Avoiding grief

If it were possible to stop knowing what is happening to animals, would you?

In a recent, rather ill-fated, conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Musk mentioned, in a conversation about the purportedly overstated dangers of nuclear energy, that "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed but now they are full cities again."

"That's great, that's great," Trump responded.

In its cavalier attitude toward the enormous, incalculable suffering and death caused by those bombs, this was obviously a deeply odd and troubled thing to say, and it was widely called out as such, though, as with most things in the barrage of odd and troubled behavior by Trump, it was quickly washed away in the unending onslaught. But I remembered it in particular because of how redolent it was of many people’s attitude toward animal populations. As long as the population rebounds, as long as the species goes on, as long as the city is rebuilt, the lives of the individuals are basically interchangeable.

As the outcry at the time demonstrated, that’s not how most normal people think about individual human lives. While enormity of and distance from suffering does reduce the emotional impact, they don’t generally completely erase a fundamental awareness that individual human lives matter.

For that matter, it is not how many people think about the lives of at least some individual animals. Many people are fully capable of taking the loss or suffering of an individual animal seriously — certainly if that animal is one that we know — but even if they are one that we see on a Dodo video or hear about on the news. But when it comes to mass murder — the death of hundreds, thousands, millions, billions — the emotional calculation, certainly for animals but for people as well, changes. In fact, it sometimes disappears.  

How does the activist deal with this? Obviously one crucial part of animal advocacy is to attempt to get people to see the individuals making up the mass. In fact, the Dodo and websites like it (at least the legit ones) are doing some of this essential work and doing it powerfully. By telling the stories of individual animals and the humans who care about them, they are helping people take a crucial step toward taking animals seriously. This is also part of the strategy of Direct Action Everywhere, with its custom of naming the formerly nameless, identity-less animals they pluck from factory farms, and telling the story of what happens to them.

But to get people to evolve from attention to the single individual to the mass of individuals, we may need something more. The sympathy that these videos provoke doesn’t seem to be, by itself, big enough to make the leap of thinking of all the pigs and chickens in the factory farm as individuals.

One thing that might be getting in the way of people taking that leap is the unbelievable level of grief that ensues once we have made it. Dodo videos don’t have unhappy endings, and we know that going in. To withstand the grief of the billions of incredibly unhappy endings that comes from seeing what is happening on factory farms, people may need to understand that the reward is greater than the pain.  But, of course, it’s not.

How many times have you tried to tell someone what happens to animals – nothing exaggerated, just the truth – and their eyes glaze over and you know they are no longer hearing you? Or they even say to you, “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, don’t tell me.” They are literally telling you that they cannot bear to know this. It is too painful. It is unbearable to know. And, unlike, perhaps, you, their psychological defense mechanisms are such that they are actually able to not know it. So they don’t.

Why are they better at this than you are? I wish I knew. Maybe people just differ, as they do in so many other ways, in their talent for denial. We all have it, of course. It’s a vital tool in surviving trauma of any kind and moving on to live your life and reproduce. Our species would not have made it this far without the ability to ignore what’s happening over there and just move on. But it seems entirely possible that some of us may just be better at denial than others.

If you could avoid grief, would you? I mean, it’s easy to say no when you are not in the midst of it, but would you really? That hideous, unrelenting pain. That moment after you wake up when, for a second, you don’t yet remember, and then it crashes in on you. If you could shut it off, wouldn’t you?

For the most common types of grief, there is, of course, no possibility of completely avoiding it. When a loved one dies, there you are. When a beloved pet dies, there you are. They are gone, you are in it.

But other types of grief are definitely avoidable and we all avoid them all the time. We all know that terrible things happen in the world. All the time. But we simply cannot afford to grieve them all. Perhaps a moment of sympathy or sadness. Perhaps even a donation to relieve suffering. But then we all move on with our lives. Does that make us monsters? Probably. But it also makes us human, and it also allows us to survive.

So how, as those who are unable, or unwilling, to let the grief we feel about animals just drift by, can we convince everyone else to enter into this terrible sadness, at least enough to allow them to stop participating in causing it?

We have all heard about the techniques for dealing with the stages of grief, i.e, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And it’s now generally accepted that these stages don’t normally go in order, but are all parts of the ongoing process of circling the hideous pain and facing it and moving beyond it.

Do these stages help in thinking about the way people deal with the knowledge that animals are being subjected to horror right now, everywhere, in numbers so vast we can’t process them? Well, let’s consider the stages one by one.

Denial, obviously. That’s where most people are. They just manage, somehow, to not think about it.

Anger. Well, as activists, we do know about that, so yeah. Sometimes they get mad at us for telling them. But it doesn’t seem to go further than that, i.e., to getting mad at the factory farms.

Bargaining. I don’t know about this one. It seems to me that the bargain most people strike is with other people. If you don’t think about this and tell me about this, I won’t think about it and tell you. We, the vegans, are the ones who break that bargain.

Depression. Yeah. It’s when people allow themselves to live with the depression and sadness and the fucking tragedy of it all that they change. But, often, this circles really quickly back into denial.

Acceptance. This is really tough. This may be the real stumbling block. With much grief, you need to accept the reality and move forward with your life. It doesn’t mean that things are ok or the sadness stops. But it gets better, it gets softer. With the grief that comes from knowing what we are doing to animals, what can acceptance even mean? We cannot, and don’t want to, accept any of it. We can stop participating, but how much does that accomplish?  The best we can do is fight. In whatever way we can manage.

I wish we had some sort of peace to offer to those who are willing to wake up and let go of the denial. That probably includes you, if you are reading this. I mean, one can hardly blame people for not wanting to sign up to this grief, since you never get to move on. The horror just keeps happening.

I would say, to be fair, that even for most animal activists, as humans, we still do manage to put it aside sufficiently to feel some happiness and joy and lots of good things. I don’t know how, and I’m not sure it’s something I’m proud of, but I don’t think about the suffering all the time. I just don’t. I put it somewhere.

But the fact that there is occasional respite from the sadness is hardly enough to motivate anyone to sign on. So what can we tell people are the rewards of taking animals seriously?

The best I can say is that it has something to do with the fact that denial is the enemy of truth and one way to think about the purpose of life is, arguably, to know as much truth as we can manage and to do as little harm as possible. And, to be a bit more woo, to be true to the flame that burns within us that is the core of who we are.  Is there any way to make this sound sane? Whether there is nothing else, or there is a spiritual reality that we don’t understand, or there is a god paying close attention, when you take into account all of the things that people believe form their core being and give their life meaning, for most of us all of those things point to not tolerating, and certainly never supporting, what happens on a factory farm.

Because, as horrible as it is to think about, those in that factory farm are not a faceless mob, but a group of individuals, each of whom matter. Once we lose the focus on the individual, the grief may subside, but we are no longer fully living in the world. Because that is how we live. All of us. One by one. To not see that is the root of (all) evil. To see it is to embrace life, as painful as it may be.