Gesturing Toward Re-Enchantment

Tarik Cutuk: Continuing my musings on some philosophical challenges

As remarked by the great Australian anthropologist, Bill Stanner, in his collection of essays (1979), it is commonly remarked amongst some Aboriginal people that White Australians have “no Dreaming” (Stanner, 1979). What is meant by this is that we lack both a collective spiritual identity and connection to Country—cultural traits, which can be traced back to the philosophical and intellectual movement of the European Enlightenment worldview.

As I see it, its project was the disenchantment of the world. As Adorno and Horkheimer point out, it wanted to disempower superstition, and thereby overthrow it through the power of reason and rationality:

God falls under the same judgment as metaphysics. For positivism, which has assumed the judicial office of enlightened reason, to speculate about intelligible worlds is no longer merely forbidden but senseless prattle. Positivism-fortunately for it-does not need to be atheistic since objectified thought cannot even pose the question of the existence of God. The positivist sensor turns a blind eye to official worship, as a special, knowledge-free zone of social activity, p.19.

However, as Graham notes:

If a society makes the sacred simply a matter of personal choice or private concern for individuals, then the next logical step is for these metaphysical isolates to extend themselves physically (which is in reality an unacknowledged search for meaning), and ownership is physical extension by accretion, p.110.

From an Indigenous standpoint (Graham), the sacred is manifest in the relationship between human spirit and the life force of nature. When the connection between the two is severed, then a human being becomes a totally isolated self, the discrete cartesian subject. It achieves freedom, but this freedom is necessarily a terrifying one. A sense of deep spiritual loneliness and alienation overcomes it then, and the essence of reality and nature becomes and remains always a hostile place, the results of the Enlightenment’s logic:

Enlightenment’s mythic terror springs from a horror of myth. It detects myth not only in semantically unclarified concepts and words, as linguistic criticism imagines, but in any human utterance which has no place in the functional context of self-preservation. Spinoza’s proposition: “the endeavor of preserving oneself is the first and only basis of virtue,” contains the true maxim of all Western civilizationin which the religious and philosophical differences of the bourgeoisie are laid to rest, p.22.

To escape this logic of all-encompassing self-preservation and reintegrate the sacred dimensions of existence into Western culture then, a more soulful connection to county would need to be reestablished, acknowledging the reality of intergenerational trauma:

The world is changed through love, patience, enthusiasm, respect, courage, humility, and living life in balance. The world cannot be changed through wars, conflicts, racism, anger, arrogance, divisions, and borders. The world cannot be changed without sacred spiritual connections.

The Challenge for Philosophy

Graham suggests that a good way for ‘white’ Aussies to go about this would be to begin by attempting to initiate closer ties with land in our daily life, not via private ownership but rather locally based, inclusive, strategic frameworks, aimed at simply caring for County in the long run. She also advocates via the Australia Philosophy Research Group (2021) for an expansion of philosophy within the education system, as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous cocreation and eventual dissemination of a uniquely Australian school of thought or philosophy, which might seek to trace the convergences and resonances between Aboriginal and other non-Western ways of knowing and being, as well as to fruitfully integrate, synthesise, and juxtapose them with the European tradition and the critiques thereof.

I contend that this true maxim of Western civilisation described by Adorno and Horkheimer is none other than Graham’s survivalist ethos:

“Such systems incorporate strong reward/punishment systems; they provide clear direction for people’s fears, dreams, ambitions and ultimately status. In fact this mentality becomes both the reason and the impelling force for constant action, change and even belief without reflection. People become habituated to such systems if rewards are, not necessarily large or rich, but at least constant and established. Collective self-knowledge is then seen as not very important; it could even be viewed as a chore or burden best avoided.”

Such is the highly irrational and surreal culture in which we find ourselves: in which University students, like myself, are trained to value grades and accreditation over true education, in which the quantity of papers a researcher publishes (as well as their citations) is more important than the quality of their studies, and in which compliance is the currency of the realm.

While the content of this new philosophy ought to be heterogenous and place-based according to the particular country one lives on, to truly embrace postcoloniality I feel that any new Australian philosophy would also need to be broadly post-secular.

This is because the discipline of philosophy itself, strictly demarcated from religion, is a Eurocentric, modern construct. As Partridge points out, in the majority of the world’s belief systems, as well as pre-modern Western thought, the cultivation and appreciation of “wisdom” is naturally entwined with the existence of deities, spiritual forces, and other tenets of the unseen as well as empirical and intersubjectively verifiable reality.

It seems to me that White Australia is being called upon to find within itself an answering image to Aboriginal metaphysics and spirituality; a move toward the Aboriginal experience of and relationship to country that transcends the objectification of the natural world.

As articulated by David Tacey, this new Australian spirituality and structure of feeling would be a spirit of place that affects and influences every facet of our lives, and would express a plurality of distinct local and regional cultures. The world religions practised here would not be superseded by this new religious instinct, but instead powerfully moulded by forces beyond their control or agency. It is this truly dynamic and living dimension of spiritual and religious traditions which inspire wonder, and true passion for the future cultural possibilities of the nation. This new collective spiritual identity would not be doctrinal, but attitudinal, providing a ground for common purpose and shared identity without being coercive or enforcing uniformity.

Diversity, multiculturalism, and pluralism would be encouraged and enhanced by a new epoch concerned primarily with caring for Country and each other; an enchanted federation bound together by a cultural attitude interested in the plural manifestations of the sacred and a shared spiritual exploration of reality.

Gesturing Toward Postcolonial Futures

At the heart of the desire to incorporate Indigenous knowledges into the modern Australian state lies an inescapable contradiction. That being: while the state officially and explicitly now desires to incorporate Indigeneity within itself, it does so only in order that it may perpetuate itself further. The Australian state studies Indigenous ontologies for the same reason a virologist studies illness: to select key components of the pathogen in order to develop a vaccine. I note with some irony that despite Yunkaporta and myself labelling modernity/coloniality pathological; that very project itself has developed and deployed categories of medicalisation such as pathology. The way objectified thought relates to the world, has much more in common with a doctor than a disease.

The goal in both instances is to immunise a body, physical or political, against the threat of something outside of it which might fundamentally alter it, cause it harm, or kill it. This is why the recent referendum was set up in a sense, to fail. ‘Aussies’ know a threat to their securities and privileges when they see one, even if only in principle.

This is not a moral condemnation. As de Oliveira Andreotti says, it is extremely difficult to interrupt the satisfactions we have with modernity’s rewards, and it cannot happen overnight.

In order to create the possibility for us to imagine something genuinely different, we first need to notice the harms we are causing, and become dissatisfied with the things we enjoy that cause those harms (e.g., comfort, security, certainty, our desire for ever expanding accumulation and consumption).

Only then might we begin to loosen the relational and affective restrictions modernity has imposed upon our being; and learn to see, sense, and relate otherwise. This requires long, sustained practice and is the work of many lifetimes. It asks of us to be patient, to slow down, to self-reflect, but also to be willing to submit, and to sacrifice.

I earnestly feel that such a radical, and even self-abnegating, willingness to reflect, listen, and change on the part of the modern Australian state and its non-Indigenous citizens could serve as the ground for an authentic national reconciliation, collective healing, and our being together into the future.

Whether this is practical or not is beside the point. Ultimately, as Alfred reminds us:

“whitefellas must change to survive” and “for Indigenous nations to live, colonial mentalities must die.”

Indigenous Knowledges cannot be preserved, and custodial responsibilities cannot be carried out as they must, while an objectifying, totalising, land-clearing, and extractivist system such as modernity/coloniality remains governing the continent. As Yin Paradies notes (p.441):

While Indigenous futurity… does not foreclose the inhabitation of Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples”, it “does foreclose settler colonialism and settler epistemologies

For whitefellas to re-establish a sacred relationship to land, for our culture and civilisation to mature and transform, it would be necessary to develop a custodial ethic and discard the worst extremes of our narrow survivalism. We would have to learn to develop a re-localised identity embedded in land and defined by our custodianship of, and love for it.

Finally, perhaps one of the most constructive things that could be done, I feel, is to engage by all available means in precisely what this essay has sought to: an abandonment of the problematisation of Aboriginality in Australia in favour of a discourse on, and reckoning with, modernity.

Rather than conceiving of Aboriginality as a problem or solution for us, non-Indigenous Australians such as myself ought to embark upon an uncompromising questioning and reflecting on the nature of our own culture, the meaning of European presence on this land, and our personal place in the story of the nation we all share.

This does not, however, mean holding that modern and Indigenous ways of knowing and being are equally valid, suitable, or appropriate. This is not about synthesising the best of two unproblematic cultural systems into a unity.  Frankly, I feel that I must reject any attempted project of “mutually beneficial” nation building drawing on both traditions in equal measure, for reasons emphasised by Yin Paradies, p.447:

While recognition as a political theory begins with the presumption that cultures have equal worth, it doesn’t end there or, if it does, we need to move beyond recognition. While all people (but not all life-ways) within modernity are ‘worthy’ (i.e. they are capable of achieving balance with global life forms), the culture of modernity itself (i.e. debt, property, institutions and nation states) is not the equal of other actual or imagined modes of (co-)existence. In my view, modernity is not worthy of continuance, even if this were possible.

I tentatively offer that this should not be about realising a fuller, more modern Australia. Instead, I would ask you to join me in orienting ourselves toward something completely other, something that exceeds us.

Beyond utopian visions and critical academic theory, I invite all of us, in the depths of our hearts, to surrender modernity and to reconnect with Country and the great spirit of the universe as explored by Watson:

This seeing, this interrogation, will remain the unfinished business, the business we will continue to return to in the life we each have within us and future lifetimes. For we will return to these unresolved questions. They are questions of humanity, and to not be touched by these questions requires of us all to ask how we could not be? Can you believe that you will escape having to answer this? Whether you do or not depends upon what you believe in, and what you understand we have left to return to in terms of settling down the future, p.31.