Rachel and Willow, I want everyone I know to listen to this. Re: empathy, I want to add this to the conversation-https://youtu.be/xjarMIXA2q8?feature=shared
The short animation is a quick précis of Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The Empathetic Civilization. And re: the tyranny of toddlers, yes AND my friend Meg whose jam is early childhood education has told me stories of three- and four-year-olds helping each other emotionally regulate. Also, our mirror neurons suggest an inherent capacity for empathy.
I wonder if the initial separation (what I call the Original Wound) when humans disassociated from the ground of being, experiencing ourselves as separate from all other beings, disrupted the inherent nature of empathy in humans.
We see evidence of empathy in sister beings—elephants mourning, trees inosculating. Yes, we also see cannibalism in hungry male polar bears who might kill a cub but that arises due to a critical unmet physical need for nourishment so again I wonder if a lack of empathy evinces an unmet need that often conflicts with someone else’s unmet need.
Also I appreciate so much the part of the conversation about shame. When Robin Wall Kimmerer in her brilliant book Braiding Sweetgrass, introduced me to the simple fact that humans are heterotrophs (we can’t convert sunlight into energy so we have to consume other beings to survive) I quit feeling guilty for eating my plant kin (I quit eating my animal kin 47 years ago). I could finally accept that biology requires me to develop a relationship with who I eat and that allows me to offer some grace to other humans who eat differently than me.
Lastly, I love the end note of recognizing our people-ness. My friend Amii says “when you see me as a person not a particular identity, you know how to relate with me as a human without getting caught up in my various identities.” When folks respectfully request my preferred pronouns, I say “ just call me Leaf. Why use the third person when I am right here?” As my mother said at 92 when she reflected on my gender, “isn’t what you really want to just to be Leaf?”
I sense many of us relish the moments when our co-creatures just relate with us as kin.
From various youtube clips, dogs also care of their puppies, when logically I often think why care when they can have 12 puppies in one go.... still it is strong in every mammal at least. Same way cross species care can happen... see how happy horses are to see human. Dogs etc also respect basics that human is feeding them so they give respect from that(not everything of course, they can escape if human treats them badly).
Part of this overemphasizing words in our current culture means power struggle and conflict "solving" happens taking things out of context. Some 4year olds behave badly and impulsively, some do good.... so context, overall setting must matter.
Humans have this very good conflict solving mechanism: with patience convincing enough people and groups that some way of doing is bad and isolating that bad behaving part usually works, as it is so strong punishment for human beings and identity.
I had a look at that video, thanks! When the child is shown learning that they have "a one and only life" it made me think of course of cultures where that learning does not occur, where life is not necessarily "one and only" and then of how that may produce a different type of person and community...
Really enjoyable discussion. I wonder if others have had the joyous experience of having thoughts prompted by Planet Critical that you then run with and explore, and end up feeling so lucky…
Not having studied trauma, and having grown up in what one could call a type of “countryside” where we from time to time had deer, coyote and even rattlesnakes outside the door, where we played, I was surprised to hear Willow describe the realization or confrontation with the fact that humans, you and I, have been removed from, or “ripped out” of, our place in the natural world as a member of it, as another kind of animal, as “terrifying.” I’ve long allowed myself to feel as merely another kind of natural animal, not exactly at one with nature but not feeling superior to it or distinctly apart from it. It was never a difficult experience or realization. But maybe that’s because I don’t particularly feel I have had anything taken from me as a “modern” human. Maybe it just hasn’t really hit me, what I am. I can imagine the terror an indigenous person might feel, having spent a life in their natural setting, being removed from it and placed in Times Square, or even a sleepy corner of Town Square Nowheresville, clothed our way, smart phone in hand, car keys in pocket, heading to work in a sterile office to sit and tap at a keyboard all day before going home to stare at and argue with a television set showing the evening news from hell.
The subject of whether nature has “a plan” or not is a good one. I agree that the idea is a kind of romanticization. But we see that, without a police force, without stop signs, without boundaries, or at least visible or apparent ones, nature seems to manage. To call what exists naturally as “checks and balances” seems also personified to a degree as it implies intention or a plan. That the weak animal in a herd may be “checked” by the lioness is an intentional action, but nothing (nothing?) that was codified or the result of a vote. To what degree can we consider the actions occurring within living nature to be more or less like stones rolling downhill, or waves crashing, as little or even nothing more than extensions of the features of physics?
But I think everyone has by now seen the video short of the lion protecting a baby zebra or what have you. Oh, and the language and dialects of whales! That’s something. It occurred to me then how we treat others. Animals have no intelligence because I can’t talk to them. People who don’t speak my language aren’t people. We speak the same language but I don’t know why you say what you say so you’re not a person.
On the subject of how to bridge the gap with people we vehemently disagree with, an image popped into my mind, of each of us clinging to or resting on a tree trunk, unable to touch each other anymore, above a point where it has split into two paths. Maybe when we continue to reach out to each other from that point it is hopeless, and requires moving back down to the single trunk, to find a subject we agree on, our common ground, and then carefully proceed from there to find the exact point at which we start going different ways, and explore that.
I loved the mention of how we can sometimes find our pre-conceived notions of how someone is going to treat us (of who they are) so wrong and how we are better off trying to let those go to allow positive experiences to happen. Hand someone you think you don’t like an olive branch and see what happens…
One thing that occurred to me at some point during the talk was a theme I focus on a lot in my current writing and that is about education, and specifically, education that is fundamental and hard, like logic and philosophy. When you are required to think in first gear. To plod along slowly through difficult terrain where you’re struggling to find your footing. Our educational programs have completely de-emphasized that type of absolutely essential learning, in my view, and it encourages people to be uncomfortable with difficult thought, with slowing down, with not having an instant answer or opinion ready to go. When you are forced to answer the question “Why do I think I know this?”. It encourages people to feel that thinking hard, gray areas, hesitation, of not knowing, are signs of failure, and something to be avoided or even embarrassed about, rather than normal ways of dealing with things you have had the intelligence to recognize as being complex, multifaceted, and requiring careful consideration.
Have you interviewed Raffael Jovine and the microalgae researchers at Brilliant Planet who have devised a relatively clear and scalable way to capture potentially 100s of gigatons of carbon per year? Sounds like all they require now is funding!
I have long struggled with the adopted tribalism of race grouping and gender grouping (amongst others) as it always seemed so exclusive, as though I as a white male could never relate to the black or female experience and so the door must be firmly closed. In a way, of course they were and are right - I can't experience what I haven't lived. On the other hand, I may have felt something of what another has felt. I might recognise the emotion and find commonality in the experience of having been passed over or being abused for being a certain way even if it was not as intense or long-lived. This is what I have always understood empathy to be.
The tribalism does, of course, serve a purpose in providing a home for the dispossessed and highlighting the injustice that is often visited on minority groups but it also has the effect of putting up a barrier, of focussing on the differences and demarcating the dividing line.
I was therefore much warmed, Rachel, by your telling of the difficult conversation with the Columbian woman and the parallel with your own feminist stance. There is nothing wrong with being the warrior as it one of our many selves. We are also nurturers, listeners, growers and story tellers and learning to inhabit all the different parts of us is perhaps one of the main goals for a life well lived. I have always admired those able to be the warrior while finding it difficult to take on myself so this is definitely a work in progress!
Coming back to the tribalism, another element of it has always struck me which is that it is just a step in a process of division or differentiation. The ever-lengthening category of LGBT*** is a neat illustration of this. Within every group there are factions and even those factions are divided and where we focus on difference we continue to divide until two becomes one. And it's true: we are all unique and we all want to be recognised for who we are. But to be recognised you have to be in relation to others and finding common purpose with others seems to me to be the way to be ourselves and to belong, whether as an individual or as a group.
Of this topic, we have good historians telling exactly how it is.
From rome, one highlight is citizenship but with twist. Need to be "stakeholder", ie own land or somehow participate. Otherwise we get leftist and rightist and other extreme activists who look to be caring but have no skin in the game. Towards end Rome lost sense of citizenship as we have now in US and especially UK.
I think it was in brazil as they have high grade sociologists there, they gave small piece of land to poor farmers and that encourages taking care of land and nature as it is their own. Either be public or giant corporate land is basicly no mans land that can be abused freely not thinking consequences.
Without citizenship cannot be this participation. This liberal idea that everyone is nomad supposed to move 1000km everytime new job opportunity arises, is wild and we humans are not built for that in individual level. Also it detaches from land and nature(even nomadic cultures respect nature more, even when one could argue they dont have same incentive to care as some of them move to new place when old place runs out of food).
Of that high horse life seen in big capital cities all over, having some land and tangibly work on it, keeps person grounded. Or it can working with some material, although lumber factory or steel plant workers in longrun think less where iron ore came from, just to stress their work is completed in time. In smallscale also those places people are aware business stops if materials stop coming in. But then it must be more local connections, materials come close, so people have visibility to whole process.
Rachel and Willow, I want everyone I know to listen to this. Re: empathy, I want to add this to the conversation-https://youtu.be/xjarMIXA2q8?feature=shared
The short animation is a quick précis of Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The Empathetic Civilization. And re: the tyranny of toddlers, yes AND my friend Meg whose jam is early childhood education has told me stories of three- and four-year-olds helping each other emotionally regulate. Also, our mirror neurons suggest an inherent capacity for empathy.
I wonder if the initial separation (what I call the Original Wound) when humans disassociated from the ground of being, experiencing ourselves as separate from all other beings, disrupted the inherent nature of empathy in humans.
We see evidence of empathy in sister beings—elephants mourning, trees inosculating. Yes, we also see cannibalism in hungry male polar bears who might kill a cub but that arises due to a critical unmet physical need for nourishment so again I wonder if a lack of empathy evinces an unmet need that often conflicts with someone else’s unmet need.
Also I appreciate so much the part of the conversation about shame. When Robin Wall Kimmerer in her brilliant book Braiding Sweetgrass, introduced me to the simple fact that humans are heterotrophs (we can’t convert sunlight into energy so we have to consume other beings to survive) I quit feeling guilty for eating my plant kin (I quit eating my animal kin 47 years ago). I could finally accept that biology requires me to develop a relationship with who I eat and that allows me to offer some grace to other humans who eat differently than me.
Lastly, I love the end note of recognizing our people-ness. My friend Amii says “when you see me as a person not a particular identity, you know how to relate with me as a human without getting caught up in my various identities.” When folks respectfully request my preferred pronouns, I say “ just call me Leaf. Why use the third person when I am right here?” As my mother said at 92 when she reflected on my gender, “isn’t what you really want to just to be Leaf?”
I sense many of us relish the moments when our co-creatures just relate with us as kin.
Thanks again for this wonderful conversation.💜
From various youtube clips, dogs also care of their puppies, when logically I often think why care when they can have 12 puppies in one go.... still it is strong in every mammal at least. Same way cross species care can happen... see how happy horses are to see human. Dogs etc also respect basics that human is feeding them so they give respect from that(not everything of course, they can escape if human treats them badly).
Part of this overemphasizing words in our current culture means power struggle and conflict "solving" happens taking things out of context. Some 4year olds behave badly and impulsively, some do good.... so context, overall setting must matter.
Humans have this very good conflict solving mechanism: with patience convincing enough people and groups that some way of doing is bad and isolating that bad behaving part usually works, as it is so strong punishment for human beings and identity.
I had a look at that video, thanks! When the child is shown learning that they have "a one and only life" it made me think of course of cultures where that learning does not occur, where life is not necessarily "one and only" and then of how that may produce a different type of person and community...
What a great curiosity! I wonder if an understanding of multiple lifetimes would increase empathy. Thanks for inviting us to ponder this.
Really enjoyable discussion. I wonder if others have had the joyous experience of having thoughts prompted by Planet Critical that you then run with and explore, and end up feeling so lucky…
Not having studied trauma, and having grown up in what one could call a type of “countryside” where we from time to time had deer, coyote and even rattlesnakes outside the door, where we played, I was surprised to hear Willow describe the realization or confrontation with the fact that humans, you and I, have been removed from, or “ripped out” of, our place in the natural world as a member of it, as another kind of animal, as “terrifying.” I’ve long allowed myself to feel as merely another kind of natural animal, not exactly at one with nature but not feeling superior to it or distinctly apart from it. It was never a difficult experience or realization. But maybe that’s because I don’t particularly feel I have had anything taken from me as a “modern” human. Maybe it just hasn’t really hit me, what I am. I can imagine the terror an indigenous person might feel, having spent a life in their natural setting, being removed from it and placed in Times Square, or even a sleepy corner of Town Square Nowheresville, clothed our way, smart phone in hand, car keys in pocket, heading to work in a sterile office to sit and tap at a keyboard all day before going home to stare at and argue with a television set showing the evening news from hell.
The subject of whether nature has “a plan” or not is a good one. I agree that the idea is a kind of romanticization. But we see that, without a police force, without stop signs, without boundaries, or at least visible or apparent ones, nature seems to manage. To call what exists naturally as “checks and balances” seems also personified to a degree as it implies intention or a plan. That the weak animal in a herd may be “checked” by the lioness is an intentional action, but nothing (nothing?) that was codified or the result of a vote. To what degree can we consider the actions occurring within living nature to be more or less like stones rolling downhill, or waves crashing, as little or even nothing more than extensions of the features of physics?
But I think everyone has by now seen the video short of the lion protecting a baby zebra or what have you. Oh, and the language and dialects of whales! That’s something. It occurred to me then how we treat others. Animals have no intelligence because I can’t talk to them. People who don’t speak my language aren’t people. We speak the same language but I don’t know why you say what you say so you’re not a person.
On the subject of how to bridge the gap with people we vehemently disagree with, an image popped into my mind, of each of us clinging to or resting on a tree trunk, unable to touch each other anymore, above a point where it has split into two paths. Maybe when we continue to reach out to each other from that point it is hopeless, and requires moving back down to the single trunk, to find a subject we agree on, our common ground, and then carefully proceed from there to find the exact point at which we start going different ways, and explore that.
I loved the mention of how we can sometimes find our pre-conceived notions of how someone is going to treat us (of who they are) so wrong and how we are better off trying to let those go to allow positive experiences to happen. Hand someone you think you don’t like an olive branch and see what happens…
One thing that occurred to me at some point during the talk was a theme I focus on a lot in my current writing and that is about education, and specifically, education that is fundamental and hard, like logic and philosophy. When you are required to think in first gear. To plod along slowly through difficult terrain where you’re struggling to find your footing. Our educational programs have completely de-emphasized that type of absolutely essential learning, in my view, and it encourages people to be uncomfortable with difficult thought, with slowing down, with not having an instant answer or opinion ready to go. When you are forced to answer the question “Why do I think I know this?”. It encourages people to feel that thinking hard, gray areas, hesitation, of not knowing, are signs of failure, and something to be avoided or even embarrassed about, rather than normal ways of dealing with things you have had the intelligence to recognize as being complex, multifaceted, and requiring careful consideration.
Have you interviewed Raffael Jovine and the microalgae researchers at Brilliant Planet who have devised a relatively clear and scalable way to capture potentially 100s of gigatons of carbon per year? Sounds like all they require now is funding!
I have long struggled with the adopted tribalism of race grouping and gender grouping (amongst others) as it always seemed so exclusive, as though I as a white male could never relate to the black or female experience and so the door must be firmly closed. In a way, of course they were and are right - I can't experience what I haven't lived. On the other hand, I may have felt something of what another has felt. I might recognise the emotion and find commonality in the experience of having been passed over or being abused for being a certain way even if it was not as intense or long-lived. This is what I have always understood empathy to be.
The tribalism does, of course, serve a purpose in providing a home for the dispossessed and highlighting the injustice that is often visited on minority groups but it also has the effect of putting up a barrier, of focussing on the differences and demarcating the dividing line.
I was therefore much warmed, Rachel, by your telling of the difficult conversation with the Columbian woman and the parallel with your own feminist stance. There is nothing wrong with being the warrior as it one of our many selves. We are also nurturers, listeners, growers and story tellers and learning to inhabit all the different parts of us is perhaps one of the main goals for a life well lived. I have always admired those able to be the warrior while finding it difficult to take on myself so this is definitely a work in progress!
Coming back to the tribalism, another element of it has always struck me which is that it is just a step in a process of division or differentiation. The ever-lengthening category of LGBT*** is a neat illustration of this. Within every group there are factions and even those factions are divided and where we focus on difference we continue to divide until two becomes one. And it's true: we are all unique and we all want to be recognised for who we are. But to be recognised you have to be in relation to others and finding common purpose with others seems to me to be the way to be ourselves and to belong, whether as an individual or as a group.
♾️🌎♾️ Thanks from the high Desert
Of this topic, we have good historians telling exactly how it is.
From rome, one highlight is citizenship but with twist. Need to be "stakeholder", ie own land or somehow participate. Otherwise we get leftist and rightist and other extreme activists who look to be caring but have no skin in the game. Towards end Rome lost sense of citizenship as we have now in US and especially UK.
I think it was in brazil as they have high grade sociologists there, they gave small piece of land to poor farmers and that encourages taking care of land and nature as it is their own. Either be public or giant corporate land is basicly no mans land that can be abused freely not thinking consequences.
Without citizenship cannot be this participation. This liberal idea that everyone is nomad supposed to move 1000km everytime new job opportunity arises, is wild and we humans are not built for that in individual level. Also it detaches from land and nature(even nomadic cultures respect nature more, even when one could argue they dont have same incentive to care as some of them move to new place when old place runs out of food).
Of that high horse life seen in big capital cities all over, having some land and tangibly work on it, keeps person grounded. Or it can working with some material, although lumber factory or steel plant workers in longrun think less where iron ore came from, just to stress their work is completed in time. In smallscale also those places people are aware business stops if materials stop coming in. But then it must be more local connections, materials come close, so people have visibility to whole process.