Isaiah, “The multitude of your sacrifices—what are they to me?” says the Lord, “I have more than enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats…. Your hands are full of blood; wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight”
Most of us don’t think of our culture as being a herding culture. Looking around, we see mainly cars, roads, suburbs, cities, and factories, and while there are enormous fields of grain and cattle grazing in the countryside, we may not realize that almost all of the grain is grown as livestock feed, and that most of the untold billions of birds, mammals and fish we consume are confined out of sight in enormous concentration camps called factory farms. Though it is not as obvious to us today as it was to our forebears a few thousand years ago, our culture is, like theirs, essentially a herding culture, organized around owning and commodifying animals and eating them.
Western culture can be seen as having two main roots: ancient Greece and the ancient Levant. … Reading the earliest extant writings from these cultures, … we find these cultures were oriented around meat eating, herding, slavery, violent conquest, male supremacy, and offering animal sacrifices to their mostly male gods. For the herding cultures, confined animals were not just food; they were also wealth, security and power.
By commodifying and enslaving large, powerful animals, the ancient progenitors of Western culture established a basic mythos and worldview that still lives today at the heart of our culture.
There have been basically two types of societies: partnership and dominator. In partnership societies, men and women are essentially equal and work together cooperatively… this was the norm for many tens of thousands of years of human life, prior to the expansion of patriarchal dominator cultures that were based on herding animals.
Bringing a culture in which men viewed women as chattel, they apparently came in three waves over roughly two thousand years, violently attacking, destroying, and fundamentally changing the older, more peaceful partnership societies.
The invading dominator cultures herded animals and ate mainly animal flesh and milk, worshipped fierce male sky gods like Enlil, Zeus, and Yahweh, settled on hilltops and fortified them, used metals to make weapons, and were constantly competing and warring. Violent conflict, competition, oppression of women, and class strife, according to Eisler, need not characterize human nature but are relatively recent products of social pressure and conditioning brought by the invading herding cultures whose dominator values we have inherited.
Herding livestock, tends to lead to aridity, and to produce a vicious cycle of environmental depletion and increasing economic competition for ever more scarce grazing grounds—and thus a tendency for violent contests over territorial boundaries. The practice of herding animals produces the psychological hardening characteristic of dominator cultures.
The agricultural revolution introduced profound changes into the ancient forager cultures, transforming their relationship with nature from one of immersion to one of separating from and attempting to control her.
Growing plants and gardening is more feminine work; plants are tended and nurtured, and as we work with the cycles of nature, we are part of a process that enhances and amplifies life. It is life-affirming and humble work that supports our place in the web of life. On the other hand, large animal agriculture or husbandry was always men’s work and required violent force from the beginning.
In the old herding cultures animals were gradually transformed from mysterious and fascinating cohabitants of a shared world to mere property objects to be used, sold, traded, confined, and killed. No longer wild and free, they were treated with increasing disrespect and violence, and eventually became contemptible and inferior in the eyes of the emerging culture’s herders.
At the living core of this ancient culture that became what we call today western civilization was the absolute supremacy of humans over animals, reinforced through daily meals. Wealth and prestige for men began to be measured in terms of how many livestock animals were owned and how large an area of land was controlled for grazing. The role model of young boys became that of the successful protocapitalist, the macho herder and warrior: tough, cool, emotionally distant, and capable of unflinching violence.
As herders and dominators of animals, we must continually practice seeing ourselves as separate and different from them, as superior and special. Our natural human compassion can be repressed by learning to exclude others and to see them as essentially unlike us. This exclusivism is necessary to racism, elitism, and war, because in order to harm and dominate other people we must break the bonds that our hearts naturally feel with them. The mentality of domination is necessarily a mentality of exclusion.
It’s obvious if we look closely that many of the root assumptions and activities of the ancient herding cultures still define our culture today. The single most defining activity of these ancient cultures was, as it is today, feasting regularly on foods provided by the bodies of dominated and excluded animals. Wars still enrich a wealthy elite class while millions bear the burden of them, and the world’s rich feed on animals fattened on grain and fish while the poor go hungry. Our capitalistic economic system and its supporting political, legal and educational institutions still legitimize our commodification and exploitation of animals, nature and people.
In all these areas our culture has zealously taken and benefited from Pythagora’s genius, but the underlying principle that he taught and lived by—compassion for all life—has been much harder for us to accept. …The principle he proclaimed that we can never reap joy and love while sowing seeds of pain and death in our treatment of animals, haunts us today.
“I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.” Leonardo da Vinci
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. ” Albert Einstein
The core values of the old herding culture still define our culture, as does its main ritual, eating commodified animals. Our deep urge to evolve to a more spiritually mature level of understanding and living, and to create a social order that promotes more justice, peace, freedom, health, sanity, prosperity, sustainability, and happiness, absolutely requires us to stop viewing animals as food objects to be consumed and to shift to a plant based way of eating.
The Industrial revolution, the Scientific Revolution and the Information-Communications Revolution, we are missing the bigger picture. None of these are actually revolutions at all, for they’ve all taken place entirely within the context of a culture of commodification, exploitation, and domination. These revolutions have not changed these underlying cultural values; if anything, they have further reinforced them! A true revolution must be far more fundamental than these.
The revolution that is demanded by our yearning for peace, freedom and happiness must provide a new foundation for our culture, moving it away from its herding values of oppression and disconnectedness toward the post-herding vales of respect, kindness, equality, sensitivity and connectedness. Above all, this revolution must change our relationship to our meals—our most practiced rituals—and to our food, our most powerful inner and outer symbol.
The revolution of compassion that is growing in our consciousness and culture requires that we stop eating animals not just for self-oriented health or economic reasons, but also from our hearts, out of caring for the animals humans and vast web of interconnected lives that are harmed and destroyed by animal-based meals.
The contemporary vegan movement is founded on loving-kindness and mindfulness of our effects on others. It is revolutionary because it transcends and renounces the violent core of the herding culture in which we live. It is founded on living the truth of interconnectedness and thereby consciously minimizing the suffering we impose on animals, humans, and biosystems; it frees us all from the slavery of becoming mere commodities. It signifies the birth of a new consciousness, the resurrection of intelligence and compassion and the basic rejection of cruelty and domination. It is our only real hope for the future of our species
