Summary
The text argues for greater consideration of cultural change projects by thinkers on EA strategy and funders, particularly in the field of animal advocacy.
Cultural struggle is different from individual outreach or education; it targets societal values and norms rather than just individual beliefs. Its large-scale changes are likely more durable and effective in the long term. It's difficult to assess the effectiveness of a cultural endeavour, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. The author provides several examples.
He underlines the importance of cultural change, which can sometimes be absolutely decisive, by citing historical examples. Contemporary examples, especially from Switzerland and France, illustrate how cultural change has influenced public perception and political action on animal rights.
Overall, the text calls for greater support and funding for cultural change initiatives (and research in this area) within the EA movement, arguing that they can play a crucial role in creating a more ethical society for the future and the long term.
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Here's a text arguing that cultural change projects should be given more consideration by EA grantmakers, especially (but not only) in the area of animal issues. It's not a systematic exposition of the issue, which would require greater research, but an interpellation that I've tried to make as well argued as possible. Also, I'm not very good at English, so I had trouble cataloging what might have been written on the subject in the EA forum or elsewhere in the EA community: So far, I have not found any similar forum posts, hence the need for this one.
I have to admit that I'm both judge and jury in this matter, insofar as my commitment to animal advocacy over the last thirty years has been primarily a commitment to cultural struggle, and that this choice has been made and maintained by myself and others from the very beginning of the fight against speciesism in France and then in the French-speaking world.
I'm also judge and jury at the same time, because I'm still involved in concrete cultural change initiatives for which I'd like to receive sufficient funding to be able to act under the right conditions and on a scale that gives us real hope of changing the culture of our societies.
Nevertheless, there are reasons that I believe to be solid for having taken this course over the years, and for maintaining it. This is not to say, of course, that cultural struggle is the only means, or that cultural change is the only goal, but that it should be implemented more thoroughly in the way we think about issues. I hope that the critique I offer below will be useful to our collective effectiveness.
Please feel free to comment and criticize the text!
What is a cultural struggle?
Cultural struggle is often presented as synonymous with individual awareness-raising or education. I think it's important to distinguish these notions, which I tried to do in an article entitled "Attacking speciesism or humanism?", from which I share here an extract relating to the question of the specificity of cultural struggle:
The difference between outreach or education and cultural change
“The strategies discussed here (fighting speciesism or fighting humanism) have two main objectives: the first is to convince people of the merits of the struggle and of the need for them to get involved; the second is to change the representations and values of our societies so that they become less arrogant, less bloodthirsty, more benevolent and more inclusive towards other animals; the ultimate goal consists therefore in a large-scale change in civilization.
Why differentiate between convincing individuals and changing their culture? The reason is that these two strategies do not operate on the same scale: cultural change cannot be reduced to a series of individual changes. Here goes an example: when I started campaigning for animal equality thirty years ago, people almost invariably said: “But animals don’t suffer!”. Five years ago, I realized that I hadn’t heard that sentence for years. Without me even realizing it, without anyone else realizing it, it had disappeared from the register of what is socially and culturally conceivable (unfortunately, this false belief continues to be invoked in relation to fish and invertebrates). Today, to claim that animals (terrestrial vertebrates) do not suffer is no longer acceptable and no one would dare to do so! Whatever the reasons for this important change are (this is not the point here), it illustrates what a cultural change is. If we take only France as a reference (but the phenomenon is probably worldwide), it is not about a few hundred, thousands or tens of thousands of people changing their minds individually. It is 70 million people who, without even realizing it, no longer have the same representation of animals as thirty years ago and no longer react in the same way. They did not need to be convinced or influenced one by one, and they were not aware that they were changing their views; simply, the culture in which they live has changed. Margaret Mead is often quoted as saying: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” I am sure that she was not thinking of a small group behind a coup, but of people working hard to change their society’s culture!”
A key difference between an action at a cultural level and an awareness-raising, an outreach or an educational undertaking, is the scale on which they operate. In one case, we are targeting an individual or group of individuals to persuade them to change their ideas and/or behavior. In the other, we try to work at the level of society as a whole to change its culture. This often involves the media and authority media (mainstream media, more or less consciously recognised as 'official', as representing society), but also all cultural interventions in the broad sense (education, art, history, social movements). There are also intermediate levels of intervention, between simply raising individual awareness and changing the overall culture of a society, when we act on collective actors, social groups, institutions, specific territories, etc.
Because of this difference in scale, changing the way a group or a society as a whole sees things requires much greater energy and resources, over a much longer period of time. It's usually a long-term process, due to the inertia of cultures and large numbers. But it's also more durable: once a cultural change has been achieved, particularly in the ethical/political sphere, the result is likely to be long-lasting.
The role of the media is essential: when you hear a piece of information or an analysis on the radio or television, you know that others (your fellow citizens) are also aware of it: it becomes a social issue. You know that you can talk about it at the coffee machine during a break at work, or with your family or friends, on the phone, in front of the television, and so on. The subject takes on a different importance from that which it might have in an individual conversation: it is weighed down by the weight of society (even if the opinion expressed in the media is negative). This difference in scale therefore generates differences in reception.
This difference in scale also means that the way we intervene will not necessarily be the same: the aim is not necessarily to convince rationally (although our rationality is an extremely powerful tool), but just as much to instil and make socially acceptable (or unacceptable) a feeling, a connotation, an idea or an analysis. This is achieved through repetition, frequency and the quality of the media or personalities who convey it. It can also be achieved much more easily through shocking speeches or actions: for example, those of the Act-Up association in the 1990s, which in less than ten years revolutionised society's relationship with the LGBTQ issue and HIV infection (AIDS).
If there is a lesson to be learned from Act-Up's actions, it seems to be that being negative at first is not entirely forbidden if it allows the public to hear about a cause. Other people or actions will later be able to give a better picture of the cause. The important thing is to create an entry point so that the word, the cause, is already known in society and has made its appearance in our culture.
In our experience, it also seems important that not only the media and public figures take up the issue, but that visible local groups provide a grassroots presence (whether informing or agitating) that enables the issue to have a more concrete impact on people's social lives.
As an example of cultural change in France, I mentioned the fact that fewer people now deny that animals are capable of suffering, but we could also point out that the words 'spécisme', 'antispécisme' and 'sentience' have entered the French dictionary, and the media have picked up on this. Contempt for animal rights activists, vegetarians and vegans is less frequent, less violent and less openly expressed in everyday life. Above all, the question of the legitimacy of animal agriculture is now a social issue. Generally speaking, the animal issue has found its way into the media, and then into politics, as a worthy of interest issue, and which people dare less to laugh at. This was not the case thirty years ago, or even ten years ago.
There's still a long way to go, but we've started to make progress.
How important is cultural change?
In Doing good better. Effective Altruism and a radical new way to make a difference (pp. 115-116), William MacAskill writes:
The concept of expected value can be used to assess efforts to effect political change. Donating to highly effective charities provides a comparatively concrete, reliable and measurable way of doing good. But the potential gains of systemic change are even greater: if you can find the right area, funding or participating in political campaigns could potentially do even more good. It's not generally necessary to put an exact figure on the expected value of that activity; rough estimates based on reasonable numbers can show you very approximately how great the expected value is. The point is simply that long shots can be worth backing if the payoff is big enough.
When assessing a potential course of action, one should therefore not dismiss it as ineffective by saying that'll never happen. Many ethical ideas that are now regarded as common sense seemed highly radical in the past. The idea that women, or black people, or non-heterosexuals should have the same rights as everyone else was considered ridiculous until very recently, historically speaking. [...] Yet slavery was abolished wholesale, and we now find those objections indefensible. Those activists who campaigned for equal rights for women, black people and the LBGT community were right to do so not because they had a good chance of succeeding in the short term, but because the benefit was so great if they did succeed.
This eloquent passage from MacAskill's book seems particularly apt. Yet it is the only passage in the book that addresses the issue of cultural (and political) struggle. This may be due certainly to the fact that the impact of cultural intervention is unfortunately difficult to assess.
In addition, and more generally, there is a problem specific to the animal issue: in virtually all other political issues (I'm thinking of racism, sexism, etc.), we also consider cultural and societal change first and foremost, rather than simply individual change (i.e. through individual awareness-raising or education). However, in the case of animals, the cultural (societal) level seems to be underestimated. It is possible that this blindness is the result of the infatuation of many activists with the strategy of converting individuals to veganism, a strategy which tends to be hegemonic in grassroots groups and which leads to an almost exclusive focus on inter-individual relationships (ex. Anonymous for the Voiceless).
For a cause like animal rights, this question of cultural change is central. It is less obvious in today's anti-racist or feminist struggles, where the principle of human equality is accepted - at least on paper - and respected in theory by almost everyone. But when it comes to the animal cause, it is the very ethical and political principles on which our society is based that need to be questioned, challenged and changed. And this work of questioning is rarely done, is not supported, and consequently remains carried out in makeshift conditions, and therefore remains in a makeshift state.
The fact that it is very difficult to quantify the effectiveness of cultural work should not lead us to ignore it. Indeed, before the abolition of slavery, it could be said that cultural work against slavery had saved no one; its effectiveness might seem nil by that standard. But in the end, this work was more effective than any of the other strategies implemented at the time, such as attempts to improve the living conditions of slaves or the simple boycott of products derived from slavery. In the end, this work was more effective than anything else - beyond measure.
Giving What We Can's page on the animal question makes no mention of the cultural work to be done as an important undertaking; if Giving what we can had existed at the time of the struggle against human slavery, I wonder whether it would not have risked missing out on the activist and cultural work for abolition and, if GWWC had been influential, its influence would have been potentially counterproductive by diverting resources crucial to the cultural struggle into ventures to improve living conditions on the plantations. Slavery might have taken decades longer to be abolished in Western countries (or it might still not be abolished). I'm not saying this to assert that the battle to improve the conditions in which animals are exploited, or to increase the plant supply, are counter-productive; I don't think so. On the contrary, I believe that the different approaches we can take work in synergy. I simply don't think it should overshadow the necessary cultural battle to be waged.
Cultural change seems fundamental in a long-term struggle such as the one against the exploitation of animals, as the examples of the abolition of the Ancien Régime in France (prepared by the philosophy of the Enlightenment), the abolition of slavery (prepared in particular by the same Enlightenment, then by half a century of militancy by anti-slavery activists), and so on, suggest. Not to mention it, if only to point out that it is of course very difficult to quantify and evaluate, is to unwittingly contribute to making it invisible.
Finally, it should be noted that political struggle can also be reduced to a large extent to a form of cultural struggle. Many struggles (such as that of the suffragettes in England) had as their main result not the direct achievement of the desired changes, but the generation of the cultural change that then made those changes possible. For example, it was only after the First World War, when the suffragette movement no longer posed a concrete threat to the English patriarchal social order (it hardly existed anymore), that British women gained the right to vote, which they had not been able to obtain before. It was no longer the balance of political power that was at work, but the cultural change that had resulted from the intense political agitation they had waged before the war. In the same way, it can be said that Act-up's activity, which was intended to be political, also had profound cultural repercussions, in terms of the social acceptance of "sexual minorities".
Furthermore, the passing of legislation (e.g. laws on animal 'welfare' or the abolition of this or that aspect of animal exploitation) also has a powerful cultural effect: the new rules quickly become embedded in the collective consciousness as necessary and normal, changing the threshold of acceptability of practices and people's perceptions of the importance of animal interests. A good example of this 'normalising' effect of law is the abolition of the death penalty in France in the early 1980s: the abolition was enacted at a time when the majority of French people (62%) were still in favour of the death penalty, but just one year after abolition, public opinion had shifted (50% favorable opinion). Or, to take another example, in France, the laws authorising same-sex marriage were passed in a fairly hostile climate, even though such marriages very quickly became commonplace and are now widely accepted. In this sense, we can say that concrete campaigns aimed at achieving legislative or other practical changes also have a cultural effect and play an indirect but important role in the cultural campaign.
Our opponents, for their part, are well aware of the importance of the cultural dimension, and are devoting considerable resources to defending speciesism, rehabilitating the image of meat, devaluing alternatives, and so on.
Today, we are also seeing the results of the long cultural work of the New Right in France and, more generally, of the extreme right everywhere in the world, which is gradually winning the cultural battle by breaking taboos and weakening the ideological achievements of our society (in particular the idea of human equality).
We must not leave this important work to our opponents, but go on the offensive and weaken the foundations of the speciesist ideological system, the very system that allows society to continue exploiting animals with a clear conscience.
How can we assess the effectiveness of a cultural struggle?
It is of course difficult to assess the effectiveness of the cultural struggle, all the more so if our evaluation criteria are not primarily the conversion of people to veganism, but the cultural change in our relationship with animals (a rather undefined notion). In the Effective Altruism community, there seems to be an unfounded prejudice against this approach (in the rare cases where it is not confused with individual awareness), considered without convincing evidence to be not very effective. I'm just as lacking in evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, we can give some general arguments and make some assessments, particularly comparative ones.
A general consideration is that the types of animal exploitation are extremely diverse (many different species, farmed, fished, hunted, experimented on, etc.) and constantly evolving, which makes the concrete struggle a Sisyphean task with no end in sight and whose overall effectiveness can appear both significant (see the success of campaigns against battery chicken farming) and laughable. For every form of farming that is stopped, curtailed or improved (less suffering inflicted), other forms of farming appear or gain ground (such as octopus or insect farming). According to the FAO, global meat consumption is set to increase by 76% by 2050. In short, if we can accurately assess what we gain when we win, the fact remains that from a global point of view, from the point of view of the global struggle against the exploitation of animals, we could compare, on the one hand, what we can gain with more or less difficulty, with, on the other hand, what is permanently lost with the increase and diversification of the exploitation of animals.
Cultural change, on the other hand, is by its very nature global, usually resulting from a synergy of different causes operating over time, and it is very difficult to isolate and assess them separately.
Nevertheless, it is possible to get a very general idea of their impact.
For example, the fact that the public in France no longer claims that "animals do not suffer" is probably due more to the enthusiasm of the media and the general public for the new knowledge that ethology has brought us over the decades about the cognitive capacities of animals than to the work of animal rights activists in the strict sense, even though it was during the same period that an animal rights movement began to make itself heard and the concept of speciesism began to be known.
The "political" turning point of the animal issue in France (the fact that politicians, MPs or party leaders have taken up the issue and are talking about abolishing animal agriculture - intensive animal agriculture for the time being) was also more the result of the publication in 2015 of horrific videos taken in slaughterhouses, which were an electric shock to journalists and the general public, than any other form of activism.
Nevertheless, the fact that leading politician, the left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, including during the presidential election campaign (in 2022), explicitly talk about speciesism in their speeches is undeniably a result of anti-speciesist cultural activism.
Global and circumstantial evaluations are also possible
Overall assessments: in some cases, we have studies or opinion polls that allow us to make hypotheses about the impact of a particular animalist strategy. In Switzerland, for example, an opinion poll conducted in 2018 at the initiative of the German-language association Tier im Fokus (TIF) seems to indicate that the veganist strategy of organisations in German-speaking Switzerland achieves very different results from the anti-speciesist strategy of organisations in French-speaking Switzerland:
In French-speaking Switzerland, opposition to slaughterhouses is higher
The study revealed differences not only between men and women, but also between the different language regions. While only 11 % of respondents in German-speaking Switzerland were in favour of closing slaughterhouses, this figure rose to 35 % in French-speaking Switzerland. On the other hand, the number of vegetarians and vegans is twice as high in German-speaking Switzerland than in French-speaking Switzerland.
The veganist strategy, as I call it, tends to consider veganism as the alpha and omega of the struggle, and to make the population conversion rate the main criterion for evaluation. The anti-speciesist strategy, on the other hand, places much less emphasis on conversion to veganism and much more on the demand for justice and the structural and cultural reforms to be carried out.In the case we've just seen, of these two different strategies (or cultures of struggle), depending on which part of Switzerland we're looking at, the anti-speciesist strategy seems more appropriate if we want, for example, a popular initiative to succeed in banning intensive livestock farming, or the import of foie gras.
Another example of evaluation (not very difficult): In 2018, various small groups of anti-speciesist activists in France and Switzerland began to break into butchers' shops and set fire to restaurants and slaughterhouses in a number of cities: this had a very negative impact on the reception of the movement in these countries, as the media began to equate anti-speciesism with illegality and violence, and the opponents of anti-speciesism found a much more sympathetic ear in the media. This is another example of a fairly simple assessment of what must be called a (failed and unfortunate) strategy for cultural change. This strategy came to an end with the repression of these activists, but the negative effects are still being felt and work is still needed to compensate for them.
Specific evaluations. Evaluations can also focus not on the overall strategies implemented, but on the methods of intervention; for example, in 2015, five thousands anti-speciesists leaflets entitled either "Against all discrimination" or "What is speciesism?" were distributed outside three French and one Swiss university, and three weeks later, same time same place, students were asked to fill in a questionnaire asking, among other things, whether they knew what speciesism was. Although an evaluation based on a small number of responses (a few hundreds) to a questionnaire is open to criticism, it turned out that of the four different leaflets distributed (they also differed in terms of the visuals on the front, one version showing a suckling sow in a crate, the other showing cute piglets), one seemed to produce better results: more students remembered what speciesism was. It would therefore be possible to make a robust assessment by looking at a larger number of responses, and not just when it comes to towing.
In short, all this to emphasize that even if it is not always easy to assess the impact of the strategies or interventions implemented, they can still be evaluated comparatively in different cases and those that prove to be better can be used.
Appendices: Examples of Cultural Work
I'd like to give some examples of cultural work that has been done, and to some extent successful.
- Peter Singer's Animal Liberation is an excellent first example: The publication of this book, translated into over thirty languages and sold in over a million copies in the last fifty years, has not yet fundamentally changed the world for animals, but it has changed it for the animal advocacy movement, and more broadly for ethics. The theoretical tools for thinking about animal exploitation were finally available: the notions of animal equality and speciesism. The book changed the direction of life, directly for hundreds of thousands of people who read it, and indirectly for tens of millions who were influenced by its ideas. After the publication of this book, the animal advocacy movement finally began to take an interest in the worst forms of violence, perpetrated on the largest number of people, and the subject of the most routine practices.
I also have in mind several different examples of cultural strategies that are well known in France, but probably less (or not at all) known elsewhere in the world, which I will present very briefly, but about which I could give more details if necessary.
- In France and French-speaking Switzerland, a large part of the animal advocacy movement claims to be anti-speciesist and talks about abolishing meat (closing slaughterhouses and fishing boats), and the term "spécisme" (or "antispécisme") is fairly widely known among the population. This is due to the fact that the first animal rights activists in France, who began to fight against meat consumption and promote vegetarianism and veganism out of concern for animals, also published a theoretical and practical journal dedicated to understanding and fighting speciesism. Les Cahiers antispécistes published hundreds of articles over the thirty years of its existence and was the mainstay of the development of the modern animal advocacy movement in France and Switzerland. From the 1990s to the present, many militant initiatives (numerous articles and books, magazines, conferences, as well as a wide range of events) have been born in the crucible of anti-speciesist ideas and have made explicit claims to them (the militant reality is perhaps more diverse today, precisely because of the success of the anti-speciesist enterprise).
- A highly effective cultural and political strategy is that of the Projet Animaux Zoopolis, which takes care of wild or liminal animals threatened by human activities, as well as recreational fishing and farmed fish for restocking rivers. By fighting at the local level, PAZ gets a lot of media coverage (More than 400 newspaper articles and radio and television broadcasts in the first five months of 2024). By changing the public's image of animals (e.g. rats!) through newspaper articles and TV shows, PAZ has a general cultural impact. PAZ uses this cultural (media) impact of its fights to put pressure on political figures (mayors, MPs) and in return obtain greater cultural impact or even new laws (its primary objective): I have described the work of this association, showing how it uses cultural struggle very effectively to obtain concrete changes at the local level, and sometimes legislative changes at the national level.
- A cultural strategy that could be even more effective if it had more resources at its disposal: the organization of the World Day for the End of Fishing (and Fish Farming) and the World Day for the End of Speciesism, in which between 100 and 150 organizations from all five continents (Africa is still poorly represented) participate each year, and whose aim is to penetrate the culture of the animal advocacy movement by proposing that it participate in these World Days and that once a year (while waiting for something better!) It adopts a discourse centered either on the denunciation of speciesism or on the question of aquatic animals (fish, crustaceans, cephalopods), elements that the movement hardly takes into account spontaneously. In fact, it's an internal lobbying effort within the international animal advocacy movement to get organizations to devote more resources to aquatic animals.
The strategy is likely to be cost-effective (one full-time person can reach hundreds of organizations, some of which will then run campaigns), but suffers from its limitations: the same person cannot monitor and advise hundreds of organizations alone. Ideally, real campaigns should be organized throughout the year, or over two weeks, etc. More information, including the Theory of Change and Development Plan, as well as an evaluation of the effectiveness of the End of Fishing campaign, can be found here. - The Sentience Network has both a cultural and a community-building strategy. It is a network of student associations dedicated to fighting speciesism, promoting sentientism and effective altruism, and vegetalizing university canteens. It is currently developing in France, but would like to export to other countries. Today, the network is run by a small team, and each local branch is autonomous but linked to the network and run by student volunteers (and the branches are partly funded by their universities). The number of actions carried out is significant, the aim is to occupy cultural space, and last but not least, many students are trained in activism and then stay with the movement, either joining existing organizations or creating new initiatives. See its Theory of Change.
There are other examples, of course, like the annual meetings, which are important for the movement itself, the magazines, and so on.
I also think that the work of organizations like Animal Think Tank or Animal Ask or Social Change Lab is very important in terms of research on cultural change (often linked to political struggles and institutional change).
Thanks for the post. I'd like to see this topic discussed a bit more among the EA community.
In particular, I'd like to see more of the following: