Over the past few months there has been a vegan onslaught, here in Ireland at least: large billboards have gone up in prominent places around the country admonishing us that our milk drinking is tantamount to depriving some poor calf of his daily dram, while other billboards enjoin us to “see someone, not something” the next time we gaze into the face of a sheep. As if that wasn’t enough, a recent and much reported piece in the Lancet suggests meat taxes may be needed to bring down our consumption of red meat by 90%, in order to save the planet from the methane emissions of cows. Beans, we are told, would make an ideal alternative.
Perhaps some years ago such gibberish could have laughed off as harmless nonsense which nobody could take seriously, but now that we have seen how whole swathes of society been taken in by gender ideology it is hard to be so sanguine. Concerted media campaigns have revealed an almost limitless capacity to alter public opinion, especially in societies with no fixed metaphysical reference points. We have seen how many in our post-Christian society have been relatively easily inducted into the ideology that holds the difference between male and female to be a social construct, and we also are seeing how this patently false belief is increasingly being translated into social policy. This does not augur well for the traditional, common-sense notion that man is no mere animal, and that the animals are essentially at his disposal. Such a conception of man was present in the Classical pre-Christian world which was never in doubt about man’s superiority to animals. Christianity, with its revelation that God had created man – alone among creatures – in His own image and likeness, gave such a distinction the firmest of foundations. The Christian conception of man’s relationship to the animals is summed as follows in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom he created in his own image. Hence it is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and leisure. Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives. (CCC 2417)
The vegan campaign seeks to upend this perennial distinction between man and the animals, in much the same way as the male-female contradistinction has been upended. The very notion of personhood (to be “someone” rather than “something”) has been bequeathed to us by the theologians of the first centuries of Christianity. The apparently touching elevation of sheep to the level of personhood is in reality the destruction of personhood; it is to strip man of his unique spiritual status among creatures.
The destruction of the very concept of personhood is clearly the mark of a worldview which has lost the guidance of what Christianity has revealed about the dignity of man. Similarly the anxiety of the fragility of creation which suggests that our red meat intake should be reduced to virtually nothing brings to my mind the anxiety of the pagans which Christ speaks of in St Matthew’s Gospel: “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” (Mt.6:31-32). The cosmos devoid of any sense of a special divine providence caring for man and providing for his needs becomes a scary place indeed.
There is an unmistakeable aura of anxious sadness in the post-Christian view of man and the world he inhabits: man is no longer a unique creature (except in his portrayal at times as uniquely evil), resources are invariably dangerously scarce, and there is no sense of man’s connection with a transcendent realm or a life beyond death. There is a sad puritanism about this vegan world and it is very much in need of an injection of Christian joy and optimism. Joseph Ratzinger has observed that “Nothing can make man laugh unless there is an answer to the question of death. And conversely, if there is an answer to death, it will make genuine joy possible – and joy is the basis for every feast” (The Feast of Faith, 130). With Christianity and the Resurrection, he observes, man is enabled to genuinely rejoice. It leads to a fundamental optimism about the world, and man’s place in the world. And significantly food is always at the centre of all celebration: festivity by definition requires feasting. So forget about the beans, pour yourself a large glass of milk (or beer or wine), and tuck into a good steak!