Re-grounding "diversity".
Shifting towards relational storytelling
Our legs were knee-deep caked in mud as we waded through a loʻi (Hawaiian water taro patch) that has been stewarded by my friend’s family for five generations. With sickles and shovels in hand, we repeatedly gathered, chopped, and dug out bundles of a tall grass that was taking over one of the paddies. We later hand-pulled another aquatic plant in the field that was initially brought down the valley by one person in his aquarium — but that later spread everywhere after a flood.
As we tried to identify the other various plants now pervasive in the area like the poisonous Angel Trumpet, my friend shares that many of the plants now considered invasive in that specific biome were initially introduced by one particular neighbor who wanted to grow a diverse range of “exotic,” ornamental plants for their own botanical garden. Decades later, they now contribute to the never-ending, extremely laborious maintenance work that kalo farmers and families in the whole region must partake in.
Elsewhere around the island, large landowners who idealize the aesthetic of perfectly manicured, resort-style lawns translate their own conditioned “tastes” into what they consider as best practices for managing their estates — contributing little, and arguably detrimentally, to local watersheds, habitats, and food and community systems. Along the Hāmākua Coast in areas considered wet forest habitats, commercial interests have turned many former sugarcane plantations that long replaced native forests into large swaths of grasslands for livestock, as well as massive monocultural stands of eucalyptus that disrupt regional water cycles.
Cumulatively, these different approaches to tending ecosystems can all be viewed as a praxis and expression of diversity — which, in theory, ought to be celebrated... Because diversity is good, right?
But what happens when the diversity in thought guiding people’s decisions on how to care for their privatized parcels of land becomes completely ungrounded — not rooted in shared, place-based biocultural knowledges, values, and understandings of what the community (human and more-than-human) needs?
Marinating in these discomforting questions, I’ve landed on a challenging need to critique the types of ungrounded “diversity in thought” that permeate society today.
The moon… that moon… which moon?
“If you're standing on the beach, and you're seeing that moon… somebody 20 meters further up the beach is seeing it in a different place. As you move and walk up and down the beach, it's moving as well in relation to where you are. So you get 1,000 people right up and down that coast, all reporting on the location of where the moon reflection is. Every single one of these stories will be wrong and right at the same time.
But the aggregate story, the big meta story, the big narrative… [that is what] is approximating the truth.” – Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta (previously quoted in my essay “Free Range Thinking: Beyond binary reductionisim”)
These days, the diversity in thought bubbling all around does not feel like people reporting about the moon simply from different vantage points. There are deeper pretexts to interrogate.
It feels more like some people have been told that the sun is the moon, that Mars is the moon, that the north star is the moon, that the bird is the moon, that the loud airplane flying by is the moon… So people disagree and argue over what color the moon is, what shape it takes, how it behaves, what impacts it has… while operating from entirely different planes of reality — some of which are totally made up.
In this way, listening to the “diversity in thought” in attempts to really know the moon no longer becomes helpful. The resulting big-picture story no longer reflects the actual beauty in diverse ways of thinking and being in the world — but the layer of disorientation underneath.
If the “diversity in thought” were founded on a wide range of out-of-touch, out-of-context “truths,” or even blatant falsities manufactured and imposed by corporate-political interests, then the overarching meta-narrative would only serve to dissociate and disorient.
For me, this is what the world currently feels like: disoriented — where surface-level polarizations need not even be taken to heart because they largely just reflect underlying differences in people’s perceptions of reality.
I am not idealizing some utopia where everyone agrees and sees the world in monolithic ways.
But a diversity in thought that can meaningfully enrich and texturize a collective’s understanding of reality — and therefore, what it means to heal ourselves and our planet — must, first and foremost, be grounded in shared truths.
I share this open-endedly to allow for nuance and spillovers. After all, I also question: How do we define shared truths? Is there even such a thing as an objective truth, or only subjective interpretations of it as sensed through those (human and more-than-human) who are “consciously” present to witness it?
And if truths were influenced by the subjective perceptions of those present to register and reflect on that reality, then what does this tell us in terms of the importance of knowing a storyteller's relationship with the knowledge they share?
Recentering relational storytelling…
Conventional measures of credibility tell us that “reality” should take all views into account — perhaps finding a middle ground or an average of sorts. We are often taught that “journalistic neutrality” and "fairness” are about giving balanced weight to different “sides” and perspectives. Supposedly, that’s respecting diversity in thought… and supposedly, that’s what responsible reporting should be about…
Given the disoriented narrative landscape of these times, however, it’s crucial to shift from relying on an illusion of “objective” journalism to relational storytelling.
As I wrote, quoted, and explored in one of my earliest Substack articles from 2021, “Deconstructing credibility”:
“Behind every report, every feature, every news item, lies a worldview rooted in assumptions ontological (what’s real?), epistemological (what’s true?), methodological (how do we find out?), and moral (why does it matter?). Or, to put it in Gelauffian terms, all news comes from a position…
Why does the news always call bombings by ISIS ‘terrorist attacks’ and those by Western governments ‘bombardments’? Because the editors take the position that that’s what they are…
Why does the news always frame the growth of the economy as something positive and not as a disaster for the climate, the environment, or the corals in the ocean? Because the editors take the position that economic growth is good.
When an editor claims not to take a position on the news, [they are] making the most basic misrepresentation possible.
Objective journalism, defined as not taking a position or having an opinion, has become precisely the opposite of what it was originally intended to be. Today, it equates to unquestioningly repeating the opinions of the powerful. By leaving the position-taking to the public, we reduce our task as journalists to issuing press releases on behalf of elites.
In the original concept, in other words, the method is objective, not the journalist. The key was in the discipline of the craft, not the aim.” –The Correspondent.
Rather than buying into the sham of objectivity, I am curious to know who the storytellers are and what their relationship is with the knowledge they share. I want to know who funds their work, what their values are, what they believe in, what kinds of worlds they support, and so on.
After all, trustworthiness in the human experience has always been founded on relationships — understanding people's worldviews, passions, life experiences, and motivations. I might not agree with a certain storyteller's views, but knowing who they are and what they stand for helps me to better practice discernment in the information I receive from them.
“Not only are these [established media outlets like NYT, WaPo, etc.] being rammed down the throats of anyone who participates in elite academic institutions in the U.S. or is a member of the managerial class that dominates urban cores… not only is there a peer pressure to adopt the prevailing liberal, interventionist viewpoint, you also have to see them as absolutely ‘objective’ and not ideological.
You have to see them as a measure of journalistic excellence and not an instrument of reinforcing the status quo or a device for manufacturing consent, rendering Empire and the ideology behind it invisible—which is extremely dangerous.
These publications, in many ways, are constantly promoting regime change wars, they're constantly justifying sanctions. They're constantly pumping up dissident figures in countries that are targeted for regime change, who are sponsored by the US government, trained by US intelligence, while justifying the imprisonment and silencing of figures like Julian Assange...
So I consider them actually more insidious and more dangerous than a publication like Fox News, where you know what the agenda is going in and you know that you are going to be propagandized to take on a more right wing, nationalistic point of view.” – Max Blumenthal via Green Dreamer EP298.
Moving beyond “becoming informed”…
Just like how western science, in its approach and presumptions, aims to objectify, reduce, and remove the personal influence and experience of the “disimpassioned observer", traditional journalism seems to parallel in seeking to do the same. In both of their attempts to arbitrate credibility and provide “objective” truths, they end up normalizing and imposing their institutional, ontological, epistemological, methodological, and moral biases as neutral and factual.
This is not to say that these ways of seeing the world hold no value, but it is a reminder that they uphold particular lenses that — as with all other lenses — need to be contextualized rather than invisibilized or viewed as universal.
In a world where history, media, science, education, and public health are all deeply political — having arisen from specific structures of power and social relations — it is vital to go beyond “becoming informed.”
“[This] makes me wonder, under these current paradigms, what role does privilege play when it comes to access to information?
Who has the privilege of ʻbecoming informedʻ? And, perhaps more importantly, who gets the privilege of remaining un-informed (i.e. choosing to stay within the comfort of sources/messages that protect one's position of power)?” –Anisa Sima Hawley in response to this essay.
Just as many are relearning the value in worldviews of relationality as exemplified by many Indigenous sciences, I believe this time calls on us to challenge conventional gauges of credibility and re-root ourselves in relational storytelling. What do we need to unravel in order to better calibrate our critical lenses and arrive as close to "the truth” as possible?
For those of us who have become diasporic and uprooted, for those of us who feel disoriented and disconnected, this is an invitation to become more porous to the stories and knowledges of place and their most rooted peoples — to allow the diversity in all forms that emerged from our biocultural sensoriums to seep more deeply into our essence… shifting, expanding, and re-aligning our moral and intellectual compasses.
This feels vital as we grapple with the uneasy and complex questions of how we can re-ground our understandings of reality — so that the diversity of thought that blossoms can truly and creatively serve to enhance our collective wellbeing.
To be continued, always.
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Related essays from UPROOTED:
“Deconstructing our dominant, elitist notions of credibility”
“Beings as verbs: The messy reconfigurations of life that are remaking the world”
“Defrosting knowledge: From broadcasting to adaptive engagement"
