Step 8: interim conclusion

Step 8 is a sort of halfway house after the first seven. It comes early, given that there are a total of 20 steps, but that’s because some of the first seven can be quite hard going when they introduce new content for the first time. Then, steps 9 to 20 are going to dig deeper as they do some more work on the idea of our being co-creators.

At this halfway house, it might be worth taking a moment to look back on some of the ground covered so far.

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

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

With this in mind, the first steps looked at the way Indigenous philosophers’ work has been mostly overlooked in the contemporary West. There was clear evidence that discrimination is often to blame, even to this day.

Alongside discrimination, there was also the issue of two different paradigms working on two different sets of underlying assumptions, so that people can end up talking past each other even when they are trying not to.

What to do?

It turned out that for some types of communicative trouble between Indigenous and contemporary Western paradigms, some existing experience from elsewhere could help. Feminist and intersectional thought turned out to be valuable contributors here: their prerequisites to successful knowledge transfer - of expert involvement, of respectful dialogue, and of the mainstream being open to allowing itself to be transformed rather than simply added to - sound as if they will happily travel.

However, it also turned out that any generalised prerequisites to successful knowledge transfer can’t be enough for this new situation, and one clue as to why already turned up in the idea of the mainstream being open to allowing itself to be transformed rather than simply added to. If the mainstream is open to being transformed rather than simply added to, then entirely new ideas might come into the mix, and existing experience won’t always be enough to help us relate to those.

It may be helpful at this halfway house to use a theory of what is called “epistemic injustice” to talk about some of the challenges involved. Contemporary Western theories of epistemic injustice mostly talk about two types of it:

The first type is a refusal to take seriously what someone says because of prejudice against who they are. This might be something along the lines of, “Women can’t understand the offside rule, so there is no point listening to a woman talking about it.”

The second type is a failure to give someone access to an established mainstream’s concepts. This makes it harder for them to talk about mainstream interests in a way that the mainstream finds relatable. For the above offside example, imagine what would happen if resources explaining the offside rule were no longer available to women. A woman talking about football would sound incompetent if she was only able to say, “the player seemed a long way away from all the others when s/he received the ball.” At least as importantly, she probably wouldn’t say anything about it in the first place: without access to the relevant resources, she would probably be unaware that there is even such a thing as an offside rule in football.

So far, so good. The above two types of epistemic injustice have been a helpful theory where they live - which is mostly in societies where newcomers are trying to add themselves to an existing mainstream, like new players joining a football team.

This is not what we are doing here, though!

What we are doing as contemporary Westerners when hoping to learn from Indigenous philosophers is more like a footballer trying to learn the game of camogie. The footballer will still do well to make sure they don’t commit the above forms of epistemic injustice, because both are arrogant and discriminatory - but steering clear of those two won’t, on its own, help them to learn camogie. Camogie has no offside rule, in any case. What it does have is people playing with sticks, and this will be an entirely new way of interacting with a ball for someone who grew up as a footballer.

The example shows that once knowledge transfer is no longer just about newcomers adding themselves to a mainstream, but about the mainstream becoming open to transformation (in this case, about people who grew up with football becoming interested in camogie), a third type of epistemic injustice kicks in. The third type is a mirror image of the second: it is still about learning concepts, but now it is not about “us” needing to give “them” access to “our” concepts. Now, it is about “us” needing to have the humility to learn about “theirs”.

Again, so far, so good. But if we think about it carefully, we have already seen a glimpse of a fourth type of epistemic injustice, as well! This fourth type relates to what has been said about our role as co-creators. Once the remaining steps become more involved with all that, this fourth type of epistemic injustice is going to be about what happens when a relationship doesn’t give space to all its members to act as subjects not objects. Whenever this happens, the relationship can’t become genuinely co-creative. Brian Burkhart’s multi-species jazz band was a first glimpse of how a co-creative dynamic can work when it does. The remaining steps are going to do some more digging on the difference between genuine co-creation and a unilaterally preconceived master plan, and on how we might go about moving towards the former in a part of the world that has mostly concentrated on the latter in the last 500 years.

For now, what matters is that both the basics of quantum theory and the work of Indigenous philosophers have told us that we can’t responsibly expect to exercise unilateral human control of the world: in a world where Newton’s apple is only part of the story and not the whole, it is more realistic to think of responsibility as a mix of responsiveness and respect. We can use our human talents, but we can no longer realistically think of ourselves as having enough of them to warrant our continued failure to pay attention to the wisdom of non-human parts of nature.

The big question, for the remaining steps, is how to re-learn to communicate with these.