In 2014, Dr. Darcia Narvaez effectively up-ended the field of moral reasoning with a book entitled Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality, with the argument that morality is not a result of cognition, but rather constructed by early developmental experiences. For several hundred years, tracking back to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the field of moral reasoning has framed ethics as an exercise in cognitive discernment: e.g., what is required to know and choose the good. Narvaez, one of the world's leading trans-disciplinary psychology researchers, has spent several decades studying Small Band Hunter Gatherer (SBHG) tribes, and Indigenous cultures generally, and from this research came to the both obvious and astonishing conclusion that, "Small Band Hunter Gatherers are the baseline of human normalcy."
The long arc of human evolutionary history tracks back at least 200,000 years. During this history, humans were, for at least 95% of this time, organized into small band hunter gatherer groups. This was the evolutionary context in which our brains and nervous systems were organized and optimized, and these groups, who were gracile and mobile, and who followed the migratory paths of animals for food, were inextricably woven into their ecological niches, and prioritized relatedness above all things.
The word relatedness, whose deepest expression is kinship, is an attempt to name the felt experience of being connected to someone or something else in a way that changes the nature of the boundary between the two entities. Relatedness creates a “we”, a diventity. A density of diversity that gives rise to novel identities: a dual identity.
The San people of the Kalahari, arguably the oldest continuous culture on earth, explain that when someone really sees an animal for the first time (a seeing of the not merely the eye, but the heart), a tiny energetic thread forms between the person and the animal. This thread is a tiny lightning strike of relatedness. It is not a cognition. It is a line of energy that emerges upon mutual recognition between two beings, what the Zulu language calls sawubona. Upon each subsequent recognition and acknowledgement, the thread gets stronger, growing, through time and mutual accompaniment, into a cord, and then a rope. In this manner, the San communicate with all of the Living World. Through the ropes of relatedness, information is exchanged in the dare-I-say quantum field of relatedness. In the same way that modern people sometimes intuit when a relative has been in an accident–a sudden pause, a feeling arising out of nowhere, the sudden overpowering need to contact this person–the San culture fosters these intuitions of relatedness with the entire Living World. At the level of cultural identity, the San themselves say that to become San is create "ropes of relatedness with all of the Creation." The San are not the people who live on the mountain, or by the sea. They are the people who are related to everything.
The San also seem to be, predictably, among the very best trackers in the world. Hard-ground tracking is, in many ways, the ultimate expression of nature connectedness and literacy, the ability to read the landscape of nature with exquisite precision in time. Informed by this experience of relatedness, the Living World is not, to the San, a static aesthetic backdrop but a fabric of relationships woven thoroughly through their very bodies in the ever-present now.
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