Red Alert!

We’re scheduled to take up Daniel Wildcat‘s Red Alert! today in NW, after first getting caught up with Scott Pratt.

To begin at the beginning: Wildcat leads with an epigraph in which a tribal elder addresses “the Spiritual Person of the universe.” But wait, I thought I was a spiritual person. I thought there were lots of us. Where do we look for the big SP, within or apart from nature? Can we naturalize native spirit? I sure hope so.
Then, another epigraph from Octavio Paz alleges that Americans want to use reality rather than know it. Can’t we do both? Mustn’t we? Isn’t knowing a verb?

“Cultural genocide” sounds harsh. Is it fair?

“Managing nature” sounds arrogant. But if we could develop (say) nano-scale technologies for neutralizing CO2 impacts why shouldn’t we? Wouldn’t that be more sustainable than doing nothing? What would be objectionably “mechanical” about it? Does humility require that we just wait for the end of the world, wait for our defeat at the hands of our enemy-even if he is ourselves?

We do indeed suffer “ecological amnesia” – or maybe we just have an ecological blind spot.  Can’t our communications technologies address this? Haven’t they already begun to do so, through web-based activism? I say we should be doing whatever we can to instill a shared consciousness of the whole human tribe as singular and inclusive, of our native place as the whole earth.

Another view sure to incite: the cosmos isn’t really spiritual, except insofar as it sprouts local spirits. The world without us would be pretty devoid of spirit, unless animism is true. It’s not.

I love the idea of living seven generations into the future. But why seven? Is that a magic number? And I’m just going to say it: shaman reveries all seem pretty “faux” to me. What am I missing? (Maybe I should take the Unitarians’ course? But I don’t have a drum or rattle.)

“Nature exists right outside our doors, beyond the monitors and screens we ironically look at in order to feel ‘connected.'” I agree entirely, but let’s not presume that any form of connection is illicit. Go out and connect, come in and connect. It’s all good.

Wildcat deplores “the pseudo-evolutionary idea that tribalism is somehow categorically savage and uncivilized.” On the other hand, there are no tribal (or national) boundaries visible from space. Insisting on primacy of place may reinforce our worst, most xenophobic tendencies. As a story in the Times yesterday notes,

You and I tend to conform our opinions about the validity of science to match what would be consistent with how our tribe operates. (“Are We Hard-Wired To Doubt Science?”)

We are one planet and one species. Indeed, it is one cosmos. Let’s grow the tribe.

Scott Pratt

We’re talking today about the ideas of Professor Scott Pratt (U. of Oregon), who visited our campus last spring and planted the seed of my interest in our course topic. Don’t know much about native and indigenous wisdom but I’m having fun learning.

NOTE TO STUDENTS: Class canceled today. Check your email.

From Scott’s website:

In my book, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy, I argued that the philosophical views of Native Americans played a significant role in the origins of classical pragmatism-the philosophies of John Dewey, CharlesPeirce, and William James. By examining both the Native American philosophical traditions that emerged in the interaction between indigenous Americans and Europeans, and the ways in which the work of seminal European American philosophers developed, I argued that a case can be made for the influence of Native American thought. In particular, I looked at the work of Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, and Lydia Maria Child, the Native American traditions that they encountered, and ways in which these interactions contributed to a developing and distinctive American philosophy. Among the aspects of native thought that were most influential, I argued, was the principle of pluralism…

When Scott visited us last Spring he began with a series of creation myths from the Tualatin people of the Pacific Northwest. In each rendition, successive native epochs are eventually transmuted into non-human natural forms. Each gains from its respective creation story a coherence and inner relatedness that binds the people to one another, to the land and climate, to time and place.  Each tale somehow “liberates” its tellers from the threat of stolen or wrongfully-assimilated identity. In the aggregate, the tales stand together as a pluralistic unity: just the relatedness to please a good pragmatist.

Such stories may strike the literalizing western-scientific ear as quaint, charming, but irrelevant. Native thinkers and their sympathizers instead applaud their instructive attention to Mother Earth, and their receptivity to her lessons.

Pratt’s pragmatic-compatibilist thesis is that we can learn from such native American traditions, without compromising our commitment to the scientific story. The native point of view is inherently pluralistic. The scientific image, so far, has not been.

Calling  the earth and its people a “creation” may hang up those of us who’ve grown weary of the stale Intelligent Design squabbles of recent years, but the indigenous focus is not on the idea of a divine Singularity event that produced the cosmos. It is not even meant to contradict the evolutionary emphasis on natural processes of development over time. It is meant to underscore the inclusive relatedness and sacred spirituality of everything.  With the right spin, it’s nothing Darwin wouldn’t welcome. Or a Darwinian like E.O. Wilson.

But it might be un-Christian. Everything means everything, in the claim that everything and everyone is sacred and already “saved” by its natural provenance.  If you’re really a sacred part of the whole, you can’t fall. You don’t need to be redeemed. You don’t need a missionary to rescue you from paganism.
George Tinker had a beautiful dream of pluralism. How practical is it? Well, how practical was MLK’s? More than it seemed in 1962, for sure. Same goes for the Lakota phrase mitakuye oyasin, and its inclusive/pluralistic disposition towards creation.

Daniel Wildcat’s vision– which we’ll begin to explore in greater detail next class– is not merely meditative, but “co-active” and pragmatic.

Here’s our puzzle and challenge: how to honor the wisdom of native tales like that of the Skyhomish, who imagined a primordial tribal council setting the path of the river, and the “school” version that invokes only physics and geography? Are these really complementary “knowledges,” the mutual preservation of which makes us smarter? The solution, if there is one, will look forward to fruits. It won’t try to lock down the one true story and exclude all others. Is that too plural? Or just plural enough?
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FYI, for those wishing to understand and possibly emulate the spiritual journey of Ed Chigliac:  The First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville is offering a course called “The Shamanic Journey,” February 2–March 2:

Interested in learning an ancient form of healing and self-knowledge? Sian Wiltshire, our intern minister, who has been a shamanic practitioner for almost a decade, will be offering a class on the shamanic journey—the central spiritual practice of shamans around the world. Bring your curiosity and your questions to this five-part class. Please bring with you a pillow, blanket, any rattle or drum you may have (not required), and a journal or paper to write on. Norbert Capek Classroom (Morgan House), 1808 Woodmont Blvd., Nashville

primal roots

Bruce Wilshire is a distinguished philosopher from Rutgers University. We’re sampling his Primal Roots of American Philosophy today in NW, to get a feel for what he considers the natural affinity between philosophy in the American grain and, well, the native American grain.

Emerson, Thoreau, Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce… these classic American philosophers were meliorists devoted to making things progressively better. But their “progress” did not sunder mind from body, matter from spirit, subject from object. With Black Elk they sought Spirit under the big sky, on this planet, here and now. That, after all, is where we are.  America has “evaded” philosophy, said Cornel West. But that’s a good thing, when what’s being evaded is an unsustainable “modern” schism between humans and the life-world.

I’d never considered William James a Shaman, but maybe that is the right word for those whose own good words and examples help to cure some of us of our inveterate, debilitating habits of mediation and insulation from direct and immediate experience of our world. James urged receptivity to whatever might be present to absorb one’s “life-currents,” to the purity of “pure experience,” to the sufficiency of the present moment. Future fulfillments, so much the focal center of pragmatic philosophy, depend upon our successful attending to the now. Like Ed, of Cicely (“could be you’ve been called…”):

The best text in James I know to convey the lure of the primal and indigenous is this, from “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings“:

…we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life’s more elementary and general goods and joys.

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one’s body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. “Ali! my brother,” said a chieftain to his white guest, “thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people. . . . when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present.”

We too often fail to live in the present, and thus fail to be present to our very lives. We lack the quality of experience that John Dewey revered as natural piety, “a sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts… marked by intelligence and purpose [and] a capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable.” A Common Faith

native American wisdom

We begin today with Native American Wisdom, a collection of provocative quotations attributed to sundry indigenous sages.  Here are a few of the questions and comments they’ve provoked in me. Tell me yours.

“All things are connected,” of course– whether Seattle said so or not– but just how intimately? Is the universe “internally” and determinately wired, or are the relations between us and our world loose enough to sustain our ambition and initiative?

And, just how much bigger is Mother Earth than you and me? How much does she suffer our collective foolishness and our consumptive excess? How much can we actually perturb and  derange long-term  ecological interrelationships and regional or planetary biodiversity? Do we give her too little credit, and ourselves too much?

We all spend forever on this rock, Annie Dillard once wrote, mostly “tucked under.” So the question of how we regard our ancestors, tucked already, is at the same time a question of how we see ourselves spending eternity. For those inclined to take the long view, it is a sacred question: the earth is home, now and always, to wave upon wave of human aspiration and repose. It is incubator and  sacred burial ground alike.

Native peoples famously revere the spirit of both the land and all the life upon it, and still they hold the humans to special account:  “A man who would not love his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.” Humans  bring something new to the wild world. Human nature is larger than nature per se, in this respect, but is also inseparably a part of it. Human culture is “civilized” but it often needs the tonic of wildness. What does this complicated condition say about us? What special obligations, of  an ethical nature, does it impose?

Philosophical naturalists are not necessarily natural lovers of Nature, but indigenous naturalists always are. They’re born conservationists. But, conservatives, with respect to technology and science and “progress”? Is there a form of change naturalists can or should believe in?

I always think of native peoples as tribally territorial, deeply imbued with a sense of place;  but at least one of the native speakers we read today chooses to emphasize the concept of homeland as open and unbounded, not so much a particular place as an expansive and figurative landscape, a stage for uncircumscribed movement by free peoples across space and time.  How different is that, I wonder, from the combustible freedom of mobility we celebrate in our own time? When people nowadays re-locate for work or whim, and cruise for personal amusement, are they free? Or just untethered?

“It does not require many words to speak the truth.” How many words will we need to address this? Too many, no doubt. But this is the most interesting question I’ve found so far, in my own reflections on native wisdom. A proclivity for more silent forethought might be the most important thing we can hope to learn. Guess we’ll have to talk ourselves into it. [words… talked out…Reality (conceptual shotguns)]

“We do not want riches. We want peace and love.” Another big challenge to the heirs of western ideology: is our civilization’s commitment to the perpetual expansion of wealth compatible with the other, simpler, humbler virtues we say we honor?

On the question of education, it’s hard not to feel one’s cheeks redden when reading Canassatego’s polite repudiation of “the white man’s kind of education.” Thoreau issued the same indictment in Walden, of the practical disutility of so much that we call “higher education.” Why don’t we all study “cabin building” and, if not deerslaying, then at least gathering, planting, and harvesting?

“We shall soon pass, but the place where we now rest will last forever.” Or, as I usually prefer to put it: “the things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves…” We should be teaching our children that, too.

And what about a sense of humility before “the Great Mystery”?  If anything, such an attitude would actually reinforce the vaunted presuppositionlessness of the scientific quest.

“A pause giving time for thought was the truly courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation.” But we hate the silent pauses, don’t most of us, most of the time? That’s a correctable deficiency on our parts, isn’t it? From fear of being taken for slow half-wits we leap into the breach, too glib to be good. A council of elders would find our typical exchanges brash and impudent. They’d want nothing to do with our classrooms, our courtrooms, our interview exchanges.  Don’t you sometimes feel the same way? Don’t you frequently find yourself wanting to push your interlocutors’ “mute” buttons, if only they had them?

I’ll give you a few moments to think about that. And I’ll shut up now, just for now. Your turn. Take your time.

Next time: Bruce Wilshire’s Primal Roots of American Philosophy.

native wisdom

“We learn by teaching.” My page-a-day’s proverb this morning is perfect, for Day 1 (finally!) of Environmental Ethics and Native Wisdom (hereafter abbreviated “NW”).

As previously reported, the class was inspired by the visit to our campus last Spring of Professor Scott Pratt of the University of Oregon. He’s already sold on the total concept of indigenous and native wisdom. I still have lots to learn.

We’ll begin with a quiz, actually more a survey-questionnaire, to elicit an understanding of our respective starting-points with regard to the key terms our impending study.

What, for instance, should we understand by “environment”? It’s not just extra-human nature, is it? Aren’t we all, in fact, parts of one another’s environments? Haven’t our proliferating and ubiquitous media environments become too big to ignore? Isn’t the world wide web an ecosystem?

How about “ecology,” “progress,” “nature,” and “culture”? Shouldn’t we be “for” them all? Aren’t we inseparable from them all?

Is there really a legitimate controversy about the climate crisis? Can anyone seriously deny the reality of anthropogenic global warming? But can we deny, either, the promise and possibility of new technological remedies for the problems we’ve created for ourselves and our planet?

Is industrial agriculture as we know it even remotely sustainable? Is it not insane to ship “organic”  food halfway around the world? Is most of our food even real? Can we ever bring our carbon footprint close to the now-talismanic  “350” again? What if we don’t?

Can we afford to keep on growing? Can we afford not to?

If our present relation to the Earth is fragmented and life-threatening, can we really embrace an alternate, more “holistic” paradigm? Is that something we should each aspire to, personally? Or do we have to be “all in” on this one, if the patient is to have any chance of recovery?

Is  “Mother Earth” a fairy tale? Is “Gaia” just a myth? Or is earth-centered goddess wisdom our last great hope?

What has any of this to do with the great-spirited wisdom of native and indigenous peoples?

And can we sustain a continued healthy  interest in expanding technology, exploring our world, and deepening the scientific comprehension of ourselves and the cosmos?

Here’s an intriguing flash of pop-culture memory, for those who recall him: is there a Commander Chakotay in our future?

And speaking of pop culture: does the world of  “Avatar” appeal?

Clearly we have plenty to consider. This is a course with real life-changing potential. I’m a little concerned about that, frankly, but I’m here to learn.

Mostly I’m just eager to get on with a course that should be fun, maybe a bit contentious on occasion, but (I predict) hugely instructive too. Maybe we can even hope for “enlightening.” I expect to learn a lot of native wisdom (including some wise words about the value of sometimes holding your tongue) in the weeks ahead. Our first reading assignment is here.

Note: a new collection of links has been added in the right margin, under “environment“- check it out, give me your suggestions, let us all know (in class and in “comments”) when you find good stuff.