In 1995, I visited a Maori village (Marae) on the Whanganui River (fong-a-nu-e) in New Zealand. George, the chief or Matai of the community, showed me around and took me to see an ancient tribal canoe. This canoe had been buried so that the bow stuck vertically out of the ground by about three metres. The bow of the canoe was highly decorated in traditional Maori black and white designs. George asked me to place my finger on the designs and trace out the shapes I saw. I did this, carefully running my finger over the black fern leaf patterns. When I finished, he looked at me and laughed: “Now it’s my turn”, he said, as he placed his finger on the white parts of the design and traced out the same fern leaf shapes.
Where I saw fern leaves in the black areas, George saw them in the white. He suggested that many of the problems experienced between the white ‘Pakeha’ European settlers in New Zealand and Maoritanga (the Maori people), were embodied in this simple exercise. The future of New Zealand/Aotearoa was decided in 1840 through ‘X’ marks scrawled on the bottom of a paper and ink contract… in “black and white”. The legally binding signatures of an oral culture on a written document that lead first to war, then to a heated and often violent debate that continues to this day.
My favourite story from this conflict was of the Matai who had a 1000 Dollar reward placed on his head by Her Majesty’s Governor. He responded by placing a 1000 Dollar reward on the head of the Governor. The patronising paternalism of a self-righteous empire, met head on the wily wisdom and astute politik of a “savage” who failed to meet the evolutionary subordination assumed by the British Empire to be the lot of anyone with a dark skin. I wonder if the racists amongst us today believe that people returning from their holidays in the sun are somehow temporarily transported backwards along the “Great Chain of Being” because they have a tan? Or if black cats are inferior to white ones, black rabbits to their white cousins? The ignorance of racism is astounding.
Sitting on a weather-gnarled granite boulder, a brisk breeze whipping peaky waves across Loch Vayatie in the far North West of Scotland, my partner called out in excitement, barely audible above the roaring wind, and pointed up into the indigo evening sky. There, circling without a single flap of wing soared a huge Golden Eagle. Early evening stars sparked as giant wings carried this embodiment of grace, beauty and power across the heavens. The wind howled and the waves crashed, the sun-kissed skin of my face and hands after a day paddling an open boat, gently glowed. And I was humbled.
The 17th Century Renaissance of classical ideas brought Aristotle’s “Great Chain of Being” firmly into the modern era. At one end of this linear evolutionary path lurked the “lowest orders” – minerals, plants and animals, at the other, God. Somewhere in the shadow of the Almighty – in his image no less – sat “Man”. So here in the days of the European Enlightenment started that slow descent towards the turgid ossification of human being that we know today as “Post-industrial Culture”. The assumption that humans were second only to God with the rest of the universe, in turn, second citizen to us humans, has somehow seeped through the centuries into the very core of contemporary Britain.
Herbert Spencer took the ideas of Charles Darwin and his “survival of the fittest” (a term Darwin himself never actually used) and corrupted them into “Social Darwinism” to meet the fledgling Conservative morality of Victorian Britain. At that time Britain was consumed in the fire-and-iron of the industrial revolution, whose capital-flush classes, rich from the pickings of colonialism, needed a subordinate and dependant under-class to provide the cheap subservient labour necessary to drive the mass production machine. Here Spencer peddled the notion that some people are simply “less fit” than others. Some people – by the powers of nature itself – are meant for the gutter. Poverty, he proposed, is a simple biological fact of life.
Both Spencer and the Renaissance thinkers who re-birthed the ideas of Aristotle were wrong. Evolution does not follow a linear path through a hierarchy of increasing supremacy. The contents of the Cosmos are not organised in a pyramid of rights and morality, with “Man” second only to God. They are however, organised in a pyramid of power. But this is social, not biological, power. And social power comes with responsibility not, as in the present day, a license to assume moral supremacy.
In fact – proven scientific fact – evolution looks more like a tree. The slug on your lettuce seedlings is as highly evolved as you are, just along a different branch. At any point in time we share the world with billions of other equally highly evolved beings. Those of you that have marvelled at the ordered complexity of a bees nest, felt the giddy rush of awe from seeing a whale’s curving fluke above the cresting waves of an ocean, found themselves “on the menu” in the territory of a bear, or been stunned to silence in the presence of an eagle, know that humanities presumptions of being at the right-hand of the divine are dangerously misplaced.
It’s about unity. George and I were both essentially correct because both the black and the white shapes described interlocking fern leaves. Our opposing ways of describing the world still described the same world, and described it well. The eagle curving through the cool crisp Highland air is as close to any kind of god as you or I, along with the microbe, the slug… the constantly mutating virus. We are all here and now, fantastic beings in a world of humbling complexity and immeasurable diversity.
The wilderness teaches us the lesson of living together – diversity in unity – each different yet all equally dependant on the unifying processes of life. Our dominant world order meanwhile, railing against this harmony, seeks a unity of a different kind, one grounded in ignorance and pursued through violence to feed the insatiable greed of the few – a unity of exploitation.
Different does not mean inferior. Non-human does not mean further from the divine. The unity of wild nature will always, ultimately, prevail.