Dumbo Feather – July 2019

decisions such as consensus or majority decision-making. Those are based primarily on some

form of representational power. In our field we refer to tables. You convene people around

a table and you somehow hash out decisions. This approach faces the constant challenge of

adequate representation, basically not everyone can fit around the table. And one of the least

represented elements, which is critical to our survival, is the environment. So none of these

are well served by a pure table. I know this is going to sound odd, but I’ve been poking around

in the field of entomology. Many years ago an entomologist posed a very interesting question

which was referred to as the “co-ordination paradox”—how do whole collectives achieve

common purpose without centralised control?

So one could immediately gravitate towards an anarchist understanding, but actually some

researchers were looking at things like termites, ants, bees and other insects. These insects

have ways in which they co-ordinate but they don’t have a strict hierarchical structure

of decision-making. And what they discovered was that these insects leave a scent in the

landscape—that’s actually the entomology description. And the scent in the landscape is

picked up by those who continue to travel and circulate. It is a model of circulation, of moving

around the landscape. Now, we can compare these two approaches. When you convene

traditionally you’re bringing people to a location that you are going to enforce some kind

of rules of structures, in other words you’re bringing people to you. So you’re convening in

Geneva, or Bangkok, you’re bringing people into that space. And since not everybody can fit

into your space and not everyone can sit around a table, you have to devise some modality by

which you attain sufficient representation. That’s where the challenge sits. The second model

of the paradox of co-ordination in entomology is you don’t convene. The change happens by

circulating with constant conversation. Every time you move around a space and you drop in

and out of conversations, you’re leaving a scent or an idea, a point of reference where you’re

picking up something and you’re dropping something. And that circulation eventually begins

to move in ways that cohere across wider collectives. So I’ll go back to my two terms: dignity

and compassion. Compassion I think requires a form of empathy. Typically we primarily

frame empathy in interpersonal terms. The easiest metaphor is, “I have to walk a mile in your

shoes.” “I’m seeing the world from your eyes.” In other words I have an ability to hear your

story or your narrative and that touches me in a certain way that I can see how that happens.

I think when we come to belonging, that empathy has to shift into a form that takes on a

greater capacity for collective empathy as opposed to individual empathy.

In other words, you have to be able to go and see the world from the place that people

experience it. I have a friend in Colombia that uses the phrase in Spanish, “Si no vas no ves”.

“If you don’t go, you won’t see how the world looks from there.”

So perhaps what we need are different forms of constantly circulating conversation where we

begin more collectively to see the world from the places that are significant and that give you

a view that has a collective component to it, as opposed to the more individualised notion of

the story. And that is precisely where dignity emerges. I have to place this into my own frame

of reference which is more faith-based than it is purely secular! But dignity is about seeing

something that is deeply divine or sacred in the other. The impact of this is that people feel

Great question!

Right.

A collective empathy has to take account for

how people see the world from the place that

they have experienced it.

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JOHN PAUL LEDERACH

DUMBO FEATHER