Step 16: a case study of scientific research as conversation

Step 15 looked at the founding fathers of ethology moving closer to the scientistic end of the spectrum than at least Niko Tinbergen is likely to have wanted to. Then it looked at some examples of contemporary Western scientists who are critical of scientism, and who want to practise a form of science which is accepting of our own, and of others’, rationality embracing our mind’s interaction with our emotions and with our bodies. Finally, it looked at a recent case study of a scientist still allowing herself to be pulled over to the scientistic end of the spectrum in her failure to practise responsiveness in her interaction with a group of apes.

In other words, the pull towards objectifying forms of relationship with non-humans is real: as the conclusion of step 14 anticipated, we can expect roadblocks to appear as we try to learn alternatives to the sole reign of a Cartesian paradigm. The mind-body split, and the split between humans and non-human nature, are what many of us will be thinking when we are not actively thinking. It is also what the structures we have made over time will make it easy for us to assume.

Science is one example of humans wanting something that non-humans can give us (just that it’s information this time, not, say, fish for our dinner). Step 15 has shown that our scientific contexts don’t always make it easy for a scientist to practise forms of honourable harvest. And yet, if we want to learn from Indigenous philosophers, and if we want to learn in relationship and potentially interact with the sacred in the material, then openness to that is what the direction of travel is going to need to be.

So what happens when someone has a go at being different?!

Robin Wall Kimmerer relates the story of a postgraduate student whose project she supervised. The project developed from a group of Indigenous basket makers’ experience with the plant of sweetgrass.

Kimmerer encouraged her student to take a holistic approach from the start: sweetgrass was a plant of particular significance in Kimmerer’s Indigenous tradition. Also, she simply loved the plant, and it wasn’t long before the postgraduate student did, too, once she had had the chance to get to know it.

One thing that emphatically did not happen was ritual: the postgraduate felt that - being Western - she would have been gatecrashing a relationship that wasn’t hers to enjoy. Also, she had to be careful to stick to practices acceptable to the university where she worked. Her project’s relationship with the basket makers was close and cooperative, but ritual did not form part of it.

—> Can you remember where to go for exact references if you want them? Step 1 and step 2 will tell you where they are.

So what was the project all about? - Its research question was how the plant of sweetgrass responded to Indigenous ways of harvesting. Experience showed that sites where the basket makers harvested regularly were sites that responded with enhanced growth. Conversely, a site ignored for long enough would then show the plant “going away”. The basket makers’ customs and stories of honourable harvest also placed importance on not becoming greedy: overharvested sites would also show reduced growth. Within these customs, stories, and experiences, two different methods of honourable harvesting were possible, but the question of which of the two was preferable (if any) didn’t become the project’s main concern.

Right at the very beginning, things became heated at an initial presentation to the committee overseeing the research. Good Cartesians that they were, they wanted to stop the project in its tracks because to them, it was obvious that its hypothesis was nonsense: any human intervention, “honourable” or otherwise, had to be harmful to the plant. Understanding humans as part of nature’s balances (rather than outside these) just wasn’t part of their thinking when they weren’t actively thinking. Enhanced growth where the basket makers had been harvesting for their baskets didn’t need scientific investigation because it was obviously a misunderstanding from the start.

Kimmerer and the postgraduate had to fight for their project, but they prevailed, and the whole thing went ahead. Four plots were planted: one each for each method of honourable harvesting, one for overharvesting, and one control plot where noone harvested at all.

Protocol was meticulously followed and lab reports written, counting plants. Away from the lab report, though, the postgraduate and her basket maker friends simply loved the plant, and since there was no rule against that, they just enjoyed being with the plant and kept their enjoyment out of the report.

It turned out that honourable harvesting by humans did, in fact, help the plant grow. Both honourably harvested patches did better than the over- and underharvested ones. The committee, after initially shaking their heads again, in the end couldn’t help but accept that the study had been carried out correctly, and that this was its result, whether they had expected it or not. They did ask the postgraduate whether she thought the unharvested patch had had its feelings hurt and stopped growing.

I don’t know what exactly she said, only that the question was beside the point! We know from Marc Bekoff’s and Frans de Waal’s work (those wasps!) that capacities may use different pathways in different organisms’ heads, hearts, and bodies, without anyone’s therefore necessarily being “less”. The committee found itself isolated in its dismissive attitude to a richer conception of rationality. After all, Deloria’s synthetic attentiveness, Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge, Cajete’s focus on our pre-verbal mind, and Kymlicka’s and Donaldson’s work on our inability to communicate with non-humans being a learnt rather than an innate incompetence, all point in the same direction: once we stop requiring everyone to talk to us in the language of our lab reports, we can, in the contemporary West, too, meet non-humans halfway in relationship.

Prompted by their own experience with the plant, Kimmerer and the postgraduate then did some digging in relation to the contexts and meanings involved. Here is what they found: an ancient, evolutionary relationship between buffalo and grass resonates with the very same dynamic that the project looked at. Migratory buffalo harvested grass honourably as the herd ate and moved on before they had a chance to thin out the grass too much, and they not only left fertiliser behind (which the plant probably already finds isn’t to be sniffed at), but they also contributed to enhanced plant growth via an intricate biochemical balance between enzymes in buffalo saliva and grass.

And here’s the thing: Raimond Gaita (of spider and urinal fame in step 14) points out that many of our family customs in the contemporary West develop in relationship with the family dog. They just don’t happen to be verbal: without words, a dog or cat living with us as part of the family will, over time, become part of what we all do together, as shared, inter-species ways of doing things develop over time.

The basket makers’ ancestors lived in close proximity to buffalo.

Buffalo and grass were, right under their noses, role-modelling a relationship of honourable harvest.

It is no wonder that the Indigenous basket makers knew exactly what they were doing when they were honourably harvesting sweetgrass.

There is no need at all to abandon evolutionary theory before we can appreciate the role of story and relationship in the project’s dynamic: we only need to allow evolutionary theory to expand to let the rest of life’s story in, and to give biochemistry back its ability to carry some meaning.

Now, recognition of embodied dynamics being able to carry meaning rings a bell, doesn’t it - a “respect” bell. In contrast to the chimpanzee case study in step 15, in step 16’s case study of sweetgrass, buffalo, and grass, non-humans and their non-verbal communications are respected. And the outcome is interesting: it looks as if the postgraduate found more here than she had bargained for (after all, the official project was only about counting blades of grass, and she ended up tapping into an ancient evolutionary relationship and its honourable harvest story). It also looks as if her respect is at least part of the reason she found more. She didn’t just stick to the project plan, no matter what: while she did, diligently, fill in her lab report with every blade of grass counted, she didn’t let this stop her from seeing the wood for the trees. She allowed herself also to be open to unexpected ideas coming in - whether they were from the basket makers or from an ancient evolutionary relationship involving buffalo and grass.

I would argue that this ticks a number of boxes in terms of the family resemblance we were looking at: in terms of allowing space for inter-species jazz bands to form, and of regenerating our ability to interact with the sacred in the material, I will happily take the postgraduate student as a first role model when I have a go.

There is something else that is interesting about this case study. Remember our earlier question that made us look at relationships between humans first? The question of whether it might be our contemporary Western habit of thinking of non-humans as “things” that makes us treat them in undignified ways much of the time? So that it made sense for us to hold up some human-only case studies to the yardstick of the family resemblance first, to see whether our relationships with non-humans were the only place where we objectified others?

We have ended up with a mixed bag of results now, haven’t we. We have a small group of humans - the Rio 2016 women’s eight - where the yardstick returned a tentative “yes", or at least a “maybe”. Then we had a case study involving wider human society, and our failure to keep bus drivers safe when we could have, because we had created structures where any change to due process would have been disruptive to the smooth running of things. There, the yardstick returned a resounding “no way”. Then, we had due process reigning supreme once again and some apes’ distress being ignored, and another “no way”. Now, we have a second tentative “yes” - or at least a “maybe” - for the postgraduate student’s work with sweetgrass.

There seems to be a pattern emerging here. It doesn’t so much look as if we reliably do well with humans, and then reliably badly with non-humans (even though, for example, factory farms show that we may well have such a tendency). What is emerging, rather, is that we seem to do better in those relationships where we are prepared to get to know each other, as opposed to only knowing about each other. That’s what the women’s eight and the sweetgrass story had in common, and what the stories of the Covid busdriver fiasco and of the chimp study didn’t have.

Once we have become sensitised to this idea, we will start to see it everywhere: in PRATEC’s work on responsiveness, of course, and in Indigenous philosophers’ such as Brian Burkhart’s or Gregory Cajete’s - but also closer to home.

—> For an amusing - and thought-provoking - additional case study, feel free to do a search for Roger Fisher in the long version of this.

Jacques Ellul - as we saw in step 12 - shows that as we allow ever-spreading standardisation to become our be-all and end-all (or, as PRATEC would put it, allow custom to become replaced by habit), anything and anyone is in danger of becoming reduced to being no more than an element in a process, humans and non-humans alike.

So why are there still more factory farms exploiting non-humans than sweat shops exploiting humans in the world? And why, conversely, have we still seen human examples of objectification alongside non-human ones anyway?

I think Jonathan Glover has an (at least partial) answer to that, and it’s chilling. He shows that the problem is not only that whenever we think of someone as an “it” rather than as a “who”, it becomes easier to subject them to undignified treatment. That, on its own, would already be enough of a problem - but things seem to be even worse than that: Glover shows that once we have seen someone being subjected to undignified treatment, it becomes easier for us to think of them as an “it”. In other words, there can be a vicious cycle at work.

If we don’t like this - and I expect most of us won’t like this - then how do we break the vicious cycle?

Raimond Gaita thinks that whenever we give someone the benefit of the doubt (human or non-human), and give them space to be a “who” rather than an “it”, then some way of relating to each other, often non-verbal, will emerge.

It did between buffalo and grass above, after all, and it is still working, many years on, with their shared biochemistry evolving to support it. Whenever we give ourselves permission to remain open to surprises like that, we are not only being ethical, although this would be reason enough: we are also, at the same time, enhancing our scientific rigour because we are giving space to any wisdom embedded in non-verbal dynamics to emerge.

—> If you are interested in learning more about this, a group of Anishinaabeg authors have put together an anthology that looks at giving space to stories, too (so, not just to tangible non-humans!), to take their place as living partners in relationship. The anthology is listed as an extra here.