Scythe: A Vegan Interpretation

“And as I see it, they’re all innocents. Even the guilty. Everyone is guilty of something, and everyone still harbors a memory of childhood innocence, no matter how many layers of life wrap around it. Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true.”

-Neal Shusterman,
Scythe

Scythe

With almost every book I’ve ever read, I could tell whether I would really like it or not after the first page. This book was one of the rare exceptions. About a year ago, I bought the book after spotting the attractive cover in a bookstore and reading the synopsis on the back. After all this time, I finally decided to take it off my bookshelf and read it. And now I’m writing this post, so I guess you could say it affected me deeply.

But it wasn’t until around Part Two that I actually started to enjoy the book. I wasn’t fond of the two protagonists at first, but as I got to know them better and they began to change throughout the story, I found them to be strong, individual characters. The reason I point this out is because this doesn’t happen often when I read, and I was pleasantly surprised by this novel. While I eagerly await the next books to arrive, I want to dissect this futuristic world in which the book is set. Be warned that I will be spoiling plot elements, and I will very briefly summarize the story, at least as much as it pertains to what I’m writing.
*Note: When writing this, I had not yet read the first sequel.

Synopsis

Scythe is set about 300-400 years in the future, though I am a little confused by the timeline. (But that’s not important.) What we know now – in the early 21st century – as "the cloud" is called the Thunderhead, a benevolent consciousness that controls everything in the entire world. There is no longer war or death or government; humans are enhanced with “nanites” that heal them, regenerate their dead bodies, and allow them to “turn the corner,” or age backwards to a younger state once their bodies mature farther than they’d like.

Thunderhead

Thunderhead watches and sees all, like Big Brother, but it is not evil or dictatorial. The only beings exempt from Thunderhead’s control are scythes, charged with “gleaning,” or killing, individuals, a rare and non-revivable occurrence in which people can be killed permanently. The story follows two scythe apprentices, Citra and Rowan, as they learn the art of killing – as well as the toll it takes. Obviously, as a vegan, a book centered on the job of killing others was chock-full of comparisons to our world today, as well as many plot holes in this fictional future. I will be separating this post into three sections: health, environment, and ethics.

Health

This topic is actually one of the most complex, because I can both rationalize and not rationalize it. It’s made very clear early on that humans do not die naturally; everything that kills us today does not kill us in this future, except for fire, acid, or anything that destroys flesh. There’s nothing different about humans, but they have nanites that heal them both physically and mentally to an extent. While jumping off a roof does technically kill them (a fun activity, known as "splatting," for bored teenagers – an alternative to drug use, I suppose), Thunderhead alerts local revival centers to which the splatted is taken and revived. Ok, fair enough.

The End of Disease

But there is a gaping hole in this idea: there are no diseases anymore, despite the fact that they’re eating the same diet as we do today. Meat, dairy, and eggs are staples in their diet, as if these advanced humans have no clue about the health effects. (Now is when my argument will start to get circular.) Nanites supposedly heal them, so I could get behind the idea that they’re being healed continuously so they could basically eat doughnuts all day and never develop any health problems.

However, the nanites excuse can be called into question since some people are still overweight, choosing to have more or less weight removed as they see fit. But this indicates that these foods are still bad for their health and the diseases would be developing in them. Yet they’re treated as a problem of the past, something not plausible in this world. Even when there are morbidly obese people, as we see with High Blade Xenocrates, there is absolutely no indication that he would be at risk for developing or already having atherosclerosis, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or any of our other top diet-related deadly diseases. In all honesty, I’m not mad so much at this problem in the story, because I could buy into the idea that the nanites are more powerful than my comprehension of them. But since it’s never fully explained, it still confounds me.

Environment

Since humans are still eating and living basically the same way as they do today, the environmental devastation must be significant, right? Nope. It seems global warming, deforestation, water and air pollution, and everything else wrong in the world have been miraculously fixed. Look, I get the point of this book is to fantasize about this incredible, utopic-like future, not about how all the issues with which we’re dealing now have been resolved, and I respect that. However, with the world dying around us currently, these are very serious issues not addressed in this future, especially since they are living exactly as we do now.

How Is There Space?

Animals are still being farmed and fished, used for clothes and accessories, and kept as pets. How are there even any fish left in any body of water anywhere 300 years in the future? How is there enough land to house all these animals? How have there not been better scientific developments in creating alternatives? And we learn that the global population has ballooned to a breaking point, so that’s billions upon billions of people consuming animal products every single day. I would be willing to completely write all this off if it weren’t for Citra’s mom. Here’s a quote from a trip to the grocery store:

“Don’t get chickenoid tenders,” Citra said, looking at his choices. “Trust me, my mother’s a food synthesis engineer. That stuff’s not actual chicken—they grow it in a petri dish.”
Rowan held up another bag of frozen protein. “How about this?”
“SeaSteak? Sure, if you like plankton pressed into meat shapes.”

Same Old Excuses, Even In the Future

(What’s a “meat shape?” Because I would think that’d be the body of the animal from which the flesh came, but I digress.) Forgoing the fact that plankton are alive, there are clearly meat alternatives, but there is still that “ew” factor of diverging from the traditional concepts of meat. And it’s not just meat. Scythe Faraday, their mentor, loves drinking warm milk before bed, and the three of them shared breakfasts of eggs. And since Citra isn’t into the alternative scene, we can infer that these are all sucked out of a cow or pooped out of a chicken. But there’s no explanation for the environmental impact. If I may so bold as to assume something, the author is completely ignorant of the topic, even poking fun at it with that earlier conversation between Citra and Rowan, and he doesn’t have a clue about the farming industry.

Ethics

As with most things regarding animal ethics, this one’s a doozy. I don’t even know where to begin. Hmmm…. Let’s start with specifics to the story, and then we’ll open it up to explore more of this world. So, our dear Citra, clearly one of those anti-vegan carnists, refuses to eat “fake meat,” but she wants to rescue the dogs of a man after he’d been gleaned. This shouldn’t come as a surprise in our speciesist world both now and in the future. Since the story is about killing, you’d think that people just wouldn’t really care about violence or death in any way, but it is quite the opposite. Our protagonists are deeply empathetic and caring individuals, along with most of the other characters in the book.

Killing Is Wrong - That's Why They Call It "Gleaning"

Scythe Faraday makes the observation that scythes should never enjoy the act of taking the life of another person. In fact, scythes should be the people that most detest doing it, because they have the ability to recognize, even after gleaning for hundreds of years, that there is nothing great or right in what they do; this is simply a necessary evil of the world in which they live. Of course, all these “moral” scythes still consume the dead just like all other people, so their words fall on deaf ears (or blind eyes) to me. They’re hypocrites, like every other “compassionate, kind, and caring” nonvegan in the world.

Slaughterhouses & Mental Health

And what about the farms and slaughterhouses? It’s clear that they still exist, since Citra mentioned the meat alternatives. But we know that people can basically work and do whatever they want, since there is no government to control them or need to work towards a goal in life because they live forever. I can’t imagine that people are lining up to breed and kill animals as their eternal career. But let’s suppose that these facilities, which must be factory farms to serve the billions of people wanting this kind of "food" in the world, are fully staffed and working at capacity nonstop. What about their mental health? Yes, they have emo-nanites to control their mood, but people still experience the same emotions as they do now. In fact, most of the time, there is no interference of emo-nanites in the story, especially when our protagonists feel betrayed, depressed, or angry. The slaughterhouse workers must experience intense psychological trauma, yet there is no suggestion that debilitating mental health issues are a problem anymore. There must be some things occurring in one’s mind that can’t be solved by the magic of emo-nanites.

Is This Actually A Vegan Allegory?

There is no mention of farm animals in this book, which is not a surprise. They’re never discussed. I’m not going to address all the ethical issues with farming animals, because that’s basically all I do in my life. However, I could definitely see this book being written by a vegan as an allegory for the way we live today. In fact, if Shusterman were vegan and wrote this from that perspective, this book would move from amazing to masterpiece. We think we’ve conquered death, that we’re fearless predators, that we’re kings of the earth, and we are the most powerful beings alive. But our power is also our greatest flaw. We are like scythes, doling out suffering and death to others, preaching about empathy and respect to all, while dining upon the tortured bodies of some of our victims.

Final Thoughts

There are so many different ways to interpret this book, and I’ve only just scratched the surface. I took tons of notes as I read and had dozens of different ideas for what to write. But at the end of the day, this blog is about veganism, and I wanted to explore the major vegan aspects (or lack thereof) in this book. Hopefully this hasn’t sullied your perception of the book. It truly was a wonderful read, and even if you’re not a fan of young adult fiction, this story has something for everyone to enjoy, with deep internal emotional struggles for our protagonists, dealing with loss, the awakening of understanding of what it means to kill, and many other philosophical ideas. I’m hoping some of my answers will be answered in the sequels, but either way, it was a fun escape into a similar, yet very different world.

In Conclusion

Lastly, I’d like to leave you with a passage from the book that speaks very much to how I feel. Hopefully, people will start to wake up and see the world in the same way.

Each day I pray as my ancestors did. They once prayed to gods that were fallible and fickle. Then to one God who stood in harsh and terrifying judgment. Then to a loving, forgiving God. And then finally to a power with no name.
But to whom can the immortal pray? I have no answer to that, but still I cast my voice out into the void, hoping to reach something beyond distance and deeper than the depths of my own soul. I ask for guidance. And for courage. And I beg—oh, how I beg—that I never become so desensitized to the death I must deliver that it feels normal. Commonplace.
My greatest wish for humanity is not for peace or comfort or joy. It is that we all still die a little inside every time we witness the death of another. For only the pain of empathy will keep us human. There’s no version of God that can help us if we ever lose that.

be conscious, be kind, be vegan

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Source: Scythe by Neal Shusterman