Step 7: collaboration and an example of a dilemma

Step 6 came in two parts. First, it took a closer look at acausal relationships as a patch of shared ground between quantum theory and Indigenous philosophies. In this first part, it showed more clearly than before why - even though some things will behave as predictably as billiard balls - both quantum theory and Indigenous philosophers say that there are many things going on which we can’t fully predict.

—> In your own words, can you say why that was?

The second part of step 6 then looked at ethics in light of this unpredictability: if we only ever know part of even those bits of the world that already exist, and if we can’t reliably understand everything that we may be participating in co-creating, then it follows that, even with the best will in the world, we can’t responsibly exercise unilateral human control because it is impossible for us, on our own, to understand the world well enough for that. And that, in turn, means that even though already existing ideas about ethics are likely to help us when we work out what to do, they can’t tell us what to do: they can come up with questions we are going to need to ask, but they can’t give us all the answers.

Brian Burkhart likened our participation in the world to a jazz band’s improvisation. A jazz band is something that we can relate to in the contemporary West - but the fact of this band being a multi-species one may have felt unusual to us at first. In Brian Burkhart’s jazz band, it is not just human players who may take turns at taking the lead: it is anyone, human or non-human, and the question of what to do is not worked out by any one individual, but in mutually responsive relationship at eye level.

Step 7 is going to look at what this may mean for collaboration across paradigms. This is not going to be about proposing that we all work towards creating a world culture where everyone has to be and do the same things! We have already seen that this won’t work because not everyone and everything behaves the way billiard balls do, so there can’t be one blueprint for everything and everyone. What step 7 is going to say is that some issues are going to need collaboration, even where no shared culture is available, and that collaboration needs a level playing field. To illustrate the kinds of challenges we may want to think about, and to look at how we might want to go about creating conditions for everyone to be able to contribute, there is going to be a dilemma at the end to cut our teeth on.

To begin with, let’s take a closer look at Ella Fitzgerald and her band, because their “Mack the Knife” improvisation is a good example of two different types of knowledge at stake here. Ella Fitzgerald forgot the lyrics to “Mack the Knife” in the middle of a concert. She and the band all played on - tentatively at first, because it must have been a nightmare scenario - and then they all found a way forward together. Ella Fitzgerald made up some new lyrics as they went along; the band improvised, too, and they all saved the day together. (A link under “Extras” will take you to a recording if you are curious to hear it now. I love that recording!)

There is knowledge that will travel and knowledge that won’t travel involved in what Ella Fitzgerald and her band did there, and the difference is relevant to this website. Part of the reason why they managed to pull it off is that they were highly skilled at playing their instruments. This type of knowledge will mostly travel: if one of their instruments is lost or stops working, they can take their skill and apply it to the next instrument of the same type, at least once they have managed to find another one that suits them. Once they have practised on the new one for a bit, their training will be as valuable there as it was on the old one.

Their improvisation on “Mack the Knife” that they co-created that evening, on the other hand, is a type of knowledge that won’t travel! The reason for this is that they were creating the fact of their improvisation and their knowledge of their improvisation at the same time. If the band falls apart and the players join new bands, none of them are going to be able to play it that way again, because the only way that they know how to play it that way is together. Equally, if the band stays together, and a new player comes along and wants to join the band, the new player is going to need some time to grow into the band before they can all improvise together like that again, and the way that it sounds is then going to have some elements of the old and some which are new.

Later steps are going to come back to this difference between knowledge that travels and knowledge that doesn’t. For now, what matters is that there is such a difference. Then, what matters next is that when we talk about collaboration between paradigms in step 7 now, we are mostly talking about the type of knowledge that doesn’t travel. Co-creating shared new ways forward between paradigms is usually uncharted territory.

Both Environmental Philosophy and Environmental science are full of examples of challenges requiring collaborative innovation.

When we look at the climate emergency, for example, we are looking at a challenge that is as unprecedented as the challenge facing Ella Fitzgerald and the band that day: as creatures living on this planet, we are going to have to improvise, as there is no tried and tested way forward with this. What is more, we are going to have to improvise together, because no one group on its own can sort out a problem that rears its head in so many places. The contemporary West is, without a doubt, the worst contributor to this problem. But that is not the same thing as saying we can solve it on our own and without help, much as we may deserve to be held solely responsible for it. It is going to be helpful, of course, if we re-generate our own relationships with non-human nature where we are, but it is likely that we are not going to be able to do it on our own: Indigenous philosophers almost certainly know more about attitudes which may help us to re-learn how to form a jazz band with non-humans (because they haven’t spent the last 500 years listening to Descartes telling them not to).

Not everyone agrees that playing jazz together across paradigms can work. The contemporary West behaved appallingly in the past, for one thing, and there is ongoing discrimination even now. Not everyone trusts that any kind of knowledge transfer between Indigenous and contemporary Western paradigms is going to lead to anything other than more cultural appropriation, more misrepresentation, and more discrimination. The doubters have good reasons for their doubts. If you are keen to learn more about this, one possible starting point is the Indigenous Canada MOOC listed under “Extras”.

Where there is respect, though, there may well be a chance that collaborative innovation can work, as long as we all remember the above difference between knowledge that travels and knowledge that won’t, and that this means no one can impose themselves. It is finding ways of putting this respect in place that we need to worry about first - because it is not yet a given.

Much work has been done on the role of reparations in this context. So far, it is not going very well. For one thing, a contemporary Western model of calculating reparations isn’t likely even to manage to work out a mutually agreeable amount of money to pay, because it doesn’t know everything that needs to be taken into account. For another, some things don’t translate into money: if people experience themselves as belonging to the land, and if the land is dug up to become a coal mine, so that its people feel that their own flesh is being cut up, then money alone can’t heal the damage. At least as importantly, contemporary Western legislative and forensic processes don’t usually relate sensitively to Indigenous ones. Gregory Cajete, for example, points out that a mutually respectful relationship in the present and going forward into the future is what matters most, and that once this is in place, reparations will become a natural component of it. This chimes with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s experience of healing circles being successfully used in this context.

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

In other words, even though there is is bound to be a place for reparation payments, there are going to have to be other ways of offering to make amends for things that don’t translate into money. Crucially, the entire discussion around reparations is going to need to sit within a context of respectful relationship, and the context of respectful relationship needs to come first so that the rest can develop in a way that actually works.

A respectful form of relationship, importantly, can’t include continuing cultural appropriation. Besides being unfair - which is reason enough to stop it - cultural appropriation is, as we saw in the first couple of steps, like a memory card without its mobile phone or tablet around it! Things need their context to make sense. If the contemporary West hopes to learn from Indigenous worldviews how to regenerate our relationships with non-humans in our own localities, then our learning must be a case of learning attitudes rather than hoping to copy and paste ready-made blueprints for what to do onto localities where the same context just doesn’t exist. If we learn an attitude of thinking of the non-humans we meet in our own localities as potential partners in relationship at eye level, though, then we become more likely, over time, to give space to them, and to ourselves, and to the relationship between us, so that mutually responsive communication can grow, and Brian Burkhart’s multi-species jazz band can improvise.

If we all expect to meet at eye level, then a similar dynamic of mutually responsive relationship might develop between groups of humans enculturated to different paradigms, too: if we learn an attitude of thinking of “other” humans, especially when we have been talking past each other for a while, as potential partners in relationship, then we become more likely, over time, to create conditions for mutually responsive communication to grow, and for Brian Burkhart’s jazz band to improvise. Jasini et al. have shown that tuning in emotionally across cultures works in schools - and Shay Welch, from an Indigenous point of view, names respect as a prerequisite for the knowledge process - that is, for the part of the jazz band’s play that won’t travel between bands, but that may well sprout new variations on a traditional tune in a new context.

None of this is intended to say that this is easy. I am now going to include an example of a dilemma we might come across - and I challenge anyone to say there is a ready-made solution available! But that is just the point: there was no ready-made solution available to the “Mack the Knife” challenge, either. There was an attitude of each individual player wanting to contribute their best to co-creating new harmonies growing from an old tune, and of trusting that if they all did that, then the band would, in turn, buoy their individual play.

For the dilemma below, I am not going to ask you to come up with a possible solution: the message of step 7 is that there needs to be collaboration at eye level before a possible way forward can be found. So, instead, I am going to ask you this:

—> When you look at the dilemma below, how do you think the humans and non-humans involved might go about creating conditions for collaboration at eye level, so that they can work together to find an innovative way forward the way that Ella Fitzgerald and her band did?

Dilemma: subsistence, religious freedom, and agency in relationship.

The United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) has been widely adopted. However, its implementation is not always plain sailing, and much of that is down to differences in paradigm: Chie Sakakibara’s Whale Snow , for example, discusses difficulties between an Iñupiat whaling community and the International Whaling Commission (IWC). In compliance with UNDRIP’s Article 20, the community is allowed to engage in subsistence whaling up to certain quotas based on nutritional requirements. In compliance with UNDRIP’s Article 12, the community is allowed to engage in their traditional forms of dance. This is experienced by the community as being better than nothing, and it is a start, but it also doesn’t really help: in a paradigm where the sacred is experienced as being present in the material, and where there is a relationship of inter-species kinship between whales and humans (termed “cetaceousness” by Sakakibara), the dance only makes sense in the context of a whale giving itself to the community to be eaten, and the eating only makes sense in the context of the dance. One without the other is like a memory card without a mobile phone or tablet around it. The dance and the gift of the whale and the eating are one dynamic; preconceived quotas and an unrelated right to dance turn it into a collection of separate ones.

But there are other considerations, too: the IWC, conversely, will understandably point out that without the quota, there is a danger that groups with no relationship of cetaceousness between whales and humans will cause harm by whaling for profit, and potentially to excess. In addition, some environmentalists might worry that any shift towards creating space for a relationship of cetateousness to decide how many whales are eaten could make things difficult for the next court case granting rights to another part of non-human nature, such as a river. They might worry that if a relationship of inter-species kinship is allowed to override animal rights, then that could create a precedent for a river’s rights as an individual being watered down.

—> How did you go about working out how to create conditions for collaborative innovation at eye-level between everyone involved? And how did it go?

Please don’t worry if you found this difficult: that’s because it is!

John Polkinghorne, in the context of quantum physics, said sometimes we just have to hang on by the skin of our intellectual teeth. What matters is not whether we can come up with a ready solution: what matters is that we are brave enough to include everyone and everything that may be relevant to one.