Whose normal is it anyway? Looking for the origins
As the world supposedly slows down and people take stock, there are seemingly hundreds of thought-pieces being published looking for answers to the question “How did we get here?” and speculating about possible tomorrows. In a recent YouGov survey commissioned by the RSA, it was revealed that only 9% of the Britons surveyed wanted a “complete return to normal”. But what is ‘normal’? And when did that ‘normal’ start? Whose normal is it? And how far back should we be looking for answers?
The pandemic can be understood as a symptom of the wider ecological and biodiversity crises the world is facing — it nestles within it. As Bridget McKenzie of Climate Museum UK outlines in this post: “It is important to distinguish between the Climate and the Ecological dimensions of the Emergency. They are entirely entangled, but Ecological devastation and the broader aspects of the global economic system is the key issue here, compared to Climate breakdown. Climate breakdown and pandemics are two parallel and slightly linked outcomes of this destructive system.”
As a design curator, I used to believe sustainable design would save us, but in the past couple of years I have come to realise that taking us off that destructive path would require a much more profound overhaul of our systems — indeed of our civilisation altogether (industrialised, growth-based and anthropocentric). As the movement to decolonise culture has taught us, these profound changes cannot happen within the frameworks that created the damage in the first place. If we want different answers, we need to question the questions as well — and that means confronting our inherited sense of what’s ‘normal’ to learn to see the world from different angles. This quest is as challenging as it is rewarding, so I’d like to share some of the resources that are helping me think this through.
Sorcières: La puissance invaincue des femmes (Witches: The Undefeated Strength of Women (my translation) by Mona Chollet, is a fantastic book that explores three archetypes of ‘threatening’ women in European history: the independent woman (single or widowed), the childless woman (barren by choice) and the old woman (no longer of ‘use’ and a source of horror). It argues that contrary to popular belief, the witch hunts did not happen during the Middle Ages, but concomitantly to the Enlightenment. It argues that it is in fact this cultural paradigm shift towards “reason” and “science” that provided the rationale for the destruction of female knowledge and networks, and by extension, Nature itself. As a French student, I had learned to revere the Lumières and their search for rational knowledge, and to think of Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I Am’ (i.e. the split of the mind from the body) as progress. As I read Chollet’s words, I felt my foundations crumbling. What I had believed was the beginning of progress (Medicine! Science! French Revolution!) had actually also provided the intellectual foundations for the plundering of the ‘Other’, be it female or more-than-human, from the growing enclosure of the Commons here to the colonisation of other lands. I would be interested to know about other authors who have tackled this question so convincingly.
The second watershed was reading “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene” by Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, a scholarly article from ACME International Journal For Critical Geographies that is freely available online. This text, collaboratively written by a Canadian indigenous scholar and a white settler sets out “[to assert that the ecocidal logics that now govern] the world are not inevitable or ‘human nature’, but are the results of a series of decisions that have their origins and reverberations in colonization.” The authors propose to place the beginning of the Anthropocene in 1610 [1] — a date chosen for its significance in the history of colonisation and settlement — doing away with geological measurements for the sake of their argument. Importantly, they invite us to question the underlying assumptions the term “Anthropocene” holds: its sense of universality, its encompassing the whole of humanity. Indeed, if the impacts of the Anthropocene are global, its origins are not. It is known that many First Nations and indigenous cultures around the world have managed to thrive in equilibrium with Nature, in fact, as part of Nature itself [2]. The severing of the mind from the body and the land that originated in Europe in the 17th century [3] paved the way for the overconsumption and industrialisation that has led to the current climate and biodiversity crises, not to mention the deep social and spatial injustices stemming from the enslavement and genocide of colonised populations. In the authors’ words, we must be wary of the assumed global nature of the Anthropocene, and understand it “as the extension of colonial logic that systematically erases difference.”
The article is well worth a read, but I will share this significant quote here: “Rather than positioning the salvation of Man — the liberation of humanity from the horrors of the Anthropocene — in the technics and technologies of the noosphere [4] we call here for a tending once again to relations, to kin, to life longing, and care. This commitment to tenderness and relationships is one necessary and lasting refraction of the violent and unjust worlds set in motion by the imperialist white supremacist capitalist (hetero)patriarchy at the beginning of the colonial movement.” Acknowledging that the Anthropocene isn’t human nature is a powerful thought — and one that gives me much hope.
Becoming conscious that you have emerged from the most ecocidal societies of the world (the birthplaces of the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution and colonisation) can be upsetting — but it is also freeing. How can the societies that have brought you education, comfort and human rights be so damaging? How can this civilisation have created so much beauty and so much destruction? It is a complex thought to hold but necessary to contemplate if we want to address our current problems and understand the ‘normal’ we’ve created: be they symptoms (pandemics and biodiversity collapse) or root causes (the severing of the relationship between mind, body and land). Only by acknowledging this complexity can we learn to preserve the good, repair some of the damage, bring back relationships and learn from others to become the good ancestors all future generations — around the world, human and more-than-human — deserve.
Notes:
[1] 1610: The authors detail two reasons for this exchange p.6 of the article; firstly the Cuban exchange: the moment when“the amount of plants and animals that were exchanged between Europe and the Americas during this time drastically re-shaped the ecosystems of both of these landmasses”; secondly referring to the horrifying calculation by geographers Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin that “in 1492 there were between 54 to 61 million peoples in the Americas and by 1650 there were 6 million. A decline that can be measured in a steep drop in atmospheric CO2 at the time.” Sources provided in the article.
[2] visit https://www.flourishingdiversity.com/listening-sessions-2019 for examples
[3] Jeremy Lent argues that this severing of the relationship between body and land can be traced as far back as the origins of monotheism — when a vertical relationship between God above and Man below was implemented, compared to a horizontal understanding of the sacred as being all around us, and ourselves just one piece of a greater whole.
[4] noosphere: “The noosphere is a philosophical concept developed and popularized by the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the new state of the biosphere and described it as the planetary “sphere of reason””. Source: wikipedia. The authors argue that knowledge cannot happen outside the biosphere — so this belief in reason and technology as separate from the biosphere cannot yield the right solutions.
