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

The vegetarian institutions Tryon’s Pythagoras establishes in India come straight out of the Indian travelogues: animal hospitals, 56 the practice of saving animals destined for slaughter, 57 and special reverence for the cow on account of its usefulness. 58 Like the travel writers, Tryon’s Pythagoras links pacifism and vegetarianism; he endorses the protection of vermin to clarify the total ban on violence and even institutes the taboo over sharing eating vessels with non-vegetarians. 59 He also recommends dubious practices such as the caste system 60 and the prohibition of widow remarriage. 61 These doctrines formed the backbone of Tryon’s own edicts, some of which he set forth as commandments for his followers, including the veiling of women after the age of seven. 62 He seems to have gathered some adherents around him, and may have been responsible for converting Robert Cook, the landowning ‘Pythagorean philosopher’ associated with the Quakers who ‘neither eat fish, flesh, milk, butter, &c. nor drank any kind of fermented liquor, nor wore woollen clothes, or any other produce of animal, but linen’, because, as he explained in 1691, his conscience told him ‘I ought not to kill.’ 63 In other words, as far as he was able, Tryon established a Brahminic vegetarian community in London.

It was with the help of Indian culture that Tryon freed himself from Christianity’s anthropocentric value system and made a leap into another moral dimension. In the Transcript he did this with the figure of the Indian King. Dismissing the welfare of humans, the Indian King turns to the issue of animal rights, summarising it in starker terms than anyone in seventeenth-century England. Any argument against maltreating animals, he said, ‘must proceed, either because they have a natural Right of being exempted from our Power, or from some mutual Contract and Stipulation agreed betwixt Man and them … if … the former, we must acknowledge our present Practise to be an Invasion; if the latter, Injustice’. 64 The idea that humans could make social contracts with animals had usually been discussed – by Thomas Hobbes among others – with derision. 65 The idea that animals had any right to be exempted from human power was an unorthodoxy of incomparable audacity. Animals were there for man’s use; the most they could expect, according to Christian religious and philosophical legislators, as John Locke put it, was an exemption from cruel abuse. Tryon’s Pythagoras, by contrast, argues that even without considering animal rights, it is vain to think that man ‘has Right, because he has Power to Oppress’. 66 In this Tryon was answering Hobbes who had argued in 1651 that humans had rights over animals solely because they had the power to exert it (or ‘might makes right’). 67

In complete contrast to the norms of his society, Tryon came firmly down on the side of attributing to animals a right to their lives regardless of human interests. He lobbied Parliament to defend the ‘Rights and Properties of the helpless innocent creatures, who have no Advocates in this World’. 68 Where was the justification for killing animals, he demanded, when they were, in Tryon’s radical deployment of political language, ‘Fellow-Citizens of the World’? 69 They were God’s children, created to live on earth and therefore ‘have a Title by Nature’s Charter to their Lives as well as you’, he declaimed. 70 The ‘True Intent and Meaning’ of Christ’s law to do unto others as we would be done by was, according to Tryon, ‘to make all the Sensible Beings of the whole Creation easy, and that they might fully enjoy all the Rights and Priveleges granted them by the Grand Charter of the Creator’. 71 This spectacular piece of moral renegotiation was a radical step away from the orthodox Christian anthropocentric universe, and one that anticipates modern ecologists’ value-laden claim for non-humans that ‘they got here first’.

Tryon went even a step further. It was the animals’ lack of language – according to Descartes among others – that signified their lack of reason. But Tryon artfully responded to this calumny by writing a series of striking ventriloquistic literary set-pieces, in which animals lament their plight in their own voice. 72 The animals, Tryon explained, never had a Tower of Babel so they all communicated perfectly even without articulate speech. 73 Cattle complain that ‘we suffer many, and great Miseries, Oppression and Tyranny,’ 74 while the birds protest that humans ‘violate our part, and natural Rights’. 75 The animals point out that the reciprocal favours that pass between a domestic beast and its owner – food and shelter for milk, wool and labour – constitute a tacit contract, the breach of which is gross ingratitude and treachery. Once again, the ideal alternative is represented by the Hindus who allow animals ‘all those Privileges and Freedoms that the Creator had given’; 76 ‘the People called Bannians ,’ said Tryon, ‘are some of the strictest Observers of Gods Law, ( viz .) doing unto those of their own kind, and to all inferior Animals and Creatures as they would be done unto.’ 77

Using the behaviour of the Hindus as a permanent backdrop to his enthused writings, Tryon extended his critique of man’s treatment of animals into a wholesale attack on European degradation of the natural world. He observed that man was the only species so unclean that it irreparably defiled and polluted its own living quarters: ‘even the very Swine , will keep their Styes and Kennels sweet and clean,’ he exclaimed. 78 Like several of his contemporaries, he was disgusted by urban pollution. In ‘The abundance of Smoke that the multitude of Chimnies send forth’, he detected ‘a keen sharp sulpherous Quality’, which he blamed for increasing humidity in the air and causing ‘ Diseases of the Breast ’. He deplored the peer pressure that had fuelled the spread of tobacco-smoking, correctly recognising the symptoms of addiction, some of the health impacts, and that children of smokers were more likely to pick up the habit. He even complained against passive smoking as it did ‘so defile the common Air’. 79

In a cycle that anticipates ecological thought, Tryon observed pollution escaping into ‘ Rivers which receive the Excrements of Cities or Towns’, enveloping the habitat of other species such as fish, and then returning – in the form of caught fish – to humans as polluted food. 80 In Tryon’s ‘The Complaints of the Birds’, American birds protest against the destruction of forests by encroaching Europeans: ‘thou takest liberty to cut them down … we are thereby disseized of our antient Freeholds and Habitations,’ they cry. 81 The problem with this world, declaimed Tryon, was ‘this proud and troublesome Thing, called Man , that fills the Earth with Blood, and the Air with mutherous Minerals and Sulphur’. 82

Tryon warned that the excessive demand for animal products like wool was over-stretching natural resources, especially since intensive farming had turned animals into ‘a grand Commodity, and (as it were) a Manufacture’. 83 He deplored the phenomenon of consumerism which ‘causes great seeming Wants to be where there is not real or natural cause for it’. 84 People wouldn’t pay a farthing for pointless luxuries like civet and coffee if they were available on Hampstead Heath, ‘and if Hogs Dung were as scarce, its probable it might be as much in esteem’. He called on Europeans to stop ‘ransack[ing] the furthest corners of the Earth for Dainties ’, encouraging them instead to be satisfied with the produce of their own soil. 85 Meanwhile, Tryon imagined, the Hindus lived in total harmony with creation. Fruit and vegetables required less labour-intensive methods of production. By restricting themselves to the vegetable diet, the Hindus subsisted without needing to rape and pillage the planet as Westerners did. 86