© Philip McCulloch-Downs, cover illustration for The Curious Tale of Otto and Trinity Small, pencil, 2018.
@vegan_artivist and @mr.cronch
Every artist wants their work to “live on” long after their death, even those whose art is purposely ephemeral. It is only natural to indulge in the occasional daydream of a retrospective exhibition in a prestigious museum or a twenty-third-century English teacher reading your story aloud to her students, who sit at their desks (will they still have desks?) in rapt attention. But it is wiser to focus on creating art worth remembering, wiser still to see yourself and your work as just one contribution along a continuum of human endeavor. We love to create and to receive recognition for it, but we don’t give much thought to what life will actually be like for those twenty-third-century schoolchildren, do we? Will they have clean water to drink and to bathe in? Will it be safe for them to venture out of doors?
In The Willpower Instinct, psychologist Kelly McGonigal writes that the human brain is inclined to regard the future self as a different person. This disconnect has consequences not just for ourselves (not staying fit or saving for retirement), but for the choices we make that affect the people around us too. Psychologist Hal Ersner-Hershfield found that people with “low future-self continuity” behave less ethically in professional role-play scenarios. They’re more likely to pocket found cash instead of looking for the person who lost it, and they’re more willing to say things that could damage a colleague’s career.
McGonigal doesn’t discuss the impact of this phenomenon on future generations, but the ramifications are obvious. Who is going to read your novel or listen to your album if they are too busy trying to avoid the plague, or the latest tsunami, or the wandering, dark cloud the last working newspaper in America has dubbed “the hungry smog monster”? What if they’ve lost those luxuries of being human?
We can’t just paint and write and sing for future generations. We have to eat and buy and save for them too. These days there is a lot of talk about making a complete transition to solar and wind energy to counter the effects of climate change, and while it’s true that an individual can do little (if anything) to prevent the continued funding of fossil-fuel energy projects, we tend to overlook what we do have control over. Truth is, the vast majority of us make consumer choices that contradict all that we claim to believe in, and most of us will fail to own that folly even after the agricultural runoff comes seeping into the swimming pool, when the pipes run dry and our neighbors start looting the local Whole Foods.
A report on livestock and the environment from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reads, “Global demand [for animal foods] is projected to increase by 70 percent to feed a population estimated to reach 9.6 billion by 2050.” Instructing livestock farmers in methods for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions is responding to a problem with more of the same, but those with the power to redirect crops grown for food-animal consumption directly into human mouths are unwilling to exercise it because the existing system is infinitely more profitable. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous use of prophylactic antibiotics in livestock feed poses a tremendous public health risk. You’ve heard of the super-bacteria too resistant for treatment with standard antibiotics? Well, picture a bacterial organism so indestructible it wipes out a sizeable number of those 9.6 billion people. Epidemiologists say the next pandemic is statistically overdue, and while it may not turn out to be that bad, no one can know for sure that it won’t be. As John Hurt’s delightfully raggedy narrator tells us in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, “Nature, my dears, is a wise woman who pays us back tit for tat.”
Humanity is as resistant to change as the “superbugs” are to antibiotics, yet there is no endpoint in the evolution of this or any other species. Juan Enriquez has presented the concept of Homo Evolutis, a version of humanity that can steer its own evolution. The scientific research Enriquez presents is focused on “curing” physical disabilities to the point that they become abilities exceeding that of an average human—a noble undertaking, to be sure, but not as far-sighted as working to “cure” our most selfish and destructive impulses. In his 2009 TED talk, Enriquez cites South African Paralympic gold medalist Oscar Pistorius as a prototypical example of this “upgraded” human species, but Pistorius’s subsequent arrest and conviction for the murder of his girlfriend proves my point rather neatly, doesn’t it? Enriquez also posits that the new humanity will control the evolution of other species too—which is simply perpetuating the “Darwinian narcissism” (as the philosopher Dale Peterson puts it) that has brought us to this point.
Transhumanism is not the answer. It is our moral evolution that is critical to the survival of the species and the planet, as Matthieu Ricard writes in A Plea for the Animals:
If in a few million years we have not ruined our planet to the point of having brought about our own extinction, it is not far-fetched to imagine the emergence of Homo sapientissimus, who would surpass us in its intellectual faculties, in the richness of its emotions, in possessing a fabulous level of creativity, and amazing artistic sense, and other capabilities whose existence we cannot guess at present. If Homo sapientissimus does not simply replace us altogether, will it regard Homo sapiens condescendingly?
The rub, of course, is that we have to evolve out of our selfish consumerism in order to buy ourselves that much time. When I look around at how humans are still treating those who don’t look and sound and act just like they do, at the long lines of cars waiting for the fast-food drive-through window, Homo sapientissimus seems like a fairy tale spun by a madman. No one can reasonably argue that this planet wouldn’t be better off without us on it. Ray Bradbury puts it best in the final vignette of The Martian Chronicles, “that way of life proved itself wrong and strangled itself with its own hands.” Artists and intellectuals acknowledge the truth of this, but they usually end up thinking and talking around the problem, throwing up their hands as if they’re too caring and sensitive to have played any part in creating this mess.
© Weronika Kolinska, Octopus,
digital illustration, 2018. @w.kolinska
Bernard Shaw was preoccupied from beginning to end with humanity’s responsibility for its own betterment, to the point that his friend H.G. Wells poked fun at his diet and anti-vivisection activism in The Shape of Things to Come. Shaw’s play Man and Superman was inspired by Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, that one specimen of humanity who has taken on “the struggle of Life to become divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and thither in the line of least resistance,” and whose conduct thereby justifies the existence of the entire species. Shaw also wrote in his preface to Misalliance that there are two types of imagination: romantic and realistic. Romantic imagination is escapist and solipsistic and riddled with wishful thinking, whereas realistic imagination is clear-eyed and empowering. Shaw believed that even one’s most private and personal decisions are inherently political. Colin Wilson writes that in Shaw’s eyes, the romantic pessimism of Kafka, Proust, Joyce, and Eliot was a total cop out:
Kafka’s effects of nightmare are produced by piling up dreamlike ambiguities and complications until the mind is hypnotized into a sense of helplessness. Shaw’s clarity produces exactly the opposite effect, for it is obviously inspired by a conviction that any problem will yield to a combination of reason, courage and determination…Somehow, whether we like it or not, we have to start believing in the future, and in man’s power to transform it.
My favorite examples of realistic imagination are Octavia Butler’s Earthseed novels, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, which describe a near future (the 2020s, no longer the future by the time you may be reading this) in which human selfishness and brutality continue to their logical ends. Homesteaders try to build a quiet life for themselves and their children and are attacked, stolen from, murdered, or separated from their families forever.
The verses at the start of each chapter serve as admonitions to us, here, in the real and present moment. Because if you’re reading this, it’s not too late to begin a life of enlightened self-interest.
Our evolution has to start now, and as bizarre as it seems, even Big Ag sees the writing on the wall. Corporations like Tyson and Cargill are investing in vegan food companies and cellular agriculture because their CEOs know that animal agriculture is unsustainable. Ultimately, these corporations don’t exist to kill animals; their only goal is to make lots and lots of money. But they won’t make money doing honorable work before each individual consumer commits to a more responsible way of life.
In other words, we need to be “ahead of our time”—which is, uncoincidentally, the most double-sided praise an artist can receive. In an open letter urging his fans to consider veganism, Saul Williams writes:
I have never considered myself ahead of my time simply because a few executives may not have been visionary enough to determine where music or antiquated ideas of race are heading or to realize their role in continually underestimating the intelligence of the listener an d our generation. Rather I have seen those ‘powers that be’ as behind the times and perpetuators of an old cycle.
Our work as vegan artists is to shed the cold light of truth on the old cycle and those “powers that be,” because others are depending on us to usher that system into the history books. We need to live as if our great-great-grandkids’ health and safety depend on the choices we make today—because they do. With clean water, air, and earth, and with peaceable food in their stomachs, our descendants will be free to enjoy the art we’ve created, and in turn create their own.