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Abstract

The world is changing, but political and educational institutions appears to be stuck in the 19th century. Modern policy and education are both premised on an Enlightenment assumption of the human, rational, individual subject. Increasingly, elements of these philosophical premises are being interrogated. The critique emerges from the environmental interest in collapsing the dualism between subject and object, and reintegrating the human with/in our ecological context. Indigenous philosophy is important for rethinking the integration of the dualism between humanity and ecology. Maori philosophy is a vital counterpoint to the anthropomorphic position of modern policy and education. Taking Maori concepts to inform contemporary philosophy generates a substantive shift in world view that does not lose sight of the solipsist, phenomenological parameters of human sense making, but enables us to make deeper ethical decisions, and transform the basis of education and policy.

Keywords

Climate change sustainability environmental education Maori philosophy Heidegger philosophy and policy

The world is changing, but political and educational institutions appear to be stuck in the 19th century. Modern policy and education are both premised on an Enlightenment assumption of the human, rational, individual subject. Increasingly, elements of these philosophical premises are being interrogated. The critique emerges from the environmental interest in collapsing the dualism between subject and object, and reintegrating the human with/in our ecological context. Indigenous philosophy is important for rethinking the integration of the dualism between humanity and ecology. Maori philosophy is a vital counterpoint to the anthropomorphic position of modern policy and education. Taking Maori concepts to inform contemporary philosophy generates a substantive shift in world view that does not lose sight of the solipsist, phenomenological parameters of human sense making, but enables us to make deeper ethical decisions, and transform the basis of education and policy.

The rational individual is an ‘empty’ cypher for subjectivity. The prevailing view of neoliberal rational individual is that it stands for ‘negative’ freedom (Hayek, 1960: 18; Nozick, 1974). Each individual pursues their maximal well-being with ‘the absence of a particular obstacle – coercion by other men’ (Hayek, 1960: 18, in Quiroz, 2018). Negative freedom was mostly a justification of elite entitlement, both by negating the claim of any group identity or ‘people’ (Quiroz, 2018: 1–3) and by negating the claims of equal rights, or equal opportunity. ‘Requiring that the situation of the less well-off be improved via the principle of the equality of opportunity, for example, involves restricting individual liberty in order to improve the situations of others’ (Hayek, 1960, 1976; Nozick, 1974, in Quiroz, 2018: 6). The justification of the rational individual is laid out in terms of maximizing profit, and restricting the intervention of other men, especially the ‘people’ who are represented by the bureaucracy of the state. But rational individualism has had other, more profound political dimensions, because by making ‘interest groups’ illegitimate, in contrast to the rational individual, all claims to identity, whether ethnic, indigenous, class, gender or sexuality, are also deemed irrelevant to the political enterprise. For decades, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, feminism, for example, was remarkably silent, as women tried to position themselves as rational individuals on an equal playing field, and accepted that they negotiated their wages and conditions on their own, rather than within a politicized group identity. The rational individual has no character or history; no gender, culture or class (cf. Benson, 2020). According to Rational Choice and Public Choice theory, the rational individual simply ascertains universal truth via deductive logic of cause and effect, and is then in a position to make optimal, self-interested decisions based on maximizing utility. As with Newtonian maths and physics, the logic of rational deduction is not bound by time, and the focus on a subjective mind rather than a historical body makes the theory a-historical with claims of universality. Classical and neoliberal economic policy assume a hierarchy of universal rationality, known as humanism, which sits in a privileged relation to both truth and power, regardless of the cultural, historical or environmental context.

Contemporary modern educational policy relies on humanist philosophical and economic assumptions. Curriculum and pedagogy have, for the most part, been based on the rational individual. Educationalists such as Dewey (1916) had a broader, more integrated approach to the holistic well-being of students and environment. But Dewey’s influence has largely given way to a reductionist rationalism and correctitude, commonly iterated by neoliberal policy and ‘student-centred learning’. The aim of neoliberal education is to fill the ‘empty vessel’ with information (Locke, 1960). Comprehension and retention are tested continuously, to benchmark each individual student against unit standards which demonstrate their value as human capital in the workforce.

In contrast to this universal rationalist cypher, many educators are very aware of culture. The counterpoint to the universal rationalist subject is the historical, gendered, culturally specific body. Rather than an empty vessel, students and teachers bring their prior knowledge to the classroom. I grew up in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s, as the Maori resurgence in politics and culture flowered. I am Pakeha, of Settler stock, of Irish descent, sixth generation on Dad’s side, and recent immigrants on Mum’s. The Catholic versus Protestant history of the Troubles is very present in my family, and perhaps that is why, for several generations, we shunned formal religion. Part of the problem of Irish religion is that Christianity was used as a colonial tool, and it rode over older Celtic modes of understanding Mother Earth, and the multiple gods that occupy streams, forests, mountains, lochs, ocean and sky. But glimpses of ancient heroes and even more ancient place names remain in the Irish and Scottish landscape. Living in New Zealand, however, I grew up more aware of Maori mythology than I was of Bible stories, and, as my interest deepened, Maori philosophy has become integral to my understanding of our world. It resonates with my limited knowledge of Ancient Celtic religion, but is more familiar and accessible because it is home. The cultural familiarity does not mean belonging, and my political, embodied reality has been a Pakeha one. My interest is generative, and relies on the generous, complex, innovative and confident bedrock of Maoridom, that is open enough to enable people such as myself to generate new ideas that refer to Maori philosophy, in a modern and multicultural context.

‘Cultural appropriation’ is something all Pakeha (Settlers) have to be sensitive about, and unauthorized use of taonga (treasures), such as Maori designs on fashion clothing for private profit, remain a problem. My family lived through a troubling colonial period which saw a radical transition, from the living, evolving and inclusive culture of tangata whenua (people of the land) and manuhiri (visitors) to the colonial oppression of Maori tribes who had their land stolen by those Settler visitors (O’Malley et al., 2010). Despite the Waitangi settlements (which were only a token gesture compared to the level of land theft), the land and resources are still largely alienated from Maori, which continues to create hardship for tangata whenua. The consequent poverty forced many Maori into a vulnerable position in the new nation state.

When I was a child, a cultural resurgence began, where Maori claimed a stronger political voice, and land reparations began through the Waitangi tribunal (O’Malley et al., 2010). This ongoing process has further transitioned Maori culture from the ring-fencing of ‘Maori-ness’ in opposition to colonial and capitalist oppression, to the emergence of Maori epistemology as an important contributor to contemporary policy, politics and economics, as a vital component of our future adaptation to and mitigation of climate change and environmental destruction.

Colonialism has historically had enormous consequences in nearly all parts of the world. The problem now has escalated even further, and climate change is threatening the biodiversity of species, including humanity, nearly everywhere on the planet. People in all sorts of cultures are trying to come to terms with new technologies, population pressure, 30 years of neoliberalized politics, and the increasing consequences of climate change: loss of fresh water, drought, storms, floods, forest wild-fires, destruction of soil ecology, ocean acidification and sea-level rise. In New Zealand, and further influencing legislation elsewhere, inclusive political ecology, policy and law necessarily engage with Maori philosophy where everything is connected in a genealogical taxonomy of relationship called whakapapa. Maori politics is one of the strongest forces for protecting and reinventing legal and policy norms. Maori philosophy embraces the river, the forest, the mountain, the foreshore and the waters as ‘persons’. Recently, this understanding has been introduced to New Zealand law, with rights akin to ‘human’ rights attributed to the Te Urewera mountains and the Wanganui River (Tuhoe and the Te Urewera Act, 2014; the Wanganui River, Te Awa Tupua Bill, 2017; closely followed by India, for the River Ganges which was recognized as a person by the Uttarakhand High Court in 2017). Similar legislation is emerging in a number of other countries, including Ecuador and Peru.

In this article I want to explore how the ethos of whakapapa, and its deep respect for the wild, that informs this legislation has wide implications for contemporary policy and understanding of the world. I look at Heidegger, and Maori thought, and examine the shift from the individual rational utility maximizer as the basis of policy, economics and education (Dale, 1997; Devine, 2004; Fitzsimons, 1995; Marshall, 1996, 1997; Peters and Marshall, 1996; Peters et al., 1993). The fundamental sciences no longer support the outdated positivism at the core of neoliberal (and liberal) politics and educational pedagogy and policy. Indigenous philosophy has long critiqued the individualist assumptions and hierarchy of rationality and Eurocentricism embedded in neo/liberal education and policy. The philosophical shifts involved shape important aspects of generative posthumanism that forecloses a narrow rationality of cause and effect, as an ordering of order, and opens up a paradigm of complex interactivity that is irreducible to mechanistic ordering.

The rational individual is justified by Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian physics. Both separates out the individual rational subjective knower from the object that is known. Heidegger’s compelling critique of the Enlightenment as an all-encompassing horizon of thought helps to explain why the rational individual and the epistemology of objectivity has shaped our policy, economic system and education so completely. Contemporary physics, feminist embodiment, and Maori philosophy and taxonomy are all deconstructing the positivist assumptions of Enlightenment individual rationality, and reshaping the epistemology, inter-relationship and processes of change in the world. Ultimately, these challenges to Enlightenment epistemology will have consequences for our understanding of subjectivity, pedagogy and educational policy. This ecology of knowledges will broaden education once again, from its neoliberal rationale of producing human resource capacity. Feminist critique and the concept of whakapapa could drive an ecologically integrated education policy, where the curriculum explores issues such as climate change in all its discipline areas.

The threat of the wild

One could ask, if rational observation were the only requirement of humanist, Newtonian physics, why has the ‘wildness’ of forests and Indigenous people been so ferociously subdued by colonial and later, modern forces? The observer position is far from value neutral. Multiple feminist philosophers have critiqued the dualism of subject from object, for the hierarchy implicit in the dualism (Braidotti, 2013; Grosz, 1994; Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 2002).

The Maori concept of whakapapa draws all elements of creation – from plants and trees to animals, the river, the ocean, mountains and so forth – into a network of familial relations. ‘Equality’ is not really the map here, but rather the interconnection and interdependence of kin relations extends between all aspects of ecology, knitting people together with all the other elements of the wild, in a careful taxonomy of relations.

The neoliberal American thinker Francis Fukuyama wrote a telling couple of pages that illuminate this question of the ferocious subjugation of the wild, in his trumpet to the triumph of capitalism, The End of History (Fukuyama, 1992). Fukuyama clearly identifies the consequences of abandoning the hierarchical separation of the ‘rational’ human from other species:

The extension of the principle of equality to apply not just to human beings but to non-human creation as well may today sound bizarre, but it is implied in our current impasse in thinking through the question: What is man? If we truly believe that he is not capable of moral choice or the autonomous use of reason, if he can be understood entirely in terms of the sub-human, then it is not only possible but inevitable that rights will gradually be extended to animals and other natural beings as well as men. The liberal concept of an equal and universal humanity with a specifically human dignity will be attacked both from above and below: by those who assert that certain group identities are more important than the quality of being human, and by those who believe that being human constitutes nothing distinctive against the nonhuman. The intellectual impasse in which modern relativism has left us does not permit us to answer either of these attacks definitively, and therefore does not permit defence of liberal rights traditionally understood. (1992: 298)

Fukuyama is right to understand bioegalitarianism as a true threat to liberal capitalism. But the existential threat of climate change shows us how capitalism as we know it is already redundant. The 11,000 scientists who issued the warning last year say urgent measures need to be taken:

Excessive extraction of materials and overexploitation of ecosystems, driven by economic growth, must be quickly curtailed to maintain long-term sustainability of the biosphere. We need a carbon-free economy that explicitly addresses human dependence on the biosphere and policies that guide economic decisions accordingly. Our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality. (Ripple et al., 2020)

Philosophically, the industrial modern system is still embedded in the separation of subjectivity from natural objects, even if this position has been very well critiqued for generations (Grosz, 1994; Heidegger, 1973; Irwin, 2008a; Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 2002). The problem is that philosophy, economics and political economy have not generated ideas compelling enough to replace the Enlightenment alienation from nature, and modernity’s concurrent model of exponential growth. Now, with 7.8 billion people on the planet, the possibility of returning to isolated, localized productivity of subsistence economies is unlikely, if not impossible. Nevertheless, a sensitivity to local and planetary ecological health is necessary for modern societies to survive and for transition from the philosophical, cultural and organizational impasse of the Anthropocene. So how do we achieve this? Educational policy with planetary ecology at its centre will have a profoundly different texture and quality from the prevailing neoliberal norms. Neoliberalism prioritizes human capital and profit rather than creativity and social, cultural, economic and ecological health. The conceptual basis of whakapapa helps education reconceptualize its policy programme, pedagogy and curriculum, and open up the potential for a transitional future.

Right now, contemporary normative politics is in a bind. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Science’s Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services (IPS, 2019), the planet is in the midst of the sixth major species extinction, unequalled since the dinosaurs at the end of the Eocene. Unprecedented polar ice melt, and the record breaking high temperatures on land and in the ocean notwithstanding (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2018), governments seem unable to extract us from business-as-usual. In a good example of the wild, the unexpected, the unplanned, the COVID-19 pandemic incidentally reduced emissions by 17% globally in the first three months of 2020, as people were restricted from flying and long-distance travel (Le Quéré et al., 2020). In contrast, decades of environmental lobbying failed to substantively reduce emissions (bar one year, 2018). Most high-profile green lobbyists, like Nicholas Stern and Al Gore, have been silent on the continued political commitment to increasing consumer growth and, with it, climate emissions. The increase in renewable energy has added to generic energy use, enabling the economy to grow further, rather than replacing fossil fuel sources (Hickel, 2016). The premise that the natural world is an ‘externality’ to economic procedure has remained substantially unshaken – and is a direct result of the ordering of subject and object, and of cause and effect, bound up in Cartesian and Newtonian scientific Enlightenment. ‘Sustainability’ attempted to bridge this gap (Brundtland, 1987) but co-opted the environmental factors into the overarching economic paradigm, losing its opportunity for genuine eco-social synthesis (Irwin, 2008b). Politics in the Enlightenment, whether liberal, neoliberal, socialist or communist, has been unable to escape the reductive ordering of order which drives our understanding of everything in the wild as a resource to be potentially consumed (Heidegger, 1977).

Heidegger argues that this technological horizon of thought encapsulates modern thinking in the consumerist ethos, which is a deterministic mode of social, ecological, political and personal organization that is extremely difficult to exceed. Most politicians and many people have swallowed the bitter pill and believe there are no alternatives. What is at stake here is laying out a new mode of understanding our world; a new horizon of thought in the wildness of planetary ecology. One that intimately binds humanity with the other populations, species, oceans, atmosphere and strata of the planet. One that constitutes a new political economy based on ecological health in our most immediate productive relationships and at a planetary scale. Educational policy with planetary ecology and bioegalitarian symbiosis at its centre will have a profoundly different curriculum, pedagogy and policies. The texture and quality of eco-social education will differ from the prevailing neoliberal norms in education. Neoliberal education, like earlier authoritarian regimes, is ruled by the consumer paradigm. It understands students as empty of cultural or gender specificity; only as individuals, who need to be taught information and rationality to become adult. Neoliberalism is all about the negative freedom of being able to own private property without the interference of the ‘people’ or the state. John Locke’s private property ownership underpins Hayek (1960) and Novick (1974), just as Locke’s description of students being a blank slate, or tabula rasa, underpins neoliberal education. As a tabula rasa, students can be ‘filled’ with information and correct methods until the student fulfils the standards of their examination criteria, and adds to their value as a human resource; whereas an ecologically integrated, ‘wild’ education would need to be more holistic, less universal and more culturally, ecologically and location specific (Crex Crex Collective, 2018). Education would be more aware of local and planetary limits, concerned with the impacts of pollution and resource extraction, and modes of living well, while treading softly on the earth.

Escaping the horizon of thought

The technological horizon of thought reduces all aspects of the known world to potential resources, waiting – often as unmined raw materials – for the demands of consumerism. Heidegger’s crucial critique of modernity is that older ways of knowing the earth, the sky, the gods and mere mortals are foreclosed by the rational ‘ordering of order’ into the paradigm of consumerism:

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve (Bestand). (Heidegger, 1977:17)

Heidegger argues that the technological Gestell, or horizon of thought that is informed by the phenomenology of modern technology, discloses some aspects of things and at the same time conceals other aspects to a forgotten world. The Gestell makes it very difficult for us to speak about older concepts of understanding. The technological horizon of thought highlights rationality, causality and the global economic paradigm to such a huge extent that other modes of knowing struggle to emerge. Pollution, extinction and climate change remained largely unobserved and unacknowledged for a very long time. Consumerism defines the pace of production. It permeates the neoliberal policy paradigm, that perceives each individual as a rational utility maximizer. Individuals maximize financial decisions in their own self-interest. This normative paradigm is based on Cartesian rationality, that separated the rational mind from the natural object. Descartes was sceptical of the subject’s own body, as an ‘object’ to be disregarded in favour of the logic of universal laws (1980, cf. Irwin, 2008a).

Psychological behaviourism, especially Skinner’s behaviourism of the 1930s–1960s, was informed by Cartesian rationality but took it to the next level, where behaviour can be manipulated through operant conditioning and language (Skinner, 1938, 1969). Theoretically, behaviourism makes it possible for policy makers to predict economic decisions and shape aggregated rational behaviour. As a horizon of thought, behaviourism enframes the economic normalisation of rational decision making. Skinner’s behavioural psychology adheres to the technological horizon of thought, producing rational individuals in much the same way as Locke’s tabula rasa have been informed to enhance their capacity as future human resources. Behaviouralism informed education for a long time and, while it is now out of fashion in pedagogy, it remains embedded in educational policy assumptions. Aggregated behaviouralism is the paradigm underpinning market rationality. For neoliberalism, negative freedom positions the market as the highest form of politics, but that is not without influence. Behaviourism can be seen in education, artificial intelligence (AI), advertising and the political ‘nudge’.

Heidegger regards ‘failure’ as one of the ways to get a surprise glance, a deeper view, of the usually taken-for-granted work of resources and technology on the horizon of thought. Heidegger’s discussion is limited to the failure of a tool, but, in late modernity, it is the failure of global capitalism to recognize the ravaging devastation of climate change, and obscure it as an externality to economic productivity that is increasingly becoming obvious.

Consumerism has been dictating the pace of production and ‘resource’ use regardless of the earth’s carrying capacity. For 200 years, the forests, ocean and soil have acted as a carbon sink for the 2.3 trillion tonnes (Oxford Global Warming Index, 2020) of CO₂ emissions we expel as pollution, a byproduct and externality of exponential economic growth. Increasingly, the air is full of the smoke from forest fires; the ocean is too hot, too acidic and choked with plastic garbage, and the soil is depleted from monoculture, pesticides, fertilizer and erosion (Shiva, 2015). As the IPCC has continually told us, we all know that business-as-usual has to come to an end (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2018).

Under neoliberalism, the environment was externalized from the analysis of costs and benefits (Irwin, 2014). The environment absorbed the pollution, the ecosystem damage, the toxic run-off from mines, agriculture, refrigeration and transport, and the soil loss and water pollution from large-scale, long-term deforestation and industrial monoculture. For 200 years the environment bore all these costs, and the overall effect was largely absorbed by the planetary commons.

The majority of people are so ‘alienated’ from the impact of industrial production on environmental systems that they failed to notice early warning signs – erosion and soil run-off; deforestation; water pollution; birds and animals becoming rare or extinct; the enormous impact of roadkill; the loss of moths and butterflies, and then of beetles and other insects. The plague on bees of varroa mites, and the impact of Bayer-Monsanto’s neonicotinoid pesticides (IPS, 2019). All are obvious, if you are not committed to the consumer ethos as a totalizing mode of understanding. But even farmers and fishermen (let alone urban dwellers) fail to observe the warning signs of the wild, when their thought processes are completely enframed by consumer demand.

The anthropocentric stance is central to the problem of corrupting and polluting our communal ecosystem, and thus alienation from nature destroys the well-being of other species together with our own. Creating an ethics of human equity remains within the Enlightenment dualisms that bifurcate culture from nature, men from women, Enlightened from Indigenous, rationality from emotions, mind from body.

From forgotten externality, nature has forced itself back into public awareness. No matter how manipulative Rupert Murdoch’s news empire is, or the denialist fake news sites funded by oil and coal corporations, ignoring the planetary impacts of fossil fuel emissions is no longer possible. Over 11,000 people in the scientific community hit the news by issuing a Last Warning in 2019, giving 11 years to radically reduce to zero or negative emissions, or face near-certain mass extinction (Ripple et al., 2020). The earth systems in many cases are worse than the worst-case scenarios put forward by the IPCC: ‘The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle. The most affluent countries are mainly responsible for the historical GHG emissions and generally have the greatest per capita emissions’ (Ripple et al., 2020).

Heidegger’s critique of the technological horizon of thought, and its ordering of order of all things as standing reserve, waiting to meet consumer demand, has been almost impossible to escape. One of the major failures of capitalism is climate change, which makes other aspects of the planetary environment more visible. The failure makes it possible to question the foundations of Enlightenment thought. The aim is to discover how rational individualism and its policy consequences are complicated by contemporary, post-Enlightenment philosophy and science.

Early roots of Enlightenment dualism

The initial entangled ‘location’ of Enlightenment thinking informed the subsequent colonization of the world with a certain mindset and violence. For posthuman feminist Rosi Braidotti, the alienation of the Enlightenment is rooted in colonial, slave-holding imperialism. She describes how the ‘lofty European ideals of Enlightenment-based rational progress and emancipation rest on the world-historical phenomena of colonialism, imperialist conquest, and trade and slaves, women, animals, and earth resources’ (Braidotti, 2009: 527). It could only occur by the dualist separation of ‘rational masculinity’ from natural, ‘feminized’ objects. The dualism that separated humanity’s emancipation from the pace of the seasons and the constraints of nature are best announced by Descartes in 1641 in the Second Meditation, on the prioritization of subjectivity and the nature of the rational mind:

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain. (1980: 7)

Descartes argues for the elevation of the mind over the body, rational deductive logic over bodily sensations, dreams and intuitions. Descartes’ scepticism about the evidence of his own body and its senses redoubles and legitimizes rational deduction as the only reliable form of producing knowledge. It also places all ‘objects’ at a remove from the thinking subject. The process of rational deduction completely relies on the close association of cause and effect. As science developed its positivist outlook, this reliance on universal rationality has also assumed universal replicability in cause and effect. After Heidegger’s concept of the Gestell, this Cartesian emphasis on subjective rationality and its reliance on cause and effect can be understood as the ‘ordering of order’.

Dualisms were famously analysed by feminists like Carolyn Merchant (1980) and Val Plumwood (2002), and show how Descartes’ hyper-separation of rationality from the phenomenon of the body produces a cascade of other dualisms: mind over body, rationality over emotion, individual subject over natural object, culture over nature. Unpacking the dualist separation of the objective knowing rational individual from other objects, including one’s own body, has gone through several important milestones. A particularly hermeneutic and historical version of phenomenology has importantly reinstated the role of the senses, in relationship to materials, into the analysis of cognition (Heidegger, 1962; Kisiel, 2002).

In his early work Being and Time (first published in 1927), Heidegger (1962) shows how things are ‘ready to hand’ in a largely unconscious, but world-making way. Everyday items such as chairs, tables, forks, lights and so on shape the way we understand our surroundings, and ourselves. Things ‘world’ us. He goes further with the concept of the Gestell, or technological horizon of thought, and shows us how a culture’s technologies shape the way people think and, thus, shape the way people and the environment interact (Heidegger, 1977). Modern technology based on the dense energy and power of fossil fuels is vastly different from the prevailing technologies in historical Indigenous society. Indigenous societies have sophisticated technological innovations that shape their understanding of the world but these are based on the wind, ocean and sun, not the energy density of fossil fuels, and are more attuned to the needs of other species and the natural environment. The pace might have changed, but the ethos of interactivity with the wild remains.

Duality and the ordering of order

Enlightenment education introduces students to the rational framework of knowledge, and the assumptions that empirical rationality can expose all modes of cause and effect. This taxonomy of essential reality that is available to rational contemplation has created tremendous opportunity to master nature with an embedded antagonism to the ‘savage’, the ‘wild’ and ‘nature’. Max Weber, for example, has this to say about essential reality:

The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation … indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means … the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. (1948: 138, quoted in Zinn, 2016: 3).

Famously, technical calculations have provided the information needed by industrialism to expand. Combined with classical economics, industrial production has taken over as the normative model for creating the goods that service modern consumer society. Consumer society makes use of enormous energy to automate cause and effect. Modernity replaces labour with machinery. Natural materials are examined for their use value in production. Mining from one place is assembled at another place, and sold somewhere else altogether. Where productivity was once local, it is now global. Where environmental impact was once immediate, it is now planetary.

The ordering of order is understood as ‘optimistic’ by Weber M 1948 [1919], Feenberg (2002), Zinn (2016) and others, with an assumption that technological innovation can solve anything. In contrast, a pessimistic view of technology focuses on the ignored externalities of pollution, resource exhaustion, the ozone hole, and climate change, which seems endemic to fossil fuel based technology. It is no longer possible to ‘forget’ or ‘deny’ that climate change is happening, nor that it is induced by human activity (IPBES, 2019). There is a prevailing sense of hopelessness about limiting greenhouse gas emissions, which have steadily climbed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It can feel as if toxic waste, plastic pollution, deforestation and climate change are entrenched, and there is nothing we can do about it (Hansen et al., 2016). Modernity is so committed to global industrial consumerism that it appears there is no alternative.

The two elements go together; rational control on the one hand is inadvertently resulting in climatic upheaval and catastrophe on the other. During the Enlightenment we situated ourselves as Masters of the Universe, taking over the role from the gods (Nietzsche, 1982). But our simplistic notion of linear progress, of mechanistic cause and effect, only resulted in short-term mastery. The longer-term impacts are calamitous. The wild has resurrected itself in unprecedented upheaval, reasserting the unknown, the unknowable, the unpredictable, as feedbacks exacerbate the impact of anthropocentric pollution. The ‘mysterious powers of the Savage’ are emerging, despite Weber’s confidence in rationality and certainty. The essential paradigm of rationality, and its objective taxonomy of simplistic, linear cause and effect, have to be re-appraised as questionable. The antidote is to rediscover the wild; to loosen our grip on control, and to allow ourselves a place within nature instead of over and above, in a position of superiority and alienation.

The failures of Enlightenment modernity and capitalism are becoming clear. But less clear are the concepts to replace Enlightenment fundamentals. To unpack this further, it is worth deepening the understanding of whakapapa and its epistemology, which is the Maori ‘scientific’ taxonomy of genera. Unlike the alienation of Enlightenment thinking, Indigenous philosophy tends to emphasize ecological integration and bioegalitarianism.

Indigenous philosophy; Maori whakapapa and whenua

Indigenous modes of technology, ownership, ecology and knowledge production are based on the inter-relationship of all things. The concept of whakapapa is fundamental to the Maori world view. Whakapapa is usually understood as genealogy. It is the categorization of all species and all geological events in a fully articulated set of familial relationships. Whakapapa, it could be argued, is an alternative framing to the technological Gestell analysed by Heidegger. Te Haumoana White describes whakapapa as strata (personal communication, 2019). Whakapapa could be understood as a kind of evolutionary theory, similar to the claves of contemporary biology. It is a geology of morals (Deleuze and Guattari, 1999). Indigenous communities are embedded in their landscapes as a form of historical social psychology that engages biology, geology, genealogy, culture and memory in a palimpsest of narrative that goes back 30 generations or more and reaches forward a comparable time span.

The concept of whakapapa is usually interpreted as genealogy, and the emphasis is on ancestors – usually human. This can easily become a positioning of the individual vis-à-vis their illustrious precursors, as a kind of political identity politics. Cherryl Wairea i te Rangi Smith argues for a much more encompassing conception of whakapapa: ‘Nowadays whakapapa is becoming more reconstructed as a means of identity whereas it actually maps out the nature of existence’ (2000: 46).

That bigger conceptual apparatus of Maori whakapapa is as a genealogical taxonomy that carefully elucidates the species and genera, and situates humanity in close kindred with the geology, the ocean, the forest, the birds, each type and variation of tree, of lizard, bat, insect, rock formation, star, galaxy. Humanity is linked by blood, by birth, by the nurturing placenta of the land and the flow of water. Whakapapa is a philosophical taxonomy, akin to Aristotle’s categories of species and genera in the Metaphysics, but without the hierarchy of rationality. Whakapapa also delineates the interconnectedness of all beings. Whakapapa can mean to layer (in a physical sense) (Mika, 2014: 53). Carl Mika breaks open the conceptual basis; ‘to become (“whaka”) earth (“papa”)/be embraced towards Papa (mother earth); to cause to become (“whaka”) earth (“papa”)’ (Mika, 2014: 53). Mika engages the dynamic evolving of becoming, in this phrase. Whakapapa is not merely a description of a static field of genera, but a changing, impacting, motive environment, where the self is also in transition.

Genealogy, strata and the becoming-earth aspect of whakapapa resonate with another important term, whenua. Whenua means both ‘placenta’ and ‘land’. They are not segregable. Whenua is the reciprocal nurturing of people and land. Whenua literally means placenta and umbilical cord and it is associated with the woman’s pregnant body; at the same time, it is the word for the earth. Papatuanuku is the earth goddess, and her husband is Ranginui, the sky god. So the earth is always understood as female, fecund, ripe, nurturing, abundant.

In Maori, knowledge, language and thinking are not reduced to mere logical rationality. The way of language is immanent with the embodiment of entrails, placenta and land. Te Reo, or language, resonates with the earthy guts of things. Thinking is misrepresented as an internal function of the mind only. Maori go beyond the enunciation emerging between each separate individual human to the shared discourse of the rivers, the forest, the ocean, the air as personages. Delamere evokes language, Te Reo, thus:

In the grander scheme of things, traditional Te Reo are the voices of nature; the jolt of an earthquake, the song of a bird, the rustling of leaves, the rumbling of thunder before a storm, the piercing bolt of lightning in the night sky, the rushing waves of a tsunami, the cry of a whale, the fresh smell of rain on the earth. (Delamere, n.d., quoted in Mika, 2014: 49)

Far from the alienated rational thinking of the individual Enlightenment subject, Maori thinking, whakaaro, is firmly embodied: by the stomach and by land:

In a Maori sense, both body and the thing being focused on are results of an activity that is not explicable through the common, economical verb ‘to think.’ Smith (2000) asserts that whakaaro means ‘to cast attention to’, which he places as an ‘activity of the stomach and the entrails.’ He continues ‘the stomach is associated with the ira tangata aspect or earthly component of that which forms the basis of action.’ It is not, however, ‘the actual process of rational thought’ (58) but a concerned inclination towards the world that whakaaro heralds. (Mika, 2014: 52)

Thought is far more than logic (though not devoid of logic). Embodied, emotional cognizance is steeped in context, relationality, awareness and an orientation that gathers together with the land, and emerges from it, as the foundation of thought. Whenua is land and people, as a collective noun. Hyper-separation of land from the people, or objects from rational subjectivity, is not possible within the orientation of the Maori language. Takirirangi Smith explains: ‘Tangata whenua truth is not an objectified, definitive truth but a recognition of relationships and interconnectedness which defines the uniqueness of things and individuals’ (2000: 59). Mika quotes Pohatu to explain how the language emerges (take) from the collection of thinking and people: ‘Kai to reo ōna ake whakaaro e puputia ai ngā take pū Māori’ (Pohatu, n.d.: 2, quoted in Mika, 2014: 52).

When man thinks, one is collected and is guided along the path between those entities, for “papa,” as the precursor of humanity, also brings with it ‘rangi,’ or sky. One is hence attuned (another meaning of ‘rangi’) towards the movement of ‘vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the years seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather’ (Heidegger, 1971: 149). Thinking is an immediate acknowledgement of that attunement even when the sky is not thought of, or when it is absent. As a derivative of ‘Papatuanuku,’ or ‘rock foundation beyond expanse’ (Marsden, 2003: 22), earth’s spreading out through rock and water is deeply concerned with the sky. (Mika, 2014: 55)

The wild is brought along with us. It is in nature and it is part of our culture. It is our bodies. The wild is irrefutable. Heidegger’s concept of the technological horizon of thought showed how the wild was obscured and forgotten – repressed – by the ordering of order. The repression of wilderness was created by alienating nature as an object, and this included our own bodies, which were subsumed by Enlightenment rationality. Whakapapa brings the wild back into view, and this will enable society to transition beyond the exploitation of modernity, towards a more integrated, quite possibly high tech, planetary culture.

Bioegalitarianism versus the end of Nature

What would happen if we took up the invitation, issued from the feminist critique of solipsist dualism, and from Indigenous philosophy – to embrace connectivity, respect and eco-egalitarian rights? These political strategies are bringing pressure to bear on the current order of alienation. In Ecuador, the Cochabamba Declaration lays out the Rights of Water (2000). In New Zealand, Maori have fought for the Rights of Personhood for the Urewera Mountains (2014) and the Wanganui River (2017). The concept is spreading, and in India the River Ganges is partially protected in the same way (2017). The political impacts could be immense. If deforestation threatens the water quality of the Wanganui river, court action can now be taken. Or if foreign multinationals try to exploit fresh water there – the river can fight back. Contrast that situation with the draining of the water table amidst the 20-year drought in Australia by thirsty coal miners and bottled water corporations.

When we understand the whole as an inter-related, entangled field, then industrial operations cannot separate and disclaim the environmental impact as an alienated, forgotten ‘externality’. The philosophy underpinning economics has to change. Education and policy will orientate around ecological symbiosis instead of the hierarchized misunderstanding of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’. Instead of prioritizing rationality at the expense of the Other, education will become more radically bioegalitarian, encompassing the animal kingdom, the insects, the microbes, the geological strata, the atmosphere; the entire whakapapa of genealogical relations. Rosi Braidotti puts it this way:

This materialist approach has important ethical implications. In terms of the human/animal interaction, the familiar ego saturation of the past is replaced by a deep bioegalitarianism, a recognition that we humans and animals are in this together. The bond between us is a vital connection based on sharing this territory or environment on terms that are no longer hierarchical or self-evident. They are fast evolving and need to be renegotiated accordingly. (2009: 528)

Understanding the deep-seated change that bioegalitarian ethics introduces shows us why the colonial genocides were so harsh. At stake was permission to pollute, permission to exploit, to mine, to wreak untold damage – without reprisal. It was a philosophical narcissism, and economic and policy entitlement. The philosophy of rational individualism and the myth of objectivity permeated education, and it enabled the industrial complex to unfold, successfully unchecked. Now, climate change and pollution have gone so far that the planet is in a mass extinction event (Hansen et al. 2016; IPBES, 2019).

The impact of pollution on future generations was ‘discounted’ by economists, on the grounds that monetary inflation would be able to pay for redress in the future more cost-effectively than now (Hickel, 2018). But climate change is now and the costs of ignoring it are now (Irfan, 2019). Children in schools all over the world are following Greta Thunberg’s example, and striking against climate change. They are demanding a future, rather than untold hardship. Because they are young and have nothing invested in private property or the status quo, their voices for change are clear, and vibrant.

Climate change has demonstrated, as nothing else has, just how toxic those forgotten economic ‘externalities’ really are. The future is in bioegalitarianism, where we teach children to live a symbiotic life with the wild, not a hierarchical life, over and against it.

The ordering of order is at the core of the colonial enterprise. This is the reason that colonial observers could not merely sit back and observe the new species and cultures that they came across. As the English massacre and rule of the Celts beginning in Ireland in the 1300s, indigenous integration with the environment got in the way of the colonial reconceptualization of nature as privately owned resource. Indigenous knowledge ensures a level of mutual respect and communal layering of knowledge, and resource use, that is not amenable to private ownership or the exploitation of people and nature as ‘resources’. Heidegger’s argument that the ordering of order enabled a reconfiguring of the Gestell, a technological alienation that produces all aspects of the world as consumer items waiting in standing reserve to meet demand, is vital to comprehend the relationship between colonialism, modernity and capitalism. Enlightenment philosophy and Newtonian science are key points of justification for the alienation, or ‘freedom’, of people from the constraints of nature.

The wild complexities of impacts and feedbacks are not strictly reducible to linear cause-and-effect relationships. The ramifications of bioegalitarianism are to take Indigenous and embodied thought seriously. From here, a new trajectory is set off. It will engage Lo-Tek (Watson, 2020) alongside Hi-Tek, but it will be orientated towards ecological diversity and respect, instead of the mining mentality of consumerism. We can hope to leave oil in the ground, as we generate energy, and other technologies with more efficiency, subtlety and less energy density. Biomimicry will inform our architecture and design, reducing the need for high-energy refrigeration or heating units. Indigenous design will influence everything from boat building to permaculture. We will not privilege ‘progress’ or ‘economic growth’ at the expense of culture and ecosystems. Instead, the wild will come along with us, integrated in the philosophical, economic and policy norms that underpin education, media, governance and trade. The beginnings of this approach are not yet visible in the prevailing neoliberal New Zealand curriculum, but can be seen in the Victorian schools’ curriculum, ‘Learning about sustainability’ (Victorian Curriculum F-10, n.d.). In this document, every aspect of the curriculum, from poetry to mathematics, engages with climate ecology. The standards at each level of schooling seem a little high to me, but the ethos and detail are exemplary.

A multitude of forms of economics and global trade have been around for thousands of years. The Silk Road is testament to the long-frequented trade routes of earlier civilizations. Technology itself has had sophisticated iterations, including clockwork (Greece, 206 BC) and an electric battery (Egypt), so it is not technology per se that is problematic (Irwin, 2018). We have a global population of 7.8 billion, still growing to a peak of some 10 or 11 billion by the end of the century, which makes relying on romantic local pastoralism impossible. The foreclosure of the future in the ordering of order is avoidable. It requires a reinvigoration of ancient ways of knowing, a re-emergence of respect for our ancestors, and our more-than-human kin. It is an engagement with contemporary physics, and an abandonment of the simplistic premises of Newtonian objectivity as reduced to cause and effect, as the underlying ‘progressive’ assumption of policy and economics. The forest fires in Australia and elsewhere around the globe have killed over 1.25 billion animals. Humanity is not the only species at risk of climate change. The pathway is increasingly clear. We are not merely rational individuals alienated from the land. We are whenua, and we are part of the wild.

Footnotes

Ruth Irwin is the author of several books on philosophy and climate change. She wrote Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change (2008) and edited Philosophy and Climate Change (2010), amongst others. She is currently working on a new monograph on climate change and the philosophy of economics to be published by Routledge in 2021. She is an adjunct professor in education at RMIT.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ruth Irwin

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Rewilding policy futures: Maori whakapapa and the ecology of the subject

Abstract

Keywords

The threat of the wild

Escaping the horizon of thought

Early roots of Enlightenment dualism

Duality and the ordering of order

Indigenous philosophy; Maori whakapapa and whenua

Bioegalitarianism versus the end of Nature

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References