Step 19: a growing pool of ideas and co-creation

Step 19 is all about green shoots of recovery here in Europe.

Here is a question to begin with. It might take you a bit of time to think about:

—> With or without thinking about the input from steps 1 to 18 (however you prefer!), how would you go about helping our continent to regenerate its relationships between humans and non-humans, so that we can all be more of an inter-species jazz band and less of a preconceived product of unilateral human control?

Take your time! You might want to make a note of your answers.

The middle part of this step is then going to look back on some ideas that some of the authors referenced have come up with. Then, the final part of this step is going to ask you to weave together your answers to the above question and any ideas from this summary that you liked.

In terms of ideas that have already been put forward, it is probably worth reminding ourselves not to take ourselves too seriously in this step. We have known since step 8, if not before, that we humans aren’t clever enough to exercise unilateral control of the world responsibly. This means that whatever we may come up with now, both from our own ideas and from the work of other humans, we are probably going to want to take with a pinch of salt: if we are serious about learning from Viola Cordova’s ripples in a pond analogy, we can’t expect just to make our own concentric circles.

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

Starting with what we are used to in the contemporary West - with a representationalist paradigm, which first and foremost looks at the already existing, and not too much at shared becoming as yet - a few of our existing practices have shown themselves to be potential stumbling blocks to our letting go of our unilateral control. These would be practices that we might want to reconsider. Let’s have a look at some of these:

Firstly, there was our tendency to leave questions of relationship and of shared meanings out of the equation when we relate to non-humans, especially (but not exclusively) in scientific contexts. Since Descartes’ and Boyle’s day, we have tended to have a narrower conception of science than, say, Gregory Cajete puts forward in his work. We have tended to see science as something which happens under reproducible conditions imposed by us, rather than as something that is open to surprises in relationship. If Robin Wall Kimmerer’s postgraduate student had restricted herself just to the former, all she would have had at the end of her project is statistics. The stats would almost certainly have been as correct as they are now, but she would have missed the rest.

A second potential stumbling block was our tendency to concentrate on perceived similarities between ourselves and others: we make monkeys take the mirror test to see if they know the difference between their own bodies and someone else’s, and we forget that they never seem to bite their own feet when they playfight and tie their long limbs into knots with those belonging to other monkeys. While we need some form of similarity that we share with another creature to start getting to know each other (maybe with a monkey, a shared enjoyment of eating fruit), we are not going to extend our comfort zone much if we just look at what we can already recognise. The more we make room for the “other” to be different from the way we are - especially in unexpected ways - the more we are going to be able to learn to relate to each other.

Moving on to include ideas from a participationalist paradigm now, it starts to matter more that human language can’t really say very much. Einstein once gave an example of someone describing a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure to make this point: for some things, we are going to have to attune to each other non-verbally, whether we are with other humans or whether we are with non-humans, and this attunement is an ongoing, ever-developing process. The Rio 2016 women’s eight were living proof: their training notes only worked for those who had already felt the sessions in the boat, and who were already attuned to feel their way into the ongoing shared learning and creation of the next one.

Relatedly, the eight’s co-creative activity had to be based on mutual responsiveness and respect. They couldn’t afford to “other” each other, because once we are co-creating, it is not only someone’s past experience which is going to be lost when we don’t treat them as worth listening to: it is also their contribution to any new creation that our jazz band could otherwise come up with. The same applies when we look at what we call an animal’s “instinct” and think of it as less-than: honourable harvest stories now exist because someone who lived in close proximity to the ancient evolutionary relationship between buffalo and grass was prepared to be more inclusive than that.

We can fully expect to experience some tension when we try any of this out! After all, we are still going to want to wash our hands with soap and water, and that’s not despite soap and water killing the coronavirus; it’s because of it. As Louise Westling said, our potential for shared meaning-making is never too far from our potential to cause each other’s deaths.

So what to do?! On the one hand, we want to be responsive in relationship; on the other, we have seen plenty of reason along the way why we also need some ways of regulating our behaviour.

I think this is where it can help to remind ourselves of what PRATEC said about the difference between custom and habit. They fully expected to be guided by dynamics that they were already familiar with, through years of shared traditional practice. The difference is that they were prepared to treat these as dynamics to learn from in ever-renewing relationship. They didn’t aim to cast any of them in stone, to be followed at any cost.

It can take a tremendous amount of courage to do that, though. We do like our illusion of control, even when we know full well that we can’t really have it.

Imagine this: you have been asked by your head of state to clear up the mess after a period of indefensible injustice towards some groups of citizens, which led to a tangled web of atrocities committed by any number of individuals and groups. You can’t pile in and impose whatever you think is best, because the writing is already on the wall that this will only lead to more violence, most likely in the form of civil war. There has to be a way forward that is both just and that enables everyone to rebuild their relationships enough to live together as a society into the future.

Daunting?! Definitely. It is the story of Desmond Tutu when he was asked to head up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Tutu is the first to say that his solution wasn’t perfect: it couldn’t have been, given the complexities of the problem to be solved. But Tutu also says in his book that he would choose the same approach again if he had to. I find his courage admirable and his approach interesting, especially in the context under discussion here. His approach was one of respecting the law, by all means, but it was also one of allowing story and meaning into a forensic process that was open-ended as people came up with their own ideas for resolution and for regeneration of broken relationships. It was a high-risk strategy: an open-ended process can come up with ideas that end up looking unjust to some, and the situation was already within a hair’s breadth of erupting into civil war. But the point was to be responsive and to move forward together, and Tutu’s book is full of case studies where it worked.

Where did the approach come from? In part, from existing, Western-inspired legislation. With regards to the way that the legislation was drawn upon to be used in the context of living, co-creative activity, the approach came from pre-colonial, African conceptions of ubuntu. In that sense, it was arguably a process of shared learning and creation across paradigms.

In terms of our own question in this step, Tutu’s experience makes it look as if the absence of oven-ready solutions that we have noticed all along is really an advantage. It looks as if it is not just through the written work of Indigenous philosophers that we are going to be able to learn to regenerate our own relationships with non-human nature in Europe: it is also through regenerating our own relationships with non-human nature in Europe that we may be able to help ourselves understand what Indigenous philosophers have been saying.

—> With all this in mind, what would you like to do with your ideas jotted down at the beginning of step 19? Does it look as if any of them might dovetail with what has been said? Are any of them brandnew? Have any new ones come up since then? What do you think are some important things to bear in mind as we all move forward?