I have been thinking a lot about how the worldviews and cultures define us, now that I am in the USA. Not only is the dominant culture in the USA very different to the one(s) in Europe, and Croatia in particular, in the USA there (co)exist two diametrically opposite worldviews: the settler colonial/Western and the indigenous.
It has been very interesting to me to navigate this space, to be respectful of the cultural norms and customs of the country I am in, while still staying true to who I am, defined by my own culture as well. Being in a different country gives you an opportunity to dismantle a lot of your own cultural and social conditioning. It also gives you an outsider view to the blind spots of the ‘foreign’ culture. Being an outsider, on the other hand, makes it more difficult to understand the complexity of the new culture, such as the one here, where different people and worldviews meet.
It has been fascinating to me, as a human rights scholar and a spiritual seeker, to observe how certain worldview with its culture, laws and social norms claims priority over others, and how difficult it is to change this by using the language of the dominant culture. As Audre Lord said, you cannot dismantle Master’s house with Master’s tools.
As a human rights activist, I have observed how much energy and resources are lost in reactivity, in fighting the dominant paradigm, which takes resources and energy away from imagining and creating new paradigms. How difficult it is to learn a new language, if you always use the dominant one! Indeed, so many languages were lost because people had to fit in, or were forced to do so. But it is very difficult to be understood if you don’t speak the dominant language. If your tools are feathers and roses, and the Master’s house is made of brick, it is difficult to dismantle it using the tools you like.
Do you even have to dismantle the Master’s house in order to get out? How do you get out? And once you are out where do you build your house? It is most likely that the Master is going to be your neighbor.
So should we build separate houses with fences in between, or are we, as a humanity able to have common gardens?
How do we make that, and what is the role of law?
I have almost started giving up on law, even though I am a lawyer by training. I have seen it as a language of power, and as such I disliked using it, even though I really know it well, particularly human rights language. Indeed, law is the tool of power(full) in most legal systems. But, as I found out reading an article by Irene Watson on raw law (thanks professors Saito and Kinnison) Aboriginal people define law in a different manner: the law is sung and lives through people. I also heard that the Maori activist Moana Jackson defines the purpose of the treaty as bringing people together. The name says it: treaty should define how people treat each other. People in relationship of equality and not of domination and subordination.
In the same vain, I have always believed that contracts should be made or at least discussed jointly by people coming into it, rather than one party (landlord, provider of a service, workshop organizer etc) brining a written copy to another to sign. A set of one-sidedly imposed norms often drafted on the basis of all the possible things that can go wrong. (What if instead we agreed that we will make all efforts so that it will go in all the possible great ways?).
How did we come to live in a society based on fear, and where our protection is law written and implemented by the authority in power, which uses fearmongering to stay in power?
What it would mean if we switched from the separation paradigm to the paradigm of interconnectivity? What if we lived our laws from down up, what if the knew them because the Earth we are part of would reveal it to us if we lived in harmony with it? What if our protection was our grounding in Earth and connection to the Stars? What if we knew our true power and exercised our responsibility accordingly?
How would the world change if we would step down from what we think we know and listen to other perspectives? What if what we thought was uncivilized holds the keys for the survival of our civilization?
What if we could take the kinship worldview seriously and question our dichotomous understanding of life (see Restoring the kinship worldview and the map, https://kindredmedia.org/glossary/indigenous-worldview/). What if we could move out of hierarchy, patriarchy, linear thinking? What if we could step out from square of separate categories into a circle of interconnectivity?
Do you want to live in this new world, and how can you help it birth into being?
“When we align our own process to the unfolding actualization of the universe, we consciously participate in shaping the new reality that is manifesting before us.” Sherri Mitchell, Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change, 2018, p. 36
I noticed parallels between your experience of a foreign country, and my experience of a new workplace. In the organizational culture, though I didn’t understand all the details, I noticed blind spots — what looked to me like systematic lapses of sense and reason. As I learned more, I had to go through a difficult reckoning. The blind spots were really ways and values that made more sense the more I understood the situation. It wasn’t how I had imagined it ought to be. I felt disappointed at certain aspects of the reality. My ideals of excellence didn’t find their home there.
Though that place didn’t support some of my principles, my principles weren’t wrong. They were just applicable to other, better places. Despite the disappointment, the dissonance taught me important things, and left me more mature.
LikeLike
“How did we come to live in a society based on fear, and where our protection is law written and implemented by the authority in power, which uses fearmongering to stay in power?”
I think a lot of it comes down to owning private property. You own something, it’s valuable to you. You want to keep it. To own something is the entitlement to benefit from it, financially or in any other way. The legal system supports the ownership of property — its main reason for being. Societies have been organized this way for awhile.
When you speak of switching paradigms from power to kinship, my intuition says that the mode of change is not replacement, but displacement. Like in systems engineering. A system evolves over time. Never attempt to drop in a replacement for an existing system. It’s too hard, it’s doomed to fail. Instead, incrementally do some combination of:
(1) make small tweaks to the old one, or
(2) write a new piece that grows and takes over one function after another.
I think (2) is what I’d like to see happen in society. A growing relevance of kinship, not opposing power and competition, but filling the vacuum of utility that power and competition were never able to fill.
In your metaphor — I don’t think the house will be dismantled as long as the master still lives there. But he would rather move into your new town and be an equal, than be master of his moldy old place. Later on, the bulldozer will come for the ruins.
LikeLike