Final Thoughts

Chapter 12Part Four: Catalyzing A Future Without Animal ProductsMarkdown

In my junior year of college, I first decided to give up meat. I had the inchoate sense that meat was bad, and I would do my part by becoming vegetarian. Over the years, I’ve had my fair share of discussions and well-intentioned arguments that have changed, evolved, and crystallized my thinking. One discussion has stayed with me since my initial foray. My college friend, who I’ll call Maynard, asserted to me, “Your choice isn’t making any differences in the grand scheme of things. You’re just one person among billions.” Maynard’s point was that everything I was doing was ultimately inconsequential, that the drop of my idealism was diluted and washed away in a vast ocean of reality. At that moment, I was at a complete loss for words. I didn’t have an answer then, and these words have remained seared into my memory ever since.

Since then, I’ve encountered other explanations that push back on Maynard’s assertion. For example, while I might not be changing overall production and consumer choices worldwide, I am at least helping individual animals. By not consuming meat and later by abstaining from using animal products generally, I have likely spared at least a few animals over my life. That was enough solace for me and continues to motivate me to this day. Still, it seemed like I could be doing more for a cause that needs all the help it can get.

I also learned about S-curve changes in social trends and movements, where there’s a slow start up followed by rapidly increasing change until there’s a new normal. Earlier, we discussed how marginalized support for same-sex marriage was just a few decades ago. In the span of thirty years, however, that support went from eleven to over fifty percent.1 Similarly, the percentage of “nones”—people who identify as atheist, agnostic, or non-religious—has increased substantially in the last couple of decades. From 2002 to 2019, the share of “nones” has increased twenty percent for Americans under thirty years old.2

Malcolm Gladwell argues in The Tipping Point that these S-curves take off due to the motivated players who are well-connected, persuasive, and who employ sticky ideas.3 We observed this play out on our screens, with influential movies such as The Birdcage and Philadelphia emphasizing the humanity and plight of homosexuals. The writers, actors, and producers of these films had an outsized impact, helping dispel terrible ideas and instilling better ones, even though collectively these were just a few hundred people at most. Naturally, I see this book as part of Gladwell’s point about information and influence spurring the S-curve. And specifically, I hope that the idea of seeing animals as a technology falls into what he deems as “sticky.” If all goes well, the ideas here will spread beyond the primary readers of this book and help evolve our conversation about the transition from animal products. I’ve partly and purposefully included chapter summaries to distill the ideas so that they’re easier to reference and pass around and as a basis for discussion.

The other issue with Maynard’s assertion is, what’s the alternative? If we know that something is a problem and we can solve it, then shouldn’t we try? At the very least, shouldn’t we cease perpetuating the problem? History shows us through many examples that even seemingly insurmountable problems are soluble. We’ve solved starvation, banished many diseases, and addressed ubiquitous safety issues (think seat belts and airbags). We’re continually producing new technology and ideas. The future can continue to get better. But we have to make moves, and we have to acknowledge the problems’ gravity.

Problem-solving can also fulfill the “purpose void” left as we have collectively moved away from religion. Only recently have atheism and agnosticism come into wide acceptance.4 This is a good thing. We’re not following the decrees of an egotistical, violent, and fictitious god or gods. We’re less beholden to texts that profess inerrancy despite an abundance of internal contradictions.5 We’ve adopted progressive values of inclusiveness, free speech, and consideration of all. A collateral effect is the loss of the prescription of that life that we are to follow, a roadmap of how to act toward salvation and eternal happiness in the afterlife. Such a roadmap is reassuring and simple, but it’s wrong. Nonetheless, a lack of purpose is a problem.

Instead, I assert that problem-solving is this purpose we should follow. Problem-solving can take many forms: taking care of children or older adults; creating media and art to entertain, educate, and enliven others; teaching women in remote villages how to read and self-actualize; entering a lucrative career and donating excess salary to worthy, productive causes such as Effective Altruism. Problem-solving, however, does not always follow a simple flow chart. We have to figure out what the problems are, and we should try to figure out if activities create more problems than they solve, as we’ve occasionally seen in well-intended non-profit programs.6 As a result, the problems that we tackle will be different over time, and different people will tackle different areas. All of this to say, there’s not a singular life formula for everyone to achieve their purpose. But we can choose to have purpose.

In this book, I’ve focused on the problem of using animals as a production technology, hopefully convincing you just how awful their use as a food source is, both technologically and ethically. I focus on this topic because I do not believe that it receives attention in proportion to its magnitude. Nonetheless, I’m interested in how we solve problems generally, especially with knowledge generation. Our institutions have much room for improvement in this regard, and I welcome readers to contact me in order to address such efforts. In particular, I’m drawn to the problem of assessing and spreading scientific research as it’s clear that the scientific journal system is too outdated and too outmoded for this task, costing us lives and suffering. We can do much better in the age of the internet.

Furthermore, scientists lack adequate understanding of epistemology evidenced by a number of unscientific statements I’ve lamented (e.g., “There’s not enough evidence to make a conjecture or hypothesis here”). Instead, we need a system that incentivizes scientists to make conjectures publicly as well as critiquing existing ones, as I laid out in Chapter 2. I currently envision something like Github,7 where each problem statement can have conjectures from anyone. If two parties disagree, projects can be forked into separate versions. Presumably, the better version will win out via measurement evidence, falsifiability, and argumentation. Anyway, if a more advanced system to cultivate our knowledge sounds enticing, please reach out to me. If I do write a second book, this will likely be the topic.

Thanks for reading, and I truly appreciate you engaging with and entertaining these ideas. As I said in the introduction, I hope that this is merely the beginning of this conversation; therefore, do not hesitate to reach out, especially if you have disagreements. I would love to hear them.8 All the best, and I look forward to sharing tapas—topped with better vegan cheese—with you.

Sincerely,

Karthik

Footnotes

  1. Hidden Brain: America’s Changing Attitudes Toward Gay People. (2019). NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/2019/04/17/714212984/hidden-brain-americas-changing-attitudes-toward-gay-people (Accessed July 12, 2020). ↩

  2. Newport, F. (2019, October 29). Millennials’ Religiosity Amidst the Rise of the Nones. Gallup.Com. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/267920/millennials-religiosity-amidst-rise-nones.aspx (Accessed April 16, 2021). ↩

  3. Gladwell, M. (2006). The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (1st edition). Little, Brown and Company. ↩

  4. Lipka, M. (2019). 10 Facts about Atheists. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/06/10-facts-about-atheists/ (Accessed August 6, 2020). ↩

  5. Ehrman, B. D. (2009). Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (Reprint edition). HarperOne.

    Qur’anic Contradictions - RationalWiki. (2020). https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Qur%27anic_contradictions (Accessed August 6, 2020). ↩

  6. Petrosino, A., Petrosino, C. T., & Buehler, J. (2006). Scared straight and other juvenile awareness programs. Preventing Crime: What Works for Children, Offenders, Victims, and Places, 87–101. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4244-2_6.

    Dubner, S. (2017). When Helping Hurts (Ep. 295). https://freakonomics.com/podcast/when-helping-hurts/ (Accessed August 6, 2020). ↩

  7. Build Software Better, Together. GitHub. https://github.com (Accessed August 6, 2020). ↩

  8. https://aftermeatbook.com/contact/ ↩

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