Step 17: on penguins’ feet, panda diplomacy, and friendships in Patagonia

Embracing a richer rationality, as step 16’s postgraduate student did - where emotional and embodied relationships and understandings are welcome alongside purely intellectual ones in the Cartesian sense, and no longer have to be excluded - is all well and good where it manages to happen, as the last few steps showed. We have now seen a number of times, though, that it is not always going to be easy for it to happen in the contemporary West! As contemporary Western societies, we have created structures and institutions that can make it difficult to cast our net wider than scientism allows. In step 15, none less than Niko Tinbergen found himself having to adapt. If a Nobel prize winner finds something difficult, it is probably fair to say that we may well find ourselves struggling, too.

Can you remember where to go if you need exact references? Step 1 and step 2 will tell you where they are.

And yet, there is almost certainly something that we can do. After all, it wasn’t just institutions and structures that kept coming up as stumbling blocks in the previous steps. It was also questions of paradigm - in other words, questions relating to the way we think when we are not actively thinking. To move beyond these additional stumbling blocks, one piece in a (maybe) growing mosaic of change can be an occasional switch to actively thinking about something that we wouldn’t usually think about.

In this spirit, this step is going to look at what penguins’ feet, panda diplomacy, and some friendships between humans in Patagonia can contribute to the debate.

Penguins’ feet, at first glance, look clumsy to the human eye. They are attached to surprisingly short legs, given the overall length of a penguin’s body. As a result, penguins waddle.

That is to say, penguins waddle when they are on dry land. Dry land is where we humans usually happen to see penguins, because dry land is is where we humans usually happen to be.

Penguins’ feet aren’t really about what they do on dry land, though. When penguins are in the water, their feet are in fact rudders, and there is nothing at all that is clumsy about them.

Two things helped us to work that one out: one, we sometimes took to the water, too. Two, we already knew what rudders were. There must be vast amounts of skills in the world that we just have no idea of, simply because we can’t relate them to anything that we already know. Dogs were pricking up their ears when they heard dog whistle frequencies long before we worked out that there were frequencies beyond our own range of hearing.

So far, so good: we have already looked at Deloria’s and Wildcat’s complaint about contemporary Western science missing out on parts of the evidence because it won’t always let itself pay attention to things that don’t already make sense to it.

But here is what our failure to pay attention will do next, then:

Firstly, if we don’t get to know penguins’ feet on their own terms (so, if we don’t get to know them as rudders), this is unjust to penguins: it makes penguins look incompetent when this is in fact the last thing that they are.

Secondly, it stops us from knowing any better, when knowing better was what we set out to do when we started practising science in the first place. In other words, we are not doing ourselves any favours here, either.

Thirdly - and this is the point that we don’t always think about - it treats penguins the way a school system will sometimes treat a student when it doesn’t think they have much potential, and this harms everyone. If we don’t think someone is up to much, we don’t always send many opportunities their way. Then, because they don’t have many opportunities to contribute, much of what they could have done may never happen. Thinking about it through the lens of Spinoza’s network, or through the lens of Viola Cordova’s pebbles in a pond, we are not just being unjust to the penguin, and we are not just stopping ourselves from learning. We are also disrupting the harmony of Brian Burkhart’s jazz band, and we are doing it by locking up one of its players’ instruments.

It gets worse: none of this has to have anything to do with conscious forms of discrimination. We look at penguins’ feet on dry land, and they genuinely do look clumsy to us, at least when we are not thinking. This happens even when we like penguins. But its happening even when we like penguins doesn’t make it ethical - or realistic - or constructive.

Panda diplomacy is another case in point.

Panda diplomacy can only work because almost everyone likes pandas. Heads of state give each other pandas for breeding programmes in each other’s zoos as a gesture of goodwill. The media arrive and take cute pictures of pandas doing something mildly amusing, and we open our newspapers and go “Awwwwwww….”.

We think of pandas as cute, and we tend to want to protect them. The thing is, though, that pandas didn’t use to be the vaguely incompetent comedy acts that we have come to enjoy them as. Pandas used to be perfectly competent to manage their own reproductive activity, as well as everything else that helped them to thrive. It was only once humans arrived in their habitats with little concern for questions of honourable harvesting that pandas ran into trouble. They didn’t need our intervention with breeding programmes and the like; they just needed our responsiveness and respect as we began to share their space. It is because we failed to be good neighbours that pandas are now in a place where they need help. The fact that almost all of us like pandas means that we weren’t acting from malice. It doesn’t mean that we were acting ethically, and it doesn’t mean that our idea now of what a panda is is in any way realistic, nor does it mean that cuteness is the natural extent of a panda’s contribution to the great inter-species jazz band of the whole.

Tourists file through an Indigenous souvenir shop. Some items have little cards attached to them, reading “Thank you for feeding my family.” It only makes sense for the shop to be there because there are tourists who like Indigenous people. It is probably fair to say that most of us don’t want to discriminate against Indigenous people. But that is not the same as there actually being a level playing field. No one supplying that souvenir shop was in need of any tourists coming in to feed their family before the very culture that most of the tourists come from created structures that made a perfectly functional way of life suddenly untenable.

—> Can you remember some of what was said about these changes in step 5?

Discrimination does not always involve actively thinking of someone as “less-than”, although that, of course, happens too. Discrimination also results from the creation of structures that fail to understand some of those who then get caught up in them.

Panda diplomacy is not the only example of a group being assigned an identity and a role by others within an otherwise friendly setting (in their case, an identity of a cute, bumbling comedy act). Friendship can, just as paradoxically, make things worse between humans with similar ease. The long version of step 17 has a case study of Welsh colonisers arriving in Patagonia and treating the Indigenous population they found there with greater kindness than colonisers mostly would. Genuine friendships developed. But genuine respect and responsiveness, it wasn’t: the frienships developed within boundaries unilaterally defined by the Welsh. Patagonians were only accepted as friends as long as they operated within these. And to this day, Patagonians report that it can often be these very friendships that can make it difficult to raise concerns about the uneven playing field there.

It doesn’t work to tell another creature, human or not, who they are required to be before they “count”. It is as Enrique Dussel said: there is nothing wrong with our having a distinctly European way of thinking; it is when we start thinking of it as being better than the rest that we start causing trouble for everyone. Appendix H in the long version has some more thoughts on this if you would like to dig deeper.

For the purposes of step 17, before we start looking at potential future ways for the contemporary West to interact with non-human nature in a way that learns from Indigenous philosophers and takes the sacred in the material into account, Raimond Gaita gets the final word: if we acknowledge the inherent dignity of the “other”, then that is of course the matter of ethics and of decency that it undoubtedly is, but it is also the pathway by which they are going to become empowered to make their unique contribution - and that is the very contribution that James’s blind spot, and the complexity of Spinoza’s network, have told us that we, ourselves, won’t know how to make.