Dendrology and Dualism: Why people are trees
Cartesian Philosophy, Cultural Relativism and Conquistadors
In my brief and poor study of anthropology, a few things really caught my imagination, one being how people can be considered trees and vice versa. Sound like some wacky social science? Well you would be right. This was part of a field referred to as non-human anthropology… obviously the study of how human societies comprise of non-human elements and the relationships humans form with these animals, plants and inanimate objects.
Curious? Consider this, you own a border collie named Shep, a peace lily named Abigail and a baby human named Tex — if you’re the type to ‘own’ a baby you should have no objections to it being called Tex. Now, Tex is the only one right off the bat you would say is a person. However, if you take the leap to think about how you treat Abigail and Shep you can draw some parallels to how you treat Tex. You tend to their needs, you care for them, you talk to them — you have fucking named them all for goodness sake.
See humans have a tendency to place neat categories around stuff and say, “here is a collection of things which are all like each other and are definitely not all this other stuff” — very scientific but could be argued fairly arbitrarily… especially if you don’t follow through. Continuing to dress your dog in ‘people’ clothes blurs the lines...
Ever found yourself swearing at your car for not starting when you’re in a rush? You’ve grabbed the nearest tree branch and started beating it for ruining your date/morning commute/hit and run spree. That’s having an argument with a object like you would with another person — albeit not very nicely. Are you stupid for doing this? Not really, most humans treat some inanimate objects, pets or plants in a human way.
‘Just cause I call my car a bastard doesn’t mean I think it is a person’ I hear you stammer. ‘Just cause I have given my pet cat my family last name doesn’t mean it is a person… and it doesn’t mean people are trees… being a person is more than just treating something like a person”. Well lets think about what it means to be a person from a perspective outside of your own.
Step back to a time when the New World was new and Conquistadors and Knights were chivalrously beginning to perform what we would later call the genocide of first nation people. This discovery brought about the first conversation about how these ‘new humans’ could be ‘integrated’ into the society of the colonials to become civilised people (Punchline: by force — depressing but some colonies do fight back). However it also erected a more fundamental debate in the Catholic Church — do these new humans have souls?
This was important back then as the essence of being a person was to have some special-god-ghost attached to your physical body. This was bestowed upon you by a deity that has made you in his image that would latterly get sent to somewhere cloudy or somewhere burny — the defining aspect of being a human was eternal life through a soul. This approach of separating body and soul eventually led to the foundations of Cartesian Dualism… All fairly moot to most Ameri-Indians as when the bigwigs over in the Vatican decided the savages did have something worth saving, they sent a load of missionaries over and further contributed to aforementioned genocide (and perhaps aforementioned eternal life).
Here though is the interesting bit — the existence of a special-god-ghost didn’t concern Ameri-Indians in their determination of personhood as they believed that your personhood came from your body. Rather than write down philosophical treatises they could determine the personhood of Conquistadors by killing them, chucking them in some water and watching to see if their bodies rotted in the same way as theirs. Punchline: they did.
Instead of believing that humans were special because they had a special ghosty bit, they thought that all animals, plants and such had the same common-as-muck-ghosty bit — the only thing that differed was their bodies. A human was a human because of their human body, a boar is a boar because of its boar’s body… if you think about it, this is a much more sensible position than the special-god-ghost which was the Catholic position or other Western takes on theology.
Under the Ameri-Indian philosophy, a human, a boar or a leopard are all essentially the same, but due to their different bodies they see different things in the world as the same. For example, when a human looks at a house, they see a house but when a boar looks at some bushes or a leopard looks at a tree they also both see houses. It is the body which leads you to see wherever you live as a house. When you look at some bread and bacon, you see the same thing as a boar looking at some truffles, or a leopard looking at some human.
Not only this, but if you’re a boar with your boar mates or a leopard with a leopard mates you would see them in the same way that you would see your human mates. Probably down the pub. Essentially, you have the same society as a pig, leopard AND a tree. That’s right, trees are just as obsessed with wealth, the rat race and keeping up with the Jones as the rest of us.
If you, like the Ameri-Indians pre-missionary and genocide, accept that humans, dogs, plants etc. are all essentially the same in their experience of the world but for their physical manifestation it is just a short step to thinking that all these things are essentially ‘people’. Especially if you also believe in an reincarnation version of eternal life — the belief in your common-as-muk-ghosty bit being attaching itself to a different physical body when the current one passes away (perhaps having been thrown in a pool of water).
The crux of this is that if everything has the same ghosty bit — but it is your body that affects your perspective — then if you get reincarnated as a tree, your life may not dramatically change (as you see it at least). So why can’t trees be people or people be trees? Abigail or Shep will still have the same sort of ‘person’ life as Tex — just to Tex, it won’t look the same. So next time you find yourself scolding your dog or pruning your peace lily — consider what the equivalent experience might be like for a human. You may find out in a future life.
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