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Jim Mason is a lawyer, journalist and animal rights activist. He was introduced to philosopher Peter Singer in 1974. Their book Animal Factories was first published in 1980 and revised in 1990. It provides a critical review and photographic documentation of factory farming practices in North America. Jim’s book, An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature looks at the historical and cultural roots of the Western belief in God-given dominion over the living world. Jim was elected to the U.S. Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2001.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”
Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.
00:00 Clips!
01:15 Welcome
02:47 Jim’s Intro
– Raised on an animal farm, milking cows, killing chickens
– Vegetarian since 1955 and more recently vegan
– Born during WWII, growing up in 1940-50s rural America
– Religious indoctrination “a family of Bible thumpers… I had to be in church every time the door was open”
– Methodist Christianity
– “A dual indoctrination of farm culture… and religion… the most intense Christian indoctrination”
– “I was brought up on human supremacy and using animals and animal exploitation as a way of life”
– Until early 30’s “I never really departed from that agrarian mentality”
– “I became an atheist at Sunday School”
– Mourning the loss of dog Butch “my main companion… a brother to me”
– “I asked the preacher… ‘Will I see Butch in heaven?’… he finally droned on… ‘No we don’t see animals in heaven – animals don’t have souls’… By the time the service was over I began to consciously think ‘I am an atheist – I don’t believe this stuff'”
– “I have since graduated from atheism to anti-theism… I don’t like any form of theism… it’s anti-science… we’ll find a better kind of based for our spirituality other than superstition.”
06:41 What’s Real?
– “It’s human supremacy. We’re made in the image of god. And since I’ve become an atheist I’ve realised that we’ve made god in the image of ourselves… We created a god that looked like us to give us power over the world.”
– Old Testament upbringing… “[not] Christian Nationalist or fundamentalist… good old mainstream Protestants”
– Era of segregation and “women’s oppression had not occurred to us yet”… Trad Wives “church, children, kitchen”
– God, bible, Jesus “we were sinful and we had to come to church to purge ourselves… a whole system to train us to behave…”
– Small-town culture “there wasn’t a lot of intellectual discussion… memorise bible verses… we didn’t get to think much… the minister… would probably tell us to shut up… to focus on the bible and the scriptures… there wasn’t any questioning”
– Tensions between hierarchy / discrimination / hell and “love thy neighbour”?
– The Vietnam War: “the church didn’t want to talk about that… the morality of our army killing people in Asia”
– Morality more through obedience than compassion
– Questioning norms being punished
– Asking dad at 5/6/7 yrs old “if animals felt pain – because I had to do painful things to farmed animals.” He said “Oh no – they don’t feel pain like we do.”
– “A set of facts were planted in my head… anti-facts… simply because an authority figure told me”
– Becoming fascinated with biology and thinking of medical school “It clashed with all I’d been told… learning about Darwin’s theory of evolution really blasts away that biblical old testament crap… the creation story just evaporates… that bolstered my atheism… believing in material reality”
– “Unfortunately the animal movement often… hostile to science… science means experimentation and the torture of animals in laboratories…”
– “That’s just a kind of science… science is a method, it’s a tool… if we use those tools then we have a truer understanding of the world… not the myth and superstition passed on in the bible and in folk tales”
– “I became a scientist and I am to this day”
– “It was like discovering wonderful things… like finding paradise… I could explore and understand things that were forbidden before… I became more and more curious.”
– The human need for something like spirituality / mysticism “a belief that’s bigger than us… a great power”
– Indigenous perspectives re: awe at nature “we need some of that”
– “… feel a membership in the world around us and not apart from it”
– “The more I learn about our evolution… as a human primate the more I feel a membership in the family of animals… I feel that connection. It makes me feel at home here. Whereas human beings, especially with what happened in our election… makes me not feel such a healthy warm and fuzzy membership in the human species… I think I’d rather be an animal.”
– Religious and intellectual alienations of humans from nature “the superior god… ourselves as superior… we’ve disconnected… we’ve alienated ourselves from the natural world… it’s a thing for us to use… it’s our slave. We don’t feel a connection.”
– “The more I study biology and science… I do see the facts of that… the reality of that membership and that connection… evolutionary continuity”
– “There is a need for that kind of spirituality but… not superstitions”
– JW: “Spirituality but with no spirits”
– “A scientific understanding of the world… it’s awesome!… our distant ancestors… they felt the same way… they were awed… they didn’t understand… they tried to understand… they invented superstitions… that’s the way they dealt with the awe… we can have that feeling today but really understanding what’s going on out there.”
26:56 What Matters?
– Reading philosophy in college re: morality
– Peter Singer’s utilitarianism. Tom Regan’s rights view
– The origins of human morality in kin-based groups “They had morals and ethics… through trial and error… what worked and what didn’t work… if people are selfish nobody eats…”
– “Morality… evolved along with technology… You couldn’t be successful as an individual… you had to have group cohesion in order to live well… the chief value was sharing… knowledge and resources”
– Around 3000 BC “These rules began to be written down… what was already understood”
– “…political chaos, international conflicts… climate crisis… We need to come to terms with some kind of morality that’s going to be universal – that’s going to bind us together instead of dividing us.”
– The role of religion as a conflict exacerbation
– Darwin’s “Descent of Man” and the evolution of morality
– Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid” and anarchism
– “We tend to think everything started with writing… but a lot [re: human morality] was already settled”
– Understanding the anthropological roots of morality “some of that stuff could be very important to us…”
– Small groups, sharing, levelling practices re: equality “to keep somebody from getting too big for their britches”… e.g. shaming
– “I like to bring it down to the basics that have been there for probably thousands of years… get real people!”
– “To live well in safety with some degree of happiness and some degree of this sense of being a member of this wonderful thing… life on the planet… do better and take care of each other better”-
42:20 Who Matters?
– Starting to write “An Unnatural Order” in the 1980s
– Exploring “how did animal domestication come to be… pick out animals out of the natural world and enslave them… the evolution of the idea of human supremacy”
– The shift from being part of the animal world to being “god that created us to be the onus of everything – that happened because of agriculture”
– “Agriculture… the most disruptive development in all of human existence”
– Jared Diamond: “Agriculture – the greatest mistake in human history”
– “We built the ideology of human supremacy to make all this OK with us”
– “We had been living in nature. We were in awe of the world around us. If we killed an animal we had to have rituals… ceremonies”
– “This is how we invented the idea that we’re supreme… human exceptionalism”
– “We’re not a part of all that – we’re exceptional creatures – god made us to have ownership of everything”
– “We don’t think of ourselves in continuity with everything else”
– “We have this rule ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ but it doesn’t apply outside of our species”
– “They love to talk about human uniqueness… the elephant is unique… the leopard is unique… all species are unique in that sense”
– “Animals suffer… and they suffer from some of the same causes that we do… loneliness, depression… animals in the shelter… look into the eyes of these dogs that have been dumped. If you can’t see that you’re not human…”
– Jim’s forthcoming book “Madness”… “We’re going to be wiped out by our own doing”… the climate crisis
– “We made ourselves wealthy off the backs of animals”
– How the word “capital” links to counting heads of livestock or even enslaved humans
– “They [herded animals] were the first form of money because they were tradable”
– The link between counting and early writing
– JW: “What do you think the modern environmental movement is getting wrong?”… “They’re ignoring animals”
– “We have no idea, not even animal rights people… of how important animals have been in our evolution… as powerful other beings that were respected and admired”… animal roles in indigenous creation stories and “first beings… animals teach us how to live”
– Early cave paintings “They didn’t paint trees and rocks they painted animals… animals stimulated us… animated the world around us… we saw continuity… we could identify with that”
– “They saw them as other people with different languages”
– Paul Shepard’s “Thinking Animals: Animals and the Evolution of Human Intelligence”
– “’Nature’ is kind of a modern concept… an abstraction”
– “Animals animate all of our lore, our folklore, our language… it’s universal”
01:02:34 A Better World?
– JW: The importance of worldviews: “Your worldview underpins every decision you take for good or ill”
– JW: The dangers of wanting to go back: “This romantic, idealised view of a pre-industrial, pre-agricultural society… to some degree based on wishful thinking… an orientalist fascination… the noble savage… go back to foraging and bartering… radical reduce human population… then we can live in harmony…”
– “The discipline of science… scientific thinking”
– “We know that we’re romanticising the past… there was cruelty and violence… they abandoned their babies… it wasn’t all the garden of Eden… will killed animals… we ate animals… we ate each other… in the early stages of agriculture cannibalism becomes a thing… to show your dominance”
– “We did terrible things back then… we can’t go back… to stone-age living and a forager society… but we do have to look at some of the things about that society that could be useful to us… sharing the resources… controlling your numbers… levelling practices so you don’t have hierarchies of wealth or power… even Marx called the pre-agricultural people a primitive communism.”
– “One of the things that divides us today is everybody has a different religion or a different set of rules”
– “What if we realised that these are common rules… these existed way before there were religions… the Koran and the Torah and all these sacred texts”
– “Maybe if we could capture that by looking at our distant ancestors we could see some commonality there… living better… living peacefully… I think we could learn a lot without going back… but we could learn from them”
– JW: The productive, positive paths forward for religious communities? “I would hope that they would do that”
– “What’s happening in the scientific age… more of the people who’ve had the indoctrination I’ve had… began to see that’s it’s mysticism… god… is imaginary… there’s not a guy up there controlling everything… that part of it is dying away… people just don’t believe that so much any more”
– JW: The surprising number of atheists and agnostics even within religiously defined communities
– Speaking at Unitarian churches “a kind of god-free religion… these are universal principles… kindness… mercy… this is not rocket science and you don’t need a Torah, an Old Testament to tell you this”
– The opportunities for both Dharmic and Abrahamic religions and for Humanism to extend their moral scope to sentiocentrism. “What they need is science!”
– “Our membership… our kinship with other life – instead of seeing it as the ‘Other’… we’re animals… we came from animals… we are animals”
– From humanity to sentientity?
– “If we were scientific about it… we would recognise that they suffer just as we do”
– The link between the scientific understanding of sentience and its moral salience
– “Why can’t we get that across to the environmentalists?”
– “Every activist must choose something that they can do to be effective… with me it’s research and writing”
– “Showing animal behaviour… feelings… emotions… we know that animals feel joy… we know the mechanism that causes that joy in the brain of the animal”
– “You’re not going to deal with overhauling our relations with the natural world unless you realise that animals are central… if you can’t deal with animals we’re not even going to get started”
– “Always pressing this idea that morality belongs in a wider sphere… the kinship… we are not separate from other beings – we have things in common”
Follow Jim
– @JimMasonAUO (“reluctantly – I think it’s in it’s death throes”)
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