Thread by @JKSteinberger

Occidental culture is fuddled up, and fuddling our entire planet up. This sounds like a woke platitude, but it's fundamental, and has very precise manifestations and implications.
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Thoughts from a #heatwave morning.

First disclaimer, still doing twitter right, none of what is written here will be new or original. All comes via Indigenous and/or Global South thinkers, from Robin Wall Kimmerer to Molly Whickam to Amitav Ghosh to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o to many others. I am in their forever debt.
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I was reading RWK's "Braiding Sweetgrass" this summer. So I decided to think about how Europe and our history represents the living world, our more-than-human relatives, the basis of our life. Let's just say I was impressed, in a bad way.
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How do we represent the world, and our place in it?
1⃣ Nature as a Decorative Backdrop (quite often to naked sexy people 😅). This is quite a universal feature. Nature is incorporated in art and architecture to decorate and frame, not as a living world with its own purpose.
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2⃣ Nature as The Foe. Nature as beasts to be slayed or tamed, the basis for the power and reputation of heroes. See: Hercules, circus animal fights, etc.
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Nature as Foe is super important: It still exists with us today, since the ability to dominate and tame nature is STILL considered a sound basis for social status & power. See: tech billionaires trying to conquer space, fossil fuel barons, etc.
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https://twitter.com/JKSteinberger/status/1049725781662945280

The fact that domination/destruction of nature is always, always intertwined with social domination & inequality is a core focus of Murray Bookchin's writings, so go read some Murray Bookchin. He is great. I am a Bookchinist.
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3⃣ Nature as Rightful Abundance. Nature as deserved gifts from god, rather than gifts and reciprocity of species and ecosystems. In this worldview, humans are deserving of nature's gifts because of their religious allegiance. The reciprocity, if any, is to god.
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And finally, most insidious of all: 4⃣ Nature as a poisonous reward, as exile from a recently created Eden due to our desire for knowledge. Nature as something that was made for us, by god, then taken away due to our intelligence. Fuddled us up *real* good, that one.
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EVERYTHING about this origin story and the meaning it gives to humans vs the living world is exactly backwards. ALL OF IT. First of all, the timeline. Science (and many indigenous teachings, actually) show humans as fairly recent newcomers to life on earth.
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Our arrival was predated by millions upon millions of years of plant and animal life, ecosystems and species that learned the ways of this planet long before we ever set foot on it. They were here before us, they might well be after. Remembering that is essential.
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Our survival on Earth was enabled by the existence and diversity of previously existing ecosystems and species. As in the Anishinaabe story of Skywoman, retold by RWK: we live thanks to the generosity of others.
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Painting by Arnold Jacobs
tweetspeakpoetry.com/2018/12/20/sky…

And this brings us to the understanding of our intelligence in our relation to our environment. Right now, the dominant story about our intelligence is that it developed as a tool against danger. It should be used for mechanistic, simplifying, domination of nature.
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Again, see the billionaire techbros, and their allies in Long-Termist/TESCREAL ideology (to learn more, follow @xriskology @krustelkram @timnitGebru ).
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salon.com/2022/08/20/und…

This is absolutely false. As we are coming to understand, our intelligence is built on relational complexity: navigating complex social relationships coming from living in fairly large groups, navigating ecosystemic complexity of species and seasons.
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Our brains are uniquely designed, evolved, to be a pale reflection of the collective intelligence of the more-than-human living world around us. We are curious, wanting to understand how our friends, families, plants and animals live. Wanting to be a part of it all.
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Rather than domination and simplification, the desire of the bully, our brain delights in complexity, twists and turns, differences and diversity. RWK and Indigenous thinkers talk about "learning from plants" or "learning from animals."
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The living world is our original school, and trying to figure it all out is what makes us and our intelligence part of it all. I need to get back to work, but I think that seeing the harmfulness of worlviews that are thousands of years old in some cases is really important.
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Both for ourselves, our thoughts, our actions, our science. We are not before, above, apart from, dominating nature. We are in it all, a part of it all. I wrote more about this here "Humanity in the patchwork of life".
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jksteinberger.medium.com/humanity-in-th…

This means we should fight off, as though our lives depend upon it (they do) simplifying and harmful ideologies, like TESCREAL, or forever economic growth thanks to technological innovation. Rather than trying to terraform and dominate, our ambition should be to reintegrate.
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We can be part of the web of life, reintegrate, flourish and delight in the vast complexity of thriving ecosystems on our living planet. But only if we rid ourselves of these false origin stories, false worldviews.
Thanks for reading. 🙏
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(more 👇)
jksteinberger.medium.com/the-bear-the-t…

Agh. Twitter deleted the original version of this thread where I also made reference to @GhoshAmitav and his description of Indigenous cultures as managers and stewards of complex ecosystems: humans evolved cultures that thrived alongside thriving complex ecosystems.

Agh. Twitter deleted the original version of this thread where I also made reference to @GhoshAmitav and his description of Indigenous cultures as managers and stewards of complex ecosystems: humans evolved cultures that thrived alongside thriving complex ecosystems.

@GhoshAmitav This was a really eye-opening idea for me: our intelligence and learning as something that was reciprocal, accompanying, learning, rather than dominating and destroying. This is who we can (and fundamentally want, I believe) to be.