Step 6: Viola Cordova’s analogies and what they might mean for us if we let them

David Peat argues that for an event to be causal (i.e., for it to behave as predictably as billiard balls would), certain conditions have to be met. Firstly, we need clearly separated billiard balls with a clear line of influence from one to another. Secondly, we need a clear, linear flow of time.

Peat then gives examples that don’t meet these criteria: mental events, for instance, as well as the behaviour of the slime mould, and that of our immune system.

Peat is not saying that there are no billiard balls in the world! As a physicist, he knows all too well that there are. What he is suggesting, though, is that not everything behaves like them. In other words, he is taking us back to the basics of quantum theory that we looked at in step 4.

—> Step 4 gave quantum entanglement as an example of an acausal relationship. Can you remember what entanglement was all about?

—> Taking a closer look at entanglement, can you remember what the common misunderstanding was that Polkinghorne would justifiably write off as just “quantum hype”?

Step 6 is going to take a closer look at some of the shared ground found at the Dialogues. Acausal relationships are a key component of this: step 6 is going to argue that our contemporary Western misunderstanding of the world as just a collection of billiard balls is at the bottom of much of the trouble we have caused for ourselves and for others around the world. Step 6 is also going to argue that if we clear up this misunderstanding - i.e., if we continue to acknowledge that billiard balls exist, but then stop convincing ourselves that everything behaves like them - then a number of other things may fall into place, from our relationships with non-humans all the way to the way we think about ethics.

Let’s recap some ideas in connection with Leroy Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity between Indigenous worldviews. He talks about patterns more than laws, and he talks about our being co-creative. That means things can play out differently in different circumstances. Indigenous ways of being in the world come from mutually responsive relationships on and with the land - and that makes for different philosophies on and with different land. Little Bear’s shared ground within this diversity, then, was about the world being more dynamic than the West would usually think, and about humans being co-participants in all our continuing creation, and about our interaction with the sacred happening right here where we are, within the material world. Viola Cordova’s PhD thesis was about parallels between some of these ideas and Spinoza’s philosophy, and it used examples from Cordova’s own, Navajo background.

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

An interesting fact to think about in the context of our co-participation in all our continuing creation is that Cordova’s snowball analogy from step 4 can’t be the last word - at least, not on its own. A snowball gets rolled, and then there’s a finished product. That really does happen, every winter, of course, but the analogy talks about someone rolling their snowball in isolation; it doesn’t say anything about co-creative activity, and it doesn’t say anything about before and after.

Viola Cordova has two more analogies, and they are helpful with these questions. Because they take the bigger picture into account, they are also more complex than the first one.

—> Just to try something out, can you draw a quick picture of what happens when you drop a pebble into a pond?

In the contemporary West, most of us will respond by drawing some concentric circles in the water. I certainly did. In a perfectly still pond, that’s realistic. Now what Viola Cordova asks us to think about is this: the pond isn’t going to be still, because there are lots of other creatures throwing pebbles too! And our shared job is to try and find a dynamic form of balance together, so that the pond and everyone in and around it can exist in harmony. This means that our job includes maintaining eye contact with everyone else throwing pebbles, so that we can work out ways of harmonising our pebbles as we go along. Brian Burkhart has likened the dynamic to that of a jazz band improvising together.

In another analogy, Cordova likens balance and harmony to our balancing on a board placed across a barrel on shifting sand.

An important point about the analogies is that either way, pond or sand, balance is going to be forever changing. We are not talking about a fulcrum in the middle that is always in the same place, the way that it would be with a see-saw: the barrel is wobbly, and part of the reason why it is wobbly comes back to our very own feet on it. We are talking about mutual responsiveness in a changing context - and it is changing because we, and everyone and everything else, are co-creators of a shared universe forever in the process of becoming.

When we think about the world in this different way, then that difference trickles down into how we think about a number of other things, as well.

First and foremost, responsibility can’t always mean the same thing that it tends to in the contemporary West. In the contemporary West, responsibility often carries a meaning of assuming unilateral control of a process, and delivering a preconceived outcome. A postman is responsible for delivering everyone’s letters on a given day. Now, in our new way of thinking about the world, whereby we are co-creators, responsibility can’t just mean control in every situation: it is also going to mean respect and mutual responsiveness. Brian Burkhart’s jazz band is not an orchestra: it doesn’t expect us to be its conductor.

Viola Cordova’s analogies also make it easier to understand why Indigenous worldviews don’t tend to rely on binary dualisms as much as contemporary Western ones do: since we are co-creators, we can’t know in advance that two diametrically opposed outcomes are the only ones we are going to be able to create - and also, even when we have created one of them, we can’t know in advance that this is going to be the last word. This also means that when Indigenous worldviews talk about circularity, we would be wrong to assume that circularity is going to be the same as repetition.

Developing this idea further, if our shared process of world-making is more creative than just a simple either-or choice every time, this means disagreement doesn’t always have to be a worry: sometimes, it can be just what is going to be helpful for the next creative step to emerge.

Last, but not least, something from step 1 is now going to make more sense than it probably did at the beginning: in a worldview where we are all co-creators, it now becomes understandable why the word “person” won’t just mean “human”, and why - for example - Thomas Norton Smith defines it as any potential partner in relationship, human or otherwise. If we are all participants in the above pebble-dropping jazz band, then being human or not doesn’t matter as much as we may have thought it did. The PRATEC project in the Andes, for example, explains that it is a misunderstanding when contemporary Westerners think that PRATEC’s work humanises, say, a stone: the stone doesn’t have to be human to be a partner in relationship. It can be a partner in relationship as a stone. Kyle Whyte refers to this as “diverse animacies”.

The question, for us in the contemporary West, is, of course, how a human who has been enculturated far away from this would go about entering into the kind of mutually responsive relationship with a non-human that step 6 has been talking about: most of the time, there won’t be a shared spoken language available. (To an extent, Kanzi the bonobo is a counterexample, but the inter-species communication in the Kanzi project was human-biased: the way it was set up, Kanzi could only communicate those things that humans had already thought to give him vocabulary for. Within the boundaries of the project, it would have been difficult for Kanzi to tell us anything genuinely new to us - the kinds of things that we hadn’t yet noticed enough to create any words for them.)

So, how could we go about making room for Kanzi to “speak Kanzi”?

There has been an elephant in the room: so far, we haven’t talked about ritual much.

—> When you think of the term “ritual”, what sort of ideas come to mind?

I don’t know what you noted down, but the first time I thought about it, some years back, I thought about a rain dance, and I thought of a rain dance as a way of making rain. We can have a tendency in the contemporary West to think of ritual as we would think of Harry Potter waving his wand to make the rest of the world do something that he wants it to do.

There have been accounts of rituals being carried out, for example, in order for a hail shower to stop. That means, in this instance, that there has been an account of a group performing a ritual in order to make the rest of the world do something that they had unilaterally decided that they wanted it to do.

However, such unilateral decision-making seems to be anything but the norm: the Indigenous philosophers referenced on this web site usually talk about ritual in terms of balance, and in terms of harmonious relationships on and with the land. In other words, we are back to Viola Cordova’s pebbles in a pond: it is about throwers of pebbles maintaining eye contact as we throw, so that we can improvise together, mostly without words, as Brian Burkhart’s jazz band would. PRATEC, for example, talk about ritual as a natural component of everyday jobs that they carry out on and with the land. With Leroy Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity in mind, this may, by now, start to feel quite natural: if the sacred is experienced as being present in this world, then why wouldn’t some ceremonial ways of doing things just form part of a group’s everyday interaction?

Now, in terms of whether and how such a ceremonial way of doing things together in a relationship involving several species might constitute communication, let’s rewind to step 5 for a minute. Step 5 talked about Olympic athletes first, and about our neurophysiological makeup adapting to those activities that we engage in regularly. Examples included cabbies, violinists, and songbirds. The choices we make with regards to our regular activities today play a part in shaping our abilities tomorrow. This means that in a culture that hasn’t really practised non-verbal, embodied forms of communication with non-humans for the last 500 years, there aren’t going to be many of us who are currently good at these. I would argue that we probably can’t, in our current state, really relate to Indigenous relationships of inter-species kinship, for the simple reason that, by the way we live, we have rendered ourselves (at least temporarily) incapable of experiencing certain types of inter-species communication.

Conversely, if we want to regain our ability to relate non-verbally to non-human nature, what better way to train ourselves than to feel our way where we are, and to see if our own inter-species relationships may, in time, allow adaptations to emerge in our own neurophysiological make-up, the way that we would expect them to if we were working as cabbies or as violinists?

Here’s an example: Frans de Waal talks about a waggle dance as honey bees’ way of communicating about sources of nourishment. What if a human who lives with bees, over time, learns to communicate non-verbally with them? Over time, their neurophysiological make-up is likely to change through regular practice. Who knows what inter-species communication might become possible then? What if, in the inter-species relationship that develops, this human then experiences awe as they grow into a sense of belonging on and with the patch of land where this inter-species, shared becoming takes place? Who knows when it would become appropriate to talk about aspects of the relationships involved as “ceremonial”, or even as “ritual”?

I have argued that after 500 years of no practice in the contemporary West, we can’t really relate to what the word “ritual” means in an Indigenous context at the moment. One thing is for sure, though: Harry Potter’s wand doesn’t cover it once we remember that both quantum theory and Leroy Little Bear’s elements of philosophical unity in diversity have taught us about acausal relationships existing alongside causal ones. The point would not be to train the above bees to do what we want: the point would be to live with them.

Some implications for ethics

The above thoughts hinge on the way that a worldview answers two questions about the universe: firstly, on whether it thinks everyone and everything in it only ever behaves as straightforwardly and predictably as billiard balls do. We have seen that even though some things demonstrably do behave like billiard balls, straightforward causality cannot realistically be applied to everything.

Secondly, the above hinges on what a worldview believes our role as humans to be: can we realistically think of ourselves as being capable of exercising unilateral control responsibly? We have seen that we do not know enough for that. Even when arguing from within a purely representationalist paradigm (that’s before we start thinking about our co-creative activity), we saw that we only ever manage to understand part of the world. Then, when we added our co-creative activity into the mix, we saw an added difficulty: we can’t know in advance everything that we might be participating in co-creating.

These ideas, captured in Viola Cordova’s pond analogy, and by Brian Burkhart’s jazz band, cannot help but have implications for ethics.

In the contemporary West, we have tended to rely quite a lot on systems of ethics which aim to tell us in advance what we should do. Utilitarianism, for example, asks us to work out the consequences that our proposed actions are going to have for everyone involved, and then to choose the course of action which results in the best outcomes possible for as many people as possible. Deontology, on the other hand, looks at process more than it does at outcome: it aims to work out in advance what we might be duty-bound to do, or not to do; it rejects the idea that “the end justifies the means”.

Within each of these, in contemporary Western Environmental Ethics, we also tend to say in advance who matters and who doesn’t when we look at these desirable outcomes or at these duties. Contemporary Western Environmental Ethics usually aims to apply pre-conceived criteria to individuals in order to decide who is worthy of consideration (for example, sentientism tries to work out in advance whether a type of individual can feel - and if the answer is yes, then any individual of that type is worthy of consideration). Alternatively (with, for example, Aldo Leopold) contemporary Western Environmental Ethics may decide in advance that the whole always matters more than any individual does.

Approaches applying pre-conceived criteria to individuals in order to decide who matters and who doesn’t can soon find themselves on shaky ground, for the simple reason that we may not know as much about an individual’s capacities as we think: for example, Frans de Waal shows that wasps use a different part of their neurophysiological make-up to achieve facial recognition from the one that humans, corvids, and sheep use. This means that just because someone doesn’t have a particular organ or biochemical pathway, we can’t automatically assume that they can’t do what we currently think someone would typically do with it. They might simply be doing it differently.

Approaches categorically prioritising the whole over the individual have been in trouble too! Applied mechanically and on their own, they have been criticised because they could end up telling us to murder our best friend to save an ecosystem.

These are two quick ways of finding fault lines in well-known contemporary Western approaches to Environmental Ethics.

The crux of the matter, at least in the context of this website, is this, though: when we look at the above contemporary Western ideas - of utilitarianism, of deontology, and of developing criteria in advance to decide who matters and who doesn’t when we apply these approaches - we will, by now, notice that the approaches have been conceived to work in a world where there is just Newton’s apple, and where we can rely on there just being relationships that reduce to a straightforward equation of cause and effect. The approaches aim to give us a universally applicable blueprint of what we should do - and they aim to give it to us in advance. That means the approaches assume that we are in a universally predictable world. They also assume that we are then clever enough to reliably predict it.

So what are we going to do now? We have seen, through quantum theory and with the help of Indigenous philosophers, that we are not in that sort of world! This means there is now a question mark on whether we can reliably use the above approaches. Once we accept that even though Newton’s apple exists, and even though billiard balls exist, not everything that goes on in the world follows the same, straightforward, causal pattern (for example, entanglement didn’t!), we are going to have to consider the possibility that the above models of ethics, on their own, are going to struggle with those aspects of the world that don’t work the way that Newton’s apple does.

Not everyone agrees with what I have just said! In fact, some people can get quite angry when someone suggests that it may not be possible to come up with a universal blueprint of how we should behave. Here’s what they tend to be worried about: if there is no blueprint of what behaviour is right to apply universally and every time, then doesn’t that mean everyone can just make up their own rules however it suits them?

That’s not quite what it means, though, because we are dealing with two separate questions. The first one is: is there such a thing as right and wrong behaviour? The second one is: is a universal blueprint a realistic way forward if we want to achieve right behaviour?

It might help us in the contemporary West to think that our very own William James, John Dewey, and Mary Midgley (for example) all treated ethics as something that needed our imagination and our compassion, as well as some tried and tested guidelines. In other words, they treated ethics as something that needs to work on an assumption of a world that has more than just billiard balls in it, and that requires us to keep learning to find appropriate ways of behaving ethically as we go along.

What James, Dewey, and Midgley don’t really do, though, is to engage fully with Viola Cordova’s pond and barrel analogies: being contemporary Western philosophers, they stop short of fully relating to our co-creative activity.

This is where Brian Burkhart’s jazz band comes in! Remember we are dealing with two separate questions: firstly, is there right and wrong? Yes there is: there are ways that an individual player can play which will make the whole band sound terrible, and there are ways that the band can fail to support the individual player, and then they will all sound terrible too. On the other hand, if they find a way of playing well together, then an individual player’s play will transform the harmony of the band, and the band’s play, vice versa, will enhance this transformation.

Secondly, let’s look at our other question from above: is there one, universal blueprint of how everyone has to play in order to achieve this? No there is not: a variety of harmonies are imaginable which will all meet the criteria of being good both for the individual and for the whole. There are, on the other hand, also a variety of ways of playing imaginable which will achieve the opposite, and sound terrible.

What it boils down to is that it is a matter of remaining responsive to each other, and of co-creating something new while drawing on tried and tested tradition. Ella Fitzgerald and her band did it when she famously forgot the lyrics to “Mack the Knife” at a concert! They can’t have rehearsed what they were going to do, because you can’t rehearse forgetting something. We could say that they honoured tradition (“Mack the Knife” remained recognisable as “Mack the Knife” throughout) - and, within that, they co-created one of the many possible, harmonious ways of doing something unique, and new, and brilliant with that tradition.

What Brian Burkhart asks us to do is to imagine something like this, and then to forget about the fact that Ella Fitzgerald’s band happened to be all human. What Brian Burkhart asks us to do is to think of the band as an inter-species one.

There are still some people who get angry with this idea because they think of it as an excuse just to do whatever suits us and then call it jazz - and Indigenous philosophers have put a lot of time and effort into explaining why this is not the case.

What I would ask these doubters to do is this: imagine a version of ethics where humans draw up universal rules of behaviour and then use them as a blueprint, to be applied everywhere - and then imagine a version of ethics where humans don’t automatically have the last word.

Which of the two is likely to make greater demands on humans to behave respectfully and responsively towards other species?