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amorpha(written by Riel)
This post is an attempt to describe a philosophical concept that has been floating around in our general headspace for... a very long time, which has taken a long time for us to codify and find words to describe. The word "spirit" here isn't being used in the sense that we consider it an actually spiritual thing, although some of us do incorporate it into spirituality (reminder again in case anyone reading this doesn't know it: in-system, we can vary widely between each other in spiritual beliefs and philosophies. We always worry when we mention this that people will consider it somehow impossible, and start looking for a commonality or "true" belief under all of them in the same way some people look for a "true self," but nonetheless, it is how we are.)
The culture and religion into which our front body was born do not seem to have words or a concept for this. Maybe if we'd gone farther in the religion we were baptized into, we might eventually have found something similar in the huge amount of theology and philosophy written about that religion, but we also hit a point where we realized it was there, it was vitally important to us, and we didn't need to find a description or term for it in someone else's writing in order for it to be valid. I am sure there are or have been cultures somewhere in the world that generally saw it close to the way we do, maybe even have a word for it, but I don't know what it would be, and if I did I would probably worry about appropriating from a culture that wasn't mine personally.
Anyway. The best description we could come up with was "the spirit in which one enters into interactions with things." And that doesn't just mean interpersonal interactions or the usual things people might think of, but that we consider the spirit in which we interact with every single thing in our environment, including intangible abstract things and ideas, to be important. And by "spirit" again I don't mean that in a religious sense, but more like... all the thoughts and emotions and intents and pervading something that underly and inform your actions when interacting with anything not-you. Heck, it can even apply to one's self, I think-- how one views and cares for one's body, and similar things.
Amanda actually wrote about something similar (though I can't claim it's exactly the same because I'm not her and haven't been inside her mind) in one of her posts about dealing with cats: What is Respect? The part about being in communication with everything in your environment, and considering every part of it to be deserving of respect, and trying to figure out what it was "saying" to you, definitely rang a bell with us, as far as being similar to our concept of spirit-of-interaction. Because that is something we've done for pretty much our whole life, and were (after a certain point) afraid to talk about to anyone, because it had been considered "proof of inability to tell fantasy from reality." We thought that at one point it was that-- because in childhood, when we had mostly echolalic language, the only way we could think of to conceptualize it in words was "everything is alive." When we hoarded things that others considered inconsequential, when we got upset when something got thrown away because it was broken, the echolalic language we reached for was often stuff like "but it will be sad and lonely if you throw it away."
So people got very Concerned (tm) at the idea that we actually thought these things were alive in the same sense as humans, because of course one couldn't go into the world as a Proper Adult thinking that-- things got thrown out, and that was just The Way It Was. The thing is, while I do think that attributing human-like qualities to them in retrospect was a mistake, our desire to interact with even pieces of trash with the same spirit-of-interaction as with humans, was not fundamentally misguided. We had no reference in our cultural reference pool for it, so we just jumped at something. Later in life, we were able to refine it into something we feel is more accurate-- something that can see that not everything in the world is just exactly like a human, but doesn't dismiss the idea that there is worth and meaning in the idea of applying some of the same qualities from your interactions with humans, to interactions with other beings and even inanimate objects.
But that was quite a few years later, and in the meantime, we thought we were "delusional," because we couldn't stop seeing interactions with objects as significant in the same way interactions with humans were. And many people in this culture seem ready to attribute it to childhood fantasy and/or some kind of fundamental error in thinking and perception. Even in the replies to the "what is respect" post, some people seemed to get into talking about anthropomorphism and "attributing agency" to inanimate objects. Which is actually not it, at all, for us. Our attribution of humanlike qualities to things that weren't human, in childhood, actually had little to do with "theorizing agency," in my opinion. It was more that not only did the concept of spirit-of-interaction exist on a fundamental level beneath words for us, we also had a definite feeling of what the proper spirit-of-interaction in approach to certain things was, which existed at a level equally beneath words. And it seemed to be normal and routine, in the culture we saw all around us, to interact with many things in ways that seemed and felt deeply twisted and wrong, compared to our sense of how it should be. But we had no words for it. And as with so many other things in our life, people gave us words for it, through telling us what we were experiencing. So we picked those words up and adopted them even though they weren't right.
But when people think that it's all about us having a problem with realizing what's sentient and what isn't... I can't describe how that's inaccurate except to say that it's working within a paradigm so different from our actual paradigm of spirit-of-interaction, that I think some people can't even see our paradigm from inside theirs-- it just isn't in their set of what they understand to be part of the world. I hope that doesn't sound snobbish or haughty. We've certainly had our moments when we realized someone else was coming from within a paradigm very different from what we'd thought it was, something so different that we'd jumped to assume it was something more familiar to us than it was; that we couldn't even see it from where we'd been looking, so to speak.
But for what it is, it's a very important concept to us. Fundamental to the entire way we try to interact with everything, nowadays. It's not necessarily that everything literally has a spirit (though it's perfectly okay with me if someone does believe that as part of their religious philosophy). It's more that spirit-of-interaction, from everything we've ever seen, all the patterns we've absorbed slowly over 30+ years, has significance and consequences beyond just a singular interaction with one person or object. It influences others' spirits-of-interaction as well, and the consequences of the actions you take based on your own can cause chains of reactions. Because I think that even if people don't really have a strong concept of spirit-of-interaction, it is still something that exists, and that they make choices about which one they're going to use on some level. And those choices and patterns in turn affect the choices others make.
Some points I also want to clarify about it: I don't think spirit-of-interaction is synonymous with "intent," at least not the way "intent" often seems to be used. I know that people will often try to excuse actions and words that harm others by claiming they didn't "intend" to hurt anyone, as if intent somehow transformed their actions into something other than what they were. Basically the best way I can describe it is: if you respond to being called on your prejudice with "but I didn't intend to offend anyone," that indicates you already entered into that interaction with a spirit-of-interaction that was fundamentally selfish and warped, even before you said the original offensive thing, and are continuing in that same twisted mode when called on it. Part of having a balanced and proper spirit-of-interaction, to us, is building in the fundamental assumption that intent isn't everything, that good intention can still lead to harm, and being able to accept that something you did with good intention may have caused harm. (I know that, for instance, we've had some troubling realizations in the past few years about some of the animals we kept as pets during childhood, and how what we thought was best or even okay for them was actually not.)
And saying "enter into interaction with" is also not quite accurate, because read literally, it could seem to imply that we see everyone as fundamentally isolated from everything else in their environment until they choose to enter an interaction. Which is not actually how we see it. Everyone is in constant interaction with and connection to many aspects of their environment, including some that are so far removed that they don't realize they're in any kind of interaction with them, from the time they're born, and even before that. But they were the words that were there. I try not to obsess too much over reaching for certain phrases when I can't find anything else, because as has been pointed out, the alternative is silence. And I have been driven away from several communities that "should have" been a haven for me, such as the trans community, because of their approach towards and ways of using language and the fact that when trying to communicate in them I felt I was doing an elaborate language-dance more than I was communicating anything real.
And this brings me to another point: As we've said before, it's not that we don't think there are some words that are offensive and should never be used to describe people. It's more that people who use language that is generally considered offensive in a certain community, can have any number of spirits-of-interaction beneath it. Which is why in some cases we've tolerated the questions of people who kept asking about "MPD" and "DID" when they meant all plurality in general, and in other cases we didn't because they showed their actual spirit-of-interaction by going "you people are so mean, I'm just trying to understand you and you lashed out at me" when told that certain terms were the preferred ones. To give just one example. It's been something we've had trouble with in the past, but since we've been able to clarify the concept, to ourselves, of looking for the spirit-of-interaction, we try more often to read the patterns of what's underneath the language as much as the actual language itself.
And when I say "read the patterns" I don't mean any kind of "toaster power"; I mean that just literally, perceiving a pattern that is there, and comparing it to other patterns we've perceived in the past and what kinds of people and behavior they were associated with. It can look like some kind of strange power to people who tend to only look at whether certain standard "politeness indicators" are present or not, when trying to get an idea of someone's intentions, but it really isn't.
And often a person's spirit-of-interaction can be just as twisted as their language; sometimes it's worse and they're trying to obfuscate its twistedness with certain types of nice/glossy/glamorous language. Sometimes a person with a generally good and decently balanced spirit-of-interaction can approach using words that are generally considered offensive (and, again, if that spirit is not selfish and warped, a person can generally accept being told not to use certain words even if their initial reaction is defensiveness). Sometimes we get triggered by certain words and phrases, but these days try as hard as possible to see through language to what the actual spirit-of-interaction is. When you're interacting with someone purely on the level of hurling triggered or widget-based reactions back and forth, you can't see who they really are.
But it seems like some people and some communities, insofar as they had a concept of spirit-of-interaction at all, have decided literal words equal spirit-of-interaction. Which can lead to various fun kinds of ableism and letting predators in. Actually there are times when we seem to read spirit-of-interaction more easily and readily than we read language in the form of words. But we live in a culture that privileges those for whom words are the direct substance of thought, so.
But going back to the previous thing: the fact that we see everyone as being in interaction with far-stretching, widespread things they may not realize they are engaging with, is one of the reasons that the concept of spirit-of-interaction is important to us. The spirit in which one engages with specific things tends to inform their values about those things, to ripple outwards, to encourage others to view or not view certain things and living beings in a certain way, and if a particularly twisted view of something reaches an institutional level, extremely bad things can happen. We were talking with a friend once, for instance, about the concept of "honoring the kill" when an animal was killed for meat, and whether it was just done to make humans feel better about the idea that they killed something not too different from themselves. Maybe it is in some cases, but Yarrow and I, talking about it (she eats meat, I try not to) agreed that the spirit-of-interaction which underlies the concept of honoring the kill, if one is honest and not just going through the motions, is much less likely to lead to things like, say, factory farms.
(This is, also, one of the many reasons why even if I don't consider myself a particularly spiritual person, I can see benefits in many spiritual concepts. And it's also not that I believe non-spiritual worldviews and philosophies can't have their versions of these concepts as well, far from it. It's just that those can have as many different spirits-of-interaction underlying them as religious ones can, and the one I've felt pushed towards by default, and had to fight myself over for a long time, has some of its own wrongness and twistedness in its spirit-of-interaction towards certain things, and doesn't fix all the wrongness that's long been inherent in many mainstream Western religious views and their spirits-of-interaction. And I should probably cut this off right here, and say that if any comments seem to be going in the direction of starting a religious flamewar I'll delete them, except to say that I would like to expand on some of this and make it its own post in the future.)
In the end, like with many other things, figuring out this concept was also part of survival for us. The people who mistreat animals in a certain way are often the same ones to mistreat other humans in a certain way. The people who snark and gloat over something genuinely bad happening to someone they consider an ideological enemy, are often the ones who would be just as willing to take sadistic pleasure from your suffering if they changed their mind about you, and to even set things up or prod you in certain ways to make a situation worse for you. The people who try to minimize or dismiss real dehumanization and cruelty with "but it was just a joke," "I'm sure they don't really mean to hurt anybody," are often the same ones who will minimize it when it is happening right in front of their face, even to someone they care about. All of which are just a few of the reasons why we've learned the importance of noticing someone's spirit-of-interaction with various aspects of the world beneath their words. And get repeatedly disturbed when we see people with a general dehumanizing, controlling, or even outright cruel spirit-of-interaction being welcomed into various communities, held up as good allies, linked to with "read this great post that sums up everything!", etc.
And that's not even getting into things like the environmental consequences of the choices of people who have certain spirits-of-interaction with material things in the world around them, and various aspects of the world in general. (And some people who claim to be very ecologically conscious have a spirit-of-interaction that is actually fundamentally selfish and self-glorifying, ignores the classist limitations of the "ideal lifestyle" they promote, etc.)
Anyway. This concept is also, I think, going to be basic to our attempts to articulate various other perceptions we've had of things and people, and, well, to understanding how we work in general really. So it will show up again in future posts, I'm pretty sure; so we can refer back to this post if someone doesn't know what we mean when we talk about this concept.
This post is an attempt to describe a philosophical concept that has been floating around in our general headspace for... a very long time, which has taken a long time for us to codify and find words to describe. The word "spirit" here isn't being used in the sense that we consider it an actually spiritual thing, although some of us do incorporate it into spirituality (reminder again in case anyone reading this doesn't know it: in-system, we can vary widely between each other in spiritual beliefs and philosophies. We always worry when we mention this that people will consider it somehow impossible, and start looking for a commonality or "true" belief under all of them in the same way some people look for a "true self," but nonetheless, it is how we are.)
The culture and religion into which our front body was born do not seem to have words or a concept for this. Maybe if we'd gone farther in the religion we were baptized into, we might eventually have found something similar in the huge amount of theology and philosophy written about that religion, but we also hit a point where we realized it was there, it was vitally important to us, and we didn't need to find a description or term for it in someone else's writing in order for it to be valid. I am sure there are or have been cultures somewhere in the world that generally saw it close to the way we do, maybe even have a word for it, but I don't know what it would be, and if I did I would probably worry about appropriating from a culture that wasn't mine personally.
Anyway. The best description we could come up with was "the spirit in which one enters into interactions with things." And that doesn't just mean interpersonal interactions or the usual things people might think of, but that we consider the spirit in which we interact with every single thing in our environment, including intangible abstract things and ideas, to be important. And by "spirit" again I don't mean that in a religious sense, but more like... all the thoughts and emotions and intents and pervading something that underly and inform your actions when interacting with anything not-you. Heck, it can even apply to one's self, I think-- how one views and cares for one's body, and similar things.
Amanda actually wrote about something similar (though I can't claim it's exactly the same because I'm not her and haven't been inside her mind) in one of her posts about dealing with cats: What is Respect? The part about being in communication with everything in your environment, and considering every part of it to be deserving of respect, and trying to figure out what it was "saying" to you, definitely rang a bell with us, as far as being similar to our concept of spirit-of-interaction. Because that is something we've done for pretty much our whole life, and were (after a certain point) afraid to talk about to anyone, because it had been considered "proof of inability to tell fantasy from reality." We thought that at one point it was that-- because in childhood, when we had mostly echolalic language, the only way we could think of to conceptualize it in words was "everything is alive." When we hoarded things that others considered inconsequential, when we got upset when something got thrown away because it was broken, the echolalic language we reached for was often stuff like "but it will be sad and lonely if you throw it away."
So people got very Concerned (tm) at the idea that we actually thought these things were alive in the same sense as humans, because of course one couldn't go into the world as a Proper Adult thinking that-- things got thrown out, and that was just The Way It Was. The thing is, while I do think that attributing human-like qualities to them in retrospect was a mistake, our desire to interact with even pieces of trash with the same spirit-of-interaction as with humans, was not fundamentally misguided. We had no reference in our cultural reference pool for it, so we just jumped at something. Later in life, we were able to refine it into something we feel is more accurate-- something that can see that not everything in the world is just exactly like a human, but doesn't dismiss the idea that there is worth and meaning in the idea of applying some of the same qualities from your interactions with humans, to interactions with other beings and even inanimate objects.
But that was quite a few years later, and in the meantime, we thought we were "delusional," because we couldn't stop seeing interactions with objects as significant in the same way interactions with humans were. And many people in this culture seem ready to attribute it to childhood fantasy and/or some kind of fundamental error in thinking and perception. Even in the replies to the "what is respect" post, some people seemed to get into talking about anthropomorphism and "attributing agency" to inanimate objects. Which is actually not it, at all, for us. Our attribution of humanlike qualities to things that weren't human, in childhood, actually had little to do with "theorizing agency," in my opinion. It was more that not only did the concept of spirit-of-interaction exist on a fundamental level beneath words for us, we also had a definite feeling of what the proper spirit-of-interaction in approach to certain things was, which existed at a level equally beneath words. And it seemed to be normal and routine, in the culture we saw all around us, to interact with many things in ways that seemed and felt deeply twisted and wrong, compared to our sense of how it should be. But we had no words for it. And as with so many other things in our life, people gave us words for it, through telling us what we were experiencing. So we picked those words up and adopted them even though they weren't right.
But when people think that it's all about us having a problem with realizing what's sentient and what isn't... I can't describe how that's inaccurate except to say that it's working within a paradigm so different from our actual paradigm of spirit-of-interaction, that I think some people can't even see our paradigm from inside theirs-- it just isn't in their set of what they understand to be part of the world. I hope that doesn't sound snobbish or haughty. We've certainly had our moments when we realized someone else was coming from within a paradigm very different from what we'd thought it was, something so different that we'd jumped to assume it was something more familiar to us than it was; that we couldn't even see it from where we'd been looking, so to speak.
But for what it is, it's a very important concept to us. Fundamental to the entire way we try to interact with everything, nowadays. It's not necessarily that everything literally has a spirit (though it's perfectly okay with me if someone does believe that as part of their religious philosophy). It's more that spirit-of-interaction, from everything we've ever seen, all the patterns we've absorbed slowly over 30+ years, has significance and consequences beyond just a singular interaction with one person or object. It influences others' spirits-of-interaction as well, and the consequences of the actions you take based on your own can cause chains of reactions. Because I think that even if people don't really have a strong concept of spirit-of-interaction, it is still something that exists, and that they make choices about which one they're going to use on some level. And those choices and patterns in turn affect the choices others make.
Some points I also want to clarify about it: I don't think spirit-of-interaction is synonymous with "intent," at least not the way "intent" often seems to be used. I know that people will often try to excuse actions and words that harm others by claiming they didn't "intend" to hurt anyone, as if intent somehow transformed their actions into something other than what they were. Basically the best way I can describe it is: if you respond to being called on your prejudice with "but I didn't intend to offend anyone," that indicates you already entered into that interaction with a spirit-of-interaction that was fundamentally selfish and warped, even before you said the original offensive thing, and are continuing in that same twisted mode when called on it. Part of having a balanced and proper spirit-of-interaction, to us, is building in the fundamental assumption that intent isn't everything, that good intention can still lead to harm, and being able to accept that something you did with good intention may have caused harm. (I know that, for instance, we've had some troubling realizations in the past few years about some of the animals we kept as pets during childhood, and how what we thought was best or even okay for them was actually not.)
And saying "enter into interaction with" is also not quite accurate, because read literally, it could seem to imply that we see everyone as fundamentally isolated from everything else in their environment until they choose to enter an interaction. Which is not actually how we see it. Everyone is in constant interaction with and connection to many aspects of their environment, including some that are so far removed that they don't realize they're in any kind of interaction with them, from the time they're born, and even before that. But they were the words that were there. I try not to obsess too much over reaching for certain phrases when I can't find anything else, because as has been pointed out, the alternative is silence. And I have been driven away from several communities that "should have" been a haven for me, such as the trans community, because of their approach towards and ways of using language and the fact that when trying to communicate in them I felt I was doing an elaborate language-dance more than I was communicating anything real.
And this brings me to another point: As we've said before, it's not that we don't think there are some words that are offensive and should never be used to describe people. It's more that people who use language that is generally considered offensive in a certain community, can have any number of spirits-of-interaction beneath it. Which is why in some cases we've tolerated the questions of people who kept asking about "MPD" and "DID" when they meant all plurality in general, and in other cases we didn't because they showed their actual spirit-of-interaction by going "you people are so mean, I'm just trying to understand you and you lashed out at me" when told that certain terms were the preferred ones. To give just one example. It's been something we've had trouble with in the past, but since we've been able to clarify the concept, to ourselves, of looking for the spirit-of-interaction, we try more often to read the patterns of what's underneath the language as much as the actual language itself.
And when I say "read the patterns" I don't mean any kind of "toaster power"; I mean that just literally, perceiving a pattern that is there, and comparing it to other patterns we've perceived in the past and what kinds of people and behavior they were associated with. It can look like some kind of strange power to people who tend to only look at whether certain standard "politeness indicators" are present or not, when trying to get an idea of someone's intentions, but it really isn't.
And often a person's spirit-of-interaction can be just as twisted as their language; sometimes it's worse and they're trying to obfuscate its twistedness with certain types of nice/glossy/glamorous language. Sometimes a person with a generally good and decently balanced spirit-of-interaction can approach using words that are generally considered offensive (and, again, if that spirit is not selfish and warped, a person can generally accept being told not to use certain words even if their initial reaction is defensiveness). Sometimes we get triggered by certain words and phrases, but these days try as hard as possible to see through language to what the actual spirit-of-interaction is. When you're interacting with someone purely on the level of hurling triggered or widget-based reactions back and forth, you can't see who they really are.
But it seems like some people and some communities, insofar as they had a concept of spirit-of-interaction at all, have decided literal words equal spirit-of-interaction. Which can lead to various fun kinds of ableism and letting predators in. Actually there are times when we seem to read spirit-of-interaction more easily and readily than we read language in the form of words. But we live in a culture that privileges those for whom words are the direct substance of thought, so.
But going back to the previous thing: the fact that we see everyone as being in interaction with far-stretching, widespread things they may not realize they are engaging with, is one of the reasons that the concept of spirit-of-interaction is important to us. The spirit in which one engages with specific things tends to inform their values about those things, to ripple outwards, to encourage others to view or not view certain things and living beings in a certain way, and if a particularly twisted view of something reaches an institutional level, extremely bad things can happen. We were talking with a friend once, for instance, about the concept of "honoring the kill" when an animal was killed for meat, and whether it was just done to make humans feel better about the idea that they killed something not too different from themselves. Maybe it is in some cases, but Yarrow and I, talking about it (she eats meat, I try not to) agreed that the spirit-of-interaction which underlies the concept of honoring the kill, if one is honest and not just going through the motions, is much less likely to lead to things like, say, factory farms.
(This is, also, one of the many reasons why even if I don't consider myself a particularly spiritual person, I can see benefits in many spiritual concepts. And it's also not that I believe non-spiritual worldviews and philosophies can't have their versions of these concepts as well, far from it. It's just that those can have as many different spirits-of-interaction underlying them as religious ones can, and the one I've felt pushed towards by default, and had to fight myself over for a long time, has some of its own wrongness and twistedness in its spirit-of-interaction towards certain things, and doesn't fix all the wrongness that's long been inherent in many mainstream Western religious views and their spirits-of-interaction. And I should probably cut this off right here, and say that if any comments seem to be going in the direction of starting a religious flamewar I'll delete them, except to say that I would like to expand on some of this and make it its own post in the future.)
In the end, like with many other things, figuring out this concept was also part of survival for us. The people who mistreat animals in a certain way are often the same ones to mistreat other humans in a certain way. The people who snark and gloat over something genuinely bad happening to someone they consider an ideological enemy, are often the ones who would be just as willing to take sadistic pleasure from your suffering if they changed their mind about you, and to even set things up or prod you in certain ways to make a situation worse for you. The people who try to minimize or dismiss real dehumanization and cruelty with "but it was just a joke," "I'm sure they don't really mean to hurt anybody," are often the same ones who will minimize it when it is happening right in front of their face, even to someone they care about. All of which are just a few of the reasons why we've learned the importance of noticing someone's spirit-of-interaction with various aspects of the world beneath their words. And get repeatedly disturbed when we see people with a general dehumanizing, controlling, or even outright cruel spirit-of-interaction being welcomed into various communities, held up as good allies, linked to with "read this great post that sums up everything!", etc.
And that's not even getting into things like the environmental consequences of the choices of people who have certain spirits-of-interaction with material things in the world around them, and various aspects of the world in general. (And some people who claim to be very ecologically conscious have a spirit-of-interaction that is actually fundamentally selfish and self-glorifying, ignores the classist limitations of the "ideal lifestyle" they promote, etc.)
Anyway. This concept is also, I think, going to be basic to our attempts to articulate various other perceptions we've had of things and people, and, well, to understanding how we work in general really. So it will show up again in future posts, I'm pretty sure; so we can refer back to this post if someone doesn't know what we mean when we talk about this concept.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-03 12:59 am (UTC)And yet I've known many people who've taken for granted that this is the way things are. It seems to be a spiritual relationship with the world, rather than a purely material one. A soul-to-soul connection, or at least awareness.
Or did I misunderstand?