We're here to dismantle the master's house but they no longer live here, ft. Tyson Yunkaporta
How do we keep up with the changing terrains?
Hello dear one!
I’m excited to share some highlights from my latest conversation with Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta, whose latest book is Right Story, Wrong Story: How to have fearless conversations in hell.
And, if you’d like to process the recent devastating floods and climate disasters with me in more expansive ways, I invite you to check out my past essay on unsettling disaster politics — which explores how “disaster” is subjective, manufactured, and arbitrated by power.
Sending softness, and love, always! x
Bush medicine is for the bush, and ailments from civilization require civilized medicine.
This is a point shared by Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta, an academic, arts critic, and researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He was diagnosed with bipolar in the recent years and has since been on medication for it.
Of course, there is much to critique about modern medicine, including institutional biases in research funding and the influence of profit-driven motives that can misalign intentions. At the same time, many traditional remedies continue to provide support for a variety of conditions, and plant medicines—often rooted in ancestral knowledge—form the basis of many pharmaceutical drugs, which are then synthesized and patented.
But it reminded me of my conversation from a few years ago with anthropologist Dr. Christopher Ryan of Civilized to Death: The price of progress, which challenges the dominant narrative that we are “better off” today due to “advancements” made possible through “civilization,” such as modern medicine.
“People talk about ‘the past’ as if there's some sort of universal past that we can compare to the present, and that's simply not the case.
If you're talking about 300 years ago, then that argument is true—there were a lot of infectious diseases that were killing people 300 years ago, such as smallpox, cholera, influenza, and tuberculosis, which we now have ways to deal with through vaccines and antibiotics.
But if you're talking about ‘prehistory’—before agriculture—none of those diseases even existed among humans.
All of the diseases I mentioned are pathogens that came over from domesticated animals to human populations after… we were living in very close proximity to them and to their waste products.
Tuberculosis came from cattle; smallpox came from chickens and ducks; influenza and all of these diseases come from the results of civilization.
So when someone says, ‘But now we can treat all these terrible diseases that killed people in ‘the past,’ it's true if you're talking about medieval Europe. But it's not true if you're talking about 20,000 years ago, because those diseases didn't exist.
To me, that's like someone saying, ‘Thank God we've got airbags and seat belts now because all our ancestors died in auto accidents.’ Well, yeah, people died in auto accidents twenty or thirty years ago not having seatbelts or airbags, but not 20,000 years ago, because there were no cars.”
The whole question of progress is a giant discussion in and of itself that warrants being looked at from many different angles.
Chris’ work looks at how the rise in unhappiness, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and other modern chronic illnesses are the outcomes of lifestyles and environments born out of the context of modern civilization. And he debunks the presumption that technological advancement has enabled people to have more leisure time, noting how hunter-gatherer communities, in comparison to post-agricultural communities, had (and have) a lot more leisure time, and how ironically, their few hours of daily “work” largely just consist of what many people in “civilized” societies do in our recreational time (e.g., fishing and hunting, cooking, crafts, spending time with children, etc.).
Still, this is not to romanticize any version of a “past.”
But there is an underlying both-and message here, which is that there is a lot that we must relearn from ancestral ways of life and Indigenous cultures — particularly in regards to what it means to nurture more life-affirming, rooted webs of kinship, community, and care, and what it means to develop an embodied, sensorial fluency in the languages of our bodies and lands.
At the same time, the entire context of modernity has already changed so much that we cannot just prop up ancient knowledge in some purist fashion without also weaving it into the messy fabric of the present.
As Tyson writes in Right Story, Wrong Story:
“Ancient wisdom may provide examples of healthy models of governance, economies, and technologies, but these can't help at the moment unless there's a through line to now. They can only help if examined alongside stories of development, growth, cybernetics, liberalism, modernism, and so on.”
Anciently modern, traditionally futuristic.
It’s important here to nuance the meaning of “traditional” or “ancient” and “modern.” While they are often posed as binaries, I interrogated the dominant, monocultural meaning of “modern” in this previous essay — because the word simply means relating to and of the present time.
On the other hand, while some think of traditional or ancient as being outdated or relics of the past, the more accurate meaning, in my view, is just that they have deep roots. In other words, while “modern” is more about temporality, “traditional” is more about rootedness — meaning that they are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, that rootedness, I believe, is vital for teaching us how to relate to and live synergistically as parts of our landscapes in the here and now — and the costs of uprooting land-based cultures, languages, and knowledges from colonization and forced assimilation have been immense.
This doesn’t mean that everything with deep roots should be upheld as they are, however. Many Indigenous scholars like Enrique Salmón emphasize that a core part of Traditional Ecological Knowledge is that it must be allowed to stay alive and adaptable — not bottled up and preserved. As Enrique, as well as Sophie Strand, shares, oral cultures (considered “not civilized”) actually had and have much more reiterative relationships with knowledge because of the much more fluid nature of that format of knowledge sharing.
With the blurring of these binaries, I would argue that something can be anciently modern, or even traditionally futuristic, for that matter. It’s not meant to be linear. Perhaps this is another way to see the “ancient wisdom with a throughline to now” that Tyson speaks to.
Using life as analogy, this “anciently modern” would be akin to looking to the 55 million year-old Amazon rainforest who is still an integral part of the stability and co-creation of Earth today — rather than a juvenile, destructive monocultural farm imposed upon a clearcut portion of the forest that has no deeper relations to place, or the woolly mammoth that some are trying to “de-extinct” even though the conditions that allowed them to thrive in their period no longer exist.
As we “wake up” to how disoriented and dissociated modern civilization is, like a young teenager acting out, trolling, and rebelling for the sake of rebelling when they really are just traumatized and lost, there is not a more crucial time to honor and uplift all that is anciently modern and traditionally futuristic.
The new masters no longer live here.
To riff of of Audre Lorde’s saying that we cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, maybe expanding on this idea of “anciently modern” means that we cannot dismantle the master’s house with just swords, spears, and arrows, either.
In my interpretation, Audre’s quote speaks to the limitations of trying to work within the rules of the system to try to transform the system itself. I resonate a lot with that perspective.
And also, Tyson plays provocatively with this analogy when he suggests that the original master’s house that needed to be dismantled has already changed, so we need to pay attention to our shifting contexts:
“So we've finally arrived to dismantle the master's house using the master's tools, but he doesn't live there any more. He's buying up water rights and spearheading land grabs elsewhere. He hopes we’ll tear his house down because it's insured for more than he could get for selling the place.
And his nephew, who's into social justice and deep ecology and philanthropy is using the house now. He’s holding a frat party or spiritual retreat there and he invites us all in for vodka shots and ayahuasca.
These new masters have no home, no country. They are super wealthy refugees from the great nations they have gutted and rendered irrelevant, building leaky life rafts from decentralized autonomous organizations, making a crossing to digital realms without Westphalian boundaries in a bid to keep all their shit while the world floods and boils…”
If we really read into this, there are so many layers here to unpack: how the landscape of the “game” has shifted, how we’re often one step behind, the co-optation, the optics of change, the confusion of where we even direct our efforts anymore because the “thing” to dismantle is no longer so clearly defined…
So I ask Tyson, if many human ailments from modern civilizations need to be tended to with modern medicine, then what is the medicine that civilization itself needs to be met with?
He calls on us to look towards the cracks and margins.
“There’s this almost leap of faith in complexity science and systems thinking. When you start to understand complex, adaptive, self-organizing systems, you see this pattern again and again when there's a disruption or a threat to the system.
The system becomes destabilized, it’s throwing up like an immunological response at some stage. Something will arise within that system that will combat the virus or whatever is introduced to the system. There's always that response with the self-organizing system.
It's almost spiritual, and then some people sort of have a faith in that.
But it can also just be a good basis for inquiry, so that when you're looking at systemic problems, you're keeping an eye open:
What are the little strange attractors popping up that might produce really out of the box solutions that don't seem obvious initially, but will have those knock on effects that will spread through the entire system and stabilize it, or adapt it and change it, make those mutations, that actually come into balance with everything that’s in relation across that system?”
It sounds a bit abstract, perhaps because part of the invitation is to recognize the experimental nature of everything. After all, never in the course of the history of the planet have we been here, at this exact junction point. There is so much about how the world works that we do not know and can never really frame nor understand.
But in our full discussion, Tyson offers an example of the system’s possible “immunological response” when I ask him about his diagnosis, neurodivergence, and altered states of mind.
In the end, the biggest takeaway I gleaned in terms of what this all means for our paths forward is that we need to move away from focusing on the outcome of an individualized “health and wellness” and towards building communities and “black market” economies of care. He notes that this is not about “institutional economies like economies within a state,” but rather the “informal human economies, the networks that endure after a major disruption to an economic system.”
So we return to context — and how we can transform and recreate the conditions that best support our collective wellbeing.
There’s a lot more in our conversation. So if any of the above intrigues you, I hope you get to join us in this episode (Green Dreamer EP453) here or via any podcast app.
And if you are a supporting subscriber, you can also watch the extended, bonus video version of our interview here!
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“We can’t address the worst parts of our lives through research, policy or program interventions. The only way you could take that pressure off is to end capitalism.” — Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta, Green Dreamer EP453
Invitations into reflection & action:
What are some examples of things that are contextual to your place and feel anciently modern, or traditionally futuristic, that you are curious to learn more about?
When Tyson talks about rebuilding communities and black market economies of care, they feel more in line with the mentality to not wait around on some higher ups to take charge but to “take matters into our own hands” simply because XYZ should exist and be more accessible to support people. As you consider these invocations, what might this look like in your context, and how can you nurture or tap into these informal networks a bit more?
Dive deeper…
In light of the recent devastating floods and hurricanes, check out my past essay on disaster politics, “To unsettle”
Bruce Pascoe: Respecting and falling in love with Mother Earth (Ep438)
Serene Thin Elk: An invitation into collective, generational healing (Ep446)
What’s next?
I’m so excited to share my next interview, our round-two conversation with
of The Body is a Doorway: A memoir: A journey beyond hope, healing, and the human.We talk about narratives around chronic illness and how that is tied to broader ailments of society and our planet, what it means to reclaim the rooted meaning of community, how we might “glitch towards a return to each other,” and more.
Thank you for all the ways you continue showing up for yourself and your beloveds! More soon ~