Reflections on Issue Sixteen
Sensing Distortions & Illusions
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Thank you to everyone who had a chance to read Issue Sixteen over the past week. For those who have yet to read it, the reflections from other readers below may be a good starting point, or you can read “Sensing Distortions & Illusions” first.
The Understory reflections between issues are intended to share thoughtful comments from subscribers that expand upon and challenge parts of the previous issue. I am immensely grateful for the comments added this week, and hope they provide further value in thinking about the responsibilities of advertising and marketing to bring about the change we want to see in the world, and how we can see a clearer picture of reality on the other side.
As Shared by Peter Tavernise
“As an English major who flirted with advertising right after graduation, I spent time reading Ogilvy and others who were considered luminaries. I'm thankful that it turned out I wasn't really any good at convincing people to buy things I didn't believe in myself, which is how I wound up fundraising for higher education. Copyranter and other insiders have done what Confessions of an Economic Hitman did for so-called global development, shining a light on sins and abuses of the advertising world NOT that it was really hidden (what could our democracies be like if we were not allowed to advertise for politicians? The mind boggles.). We live in a panoptoconic consumer-advertising environment that is almost impossible to escape.
Language matters, and as you've written, representation through language matters. We've learned from Robin Wall Kimmerer and other writers informing us of Indigenous ways of being in the world, that our language is greatly impoverished by its insistence on making so much of our reality nouns, and emphasizing separate-ness. This brief article gets to the crux of what we lost and can reclaim in terms of the Presencing you describe. The Mystery as a verb—the Great Mysterous-ing:
‘From the Native American point of view, the word ‘god’ as a noun is a grammatically induced hallucination, like the dummy ‘it’ in ‘it is raining.’ The closest Lakhota equivalent is tanka wakan [thãka wakã] (sometimes reversed in sacred speech), which is an adjectival-verbal construction. This phrase has routinely been mistranslated as the ‘Great Mystery’ but is better glossed as ‘the Great Mysteriousing.’ Such mistranslation is not trivial as it obscures the deep differences between a verb-based and noun-based worldview.’”
I am grateful for the continuous exchange about how language correlates to sensemaking and meaning in our world. Kimmerer first turned my attention to the grammar of animacy and how vital it is to our relationship with other “feathered people and people with leaves.” In her writing and speaking, she often returns to the troubled pronoun “it” for objectifying the natural world, and her revolutionary pronouns “ki” and “kin” as more suitable replacements. In “Nature Needs a New Pronoun: To Stop the Age of Extinction, Let’s Start by Ditching ‘It’,” Kimmerer writes that language, if used with intention, can be a tool for cultural transformation:
“Colonization, we know, attempts to replace Indigenous cultures with the culture of the settler. One of its tools is linguistic imperialism, or the overwriting of language and names. Among the many examples of linguistic imperialism, perhaps none is more pernicious than the replacement of the language of nature as subject with the language of nature as object.”
Kimmerer expands this idea in Orion by describing Indigenous languages as an affront to colonial ears, not just because of their foreign sounds, but how they challenged the tenets of Western thinking about human supremacy over other beings. Matthew C. Bronson’s article compares noun-heavy English to the structure of Indigenous languages. As Bronson notes, Indigenous languages rarely use nouns and speakers can go entire days without uttering a single noun. If we consider this in light of the death of the majority of the world’s languages, what we are losing with the loss of these languages is not only words of differing sounds, but entire cultural heritages of representation that can help heal our separateness from nature as Peter writes. This hypnotic ability of words makes “language in its very essence is a form of thought control, an attempt to configure the reality of a person or a group in alignment with one’s own.”
Considering how marketing and advertising speak is just as important as the content of the message in understanding cultural distortion and illusion. Perhaps the context of Indigenous language systems reveals both the power and possibilities for marketing and advertising to embrace its profound cultural responsibility around language.
“Your description of Bucky's integrities reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh's meditation on Interbeing through a piece of paper:
‘If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.
Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.’
Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditation on Interbeing is a beautiful reflection of what presencing truly sounds like in its unfolding of interrelationships. On this re-reading, it brought to mind Hokusai’s famous woodcut—where, in the shadow of Mount Fuji, strong gusts carry papers from the packs of travellers along the Tōkaidō highway. As the trees sway beside the travellers, they release unadulterated leaves that intermingle with the human-created papers. Here we have a scene that is both timeless and at the same time momentary. People and their objects in relationship with the natural forces around them.
Over a century later, Jeff Wall recreated a scene in Hokusai’s image for this photograph, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai). Wall reconstructed the narrative in the industrialized agricultural land just outside Vancouver. In contrast with the idyllic, naturalistic view of Edo Japan from Hokusai, Wall’s premeditation in constructing the image parallels its contemporary human-altered landscape—total control of environment and medium, a kind of delusional allegory for our current era.
“I've stopped asking how the universe works. Please take a listen to This Mythic Life podcast which a guide from my PGI program recommended to me today. I've been sitting here gobsmacked by how on-topic it is regarding our relationships with language and the land. Sharon Blackie interviewing David Abram, the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology.
I was not familiar with David Abram’s writing and was similarly enamoured by what he shared in the exchange with Sharon Blackie. While there were many noteworthy moments in the discussion, two, in particular, stood out as related to the themes of Issue Sixteen. First was the narrative of magic as it relates to illusion and the comment by Noah below. Through his travels around the world learning from Indigenous medicine people, who Abram fondly calls “magicians,” he came to understand that the role of the magician is to free us from outmoded ways of thinking. Magicians help to connect the human world with the “more-than-human” community that surrounds us. For Abram, magicians are intermediaries between worlds. For more on Abram’s thinking on magic, see The Spell of the Sensuous and this interview with Scott London.
The second was Abram’s distinction in the ways contemporary society talks about nature rather than to nature:
“We do spend a lot of time talking about nature. Talking about the weather. Talking about this and that. I’ve noticed that in healthy cultures, cultures that actually live in some kind of reciprocity with the surrounding landscape, they spend just as much time talking to the ground underfoot, talking to the wind and weather patterns, talking to the mountains…to begin every now and then to begin opening our conversation out beyond the exclusively human space where discourse tends to be held as if humans alone speak. Or that language is an entirely human prerogative. And it is what distinguishes us from the other animals. We’ve got language and they don’t. But this is a kind of madness, really. And it is very recent as an assumption. I reckon that every deeply Indigenous, traditionally oral culture that we know of, assumes from the get-go, not just that everything is alive, everything alive, indeed that everything speaks, just most things don’t speak in words.”
The illusion of separation is one of our own making, and language is the engine of distortion that continues to reinforce it.
See Peter’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his
As Shared by Monique Morden
“I find it infuriating that for decades there have been people who have known what is the right thing to do and it gets stifled or subverted by the quest for money. Thus reinforcing my mantra that ‘Being right isn’t enough.’ We need to leverage tools used for evil for good. We can just as easily use the tools of advertising and PR for the right side of the issue. Although one needs money or innovative resources by which to do this.
I heard a CBC interview with a botanist who mentioned she apologized to a recent PhD grad that after 40 years in the field she thought we would have been much farther forward on a known and proven issue. Instead of the student being down she told her prof that there was no better time to bring this fix and work on this issue. I paraphrase but... at a time when we are on a precipice, there is no better time to know where you stand and to make an impact by showing others where to stand on the teeter-totter. I just loved that optimistic view. And for us all to keep fighting.
Another thought I had related to reading Sapiens. It really drove home to me the positive and negative in every new scientific step we take. If only we examined these polar positions and the continuum of discoveries in advance of using them or releasing them to “the wild” perhaps we could stop or at the very least be more aware of nefarious uses and applications. AI is a good example. Hopefully the horse hasn’t left the barn in that case, but, even if it has, we have the capability to corral the horses."
We share a similar conclusion about what can at times seem like an unrelenting drive towards wealth creation and growth at whatever expense necessary to achieve them. Through scientific writers such as Yuval Noah Harari and E.O Wilson, my appreciation grows of the multitudinous lenses by which we might view our “discoveries” and the paths forward as a result. In a field that has for centuries dismissed the importance of values and emotions, we are now seeing an attitudinal change in science that incorporates both. I am confident that the resulting discoveries within a more spacious framing will lead to paths of greater stewardship and reciprocity in the future.
As Monique says, we still need counter voices. While we might celebrate artificial intelligence for being able to do things like identify wildfire risk, I am more heartened by the recent acknowledgement and amplification of ancient, Indigenous knowledge in our forests to prevent widespread fires. Those traditions have a history that has proven itself based on stewardship and balance. On the other hand, AI’s history is just being built. As we begin to learn more about artificial intelligence such as how carbon-intensive training large AI models is through the research of Emma Strubell or the questionable ethics as highlighted by the recent dismissal of Timnit Gebru, we should first look backwards into the future (Issue Four).
“Lastly, I need some guidance on your Sylvia Plath quote near the end. I don’t think I connected the dots on that.”
The quote came from a chapter header in Lepore’s book, which resonated deeply with me at the time of reading it. “I am skeptical of people whose God is testing.” If Then is a book about the desire to manipulate people and event outcomes. So the way I understood Plath’s quote was that for many of the “computer men” of the 50s to the present, the computer has become not just a way to understand, but also to manipulate outcomes and reality. While this work was once thought to be the work of God(s), in our contemporary, non-secular context, it is the work of machines.
See Monique’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers
As Shared by Noah Russell
“When I imagine great illusions, I think of stage magicians who practice tirelessly to perfect sleight of hand and graduate to levitation, disappearance and telepathy. Honed through repetition, their craft exploits an understanding that humans’ focus is relatively easily distracted such that illusion seems real and in our collective desire for wonder, we willingly surrender our full faculties. This is not to say we might not remain curious or doubtful but the idea that magic exists in a world of process and progress answers a deep hunger for a life that still holds mystery, unexplored frontiers and mystical energies.
Like the Magician, advertising has worked hard, practiced and perfected its stagecraft in an attempt to create a show for which the audience will pay. We are the paying audience; even those among us who attempt to see past the magicians' tricks have paid for their seat and the opportunity to argue the distortion.
Our daily lives in the western world are a constant barrage of modern magic. We marvel at the relative ease with which we enjoy comfortable existence. Running water, electricity, a telephone - back a few hundred years and these would all have seemed magical. Today’s conveniences of online shopping, personalized feeds, steaming content and handheld AI are yesterday’s science fiction but they still exist on a backbone of illusion. These presuppose our willingness to appreciate the magic without asking to see behind the magicians apparatus. We are still the audience, paying others for awe and wonder.
In this issue, Adam tackles what is perhaps the greatest challenge to climate action; the nefarious efforts of advertising (corporate narratives) to conjure illusions on behalf of clients motivated by the accumulation of wealth and power. The challenge is that so many of the illusions, or disillusions of climate change seem both obvious tricks but incredibly complex in their unraveling.
When the temporal nature of the show becomes the persuasive reality of our daily lives, the magic is normalized and we accept it as fact. The omnipotent reach of tech, personalized media feeds and data-driven marketing (that knows us better than ourselves) makes us an audience for whom the real illusion is our belief in self-determined choice. We might now ask if the auditorium is growing; can we even opt-out of the show?
Is there a different theatre? If we feel that the magician is lacking and instead we attend the theatres of climate awareness and ecological embrace - are we able to break free of capitalism’s spell? I’m challenged by the fact that even the most ardent climate change realists exist in a world where they communicate through mass media channels, fund themselves through elite philanthropy, decry the idolization of greed and ambition but ultimately, too often fail to escape the system they rail against. We crumble to convenience, cost savings, entertainment, comfort and conformity. We become theatre within theatre where the magician simply uses the alternative realities as part of his illusion. Think of greenwashing, toothless sustainability initiatives, recycling, corporate social impact statements, political posturing and triple bottom line accounting. They all assume that we are capable of simply modifying the show to make it palatable, to extend the run. No longer filled with wonder, I’m convinced I am more aware of the illusions being presented but I’m still in the audience.
I’m not sure how to leave the theatre but I’m more and more convinced that we have to stop watching, to stop providing an audience and run. As I inch for the door, I fear being left with only a ticket stub and fleeting memories. But I fear that as theatre falls around us, the show will go on.”
I was intrigued to see how the theme of magic and magicians recurred in Peter’s and Noah’s comments. Through this contrast and the thinking of David Abram, I’ve come to appreciate that illusions and distortions created by magic have the capacity to heal, as well as the capacity to inflict damage. It is about the intentions of the magician, and as Noah says, the explicit contract with the audience.
In the documentary based on Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s book, Merchants of Doubt, Jamy Ian opens the film by introducing the profession of the magician:
“My expertise is in deception. The thing that sets magicians apart from other types of thieves and liars is that we are honest liars. It’s the moral contract. I am going to fool you, but it’s okay. Right, that’s my job. And I am going to bring you back in a not severely altered condition.”
A moral contract sounds like the greatly needed tonic to our current culture of delusion. Given the right intention, Noah and I might purchase another ticket to the show, and perhaps even agree to emerge from it with a severely altered consciousness. The question remains—who will be our future climate magicians and what will be their moral contract?
See Noah’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his
I hope this week between issues provides the space for further discovery and reflection. Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead. See you next Saturday with Issue Seventeen.
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Why I Write The Understory
We have crossed the climate-change threshold from emerging to urgent, which demands a transformative response. The scale of the issue demands not only continuous focus but also the courage to take bold action. I've found that a persistence of climate consciousness improves resilience to the noise and distractions of daily life in service of a bigger (and most of the time invisible) long-term cause.
The Understory is my way of organizing the natural and human-made curiosities that capture my attention. Within the words, research, and actions of others lies the inspiration for personal and organizational journeys. I hope that my work here will help to inform not just my persistent consciousness, but yours as well.
Reading these alternating articles and responses has become a highlight of my weekends, thank you for the integrity, depth and thoroughness with which you continue to steward this evolving discussion and nascent community. Thank you!