[Note for readers outside of Aotearoa New Zealand: Pākehā are the European settlers, predominantly from Great Britain who colonised Aotearoa from the 1800’s onwards. It is a colonisation that is ongoing.]
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly—perhaps she’ll die!
In Te Ao Māori (the Māori world), pūrakau (stories) and whakataukī (adages or sayings) are often used to illustrate and explain deep truths and pieces of wisdom that make them available to everyone. This is not a matter of “dumbing down” (a white concept if ever I’ve heard one), but rather, opening up the knowledge that matters to everyone. These narratives are sophisticated (and highly efficient) transmitters of wisdom.
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her;
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she'll die!
I like to think of wisdom as systemic understanding—embodied, relational, and place-time based knowledge that recognises the ever-evolving web of life of which we are a part. Systemic understanding—being able to work with the complexity of living systems—is essential to human and planetary flourishing. You can’t address dynamic complexity (ie reality) using linear means, or you will be WAY behind the 8-ball (to use a Pākehā saying).
There was an old lady who swallowed a bird;
How absurd to swallow a bird!
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she'll die!
Pākehā have access to these vehicles of ancestral wisdom too, even though we might not recognise them in these terms. We can draw on these beautiful, and simple, ways of understanding complexity without needing to appropriate the mātauranga of others. The ancestral wisdom of Pākehā has been passed down too, looked after by those who were forgotten, or dismissed, or suppressed, or ignored in the dominating imperial march of rational and superiorTM Western thought. We can reclaim that wisdom from the adages, and the stories, and the poetry, and the old wives tales, and the songs that have been kept alive over generations for us to draw from.
There was an old lady who swallowed a cat;
Well, fancy that, she swallowed a cat!
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she'll die!
Our own ancestral wisdom has some pretty pointed criticism for the way that our dominant orthodox Western worldview has been operating in the world. It throws into sharp relief the disconnection of “intelligence” and wisdom that has happened over the last several hundred years via a colonial enterprise that has privileged a particular way of knowing, doing, being, and valuing over all others. We have, in Iain McGilchrist’s terms, favoured a left hemisphere way of attending to the world, that is decontextualised, mechanistic, unnuanced, and cannot comprehend wholes[1]. And, since our worldview is not a passive lens through which we see the world, but our active means of shaping it, it has led us to create a world (through the systems we have implemented) in its fragmentary pixellated image.
There was an old lady that swallowed a dog;
What a hog to swallow a dog!
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she'll die!
Decolonial scholar, Bayo Akomolafe asks, “what if our approach to the crisis is part of the crisis?”[2] This is not a fanciful question, but a material one. It may seem like the province of “mere” philosophical discussion, but it has profound ramifications. It is at the heart of our global metacrisis, and is worth slowing down to pay attention to. We have inherited a worldview that is based on faulty logic, but can only evaluate itself using that same logic. The dominant orthodox Western worldview has been imposed on the world, whether we like it or not, through colonisation, imperialism, globalisation, and capitalism. It has then, through the success-to-the-successful loop of those who dominate being given the power to determine the rules for everyone else, proceeded to redesign the world according to its mental model; a model of separation, competition, and hierarchies of worth in an anthropocentric universe.
There was an old lady who swallowed a goat;
Just opened her throat and swallowed a goat!
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she'll die!
But this mental model is inadequate to the task, because it is only partial. Life does not work in discrete components. Living systems are complex dynamic systems, not mechanical ones. Indigenous cultures have always known this, and Western science has been catching up, but the dominance of this model is baked into all our societal systems, keeping us locked into their outdated Newtonian-Cartesian logic. It might seem like a cliché, but everything and everyone is interconnected and interdependent—literally, not just metaphorically. No-one and nothing is a hermetically sealed unit in isolation of anyone or anything else. And, again it seems like such an obvious statement to make, but the world is always in motion. Trying to “fix” it in space and time is futile. Life keeps life-ing. And humans cannot actually control it, because it is more-than-human, with its own intelligence that the orthodox Western “we” are only starting to recognise. The hubris of a worldview that thinks it can know everything is embarrassing.
This mechanistic worldview has led us to some quite primitive approaches to addressing problems, that continue to focus on: (a) the surface level issues, rather than what is giving rise to those issues; (b) narrow-path investigations through specialised lenses (eg using discipline-specific approaches that are tightly focused on particular aspects); and/or (c) an inability to factor in ourselves as participants in the problem. Defaulting to an analytical orientation to the world means that problems become isolated from their contexts, contexts are not understood in their fullness, and our own part in them remains unexamined. This might be cognitively “easier” but it leaves a huge chunk of the story out, and more often than not leads to undesirable unintended consequences. Quick wins can lead to long term losses. This is what Bayo means about our approach to the crisis being part of the crisis.
There was an old lady who swallowed a cow;
I don't know how she swallowed a cow!
She swallowed the cow to catch the goat,
She swallowed the goat to catch the dog,
She swallowed the dog to catch the cat,
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird,
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her,
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly;
I don't know why she swallowed a fly – perhaps she'll die!
The old lady who swallowed the fly came up with quick solutions each time to fix the initial problem, and each time her intervention caused an even bigger problem, which she again tried to solve using the same logic. This is a very clear and simple Pākehā pūrakau that we might need to start learning from, before it is too late.
There was an old lady who swallowed a horse...
She's dead, of course.
[1] McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
[2] Akomolafe, B. (2021, August 3). A Slower Urgency. Bayo Akomolafe. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/a-slower-urgency
Love it Rebecca. A powerful message made all the more impactful via your rich style of writing. Looking forward to the next instalment.