My "ideological" journey: from nationalism to altruism
I've been alive for 23 years, and in that short time I've had some pretty hefty shifts in my thinking about the world. This blog post is an attempt to chronicle those shifts, to explore why they happened, and potentially to help us unravel the maze that is our own beliefs.
Back in the good old days of the 1990s, when coronavirus was just a funny word, I was born into a Welsh-speaking family in North Wales. Shortly afterwards, there was a historic referendum in Wales, asking the people of Wales whether they believed Wales should have an Assembly. By a meager 6,721 votes (50.3 to 49.7%), Wales declared it wanted an Assembly, and Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru (National Assembly for Wales) joined me in its infancy. A desire for self-government and independence was on the rise in my home country, and it was in this context I grew up.
When I was around 9 year's old, I regularly went around all the computers in my primary school and changed their search browsers to "gwgl.com" - the Welsh google page. Those agrieved by its unfamiliarity would frequently change it back to Google, but I was relentless in my quest. At this young an age, I felt compelled to spread Welsh everywhere I went and impose it upon others. However, some of my more nationalistic teachers still didn't appreciate my efforts. Towards the end of primary school, I was accused by a teacher of betraying Wales and my ancestors for having misbehaved during a class on the Celts. I can still feel 10 year old Dewi's shame. This is clearly ridiculous, but affected me deeply at the time.
During my time at high school, I became even more patriotic, and felt strongly that everyone in Wales should be speaking Welsh. I couldn't believe that so many of my Welsh-speaking friends were speaking English with each other, and that Welsh-speaking parents spoke English with their children. This was unfathomable to me. My mind could not process that people would have different passions and motivations in life, and didn't actually care which language they used to convey their feelings to each other. I also felt (and still do feel) that they were missing out on so many lovely features of our community, that was done through the medium of Welsh and with the Welsh language as the glue that kept us together.
The neglect of my peers towards Welsh culture strengthened my feelings of anger against "the English," who in my mind clearly led to this despicable situation by hypnotising all the Welsh people with their Welsh Not, Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, the death of Llywelyn ein Llyw Olaf, etc. etc. I also felt incredibly depressed about the future prospects of the culture I loved, as it seemed all but doomed to me. I was utterly failing to inspire some of my friends to speak Welsh with each other in school, and more and more English was heard on the playground.
Towards the end of high school, I started learning about politics, and opened my eyes to the wider world outside of little old Wales. I remember sitting in the computer room and having to research the political parties for some project or other, and being shocked to realise that I knew absolutely nothing about UK politics, who was in charge, what they believe, what their track record was, and why everyone around me seemed to hate the current government. During this time, a friend of mine mentioned to me that he thought my thinking on "the English" was pretty problematic and verging on racism, and I also met what I can only describe as a Welsh extremist who also called me a "traitor" for considering going to university in England, and all of a sudden everything I had previously felt so strongly about came into question in my mind. For the first time ever, I asked myself: why do I believe this?
The romanticised past I yearned for, the purity of a Wales without English, the eradication of those who had oppressed us, suddenly made a lot less sense to me. Without a doubt, the UK Government (and British companies) have done some absolutely terrible things all over the world, from the slave trade to the Bengal famine and beyond, but that wasn't what was driving the nationalist sentiment around me and within me during my teenage years. We learned at school how bad the English had treated us, the Welsh, and I felt we needed to do something about it. This was the problem I felt compelled to solve: avenging my ancestors and gaining independence for Wales. It wasn't that we were being taught that the current system was systematically oppressing Welsh people, it was the long history that carried with it so much emotion that was driving our anger towards today's government. (A small disclaimer here that this does not reflect everyone's experience of education in Wales. I'm sure many people didn't have overtly nationalistic teachers or just ignored these types of lessons.)
Then I learnt about climate change and biodiversity loss. What a shock that was. What did it matter if Welsh was going extinct, if the human race would get their first, potentially the only source of intelligence life in the entire universe, along with the rest of the animals on our planet? This was the first time in my life I really appreciated perspective, scale, and importance. Depending on what your perspective is (what you love, where you're from, what your parents tell you, etc.), you will often have completely different beliefs about what is important, regardless of the actual scale of that problem and the amount of suffering it causes. I realised that the decline of my language was not actually causing that much suffering in the scheme of things, but climate change and biodiversity could ruin us and was already leading to huge suffering in poorer countries. I did the only thing I could think to do: I put down my revision notes in the middle of my A Level exams, and spent four days in my garden building a pond. Maybe not quite the most cost-effective intervention, but hey, we've all got to start somewhere.
A few months later, I rocked up at Durham University for the first time, having just been on a two week mad-one visiting my friends in all the main universities in Wales and drinking a ridiculous amount of alcohol. This continued for some time in Durham, and I'm sure many of you who were with me in first year at Chad's can attest to the madness. At Chad's, we were blessed to be fully catered during first year, and we'd eat together for all our meals. Here, I met a very strange species for the first time in my life: omnivores-turned-vegetarian. I relentlessly interrogated many of my vegetarian peers, trying to understand why they would sacrifice the opportunity to eat those lovely chicken breasts. Some thought it was healthier. Some didn't want to hurt animals ("but they're just farm animals!" I thought, assuming farmed animals weren't worthy of moral consideration). Some said it was for the environment. It was this final point that niggled my conscience.
I spent a few months after turning 19 researching this point further, trying to understand the link between animal agriculture and environmental destruction, both through climate change and biodiversity loss. It turns out my tofu-eating friends were correct: eating meat does indeed cause much more planet destruction than eating the equivalent plant-based meal. I'd never eaten a vegetarian meal in my life, and was quite a fussy eater, so I was in a bit of a quandary. My values, as a self-described environmentalist, were in conflict with my way of life. I bit the bullet, and asked a friend of mine to join me in eating no meat for a week. That week turned into "until exams are over, then we'll go for a lovely raw steak." That steak was never consumed.
That summer of 2016, after my first year at university, I went on a charity expedition to Borneo "to save the orangutans and the turtles." It was here my thinking really developed. I read a book by the moneyless man, Mark Boyle, and came to the conclusion that money was the source of all evil. Down with the capitalist system! (Disclaimer: I no longer believe this, there is very little nuance in that perspective.) I also witnessed immense suffering at the wildlife sanctuary we were volunteering at, including a crocodile whose face had been ripped apart but was forced to continue to just about survive in a small cage as a zoo spectacle, and I started to question myself again: why am I vegetarian just for the environment, if eating meat also causes billions of animals to suffer every year? And what about eggs and milk, don't they also cause suffering? I pledged to go vegan, and started to advocate for all those around me to stop eating meat too. Suddenly, seeing people eat meat became morally outrageous to me, in the same way that I used to sit in disbelief as I listened to my Welsh-speaking friends speak English with each other. Why were my friends and family still eating meat, when it was causing so much destruction to our planet and to our descendents, and so much suffering to animals today? This is something I still ponder regularly.
Upon returning to Durham in October 2016, I joined the vegetarian and vegan society, stopped eating all animal products, and started walking around town in socks and sandals. I clearly had to live up to the stereotype. I had co-founded a charity toastie bar with a friend of mine in college before I went vegetarian, the friend who pledged to go vegetarian with me for the months before exams, and we were still serving meat at the toastie bar upon our return to university. This niggled at me for quite some months, as I was not only going out and buying meat for our customers, I was also forcing many of the other chefs who were vegetarian to handle that meat. The charities we were supporting were also animal welfare charities, and this seemed ludicrous to me that we were doing all this work to raise funds for animal welfare while giving students ham and cheese toasties.
One day in April 2017, we decided to get rid of all meat from the toastie bar, and turned it into a vegetarian toastie bar. We consulted no one, and basically forced it on the college. It was not our brightest move, and it led to months of drama in college. During this drama, my friend and I repeatedly stood up in front of the whole college and made the case for the toastie bar being vegetarian. We had a lot of pushback, and we made some crazy speeches, involving dying horses in Patagonia, the end of life as we know it, selling our organs on the black market, and offsetting murder by donating to Oxfam. Remarkably, we emerged victorious, with 95% of the college supporting us. An awesome feeling.
So by this point, I'd gone from being a Welsh nationalist to an environmentalist to an animal rights person. I still cared about my Welsh culture and the environment, but the billions of animals that are suffering in factory farms was my greatest concern. It was around this time a friend of mine suggested I watch a TED talk on a funny-sounding movement: "Effective Altruism." I had no idea what altruism meant, and the "effective" part sounded pretty pretentious, but I watched it anyway. "Wholly molly!" was my response.
Effective Altruism (EA) is a social movement that's trying to determine what the best things we can do to improve the world are, using evidence and reason. It was exactly the community of people I was looking for, and I became obsessed. EA introduced many many new things to me, including rationality, frameworks for determining how important various "cause areas" are, huge amounts of resources for better understanding the world we live in and all its uncertainties, and a path forward for what I can plausibly do to contribute to actually having an impact in improving the world. EA is a very young and changing movement, always adapting to new information and better arguments, so it's very dynamic and can't really be pinned down to any stationary beliefs, but I'll provide my current reading of it below.
People in the EA community want to maximally help make the world a better, happier place, with less suffering. This includes all humans alive today as well as all future humans, and any animals that can plausibly suffer. The current areas of greatest focus, based on the currently used framework of "scale" (how big of a problem is it), "neglectedness" (how little attention does it receive globally), and "solvability" (can we actually do anything to improve the situation), are:
Existential risks. These are things that could lead to the end of the human race such as extreme climate change, super-deadly pandemics, and uncontrolled emerging technologies like AGI. Preventing these risks from killing us all helps ensure that trillions of future happy humans can exist, and I doubt all of humanity dying would be an enjoyable affair either. Somehow, this field of research has almost entirely been neglected until recently.
Global health and poverty. Around 8% of the world still live in extreme poverty, without acceess to basic healthcare and nutrition, and billions of people's lives could be massively improved with more access to basic resources that we take entirely for granted in the UK. "Solving" this might be hard, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try, as well as do a lot more research into what is most likely to actually work.
Animal welfare. Over 70 billion animals are slaughtered every year for our animal flesh habit, and these animals almost certainly live terrible and suffering-filled lives. It is more efficient environmentally in terms of land use, water use, and co2 production to not eat meat, and yet we still inflict this unnecessary suffering upon these animals. Technologies like plant-based and cultivated meat seem most promising in ending this problem at the moment.
Promoting research and cooperation. There are enormous uncertainties surrounding the above, and it's likely there are even greater problems facing the world that we haven't even thought about or haven't emerged yet. Having better philosophical foundations for tackling these questions, more research into our priorities and what risks we face, and better mechanisms for making decisions and working together are likely to make the world's inhabitants much better off in the long-term.
This is not exhaustive! Learn more at the 80,000 hours website.
It is in this community I now find myself, presently as president of EA Durham, and I continue to be inspired by and learn from its many members worldwide. The world is far more complex than I'd previously appreciated, but there are also many things we know with high certainty would make the world a significantly better place, so finding and implementing the most effective ways we can bring about those changes is an awesome and inspiring challenge for all of us. It's likely my thinking will continue to evolve as I learn and think more, and EA as a movement will almost certainly change with time, and I'm excited for that journey. While I've been criticized in the past for "changing my mind on big issues," I still think that updating your beliefs after learning new information, backed by rigorous scientific evidence from reliable sources that you've deliberated over thoroughly, is something we should embrace, while pushing back against ideological silos that narrow our understanding of people and the world.
One outcome of my involvment in EA has been that I've taken the "Giving What We Can" pledge, to donate at least (and hopefully much more than) 10% of my lifetime income to effective charities or organisations working to improve the world and its inhabitants. The top 10% of my income is very unlikely to make my life much better, but could for example add enormous value to someone's life in a poorer country. If this isn't something you think you can do, have no fear, it's by no means a prerequisite to getting involved with Effective Altruism, although it is a very easy thing we can all do to increase the good we do in the world.
I'm now at the juncture where I've almost finished education, and have to decide how to start the rest of my life, and what path I want to follow or create for myself. I've always been "mission-oriented," wanting to solve certain problems, and I'm so grateful for all the work people in the EA community have done in breaking down the question of what the biggest problems in the world are and where we can have the biggest impact. Now all I have to do is decide which of these many problems I'm most passionate about, and how I can contribute most effectively using the skills I have and could develop. If only this was an easy question. I'll keep you updated.
