PU #237 - CHANGE IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE - If You Want It To Be
Not sure I’m seeing much point in Philosophy Unleashed being on Substack yet? Far fewer people are reading it there each week than regularly read the traditional website www.philosophyunleashed.com (and the posts are still going up there too anyway). Still, I keep being told that this is where writers write these days and blogs are a dead medium. Even the Michael Connelly novel I’m currently reading has seen his longtime journalist character, Jack McEvoy, move from newspapers and books to Substack, so I guess I’ll stick around a little longer and see how it goes. I still like the idea of having a direct email list for you to get your weekly fix of PU direct to your inbox…but so far only a handful of you regular readers seem to have actually subscribed? Was the change worthwhile?
Anyway…on with this week’s post…
Neuroscientist, Dean Burnett, made a very astute point earlier this week following the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. On his Facebook page he noted:
“Not the key point, but all the ‘Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’ coverage shows how quickly and easily the entire UK media complex can switch to someone’s new name/title, even after using their old one for decades, when it’s an incredibly pampered white male deviant.
So, you know, it’s not *that* hard...”
Dean’s a funny guy. A writer of witty popular science books and a former stand up comic. Back in university, he actually taught me improv and directed the first improv show I was in. His post was funny, and honest about this not being the “key point” of the arrest, but, like all good comedy, in his joke there was a powerful truth. It is the same truth we saw during the pandemic when sudden and far-reaching changes in areas once thought impossible occurred almost overnight. The obstacles to change are almost always in our willingness to try. They are seldom as insurmountable as we are told they are, and the people telling us change is impossible almost always tend to be those people with some sort of interest in things staying the same.
A person transitions from a male name to a female one, or a daily social practice we once thought we could not live without is deemed too dangerous to continue in the face of a deadly virus — if the will is there to adapt to the changes proposed to us then the change is quickly embraced as a “new normal”. (Just ask any UK teacher who now marks GCSEs once given lettered grades with a number, one to nine). As soon as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles, because the full force of the law was behind the new edict the entire British media jumped in line without question and references to a “Prince” Andrew vanished almost immediately. When, instead, well-funded think tanks, politicians, or powerful lobby groups make it more financially lucrative to ridicule and question proposed changes then the alternative occurs. Stagnation and obstacles. Resistance to change depends on who is proposing the change. The powerful, or the marginalised? It is almost never about objective reality.
I was thinking about this as I read this weekend about the seeming decline in vegetarian and vegan options across UK restaurants and fast food outlets. According to the news, the boom in plant-based alternatives to meat earlier this decade has now bust and people in the food industry have moved on to the latest nutritional fad: high protein diets. Mainly chicken. Animal rights be damned.
It’s not that the vegan/veggie options are disappearing entirely off the menu, but they are becoming fewer. One writer described it as merely an equilibrium being finally met after an initial over-correction towards plant-based. Wanting to assure all consumers were being catered for, food outlets packed their menus with so many new plant-based options it simply wasn’t financially viable for them. They have now kept the dishes that made them money, but got rid of the offers that people weren’t buying.
As a vegetarian since 1998, I had noticed firsthand this sudden rise in veggie options across the country and, more recently, its decline. New favourites I had started ordering from different places were suddenly unavailable on menus. A trip to New York last year left my wife and I surprised that so few places there catered for vegetarians beyond a single, ill-considered dish. It hadn’t used to be like that. Compared to the UK it felt so backwards. But then the UK started following suit.
What has this got to do with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Dean Burnett’s post? We’ll get there. But first I want to recount an argument I used to have with animal rights activists when I was younger. We were protesting our fourth McDonalds in as many weeks and I raised the question of whether our boycott of the chain and standing outside with our leaflets was maybe less effective a strategy for improving animal rights than it would be to simply encourage moreconsuming of McDonalds’ vegetarian products? If we made it economically viable for McDonalds to sell less meat and more plants then surely they would? The chain weren’t murdering animals because they wanted to be cruel. They wanted to make money and, currently, meat was their means to that money. If selling veggie burgers could be just as lucrative (or even more lucrative) then they would likely pivot to vegetables instead.
The activists disagreed. They hated the idea of giving McDonalds their money even more than they hated the continuing massacre of animals their refusal to engage in the logics of capitalism sustained. Better to feel morally pure than, perhaps, achieve the more moral outcome. The age old battle between deontology and consequentialism. But I think the recent diminishment of plant-based options in the UK food industry exposes something about the logics of capitalism I had forgotten about at the time: a morally neutral economic market only cares what makes them money, and so even if activists poured all their money into making a compelling economic argument for McDonalds to kill fewer animals and sell more veggie burgers, they would only do so for as long as it made them profit. Without a global change in thinking about our diets, and the rights of non-human animals, eventually the novelty market would run out and the company would be back to selling what it had always sold. Capitalism simply doesn’t care about anything loftier than the bottom line. The rise in plant-based diets in the UK was never about animals, or even the powerful environmental arguments against eating meat. It was about personal health and, rightly, recent reactions against ultra-processed foods made consumers realise it was probably healthier for them to be eating “natural” food, like chicken, than processed fake meat alternatives.
Which, finally, brings us back to name changes and neuroscientists. Dean’s post. Change happens whenever we choose to embrace change. When I was first boycotting McDonalds and choosing not to eat meat back in 1998 it seemed impossible that vegetarians like me would ever be catered for in every restaurant in the country. More impossible still that vegans would ever be! Yet, when the decision was made to cash in on the growing boom in plant-based diets that “impossible” change was made real all over the country. Now that the economic motive is no longer there, and people are choosing not to bother again, the change is slipping. Showing that change — even radical change — is simply a matter of effort. Change is always possible if we will it to be. When someone tells you change is too difficult, they are only ever really saying that they can’t be bothered to try.
From now on, therefore, I want you to scrutinise those who say some change you think would make a better world cannot be achieved. Is what they’re saying true, factually? Is it actually impossible? Or is it simply difficult and they are unwilling? And if so, why are they unwilling? What do they gain from things staying as they are and what do they lose from things changing?
The more we recognise how much of the way we do things in the world is the result of human choice rather than unavoidable circumstances, and that some different choices could make a different world, the sooner we might start making such choices and dismantling the impoverished way things are for something better.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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