The Expropriation of Knowledge

________________________________________

As humans have moved into totally artificial environments, our direct contact with and knowledge of the planet has been snapped. Disconnected, like astronauts floating in space, we cannot know up from down or truth from fiction. Conditions are appropriate for the implantation of arbitrary realities. Television is one recent example of this, a serious one, since it greatly accelerates the problem.

At the moment when the natural environment was altered beyond the point that it could be personally observed, the definitions of knowledge itself began to change. No longer based on direct experience, knowledge began to depend on scientific, technological, industrial proof. Scientists, technologists, psychologists, industrialists, economists and the media which translate and disseminate their findings and opinions became our source. 

Now they tell us what nature is, what we are, how we relate to the cosmos, what we need for survival and happiness, and what are the appropriate ways to organise our existence. There is little wonder, therefore, that we should begin to doubt the evidence of our own experience and begin to be blind to the self-evident. Our experience is not valid until science says it is. [Mother’s milk is healthy!]. It is also little wonder that we feel removed from participation in the larger issues which shape our lives. We feel removed because we are removed. 

As we continue to separate ourselves from direct experience of the [Earth], the hierarchy of techno-scientism advances. This creates astounding problems for a society that is supposed to be democratic. In democracies, by definition, all human beings should have a say about technological developments that may profoundly change, even threaten, their lives: nuclear power, genetic engineering, the spread of microwave systems, the advance of satellite communications, and the ubiquitous use of computers, to name only a few. 

And yet, in order to participate fully in discussions of the implications of these technologies one must have training in at least physics, psychology, biology, philosophy, economics, and social and political theory. Any of these technologies has profound influence in all those areas. Because most of us are not so trained, all discussion takes place among our unelected surrogates, professionals and experts. They don’t have this full range of training either, but they do have access to one or another area of it and can speak to each other in techno-jargon - 'tradeoffs,' 'cost-benefits,' 'resource management' - and they therefore get to argue with each other over one side of the question or the other while the rest of us watch.

That their technological training and the language they use excludes from their frame of reference a broader, more subtle system of information and values rarely seems to occur to them. The alternative to leaving all discussion to the experts would be to take another route entirely. That would be to define a line beyond which democratic control - which is to say full participation of the populace in the details of decisions that affect all of us - is not possible, and then to say that anything which crosses this line is taboo. Yet, the notion of taboo is itself taboo in our society, and the idea of outlawing whole technologies is virtually unthinkable. 

San Francisco ecologist Gil Baillie, in a brilliant article in the 1975 edition of Planet Drum, argues that taboo systems of earlier cultures were not quite the darkly irrational frameworks we now believe them to have been. Most often they reflected knowledge taken from nature and then modified by human experience over time. Their purpose was to articulate and preserve natural balances in a given area or within a given group of people at a particular time. They were statements about when too far is too far. 

This sensitivity to natural balances, which was the basis of virtually every culture before our own, has now been suppressed by our modern belief that science and technology can solve all problems and that, therefore, all technologies which can be created ought to be. The question of natural balance is now subordinated. Evolution is defined less in terms of [the Earthly] process than technological process. The [Earth] and its information are now considered less relevant than human ingenuity, an idiotic and dangerous error shielded from exposure only by the walls of previous assumption and the concrete of the physical forms within which we live.

Ivan Illich, a leading critic of the expropriation of knowledge into a nether world of experts and abstraction, argues in Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health that professional medicine may be causing more harm than good. We go to doctors as we go to mechanics. They speak a language that remains impenetrable to us. We take their cures on faith. 

Illich remarks that this may be producing more illness than cure: It has separated people from knowledge about keeping themselves healthy, a knowledge that was once ingrained in the culture. Although some of our techno-scientific methods work, some do not, and the doctors who use them may not understand them or may be inexpert in their use. The doctors, Illich believes, are also taking the validity of techno-medicine on faith. Their source is usually the chemical and drug industry, which has a stake in disrupting natural healing methods. How else could they sell their chemicals?

________________________________________

As a child I wondered how [men and women] learned which plants were edible and which were not. How did our ancestors learn about poisons, or cures for poisons, without any doctors around? I assumed it was trial and error because that was the way it was explained to me. A group of cave people or Indians came upon a new plant. One of them tasted it and keeled over dead. That’s how they knew not to eat that plant again. Doubtless this was one method, but from what I can gather this 'taste method' was not the primary means for acquiring this knowledge. It certainly could not account for the finely detailed knowledge Indians have of plants.

How was an Indian to know that eating juniper berries would make one’s liver function better, one’s skin color change and one’s energy increase? None of these effects could be immediately apparent. The effects might take days or weeks or longer. And yet they knew it.

'The medicines developed and produced through ‘modern technology’ are usually extracted from medicinal herbs and plants. The major sources of information about plants and their medicinal uses are the people who live in harmony and very close to the cycles of Mother Earth. The drug companies would take many years if they were to research all the plants by themselves in an attempt to discover their medicinal uses.' De Novais mentions Indian medicines such as coca, ipecac, quinine, curare, among others, and traces how some of these led to anesthetics such as procaine and novocaine, and to cures for amebic dysentery, malaria, heart disease, and poisons, and to treatments for nerve disorders, epilepsy and others. All of these were first used by Indians.

'The drug companies secure an adequate supply of the basic plant material, sometimes buying off Indian land for production, and sell the drugs derived from these plants to the world and to the people who first told them about them as well,' de Novais notes. 'They make great profits from their ‘discoveries’ without any monetary reward to the Indians from whom they acquired their ‘drug secret.’ Quite the opposite in fact. By taking over the land and turning the Indians into laborers, while introducing the money system and imposing Western-style medicine, the drug companies put the Indians in the position of having to buy the medicines they formerly had in abundance.

While researching the portion of this book that deals with the consequences of humans ingesting as much artificial light as we do now, particularly television light, I came upon an odd report in the New England Journal of Medicine. A team of doctors discovered that infant jaundice could be cured by ordinary sunlight. This discovery led to a spurt of articles on the possibility that natural light might be healthy for humans. What a revelation!

The doctors had undertaken their study of the effects of sunlight on jaundiced infants when a day nurse remarked that the infants near the open window were improving faster than those who were away from it. Then, while working on the study, someone discovered that over seven thousand years ago, Egyptians treated jaundiced infants by placing them in the sunlight and feeding them an herb that had a beneficial interaction with the sun’s rays.

The article did not ask, but I couldn’t help wondering how the Egyptians, stranded back there in time, discovered this important effect of sunlight and herb on jaundice without grants from the National Science Foundation.

One explanation for the knowledge of earlier cultures, expounded by such people as the popular German writer Erich Von Daniken, is that humans - white with red hair - had arrived from outer space and taught the ignorant savages everything they knew. This kind of explanation, aside from its implicit racism and its entertainment value, is an indication of how far we all are from understanding knowledge systems that are based on direct experience.

Recently, I had the chance to see some time-lapse films of plants by Dr. John Ott. Time-lapse photography makes it possible to see plants moving. It reveals them constantly straining for light like baby birds with their mouths open. Tendrils climb, crawl and wave around. Stems swell, inflate, then relax, like an inhaling and exhaling lung. Plants vibrate and pulsate in response to the immediate condition of their environment.

In one particular sequence, passion flowers blossomed in an excruciating process of slowly mounting intensity. The bud began to turn into a flower, the petals took form and slowly burst out from the bud that contained them. Suddenly there was another burst of energy as the petals released themselves upward, stretching and straining every tiny tip, exhibiting a fullness of expression clearly analogous to orgasm and what even looked like plant pleasure.

From this perspective, it is obvious that plants are alive in more or less the way humans and other animals are. Our failure to see plants as living creatures, and to appreciate ourselves as some kind of sped-up plant, is the result of limited human perception, a sign of the boundaries of our senses or the degree to which we have allowed them to atrophy, or the fact that we have become too speedy to perceive the slower rhythms of other life forms.

It is a cliché among naturalists that the most critical ingredient of their work is patience. The researcher has to slow down sufficiently to wait and wait and watch until cycles of activity which were previously invisible become visible. The longer one waits, and the slower one’s rhythms, the more one is able to perceive the tiny details of natural growth.

Pre-technological peoples do not have to go through a slowing-down process. Surrounded by nature, with everything alive everywhere around them, they develop an automatic intimacy with the natural world. Beyond intimacy, there is the sense that events of the forest, or desert, are not actually separate from oneself, that humans are just part of a larger living creature: the [Earth]. This was not merely a way of speaking for Indian peoples; it was a definite fact. They meant it and would give evidence of it. Things that grow are put into our bodies so that we grow. The air goes into us and out. The water goes through us. Warm air outside warms us inside and vice versa. We can imagine that we are not connected to things in this way only when our connections are blocked, altered or stunted. 

For Indian people, the plants, weather, terrain, soil, water, and their interactions were part of the body of which they themselves were also a part. They experienced these natural forces as they did themselves.

In Wizard of the Upper Amazon, F. Bruce Lamb records the apparently true account of Manuel Cordova de Rios, a Peruvian rubber cutter, kidnapped by the Amaheuca Indians for invading their territory and forced to remain with them for many years. Rios describes the way the Indians learned things about the jungle, which was both the object of constant study and the teacher. They observed it first as individuals, experiencing each detail. Then they worked out larger patterns together as a group, much like individual cells informing the larger body, which also informs the cells.

In the evenings, the whole tribe would gather and repeat each detail of the day just passed. They would describe every sound, the creature that made it and its apparent state of mind. The conditions of growth of all the plants for miles around were discussed. This band of howler monkeys, which was over here three days ago, is now over there. Certain fruit trees which were in the bud stage three weeks ago are now bearing ripe fruit. A jaguar was seen near the river, and now it is on the hillside. It is in a strangely anguished mood. The grasses in the valley are peculiarly dry. There is a group of birds that have not moved for several days. The wind has altered in direction and smells of something unknown. [Actually, such a fact as a wind change might not be reported at all. Everyone would already know it. A change of wind or scent would arrive in everyone’s awareness as a bucket of cold water thrown on the head might arrive in ours].

Rios tells many of the Indian stories concerned with 'personalities' of individual animals and plants, what kinds of 'vibrations' they give off. Dreams acted as additional information systems from beyond the level of conscious notation, drawing up patterns and meanings from deeper levels. Predictions would be based on them.

Each detail of each event had special power and meaning, understood as part of a larger pattern of activities and forces. The understanding was so complete that it was only the rare event that could not be explained - a twig cracked in a way that did not fit the previous history of cracked twigs - that was cause for concern and immediate arming.

Rios recounted the way the Indians would capture and kill pigs. They knew that the pigs were led by a single sow, and that they walked through the forest in a very widely dispersed, but specific, fanned-out pattern behind the lead sow, much as birds fly through the air in formation. The Indians knew that killing the lead sow would throw the others into a state of confusion while they worked out who the new lead sow would be. During the confusion, the Indians would kill a few pigs, being careful not to kill any emerging leaders. 

Instead, they would allow the new lead sow to emerge and lead the surviving band out of danger. Then they would take the dead leader, and cut off her head. They would plant the head just below the surface of the ground, facing in a specific direction exactly. If they did this just so, the entire band would return to that exact spot in precisely three moons. If they erred in any minute detail of the procedure, the band would not return, and the Indians would have to hunt for a new band.

Many books written by Indian people describe another method by which knowledge of plants and animals could be amplified and integrated into the observer, directly, physically: emulation. By imitating a creature, 'getting inside' it, one learns to understand it better. A person imitates a plant’s stance and movements, its behavioral characteristics, in order to be as it is, to integrate its mood and character into herself or himself.

This is often done tribally, or personally, in dances and ceremonies, and includes not only plants and animals but also the attitudes of wind, rain and other people.

Indian literature as well as the literature [what we call 'myth'] of pretechnological people, including our own European ancestors, is filled with stories of humans turning into wolves, bears, birds, snakes, or insects, in order to circumvent some otherwise insurmountable difficulty by using the knowledge of the appropriate creature. If stealth were the capacity human beings needed, a way of gaining knowledge of stealth would be to observe stealthy creatures - panthers, for example - and then imitate them. If instant strike from repose was desired as a protective ability, then the cobra was a good model. If calmness and flow were sought, observe streams. If airiness or lightness were wanted, imitate the butterfly.

Indians did not name people after particular creatures from some kind of charming aesthetic sense - Many White Buffalo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull. The animals and natural elements that were part of the names had concrete observable characteristics: strength, constancy, agility, slyness, fierceness and so on. Nature was not only a metaphor for human behavior, nature was literally a teacher. The way animals solved problems, or the way they moved or otherwise behaved, became the model for human behavior.

Even today, imitation and emulation inform human behavior. We read that Muhammad Ali says, 'I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.' By using such phrases, he mentally associates his own movements with those of the creatures. While he cannot behave exactly as they can, he does probably succeed in integrating some creaturely movement into himself. Of course, if he had never seen a butterfly or a bee, he could not learn anything from them.

The imitative process is automatic with children. They imitate whatever is around: parents, cats, dogs, insects, plants, cars, each other, and whatever images are delivered through the media. Of course, imitating the animal seen in the media image is not the same as imitating the animal seen in the forest.

To achieve their exquisitely detailed knowledge of the world around them, [men, women, and children] living in nonmediated environments had to use all their abilities to observe themselves, the [Earth], and the things that grow from it. They might not have even considered the [Earth] to be something that was actually outside them since their senses told them it was also inside them. Their world was organised along flow lines, not in separate and distinct boxes.

Knowledge results from personal experience and direct observation -seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. These are aided by several inward systems. There is instinct, for example, gathered by innumerable previous generations and carried forward in the cells. There is intuition, what Eastern religions call 'knowing without seeing.' In addition there are feelings, which may have been informed by prior experience. All of these - the five senses plus instinct, intuition, feeling and thought - combine to produce conscious awareness, the ability to perceive and describe the way the world is organised. Western people like to think of these human qualities as separate from one another and some as more 'real' than others. 

Yet all of the abilities interact both between person and planet and among each other. One sense interacts with another sense, the senses interact with feelings. Intuition functions together with instinct, thought flows constantly in and out of all experience. The fully functional human being can be understood as a kind of microcosmic ecosystem inside a wider ecosystem inside a wider one and so on, all systems flowing in and out of each other. As with other systems, when one thing is altered, the overall balance is altered. Changes in one aspect of human perception or experience affect all others.

In 1969 my wife and I visited several of the small islands that make up the larger area that colonists named Micronesia. Most of these islands are so small and so remote - hundreds of miles from each other - that many of their native cultures remain largely intact, although there is an increasing U.S. military and business presence there.

On one island, we met a man who had a small motorboat. He had been to school in Hawaii, had lived in Los Angeles for a time and spoke good English. He offered to take us for a ride into the ocean to visit some tiny islands he knew about. This required taking one of two routes past the coral reef that surrounded the island. He gave us a choice. One route took many hours to where there was a break in the reef; the other way, he told us, was to follow the pattern of the waves until they are organised just so. Then he would leap the reef with the boat. We decided to go along with him on this latter route.

When we got to the island, he succeeded in spearing a few fish. We built a small fire, and he threw the fish directly into the flames. After a few minutes, he reached into the fire with his hands and turned them over. I asked him if reaching into the fire like that didn’t hurt. He answered, 'It hurts a little bit.' We were becoming more interested in this man. Then he started talking about the reef, a favorite subject. We asked him why he walked around on the reef with bare feet when we had been warned always to wear thick-soled sneakers because of a poisonous starfish that can deliver a painful and sometimes paralyzing wound.

He then told us words to this effect: 'Yes, but if you step on one all you have to do is pick it up, turn it over, and place its underside directly on your wound. It will suck its own poison back out of you.'  We asked him how he knew that, and he said, 'Everybody around here knows that. Whenever there is something poisonous its antidote is never more than a few yards away. Everybody knows this. It’s the same everywhere.' 

We asked him about his life during those years in the big cities of the world, and his story was like any story of any Indian who leaves home to participate in the life of the 'developed' world. It was about fights, miserable jobs, jail, and drunkenness. Detailed knowledge of wind, rain, sun and stars only got in his way. It would have been far better for survival in our world to suppress those observations and to develop mental agility, persuasiveness, charm, guile and aggression.

Naïvely, we asked why he chose to sacrifice his island life for cities and for this he had no answer, except to say that his own response to cars and machines reminded him of the way the fish becomes stunned by the glint of the diver’s metal face mask. At last he had come back to the island, where he remained, hoisted between cultures.

In 1974 I was one of thirty 'leading environmental educators' invited to attend a conference at Ann Arbor, Michigan, jointly sponsored by the Environmental Education Program of the School of Natural Resources of the University of Michigan and the Division of Technology and Environmental Education of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The goal of this conference was to provide guidelines to the government on how to grant money for environmental education projects. We thirty people would decide what is good and effective environmental education and what is not. We had four days to do this.

I arrived to discover that the meeting place was a motel outside of Ann Arbor, sandwiched between two freeways. If we wished to go anywhere, we had to do so by car. The rooms we slept in had windows which did not open; they offered twenty-four-hour air conditioning or heating. The rooms in which the meetings themselves were held had no windows at all. The light was fluorescent. The motel had a swimming pool under a glass roof. Artificial palm trees were arranged around the pool area. The glass roof did not open, but there were lounge chairs here and there and portable sunlamps on wheels.

The talk at the conference was in techno-newspeak. We spoke of 'educational delivery systems,' 'value tradeoffs,' 'checklists,' 'guidelines,' 'needs assessments,' 'target groups,' 'cost effectiveness,' 'impact strategies' and, of course, my specialty, 'education of and through the media.' During the second day of the conference, a small group of the participants interrupted the proceedings to point out that we were all receiving an environmental education directly from our environment of windowless rooms, blank walls, and fluorescent lights. 

While we spoke of teaching others about an organic environment out there somewhere, our artificial environment was teaching us that nature was irrelevant, separate from us, and of only intellectual value. The natural environment, if it existed for us anywhere, was only in our minds, in our memories. Our failure to recognise that this was important signified that a widespread aberration of mind had proceeded further than we preferred to believe. It was useless for us to speak of making others sensitive to environmental values when we, a group of so-called leaders, were satisfied with a setting that totally excluded the organic environment, and did not even notice that condition. 

A biologist in her sixties stood up and gave an impromptu lecture, pointing out that a serious distortion had taken place in the very concept of education, and that we were all examples of it. I will paraphrase what she said:

'When we are inside these motel walls, we begin to think the natural world has nothing to teach us. We environmentalists suffer the same distorted notion of education that all Western people do. We think of education as objective, quantifiable and verbal. Our own words become our basis.

'As a result we don’t have a sense of the rightness or wrongness of each new technological wonder. We hear about a ‘green revolution’ which will feed the starving millions and we buy the expert’s word, just as everyone else does. Without any experience with natural balance, we forget that things grow only so fast. If you accelerate the process artificially, something is lost.

'We read studies by scientists which say than the ozone layer is safe despite aerosols, and we read other studies by scientists which say the ozone layer is in danger. We wonder which is true? Which scientists are correct? But this wondering signifies that we have sold out our instinctive knowledge. Obviously, any artificial alteration of the ozone layer changes the volume of radiation which reaches the planet, and is harmful.

'We read that the whales are beaching themselves and we wonder why. Scientists tell us that the leader whale may have parasites in its brain, goes crazy and leads the others to the beach. Millions of people read this story and find it logical, because their knowledge of whales is confined to the length, weight, mating habits, breeding grounds, commercial uses, and optimum sustainable yield. 

'And yet, the Solomon Islanders have long descriptions of whales and dolphins beaching themselves every year for thousands of years. The islanders say it is a human-animal communications ritual, part of a cycle which is obscure to us. I don’t know if they are right either. I do know that whales don’t have leaders - they operate in groups - and given their brain size they are probably the most intelligent mammals on Earth. I don’t believe it’s a parasite problem.'

She concluded by saying that we have 'put all of our eggs into a single basket; we have assumed that empirical objectified processes produce knowledge equal to what the environment offers as information. We have assumed our knowledge is growing. I’m not so sure.'

Teachers teach. Education is cerebral not sensory. It was our role to help the teachers know what to teach. We were the ones who know.

The participants agreed it would have been better if the conference had been in a location nearer to nature. It would have been more pleasant that way. [That’s what nature is: pleasant!]But as long as we were here on this important mission, we might just as well get on with the work and cease with the diversions.

One year later, I received a 548-page bound volume called an 'instrument' which summarised the 'emerging issues in environmental education' with details of the findings of the 'experts' at this landmark meeting. The instrument was submitted to the Office of Environmental Education which, for all I know, may still be using it today.

With nature obscured, nearly everything we know comes to us processed and it may be right or it may be wrong. We know only what we’re told. For most of us the TV news is now our source. Without any basis of comparison, as the news report changes, our understanding changes.

Mother’s milk is unsanitary. Mice like cheese. Mars has life on it. Technology will cure cancer. The stars do not influence us. Nuclear power is safe. Nuclear power is not safe. Mars has no life on it. Food dyes are safe. Saccharin is safe. Technology causes cancer. Columbus proved the world was round. A little X-ray is okay. The Vietnam War was not a civil war. 

We will have an epidemic of swine flu. Mother’s milk is healthy. Technology will clean up pollution. Preservatives do not cause cancer. Economic growth is in the offing. Red food dyes are not safe. Swine flu vaccine is safe. The Vietnam War was a civil war. Hierarchy is natural. Humans are the royalty of nature. Saccharin is not safe. Swine flu vaccine causes paralysis. 

We have the highest standard of living. Hormones in beef cause cancer. Touching children is good for them. Too much sun causes cancer. And so it goes.