Table of Contents
The predator
There are two kinds of predators. There are those that evolutionary became as such. They are the strong preying on the weak.
Then, there are contingent predators. They worsen the world of the living by their unwillingness to stop stealing hard-won energy from others, even if refraining from doing so would make things better for everyone.
These ‘others’, these victims, ruminators, foragers, cultivators and builders, are all those unwilling to prey on others. Many of them have the strength or ability to prey, but choose to apply these aptitudes in friendly cooperation with their environment.
The energy provided by the sun and plants are not prey, they are fruit. And fruit in this particular text stands for a particular type of resource: one that provides energy but is not prey.
Then, hard-won energy is that which is sought, harvested, cultivated, or created instead of obtained from the destruction, suppression, or theft from another sentient being who is significantly disadvantaged without it. After all, etymologically speaking, the word energy is closely related to the word work. In fact, the ancient Greek energeia effectively means work. Energy is then the fuel, the heat that, as Stephen Fry puts it in his series Leap Years, maintains the order of the living world, in a perpetual resistance against entropy, the inevitable process of energy dissipation and structural decay that governs the universe.1
Predators prey on those unwilling to predate. It is what could be called, in a system based on fairness and equality, an injustice. On the other hand, if a rather extreme version of the end-justifies-the-means principle is adopted, a predator can be seen as a beneficial agent that improves the energy efficiency ratio: a substantially greater amount of energy is obtained per time unit.
This enables the expenditure of more energy in less time, which is achieved by accumulating hard-won energy quickly snatched from many preys in a relatively short time. Such quickly accumulated energy can be used to create better things and systems.
However, ethics aside, this process is not sustainable in the long-term, and it will result in widespread misery. Even more, a byproduct of this is the immense energy wasted in upholding an order that makes sustained predation bearable enough so that work can continue under such circumstances.
Technologies are apredatorist systems
Many technologies are in a way apredatorist systems. They make preying upon others so difficult that it is not worthwhile anymore. So to speak, the ROI ceases being justifiable, as the costs far outweigh the benefits. As a result, the non-predators can organise themselves without this implicit fear, without having to take precautions against potential instances of predation in a less cohesive collectivity, like toll keepers stationed at the bridges connecting society. Akin to carnivores preying on herbivores, they operate by the principle that violence, trickery and extortion are less costly ways to obtain energy than the slow, gruelling process of harvesting it or cultivating it.
Examples of these technologies abound: advanced farming machinery provides enough food to satisfy predators, in this case feudal lords or slave owners. Then, the cost of preying on peasants and slaves becomes higher than simply sharing in the energy provided by a machine-enhanced harvest. Other less obvious technologies are written down methods or procedures that teach predators to confront their emotions in healthy ways, to learn to find a purpose so that less energy is wasted in a cyclical or aimless existence -or the use of relieving compensators for purposelessness such as overconsumption and other addictions,- and to understand the superiority of cooperating instead of exploiting others. It is valid to consider these procedures as technologies as well, they are durable, they perform functions consistently and can be replicated by following their method of construction.
Once a robust technological system is set up, contingent predation becomes obsolete. Ideally (an ideal, a North Star that orientates and illuminates but probably remains forever beyond grasp), the scenario would be an ever-decreasing amount of time and effort required for processing energy for every individual organism, and more time would be spent in discovering and celebrating each other, life, and the universe.
Vegetarianism compared to apredatory values
So vegetarianism and apredatorism, for lack of a better word, can be seen as derivations not so much of an ideology but of a deeper ethical premise: that it is not so much a categorical refusal to carry out certain actions, such as eating meat, but to not contribute to the proliferation of predation beyond what is ecologically necessary (for example by not participating in the perpetuation of the cattle industry).
The consequence of defining a personal vegetarianism as a natural ramification of a deeper principle is a question of not mistaking the branch for the trunk. In this particular version of vegetarianism, the principle of not eating meat under any circumstance is not the trunk, it is a branch of the apredatorist principle. Once we can accept this distinction (almost entirely suitable to be deemed as being ‘just semantics’), we may be able to promote a far greater range of ethical stances regarding consuming meat than labelling any deviation as a ‘flexitarianism’. The issue with terms such as ‘flexitarianism’ is that they carry connotations of incompleteness, of an inability to fully commit to a personal value. They imply a kind of moral weakness, an incomplete rejection of something.
So, as a result, the label ‘vegetarian’ can become unnecessarily restrictive to those who approach the matter in more nuanced ways but are unable to articulate this in a few words. In many cases, such as in experiencing foreign cultural rituals that happen to include meat, or accepting it as a guest in a home not prepared to serve vegetarians (not as an ethical choice but purely because of cultural conditions), the label ‘vegetarian’ might obstruct the individual’s path towards self-enrichment and actualisation.
Were they to decide to accept the meat even though they have labelled themselves as vegetarians, a misunderstanding similar to the problem with flexitarianism would take place. Even if their reasons are valid, the ‘sinning’ vegetarian would have communicated a certain lack of integrity and an alarming willingness to transgress their values. At worst, it would convey a kind of hypocrisy in the eyes of others -and perhaps in the vegetarian’s very own perception of themselves-, an insight into a personal character that is not wholly trustworthy, or demean the vegetarian cause overall.
On the other hand, one can be ‘flexible’ in their meat eating habits and still be fully committed to this apredatorist moral principle in its version that I just described. It is a principle that extends beyond consumption habits, also implicating social expectations, broader consumption habits (or substituting them for non-consumptive habits) and personal codes of conduct regarding our treatment of others, be they human or non-human. It is not a barrier against the omnivore social world, or the adjustment of consumption habits as a form of protest. It is a porous principle that allows complexities of the real world to permeate the behaviours and attitudes that result from it.
To make this last sentence clear, it deals with distinctions from a different dimension of criteria. To use an analogy, it is comparable to the difference between having to declare a preference of either cats and dogs and declaring a preference for pets with certain specific traits, regardless of whether they are cats or dogs. Similarly, we do not declare that we prefer cats just as we would say that we are vegetarians and do not eat meat. We declare that we prefer pets that do not shed hair, that fit in an apartment and that are friendly to children, criteria that can apply to certain cats and certain dogs. Following this analogy, this preference is akin to declaring that we seek to contribute to the mobilisation of apredatory values, and that, frequently, not eating meat aligns with this.
And as might be clear to the reader by now, the concept of apredatory values is itself an apredatorist technology.
- Stephen Fry goes further to state that energy ultimately comes from the sun, becoming stored in plants through photosynthesis, which become ‘calorific treats’ to other animals, which in turn become prey to predators. ↩︎
✵
Leave a Reply