent and remains widely (sometimes wilfully) misunderstood.1 Was he the peaceful, quasi-Hindu-Pythagorean protector of living things he is often made out to be? Or was he, rather, a savage wild man intent on retrieving from the depths of his psyche man’s primeval hunting instincts?

  Thoreau’s friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, the revered leader of the ‘New England Transcendentalists’, brought him into contact with the foremost vegetarian reformers in America, Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), his cousin William Alcott, and Sylvester Graham (mastermind of the modern breakfast cereal). Thoreau experimented with the ‘raw grain’ diet peddled by these men and their vision of humanity clearly rubbed off on him, for he claimed that before he arrived at Walden Pond, ‘Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination.’ The vegetarians in turn eulogised Thoreau’s earthy knowledge of the outdoors; as Bronson Alcott put it: ‘He knows more of Nature’s secrets than any man I have known, and of Man as related to Nature.’ As they observed Thoreau living in his wood cabin, the vegetarians no doubt hoped he would discover in nature what so many of them believed: that man was a gentle animal hard-wired for sympathy with all living beings.2

  Thoreau did indeed experience that side of human nature, and Emerson, in his hagiographic obituary, described Thoreau as an Orphic figure who had such ‘intimacy with animals’ that ‘Snakes coiled round his leg; the fishes swam into his hand, and he … took the foxes under his protection from the hunters.’ But as Emerson pointed out, Thoreau was not partisan to one particular viewpoint, least of all that of the vegetarians. Thoreau was convinced that eating meat was nutritionally unnecessary, that vegetable food was cheaper, easier to acquire and, being a lighter diet, was well suited to the contemplative life, and he demonstrated this to the American nation by documenting his daily intake of rice and home-grown beans. But Thoreau distinguished his views from the cranky missionary zeal of the vegetarians. ‘He liked and used the simplest food,’ Emerson explained, ‘yet, when some one urged a vegetable diet, Thoreau thought all diets a very small matter, saying that “the man who shoots the buffalo lives better than the man who boards at the Graham House.”*… He confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among Indians,† would have been a fell hunter.’3

  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 recognised that civilisation cultivated the moral feelings that tied humans into societies, and bound them to
the wider community of all living things.

  These two poles relate directly back to the dual tradition represented by Thomas Hobbes’ emphasis on 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. These two rival ecological traditions became philosophical foundations for the two great political movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Left and the Right. The Right followed Malthus in viewing nature as a constant and pitiless struggle between individuals in which only the most capable deserved to survive; in the wake of Charles Darwin’s discoveries this became the dominant ideological view in the West. But the Left also used Darwin’s arguments with less individualistic ramifications. Just as the Rousseauists fundamentally disagreed with the Hobbesians and the Malthusians, so in the post-Darwinian world some argued that cooperation and sympathy were also powerful forces in the ecological system.

  Thoreau built these clashing ideas of man’s place in nature into an evolutionary scheme in a chapter in Walden called ‘Higher Laws’ (it was originally entitled ‘Animal Food’). He began the section with the provocative claim that on seeing a woodchuck he ‘felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw’. ‘I was never unusually squeamish;’ he elaborated. ‘I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary.’ In the modern urban world hunting has been portrayed as antithetical to ecological sensitivity, as it often has been, but like Rousseau, Thoreau saw that it at least brought people into unmediated contact with nature. Thoreau frequently supplemented his coarse diet at Walden with fish and other spoils of the hunt, and this satisfied what he saw as man’s predatory niche in the ecological cycle: ‘The perch swallows the grub-worm,’ he explained, ‘the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.’4

  Despite occasionally dipping his tongue in gore, Thoreau did finally decide that the principle of living a peaceful bloodless existence was the ‘Higher Law’. Human civilisation, he insisted, would inexorably progress from savagery into herbivorousness:

  Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? … he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.5

  Although he recognised that hunting had its own bounded legitimacy, Thoreau exalted the transcendent life of the vegetarian. The meat-eater at the top of the food chain remains viscerally dependent on all the other animals, but the vegetarian attains a superior rank. Rather than being ‘the fiercest and cruellest animal’, Thoreau called on man to transcend the food chain: ‘Does he perform his duty to the inferior races? Should he not be a god to them?’

  Under the guidance of Emerson, who had inherited the Romantic spirit of Wordsworth and Shelley, Thoreau took a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita with him to the log cabin at Walden and enthused about the idea of transcending the material world. When in deep meditation he often imagined himself as an Indian ascetic, proclaiming that ‘To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi’, while Robert Louis Stevenson compared him to a ‘gymnosophist’. The food he ate was a special aspect of this persona; he wrote in Walden that ‘It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loves so well the philosophy of India.’6

  Rather than presenting this ascent in traditional dualist terms of mind over body, Thoreau made it sound like the yearning for spiritual freedom was itself an innate force: ‘The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct,’ he wrote. ‘I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.’ Both lobes of his imagination – the transcendent ascetic and the earthy hunter – were ‘natural’; like Shelley, he thought that the height of civilisation could be as natural as the life of the primitive American Indian.

  Thoreau’s tussle between what he described as the opposing ‘instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, a spiritual life … and another toward a primitive rank and savage one’, is analogous to a similar struggle experienced by Thoreau’s literary and political forebear in the great American tradition, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin too represented this struggle between meat-eating and vegetarianism as between two fundamentally opposed concepts of man’s position in nature. As with Thoreau, it was during a reflection on the murderous food chain that Franklin decided to relinquish vegetarianism and eat some freshly caught cod.7

  This tension between predatory instincts and ‘altruistic’ abstinence stands for a wider struggle of political affiliations. The presence of both tendencies in Thoreau’s writing is what makes it possible for him to be claimed by the Left and the Right in modern America, and what arguably makes Thoreau, along with Franklin, the quintessential voice of the American tradition.

  Thoreau repudiated the legitimacy of democracy because it stifled an individual’s commitment to a ‘Higher Law’. Instead, he wanted to see a reduction in the power of the State and an increase in individual liberty. But the higher law to which Thoreau himself was committed was far from individualistic: just as he believed that the progress of civilisation would fortify man’s instinct of sympathy and respect for all living beings, so he also believed – like the anarchist William Godwin – that humans had a strong enough communitarian instinct to live harmoniously with one another without the interference of the State.

  Thoreau focused on applying this higher law to the abolition of slavery, convinced that as an individual adhering to the clear law of conscience he could help to bring about the end of that crime against humanity. But he also accepted that one day there would be ‘a benefactor of his race’ (he was probably thinking of the Alcott cousins) who would lead humans away even from their crimes against animals. ‘The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels,’ he promised, ‘will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind.’ Thus, with his faith both in the integrity of the moral individual and in the ultimate possibility of awakening moral instincts in the whole of humanity, Thoreau marked out a path towards universal vegetarianism.8

  In 1842 Emerson gave Thoreau’s friend Bronson Alcott – the self-taught farmer’s son who became an educational reformer and abolitionist – enough money to visit England. There Alcott stayed at a radical educational establishment led by the vegetarian James Pierrepont Greaves, whose inhabitants ‘labor on the land, their drink is to be water, and their food chiefly uncooked by fire’. Such was the North American’s effect on their community (or ‘Concordium’) that they named themselves Alcott House in his honour. It was also they who, in 1847, were among the key contributors to the formation of the Vegetarian Society.9

  The other major group that helped to form the Vegetarian Society were the Bible Christians. This congregation had been established at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the Reverend William Cowherd started giving away hot vegetable soup in the industrial centre of Salford, near Manchester. Blending Emmanuel Swedenborg’s mystical Christianity, Cheyne’s medical arguments, Saint-Pierre’s Rousseauist principles and Thomas Paine’s radical politics, Cowherd encouraged his congregation to see God dwelling in all creatures:

  Hold, daring man! thy hand restrain –

  God is the life in all;

  To smite at God, when flesh is slain –

  Can crime like this be small?

  After Cowherd’s death his ministry was continued by the radical liberal mill-owner Joseph Brotherton (1783–1857), a founding patron of the Manchester Guardian, eventually MP for Salford and, in 184
7, first chairman of the Vegetarian Society. Cowherd’s other prominent follower, William Metcalfe (1788–1862), emigrated to the United States in 1817 where he allied himself to Bronson Alcott and Sylvester Graham, and eventually founded the American Vegetarian Society in 1850.

  Forming a ‘Society’ was a characteristic of Victorian reform movements, but it could be said that cordoning themselves off into a distinct community was in fact counterproductive to the overall aim of reducing the number of meat-eaters and the amount of meat eaten. Precisely by making ‘vegetarianism’ a fixed identity – indelibly associated with crankiness as it was – the vegetarians must have put off many who might otherwise have seen the sense of arguments against meat-eating. It certainly opened them up to a new wave of mockery. The satirical periodical Punch guffawed after the Vegetarian Society’s first annual meeting: ‘We see by the papers that there is a Society in Manchester that devotes its entire energies to the eating of vegetables, and the members meet occasionally for the purpose of masticating mashed potatoes and munching cabbage leaves.’

  In 1853 there were 889 members of the Vegetarian Society, half of whom were said to be labourers and tradesmen. These numbers were swelled in the 1880s when prominent members of the literary establishment lent their name to the cause. In 1881 the playwright George Bernard Shaw converted to vegetarianism after reading Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam. He thus consolidated the strong links between vegetarians and sandal-wearing socialists, and was quickly followed by Leo Tolstoy who wrote a resounding endorsement to a new edition of Howard Williams’ large anthology of vegetarian writing.