Step 5: specific stumbling blocks

Step 4 talked about some elements of unity in diversity between Indigenous worldviews.

—> Can you say in your own words what that was all about?

Step 3 talked about some general prerequisites to successful knowledge transfer.

—> Can you remember what some of these were?

Step 5 is going to talk about some ways in which step 3 (the general one, on any two paradigms learning to talk to each other) can’t be enough, on its own, for these specific ones - Indigenous and contemporary Western - and why these two are going to need extra care, over and above what step 3 recommends.

It is going to become apparent that we can’t just learn from Indigenous philosophers, and then simply copy and paste what we have learnt onto our own relationships with non-human nature! In some ways, it is likely to work out just the other way round. McPherson and Rabb call Indigenous philosophies “transformative philosophies”. This is going to mean that in some ways, we are going to have to work on forming our own relationships with non-human nature first, right here where we are, before we can understand what Indigenous philosophers saying about their relationships where they are.

If we think it through, this sequence of events follows from what Leroy Little Bear just told us in step 4. If there are patterns, and not just laws, and if we are involved in co-creating bits of world where we are, then it stands to reason that some things are going to be unpredictable and, at least for those, it won’t help us to learn someone else’s facts. It might help us, though, to learn attitudes and dynamics of attentiveness, and to see if there might be a different way that these can play out in mutual responsiveness in our own relationships.

So if this responsive approach is tried and tested, and it seems to work, then why do we have our contemporary Western tendency to look at the world as just a collection of predictable billiard balls instead?

I don’t think there is one easy answer to that. Some of it may well make more sense after the end of step 20, but it is going to be patchwork.

Here is a first installment:

In the contemporary West, we can have a tendency to focus on reproducible scenarios. “Outliers”, if they can’t readily be explained, are often simply classed as errors and left out when we report the results of an experiment. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin thinks we are “a culture addicted to certainty”.

To some extent, our idea that we can bring non-human nature under our unilateral human control almost certainly came from our - perfectly understandable - Enlightenment focus on drawing a clear line in the sand between science on the one hand and the power of the Catholic Church on the other. Once this had been accomplished, people like Galileo could no longer be persecuted for saying the earth revolves round the sun rather than the other way round.

Freedom to say the earth revolves round the sun rather than the other way round is undoubtedly a good thing! But it came at a price. It is true that science and the Catholic Church were now able to co-exist peacefully: their respective jobs were now for each just to deal with what we thought of as its own remit. However, much of the line in the sand between them relies on René Descartes’ thinking, and that can spell trouble in its own way. If we think, with René Descartes, that mind and body are separate entities, and if we think that anything which is not a human being just “works” like a mindless, predictable machine, then science is free to experiment on the machinery without spending too much time worrying about whether there might be any meanings involved. The human species has a history of practising science that involves blinding vultures to learn about their sense of smell.

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

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin argues that this new, objectifying attitude towards non-humans was useful - at least at first glance - to our Enlightenment ancestors outside the laboratory, too: the academic discipline of economics soon started to develop. It meant that some things now became measurable in our trade relationships, and others didn’t. Relationships changed as a result of this - both between humans and between humans and non-humans - once the financial bottom line had become more visible than other aspects of what was going on. Descartes’ thinking could be quite useful in justifying some of this change: if non-humans don’t carry meaning in their own right, then it is easier for us humans to do whatever suits us with them, and we don’t have to worry too much about our behaviour. Factory farms speak for themselves. Apffel-Marglin goes as far as to say that the climate crisis, too, is a direct result of this way of thinking.

The contemporary Western attitude of objectifying non-humans that Apffel-Marglin criticises when she says this has had a few hundred years to bed in now. This means that we don’t always notice it much any more: much of it has had time to become something that just goes without saying. In English, for example, we talk about an animal as “it” unless we know “its” name. We also often talk about the sacred as being “in the next world”. When we use the term “spirit”, and someone asks us what we mean by that, we may well say that we are referring to something “supernatural”, something that is in its own separate realm from nature. We may not usually think about this being what we tend to think: the point is that it is what we tend to be thinking when we are not actively thinking!

And then the PRATEC project (an Indigenous-led initiative in the Andes) comes along and tells us that the Qechuan terms runa, huaca, and sallqa don’t really translate into English as human, deity, and part of non-human nature because of the interpenetrability of these different forms of life, and because the word “life” itself has a different meaning where they are.

It is no wonder we are going to struggle with that after 500 years of Descartes!

Part of the point made by McPherson and Rabb when they talk about “transformative philosophies” above is that we can’t just undo 500 years of habit-forming by getting our heads round something we read in a book now. They did write a book, so they clearly see some value in our reading a book - but they also say that there is going to be more than just our heads involved in our learning to understand their philosophy. When we think about it, we can find a number of reasons why they are probably right.

This first part of McPherson and Rabb’s point is the easy part: we have fallen into habits of thought, such as thinking of an animal as an “it”, and we can’t change a habit just by reading something for a few minutes because habits kick in when we are not actively thinking. Reading alone doesn’t change a habit.

A second part is that our habits of thought are also habits of behaviour, and - as any Olympic athlete will tell us - habits of behaviour will, over time, make a difference to what our bodies can and can’t do. Descartes’ line between mind and body is going to become blurred here! For example, London cabbies’ neurophysiological makeup has been found to have adapted to their work as cabbies. Their capacity for spatial cognition is better than someone’s who has not been working as a cabbie for years. Accomplished violinists’ neurophysiological makeup has been found to have become adapted to their violin playing. Songbirds’ neurophysiological makeup has even been found to adapt seasonally!

In other words, when it comes to neurophysiological capacities, it’s “use it or lose it”. If we don’t practise something regularly, we won’t be as good at it as we could be because our mind-bodies respond to training. In the contemporary West, since the Enlightenment, we have not been accustomed to listening to non-human nature much. That means our ability to do so has almost certainly declined. And that, in turn, means that sometimes we won’t know what Indigenous academics are talking about when they talk about their relationships with non-humans, because we won’t have experienced anything that is similar enough to help us understand.

A third part is that we have built systems and institutions that work for the kind of world that Descartes thinks we are in, but they don’t really work for a world that thinks the way Indigenous philosophers do.

Let’s see what you make of this example:

Contemporary Western nation states have laws that treat land as a commodity that belongs to a human or to a group of humans.

How would you explain to a contemporary Western legal professional that the land you are both standing on is alive, and that in fact you belong to the land at least as much as the land belongs to you?

How would you explain to the legal professional that they now need to leave, because you and the land are due to spend some time together in private to keep the relationship healthy?

How would you explain to the legal professional that if there were to be a new human or group of humans entering into relationship with the land, then they, too, would be required to respect the land and to keep the relationship healthy, and that this would have to happen no matter whose name was on a document certifying legal ownership?

Once a contemporary Western system of institutions is in place, it can become quite difficult even to talk about some aspects of Indigenous ways of being in the world: the framework in which it is easy for them to make themselves understood has been taken away. It is a bit like that memory card in our earlier example when it is just sitting on the table in front of us without its mobile phone or tablet around it: it becomes difficult to see what it is all about.

A fourth part of what McPherson and Rabb are talking about is going to keep coming up throughout the remaining steps, and this might be the tricky part for those of us who grew up using a noun-based language such as English. When Lerory Little Bear calls us co-creators of the world, he doesn’t just mean that we in the contemporary West have let Descartes co-create a world where it is normal to think of non-humans as “its”, and he doesn’t just mean we have let our governments co-create a legal system whereby we can deal with land as real estate, but not as a partner in relationship.

Little Bear also means that our co-creative activity is still going on, all the time, even as we speak. It is likely that “co-creators of the world” doesn’t really cover it, and that what is meant is something more like “worlding” than like “the world”, given that the philosophies where the statement came from tend to go hand in hand with verb-based languages. According to Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity between Indigenous worldviews, we are, in our inter-species relationships, participating in an on-going, sacred process of our shared world’s ongoing becoming.

We don’t usually think about it like that in the contemporary West. Of course we are going to struggle with just a book to help us, at least until we have tested the water a bit in our own relationships! Almost the entire second half of McPherson and Rabb’s book is about experiential learning, and about learning in a multi-species context on and with the land.

And then, alongside all these genuine difficulties, there is an uglier one: we haven’t yet talked about discrimination.

All of the above potential stumbling blocks are still there even for those of us who have no intention of discriminating against Indigenous individuals or groups. I am assuming that’s everyone who has taken time to read this far.

And yet, we are not immune, much as we would almost certainly like to be: discrimination can be a bit like flooding finding its way through a barrier of sandbags that we think we have packed tightly. Some discrimination, whether we want it to or not, comes in a package with the systems we have made, like the above contemporary Western laws treating land as a commodity: they don’t just sit there on paper; they filter into the way we think when we are not thinking. They also filter into into who is likely to find it easy to relate to the relevant institutions, and who is likely to have a difficult experience with them.

And then it gets worse once we look beyond a setting where all of us have come together because we are keen to learn. It is difficult to this day for Indigenous groups to be heard, and that is not just in situations where it is a numbers game (such as, for example, elections). It is also in other aspects of life, and these include universities. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonising Methodologies concentrates more on the research side of Indigenous thought being rendered invisible. The PRATEC project’s work is more critical of the role of education in creating the next generation of academics whose default way of thinking is a contemporary Western one, and how this once again creates conditions for the next generation of Indigenous ideas to remain likely to go unheard.

For anyone wanting an in-depth look at the history of colonialism and genocide that came before these present-day troubles, the Indigenous Canada MOOC, available through this website’s list of extra resources, is a good place to start.

I feel ashamed, not because I was there at the time to behave like that, but because part of the reason I am here now is related to privilege that I have enjoyed because of earlier contemporary Western people behaving like that.

The difficulty, now, is that the two troubles discussed in step 5 - the trouble of genuine, specific difficulties between the two paradigms in understanding each other, and the trouble of discrimination - can make each other worse in a vicious cycle. If we don’t think someone is very bright, then we are less likely to try to understand what they are saying, and if we don’t understand what they are saying, then we are less likely to think they are very bright. This is especially true if one of the paradigms involved - the contemporary Western one - is a universalist one that tends to think of the world as billiard balls which are going to behave in a predictable way wherever we go, while the other experiences the world as a process of continuing co-creative activity shared by living entities in locality, so that we can’t always know in advance how a process is going to play out. There is a built-in danger here of the former treating the latter as an “outlier” to be dismissed.

Enrique Dussel points out that there is nothing wrong with the contemporary West having its own ideas. It is the fact of our thinking these ideas have to work the same way everywhere that has allowed us convince ourselves that colonising others might be acceptable behaviour.

When the Brundtland report came out - arguably paving the way for today’s COP meetings to take place - this was (and remains) a milestone in contemporary Western thinking about human relationships with non-human nature. At the same time, an interesting fact about the Brundtland report is that it doesn’t talk about the contemporary West looking at changing the way we live. It genuinely doesn’t seem to have occurred to us, at least at the time, even to ask the question of whether our way really has to be the only way.

It is no wonder, then, that when Indigenous academics heard about quantum theory starting to help the contemporary West see the world as a process of continuing and not always predictable becoming, they pricked up their ears and wanted to meet David Peat and David Bohm.

With the above thoughts on specific stumbling blocks between the two paradigms in mind, step 6 is going to take a closer look at the shared ground they found.