Saturday, July 2, 2011

In praise of tacit knowledge: lessons in listening part 2

For someone who lives by words, I have a surprising proclamation to make: we rely too much on language. Hear me out, because I know what it is to rely on language. Years of philosophical training encourage such reliance but ultimately reveal its limitations.

There are multiple ways of knowing, thinking, and communicating—sensation, emotion, movement, sound, shapes—and it is impossible to reduce all that is worth knowing to factual statements. In fact, most of what gets communicated even in speeches is conveyed at the level of gesture, posture, vocal tone, and so on. (Which is why email is notorious for sparking misunderstanding; it is too easy to misread...or, perhaps, too easy for the actual meaning to poke through the veil of words.) I was discussing this sort of thing recently with a very interesting woman from Wyoming whom I met at a cafe last week. 


I had been reading the New York Times and was annoyed by yet another article touting some quality that purportedly makes humans superior to other animals. I wondered aloud why we expend so much effort delineating difference rather than recognizing our kinship.* My accidental lunch companion, who works with horses for a living, responded by telling me about Buck, a Sundance Festival award-wining film about a cowboy named Buck Brannaman who “helps horses with people problems.” He learned natural horsemanship from Tom and Bill Dorrance and Ray Hunt, who inspired a new way of engaging with the animals. There's a brief trailer clip for the film at the link above that gives you an idea what all this is about, but at bottom it's about respecting the horse's tacit knowledge of the world.


As my Wyoming companion waxed poetic about these horsemen, it became clear that as much as she enjoyed visiting Manhattan—she had, in fact, grown up here and was back to help care for her 91-year old mother—she also felt alienated by an implicit dismissiveness toward the beauties of rural life and subtly demeaned by a contempt toward nature her urban counterparts didn't realize they had. That, perhaps, is the most difficult thing about contempt: it's a moral prejudice rather than a language statement we consciously believe.

It was only after we parted company that I re-discovered Verlyn Klinkenborg's New York Times column about the rural life. In honor of my lunch companion, then, as well as a more humble and open way of living, I’m going to quote an obituary Klinkenborg wrote in 1999:
There is no such thing as a horse whisperer. There never has been and never will be. The idea is an affront to the horse. You can talk and listen to horses all you want, and what you will learn, if you pay close attention, is that they live on open ground way beyond language and that language, no matter how you characterize it, is a poor trope for what horses understand about themselves and about humans. You need to practice only three things, patience, observation and humility, all of which were summed up in the life of an old man who died Tuesday in California, a man named Bill Dorrance.
Dorrance was 93, and until only a few months before his death he still rode and he still roped. He was one of a handful of men, including his brother Tom, who in separate ways have helped redefine relations between the horse and the human. Bill Dorrance saw that subtlety was nearly always a more effective tool than force, but he realized that subtlety was a hard tool to exercise if you believe, as most people do, that you are superior to the horse. There was no dominance in the way Dorrance rode, or in what he taught, only partnership. To the exalted horsemanship of the vaquero —the Spanish cowboy of 18th-century California—he brought an exalted humanity, whose highest expression is faith in the willingness of the horse.
....what you could learn from Dorrance was a manner of learning whose subject was nominally the horse but that extended itself in surprising directions to include dogs, cattle and people. If you learned it, you would know it was nothing to boast about.
There is no mysticism, no magic, in this, only the recognition of kinship with horses. Plenty of people have come across Bill Dorrance and borrowed an insight or two, and some have made a lot of money by popularizing what they seemed to think he knew. But what he knew will never be popular, nor did he ever make much money from it. You cannot sell modesty or undying curiosity. It is hard to put a price on accepting that everything you think you know about horses may change with the very next horse.
“You cannot sell modesty or undying curiosity.” You can’t buy them, either, and that’s actually good news. It means they are within the reach of every single one of us, if we are willing to practice.

It seems to me that our culture actively encourages us to mistrust others, to adopt a "moral prejudice" that is inimical to curiosity, let alone honesty, respect, compassion, love, and understanding. The pervasiveness of manipulation by the advertising industry, politicians, media moguls, and corporations demands we become more discerning, not less; the manipulation is blatant, so ubiquitous that it has become invisible. (The Union of Concerned Scientists says that the average American is exposed to three thousand ads each day.) Is this why we simply shut down, shut away, shut off? How do we protect ourselves from harm and yet remain open to one another? For starters, we need to be curious, and we need to
listen.

Considering a recent
kerfluffle on a New York Times comment thread, it seems to me that we get into trouble precisely because 1) we assume we already know what we need to know about a situation, and 2) we are quick to assume that others, in general, are ignorant. In the first instance we foreclose our own curiosity; in the second, our humility. We would do far better to assume that we have limited knowledge and others might have something to teach us, even in areas in which we have expertise. But the very same belligerent, self-satisfied incuriosity that dominates our public discourse —c.f. the comments beneath virtually any YouTube video clip— reinforces the notion that other people are uninformed or worse. I would argue that ideological intransigence is much more dangerous to democracy than simple lack of knowledge.  As long as our arrogance-cum-ignorance keeps us from questioning ourselves or others, all it will take is a comely face or the mere appearance of confidence to disguise intellectual and moral rot. 

________________

* Subject for another post. Here I'll simply note that the leading candidates (language, the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror, etc.) all fail the task, and that looking to define humanity by selecting one quality that appears to be unique seems to me to be a pretty muddle-headed way to prove superiority, which itself is a muddle-headed project.


7 comments:

  1. I indeed agree that there is much ignorance and lack of humility out there. I wonder, though, if we are so starved for someone to listen to us, to hear us, to feel that our voice counts, that we then yell out into the ether hoping somehow it proves we exist. What do you think?
    Kilroy was here.

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  2. Dear Kilroy, er, Kellie,

    Are you proposing that the fundamental problem is self-centeredness? Or not having been heard/listened to for so long that we (or some) are willing to simply yell or use force? It's interesting to think that yelling into the ether might be a way of "proving we exist" -- though I would think that hearing back _from_ the ether might feel more like proof. (And which you have so kindly offered here. :)

    My concern is the inability of people to listen even when they are getting that feedback, though, from the ether or in person. What prompted this particular post, besides my natural inclination toward the kind of practices promoted by the horsemen that the Wyoming woman told me about, was actually an interchange on the New York Times comment thread over an article about JFK officials holding up a runway to help some turtles cross. One reader commented that this was nice, but that the way geese are treated is "a whole different story", which prompted lots of agreement and then a surprisingly contemptuous, acidic backlash comment. I didn't know that geese are being culled in New York, so I posted a comment, and you can follow the rest of the story through the link I have on the word "kerfluffle" above. What surprised me is that my reasonable comment did not elicit a more reasonable response from aforementioned Mr. Contemptuous. He was slightly less acidic, but instransigent in his position - -as well as his attack on the first commenter. I realized that I could be endlessly distracted by trying to gently persuade one person at a time, or I could get on with my own business and pursue what is most important to me.

    Which happens to be yelling out into the ether in hope that I learn that I exist.... :)

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  3. And to add to this: I was quite startled, after writing about why I choose not to use Botox and etc to freeze my face, that some scientists in California have done research about empathy and Botox. Apparently, if we are not able to mimic the faces of people we are talking to, we have less of an understanding of them. Not because THEY aren't moving their faces...but because they don't give us the signal that allows us to mimic them...something about internalizing another's expressions helps us empathize better.

    I totally understand the city person's disdain of rural life. Sometimes I feel city people think if we live in the country we must be on vacation...

    Klinkenborg is fantastic, isn't he? Have you read his book told from the point of view of a tortoise....talk about empathy!

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  4. VL, by the way....I'd love your thoughts on this question: People have been calmly, rationally, talking about climate change (which I will now refer to as the climate catastrophe) for years. The message hasn't gotten through with enough urgency yet. So what do enviros do? Do we change our language? or do we talk louder?

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  5. following this line of thought; i have an actress friend in her forties who was chosen for a part exactly because she hasn't succumbed to any surgical alterations. she fully recognizes that her value as an actor depends upon her facial expression and ability to express a range of emotions- not the least of which is empathy

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  6. VL will have a better answer to Dominique's query, but i wonder if the reason the message is not reaching enough people is because it requires something of us...we need to change our behavior, or we need to become more actively engaged in one way or another. Having been in situations in my younger life where i took unpopular stands on environmental issues- fighting for new standards for dioxin emissions in the state of Florida, to mention one- i became painfully aware that the message is far too often perceived as threatening. people don't listen so much as they project. sigh, psi

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  7. Love the points about Botox, and happy for the actress friend (good for her!): didn't know about the study, but how we act affects how we feel, so it makes perfect sense. Someone once wrote that the Nazis hated the Jews a lot more _after_ they started subjugating and killing them....

    Have not read Klinkenborg's book, but it sounds fantastic - must look it up.

    And about messaging: well, that's the million dollar question. Agree that part of the answer is the need for change, which is never easy to tackle. But I think most people would actually be happier with those changes than they are with their current lifestyle (just like it's more enjoyable to eat good food than pre-processed crap). Which is partly why I think we won't succeed in dealing with the environmental crisis without understanding the human crisis we're in as well.... which also happens to involve the rural/urban split....but more on that in the next post, I promise!

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