Supposing the Native American worldview is ‘more true’ while the
Western European worldview is ‘more easy’
or, ‘Two radically different architectures for ‘story’ that ‘uses us’
"... unmoved ... from time without end ... you rest ... in the midst
of the paths ... in the midst of the winds ... you rest ... covered
with the droppings of birds ... grass growing from your feet ... your
head decked with the down of birds ... you rest ... in the midst of
the winds ... you wait ... Aged one." --- Lakota tribute
Our western society is a scientifically-minded society that, as
Johannes Kepler observed in 1619, tends to “choose not that which is
most true but that which is most easy”.
In the Native worldview, there is no split between the ‘inanimate
world’ and the ‘animate world’, the world is understood, instead, as a
(fluid-) dynamical continuum, a worldview that resonates so strongly
with relativity and quantum theory that physicists like F. David Peat
(co-author with David Bohm) have written books like ‘Blackfoot
Physics’ to describe and underscore the deep parallels.
Why do we need to split apart the ‘living part’ of the universe from
the ‘dead part’? And does it make sense to believe that a dead
universe became ‘infected with life’; i.e. that ‘life’ is an adjective
that applies to some things (‘life-forms’) rather than, as Erwin
Schroedinger (formulator of quantum wave dynamics) suggests, an
inherent property of nature.
As modern physics implies, nature is a dynamically unifying (space-
time) continuum, a self-renewing continuum characterized by continuing
‘gathering’ and ‘re-gathering’. We may say that a human body ‘de-
composes’ when ‘it dies’ but nature wastes nothing (nature includes
all things and excluded no thing) and the material and energies that
‘stayed together’ (in the manner of a convection cell or hurricanes in
the continuing flow of our natural living space), are fully ‘re-
gathered’ in the ongoing dynamics of nature.
An important ‘clue’ as to how we give meaning to dynamical processes
in nature associates with our tendency to conceive of ‘re-gathering’
as ‘scattering’ (decomposition rather than ‘re-composing’). That
is, by conceiving of the ongoing ‘re-organisation’ in nature as
‘disorganisation’, we split nature into two parts; (a) a world of
chaos and disorganisation that is nevertheless a breeding ground for
‘organisational structures and organisms’, and (b) organised
structures and organisms which emerge from and feed on the world of
chaos and disorganisation. In other words, we split the world into
‘signal’ and ‘noise’ and conceive of these two realms as ‘mutually
exclusive’.
This, OUR splitting of nature into ‘disorganisation/noise’ and
‘organisation/signal’ is conceptualisation which, while we impose it
on our mental models, is not imposed on nature.
The highly organised dynamical form we call ‘hurricane’ is not first
‘born’ into a transcendent realm (the realm of ‘organisation’) then
proceeds to ‘graze’ on the pasture of relative ‘disorganisation’ that
it ‘emerged from’; i.e. the ‘hurricane’ never quits being a ‘feature’
of its dynamical mother-space. The fact that we name and define it
as a ‘local system’ is a matter of our ‘choosing not that which is
most true, but that which is most easy’.
How does it come about (in our minds, at least) that the ‘hurricane’
or ‘convection cell’ that is inherently included in the fluid-
dynamical continuum of nature, acquires ‘local being’ as a ‘local,
independently-existing object/system/organism with its own local
behaviour’? This conceptualisation has been described by many
philosophers, as being the synthetic product of language or ‘language
games’ (Poincaré, Wittgenstein etc.). As John Stuart Mill observed,
the notion of ‘local being’ derives from our linguistic defining and
name-labelling of forms; “Every definition implies an axiom; that in
which we affirm the existence of the object defined.”
If we can synthetically impart this transcendent ‘local being’ to a
‘hurricane’, otherwise understood as a convection cell within nature’s
fluid-dynamical continuum (see ‘A Fluid-Dynamical Worldview’ at
www.goodshare.org/fluiddynamicview.pdf ) then we can impart ‘local
being’ to any dynamical form (e.g. the ‘organism’) that boils up in
the fluid-dynamical continuum of nature, as a dynamical feature, and
persists for some time in the swirling gathering and re-gathering of
nature’s fluid-dynamics, that is reflected back in the organisational
patterns of galaxies (Milky Way) and organisms (Ammonites) alike.
There is nothing in nature that exists as a ‘local, independent
system’ with their own ‘local behaviours’, as attested to by
relativity and quantum wave dynamics; i.e. our conceptualizing of the
natural world we share inclusion in, in terms of self-standing ‘local
objects/systems/organisms’ with their own ‘local behaviours’, as
requires us to impose an absolute rigid and empty [Euclidian]
reference space geometry to give meaning to the absolute motion that
is constituted by the ‘local behaviour’ of ‘local objects/organisms/
systems, is the artefact of our language game-playing and our
penchant for ‘choosing not that which is most true but that which is
most easy.’
Once we have persuaded ourselves to ‘swallow’ this notion that
organisation emerges out of the disorganised soup that is nature’s
base-level stuff and in the process ‘transcends it’ so that it takes
on the status of ‘signal’ relative to ‘noise’ (mutually exclusive
realms, as in ‘meaningful’ and ‘without meaning’) and is naturally
empowered to graze upon the fluid-dynamical pasture from whence it was
born. This sort of ‘Oedipal’ archetype, where the child-as-dynamical-
feature of the mother-space feeds on (exploits) itself (the dynamical
space of nature in which it is an included feature) is a twisted
conceptualisation that is easily recognized in what we refer to as
man’s abuse of his environment (i.e. his abuse of the common living
space he is included in).
Problems in the ‘foundational basement’ of our language games are
likely to get amplified in our higher level (upper story) use of
language games, as in our ‘story-telling’. That is, if we split both
nature and the cognitive realm into two mutually exclusive realms;
‘signal’ (that which is full of meaning) and ‘noise’ (that which is
devoid of meaning) and at the same time ‘organisation’ (local systems,
organisms, governments, businesses) and ‘disorganisation’ (the
swirling flow that is devoid of organisation), then we shall inherit
the problem noted by Newton that our understanding by means of
generalising what is already going on (what has already ‘gathered’
into place) fails to address how things ‘came together’ (the
continuing gathering and re-gathering based (fluid-)dynamics of
nature);
"... but though these bodies may, indeed, persevere in their orbits by
the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first
derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those
laws.” --- Newton
In the evolutionary dynamics of nature (and/or of man), there is a
problem in that our standard methods for ‘giving meaning’ to what is
going on, are no longer applicable when we are in the course of
‘revolution’, when our old story by which we make sense of things is
crumbling and some new story, that is not quite yet ‘in place’, is
beginning to install itself.
For example, after the British Empire had been ‘in place’ for a few
generations, we (as the British) have a ‘story’ that gives meaning to
what is going on, and that also furnishes a role-play for ourselves,
not that we have unlimited flexibility to pick and choose it (not
everyone can be emperor). We allow ‘our stories’ (the one’s we
accept, voluntarily or otherwise) to constrain our behaviour and to
keep us in orbit like the planets around the sun, or the serfs around
the landlords or whatever. This is part of our ‘language game’
approach to meaning/understanding that in turn shapes our behaviour.
But, our stories can not only be constraining and ‘use us’ (force us
into role-plays), but our stories can also be ‘limiting’ and a
‘limited story’ is like a cancer since it tends to ‘imperialistically’
proliferate its own role-plays without listening to the collection of
cells in which it is included. British (and European) colonialism
was an imperialistic limited and limiting story of the ‘cancerous’
sort that sought to proliferate itself.
Within the human collective ( the ‘brotherhood of man’?), an
imperialistic control-seeking ‘limited story’ can ‘use us’ to the
point of ‘abusing some of us’. Cecil Rhodes, a name associated with
Oxford scholarship, articulated one aspect of this limited story that
illustrates how ‘story’ can both use and abuse us;
'The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We
must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians
of Southern Africa... I personally prefer land to niggers.”
Nelson Mandela had a ‘bigger story’ in mind; one that did not ‘limit’
itself by the notion of racial supremacy, but instead celebrated the
diversity of the brotherhood of man. This ‘enlargement’ of the story
allows the older more limited story to die without the result being
‘emptiness’ accompanied by depression. That is, it provides enlarged
context within which the ‘old story’ still figures, but now only as a
feature within a broader landscape so that ‘all our eggs are no longer
in one basket’. (accepting the enlarging unfolding of the story one
is included in is to participate in evolution while defending a
limited story is to promulgate cancer in our common living space).
Here, it is useful to loop back to make comparison with the
architecture of our scientific thinking (our scientific meaning-giving
architecture).
In science, we have this idea that ‘organisation’ can emerge from a
sea of ‘disorganisation’ (as the hurricane emerges from the swirling
'disorganisation' of atmospheric flow) and somehow ‘transcends its
humble origins’ in being born and thereupon proceeds to graze and feed
on the ‘pasture’ (common living space) that it has ‘arisen from’, to
‘build strength’ and 'move freely about' (over what is now its pasture
rather than what it was included in and emerged from) as is the
capability our scientific thinking gives to our notional ‘local,
independent adaptive systems’.
Poincaré and other philosophers of science have noted this twisted
paradox that permeates science, whereupon we develop generalisations
in the form of hard laws and principles from a collection of
disconnected observations and experiences, and then, once we have
these generalisations ‘in hand’, use them to ‘correct our experience’,
and to refer to departures from the ‘generalised fitted curve’ as
‘experimental noise’. But as we know from our experience,
‘experience’ is something that can never be exactly repeated because
the circumstances in which an experience transpired will never come
into connective confluence twice in exactly the same way (the ‘initial
conditions’ will never be the same in the continually evolving world
dynamic that is nature). As Heraclitus said, we can never step twice
into the same stream.
Scientific formulations (generalisation of experience based laws,
principles) thus have in common with ‘story’, this twisted notional
capability of rising up out of a disorganised pool of experiences (so-
called ‘facts’) and transcend the ground that they have risen up out
of so that ‘story’ and/or ‘scientific formulation’ now ‘corrects’ our
real-life experiences and imposes new generalised meaning on them.
That is, both ‘story’ and ‘scientific formulation’ graze on the
pasture of experiential ‘facts’ from which they have transcendentally
arisen, feeding on them and becoming stronger in this feeding, as is
the notion of the hurricane, an organised form that, once formed,
feeds and strengthens as it grazes on the ground that it has
transcendentally arisen from.
As journalists, discussing the current ‘religious wars’ pertaining to
‘man-caused global warming’ observe, the respective ‘stories’ of the
‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ feed and grow from the same pool of
facts from which they have ‘arisen’, just as in the case of
‘evolutionary theory’ where creationists, intelligent-design
supporters and dawkinsian fundamentalists all graze on the pasture of
facts from which they have arisen, each one feeding on them and
growing in strength (in the respective views of their proponents).
As in the case of the ‘fitted curve’, the generalisation that
constitutes story or theory is used in a backwards-twisted fashion, to
correct our very particular and unique observations and experiences.
Some of the supporters of anthropogenic global warming, in the face of
strong arguments supporting solar irradiance variations as the source
of global warming and the rise of CO2 being the result rather than the
cause (since the oceans are a sort of carbonated-beverage-like
buffering repository of CO2 that gives off CO2 when warmed), have
opined that they will ‘stick with their limited story’ because it
‘keeps man in control’ and if they were to accept solar irradiance
variations, man would be helpless in the face of what was in that case
unfolding.
This is essentially the same thinking as with the white supremacist
colonizers in Africa; i.e. to abandon their limited story that casts
them as being in control of the unfolding dynamics of their living
space, would put them at the mercy of an unfolding that was beyond
their control. Thus ‘fear of loss of control’ is a primary under-
girding of the sustaining of limited imperialist story, even when it
has obviously become cancerous and is not only ‘using’ but ‘abusing’
those included in it.
Arguments/conflicts that arise between individuals and/or social
collectives such as cultural/racial/religious groups or ‘sovereign
nations’ can be understood in terms of the respective protagonists
‘being used by story that is limited’. In the story known as ‘The
American Dream’, “destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and
determination”. This story both ‘uses’ and ‘abuses’ us in the same
sort of manner that white European racial supremacism used and abused
in the ‘overt’ era of colonisation. That is, those who fail to go
from rags to riches are seen as lacking in courage and perseverance
and may be hit with a ‘double whammy’ (i.e. the actualizing of their
potentials may have been suppressed by social disaccommodation/
disopportunization, and because they are seen as under-achievers, they
may be further excluded and disopportunized).
Whether or not all we need to command our destiny is courage and
perseverance is currently coming under question, as the following
mainstream media article indicates;
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25311529/
"Is everything spinning out of control?
Can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in American psyche is under
assault
WASHINGTON - Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees
are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing.
Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care
border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and
against terrorism.
Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.
The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is
under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping
away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded
with sheer courage and perseverance.
T
he sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year's presidential
election. Each contender offers a sense of order — and hope.
Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening
time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his
large crowds believe his exhortation, "Yes, we can."
.... “ Surely people know how to fix problems now. Maybe. And maybe
this is what the 21st century will be about — a great unravelling of
some things long taken for granted.”.
* * *
The article suggests that this story, of being able to command our
individual and collective destiny with sheer courage and perseverance,
is ‘embedded in the American psyche’. This story ‘uses’ and ‘abuses’
us; i.e. we pick up on this challenge, but in doing so, we are
creating an ‘abused’ class. This limited, imperialistically
proliferating story has become a cancer in our common living space.
It is a story based on scientific thinking or ‘objective rationality’
which has us model and understanding the dynamics of the world we live
in, in the ‘most easy but not most true’ terms of ‘what things do’.
It fails to take into account that the dynamics of things condition
the dynamics of the space they are included in, at the same time as
the dynamics of space condition the dynamics of the included things
(‘things’ being understood alternatively as ‘local systems/organisms’
or as ‘dynamical features’ within the flowing continuum of nature).
Again, ‘story’, like a scientific theory, is a generalisation based on
many disparate observations and experiences, that brings
‘organisation’ to them. By a twisted logic, we allow such
generalisations to ‘transcend’ the soupy ground from which they were
hatched and then be allowed to graze and feed on that ground and grow
stronger from it; i.e. the story and the scientific theory are
generalisations that, once formulated, we use to ‘correct our
observations/experiences’.
This was not the ‘way of the native americans’, but neither was it the
case that ‘native americans’, while they accepted that man is included
in an unpredictable, uncontrollable unfolding world dynamic, were
lacking in ‘courage and perseverance. But the story that they
allowed to ‘use them’ was ‘creation myth’, the story of our
involvement in the ongoing, continually unfolding fluid-dynanmical
continuum of nature. The courage and perseverance was not applied to
controlling one’s future (as an individual or as a collective) but to
put oneself in the service of sustaining balance and harmony within
the unfolding. The primary ‘referencing’ for behaviour was ‘the
unfolding’ and not some abstract dream of a wouldn’t-it-be-nice
‘desired future’ that the persevering individual or collective would
‘bring about’.
The difference here is between Horatio Alger and Mother Theresa, ...
between Stalin and Gandhi and Thatcher and Mandela; i.e. while the
former let themselves be used by a ‘powerboating’ story wherein one
dreams that ‘destiny can be commanded by sheer courage and
perseverance’, a story that risks becoming cancerous as its ‘using us’
turns to ‘abusing us’, ... the latter let themselves be used by a
‘sailboating’ story wherein we accept that we are included in an
unpredictably unfolding world, and it is the unpredictable unfolding
that is given precedence in the actualizing and shaping of our
behaviours, a behavioural ‘attuning’ that requires both courage and
perseverance; i.e. the unfolding story ‘uses us’ to sustain dynamical
balance and harmony in the unfolding, it does not use us to ‘determine
the unfolding’. In Mach’s terms, we accept that our dynamics
condition the dynamics of the common living space we share inclusion
in, at the same time as the dynamics of space condition our dynamics.
We are included features in the unfolding, we do not determine it.
.
The conclusion here is not that we must adopt 'the Native American' or
African Tribal traditions. It is merely that man has had at his
disposal both 'more true' and 'more easy' story architectures and that
our modern (western) insistence on emphasizing the latter is 'killing
us'.
'Inclusionality' is about raising awareness of these two story
architectures and the associated dysfunction of putting the 'more
easy' version into an unnatural precedence over the 'more true'.
* * *
Footnote on the ‘signal’, ‘noise’ mutually excluding split
Clues to our manner of thinking that leads to the split between
‘signal’ (meaningfulness) and ‘noise’ (meaningless signal) can be
found in communications theory where three major theoretical works on
communication were developed in parallel in the first half of the
twentieth century, by Shannon, Wiener and Gabor. While the two
former theoreticians imposed a split between ‘noise’ (disorganisation/
meaninglessness) and ‘signal’ (organisation/meaningfulness), Gabor’s
communications theory incorporated quantum theory’s ‘uncertainty
principle’ and made no split between ‘signal’ and ‘noise’.
There is a lack of ‘explicit content’ in Gabor’s theory, as manifests
in holography (Gabor won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for the
development of holography which was enabled by his new communications
theory that addressed not only intensity but phase [understanding
signal as ‘complex’ or having both a real and imaginary component as
in harmonic motion]). In a hologram, the images one sees are by way
of (phase-) ‘interference’ of signals and the coherency (or lack
thereof) that associates with the ‘interfering’ signals. There are
no dependencies, in this manner of imaging or ‘meaning-giving’, on
local, explicit objects and their movements; ... the objects can
instead be understood as ‘fluid’ – dynamical forms within the
continuing flow of interfering signals.
In our western scientific-minded society, we have a habit of
‘splitting’ dynamical forms ‘out’ of the fluid-dynamical continuum of
nature by labeling and defining them and making them over into
notional ‘local’ systems. The hurricane is one example; i.e. the
fluid-flowing atmosphere is the mother of convection cells or ‘storm
cells’ whose dynamical form catches our attention (for good reason)
and our common practice is to ‘choose not that which is more true but
that which is more easy’ and treat the hurricane as if it were a local
self-standing system with ‘its own’ local behaviour, rather than a
‘boil’ or ‘whorl’ (i.e. ‘flow-feature’) in the atmospheric flow that
has been nonlocally induced by thermal flows from the sun that are
further distributed by/in the flowing in oceanic and atmospheric
space.
There is a parallel in these alternative meaning-giving architectures,
one which splits apart ‘signal and noise’ and one which considers all
signal as useful, and the meaning-giving architectures in biology
wherein it is common to split apart ‘animate nature’ and ‘inanimate
nature’ on the grounds that the former is ‘alive’ and the latter
‘dead’; i.e. we split the world dynamic into two mutually exclusive
realms. But there is alternative meaning-giving architecture wherein
we accept that the world dynamic is continually gathering and re-
gathering into dynamical forms without excluding anything, so that as
with the hurricane (convection cell) and the atmosphere (fluid-
dynamical space), ‘life’ feeds ‘death’; i.e. the spinning cells feed
the dynamical space they hatch (boil-up) in at the same time as the
dynamical space feed them.
The dynamical forms that we see ‘emerge’ in the dynamical space of
nature DO NOT DIE since they were always features within the flowing
continuum of nature (they participated in the ‘re-gathering’ that
characterizes the fluid-dynamical continuum of nature), and neither
did THEY ‘live’ as self-standing objects/systems in the sense of
having enjoyed a transcendent birth, but they instead ‘gathered’ in
the manner of convection cells in a fluid dynamic (see ‘A Fluid-
Dynamical Worldview’ at www.goodshare.org/fluiddynamicview.pdf ).
