Shift in Mind Set
Clearly, it is not easy to be appreciative when faced with differing perspective and practices—especially when the person with whom we disagree views us as the worthy (or unworthy) opponent. As one of my socially-activist colleagues has noted, “I don’t want to appreciate the perspectives of practices of the people against whom I am struggling. I want to block them, not understand them!” It takes heavy lifting to sustain a relationship of minor or profound differences. It takes a fundamental shift in mind set. It takes an effort to learn from the inter-connected forest. Robert Macfarlane (2019, pp. 103-104) puts it this way:
“Certainly, orthodox ‘Western’ understandings of nature feel inadequate to the kinds of world-making that fungi perform. As our historical narratives of progress have come to be questioned, so the notion of history itself has become remodeled. History no longer feels figurable as a forwards-flighting arrow or a self-intersecting spiral; better, perhaps, seen as a network branching and conjoining in many directions. Nature, too, seems increasingly better understood in fungal terms: not as a single gleaming snow-peak or tumbling river in which we might find redemption, nor as a diorama that we deplore or adore from a distance – but rather as an assemblage of entanglements of which we are messily part. We are coming to understand our bodies as habitats for hundreds of species of which Homo sapiens is only one, our guts as jungles of bacterial flora, our skins as blooming fantastically with fungi.”
Macfarlane (2019, p. 104) borrows a term from Lynn Margulis to define an outcome of shifting mind-set:
“Yes, we are beginning to encounter ourselves – not always comfortably or pleasantly- as multi-species beings already partaking in timescales that are fabulously more complex than the onwards driving version of history many of us still imagine ourselves to inhabit. The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms, ecological units consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase.”
It seems that we are entangle with people with whom we disagree and well as those with whom we agree. As members of a Holobiont (or perhaps several holobionts), it is incumbent on us to find or invent structures, processes and attitudes/cultures that enhance interdependence, collaboration and appreciation.
Conclusions
In closing this essay, and this set of essays on sustaining relationships midst differences, I travel from the world of the Bach family, Abraham Lincoln, Carol Gilligan, Forest networks and Holobionts, to the world of early 20th Century theater and mid-20th Century musicals. In 1913, the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, offered Pygmalion, a play about a young woman from the lower class being prepared for life in the upper class. As a noted socialist (Fabian) critic of British society, Shaw was depicting the way in which small changes in behavior (in this case, dialect) can lead to assumptions other people make about social class, which leads, in turn, to a total change in the way people perceive another person. Shaw’s Pygmalion tale became even better known (at least in the United States) in a Broadway musical version called My Fair Lady. This tale also has traveled to the halls of Harvard University.
