by Barry Lopez
It would take four or five days to travel there, then there would be ceremony, then four or five days to travel back. Did I want to travel with them? Yes, I said, I very much wanted the experience of being on the land in their company, and of watching, and also helping if that would be all right, while they cleaned up the place. I was certain they had extended this invitation because of the affection they had for Petra, more this, I think, than whatever impression they had formed of me during my short stay in Willowra. (When Petra and I traveled with her Warlpiri friends, it was imperative, she explained to me, that we conduct ourselves as if we were brother and sister. It wasn’t a matter of what we actually were to each other—good friends—but a matter of fitting into Warlpiri society in a way that showed respect for Warlpiri mores. In order for us to place our sleeping areas next to each other on the ground, it was necessary that we be brother and sister. In the same vein, before Petra left Willowra for Alice Springs, she pointed out some places outside the settlement I should not approach or inquire about, Dreamtime places. They were off-limits to someone like me. I followed her instructions precisely.)
Despite what I felt was the honor, as well as the gift, of what the Warlpiri offered me, I finally decided not to accept the invitation to travel with them to the water hole. An acquaintance in the settlement helped me frame my explanation so that it wouldn’t be read as either a rejection or an insult, and the party left without me. To this day I do not know if I made the right decision. The argument for going was that I would be able to report an extraordinary story of Warlpiri vitality, of human passions and historical perspective, of racism and perseverance. The argument against going was essentially my discomfort with being a witness. The Warlpiri, I decided, did not fully appreciate what I did as a writer. For them, the invitation they extended was an invitation to be with them socially during extremely significant days. It was not an invitation for me to describe for strangers what I had witnessed—or at least it was my impression that this was the case. If I wrote about it, I argued with myself, I would only be putting myself in the position of interpreting something spiritually important about which I had only the most superficial understanding.
If I had to make the decision all over again, I think I would have gratefully accepted the invitation, let it inform my general thinking about traditional people, and never have tried to interpret publicly what I had witnessed. I asked the people who went to describe their experience to me when they came back. I wanted to leave the decision about what was said about the event to them. It didn’t seem to me that I was going to miss something important by not going. It seemed I would miss something important by not waiting for them in Willowra, and letting them, for once, be the sole reporters, the only interpreters, of their culture.
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IN THE YEARS I was growing up, paleoanthropologists like Louis and Mary Leakey, with their pioneering work in Tanzania and Kenya, provided people with a rough sketch of the physical evolution of Homo sapiens. The view since then has been greatly refined; in recent years, however, the attention of scientists interested in the history of mankind and what it means to be human, has moved more toward cognitive research. Their focus is not on the outward appearance of our human ancestors but on the evolution of the mind within. Their work offers us new ways to understand human beings by moving us away from long-simmering questions about racial and cultural superiority and toward more pressing issues, such as the development of empathy and the human capacity for cooperation.
Research into the development of the human mind is a pelagic and not infrequently contentious field of inquiry. It’s easy to become completely lost in its neurological pathways and psychological implications—not to mention having to deal with the utility (or inutility) of altruism, and a related assertion, that compassionate governance and altruistic behavior constitute “socialism” for some on the political right. To successfully address major international problems like freshwater availability, however, for all human cultures in the decades ahead, will require empathetic understanding. But, one must ask, How is empathy on this scale to operate in cultures that remain suspicious about the predicaments of strangers? Or in cultures that are already on the verge of falling apart because of war, environmental stress, and the abuse of dictators? Or, indeed, in cultures that are indifferent to the fate of those living beyond their borders, believing their final disintegration is of no real consequence?
Empathy and compassion would seem to be requisite components in the development of any new politics that aimed to place human welfare, for example, above material profit in a restructuring of national priorities, or in the redesign of domestic economies.
I return to this topic of the capacities of the human mind, originally presented in the chapter set at the Jackal camp, because research into the psychological development of personality and into the phylogenetic development of the human mind suggests that certain people within the same social group—psychologically fit and emotionally mature Australian pastoralists, say, or psychologically fit and emotionally mature Pitjantjatjara Aboriginals—have a greater capacity to empathize with others in that group across a broad spectrum of ideas, such as the utility or appropriateness of certain ethical positions. In any given group, then, some people will be more capable than others of understanding what another individual is trying to say. They are able to help make that person’s position or reasoning clearer to others in the group. Again, this ability to listen closely and empathetically, to ameliorate social tension and increase understanding in a group, is not necessarily associated primarily with a listener’s relative level of intelligence or his or her ability to perceive and then explain complex patterns. Success here depends as much or more on something harder to define: the ability to see the world from someone else’s point of view without fearing the loss of one’s own position.
For me, the ability to listen carefully to another person’s perspective, rather than summarily deciding what that person means, is in keeping with the behavior one expects of an elder. And the ability to understand what someone else is thinking is the foundation of stable social order.
I’m often fearful, listening to discussions about human fate arranged around the agendas of government and international business, that “the best minds” are infrequently present when critical decisions are being made. If Theory of Mind psychology is correct in saying that minds operating at the higher levels of intentionality have the greatest capacity to be discerning and empathetic, and if it is wise to take seriously the idea that global climate disturbance, ocean acidification, and other planetary environmental problems cannot be successfully addressed without the highest level of international cooperation, what are we to do in our time about ultranationalists and xenophobes in positions of power and authority? Or more important, if the best minds are not at the table—because of prejudices about race, ethnicity, gender, formal education, urbanity, and material wealth—what is the process that will place them there?
Theory of Mind speculation supports—almost inevitably, it seems to me—the observation that in traditional societies the selection of elders, the people who are widely supported when it comes to making decisions (with other elders) for the group, has relatively little to do with how old a person is or with how intelligent they might be. More important is an ability to empathize, an ability to respect other views. (Another common attribute among elders is that they have historical imaginations. They draw on the details through memory of what has worked and what has not worked in the past when people were faced with challenges.)
In order to imagine a successful conversation among people who deeply understand one another and who can bring into play the metaphors and patterns of thought upon which their enduring cultures are founded, it would be necessary to set aside the Western commitments to progress and improvement. (When Darwin argued that the arc of biological evolution for any particular species was not about improvement but i
nstead about successful adaptation to a new or changing environment, he was making a point about the evolution of Homo sapiens fundamentally at odds with much of Western thinking.) Furthermore, for such a group to function productively, it could not begin by embracing any one culture’s views, or by differentiating, for example, between “advanced” and “primitive” cultures, or by favoring any one religion’s sense of human destiny. Confronted with the task of discovering a path to reconciliation and cooperation in a time of unprecedented threat to human existence, elders focus on the idea that the primary organizing principle for human achievement is stability, not progress, meaning that balance, symmetry, and regularity are more to be valued than change, growth, deviation, and ambition.
The idea that people without an overriding allegiance to any particular form of governance, economic organization, or religious conviction, and with no great investment in personal advancement or cultural superiority, can come together and achieve what neither government nor business nor armed combatants are able to do today, to put human physical and mental health first, not their own welfare, is of course anathema to most governments, corporations, and armies. Until we can do this, we remain stuck with the often venal aspiration that drives many first-world nations—to triumph. To win.
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I’VE HEARD SOMETIMES that unless you’re truly interested in the physical landscape you find yourself moving through, it’s tedious to travel with traditional people, that when you make camp in the evening “there is no intelligent conversation to be had.” That is not my experience, and the complaint ignores several important considerations. Are things that are human more important to talk about than the things that are not? Is it right, in such circumstances, to pursue a conversation that doesn’t make room for everyone? Would it be the case that people from your own culture are more likely to be engaging conversationalists than those from another culture? It’s generally true that traditional people are mostly quiet while traveling, because the syntax and vocabulary of spoken language too often collapse the details of a place into meaning, precluding other interpretations. The conversation around indigenous campfires, however, is often metaphorical, or even allegorical. So it engages more than one type of mind. It provides for more than one level of intellection.
It is also true that in every culture there are people who choose not to say anything, though they could say a lot that was worth remembering. In my experience, it is possible to soar in conversation with someone not of your own culture, if you can find a way around the language barrier and if you and the person you’re speaking with are focused on a world outside the self; and if both of you are able to empathize with views not your own and to incorporate them into the great reality of human experience. For this to work, both sides of the conversation must be informed by curiosity, respect, and an understanding that the world we find around us is too changeable, too multifaceted, too ramulose, for anyone to fully comprehend. It is not meant to be understood.
I’ve implied much here about the ability of elders in traditional societies to guide their people down the perilous roads all societies must travel (and left it to the reader to imagine that some elders, engaging their own egos to too great an extent, or seduced or corrupted by the secular world, fail at the work). I should emphasize, then, that all elders know they’re fallible, that they know there are “no guarantees in life,” and that some dangerous situations simply cannot be circumvented. But the thing with them is that they also know that once they are chosen, they must never quit out of despair or fear. To do so would be an act of betrayal. And they are chosen because people agree, every day, that this person is the best mind they have. It is not possible to make oneself available to serve as an elder, and I’ve been told that no one really seeks the position anyway, because the responsibility is so great.
With the disintegration of traditional societies the world over, the model they represent of wisdom passed on through a series of elders whose decisions were not questioned is in danger of being lost. The democratic model of governance in the West is based on the idea that everyone’s voice must be heard. Those individual voices are often drowned out and subsumed in the West, however, by charismatics who say, “Follow me! I know the way!” In traditional societies people come to understand who it is who can really hear another person’s voice, so they are comfortable with that person coming up with a plan in conversation with other elders in an emergency, and they feel no loss of autonomy in doing what the elder asks of them. They know the elder is not a “follow me” personality. His guiding thought is no one left behind.
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OVER A PERIOD of two decades, partly by accident, partly by design, I visited many of the Pacific landfalls of James Cook and Charles Darwin. I went ashore at Valparaíso on the coast of Chile to walk the streets of that town where Darwin began his journey on foot across the southern Andes. I rounded Cape Horn, as both Cook and Darwin had done, and walked the shore at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawai‘i where Cook was killed. I picked up Cook’s trail in Tahiti, in the waters of Antarctica, and along the coast of northern Alaska. I imagined Darwin present on the streets of Buenos Aires with me, ashore in the Falkland Islands, having a meal in Cape Town, and bushwhacking his way to the top of Isla Santa María in the Galápagos.
Any reasonable traveler or reader, I believe, given the time, can draw his or her own conclusions from all that’s been written about Cook and about Darwin, and can enhance their views by visiting places like Kealakekua Bay. I admire Cook for the reasons I’ve previously set forth. He lost his way, figuratively, on his final voyage, and he was a never-around kind of husband and father; but he encouraged in us all a sense of endeavor and of great imagining. I’d give nearly anything to have had dinner with him, ask him how he imagined the duties of a navigator changed when it was not a journey of exploration but a journey in service to commerce. What, for example, was to be considered a detour?
It is his counterpoint, however, whom I think about more often today, the poorly recollected and uncelebrated Ranald MacDonald, a man born into two cultures, in neither one of which did he ever feel truly comfortable. He arrived in Australia in the early 1850s, setting up in the Victoria goldfields around Ballarat, hoping to make a fortune after his months in Japan and after sailoring for a few years in southeast Asian seas. We lose track of his whereabouts after that, but not of his life quest. Ranald MacDonald longed to be someone, in part because for most of his life he was regarded as no one. He made his mark in Japan, but history moved him aside to create room for Commodore Matthew Perry. MacDonald didn’t have the pedigree, the friends, or the money to establish and promote his claim.
What would we have thought of MacDonald if he’d found the gold he was so eager to acquire in Ballarat, or later in the Cariboo region of southern British Columbia, and if he’d been able to use that wealth in a well-managed campaign to amass accolades and achieve social standing? Would this mestizo roustabout ever even have taken that route of self-promotion? He wasn’t any kind of erudite James Cook, a cultured person to sit down to dinner with. It would have been a plate of beans and a cup of sugared tea in a ramshackle mining camp for him; but his conversation, his opinions, would have provided perspective on what we thought we knew about the world when we sat down together to eat. He would have tinted the view we have of ourselves, standing before our gods with the lists of our accomplishments. And we might have felt some tenderness toward him, as his long-lived dreams and the trouble he weathered emerged from beneath the dramatic accounts of his adventuring.
Elders would have understood equally the unfiltered lifelong inquiries of either man, the bicultural mestizo and the Enlightenment hero.
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ONE CLEAR, LATE SUMMER afternoon in early March, in Sydney, I was crossing a greensward in a city park, en route to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I’d been invited to
give a talk there about a collection of short stories of mine that had just been published. Fair-weather cumulus clouds were nearly stationary above me as I walked, and the air immediately around me was calm as well. The most fragmentary of breezes occasionally unsettled the leaves of gum trees in the park. The delicacy of the weather reinforced a feeling I had in that moment of unfocused exuberance, a faith that no matter what people had to face in the world that is coming for us, they would fare well. Whatever the nightmare, some group of us would see a way through, for ourselves and others. I recollected bits of conversations I’d had with people well placed in international business who seemed, to my mind, to have no substantial belief, really, in what they told me they believed in—a world of successful commercial strategies and conventional success. Instead they appeared to believe in something quite different, in affection for certain parts of the broken world, and in the possibility of changing the corporate enterprises they ran, so that they would no longer be contributing to the social and environmental wreckage around them.
I recalled some lines of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, published when he was only twenty-four, in a poem called “El pan nuestro”:
And in the cold hours, when the earth
smells of human dust
and is so sad,
I want to knock on every door
and beg forgiveness of whoever’s there,
and bake bits of fresh bread for him,
here, in the oven of my heart…
(my translation, with Luis Verano)
An affection for humanity had swelled in me that morning, a hope that we would be all right, find the grace to accommodate each other more completely, invest more deeply in the philosopher’s cardinal virtues, the ones that transcend all religions: courage, justice, reverence, compassion.