Step 18: what would it take to find a workable way forward?

Step 17 - and with it, Appendix H in the long version if you decided to dig deeper - showed that once any perceived “other” is able to contribute on their own terms, they are likely to add exactly those harmonies to the jazz band that we would not think to contribute, and that we would be unlikely to manage to make ourselves even if we did manage to think of them ourselves.

But we also saw that this can be tricky: contemporary Western nation states are going to want to keep their existing legislative frameworks (and some of their reasons for this make perfect sense, when we think about predictable amounts of tax revenue to keep things like schools and hospitals going). These legislative frameworks, however, tend to be based almost exclusively on contemporary Western understandings.

—> Can you remember what the whaling dilemma in step 7 was all about?

So, what to do, when we also know that sticking to the plan can lead us down the path of Ellul’s “technique”, replacing any scope for responsiveness and, as (for example) Glover’s work showed, also potentially any scope for respect?

It looks as if we have got another perceived binary dualism to resolve - this time, between laws regulating our behaviour on the one hand and room to manoevre on the other.

It is interesting to note that none of the authors referenced come up with a magic bullet for that! At first glance, this seems disappointing: after all, they came up with ways of resolving other perceived dualisms, such as those between the individual and the whole, and between universalism and relativism, and between determinism and not, all in a participationalist paradigm. At second glance, though, this absence of a ready-made solution may be just what we are looking for. If someone were to tell us in advance exactly what our wriggle room must look like, then it arguably is no longer wriggle room; it is in danger of asphyxiating us with yet more of Ellul’s “technique”.

Another interesting point to note here is that many of the Indigenous philosophers referenced are also legal professionals. This means that it is not the idea of societies using legislation to regulate behaviour itself that they object to: what they criticise is the fact of its almost exclusively being based on Western paradigms, so that it often turns out simply not to understand Indigenous concepts and contexts. And those Indigenous concepts and contexts include, amongst other things, responsiveness and a forward-looking attitude when legislation is applied to real-life situations, as (for example) the discussion of reparations in step 7 showed.

In a participationalist paradigm, when we think about it, it can’t really be any other way: if we want to learn from and with Indigenous worldviews, then we are going to want to be open to entering Leroy Little Bear’s co-creative universe, where our ripples in Viola Cordova’s pond don’t just project outwards, but interact with everyone else’s ripples, because we are all members of Brian Burkhart’s great inter-species jazz band of the whole. Of course we are all going to surprise each other at times - and of course we are all going to throw each other off balance at times - but by and large, we may find that we can create new harmonies growing from traditional tunes together.

Here is a case study to pick up where the step 7 dilemmas left off. It is a particularly knotty one, I think, but that is also why it matters.

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

Practices of animal sacrifice don’t tend to be discussed much in the literature. Maybe they are on the wane, or maybe they are just not discussed much. But they exist. I find this difficult - but I know that my raised eyebrow can at best be a neighbourly one, not a moral one. I can’t, hand on heart, say that eating my favourite ice-cream doesn’t make me complicit in factory farming methods that I would find equally difficult to watch if they weren’t so carefully kept out of sight.

Radhika Govindrajan, a geographer, went to live with a remote community in the Himalayas and became part of its day-to-day interaction in inter-species relationship. She has stories of cows being part of the family, and of loving, embodied, relationships of care and emotional involvement across species boundaries. One of these relationships is between humans and goats. A goat may live with a family for years, rubbing its head on its humans as its humans gaze lovingly at their goat. Govindrajan has pictures. You can see the love. And then, the goat is asked (non-verbally) if it wants to sacrifice itself. The goat may reply (non-verbally) that it does. And then, the goat is killed by its own human family.

Animal rights activists are up in their arms. I, too, feel upset as I write this. And yet I can’t, hand on heart, say that I know they are wrong (a detailed rationale of why I can’t, besides the ice-cream, is in the long version).

What I am left with is threefold: firstly, if they are wrong (and I don’t know either way), then they are arguably likely to notice sooner rather than later that they are wrong, and to mend their ways: after all, the underlying assumptions that make up their paradigm are all about shared learning and creation, whereas a contemporary Western paradigm tends to try and nail things down on the assumption that they are static.

Secondly (since the question in these final steps is how the contemporary West can regenerate its own inter-species relationships), I can’t help noticing that - however terrible I may feel about the way things end for the goats and humans involved - Raimond Gaita would argue that at least the goat was honoured as a partner in relationship. Our factory farm animals, conversely, aren’t. (Raimond Gaita is the philosopher who said in step 14 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.”)

Thirdly, I suspect that the whole thing is another case of no one being able to grasp Spinoza’s entire web of relationships - which means it is another case of someone who seems quite “other” to me in their difference being able to see bits of web that I can’t, and vice versa. Of course that is going to bring disagreement, and of course, when that disagreement is about something we both care about, the disagreement is going to cause us pain. But equally, as we saw in the case of Deloria’s initially unpalatable ideas on evolution, it can sometimes be in the very pain of that disagreement that a seed of a possible way forward is hidden - especially when we can’t really understand each other at the start, and especially when neither of us has enough of the full picture to say, hand on heart, that they know they are right for both of us.

The Rio 2016 women’s eight are living proof that we in the contemporary West, too, can allow responsive practices to grow from traditional ones together. And the West, too, has inter-species stories where the potential for shared meaning-making is never far from the potential to cause each other’s deaths, as Louise Westling points out in her book where ethology meets Merleau-Ponty. It is not something we have been used to of late, but that is not the same as its being out of our reach altogether.

We are even starting to have our own case studies of people having a go at letting new, ceremonial ways of doing things develop from everyday, responsive, inter-species interaction.

Here is an example I enjoyed reading about.

A project in the Pacific North West of the United States aims to create conditions for salmon to resume their travel up their accustomed estuaries, after changes to the landscape (which were made to help large-scale cattle farmers) had made these journeys impossible for a while. The project uses contemporary Western scientific methods to mitigate the impact of these changes. That is, in the day, it does. At night, one of the scientists leaves his microscope lamp on. He says it is to help guide the salmon home, and he says he does it in a nod to a salmon ceremony that used to involve bonfires.

If he was appropriating those bonfires, I would worry that he might be gatecrashing a relationship that isn’t his to enjoy. I don’t think that this is what is going on, though: after all, he seems fully aware that this is a new situation, because he has involved his microscope. His microscope, while gesturing towards the tradition, isn’t copying the tradition: rather, it is finding a new way of inviting a response. This makes me think he is going to be sensitive not only to the way that the context has changed, but also to anything that the salmon might do or not do next. I also think that the fact of his being on the project means he is well placed to be one of the first to notice what the salmon do or don’t do next, and he has already shown that he wants to. If ceremony can emerge from co-creation in practical inter-species community, I would argue the scientist’s microscope lamp looks like a promising starting point.

In the same vein, Robin Wall Kimmerer thinks we might all want to try planting a garden, and that this would be a possible starting point for our own acts of practical reverence.

I don’t know if we are all going to want to do the same thing, but I agree that if we are open to the Rio 2016 women’s eight’s experience of shared learning and creation, and if we are open to Indigenous conceptions of this happening across species boundaries, with respectful and responsive relationships so that shared meanings can emerge and be honoured in a ceremony of the everyday, then practical reverence sounds promising in Leroy Little Bear’s co-creative universe where the sacred and the material are part of the same piece of world.