Step 14: how are we doing? Part 1, with other humans

Step 13 shared some thoughts on what we might mean when we talk about “the sacred”: a number of ideas, especially William James’s, converged on our inability to come up with one, universally applicable definition of it.

At the same time, we are trying to work out how we are currently doing in the contemporary West when it comes to interacting with the sacred in the material.

That means we are going to have to give this a go without being able to pin down exactly what it is that we are looking for. We are dealing with two questions rather than one: firstly, are there some workable ideas regarding the sacred that we can use as a kind of yardstick, even if there can’t be one universally applicable definition of it? Secondly, if and wherever we find that we don’t measure up to our yardstick, why is that? Is it because we don’t currently measure up in our relationships with anyone at all, or is it exclusively when it comes to non-humans that we don’t measure up, while our interaction with other humans is fine on that front?

—> Off the top of your head, from your memory of what has been said so far, what would need to go on a list of features to make up a family resemblance of the sacred? (A family resemblance, in this context, is a list of features that most members of a family will have most of. They don’t all have to have all the features, but they will each have enough of them to be recognisable as members.) Is there anything that you would add that has not been said in previous steps?

Here is a list of some ideas that have been mentioned.

Leroy Little Bear, Viola Cordova, Spinoza, William James, and John Dewey all, each in their own way, talked about allowing space for a world that is in motion. They acknowledge Newtonian physics as part of the picture, but they also, each in their own way, talk about the world being more than just a piece of machinery, and deserving of space and respect to actualise this “more”. In the same vein, Vine Deloria (and also, for example, Shay Welch and Brian Burkhart) talk about truth as “respectful success”.

PRATEC, relatedly, stressed the importance of our responsiveness in relationship - as did Brian Burkhart’s jazz analogy.

Anne Waters pointed out that our maturing in relationship can be sacred.

All this can sound unusual at first if we are more accustomed to thinking about the sacred as being in the next world than in this one! I find Raimond Gaita’s ideas helpful when that happens: Raimond Gaita talks about our interactions being meaningful in the same breath as he (occasionally) talks about the sacred. When we are trying to learn from and with a worldview that experiences the sacred in our relationships in this world, looking for the meaningful as another piece in the mosaic makes perfect sense. A famous example of Gaita’s thinking here is that “To piss the spider along the channel of the urinal to the hole leading to the sewer is worse than just casually washing it down the hole, but not because it is worse for the spider.”

—> If you are looking for exact references, can you remember where to go? Step 1 and step 2 will tell you where to find them.

Meaningful interaction is mutually responsive interaction. When one side is treated as an object (Gaita’s spider!), any meanings created won’t be co-creative ones.

It looks, just from this rough and ready sketch of some key points made earlier, as if something almost amusing may have happened in the contemporary West - almost amusing because it could also give us a lot of trouble when trying to learn to reconnect with the sacred in the material. It looks as if some of our control mechanisms, the very same ones that we wanted to have so that we could make sense of the world, may be stopping us from participating with an ever co-creative world in a way that makes sense.

When we look around us, much of the objectification that we may see no longer happens by anyone’s active choice, but because it is baked into the way we have allowed our structures and institutions to develop. Popular (albeit simplified) interpretations of the “survival of the fittest” idea have been used to normalise inconsideration, and Jacques Ellul’s work has shown that a form of standardisation that stifles respectful responsiveness has spread beyond a tipping point where it may, by now, be difficult to overcome.

In other words, we needn’t be surprised if we find that, as we try to co-create mutually responsive relationships with others, we may well come up against some roadblocks.

—> Before we look at some case studies of how we are doing at the moment, which of the two ideas that we toyed with at the beginning of step 14 do you think is the most likely, and why? Are we going to find that it is “just” with non-human nature that we struggle to relate to the sacred in the material, and we’re fine with other humans? Or is it going to be the other way round? Or maybe a bit of both? Or is there something else at play entirely?

Let’s start with a case study of a small group of humans who had the chance to get to know each other quite well as they worked together. Step 12 talked about team sports being an example of a context where performative knowledge processes (in other words, mutually responsive forms of shared learning and creation) may find fertile ground to develop.

In the run-up to the Rio 2016 Olympics, Team GB’s women’s eight was on track to become the first of its kind to win a medal. Other Team GB boats had, of course (think Steve Redgrave!), but never the women’s eight. The USA were pretty much unbeatable at that time, but Silver or Bronze were within reach at Rio, all being well. The eight’s journey has been documented by a couple of its members. So we are going to be outsiders, of course, because none of us rowed in that boat - but we are going to be outsiders with access to a couple of first-hand accounts.

Early results were encouraging that spring of 2016. The eight was going well. About halfway through the Olympic Season, two rowers who were, at the time, rowing in a small boat which was also qualified for the Olympics, challenged for seats in the eight. The challengers were superior to several members of the eight on paper (ergometer scores and so on). In other words, it looked as if they might be able to make the eight go faster, and thus increase the boat’s chances of winning a medal. Seat racing was duly scheduled. (Seat racing is when crew members are swapped in and out one by one, and the eight does a series of timed pieces to see which combination is the fastest.) To create the level playing field that is needed in order for seat racing to produce realistic results, the challengers were told about the eight’s way of rowing as it currently was, and off they all went.

And here’s the thing: the challengers, superior on paper, were not only beaten. They were beaten by such a wide margin on the first day that the planned second day of seat racing was cancelled as a result.

In other words, there must have been a performative knowledge process going on. If it had just been a case of the eight following some standardised instruction on the “one best way to work”, then the challengers would have been able to do it better than them - and they weren’t.

To an extent, this may have been down to what John Dewey said earlier about our spoken language only going so far: some things have to be felt. Rowing is one of these. But these were all rowers coming out of the same training base where they all rowed several times a day, day in, day out, and in different combinations over the years. Both challengers had been part of Team GB women’s eights in previous years, just not of this particular eight, in this particular year. Much as John Dewey has a point when he says spoken language only goes so far, there is no way that this day of seat racing could have played out the way that it did without there also being an element of mutually responsive, shared learning and creation going on between the team members that made any training notes become outdated by the time the eight took to the water the following day. Whatever else the eight may have been, they were also Ella Fitzgerald and her band, co-creating their shared rhythm at the same time as learning what it might be - and mutual responsiveness, allowing agency to move into relationship, was one of our items on the list of the above family resemblance.

The list had more items; one of these was mutual respect. A longer version of the women’s eight’s story is in the longer version of this work (the version that also has all the references). It’s a good story, and it is in chapter 14. The eight rows on with its crew members as they were, and they work like a jazz band, co-creating their rhythm for Rio from the experience everyone brings to the boat, and at the same time making it their own, new creation. At the end, the eight win their silver, and it looks, from the way that they talk about their relationships and about how they went about their shared learning and creation, as if they came quite close to the family resemblance above. We can’t be sure, of course: whatever we may pick up even from their first-hand accounts, we remain outsiders.

When we think back to step 12, the story of the UK’s bus drivers in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic is also relevant in this context of holding up our interaction between fellow humans to the yardstick of our family resemblance. This second case study played out very differently from that of the women’s eight. UK bus drivers suffered a disproportionate number of deaths in the early days of the pandemic. This was at a time when no one infectious was supposed to have any need to get on a bus and cough all over the driver: self-isolation payments were, in theory, available if someone was ill or a close contact of someone who was ill. In practice, though, it turned out that the self-isolation payments didn’t work: 60% of the claims were turned down. This meant that some people who should have stayed at home simply couldn’t afford to. Then they got on a bus to work, and they coughed all over the driver. The rest is history.

The trouble, here, is not that the process turned out to have some teething troubles. Most processes probably do. The trouble was that nothing could be done when these teething troubles reared their heads. The 60% of self-isolation payment claims that were turned down, weren’t all turned down on the same day. They were turned down over time, and, during most of that time, someone already knew about the first ones that hadn’t worked. No one actually learnt from this knowledge. Due process was all that there was, and it continued to be followed to the letter, even once it had become clear that it didn’t work. Jacques Ellul’s book is full of information on how we manage to paint ourselves into a corner where tweaking one process throws other processes around it into disarray, and then we no longer have any real option of tweaking it because the cure (of tweaking the process that doesn’t work and causing disruption to other processes) has arguably become worse than the disease (of living with a process which does nothing, but which at least leaves other processes around it to work in peace).

With regards to the family resemblance, the bus driver case study falls at the first fence, then: there is no responsiveness, no co-creation in relationship, no shared learning, no jazz band. As for respect, I suppose at first glance we could say leaving all the other processes to work in peace respects the tax payer - but that doesn’t work for Spinoza, and it doesn’t work for Brian Burkhart’s jazz. Respect involves playing for a sweet spot where the individual jazz player is good for the band, and where the band is simultaneously good for the individual jazz player. It doesn’t involve treating bus drivers as if they don’t count.

There is no agency in relationship in the bus driver example, and there is no respectful success. An interesting point bubbles up to the surface when we think back to Raimond Gaita’s spider above: no one involved in the bus driver fiasco can have been fully alive to the meanings created by what went on. If they had been, they couldn’t have carried on going along with it once the problem was known. In other words, the fact of our elevating due process to a position of sole reign succeeded in crowding out any meanings involved.

With regards to the family resemblance, the bus driver case study represents our failure on just about all the fronts that there are.

It is just as well that we can look at the Rio 2016 women’s eight, too, and know that we have it in us to come alive as Dewey’s entire creatures as we learn and co-create with each other, even in the contemporary West.

—> Do you have a case study or two in mind that you think is relevant to step 14? How does yours play out; is it more like the eight, or more like the bus driver fiasco, or is it something else entirely? Why?