More on Tradition and Veganism

I had a strange conversation once upon a time, and I’m going to change the names to protect the guilty here, but, I think it illustrates how traditions can be less than helpful.

A friend of mine had gone through a bad break up and immediately her ex started dating a friend of hers. This is the kind of situation that is often upsetting. My friend said she’d get some kind of revenge and everyone who heard this tried to discourage her from that course. However, she cited her ethnic heritage and said that her ancestors fought wars, were known for their fearlessness and their revenge-taking tactics. Getting even, in her eyes, was a respected cultural imperative.

It’s one of those weird things. I’m not above citing certain cool things about the various cultures that contribute to my current soup of DNA. It’s kind of interesting actually. But the thing is, there’s always the bad along with the good. Follow the history of the human race linguistically, and you’ll find that most people today have a solid mix of raiding conqueror mixed in with the conquered. And even those who come from extremely oppressed groups often don’t embrace every single thing about their ancient ancestors. Instead they are able to love the tenacity, the creativity, the hard work they see in their culture, but reject other aspects that they feel are outdated in today’s world or even blatantly harmful.

So I don’t see being vegan as going against tradition, but instead reinforcing the traditions that emphasized compassion, conservation, reverence for the natural world, empathy for animals, and so on.

There’s another thing that popped into my head during all my fiction writing this past month. Perhaps we do our culture a disservice if we cling to the most obvious, the most written about and repeated traditions without fully understanding their role or meaning, all while ignoring the smaller traditions the ones that observers found less bizarre, less worthy of note. Perhaps it’s an insult to our ancestors as well if we believe that they couldn’t or wouldn’t change if they were alive today and had at their disposal all the information we have. Would a culture that survived primarily through fishing look at the current devastation of our oceans and decide that fishing at the level at which we practice it today is unsustainable, even immoral? These things sneak up on us, because we live them in real time. The oceans were polluted and species endangered when I was a child. I’m shocked by the prediction that the oceans will soon be empty of fish. But many people my age are able to shrug it off because they’ve never seen a healthy ocean. But I wonder at the shock a pre-colonial Native American from the Northern Pacific coast would feel if suddenly transported to our time. The difference would so incredible, so hard to believe.

Those of us who come from a mixing of cultures and heritages know that to blindly follow tradition can perpetuate evil, because we contain within ourselves the killer and the victim, the oppressor and the oppressed. We know that the slippery slope to doing harm is short and that even the most ordinary among us can slide. We know that somewhere in our ancestry is the rapist, and we know that others of our ancestors clung together with fierce love against all odds even to defy death. We know that our families contain those who denied their own and pretended to be what they were not. We know that we come from thieves and from healers and some among them were both. We know that we have to choose to do the right thing every day, because we have the capability to go either way.

Because of this I never feel that choosing to be more compassionate is ever a betrayal of our traditions. Instead it reasserts a strong tradition of trying to be better, trying to be kinder, even if entire generations in our past took a detour away from that goal.