Step 20: conclusion

It all started with Viola Cordova telling us that it is going to take more than one worldview to live on the earth without wrecking it.

Indigenous worldviews are often overlooked in the contemporary West - partly because of discrimination, and partly because we can genuinely struggle to understand what Indigenous philosophers are telling us when our own underlying assumptions about the world are different from theirs. The term “spirit” was one example: in the contemporary West, we tend to think of a spirit as something otherworldly. Leroy Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity between Indigenous worldviews, on the other hand, showed that this is different from the way an Indigenous philosopher will tend to think about it.

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

Familiar categories aren’t always going to work in an unfamiliar paradigm: they can be starting points and maybe stepping stones, but in the end, we are going to have to leave them behind and meet the unfamiliar on its own terms.

—> Can you think of some more examples?

One example were the Dialogues in step 4, when a group of Indigenous academics and Western quantum physicists met for a series of conferences over a period of ten years. The idea was to look for shared ground between Indigenous worldviews and quantum theory, and they found not only that, but also shared ground with Spinoza’s thought, and with European phenomenologists and American Pragmatists. Shared ground was all it was, though - and that is not the same as its being the same thing.

Most importantly, probably, they found that whichever way we look at it, we humans don’t know it all. Even when we only look at the already existing (in other words, when we stay within our familiar, representationalist paradigm), the most we can manage is verisimilitude. Then, once we take into account that we are also co-creating the world as we go along (in other words, when we include the ideas of a participationalist paradigm in our thinking), we can see that we can’t reliably predict all that we might be participating in co-creating, either (nor what exactly any of it is going to look like). Viola Cordova had a cluster of three analogies to show what is meant by that.

—> Can you remember what they were?

A few byproducts fell out of our thinking about those analogies. First and foremost, in a universe that is more than just clockwork, science can’t successfully expect to carry on looking away when some forms of evidence show up that don’t seem to fit. When there is more than clockwork involved, it is only reasonable to expect some surprises: we are going to have to become better at giving initially uncomfortable evidence the benefit of the doubt.

Relatedly, we saw that dualisms don’t have to be mutually exclusive anywhere near as often as we tend to think. They may well look mutually exclusive at the beginning, but we don’t always know if this is going to have to be the last word.

—> Can you think of some that turned out to be more like yin and yang?

Again relatedly, because Indigenous philosophies had greater focus on our co-creative activity and on our shared becoming than on the finished product, we saw that many Indigenous concepts come with verb-based languages to match. In other words, it is not just that our contemporary Western categories won’t always do the job: it is also that sometimes, no categories will do the job!

And finally, bearing in mind our co-creative activity, we saw that some of the things that we think in the West aren’t going to travel well. We tend to think of ourselves as knowing things that apply universally - and in some cases, we are probably right: Newton’s apple does reliably fall, even in the Andes. Other things, though, we may be wrong about because we lack understanding (think bats’ echolocation before we knew what it was). Also, since we are co-creative, not everything can work like Newton’s apple: some things are going to play out differently in different inter-species constellations and relationships on and with different patches of land. In this context, causality doesn’t seem to cover anywhere near as much as we tend to think in the contemporary West. We “sort of” have a flavour of acausal relationships in our contemporary Western understandings of vicious cycles and of virtuous cycles, but Viola Cordova’s analogies take this further - as does quantum theory.

So the Dialogues left us with an interim conclusion that we humans don’t know it all! And Indigenous philosophers have been telling us all along that there is wisdom in non-human nature, and that we only need to regenerate our mutually responsive relationships with everyone in it! That was the encouraging, and also daunting, message of the interim conclusion in step 8.

So, what now? How do we start to communicate when there is no shared spoken language available? On the one hand, there is science of course, but we have just seen that science on its own can’t know enough to ask all the right questions. On the other hand, Indigenous literature will emphasise the role of ritual as a form of inter-species communication, but we in the contemporary West haven’t practised that for a while. We saw three potential stumbling blocks in relation to this. Firstly, our lack of practice is a likely stumbling block, at least for now, because research involving cabbies and violinists - and songbirds - shows that our neurophysiological pathways adapt to what we do and don’t practise. Secondly, there is our own raised eyebrow to consider: it tends to shoot up the moment someone says “ritual”, because we tend to think of it as some sort of magic, as our accumstomed worldview is not used to engaging with the almost certainly acausal dynamics and balances involved. Thirdly, we can’t just gatecrash other people’s inter-species relationships that aren’t ours to enjoy; it would have to be a case of forming our own, where we are. At the moment, we don’t have many inter-species relationships at eye level here in Europe.

And yet, if we want to learn from and with a worldview that experiences the sacred as part of the material, we can’t just take the material and throw out the sacred, and still think that we are engaging with what we are being told.

Vine Deloria, Benedict de Spinoza, and Brian Burkhart’s jazz analogy converged on something interesting here. The jazz analogy was all about the individual player’s improvisation transforming the band’s play, at the same time as being buoyed by the band’s play - a bit like when Ella Fitzgerald forgot the words to “Mack the Knife”, and she and the band all found each other again in something entirely new, still recognisable as “Mack the Knife” (or it wouldn’t have been as good), but also transformed.

William James tells us no one person or group can define the sacred. He must have a point: from what was said above about the world being more complex than we can fully grasp, now that we are looking at a world where the sacred is being experienced as part of that complexity (and not somewhere beyond it), it stands to reason that the sacred is also going to be too complex for us to grasp.

This might sound like a fourth stumbling block at first, but when we take a closer look, it could just as easily be a seed of a way forward. What if it is not our job as humans to grasp the sacred, but to contribute to co-creating it?

Where else to hope for a glimpse of that elusive sacred in the material than in any of the sweet spots we may co-create in our multi-species jazz band, where we find a way to honour everyone as each of us individual players and the great jazz band of the whole enhance each other’s play?

And what if ritual - since we saw that it tends to be part of everyday labour in any case in an Indigenous multi-species jazz band where the sacred is in the material - is better understood not as magic, but as an inter-species relationship lived out in mutual respect and responsiveness, which has, over time, turned ceremonial?

If so - and we looked at a couple of case studies gesturing in that direction - then our best hope of regenerating our neglected inter-species relationships in the contemporary West is to take baby steps towards living with each other again, and to see if anything ceremonial develops when we make a start on the mundane. It won’t be the same as Indigenous ritual, and it won’t be on Indigenous land, because that would be gatecrashing a relationship that isn’t ours to appropriate. Rather, if we take our own, co-creative baby steps from where we are, here in Europe, maybe we won’t just be learning from Indigenous philosophers and then applying our learning over here - maybe we will also learn with other species on and with the land in Europe, and find that this then helps us understand what Indigenous philosophers have been telling us.

Either way, it looks as if there is potential there - for us to relearn to live in inter-species relationship, to become open to what “others” can teach us and, through that, to become better neighbours to everyone, human and non-human, who is currently on the receiving end of our overgrazing of the climate commons.

—> Step 3 and step 4.2 each had a question that was marked as worth revisiting after the end of step 20. If you want to, now is a good time to look at the answers you gave at that time.

Do you want to keep your answers as they are?

Or is there anything that you would like to add to them now?

One example of a point to consider is the difference that including the above participationalist ideas (mostly discussed in later steps) might make.