As I reached the section in which you refer to Cartesian thought, I reflected on how the discovery of the atom further emphasized the ideas of separation and mechanization and disconnected us from the processes that make life possible. I wish I could remember whose book I read, but the assertion was that studying phenomena at a microscopic level not only fills our minds with facts and details, obscuring the bigger picture, it also encourages us to separate phenomena into their individual parts, almost dissecting them as Descartes did to animals to prove they had no soul. We ending know more and understanding less.
On a hokier level, your appeal to indigenous cultures reminds me of the analogy in Daniel Quinn's New Age novel Ishmael. In it, Ishmael asks the narrator to consider his society as a a car driven off a cliff and to imagine how many cars have already crashed at the bottom. He then points out that there are plenty of societies that have simply chosen not to drive off the cliff. In our current society, it seems that the best we can do is rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic (sorry to mix my metaphors). I'm still vegetarian 25 years later, and this makes me healthier and reduces my carbon footprint, has some infinitesimal effect on factory farmed animals, and has some similarly small effect on slash-and-burn agricultural, but does it really have any effect on the direction our society is headed? No, not really. Does that or should that reality compel me to change my behavior? I don't think so. I continue to believe that such decisions have intrinsic value, if only because I have thought them through and continue to challenge myself on that value.
Thanks for pulling all this together Adam. Where do you find time to do all that reading??!
I think many of us get the interdependent, interconnected world model. eg. I think of the David Suzuki Foundation's (new) vision: "that we all act every day on the understanding that we are one with nature."
The big challenge as I see it is shifting a critical mass of human behaviour to that understanding, from linear/detached to circular/interdependent. Certainly current trends to mindfulness, slow streets/food/growth, ongoing spiritual voyages are bright spots. Urgently. All over the earth.
But alas those who practice such living have historically been dominated, exploited, destroyed and impoverished by prevailing capitalist and colonialist drivers. When I read how the domination gene can now be supercharged with surveillance AI, I shudder for the ability of evil dominants (confession: I too live off the avails of historical conquests of this type) to rise to even greater heights as they bring us all down.
All that said, COVID may be our friend. It shows no mercy to those who insist the economy trumps everything; it fractures a lot of the structures that our doom is built on, and it reveals our utter interdependence with the smallest of beings almost completely beyond our control. It is also powerful enough to really get our attention.
" “Because we . . . also know that, being a living part of the earth, we cannot harm any part of her without hurting ourselves." Harming the living planet would be acknowledged as self-inflicted harm. “ another excellent article, thank you. This above is the crux, and the problem in itself. Coming into understanding of our interdependence with the Earth is 1/2 of solving our current schism. The second half is healing our own mind body rift. If we don’t do both, we don’t have the capacity to truly apprehend our connection with the earth, nor do we have the embodied sense to assist us in avoiding self harm. Lacking both at the moment, we harm the earth and ourselves simultaneously. And we are insensible to both harms. They do not touch us, because we have lost our sense of ourselves. One route to that restoration. As we have discussed, is via somatics. Adding to the above, this reconnection is also the route to healing our traumas, and overcoming our addictions, individually and collectively. See Gabor Mate's Ted Talk (Rio) on addiction, power, and filling the hole inside ourselves with our own light. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbX1XaREkR0
Hi Adam, a great article, very well presented and researched, and, a timely call for a paradigm shift in all our belief systems to understand and include Indigenous peoples "interconnected and inter-related" world views.
As I reached the section in which you refer to Cartesian thought, I reflected on how the discovery of the atom further emphasized the ideas of separation and mechanization and disconnected us from the processes that make life possible. I wish I could remember whose book I read, but the assertion was that studying phenomena at a microscopic level not only fills our minds with facts and details, obscuring the bigger picture, it also encourages us to separate phenomena into their individual parts, almost dissecting them as Descartes did to animals to prove they had no soul. We ending know more and understanding less.
On a hokier level, your appeal to indigenous cultures reminds me of the analogy in Daniel Quinn's New Age novel Ishmael. In it, Ishmael asks the narrator to consider his society as a a car driven off a cliff and to imagine how many cars have already crashed at the bottom. He then points out that there are plenty of societies that have simply chosen not to drive off the cliff. In our current society, it seems that the best we can do is rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic (sorry to mix my metaphors). I'm still vegetarian 25 years later, and this makes me healthier and reduces my carbon footprint, has some infinitesimal effect on factory farmed animals, and has some similarly small effect on slash-and-burn agricultural, but does it really have any effect on the direction our society is headed? No, not really. Does that or should that reality compel me to change my behavior? I don't think so. I continue to believe that such decisions have intrinsic value, if only because I have thought them through and continue to challenge myself on that value.
Thanks for pulling all this together Adam. Where do you find time to do all that reading??!
I think many of us get the interdependent, interconnected world model. eg. I think of the David Suzuki Foundation's (new) vision: "that we all act every day on the understanding that we are one with nature."
The big challenge as I see it is shifting a critical mass of human behaviour to that understanding, from linear/detached to circular/interdependent. Certainly current trends to mindfulness, slow streets/food/growth, ongoing spiritual voyages are bright spots. Urgently. All over the earth.
But alas those who practice such living have historically been dominated, exploited, destroyed and impoverished by prevailing capitalist and colonialist drivers. When I read how the domination gene can now be supercharged with surveillance AI, I shudder for the ability of evil dominants (confession: I too live off the avails of historical conquests of this type) to rise to even greater heights as they bring us all down.
All that said, COVID may be our friend. It shows no mercy to those who insist the economy trumps everything; it fractures a lot of the structures that our doom is built on, and it reveals our utter interdependence with the smallest of beings almost completely beyond our control. It is also powerful enough to really get our attention.
" “Because we . . . also know that, being a living part of the earth, we cannot harm any part of her without hurting ourselves." Harming the living planet would be acknowledged as self-inflicted harm. “ another excellent article, thank you. This above is the crux, and the problem in itself. Coming into understanding of our interdependence with the Earth is 1/2 of solving our current schism. The second half is healing our own mind body rift. If we don’t do both, we don’t have the capacity to truly apprehend our connection with the earth, nor do we have the embodied sense to assist us in avoiding self harm. Lacking both at the moment, we harm the earth and ourselves simultaneously. And we are insensible to both harms. They do not touch us, because we have lost our sense of ourselves. One route to that restoration. As we have discussed, is via somatics. Adding to the above, this reconnection is also the route to healing our traumas, and overcoming our addictions, individually and collectively. See Gabor Mate's Ted Talk (Rio) on addiction, power, and filling the hole inside ourselves with our own light. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbX1XaREkR0
Hi Adam, a great article, very well presented and researched, and, a timely call for a paradigm shift in all our belief systems to understand and include Indigenous peoples "interconnected and inter-related" world views.