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

One other external force joined the fray, exerting a surprising influence on Western culture. European travellers to India ‘discovered’ the ancient Indian religions and the fascinating doctrine of ahimsa , or non-violence to all living things. They interrogated Hindus and Jains on its philosophical ramifications; with astonishment, they observed animal hospitals, widespread vegetarianism and extraordinary kindness even to the most lowly creatures. News of Indian vegetarianism proved a radical challenge to Christian ideas of human dominance, and it contributed to a crisis in the European conscience. To many it seemed that the idealists’ dreams had become a reality. Vegetarians got down on their knees, calling on the ancient Indian philosophers to lead humanity away from its state of corruption and bloodshed.

Europe’s encounter with Indian vegetarianism had a massive impact well beyond the radical fringe. A thriving trade in travel literature inflamed the eager inquiries of serious philosophers and fuelled the curiosity of a wide popular audience. The travellers themselves tended to ridicule Indian vegetarianism as absurd soft-heartedness, but many readers saw in the Indian system a powerful and appealing moral code. Members of the philosophical establishment – John Evelyn, Sir Thomas Browne and Sir William Temple – recognised that the Indian vegetarians proved that people could live happily on the original fruit and vegetable diet. Sir Isaac Newton’s reading about Eastern sages helped to convince him that ‘Mercy to Beasts’ was one of God’s first and most fundamental laws from which Europeans had long since apostatized. Sceptics at the end of the seventeenth century used Indian vegetarianism to plant a powerful blow on European religious and social orthodoxies, arguing that Indians upheld the original law of nature: to do unto others (including animals) as you would be done by.

The impact of Indian vegetarianism vitally influenced a shift away from the Bible’s mandate of unlimited dominion. It encouraged people to imagine that broadening the sphere of ethical responsibility was beneficial for humans as well as for nature itself. Indian philosophy – and principally the doctrine of ahimsa – triggered a debate that has evolved over time into the modern ecological crisis.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of immense scientific development. New discoveries and systematising theories emerged from all over Western Europe and filtered out into the widely educated population. Microscopes plunged the observing eye into thitherto invisible worlds; surgical explorations opened up concealed areas of the human body; ever-growing tables of astronomical observations from bigger and better observatories drove human knowledge deeper into space; accumulated navigational skills extended the known world almost to its limits, bringing new peoples and new species under the scrutiny of Enlightenment science – or ‘Natural Philosophy’ as the discipline was then known. If the vegetarian argument was to prosper it would have to keep up with the times and adapt its logic to modern systems of thought. Vegetarians developed elaborate scientific ways of defending their philosophy, and plugged their views into the main channels of Enlightenment thought.

Intrepid investigations with the scalpel confirmed that the human body was almost identical to that of apes and very similar to other animals, which put the study of anatomy and physiology centre-stage in philosophical debate. Man was partly an animal: but scientists wanted to know exactly what sort of animal, herbivore or carnivore? A substantial sector of the intellectual world concluded that the human body, in its original form, was designed to be herbivorous – thus substantiating the scriptural evidence that the primeval diet was fruit and herbs.

Science flourished in the eighteenth century, but it was founded on the schism with received modes of thought engineered by the philosophers René Descartes and his vitally important rival, Pierre Gassendi. Within their new frameworks, Descartes and Gassendi set to work on the most pressing questions: the nature of the soul, of man, and man’s place between God and nature. Contrary to all expectations, both Gassendi and Descartes agreed that vegetarianism could be the most suitable diet for humans. Amazingly, three of Europe’s most important early seventeenth-century philosophers – Descartes, Gassendi and Francis Bacon – all advocated vegetarianism. At no time before or since has vegetarianism been endorsed by such a formidable array of intellectuals, and by the 1700s their pioneering work had blossomed into a powerful movement of scientific vegetarianism.

Anatomists noticed that human teeth and intestines were more akin to those of herbivores than those of carnivores. Dieticians argued that meat did not break down in the digestive system, clogging blood circulation, whereas tender vegetables easily dissolved into an enriching fluid. Neural scientists discovered that animals have nerves capable of exquisite suffering, just as humans do, and this was discomfiting for people who based their entire moral philosophy on the principle of sympathy. At the same time, the study of Indian populations indicated that abstinence from meat could be conducive to health and long life. This helped to transform the image of vegetarianism from a radical political statement into a sound medical system. The idea that the vegetarian diet could be the most natural was so astonishingly prevalent in university medical faculties across Europe that it appears to have been close to a scientific orthodoxy.

Numerous vegetarian doctors emerged all over Europe, transforming these scientific arguments into practical dietary prescriptions for patients believed to be ailing from over-consumption of flesh. These diet-doctors became conspicuous figures in society, much like the celebrity dieticians of today, but they were also primary movers in pioneering medical research. Meat was almost universally believed to be the most nourishing food, and in England especially, beef was an icon of national identity. It was still common to suspect that vegetables were unnecessary gastronomic supplements and that they were prone to upset the digestive system in perilous ways. The vegetarians helped to alter such suppositions, by presenting evidence that vegetables were an essential nutritional requirement, and that meat was superfluous and could even be extremely unhealthy. The vegetarians thus played a key role in forming modern ideas about balanced diets and put a spotlight on the dangers of eating meat, especially to excess.

Believing that the vegetable diet was healthier and meat was positively harmful invariably led people to the conclusion that the human body was designed to be herbivorous, not carnivorous, and that killing animals was unnatural. Examining natural laws was supposed to provide insights into God’s creational design, independent from scriptural revelation. The new scientific observations were seen to endorse the old theological claims for the origins of the vegetable diet, and it gave added force to the view that human society’s savage treatment of lesser animals was a perversion of the natural order.

These deductions were backed up by changing perceptions of sympathy which became one of the fundamental principles of moral philosophy in the late seventeenth century, and has remained an abiding force in Western culture. The idea of ‘sympathy’ in its modern sense as a synonym for ‘compassion’ was formulated as a mechanical explanation of the archaic idea of sympatheia , the principle – spectacularly adapted to vegetarianism by Thomas Tryon – according to which elements in the human body had an occult ‘correspondence’, like a magnetic attraction, to similar entities in the universe. Descartes’ followers explained that if you saw another person’s limb being injured, ‘animal spirits’ automatically rushed to your corresponding limb and actually caused you to participate in the sense of pain. Although the Cartesians thought that sympathy for animals should be ignored, later commentators argued that the instinctive feeling of sympathy for animals indicated that killing them was contrary to human nature. Vegetarians seized upon the unity of the ‘scientific’, ‘moral’ and ‘religious’ rationales and tried to force people to recognise that eating meat was at odds with their own ethics. Although most people preferred not to think about it, the vegetarians insisted that filling the European belly funded the torture of animals in unpleasant agricultural systems, and ultimately the rape and pillage of the entire world.