Amongst the many and varied things I have been reading and listening to is James Bridle’s Dark Age. He’s making the case that we seem ill-equipped to deal with the dark side of technology. He seems to say that we have shaped tech according to certain ideologies – consumerism, materialism, infinite progress, data collection, extraction, gaining and retaining power or control – and that it therefore enhances and perpetuates those aspects of our culture. It is mal-adapted for increasing, say, equality, equity, environmental protection, connection to the natural world, or anything else we might choose to value that does not raise money for corporations or increase the power of the already powerful.
One thing I will never forget – and it has come up in my thinking about the animal culture project.
Caroline Elkin wrote a book called Britain’s Gulag in which she recounted the testimonies of Kenyans who had been tortured in British concentration camps. The torture is absolutely appalling. But what is terrifying is that the testimonies were discredited until papers that had been kept secret by the British Government came to light. Actual experience cannot stand up unless the event is recorded in documents. What makes this especially egregious is that the British had destroyed most of the evidence but didn’t have time to destroy it all, so it is merely a matter of chance that any records – apart from the mental and physical scars of the survivors – existed.
Bridle also explains how Inuit people talked about how the sun was setting in a different place and they were mocked – but what they saw was the way in which the polluted atmosphere distorts light and makes it seem as if the sun had moved. They’d noticed this, which scientists hadn’t, but were considered foolish until the effect was proven by science. In a similar vein, we talk about Columbus discovering America – a place that had been inhabited for many thousands of years.
The only evidence that counts is what those in power say counts.
So, we say that non-human animals don’t think or don’t have an inner life or don’t reason or don’t make decisions because we can’t prove it with the tools at our disposal. When non-human animals eat medicinal plants we don't believe they have knowledge. We think they're driven by instinct or chance, because we can't conceive of information that is not mentalised in the way we mentalise things. Or we assert a different form of colonialisation by thinking for them, reasoning for them, deciding for them – by interpreting them from our limited perspective. What is astonishing is that they don’t do this to us. Consider the horse Clever Hans who was so good at reading the tiniest unconscious human facial or bodily expressions that he was believed capable of complex arithmetic. This discrepancy, sadly, seems to be related to a power differential: non-human animals cannot afford to make mistakes. They will be punished or killed.
Ha! Recall how in places with no humans, the native animals were unafraid. We considered them tame or stupid. But we could describe them as confident, curious and companionable. Now we have a world full of wary non-humans and over-confident humans who believe nothing unless they wrote it down themselves. No, unless those in power wrote it down.
It’s not surprising that we have conspiracy theorists and people suffering strange diseases, like Morgellons). They are responding to a world where reality is defined and shaped by power and technology and where intuition and experience seem to have no value. They are rightly disoriented. They hear stories like that about the Kenyans and can reasonably believe that things are hidden from them. What is interesting, though, is that however much information there is available saying that, for example, 9/11 was not a US plot and Morgellons is not caused by springtails, people become more convinced of their intuition.
It's like there is an experience, we have an intuition, we seek out evidence, then we seek to match it to the intuition instead of to the reality of the experience… It’s like we are so separated from actual lived experience that we become reliant on our mental model of the world and on the world as it is depicted by the available data. When the Inuits insist on the primacy of lived experience, we mistake that for a reliance on some imagined intuition, because we don’t seem able to distinguish between the two.
I blame Descartes.
Some seem to think that more information leads to greater wisdom. NO.
Others seem to think that intuition is veridical. NO.
Wisdom arises through experience, learning and assimilating. It comes from living and testing ideas against reality. It's not about accumulating data in lists and collection, libraries and the cloud, but about being the being wherein ideas assimilate - like the hyphae of the mycorrhizal fungi - into a network which is always contingent on place and environment and always subject to change. There is no one truth, like a number or an equation. There is the fluid process of making meaning - like life - out of place and time.
Anyway, to get back to the animal cultures, what I think matters is to give primacy to the lived experience of the animals. We can’t experience that, of course, but we can see what matters to the animals through their culture. And we don’t need more and more information about brains and hormones and whether they can recognise themselves in mirrors. All we need is to give them enough fucking space - enough place and environment - to create those cultures for themselves. We don’t need to have any goddam information at all.
Comments