Find our conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.
Steven Rouk is founder of the non-profit Connect For Animals, a platform that connects people who want to end factory farming and bring about a more anti-speciesist world. He also helps high-positive-impact organisations implement technology and artificial intelligence solutions.
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
01:02 Welcome
– Will we DESTROY! each other in this conversation?
03:07 Steven’s Intro
– Math, music and writing, then data science and programming
– Philosophy and “what does it mean to lead a good life?”
– Animal ethics… footage from a farm investigation
– Dabbling in vegetarianism & veganism “caring about animals more seriously”
– “This is a huge problem… what would it look like for me to devote more of my life…”
– Full time animal advocacy… volunteering, bringing data & tech
– Working for Mercy for Animals
– Seeing people struggling to get active and “plugged in” & stay engaged
– “I don’t think we’ve been doing a very good job of capturing this people power”
– Founding Connect For Animals “Get them connected… stay connected… get active for animals… accelerate the end of factory farming”
08:40 What’s Real?
– Growing up in Georgia, USA in a religious, Christian family (half Methodist, half Baptist, several pastors)
– “It was a very large part of my life growing up… church Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday evening, summer mission trips, choir.”
– “That meaning… came from the Christian church”
– Specific beliefs, some fundamentalism, Bible literalism
– “I remember thinking that the Earth was 6000 years old and evolution was a hoax… carbon dating wasn’t real”
– “There was also this deep caring for others side… family… people who didn’t have what you have… sick… bad things happened to them…”
– “My mum… someone who just cares so deeply for others”
– At a science & maths focused high school “There came to be these little questions… things are not squaring up right”
– “For a while… what I’ve been taught from religion is true… I just need to work out how to make it square with these other facts… maybe the people who believe in evolution are completely mistaken… an anti-religious, anti-spiritual conspiracy?… scientists trying to destroy religion?”
– “Learning about the conspiracy… a mistaken or misguided or bad worldview” vs. learning the actual facts
– Religious resource handouts explaining why evolutionary scientists were wrong
– At college in Arizona “Being out on my own, thrown into the world… gave me a lot of space and also interest to explore… these tensions… questions”
– First semester “It just hit me… this was the most important thing that I wanted to dive into… what do I believe and why”
– Buying dangerous books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
– “I just burned through them… I read each one of those in maybe a day or a night”
– “Going on YouTube and watching ‘pastor vs. atheist’… as much content as I could consume especially from the opposing side”
– “In some spaces it’s actively discouraged to consume anything that is trying to convince you to not believe in your religious upbringing”
– “If you believe your eternal soul or salvation or damnation is on the line it’s very dangerous to dabble in anything that might sway you”
– Working a Word document of questions “If God doesn’t exist then where do good and bad come from?”… “If God does exist where does evil come from?” and journaling responses and ideas
– End of first semester “I basically came out… the weight of evidence on the non-religious, non-Christian worldview… seemed so much stronger… it just made sense… so many fewer loop-holes… and weird things that just needed to be patched up”
– The non-religious stance: “It made more sense as a bundle of knowledge and ideas”
– “Some people have traumatic experiences with religion… for me it was really just weighing these two big piles of evidence”
– Deconstructing religion then re-constructing ethics, purpose, meaning, “how do I lead a good life?”
– Social transition “Family for me was always going to be the hardest… all the family that I knew were Christian… most of the friends… the water… that you exist in”
– “My family… very loving people… I didn’t think they were going to throw me out and never talk to me gain… I know some people do have that experience.”
– Writing a long letter to family members “I don’t want to do this in person”
– At college “The first thing I did was look for campus Christian groups… made a bunch of friends”
– Telling those college friends “I don’t believe in a lot of this actually… maybe we can still hang out?… I made other friends. I still hung out with a lot of those people actually…”
– “There are still family members… it’s still a thing for them… still disappointed… they truly believe that I’m going to have very, very negative eternal consequences.”
– Cultural religious community identification, technical theism distinct from established religions, spiritual but not religious, astrology?
– Clearer Thinking’s work on astrology (and here’s Jamie on the Clearer Thinking podcast)
– “A very sceptical framework… Any claim theoretically could be true… why would that be true and is there evidence for it?”
– Clarifying belief tensions through “An understanding of human psychology – the power of the human mind. And also the placebo effect.”
– “If you expect something to be different then you can feel different… explain… people’s experiences that don’t seem to match up with what we know about reality… an artefact of human psychology”
– “At that point are you whittling down Christianity to just the barest bones thing that can still theoretically make sense?… [Instead] Let’s put this aside. Let’s start fresh…. I don’t necessarily know if that idea makes sense just naturally popping up as an explanation.”
– JW: “The psychology of human agency detection doesn’t undermine the case for theism by itself. But it does explain why a human, even ancient humans might have originally been drawn to some of those patterns of thinking… why that hypothesis is there in the first place.”
33:01 What Matters?
– “Growing up there was such an ethic of caring for others that was infused into my childhood and what I thought of as right and wrong”
– “It was very human centric but it also included animals to a certain extent… animal cruelty was wrong”
– “You can see this in Christianity… there’s very much a human supremacy… we’re going to worry about humans just vastly, vastly more than any other being”
– “We’ll try, maybe, to not be too cruel or too violent if we don’t need to be. But we’re not generally going to worry too much about the impacts on other animals because they don’t have souls… one human is the ethical equivalent of… more than an infinite number of other beings”
– Divine command vs. intrinsic compassion “It was probably a blending of both of those… I get more of the intrinsic good nature…”
– “God is love. God loves us. The nature of God is loving and compassionate. The more we are like that the more we are like God…”
– “It fundamentally comes from there [because of God] but it can be felt like this independent intrinsic thing where it’s good to care for other people… It wasn’t purely just an obedience thing”
– “It is part of a set of certain people’s beliefs that without God the notions of right and wrong just don’t make sense and that the world is just this lawless, chaotic… in a sense it is!”
– Religious explanations for everything: “If you see individuals in church who are behaving very badly… they have fallen… A whole suite of explanations and rationalisations”
– “If you just fully commit to the worldview then you can find a way to explain away a lot of things”
– Reconciling hell with a benevolent god? “God doesn’t create hell… hell is either the absence of God… created by the devil… separation from God…”
– God helping us avoid hell through Jesus by “doing all he can… to do more would be to take away free will.”
– The all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God concept “That trifecta of qualities mixed with the problem of evil… digging into those was a really fruitful exploration… it didn’t quite make sense… you’re jumping through a lot of hoops here.”
– “Could you just take it on faith that this is the best possible world that could be created? Sure, but it seems much simpler to just accept this other suite of ideas about how reality actually functions.”
– Retaining a core of compassion and caring for others – emotionally imagining the perspectives of others but “I needed to satisfy the logical side of things”
– Moving to Boulder, Colorado “right across from the Mork and Mindy house”
– “In the basement… I sat down and wrote out little post-it notes of everything that I cared about… I need to figure out what’s at the roots of these… math and music and beauty and animal ethics and global poverty and suffering and coffee… is there a root here?… Tracing it all the way down… It all fundamentally traced down to the wellbeing of either myself or others.”
– “Either I’m experiencing something positive or negative or other people are… including non-human animals”
48:59 Who Matters?
– “That’s also why I care about animal ethics… animals have the capacity to experience positive and negative things, good and bad lives, just like we do”
– “This single sticky note that said ‘wellbeing’ on it… sentient individuals, myself and others. That core idea is still very much the foundation of why I think, fundamentally, anything matters”
– Dabbling in meditation and “the nature of experience… looking at that clearly”
– “I am conscious and sentient… you can never necessarily be sure that anything else is… it seems like I’m an example of a human mammal with a brain… good reason to imagine that almost all or most other humans and mammals have subjective experiences…”
– “A lot of time scientists were just trying to defend human supremacy and looking for ways to do it”
– The scientific evidence for non-human animal sentience
– “The clash… Sure, every sentient being matters… slam that into reality… a lot of really complex moral conundrums… Food seems like one of those that is less difficult… more immediate… directly actionable.”
– “I didn’t have to stop a puppy kicking habit… because I didn’t have one”
– JW: “And it wasn’t socially normal to kick puppies either”
– “How do interact with other animals on a regular basis… when you take food into the equation, that’s one of the more direct ways… you interact with a lot of animals”
– “Historically in the animal welfare movement being vegetarian or vegan is one of those behavioural indicators that is top of mind… kind of an expected or good step to take”
– “It feels very direct… you’re switching literally from eating the flesh of an animal who was killed and dismembered and turned into food products for you to eat”
– JW: “There are pieces of the victim or things that have come from the victim right in front of you”
– “This journey of trying to live in a better relationship… to cause less harm”
– “It took me a while… 5 or 10 years… I didn’t really know any other vegetarians or vegans”
– “Very easy to eat the tuna salad or pick up the hamburger… nobody cared… you’re going back to being normal again”
– “Over the course of repeated exposures… thinking more… watching documentaries… reading… I did become more serious over time… go vegetarian then to go vegan… eventually we got there.”
– JW: “Hopefully we’ll be the normal ones in the future and it will be unthinkingly the default… the social pressure will point the other way”
– How the problem of evil gets even worse when you go beyond humanity to considering all sentient beings
– JW: “When you start to care seriously about non-human animals the problem of evil and the problem of suffering are compounded by many orders of magnitude… wild-animal suffering… sextillions of sentient beings that could experience pain and suffering before humanity even evolved into existence”
– JW: “If plants feel pain then the problem of suffering has just got another level bigger… if you want to maintain a religious worldview and say that plants feel pain those two things don’t necessarily go together”
01:07: 42 A Better World?
– “Things get very weird once you go too far into the future… It’s easy to imagine near-term… if every human globally had adequate food and healthcare… reduce levels of war and disease and extreme poverty… eliminating factory farming… the things that humans directly do that are not necessary… most or all animal agriculture… animal experimentation… using animals…”
– “…the trajectories that I would hope that we are already on… there is a lot of movement to fix human problems there is a much, much, much smaller movement… to try to fix the issues of animal suffering…”
– Obvious physical vs. emotional and psychological suffering. Latter “much more difficult… Getting better methods of understanding psychological suffering and then addressing it in humans and non-humans could be one of those next phases”
– “We do some of that already… psychologists… mindfulness and meditation… healthy social relationships…”
– “Then you have to talk about wild animals… invertebrates…”
– “Use intelligence and technology and political global willpower to try to improve the wellbeing for as many beings as we possibly can.”
– “Trying to find configurations or ways that we can at least not cause extra harm.”
– “Human society and technological advancement could play a big role in helping us with some of these things…”
– “AI could, if we get it right, could be a very powerful tool we could use to help us with improving wellbeing”
– Animal exploitation and agriculture: “Unfortunately there’s probably not a silver bullet”
– “So deeply engrained in every facet of society… legal… businesses… culture… religion…”
– “Humans view other animals as resources… calories… nutrition… taste… If you don’t have an ethical reason to not to use a resource then people are going to find all kinds of different ways to use the resource”
– “Animals have not been able to collectively organise and advocate for rights”
– “A diversity of approaches that tackles these different pillars… vegan outreach… educating people… alt-protein space… legal reform [and incremental advancements]…”
– “We should be investing across all of these fronts… seeing which of them we have underinvested in that seem to be showing current promise… a portfolio mix.”
– The risks that portfolio approaches lead to fragmentation or disorganisation
– “The farmed animal advocacy movement has shifted to try to have a more global mindset in the last 5-10 years”
– “There’s a world in which it makes sense to invest no money, for example, in the US or the UK animal advocacy movement and instead send 100% of it to other countries… there’s also a world in which potentially it makes sense to invest all of your animal advocacy resources into a single country… to try to completely transform society… then use that as the example”
– “The best thing that I could find that seemed like a gap… it is challenging to get connected to a form of animal advocacy that is a right fit for your skills and your interests – and to just be connected to the animal advocacy space more broadly”
– “There’s a lot of organisations doing great work… but they often do great work separate from each other…”
– “I saw all this people power that we seemed to be missing out on because people did not know all the ways that they could help… people were disconnected and isolated from each other”
– “If we could capture more of this people power… keep people in this space longer… help with that coordination… take the whole dial of the movement and just turn it up… increase the impact”
– “I couldn’t find something… this is my thing… I’m going to try to make this [Connect For Animals] happen”
– Other community platforms like Beyond Animal and Hive and animal advocacy conferences like VARC and AVA vs. Connect For Animals as a mass accessible platform that can help people engage then deepen their involvement
– “We want to be some of the first steps that they take”
01:29:30 Follow Steven
– Connect For Animals (Create an account, sign up for the newsletter and explore!)
Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop.