I became a vegetarian in my mid-twenties, shortly after deciding to become a Zen Buddhist. It was the 1980s, the dawn of the “New Age,” and spiritual cultural appropriation was all the rage. But Buddhism was different. The spiritual part was optional. It was not a religion in the sense that I had previously understood the term; and the Zen variety was decidedly atheistic, a kind of applied philosophy that, as with most other Buddhist schools, highlighted an equality of worth among all sentient creatures. The last meat I ate after deciding to go vegetarian was a hot dog, actually three hot dogs, three greasy overcooked tubes of random animal flesh from the snack bar at a powerlifting contest. And, interesting side note, exactly a year later I competed in that same powerlifting contest as a vegetarian—something that my steak-and-chicken-breast-fed lifting buddies said would be impossible—and went home with a third-place trophy and a personal best deadlift.
Vegetarianism in the 1980s was nowhere near as popular as it is now, especially not among the working-class crowd I hung out with, and when people found out that I didn’t eat meat, their first response was usually a stunned “why the hell not?” I eventually amassed several stock replies to that question that I would vary depending on the circumstance. Sometimes I would simply say “because I’m Buddhist,” but that was rare, and almost guaranteed to lead to a further barrage of questions about Buddhism that required more time and energy to answer than I typically had patience for (I never did get very good at the whole Zen thing). Usually I gave some variation on the “animals are sentient beings too” moral argument against eating meat, a response that frequently led to a knee-jerk dismissive reaction, usually a flat denial that an animal’s status as a conscious, pain-experiencing being was at all relevant—followed by a “besides, bacon tastes good!” or the quasi-tongue-in-cheek “but plants are living creatures too!” Occasionally I would get a more extreme response. For example, I had one person call me a flaming hypocrite because I was wearing a leather belt and leather shoes and driving a car that ran on the combustible remains of once-living beings. I obviously didn’t really care about animals.
At the time, I didn’t understand the power of cognitive dissonance, and how most of the negative reactions I got were aimed at reducing the uncomfortable mental state that a moral argument for vegetarianism might be expected to elicit in meat eaters who considered themselves to be morally-grounded persons, otherwise I would have been far more careful to explain my meatlessness in ways that were less likely to be interpreted as pretentious or confrontational. It’s a joke these days, a running meme, that vegetarians are militant assholes, that they want to shove their vegetarianism down other people’s throats (pun intended) the way an evangelical Christian wants to infect you with their undying love for Jesus. And while there is no shortage of vegetarians who are like that, cognitive dissonance only aggravates the desire to put them in their place.
The potential for dissonance is also exacerbated by the fact that the moral argument from sentience is compelling, and, at least so I thought at the time, airtight. If you eat meat, you are saying that you are more important than the animals you are eating. You are saying that their pain and suffering is subservient to your pleasure. You are claiming that you have some kind of preordained right to kill and consume other experiencing beings. If that’s so, then where does this right come from? Every answer I got to that question was some variation on “might makes right.” “Why do I eat animals? Because I can: humans are at the top of the food chain.” I would also frequently get lectured on how a vegetarian diet was not healthy, a lecture for which I had a good stock of logical rebuttals and all sorts of data to the contrary. Hell, I placed in my weight class as a powerlifter after a year of zero meat consumption; physically, as a lean and muscular twenty-to-early-thirty-something, I looked to be the very opposite of unhealthy.
In the name of full transparency, I should mention that I am no longer vegetarian. And, just for the record, the reason I am no longer vegetarian has nothing to do with no longer calling myself Buddhist (although that happened too), or a change in my beliefs about the sanctity of nonhuman life (if anything, I hold these beliefs with even more conviction, although my thoroughgoing atheism makes me uncomfortable with the word sanctity), or the unjustifiable exercise of human death-dealing power (again, my convictions here are still as strong as they have ever been). The reason I am no longer vegetarian is because those things had nothing to do with why I became vegetarian in the first place. I am no longer vegetarian because I am no longer in my mid-twenties-to-early-thirties. With age I have become more adept at questioning my true motives, and at accepting the answers at face value despite how uncomfortable they might be (although the later capacity is still very much a work in progress). I have become better able to contend with my own cognitive dissonance, better able to live with ambiguity and contradiction in my thoughts and actions. The truth is that I was vegetarian mostly because most other folks weren’t. Vegetarianism was a safe way for me to express my deeply entrenched contrarian nature. It was the same reason that my car in high school was a small, gas-efficient pickup when all the other kids were into muscle cars. Being vegetarian allowed me to be different, to stand out from the crowd, to show that I wasn’t just another mindless sheep, to show that I was sophisticated, someone who lived intentionally. Or at least it allowed me to think these things about myself; it provided plausible support for a delusional narrative—a story woven as camouflage, ultimately to hide a seething mass of insecurities.
One of the pro-vegetarian arguments that I came across when I was still meatless and collecting good arguments in favor of my chosen lifestyle was the argument that eating meat is ecologically corrosive. I had a poster in my office as a graduate student that listed several reasons why eating meat is bad for the planet. I don’t remember them all, but they included details about how much land and water and energy it takes to raise animals as compared to food crops, how many people you could feed for how long with the grain that is fed to meat animals, etc. Recently, this line of argument has become more prevalent and in the mainstream. I have run across advertisements in the popular media—by animal rights groups and others—that play up the benefit to the planet if we all cut back on the amount of meat we consume. According to one of the ads, the gluttonous meat-based diet of a typical American simply cannot be scaled up and made global; if everyone in the world ate like us, we would all starve. And it is this particular argument that I want to drill into and spend some time with. I think there is a critical problem with this way of thinking about things, with the “we should be vegetarian because there aren’t enough resources on the planet for everyone to eat meat” idea, and with the large number of related ideas about how we each need to reduce our individual footprint and learn to live more “sustainably.”
The problem with these good-intentioned notions is that they are directed at the wrong part of the problem. In fact, they aren’t really directed at the problem at all; they are directed at peripheral symptoms. That the Earth has limited resources is not the problem. Neither, by the way, is climate change or species extinction or war or poverty or gobs of plastic in the ocean. All of these things, as problematic as they are, are just symptoms of the real problem.
The real problem is that there are way too many people.
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Overpopulation has been on the public’s radar since at least as far back as Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book The Population Bomb was published in 1968, and among academics and other thinkers, perhaps as far back as Malthus. But it has apparently been dismissed as mere gloom and doom prognostication. I am not aware of a single US law or government policy enacted specifically to address global population. Other countries, most notably China, have attempted to stem the tide of their own country’s accelerating population through official policy, but the US party line appears to be that overpopulation, if it’s even a problem at all, is simply not our problem. China and India are the problem. Poor countries in Africa that have too many people to feed are the problem (and never mind that a large number of folks in the proportionately less-populated US are chronically food deprived). The Western reaction to the Chinese one-child policy that was in place from 1979 until 2016 was by and in large negative. It was frequently held up as an example of horrendous government intrusion and a violation of personal freedom, and yet more evidence that communism was evil. And, to give the critics credit where due, the one-child policy was in point of fact evil in that it amplified an already existing cultural gender bias against woman—if you could only have one child, then for god’s sake it better be a boy! Evil, perhaps, but it at least represented an attempt to address the actual problem.
There are a couple of unique features of overpopulation relative to other global problems. One is that it is a problem with a very simple solution. Extremely simple. If every two people on the planet had only one child between them, on average, the problem would disappear completely in a couple of generations. The Chinese understood that. Hell, the math is simple enough for even a young child to understand. Another unique feature is that it is a problem that will eventually solve itself even if we do nothing. In fact, the more nothing we do, the faster the problem will resolve on its own. Nature is very clear about what happens when a species’ population exceeds carrying capacity; unfortunately, it’s not very pretty. Neither of these features are of much help, however. As simple as it is, the idea of intentional population reduction makes people extremely uncomfortable. And population reduction resulting from doing nothing, from an uncontrollable pandemic disease or massive war or global-drought-induced starvation, is the stuff dystopian postapocalyptic movies are made of.
So, what’s to be done?
Years ago, I accidently stumbled upon an obscure book at a college library that changed my views on environmentalism dramatically and permanently. Unfortunately, I can remember neither the title nor the author. It was published sometime in the late 1970s, and presented a scathing attack on popular beliefs at the time about the benefits of aluminum can recycling. Actually, it was attacking the larger cluster of conservation ideas that are now collectively subsumed under the term sustainability, and it used aluminum can recycling as an easy to understand illustrative example. The author’s main thesis was that recycling was not a long-term solution, it was a diversion, a band aid, a way of masking the true disease so that it would only continue to fester and spread. Despite being written over forty years ago, it seems to me that the author’s ideas are still relevant. And, as the author had predicted, the real problem has only gotten worse in the interim. The real problem, as I am arguing here the only real problem, is runaway population, and yet we continually focus our attention on the many symptoms. Why is that? Why is the problem itself largely being ignored? Why is it that instead of attacking the problem head-on, we would rather focus on select, and comparatively minor, symptoms? As near as I can figure, there are at least four not mutually exclusive reasons for this.
First—and this applies especially in the Western world—is the historical residue and the persistent contemporary influence of Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious traditions. It is frankly astounding to me that in the twenty-first century we yet remain under the grip of medieval fairytales about a Bronze Age sky-dwelling war god. The “be fruitful and multiply” mandate is still taken seriously among some of the most popular Christian sects, most notably the Catholics, who continue to leverage their considerable political power against the ready availability of birth control and abortion. Also, most versions of Christianity—and all versions of Islam—still retain the doctrinal power differential between men and women, where women are not allowed complete autonomy with respect to their reproductive capacities (or pretty much anything else). This is important because there is a clear relationship between birthrates in a given society and the extent to which women are granted equal access to power: the more powerful women are in a society, the fewer babies that society produces.
Second, and this may be just a secular variant of the first reason, population increase is considered to be a generally good thing, a sign that the species is healthy and flourishing. Population growth is a sign of fitness. Having a large population is considered by many to be proof of human preeminence as a species. This perspective, however, leaves out the other side of the balance: a species that overshoots carrying capacity is quite likely to be destined for extinction, and overpopulation in other animal species is a sign of weakness, a clear indication that the species has failed to adapt successfully to the limitations of the environment, clear evidence of a distinct lack of fitness. In reality, there is a curvilinear relationship between population and a species’ ability to adapt and survive: too few, and a single catastrophic event can wipe out everyone, or there may not be enough genetic diversity to ensure adaptation to a rapidly changing environment; too many leads to resource depletion followed by population collapse. The best scenario is a happy Goldilocks medium—a medium that humans likely surpassed, at least in terms of the planet’s natural, non-industrially-enhanced carrying capacity, centuries ago.
Third, the problem is big, enormous, and engenders a sense of helplessness, a penetrating feeling that nothing can really be done about it, that it is inevitable and unstoppable. From a psychological standpoint, when a problem appears too big to tackle, it is possible to reduce the resulting anxiety by focusing on a smaller peripheral issue, one where it is possible to make detectable headway even though this has little or no effect on the larger problem. The notion that life-choking quantities of plastic in the ocean can be reduced by choosing to forgo a plastic straw with your fast-food beverage falls into this category. The plastic in the ocean is the result of poor garbage disposal methods—the dumping of raw garbage directly into the ocean chief among them—not the result of drinking out of straws. But the act of refusing a straw supports the illusion that we are doing something meaningful. So, instead of tackling the too-big actual problem, we concern ourselves with a relatively small symptom. Insufficient resources for everyone on the planet to eat a Western meat-based diet is a symptom that can be reduced in severity if everyone in the West simply reduced their meat intake. That this in no way addresses the real problem is irrelevant. Just like completely outlawing plastic straws will have no detectable influence on levels of ocean plastic.
And finally, the forth reason that people prefer to ignore the real problem is that it doesn’t matter. Most people simply don’t care about anything beyond what affects them personally today. This isn’t, necessarily, because people are self-centered assholes (although there is that), rather it’s because we are proximal thinkers, we focus on what is right in front of us and easy to think about, and ignore things in the distance or in the future, or things that are complex that don’t affect us directly in ways that are perceptually salient. If it doesn’t affect me right here or right now or in the very near future, then it really isn’t my problem.
So, I’ll ask again, what is to be done?
I don’t have any concrete answer to that question. Actually, I don’t have any abstract or theoretical answer either. All I can offer here is the platitude that the most important part of determining a solution to any problem is to have some grasp on what the problem actually is. Directing attention to the various symptoms might be necessary—in the way that it is sometimes necessary to bring the patient’s fever down even if doing so does nothing to treat the actual disease. The first and most important step is to acknowledge the true source of the symptoms. That there are not enough resources for everyone on the planet to eat an American diet’s worth of meat is a symptom, not the actual problem. Becoming vegetarian will not help to solve the problem because the real problem is that there are already far too many vegetarians.
