Step 9: when there is no shared spoken language

The “halfway house” of Step 8 summed up why we humans don’t know enough to be able to exercise unilateral control of the world responsibly. That means we are going to need to become open again to learning to relate in mutual responsiveness to non-human parts of nature. We used to think of this as something quite normal, even in the West: Louise Westling, for example, uses some pre-Enlightenment Western myths as examples to illustrate this point when she links some of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy to Niko Tinbergen’s and Konrad Lorenz’s findings as they established the new discipline of ethology.

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

This website has no intention of throwing out the baby with the bathwater: there is nothing wrong with the contemporary West practising science. As some of the earlier steps pointed out, science has been massively helpful in a variety of ways. One of the most recent, obvious examples was its invention of a Covid vaccine, and the many lives saved by it. The trouble is not that the contemporary West practises science. The trouble is that the contemporary West sometimes thinks it has to choose between practising science and treating non-humans as potential partners in relationship, when it could, instead, be spending its time finding ways to do both.

Contemporary Western science may well be our first piece in a - hopefully soon growing - mosaic of ways in which contemporary Western humans and non-humans might regenerate mutually responsive relations: both Indigenous authors (for example Gregory Cajete) and contemporary Western authors (for example David Peat) expect contemporary Western science to play its part in this.

It won’t be able to do it all on its own, though. If it could, then it would arguably have done it by now: nobody wants the climate emergency, least of all those with the best instruments to measure exactly how dangerous it is becoming.

—> How do you think two living beings might go about communicating with each other when there is no shared spoken language available? (There is no one right answer here - the more ideas you come up with, the better.)

We humans tend to rely on the spoken or written word a lot - especially in our own language. I know I don’t make much of an effort to brush up my more-than-rusty French before any trip through the Eurotunnel. In fact, I have caught myself tutting about the French not speaking much English - before I noticed what I was doing. Then it made me laugh at my own arrogance.

When we think about it, though, much of what we communicate (even between those of us who do have a shared spoken language) can’t fully be put into words. Einstein once joked about the pointlessness of describing a Beethoven sonata as a variation of wave pressure. John Dewey thinks a lifetime of talking might be too short to comprehensively convey even one single emotion. McPherson and Rabb’s work is happy enough to use the language of English - as is this website - but they are emphatic that human language on its own is not enough, even between humans: they not only talk about the need to write story back into the land; they devote almost the entire second half of their book to experiential forms of learning.

With regards to our relationship with non-humans, one of my professors when I was a student - David Cockburn - published an article on something we don’t often think about: he was watching a wildlife programme, and he found himself developing empathy for - wait for it - a squid. Not knowledge about a squid (David Cockburn is a philosopher, not a zoologist), but empathy that can’t have come from anything other than from a gut response to the squid’s body language.

David Cockburn is not alone with this: he just looks alone because he is in the contemporary West. Indigenous philosophers will not only tell us the same thing, but lots more besides.

Many readers are going to be as Western as I am. If that’s you, maybe it helps to think about it this way at first: an earlier step talked about Frans de Waal’s reports of wasps using a different neurophysiological process for facial recognition from the one humans, corvids and sheep use. At the time, all we needed to know was that absence of a particular organ or pathway doesn’t necessarily mean absence of a particular capacity (such as facial recognition, or such as the capacity to feel pain). Now, there is another thing to think about with those wasps.

What if facial recognition, as such, doesn’t even matter? What if another living being - it doesn’t have to be a wasp - can achieve what facial recognition would achieve, but without actually using facial recognition? For example, what if they can recognise another living being’s identity and current emotional state without even seeing them at all, maybe from the way that they smell? We humans wouldn’t necessarily have any idea that any of this was going on: if it is far enough removed from our own, human experience, then science won’t have thought to ask any questions about it because it won’t occur to it that there is anything interesting to sniff out (pardon the pun).

It is even more interesting than that with David Cockburn’s empathy experience above. The crucial difference is that he wasn’t trying to work out any scientific facts about the squid (that is, he wasn’t asking any pre-conceived questions about it to gain propositional knowledge of it). Rather, he was getting to know the squid as another living being, and then he suddenly found himself responding to the squid.

In other words, he was pretty close to what Ella Fitzgerald and her band were up to in step 6: when Ella Fitzgerald forgot the lyrics to “Mack the Knife”, they didn’t have time to hold a meeting and to exchange propositional knowledge on how to proceed. Propositional knowledge (knowledge “about”, categorised into elements of human language) may have helped them to become good at their jobs in the first place, but it wasn’t what saved the day at the concert. At the concert, they played a few tentative bars before they were at home with each other again in the new situation. Then they did what a jazz band does best: they improvised together, and that means they were living a mutually responsive relationship in which they didn’t need to talk to each other. They had found a shared language that worked for them in their play.

In Step 6, Brian Burkhart used his jazz analogy to talk about locality. Locality was more than just the fact of events playing out differently in different places, although it was that, too. It was first and foremost a network of mutually responsive relationships with and on the land, and it involved humans and non-humans alike, so that Burkhart’s jazz band was a multi-species one.

Step 6 then pointed out that the authors referenced on this website usually describe Indigenous ritual not as any kind of magic whereby a human unilaterally tries to get what s/he wants, but as balance in relationship, whereby each individual player and the band are good for each other, both ways.

Since there is no shared spoken language available between humans and squids, I would argue that a seed of Brian Burkhart’s jazz appears in David Cockburn’s empathy for the squid as he spent some time in the company of its body language.

In other words, science no longer has to be the only way that we contemporary Westerners use to regenerate our neglected ability to communicate at eye level with non-humans when we become brave enough to give shared decision-making a chance: we can spend time in the company of non-humans, too, and start to get to know each other again. What happened - the empathy that developed - came as a surprise to David Cockburn, and I think this is a good sign in a living world that both quantum theory and Indigenous philosophers have told us is more than just Newton’s apple.

David Cockburn was brave enough to look beyond our accustomed contemporary Western comfort zone of steering the conversation by asking pre-conceived questions, and he learnt something that he couldn’t have been expecting.

With this in mind, and when trying to learn from and with a paradigm where the sacred is experienced as being present in the material rather than in a realm beyond, the remaining steps are going to talk about the possibility of our finding ways of learning besides propositional knowledge alone. They are going to talk about our learning to make links between the map of the material emerging from the work of contemporary Western science on the one hand, and Indigenous philosophers’ conceptions of performative knowledge processes, meaning, story, and ritual on the other. A postgraduate student of botany is going to provide an example of wisdom being contained in an ancient evolutionary relationship between non-humans, and of this wisdom then finding its way into contemporary practices through the medium of story from there.

But first, in step 10, we are going to need John Polkinghorne’s earlier advice to hold on by the skin of our intellectual teeth: Vine Deloria is going to say some things we may well disagree with. I certainly disagree with them! The interesting thing about them is, though, that there is still wisdom in what Deloria is going to say - not despite, but in part because of the ideas I find the most disagreeable. It is going to be an interesting juggling act at first, and then, with any luck, we may see what Indigenous philosophers mean when they talk about disagreement as a sign of progress.