Second in a series
Re “olokokiapia: An Antidote to Neo-liberalism’s Influence on War and Peace”
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Four Arrows, with his daughter, Jessica Jacobs, co-founder of the charter school Innovatory School for Professional Youth, at a wedding ceremony he performed
The second force that interacts with CAT (Concentrated Activated Transformation) is the concept of Authority. In Western tradition, authority stems generally from external sources. We listen to the authority of our books, our teachers, our preachers, our parents, our leaders. Such authority, especially when coupled with fear or stress, literally hypnotizes us to believe the messages of the authority figure, no matter how incorrect. To the contrary, Indigenous wisdom teaches that the only true source of authority is personal reflection, honest reflection, lived experience in light of the spiritual understanding that everything is connected. If education is to change the way people relate to Nature, even the neuroscience reveals that if we reflected honestly on how Nature makes us feel, we would realize its importance to us in a deeper way than any ecological literacy course accomplishes.
The third force is Words. Western culture seems to be famous for its deceptive use of words. Social neuroscience even wants us to believe that it is a key aspect of human existence. These studies, as summarized in my book (2010), seem to reveal that deception is a higher order brain function that evolved to help humans survive. The back cover, for example, of David Livingstone Smith’s text, “Why We Lie: the Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind,” says, “Deceit, lying and falsehoods lie at the very heart of our cultural heritage.” He tells us “Mother Nature has seen to it that the conscious mind is relatively blind to the nuances of social behavior (p. 146).”
In Indigenous ways of thinking, we learn to observe and listen carefully to understand physical reality and experience, not to find ways to misrepresent it. There can be little doubt that deception has “evolved” to play a large role in the world today. But this says something different. Indigenous Peoples always have believed it is important to see what is real about a situation, a thing or an entity. If something did not occur in the physical plane, it did not occur. Our languages help in such understanding because they are rich with descriptive terms and action verbs that minimize reductionism and abstract generalizing.
Shame on Ecological Denials
Although each of the forces in the CAT-FAWN concept are vital, I want to elaborate here on this one because our denial about the state of ecological affairs in the world is funded by our use of deception. We have much to learn from Indigenous wisdom about changing this.
Indigenous thinking honors the reality that there are always two sides to the two sides, that there are realities and there are realities. Learning how they interact is real understanding. Our knowledge comes from our stories, stories that mirror the way the human mind works. They echo a truth lived and remembered because their roots go beyond the context processes of the brain. They stem from the heart of the human psyche. Thus, understanding what is true is a matter of heart and mind. This also helps one know what cannot be comprehended or articulated. If it were otherwise, if deception, not right thinking and remembering, were tools for social cohesions, as these studies seem to conclude, it seems that survival would be compromised, not enhanced. Moreover, Nature is the first and foremost teacher of how things are in the world. This is why we believe that the animals and plants are our teachers. Neither Nature nor animals lies about reality. Animals may have instinctive ways of hiding food or playing dead or stalking prey. But these are not examples of misrepresenting reality in the ways human deception does. I think deception is not a cultural adaptation for survival and social cohesion but rather a moral failing.
In the development of early human societies, a single isolated individual had no chance at long-term survival. Of course, this perspective, as we have seen, stands in opposition to many Western academics view on the value of deception in survival. Still, it was the “group mind” that developed first among human beings. This “group mind” was rooted in the interdependence and mutual reciprocal behavior, which paralleled the symbiotic relationships found in natural communities. The dynamic process of human adaptation to ever changing environmental conditions that is so much a part of the “genius” of human evolution is based on our singular ability to evolve social environments conducive to the needs of our group. Honesty is both a value and a way of behavior that is required for the development of “trust” within a group.
The Value of Honesty
Honesty reinforces “trust” between members of a community that, in turn, fosters the cooperation necessary to sustain the group. Human adaptive values are those that encourage individual and family relationships, love, honesty, cooperation, collaboration, compassion, generosity and selflessness. These are the values that keep a group working and living together for mutual benefit. Pre-agricultural humans cultivated these values of group cohesion because the survival of the group was the first and foremost priority. For our pre-agricultural ancestors, belonging to a group mattered and belonging to a place mattered. Values that reinforced belonging to a group form a deep part of human consciousness. Psychologically, pre-agricultural people did not see themselves as separate from their group or the natural place in which they lived. The community or group mind and its affective orientations of belonging, interdependence, mutual – reciprocal behavior characterize all tribal societies. Some socio-biologists would refer to this deeply embedded sense for belonging as an expression of our human instinct for “biophilia,” the predisposition to relate or affiliate with other living things, particularly other humans. This instinct might be said to be the biological basis for sociability, relationally and community
In his wonderful book, A Time Before Deception: Truth in Communication, Culture and Ethics, Cooper writes about how Native peoples’ first reactions to European habitual lying was believing that the invaders must be insane because in their cultures only insane people who had lost touch with reality spoke in ways that misrepresented it. His research also shows that lying can become a deviant strategy. The strategy may, like the use of weapons of mass destruction, lead to temporary benefits for a small number of individuals. In the long run, they are not an evolutionary boon to humankind at all.
Cooper also details a research project where when Indigenous individuals and Western individuals suggested and ranked various aspects of cultural values that might have an impact on integrity, Native peoples ranked “respect” above all else, but it did not even make the Western list. He shows how the concept of appreciation for life and the recognition of spirit in all things pervades traditional Indigenous thinking and that such perception informed all communication in ways that are incompatible with deception. In reading his book, I was reminded of Vine Deloria Jr.’s famous book, Red Earth, White Lies: The Myth of Scientific Fact (1995). I think it is vital for neuro-philosophers to consider Indigenous ways of knowing the histories of Indigenous Peoples before drawing conclusions too quickly from the kinds of studies and scientific conclusions that have been reported in neuroscientific research.
Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs, Ph.D., Ed.D., is a Cherokee/Irish author of 21 books and a professor at Fielding Graduate University's College of Educational Leadership and Change. A former Marine Corps officer, he is co-founder of Northern Arizona's Veterans for Peace and recipient of the 2004 Moral Courage Award (Martin Springer Institute for Holocaust Studies). He lives in a small Mexican fishing village. Four Arrows may be contacted at djacobs@fielding.edu
