Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and on the Sentientism podcast here.
Jesse Tandler is Managing Director of the New Roots Institute. He oversees programming, people operations, and implementation of New Roots Institute’s strategy. Jesse is a writer, academic, and has been an educator for nearly two decades. He earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 2002 and an MFA from the New School in 2007. Shortly thereafter, he began teaching high school students about the ethics of our food culture. Later, during his PhD work, Jesse continued to include environmental and animal ethics on the syllabi of his undergraduate classes at the City University of New York, where for five years he taught philosophy, literature, writing, and rhetoric. In 2017, he moved to Los Angeles to apply his years of research and educational experience in the non-profit sphere. Outside of New Roots Institute, you may find him practicing yoga, appreciating beauty in its myriad forms, reading in one of his preferred languages, or teaching food politics at UCLA.
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!
01:09 Welcome
02:55 Jesse’s Intro
– Continental philosophy, teaching food politics and running New Roots Institute (was the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition)
03:32 What’s Real?
– Jewish pre-school
– “I assumed there was a god because that’s what the adults told me”
– At 6-7 yrs old “It seemed slightly improbable to me because there was no other evidence for it”
– At 4-5 yrs “I started getting really concerned about death and what was going to happen when I died… the annihilation of my consciousness”
– “I asked my dad and he said ‘of course there’s no god’… I felt validated actually”
– Next 15 years “a very atheistic worldview… probably some contempt for religion and people who believed in something that seemed completely impossible to me… I was pretty loud about it…”
– “Very few atheists around me…” A 9th grade debate: “Is there a god… it was pretty much me against the class”
– “It became a point of identity for me… in middle school and high school”
– “Some of my points of identity – like being a meat-eater – had changed drastically”
– College at Berkeley, psychedelics “It opened me up to the possibility that I might just not be seeing everything… my five senses were limited… I had a circumscribed intellect… it was unlikely I had access to whatever the reality out there is.”
– “Us looking at the universe is like a dog looking at the TV… the dog has no idea what’s going on with the TV… I barely have any idea…”
– 2 layers: phenomenon “what we experience” then “something else going on that we just don’t really have access to – maybe some kind of spiritual access.. intuitive access.. but we can’t figure out empirically.”
– “I’m actually not sure how much it matters what that fundamental reality is that we can’t access… I still have to behave as though this world is this naturalistic thing that I’m experiencing.”
– “The understanding that there is more gives me a humility and more compassion”
– “I might not believe that fundamentally we have free will.. but it definitely appears that way… I have to hold myself accountable on that level… I still have to behave with choice.”
– “I’m looking at things at a very particular scale… my table… is actually mostly space… that’s definitely not the way I’m experiencing it”
– “I operate as though the world is naturalistic because I’m not sure how else to operate in it”
– JW: How our intuitions work better re: “middle sized dry goods” and not so well for philosophy of mind or the foundations of physics
– JW: Open-mindedness and humility vs. arbitrary / fabricated beliefs
– @Conspiritualitypodcast and the risks of people in the yoga / wellness / mysticism worlds can slip into conspiracism, cults and far-right worldviews
– We need to disagree about reality… but without undermining our compassion for and relationality with those we’re disagreeing with
– JW: Actual reality, socially constructed reality, cognitive reality (and the degree to which they’re correlated)
20:38 What Matters?
– “The journey was definitely away from the certainty that I had about what was right and wrong and who was right and wrong”
– “Adolescence… lack of maturity… being able to intellectually dominate most of my friends”
– “I had enough rhetorical agility that I could convince myself that because they didn’t’ have a satisfactory answer… that I was right… not being able to fully empathise and see people and listen”
– at 16 reading Nietzsche “took this stance of amorality… of being above it in some way… not really recognising that I was just taking on a different form of morality”
– “…my position became more and more relational and about compassion mostly because that was my moral intuition… what felt right to me”
– “Recognising it as a feeling and spirituality over some solid ethics that is totally a matter of right and wrong… right and wrong do seem to be constructs”
– “If someone agrees with me… that hurting others unnecessarily is wrong… I feel much more confident that we can have a conversation where they might come to the conclusion that farming animals unnecessarily is wrong… that consuming animals might be wrong”
– “If someone starts with the premise that it is not wrong to harm others for their pleasure… I can’t really argue with that… that’s just the premise they’re starting from… I’m not going to be able to persuade them logically – of anything.”
– Sperber and Mercier’s paper on Rationality: “The thesis is that rationality is just a tool of persuasion… we use it to persuade others… to persuade ourselves… it doesn’t have any kind of access to truth or reality.”
– JW: Rational ethics as a response to a fear of sentimentality and feeling? Vs. feminist care ethics / relational approaches. But aren’t even the “rational” ethical systems ultimately founded on some sort of care? Does that mean we can find some broad consensus (e.g. not needlessly harming others)?
– JW: Is the drive for a perfect, objective, externally defined morality, amongst the non-religious, a hangover from religious modes of thinking?
– “It’s not even a choice… I can’t function without employing some kind of morality… we’re constructed in a way that it’s just impossible to escape”
– “If it’s not persuasive to other people then it’s destabilising to us”
35:38 Who Matters?
– JW: How someone can write a 600 page book on “ethics” without mentioning non-human animals once
– “It’s a little embarrassing that it wasn’t until my mid-late 20’s that I really started thinking about it [non-human animal ethics]”
– Working with high-school and college students
– “I had what was supposed to be a pretty stellar education… I took philosophy courses at these elite institutions… the information about what was happening with animals… how we were treating them… how we might challenge our thinking about that treatment… was not really ever brought up”
– “It was astounding to me… how did I get through this education… and not think about this very glaring piece of information…”
– “I didn’t hear the word vegan until I was in college… I thought ‘that’s weird!’… now… everyone knows what vegan means… knows someone who is vegan… there is a lot more awareness”
– “I didn’t know a single vegetarian in high school”
– Asking a vegetarian college friend why he didn’t challenge Jesse more: “’Everyone’s on their own journey’… well yeah but you can expedite the journey a little bit… I would have appreciated it so I didn’t continue in my ignorance.”
– “There was no one around me who was pushing me on to thinking”
– Teaching a food politics course at UCLA… intersection of race, gender and speciesism… watching Dominion… carnism, ecofeminism, utilitarianism, deontology, essay by Aph Ko… “So many of them say… this was so eye-opening… really blown away by this”
– “It took a couple of weeks… really digging into it… fully challenging it… for a lot of them [UCLA students] to come to the conclusion that… yeah – this is wrong and something that I don’t want to participate in.”
– “A number of them still say… ‘I care about the suffering… but I do think it’s OK to still eat them’… that’s after really thinking it through and seeing how other people in class are responding.”
– “Morality is in most cases socially reasoned”
– “As long as Sentientism or veganism isn’t the normative stance you’re probably not going to exceed 10% of the population that’s moralistic enough to go against the grain”
– “You need to change the social pressures… get everyone thinking that everyone else thinks that this is wrong… that I’m going to be judged for… consuming animals or talking about them in a speciesist way…”
– “It’s that fear of judgement that will end up shifting the morality much more than any kind of individual inception”
– “I read ‘Eating Animals’ and I immediately called up my mother and I said ‘read this – this will mess you up’”
– Fairly amenable family. Friends more mixed. “I was very frustrated and angry about it… it seems so obvious… how do these people around them not see it?”
– Focusing on communication and receptivity (in self and others) because “my frustration and anger was not persuasive at all… it was making people defensive”
– Instead “focusing on building the relationship and the trust – and letting that trust be a channel for communication that, if the other person was open, could influence them”
– Rather than ignoring the relationship and the trust and “going straight for trying to get someone to see how wrong they were”
– “Learning how to really listen… asking questions… being the example… establishing trust… be curious”
46:47 A Better World?
– New Roots Institutes work: students in classrooms and also training students to change things structurally
– Changes in people’s environments… vegan options, default menu options change, broader awareness of factory farming, impacts on environment / workers / public health… “those gradual feedback loops”
– “We’re working on both the behavioural and the structural levels… that’s the most persuasive way to do it”
– “The way we treat animals, the way we treat humans, the food system – they’re all very connected. So I don’t see the possibility of influencing one without influencing the others.”
– New Roots’ 5 core values, including “humble self-awareness… The movement as a whole could use that significant amount of uncertainty and humility… be curious… listen to others”
– The “inclusive collaboration” value… “combining those things is a way to increase compassion in general… for animals, for nature… increasing reverence”
– “We think we’re the pinnacle of evolution… trees are definitely more advanced than we are”
– “Having that kind of openness… makes us more reverent and respectful of all existence… which should have an affect on the food system… how we treat each other… how we treat other animals”
– Having a New Roots Institute vision but “for me it’s very much about the process”
– “We just happen to focus on factory farming because… it’s a huge locus of suffering… it’s also how we get into classrooms. If we were to focus on animal agriculture in general that’s much more limiting… who we have access to… who is going to listen… but pretty much everyone can agree that factory farming is messed up.”
– “So we can work on instilling these values… that are going to make for this more compassionate world by focusing on factory farming… It’s not that we only care about factory farming but it is our access point.”
– Sentience Institute surveys showing strong US consumer support for ending factory farming and even banning slaughterhouses
– Some people “are looking for another way of continuing to eat animals [instead of factory farming]…”
– “If a student brings up ‘where can I get eggs that are more humane?’… it really depends on what your ethics are… but here are some questions you might want to ask yourself… even in the most ‘ethical’ farms… male chicks are still killed… hens are killed after their egg production drops…”
– “Get them to connect their values to what they’re doing rather than telling them ‘this is bad – we’re against this’. We don’t have to say ‘we’re against this’ because they’re probably going to be against it.”
– “As soon as we tell them what we think they should do… we’re going to be creating resistance in them”
– JW: The Sentientist Education challenge is as much about removing “bad education” that takes people away from naturalism and sentiocentric compassion as it is doing “good education”
– Could working with younger kids backfire because “the parents have to snuff it out”… “We work with high school and college students… they have more choice… also they run campaigns in their schools”
– Younger kids: “It’s great to get to them younger… but I actually don’t know that their ideas are so crystallised by high school or college that they can’t be led towards caring about animals… in fact I think that’s the time when it could possibly make the most sense… and they’re most likely to rebel against their parents and social norms.”
– JW: Working with religious education (RE) teachers in the UK on introducing Sentientism as a worldview
– “That’s another reason why our approach is not proscriptive… even though we have a clear agenda… we do want to end factory farming.”
– “The way to do that is not to proscribe… it’s to make people aware, to get them to think, also to get them not just to hear the information but to speak these things aloud… in front of other people… It matters when they’re hearing each other say these things… when they’re hearing themselves say it.”
– Desirability / confirmation biases “you’re not going to get them to think critically by just giving them information”
– “Curiosity… getting them to think about it rather than convincing them of it… that’s going to undermine the trust.”
– “We’re not going in there with ‘The Truth’… this is a vision of a world that we happen to think is more beautiful… we’re not going in there with righteousness… it’s very easy for vegans to be dogmatic.”
– JW: How veganism as an identity can be a blocker or a defence mechanism “’I am not a vegan so…’”
– New Roots has reached hundreds of thousands of students via 1-2 hour classes “That’s step one”
– “Step two is the recruitment… we have this leadership programme… we want to be pulling students from those schools… building these advocacy ecosystems… communities… who to work with”
– The intensive summer course to train 100-150 students, then partnering to work on campaigns through the school year… “cutting the oat milk surcharge… making oat milk the default… getting more vegan options on the menu… getting UCLA to go 50% plant-based in their dining halls by 2027… model UN to go completely plant-based… changing the social norms on those campuses”
– “We’ve seen in our data that the % of students identifying as vegan and vegetarian increases over the course of the years… there does seem to be social influence there”
– “Providing the movement to end factory farming with the trained, embedded talent”
– Connecting more to the environmental movement “to get our students involved there”… “the environmental movement still is not really recognising factory farming as a major driver of climate change and other environmental degradation”
– “Social change… it starts in smaller groups around the periphery… that’s how you get the greater social influence”
– So far New Roots Institute works in 8 cities with ~150 new students each year “to make sure we’re getting the model right… then it’s very scalable… we can just hire new educators… there’s nothing that’s intrinsically limiting it”
– Linear change vs. tipping points? “My sense is that there will be tipping points… once you get to a certain point in how many people are professing a particular ideological stance the social pressure on everyone else in those groups becomes too much to resist.”
– “We don’t really have to convince people to be compassionate… we just have to get them to recognise how their behaviour might be misaligned with their deeper principles”
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Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon.