Gary Snyder offered me another way to think about learning native wisdom in an important observation he called “The Three Lineages”:
Mythopoetically speaking, there are three human lineages. One is the Children of Abraham —a group who all believe in a very convincing story, and one which traces their contemporary existence back to the somewhat quirky patriarch Abraham. These people of course are known in the world today as Jews, Muslims, or Christians.
The next group is the Descendants of the Primates. These people are commonly found in universities, coffee shops, the upper levels of corporations, Hollywood, and the Democratic party. They are not necessarily comfortable with their relationship to primates—monkeys really do seem foolish sometimes—but they have no choice but to accept it, since it is seen as the only rational answer.
The third group is the Sons and Daughters of the Bear Mother. This lineage dates back to the very far past, when the Bear Mother had children who were half human, and they in turn are the ancestors of the whole lineage. The Sons and Daughters of the Bear Mother are the most ancient and widespread of all lineages. All of North and South America, all of ancient Eurasia, and much of contemporary Africa. These are—you might say—the Pagans. These folks never had any problems accepting their kinship with animals—unlike the descendants of primates. The highly civilized current members of this line include Hindus, Confucianists, Daoists, Buddhists, Korean Shamanists (Korean national mythology actually says they are descended from bears), a few Turtle Islanders, and a lot of Japanese.
When I read this in an e-mail message, I thought, “Makes sense to me.” I love the typical Snyder playfulness as well as the insight in it. It intrigues me because the “third lineage” gives me another way to think about what I observed, or thought I observed, during my early days in Alaska batting around in Eskimo, Indian, Aleut, and Tlingit villages. I’ve been struck again, especially in light of the environmental plight, but also considering the plight of our short-term culture and all its social and environmental relations, by the contrasts between those indigenous cultures and our own. It seems important to discover what we might learn from those much older cultures.
The matter now seems even more urgent than before. A decade or two ago, I still believed we had at least a couple more generations before our environmental destruction caught up with us, that maybe we had time to turn things around. Yet the recent revelations by climatologists about the potential of an ice age in the United Kingdom and northern Europe give me pause. And the worst-case projections, such as those reported to the Pentagon,1 indicate that we may have only a couple decades, not generations, before climate change and our destructive tendencies catch up with us in more profound ways than our worst nightmares could predict.
When we think about sustainable cultures, we have models right at hand (as in Snyder’s “Axe Handles”). Eskimo and Indian cultures in Alaska have been around about three times as long as Western civilization, and ten to a hundred times longer than any European empire that we study in history books. Now, given their imminent demise because of Nature’s rebuttal to our demands upon it, or because of the machinations of transnational corporations that seek to rule the world, we nonnative peoples have to wonder, What do those indigenous peoples know that we don’t? What might we learn from them?
A recent conversation with Wes Jackson at the Land Institute in Kansas provided some new language for this effort. Wes, who is working on developing a “perennial prairie” that could feed humans and other creatures and sustain itself over long, difficult periods, says, “We have to mimic the structure in order to be granted the function.” I like the modesty of that. Not “we can get our hands on—or control—the function,” but the function will “be granted” to us. I also was caught, especially, by the distinction between structure and function. Naturally, I have warped those two keywords in Wes’s statement to my own ends here, using them in ways he may not have considered or may not approve. Neither he nor Gary Snyder is to be blamed for whatever foolishness I have created in what follows.
I want to distinguish two types of cultures: functional cultures and structural cultures. Both cultures have structures (complex kinship patterns, language systems, clans, moieties, ritual observances, taboos, courtesy patterns), but functional cultures are organized not only around them but around other elements of culture as well. Functional cultures include other cultural systems in their own: bees, birds, all the skitterish reptiles, moose, mice, and other mammals, the finned and flippered fish and other creatures of seas, rivers, and lakes that represent larger than human natural systems. Indeed it may be more accurate to say that members of a functional culture see their culture as incorporated in the larger cultures of a larger Nature.
However that may be, what follows are some sweeping generalizations without evidentiary support. Yet I do believe that one can observe these characteristics in traditional (functional) cultures such as I was privileged to experience in Montana and Alaska and have observed in my own Western (structural) culture, but I pose them as propositions, not proofs. They are concepts for consideration rather than conclusions.
Functional cultures are complex, balancing and holding together a huge web of information, intuition, ritual, spirituality, arts, humanities, and science to create a whole cultural system that operates within greater natural systems. None of these areas of insight are separate disciplines, and one may not be more important than another. Wisdom is the goal of learning. Citizens of structural cultures sometimes mislabel such knowledge “simple” or “unsophisticated” or “superstitious.”
Structural cultures tend to put their faith in a harder, more structured knowledge called “science.” (“Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts,” says the dunce inspecting the school in Dickens’s Hard Times.) Structural cultures tend to suppress the disorder of intuition and to create order in the structure of their institutions, including their ritual or religious systems. That is, they are based on hierarchies, including codes. The codification provides the structure for both ethics and law, whether civil or religious. The hierarchical structure of the culture is replicated all along the way in social intercourse, in thought patterns, in the structure of the codes, either legal or ethical. In structural societies the arts and humanities, which tend to have a functional connection to wildness and an animating spirit (although with an emergent “form” that serves function), are less important than economics and science. They are often seen as frills, the first things cut when budgets get tight. Knowledge, which is less than wisdom in functional cultures, occupies an elevated status in structural cultures and becomes the goal of learning. The structural culture is thus both fragmented and simplified, and it lacks a comprehensive view of how the world really works. Citizens of structural cultures call this type of culture complex, sophisticated, and knowledgeable—without any apparent sense of irony.
The aim of education in a functional culture is wisdom that will ensure the survival of the people. The means of education are storytelling, dance, experience, imitation of elders, and careful observation of the natural world and of the human, social world that is included in it. All members of the culture participate in such observation, and universal education is the norm.
The aim of education in a structural culture is knowledge that will lead to personal advancement or advantage. The means are “facts,” acquired via books or computers. Careful observation of the social and natural worlds is left to specialists. The human, social world is seen as distinct from the natural world. More education is available for some, less for others. The facts citizens of structural cultures want to learn are those that are useful in acquiring knowledge, which can be used to gain influence and power.
Functional cultures are organized according to consensus and appropriate scale, and their purpose is to function, to maintain balance and harmony in humans’ relationships with one another and with the surrounding environment. The goal for members of a functional culture is generally to develop oneself as best one can, seeking to gain wisdom that will serve the community. “First we make sure everything in the system has enough, then we look after ourselves,” its citizens say. Agreement is reached through dialogue and consensus. Functional cultures seek to utilize the gifts of the environment for food, shelter, equipment, and, in fruitful times, luxuries. They try systematically to avoid altering the structure of the environment, especially its balance and harmony.
Structural cultures are organized according to hierarchy, a structure that the culture assumes works best. Its purpose is growth: increased income, territory, power, and property—including other people, grain in the bin, the gewgaws that come from commerce. The goal for citizens of a structural culture is generally to develop certain skills that serve the self first, so that one can find work to support oneself and one’s immediate family, helping it acquire the things that reflect success. If there is enough left over, out of its abundance citizens in a structural culture may share with others. Agreement is reached not through dialogue but by vote, or compelled by imperial edict or by legislation. Structural cultures tend to alter the function of the environment for convenience, ease, or profit.
Functional cultures have members (in many tribes within the United States, now “enrolled members”) who belong, all of whom are enfranchised to participate in public life. These are members in the sense of family members, recognized as such by the community.
Structural cultures have citizens who may or may not participate in public life, and some have no role in civic life because they are disenfranchised by poverty or lack of education, race or sexual orientation. Those who live in a structural culture become citizens by various kinds of legal certification rather than recognition.
The functional culture seeks to live within natural systems so that they provide sustenance and physical safety: food, clothing, shelter, and protection from wild animals and other cultures. Functional cultures also seek spiritual safety: safety from giving offense to the spirits, animals, and plants of a place that might upset members’ own inner spirit and undermine or destroy their physical and spiritual relationship to the world. Functional cultures know that if one’s spiritual relationship to Nature is undermined, one’s physical connections are jeopardized. Appeasing the spirits is an important cultural goal. It may be simple fear—the fear of spiritual ruptures—that drives functional cultures to seek to appease the spirits.
Structural cultures also seek safety. Safety from the ravages of the natural world is to be wrested from a hostile environment by knowledge rather than wisdom. Citizens seek to protect their wealth and their persons. Spiritual safety is won by obedience to hierarchical institutions and encoded beliefs. Structural cultures believe that humans have only physical, not spiritual, connections to Nature. Structural cultures seek to appease their institutions, the very ones that alter the structure of the environment for the convenience, ease, or profit of their institutions’ executives, the upper levels of the hierarchy. It may be simple fear that drives structural cultures to appease and thus protect their institutions.
Both cultures seek power. Functional cultures seek the power inherent in good relationships. They try to find their place in the system in which they live. They want to stand in right relationship not only to the human community but to all the creatures in the natural system. They are horizontally integrated: their own structures are part of the larger system and the other natural cultures that surround them, everything connected and reaching out to affect and include everything else. Some scientists and religionists today talk of “horizontal transcendence” rather than vertical transcendence, to underscore that spiritual connections are contiguous with environmental and social connections.
Structural cultures seek the power inherent in dominion. They try to create a place in the system that will give them what they want from other cultures and from Nature, both of which are seen as resources. They want to maintain a more powerful stance than other human societies and to be vertically integrated in the highest positions in their own system, regardless of what that may mean to other cultures, human or otherwise, around them. Vertical transcendence is the order structural cultures see in the natural world, with the human species at the top. That vertical transcendence matches the view of humans’ spiritual relationship to the godhead that exists “up there,” with humans just a little lower than the intervening angels, above all other creatures.
Functional cultures are organic, natural, quadriform: four seasons, four directions, four colors . . . They are less time constrained and more seasonally conscious. Time is not so much incremental or digital as flowing. It does not move in a linear fashion but may curve around. The past reoccurs in the present; elders who have gone before may be very present.
Structural cultures are engineered and are generally trinitarian. Christianity’s trinity is but one example. It seemed only natural for Freud to find an id, an ego, and a superego. I have seen Anglo teachers read an Eskimo student’s paper in which an idea is examined from four perspectives and automatically redline the fourth as redundant. In structural cultures time is minute conscious, its passage now marked in digital clicks on the wrist. Time moves in a linear fashion; the past is past. Even when elders or old friends, now deceased, return, they are not present but exist only in memory.
In functional cultures everything is connected, and the questions for study are, What is the function of this? What relationships are we seeing here? Functional cultures seek to discover connections in the nature of things and understand that “Ground Squirrel is grandfather to Bear,” as Tlingit elder Austin Hammond said one day when I was visiting at his place.
Structural cultures study structures, whether human or otherwise; they isolate and disassemble them. The questions for study are, How is this made? What is it made of? What are its components? Rather than study the relationships within and between things, structural cultures take them apart, searching for smallest units. Until ecology came along, structural cultures pretty much ignored exploring relationship or function in favor of analyzing structure. Even now structural cultures are puzzled at the notion that Ground Squirrel is grandfather to Bear. An example of this attitude might be the approach to something like Ebola. What structural cultures seek to do is isolate it and destroy it because it harms humans. Structural cultures do this without asking what its role in the larger Nature might be or whether it could be essential in the lives of other creatures that may be essential to our own.
In functional cultures everything that has life has a spirit; thus all the gods have at least one characteristic in common: life, in both its physical and spiritual aspects. Since all things are connected, everything has to be treated with respect, even reverence. The gods are not transcendent but local. They are the gods of the place. The gods of the desert are different from the gods of humid places where water is abundant. If the people move, they discover and respect the gods of the new place. This sustains a concern for not upsetting relationships, for keeping the taboos, maintaining certain rituals, and paying attention to intuition and even dreams. The gods are not necessarily eternal. Therefore they need not only reverence but care. They nourish the people, and the people nourish them. Functional cultures honor the spirits in ritual and in daily behavior, which takes place where the spirits reside.
In structural cultures humans are the most important creatures, and everything else, because it is lesser, is less deserving of respect or reverence. Even lesser humans, those further down in the hierarchal structure, deserve less respect. The gods, or God, is transcendent. They too have a hierarchy in ascending order from saints to angels to the godhead. Faith (belief) is torn between thinking the gods are alive and thinking they are fantasy. They are objects of veneration on the one hand and superstition on the other. Because spiritual realities are eternal and separate from earthly realities in structural cultures, structural divinities do not need humans’ care but require our faith. Structural cultures honor their gods in ritual and in their institutions and tend to ignore them in daily behavior. Daily behavior takes place in different institutions from those in which the gods reside.
In functional cultures the purpose is to find the people’s place, to fit into natural relationship systems in a way that maintains health for all.
Of course structure exists in functional cultures—though in a less stilted form—as in a conversation in a village about a serious matter, or in an elaborate courtesy pattern that inhibits conflict. In functional cultures such structures unfold naturally and remain servants of function.
In structural cultures citizens impose structure on systems not yet understood, believing that they have the right to create what appears to be order out of what appears to be chaos. Instead of having a function that serves the health of all, what is natural or organic is used, “developed,” and pressed into service of the hierarchy. In contemporary U.S. structural culture we ape the worst years of the caste system in India. The poorest get nothing, few of our Brahmins care, and our major economic institutions, including government, design themselves to see that the lowest poor in the hierarchy get even less, while the top gets more.
Control in functional cultures remains local and resides in the community. The “chief” often has little authority, and the shaman may scare a particular family into bringing gifts or doing something he says and may cause wariness or fear around him, but for the most part the entire local community participates in controlling the local community. No one person or class has a civil authority to compel others to a particular course. Control is not the main function of the social structure; balance and harmony are.
In structural cultures control is a primary goal of the structure. Control resides in the upper echelons of the hierarchy that dictate to the rest of the community. In the political arena, that control may rest in the military or in an executive, legislative, or judicial entity. The economic sphere may be controlled by a CEO or by a transnational corporation with its own structural hierarchy. Those controlling the local community are rarely residents of that community; a great deal of community control resides elsewhere, often far away. This is the fundamental nature of colonialism, and colonialism is a primary characteristic not only of the governments of structural cultures but also of their major religions. In structural cultures evangelism and conversion of the heathen become euphemisms for colonialism and economic exploitation.
Functional cultures trust personal experience and observation. They are highly adaptive; they change according to observations on the ground and their own experience, especially as other observers share and refine their information. Even long-held traditions, the “old ways,” may shift under such scrutiny and dialogue. Because there is no vested civil authority, each new community or tribal engagement must be thought through by the community. The question becomes, Who speaks with the greatest wisdom in this situation? In other words, who is the real authority here? That person is not always the same from event to event. The last successful war leader may not be the one whose advice will lead the people to the best food sources. The best hunter may not be the best at restoring balance and harmony in the community. Thus community members are not easily led; they listen carefully to one another, and they tend to talk at length. Discussions may continue for days. Oratory and rhetoric become vehicles for examining issues. The aim is to think things through and then to share careful thought so that everyone moves toward wisdom.
Structural cultures trust their structures more than their own experience. Because they trust the structure, that is, their institutions and institutional authorities, citizens are easily managed and manipulated by “leaders”—even when those institutions and authorities are working against the community’s best interests. Civil authority seeks to have its way, and institutions rather than individuals become the vehicles for examining issues. Oratory and rhetoric become advertising, means of selling the community on the direction that its hierarchy wants to pursue. The purpose of oratory, political or otherwise, is not to explore and think through but to persuade, whether the claims are true or false. The question becomes not who has the wisdom but who has the most persuasive public relations firm. Citizens in structural cultures are sometimes persuaded by a perception of which side will win. Because they trust more in the structure than in personal experience and thought, structural cultures first become rigid (thoughtless, without self-examination), then become dysfunctional, then topple. Sometimes those in power begin to believe their own sales pitches and thus become as ill informed as their poorest citizens. Then they too are ignorant, rigid, dysfunctional—and they topple.
In functional cultures persons take precedence over institutions; community takes precedence over individuals.
In structural cultures persons are secondary and succumb to institutions; community is secondary and succumbs to commerce or corporations or rulers of other institutions.
Functional cultures understand the difference between governance on the one hand and economics and commerce on the other. Economics and commerce, though important, are not seen as the driving forces of all human endeavor, and leadership in trade is not seen as an asset in political leadership. Education and politics, for example, are understood to be fundamentally different from business.
Structural cultures, soon or late, come to see everything as a business. Education and politics are seen as commercial enterprises. Structural cultures elect business leaders (even failed business leaders) as governors and puzzle over why political rhetoric degenerates into the rhetoric of advertising. The traditional rhetoric of commerce becomes the lingua franca of government; language spins. When the spin becomes too great, language falls out of control and loses its relationship to reality.
Functional cultures assume that all things have essential needs that must be met to keep the whole natural system, including the human society, in balance and harmony. They recognize that natural systems support the people and try not to offend or alienate other “people”— four-leggeds, bird people, rivers and lakes, the living soil. Other such “people” are considered parts of the human family.
Structural cultures assume that human needs are primary. Impoverishing natural systems does not worry structural cultures much, and they deplete them without understanding or checking what their loss might mean, not just to humans but to the natural systems of which we are an organic part. Other creatures are truly “other,” are often seen as repulsive, and are not considered part of the human family.
Functional cultures are long term, what we would now call sustainable. They pay attention to everything around them, taking into account all creatures and landforms, both at home and afield. Thus, trusting their experience, they are able to maintain their function in their ecological niche and allow other creatures to continue to function as well. So they often last for extraordinarily long periods (Eskimos and Aleuts, for example, at least fourteen thousand years thus far).
Structural cultures are comparatively short term, perhaps five thousand years thus far. Because structural cultures tend to take human things into account but ignore much of the rest, except for their use as resources, they do not see the connections between humans and everything else in the complex environment that surrounds us. Structural cultures assume that Nature really is separate from humans, and therefore any impact we have on it is beyond any negative effect that could spill into our lives. As a result structural cultures can unravel whole environmental systems without knowing till it is too late (by effecting climate change, for example). When that happens, the structure cannot keep its balance, and the natural world topples. In the social world, for another example, a growing gap between rich and poor is the first mark of the apogee of the arc of an empire’s structural lifespan. When the gap grows too wide, the center cannot hold, and inevitably, things fall apart; the structure collapses in violence and chaos.
When things get out of whack and illness strikes, the healing that functional cultures seek to employ is aimed at restoring balance and harmony in relationships. The shaman’s assumption appears to be that if the people make their relationships with Nature and the tribe right, individuals will be all right. So the purpose of the Navajo night chant, for example, as I understand it, is precisely to restore that balance and harmony, to learn to walk again “in Beauty,” reincorporating and thus incarnating one of the essential components of sustainability.
Structural cultures aim at healing the self first. Psychiatrists assume that if individuals get themselves together, their relationships with other humans will automatically improve. This psychiatry does not suggest that humans might be out of touch with, out of balance and harmony with, the rest of our environment beyond the humans in our circle, or that we might need to restore our relationships in both spheres to restore health to our souls.
Both functional cultures and structural cultures may change over time, taking on characteristics of the other. Functional cultures may, under the onslaught of dominant structural cultures, become more structural. This may be a temporary survival technique, or it may actually reflect the adoption of the structural culture’s value system. When the latter happens, the functional culture is lost. A subsequent generation may seek to reclaim the old ways, but that process is very difficult, especially if the language has been lost in the transformation from functional to structural. The usual end of such an effort is to adopt the trappings of old ways (dance, music, a few stories) while maintaining the new structural core. The old functional culture then becomes a thin veneer, a gloss of old ways without substance, appearance rather than reality, ultimately an imitation of an imitation.
Structural cultures also change. Western cultures were once functional, that is, animistic. The earliest Western philosophers, particularly the pre-Socratics, saw the earth as a single living organism. Philosophy began as “natural philosophy,” seeking to understand the whole natural world around the culture. But it became lopsided instead of fully rounded. It began to rotate like a cam rather than a circle, and it was impossible for it to maintain balance. Functional reverence, care, and wisdom became subordinate to structured power, economics, and knowledge. Control of relationships for the benefit of a few humans, rather than maintenance of relationships for the benefit of all life, became the goal. Unwittingly, functional cultures that became structural cultures thus put limits upon their survival. Much in structural cultures is veneer; packaging becomes more important than product.
Nature is inclusive rather than exclusive, integrated rather than fragmented, a flowing, flexing, evolving whole rather than an assembly of constituent parts. Functional cultures mimic natural cultures, trying to alter their own behavior so it fits into Nature’s behavior. They have a function in the whole scheme of Nature, just as everything in Nature has a function of its own, all of it in relationship to everything else.
Structural cultures, in contrast, are disruptive and exclusive, altering Nature to their own ends rather than altering their own behavior to fit Nature’s. They play an artificial, adopted role, but they have no useful, authentic function in the whole scheme of Nature.
If this comparative system has any merit, the third lineage Gary Snyder describes above is a functional culture; the first two are structural. There are, thank goodness, still functional descendents of the Bear Mother. Perhaps we will yet learn the wisdom of their ways.