Why Strangers Can't Win Arguments

The struggle is has to be meaningful

We recently spent some time with the Achuar people in the Amazon rainforest for Planet: Coordinate. How their culture is responding to contact with the modern world offered some insight as to how systems both adopt and resist change.

The Achuar people live so deeply within the forest, on rivers which, upstream, cannot be navigated by boat, that they only came into contact with the outside world sixty years ago. One day, an Italian priest, who had spent some years with their neighbours, the Shuar, came walking out of the forest, seeking out the Achuar. The warrior leader of the group claimed that if he was truly a priest, he would be able to sing a religious song in the Achuar language. The priest could not, but had learned the Shuar language, and written Catholic verses in that language. He sang to the leader, and was invited to live with the Achuar people. He did so, and his memory lives on as a benevolent, kind and caring man.

Before the priest arrived, the Achuar had been a semi-nomadic people, living in small groups which moved between certain sites, hunting and harvesting. They were also polygamous and absolutely patriarchal, with men taking multiple wives, often when the girls were still children. Women’s position in their society was to reproduce, look after the home, and prepare the “chicha”, a fermented drink which is present both at every major social event and every morning during the daily ritual. The Achuar arise before the sun is up and drink guayusa, a powerful tea, until each person vomits. They then gather to drink chicha and discuss their dreams, interpreting them together. From their dreams, they decide the events of the day.

Despite staying deep in the jungle, Achuar culture is changing quickly. While they maintain the daily ritual before dawn, and continue to fish and hunt, and build their homes using the resources of the forest, they have also quickly adopted pieces of modernity. Polygamy is still practiced, but so, too, are monogamous relationships. Women are beginning to take up positions of power, much to the chagrin of some of the elders. Larger settlements have medical clinics which offer contraception to wives and young girls despite protests from husbands. Both girls and boys get an education in school, and sport Western style clothing. The boys are cutting their hair short, against tradition, and the girls are getting married at an older age. The settlements enjoy electricity and wifi, and most people have phones, while diesel-powered boats now roar up and down the Pastaza river.

Some practices are harder to uproot. The position of women is improving but political discussions still involve the men gathering in the village centre to posture and orate while their wives and daughters sit on the outside with the children, serving their husbands and fathers chicha. We were invited to one of these discussions, an all-day event in which the community was discussing who to vote for in the Ecuador Presidential election. It was a fascinating day, watching members of what can only be described as a quiet people suddenly engage in spirited, eloquent and decisive debate. What was truly incredible, though, was watching the speakers change their minds as the day went on, engaging with the information presented by their neighbours and openly admit when they had been misinformed. A far cry from how political debate is conducted in the halls of governance in the West today.

We were invited to introduce ourselves at that discussion and explain what we’re doing with Planet: Coordinate. When it was I, the woman, who stood up to introduce us, and not Robert, some of the men simply walked off. I directed so much of what I was saying to the women at the back with the children, and yet most of them ignored me entirely, while a few of the younger girls pointed and sniggered. Immediately, I became aware of my own arrogance, at my belief that seeing a woman take the lead would inspire them to question the social structures which prevented them from joining the men in the middle. Of course it didn’t. Thinking back on it now, perhaps the girls were not sniggering at me, but at my partner, sitting calmly behind me, for not being able to control his woman.

The Achuar culture has obviously changed very quickly in many respects given it has been only six decades since they believed the world was a hemisphere boundaried by forest with a river running through it. But what they’ve chosen to readily adopt vs the changes some of the elders still try to delay speaks to the nature of systems change as a movement of convenience for existing power structures. Using diesel, or even solar panels, to power boats instead of elbow grease is convenient. Using electricity to power homes in order to gain more hours of light is convenient. Buying foreign grains which cook quickly, like rice, is more convenient than depending on the forest. In fact, these things are so convenient that now the Achuar people and their neighbouring Shuar are facing the problems of rapid population growth. The Shuar, who massively outnumber the 30,000 Achuar, are now encroaching on Achuar territory because they are running out of land to support their growing population. This is causing the kind of tribal conflicts which haven’t been seen for generations.

But women entering into positions of power and taking control of their reproductive cycles and refusing polygamous marriages is not convenient for the existing power structure. It is a huge inconvenience in that it dilutes the absolute power that men held and still continue to grasp onto. It’s not even particularly convenient for the women, for it demands they struggle against their culture and husbands and friends to take advantage of the possibilities that this clash with modernity offers. While some are risking the comforts of tradition to do so, many do not. Systems change is easy when it’s convenient. When that change risks the convenience of the system itself, it will resist, deny and undermine that change. Things have a habit of thrusting towards life, including systems themselves. What makes systems change so difficult is when the thrusting of one group, in this case the women, goes in direct opposition to the thrusting of tradition. Neither can grow in perpetuity in opposition. One will have to give. Until continuity is abandoned as the goal, that giving will be perceived not as a gesture towards the future, but as a giving in against a rival.

That’s the situation we’re in today regarding how to compost our fossil-fuelled systems of power and evolve into an equitable and just society. It is never as simple as just presenting the better option or swapping in something else. Fossil-fuelled patriarchy is thrusting towards Life not out of some foundational immorality nor the grand designs of a few people, but because it is the nature of systems to reproduce themselves. They will adopt what is convenient to do so and rage against what is inconvenient. We’re seeing a mass wave of denying, rejecting and undermining what is inconvenient in global politics, whether it’s the rejection of sovereign territory, the undermining of human rights or the denying of international law. These are precepts which were established by fossil fuelled patriarchy because that system expanded its ambitions and set its sights on globalisation as the key to its reproduction. Now that resource supplies cannot maintain that vision, and the rise of the middle class is seen as a drain on elite access, it is readily rejecting what was once presumed as certain.

The women at the political discussion rejected me because, in the same vein, there is no objective morality with which we can guide ourselves. There is no linearity of progress, no ultimate synthesis of human knowledge, no single manifestation of destiny or unity. There is no latent political orientation grounded in absolute justice inherent in our DNA, just waiting to be triggered by a single moment or opportunity. There is convenience and there is struggle, and both are the impetus of Life moving through us. When Life has been secured by a particular way of being, whether that’s absolute patriarchy or fossil fuels, it is perfectly reasonable that any change to that system be viewed as a threat. When Life appears to depend on that change, it is perfectly reasonable to struggle against the existing system. The few women of the Achuar people who are struggling against male dominance are like a trickle of water breaking off from a river, forging through a forest of unknowns and uncertainty, but surging forth with determination. Some may rejoin the river downstream, others may continue to throw themselves towards possibility. Their job is not to replace what was, but create new waterways for those who seek to travel a different path.

We cannot replace fossil-fuelled patriarchy. But we can surge forth in the struggle against a convenience which threatens Life. This struggle cannot be inspired by a single moment. It will not be adopted by rational arguments nor emotional reasoning. These pleas cannot outweigh the reasonable desire for convenience, a convenience which is always contextually relevant to the biological creature we try to convince with universal moral arguments. The struggle begins within. It exposes itself as a need to surge forth rather than be swept along. It emerges when the system of convenience which supported Life’s growth threatens now to consume it. Both contain the impulse to survive and to live and to grow towards. Both contain the thrusting of Life itself. It is only when being swept along feels like drowning rather than surfing that people will begin to struggle for the shore.

But we will only create the tide that lifts us all by making it easier to struggle with us than rush past us. Eventually, the struggle must become the path of least resistance. It is context which makes it so, not universality. Just as the priest had to prove his worth by speaking to the Achuar in their language, so my resistance was worthless as a foreign woman passing through. I cannot resist that which does not act upon me and any attempt to claim so is meaningless. It is watching sisters resist, not strangers, which bursts the banks of convenience. It is meaning and relevancy which asks of us to surge forth. And it is the tide of immediacy which pulls the rest along.

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