Changing Your Mind

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.
- Laurence Sterne

It’s the time of year when everyone, by which I largely mean advertisers and newspaper columnists, turn to New Year’s Resolutions as a talking point. Whether they are trivial or profound, plausible or lost causes, resolutions focus on the importance of changing your behaviour. But I wanted to kick this (hopefully semi-regular) blog off by talking about something both very similar and completely different: changing your mind.

There is a difference between having your mind changed and having your mind opened. Frequently, especially when I’m hanging around with the right people and reading the right books, I am enlightened on a point of ignorance (whether, in Don Rumsfeld’s words, it is a ‘known unknown’ or an ‘unknown unknown’). At their best, these moments are earth-shattering. In Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong, during the bit set in the 70s, Elizabeth is driving through Northern France and comes across one of the vast stone memorials that stand, as if by accident, in fields by motorways.

'Who are these, these ...?; She gestured with her hand.'
'These?' The man with the brush sounded surprised. 'The lost.'
'Men who died in battle?'
'No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in cemeteries.'
'These are just the ... unfound?'
She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes.
When she could speak again, she said, 'from the whole war?'
The man shook his head. 'Just these fields.' He gestured with his arm.
Elizabeth went and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight.
'Nobody told me.' She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. 'My God, nobody told me."

Those moments, those ‘nobody told me’ moments, need to be hunted down. King Leopold’s Ghost, The Shock Doctrine, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Flat Earth News – the books that I think about again and again overflow with sections where the only possible response is to close the book and be furious that you have up until now been denied this information, dumbfounded that it is not compulsory knowledge, curriculum basics, plastered on billboards. Having your mind opened like this is so satisfying because it comes in moments of devastating clarity, where you turn a corner and a whole new bit of world that you never knew existed reveals itself.

Having your mind changed, on the other hand, is a much more demanding process and can rarely be instigated by someone else. It requires the disintegration of a belief previously held and its replacement with something that has been, up until that point, distasteful, or foreign, or even abhorrent. It involves a reconciliation of cognitive dissonance: ‘I am smart, but I was wrong.’ Changing your mind, just like changing behaviour is infuriating, torturous and, sometimes, a complete liberation.

Yesterday, I did something that I’ve been putting off for a few years. I went to the library and read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Truth is, I knew what I was letting myself in for. I already knew the book’s premise, and I knew many features of its argument – I guess in many ways I knew I was going to be convinced.

My relationship with animals has never been particularly tight. The ones I’m not scared of, I’m allergic to. The feeling is mutual: none of them seem particularly keen to get to know me either. The only time I have really enjoyed animals is in David Attenborough documentaries or in a sandwich. With this inclination it has been relatively easy to dismiss arguments from animal liberationists as the well-intentioned anger of some animal-lovers with misplaced priorities.

But as Singer points out on the second or third page of his quietly revolutionary book, whites who campaigned for the abolition of slavery or who volunteered on voter-registration drives during the civil rights movement, were dismissed as “nigger-lovers” by white racists, as if their actions were based not on a recognition of injustice but simply on a misplaced sympathy for the oppressed. There needn’t be any correlation between a personal affection for the victims of prejudice and one’s opposition to that injustice. In other words, you don’t have to want to cuddle an animal in order to want to liberate it.

There is no rational, ethically justifiable reason for opposing discrimination against women and black people and disabled people and gay people whilst at the same time supporting and participating in the massive suffering inflicted by humans on nonhumans. Every year billions of sentient, nonhuman beings are raised in abject suffering and then slaughtered, often cruelly, to provide inessential food for human consumption. We deprive them of their most basic needs in order for us to fulfil our most trivial. Deeply reluctantly (because it is a horrible thing to admit) I cannot see an argument in favour of this practice, which does not resort either to arbitrary prejudice or the tastebuds.

Although Singer’s book was the last nudge I needed, this change of mind has been a long time coming. In the three years I spent at Oxford, there was an ongoing debate surrounding the building of the Oxford Animal Lab, with active campaigns on both sides. Almost universally, students I knew were in favour of the lab and heavily dismissive of the (very visible) protesters. To be fair, some of the protesters were verbally aggressive and accusatory towards students, and to some extent this allowed the battle lines to be drawn as between enlightened, pro-science students and extremist, unreasonable animal fanatics. Largely, I happily took my place in the former camp. But there were moments when this comfortable framing of the debate was dented, and it was hard to maintain that the vision of the protesters as sentimental and deluded was anything other than a straw man. It was hard for me believe that Peter Tatchell (someone I would gladly fellate out of respect) was shouting about animal liberation down a megaphone on Broad Street because he had fond memories of a childhood pet rabbit. Similarly, the leaflets that SPEAK handed out in the city were impossible to read without realising our caricatures of them as pet-crazed loons were woefully inaccurate.

So often, their arguments were based around solid, ethically consistent reasoning and a principled opposition to suffering. So often, ours relied on at best a smug refusal to listen properly to their arguments and at worst an inexplicably angry denunciation of them as extremists. I am involved with protest movements who are victims of a similarly uninformed mainstream outrage, specifically Climate Camp, and these battle lines have become familiar. It had started to feel like I was on the wrong side.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
—George Orwell

So my New Year’s Resolution is to stop eating meat, right? Well, yes, except I stopped a few months ago anyway. My motivation for this decision was climate-related: meat has, on average, a larger carbon footprint than a vegetarian diet. But however much this argument convinced me (and it’s a good one) it is perhaps a more compelling moral disincentive to see a 10oz steak as the flesh of a sentient being that suffered to produce it rather than the unfortunate emitter of 8kg of greenhouse gases. It does, at least, give a second level of justification when someone points out that hard cheese can have a higher carbon footprint than poultry

But, maybe that’s what eased the transition? Maybe I could only properly change my mind once I’d changed my behaviour first (for an unrelated reason). That’s how cognitive dissonance works, right? There is an obvious motivation to see eating meat as morally wrong to further justify a behavioural change I have just made anyway, but there would clearly not have been such an incentive to accept this argument when to do so would have cast a severe moral shadow over such a central aspect of my behaviour.

However it happened, my mind has been changed. And despite my absolute contempt for the manners of nonhumans I am going to deprive myself of burgers and sausages and fish fingers and lamb balti by agreeing not to eat them.

And are they even fucking grateful? No. Animals can piss off.