94: Let’s create more effective, compasionate narratives – Writer Alex Lockwood – Sentientist Conversation

We discuss the biggest questions: "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?" with scientists, celebrities, activists, writers and philosophers. The Sentientism worldview is "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." It's a simple, yet radical, philosophy that's grounded in reality (naturalistic epistemology) and has compassion for all sentient beings (mostly human and non-human animals). Naturalism & sentiocentrism combined.

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Alex (@alexlockwood & alexlockwood.co.uk) is a fiction & non-fiction writer. He is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies at Uni of Sunderland. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University & has published stories, essays & journalism in a wide range of magazines, journals & newspapers. He has a particular fascination with how we write about our engagements and relations with the nonhuman world. Alex’s debut non-fiction work, The Pig in Thin Air, was published with Lantern Books in March 2016. Alex was one of the founding team of Animal Rebellion, a director of The Save Movement & a member of the Vegan Society‘s Research Advisory Committee. His “Planting Value” report for  @The Vegan Society  lays out plans for a transition towards a vegan UK plantingvalueinfood.org.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:
00:00 Welcome

01:11 Alex’s Intro

• A writer-academic-activist
• The challenge of focus!
• Private & public writing (e.g. COP26), being part of a network

05:10 What’s Real?

• Last week’s shamanic journeying ayahuasca retreat: “Asking deep questions about what it means to be a human being on this planet”
• Animist ontologies & methodologies
• Advocating for the non-human
• “Who is a person?… can we co-create this planet [in a way] that recognises the birthright of all beings”
• Growing up in working class, inner-city, South London council estates
• Catholic upbringing, but with some atheist family
• “School of hard knocks… spiritual & religious questions weren’t very real”
• Confirmed as Catholic, school run by monks & church every weekend… “Realising it was a symbolic story… it wasn’t taught as a fundamentalist truth”
• “Didn’t sit right with me that my very very kind & generous atheist grandfather (& his cats!) wasn’t going to go to heaven.”
• Experiences of connecting with our planet, the broader universal spirit… that have always been quite real to me
• …

…and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info and on YouTube.

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Thanks Graham.