Mimicking Four Footed Friends

Something stolen from the late Robert Genn when he was talking about inventiveness and creativity.

Researchers conclude that animal activities are based on both inherited traits and observational learning. Further, creative and inventive tendencies run in families and species. For example, the comprehension records for dog vocabularies — 400 words or more — are held by Border collies, a breed traditionally involved in sheep management, where continued employment depends on the accurate hearing of a master’s commands. These dogs learn words quickly — ball, stick, keys, doll, Frisbee — and fetch the object called for. Alert and cooperative, they can be called upon to identify dozens of individual humans by name.

and there is more:

Creativity is closely related to invention. Other factors include the love of play and the ability to use tools. Studies of animal behaviour are constantly finding new evidence of play and tool activities. Creativity is not just the property of Homo sapiens. Apes select from a supply of different lengths of prepared sticks to dig grubs from crevices. Dolphins leap for joy and perform self-motivated tricks in unison. Invertebrate octopi toy with plastic bottles by squirting them with jets of water. Closer to home, kittens and puppies show innate tendencies to play..

Playfulness helps us to deal with solving wicked problems. It takes some of the pressure off taking ourselves so seriously - and as Jane MxGonigal says in her new book - only available in digital format so far but still well worth a buy - it is one of the best ways to start to imagine our future.

Attention

I’m disheartened to see another shooting on the front page of my morning newsletter in the country to the south. Disheartened because it is a country where I lived some years ago. Disheartened when all the columns say that nothing will be done about it. Disheartened even when an article about the lack of progress in meeting the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission - who dealt after all with even more deaths that the current tragedy - has only addressed a small percentage of them, and token ones at that. And that article appears on a back page because it doesn’t sell newspapers.

But I felt more positive after a comment made by a man in a discussion group later this morning - that if there is to be action, it has to come from mothers. That’s who made things better in Ireland. Mothers on both sides of the Troubles complained to their own leaders that what they were doing was unsustainable. Today is where those mothers need to get to work.

There are only two places where guns have any legitimacy that I can think of. One is hunting for food. The other is as a last resort in a time of war. A second amendment right in the US Constitution related to a particular time and place. To pretend that it has validity in 2022 is a twisted sense of logic that ought to belie belief by any sensible person. But it’s cleverly retained by appealing to greed and fear.

But I am wrong in thinking that all Americans love their guns. This is what Pew Research Centre said earlier this year:

• A third of Americans own at least one gun. 40 % say they live in a household that has one. If you do the math, that means that the majority don’t. Men are more likely to say they own one (39%) as opposed to women (22%).

• People say the reason they own a firearm is for protection.

• 48% of Americans see gun violence as a problem. This includes 82% of Black adults, 58% of Hispanics but only 39% of whites.

• 52% would like to see stricter guns laws - but that number is declining. They are divided as to whether lower ownership would lead to fewer mass shootings. They are also seriously divided politically.

When society has changed dramatically throughout histroy, it has almost always started from the ground up - though sometimes with tacit agreement from the top until support grows. Women know about waiting nine months to bring new life to fruition. The cost of remaining silent is too high. Let’s get started.

Other

The week’s news continues - elections in Ontario, primaries in the US, hate crimes in cities, wars, resignations. So much involves anger that can turn to violence.

I’m interested in Larry Rasmussen’s and Matthew Fox’s comments about the common metaphors that we use, The former talked about the Great Chain of Being - a picture of how the universe was understood - with a supreme Being at the top with a series of steps down with lesser and lesser agency at the bottom. The Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny are similar examples - how those in power “lorded” it over those below by assuming the right to take over their territory, their culture and their language. To do so, it is necessary to think of the other as inferior. The most extreme is a Master/Slave relationship but there are lots of gradations that are more nuanced. Witness our attitude toward people of so-called colour and toward nature itself.

We often are smug as Canadians in examining American race and immigration rhetoric while conveniently ignoring the history of our treatment of our original inhabitants. Whether we believe that humans are inherently good or inherently bad, we nevertheless cannot ignore the existence of evil - as a possibility within ourselves or a reality in the larger world around us. But how does the possibility gain such a foothold?

Is tribalism learned? We belong to many groupings. As a small child I was troubled when my Presbyterian mother commented on a coming wedding. “She’s marrying a Catholic”, she said. “It’s too bad”. Something piqued my curiosity. We had a live-in maid in the household who was a Catholic who sometimes too me to her church. As a five year old rather liked an Angel who would bow her head if you put a penny in an urn she was holding. That probably is long gone and not representative of Catholicism in any way, but at least I questioned the tribalism pf my mother’s comment at the time. Why as it too bad? Since I didn’t get an answer, I decided for myself that on that point at least, she was wrong.

How do we get from too bad to replacement theory? How does a teen embody so much hatred in the span of 18 years. Is it fear? Is it the desire for celebrity? Do we have any idea of the difference between a disagreement on a certain issue or policy and turning someone with a different point of view into an “other”?

Matthew Fox today notes that hatred has always been with us as a species when we don’t examine the five year old’s conscience or curiosity to ask why. We protect our own. And when that doesn’t allay our fears we turn the other into a scapegoat. The other side of that is the hubris that builds our view as the right one and gives us the authority to exercise power. When we turn that power into an institution, we may be on the way to hatred in some circumstances - and violence is the eventual outcome.

Abandon all hierarchies and we often end in chaos. Keep them in place and the other may become objectified. It spreads to gender, race, nations and the elements of the planet - fire, air, water, soil.

How Fox deals with hatred is seeing it as the negative form of energy - the positive one being love. Both come from the heart before the mind deals with them. Anger, he says, can be part of the positive side when it follows from compassion for the other as an injustice is clearly perceived. But it can also grow into resentment that becomes hatred and ultimately leads to violence.

I can see in myself how a small thing can lead to resentment. Without reflection, it can so quickly lead to scapegoating and blame. Reflection has never been more necessary in our world of constant noise. We need to examine the small resentments that lead to such engrained ones that spring up and grow among us like viruses. They have always been part of human history in all cultures. We are no long part of a world of chains. We live in a world of networks. How do we use them to infect others with love?

What we need

The only remedy is moral outrage heated enough to get people to the polls. “Nothing great happens without anger.” (Thomas Aquinas)

This was Matthew Fox talking this morning about the impending American Supreme Court Decision if a leak is prescient. Abortion as a culture war imperative has lost any sense of nuance or humanity in much discourse.

It reminded me of something in the book that I continue to read - Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key. In his chapter, “The Ethic we need” he observes that science can provide us with what we must need to know about a subject - in the book’s context, it’s nature, but the same can apply to any moral issue. Unlike most of the culture wars which focus of what is good for an individual, he looks at the broader implications for a society as a whole. What is nearly always missing in the current brouhaha is the larger context of the reality of a pregnancy and all the players that surround it - or for that matter, that it takes more than one person to make it happen.

The Author, Larry Rasmussen, goes on to talk about change and quotes Vaclev Havel on its anatomy: “The distinguishing features of such times are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered”. Havel thought modernity was ending and saw the world as disconnected, confusing and chaotic with few common meanings or inner understandings of what we are experiencing. Rasmussen goes on to ask us what will make our species become the one that is capable of the right kind of change.

He suggests that the levels of change are threefold.

• The first one that we think of and is the easiest to do. It’s based on what we know already and is most familiar.

• The second comes when we realize that an unexpected crisis demands something more - certainly in the case of the climate crisis, but that one is now swamped in the news by the war crisis and the abortion crisis. One decision was made about the latter. It can’t be reversed without a chance of causing another crisis.

• The shouting and distrust of institutions calls for something quite different and calls for a third - a change of consciousness - what Havel called “New meaning . . . gradually born from the encounter or the intersection of many different elements” - a different view, Rasmussen says, of what does and does not make sense.

The good thing about anger is that it can be motivating and energizing - but just yelling at one another doesn’t deal with an issue and dissuades others from exercising their own view through voting since all of the speakers eventually seem like idiots.

Suppose the placard carrying supporter and opponent of abortion - or even their counterparts in the Supreme Court - needed to hear not from lobbyists or lawyers, but from several pregnant woman as to what they were facing in terms of decision - perhaps a mother with several children to support already with less than adequate means to do so, or a young teenage girl after a chance encounter with a teenage boy where neither knew anything about unprotected sex, or a woman molested by a family member, or a woman raped at gunpoint. Putting on those shoes - what does the mind say? What about the heart? What about the gut? In turn each supporter and opponent might be asked to tell their stories of unexpected crisis in their own lives when they had to make a choice - and what the values were leading to that decision - and if the decision had to be made again, what the choice might be. Could there ever be a learning experience for any of them?

Keeping the two placarded sides separate may prevent violence brought on by anger. But is it the only possibility?

Subject - not Object

In a plenary session of a course this week, a participant observed that she watched a news report with an interview of a Russian soldier. He commented that he didn’t know who to shoot - because “they look like us”.

There is something obscene in this report. Is it all right to shoot someone who doesn’t look like the speaker? Is it all right to shoot anybody at all? Not only are we being asked to reflect as we stand by and watch the needless slaughter of others. We have lived in a dream world too long.