The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. Tristram Stuart

Чтение книги онлайн.

       INTRODUCTION

Stranded in the countryside and confronted with a live chicken which he has to roast, Withnail is paralysed. ‘I think you should strangle it instantly,’ says his anxious friend Peter, ‘in case it starts trying to make friends with us.’ ‘I can’t,’ he adds, ‘those dreadful, beady eyes’ (Bruce Robinson, Withnail & I (1987)). In 1714 the philosophical wit, Bernard Mandeville, mused on a very similar predicament: ‘I question whether ever any body so much as killed a Chicken without Reluctancy the first time,’ he commented wryly, ‘yet all of them feed heartily and without Remorse on Beef, Mutton and Fowls when they are bought in the Market.’¹ Western society has fostered a culture of caring for animals; and it has maintained humanity’s right to kill and eat them. Today, negotiating compassion with the desire to eat is customary, and there are clearly defined lifestyles available for each person’s particular taste. But it was only after the word ‘vegetarian’ was coined in the 1840s, followed by the formation of the Vegetarian Society in 1847, that ‘vegetarianism’ was applied to a distinct movement that could easily be pigeon-holed, and ignored. Before that, meat-eating was an open question that concerned everyone and it affected not just people’s choice of diet but their fundamental ideas about man’s status on earth.^*

      In the era preceding the Industrial Revolution the question of meat-eating was one of the fiercest battle-fronts in the struggle to define humanity’s proper relationship with nature. The vital question: ‘should humans be eating animals?’ was a serious challenge to Western society’s belief that the world and everything in it had been made exclusively for mankind. Vegetarians called for a wholesale reappraisal of the human relationship with nature. Man was lord of the creation: but what kind of a lord, vegetarians asked, ate his own subjects?

      It started with the Bible – with the very first chapter of Genesis. The first words God said to Adam and Eve after creating the world were: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ (Genesis 1:28). In the remote world of fourth-century BC Athens, this view was echoed with remarkable consonance by Aristotle, probably the most revered authority in Western culture after the Scriptures: ‘plants are created for the sake of animals, and the animals for the sake of men’.² СКАЧАТЬ