I Dipped My Toe Into Decolonizing My "Bookshelf"

"There's a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much." ~ Noam Chomsky.

"History teaches, but it has no pupils." ~ Antonio Gramsci.

The Headline Story

'Decolonizing your bookshelf' near as I can determine from investigating the concept and how to do it is essentially a curated reading list, that likely is functionally an indulgence, or a way to wash your hands of 'complicity'. Largely it involved reading things published since 2016 and has little-to-nothing-to-do with colonialism, decolonization, or decolonization of knowledge.

Rejecting the curated suggested (but not, to be fair, required) reading, I would propose a much simpler beneficial exercise which is to heterodox your bookshelf. For example, if you have a copy of Machiavelli's 'The Prince' read Frederick II of Prussia's 'Anti-Machiavelli' pamphlet published by Voltaire. 

Then I dip my toe into an internet based sampler of pre-colonial and preferably pre-European-contact Philosophy and other cultural offerings from other places in the world. This is a fascinating and rewarding exploration, but it becomes clear why 'decolonize your bookshelf' somehow involves reading intersectional feminism, but nothing pre-European contact, because the pre-colonial world embodies very few contemporary values. Most notably that depending on your definition, no matriarchal societies have been found to exist anywhere in recorded human history.

People should definitely read heterodox, in line with John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty':

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.

People stand to benefit from looking at other cultures and the thoughts and ideas that shape them. Thus knowing where I stand, I encourage you to read on, because there's a lot of interesting thinkers and their thoughts within. 

Preramble

So there's this vague concept out there of 'decolonizing' and when I wrote my post on how it's never been cheaper to be a racist I was leaning on a listicle of 103 things white people can do for racial justice which had #45 'decolonize your bookshelf' that linked to a broken facebook post as at writing.

That listicle has since become a broken link, but a google later and I found the new '105 things white people can do for racial justice' updated earlier this month and it had fixed the link though I found 'Decolonize your bookshelf' now under #51 of 105.

So now I have three articles explaining how to 'decolonize my bookshelf.' Here, here and here.

From the first:

Decolonizing your bookshelf is about asking readers to actively resist colonialist notions within narrative, storytelling, and literature. This includes the tendency to prize and acknowledge certain types of authors and narratives over others. It is about reassessing your entire understanding of the literary canon. This history also means that non-white readers have had to process stories and historical events through a white author’s lens.

From the second: 

Decolonising your bookshelf in my words—as my beautiful baby pink and white T-shirt suggests—is asking readers to actively resist colonialist notions of narrative, storytelling, art, and literature. There is a tendency in literary studies, and book culture in general, to prize certain types of authors and narratives over others. I have touched on this a little before with my talks on the literary ivory tower. But decolonising your bookshelf is more than just resisting snobbery. It is really asking you to re-assess your whole understanding of the literary canon.

From the third:

You may have seen the phrase "decolonize your bookshelf" floating around. In essence, it is about actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long. 

Leaving me with the big question of 'What ARE colonialist notions of narrative thru literature?' helpfully the articles both give booklists, to better grasp, infer, triangulate... how to resist "colonialist notions", taking the second, more listicle, article's reading list - decolonizing my bookshelf can involve reading books first published in: 2018, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2014, 2018, 2017, 2020, 2020, 2007 and 2019 (mean publication 2017~2018, median publication 2018) respectively (excluding the double ups) the oldest text that "resists colonialist notions of narrative" is 'Vegetarian' about becoming a vegetarian in South-Korea published in 2007. 

The first article having a much longer list remains a majority post-2018 dominated book list, but has titles by Toni Morrison that date back to 1970, and Jamaica Kincaid that date back to 1988 and Mary Louis Pratt that dates back to 1992. 

This overwhelming emphasis on very recent publications naturally makes me reach for my scepticals, because one possible interpretation is the publication of texts that 'actively resist colonialist notions of narratives' is a very recent breakthrough. However I can't exclude the possibility that 'decolonizing your bookshelf' is actually just a literary version of '10 Summer Trends to Shop Now' because for suburban white women who belong to book clubs, intersectional critical social justice is so hot right now.

Notably absent from the lists, are books like 'The God of Small Things', 'The White Tiger', 'Mafia Queens of Mumbai', 'The Kite Runner', 'The Honey Thief', 'White Swans', 'The Joy Luck Club'... the decolonize cannon is not a transparent process. But if I were to say 'I've read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, an Indian Woman so consider my bookshelf decolonized' I suspect that a problem would be that The God of Small Things is a loving but not necessarily flattering depiction of Indian culture. Same same with 'The White Tiger' and many of the above absentees.

I know it's an argument from personal incredulity, and therefore not a valid one, but I cannot connect the activity as described (or deliberately not described) with the stated goal of 'resisting colonialist notions of narrative'. Largely because of the word 'decolonize' itself, which just seems to be a misnomer in this case. Before I get into the intelligibility issues, let me propose a simpler alternative.

Heterodox your Bookshelf Instead.

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that." ~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. 

"People who don't want you to think are never your friend." ~ Theramintrees. 'Debunking Prophets part.1'

The way I have come to tentatively identify 'my tribe' as it were, in the age of op eds and vast proliferation of 'public intellectuals' has worked out to be pretty simple. There's a consistent behavioural trait that is predictive of... well everything I tend to value - intelligibility, intellectual honesty, honesty, originality, creativity, insight etc.

That behaviour is this - when the person is offering a critique/criticism of something, they implore their audience to 'go and read/watch/listen to...' what they are critiquing. 

My tribe: 'Go read ... see for yourself and tell me it's not crap.'

Outside my tribe: 'Don't read ... trust me it's crap.' (or worse 'Don't read ... or you're complicit in [insert bigoted superstructure]')

Even commentators like James Lindsay, Douglas Murray and Andrew Doyle that characterize themselves as reading-all-the-postmodern-and-critical-theory-shit-so-others-don't-have-to inevitably wind up earnestly imploring people to check out texts such as 'Unpacking the invisible knapsack'.

My tribe, my people, credit their audience with possessing reason. Their audience do not need to be protected from bad ideas.

That is the difference between my conception of 'us' and 'them' where 'them' implies a need to avoid exposure to material lest it be found persuasive. The devil whispering in your ear.

From this I can derive a much better activity than 'decolonizing your bookshelf' as thus far described - simpler too: read things that disagree with you. Expose yourself to heterodox opinions, narratives, philosophies and ideologies.

For example, if you colour yourself conservative and believe vehemently in personal responsibility - read some Chomsky. If you believe capitalism is destroying the planet and society, read some Sowell.

None of it may, or need, change your mind on any particular matter, but I'm confident it will change your understanding and your mental health won't become contingent on only engaging the straw men of any particular position.

Reserving the Right to be Unimpressed.

"Some Books against Deism fell into my Hands; they were said to be the Substance of Sermons preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that they wrought an Effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them: For the Arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much Stronger than the Refutations. In short I soon became a thorough Deist." ~ Ben Franklin, The Autobiography of Ben Franklin.

This concerns the root of all evil. In my opinion. Which is rigging. Whatever it means to 'decolonize' one's bookshelf, it should not be an exercise in polite deception. 

When dealing with a proposition: "the tendency to prize and acknowledge certain types of authors and narratives over others." without defining what is meant by 'certain types', I am going to infer it suggests we live in a world where we can find in pre-colonial literary or oral traditions works every bit the equal of Plato's Republic, Saint Augustine of Hippo's City of God, Rene Descartes' Meditations, Machiavelli's The Prince, or William Shakespeare's Portfolios to name but a few suspects that might be 'prized and acknowledged'.

And it's a good proposition. An inviting proposition. Who wouldn't want to discover that we have a vast untapped body of works with which to enrich ourselves. But we can't rig it to say that a 2007 book about a South Korean woman becoming a vegetarian needs-must be as enriching as reading the collected essays of Montaigne. (or any one thereof)

Imagine a Parisian being taken to see Tokyo Tower, the ill-conceived Japanese homage of the Eiffel Tower housed somewhere in the impenetrable Tokyo skyline and painted in alternating storey-high stripes of orange and white to comply with local regulations. The Parisian, whatever the constitution of their manners, is likely to ultimately be unimpressed by a knock-off, just as the Japanese themselves are likely to be unimpressed by knock-off Louis Vuitton handbags.

In my lived experience, it is the religious that are the usual suspects in terms of withholding from me and others the right to be unimpressed. For reasons that many religions are based on or around received wisdom and informed attributes. (Tell don't show.)

All of this is simply to say that there is inherent risk in a notion like 'decolonizing your bookshelf.' (particularly given the notion that intersectional feminist texts have something to do with this process), one should brace against the possibility that one might find patriarchal societies outside of Europe. 

An Issue of Intelligibility

Over the course of some months, trying to relate the exercise and booklists described as 'decolonizing your bookshelf.' I have come to a tentative understanding by analogy, or at least, word substitution:

Decapitalizing your bookshelf is about asking readers to actively resist neoliberal notions within narrative, storytelling, and literature. This includes the tendency to prize and acknowledge certain types of authors and economic theories over others. It is about reassessing your entire understanding of the literary canon. This history also means that socialist and communist readers have had to process stories and historical events through a neoliberal author’s lens.

Something like that, helps me at least to understand that the import and weight of the proposed exercise is contained in the words 'actively resist' which...I'd take umbrage with, providing of course, that I correctly understand the meaning of the word 'umbrage'. Because I can imagine better alternative wording to 'actively resist' like 'apply critical thinking' or 'the scientific/historical method'. Because, for me at least 'actively resist' implies a fait accompli, or foregone conclusion that the undefined 'colonialist notions' are established factually as universally erroneous, bad, whatever. 

'Actively resist' puts me in mind of the almost certainly apocryphal complaint of Galileo that his philosopher colleagues refused to look through the telescope at heretical evidence.

So basically I propose instead, that people basically do exactly what I did to the paragraph describing 'decolonize your bookshelf' above. Which is to think about its content, rather than accept assertions and claims at face value.

Despite the efforts of the articles which I encourage you to read, 'decolonizing' remains a vague and ambiguous concept, possibly a misnomer, especially when applied to bookshelves. So I looked up the definition of 'colonize':

Verb

1. (transitive) To settle (a place) with colonists, and hence make (a place) into a colony.
2. (transitive) To settle (a group of people, a species, or the like) in a place as a colony.
3. (transitive) To settle among and establish control over (the indigenous people of an area). 
4. (intransitive) To begin a colony or colonies.
5. (transitive, social sciences, by extension) To intrude into and take over (the autonomy, experience, social movement, etc, of a less powerful person or group); to commandeer or appropriate.

I assume with some confidence that definition number 5 is the one to focus on here. And it is the prefix "de" in "decolonize" that implies an activity of subtraction, implicitly followed by some kind of restoration or repair presumably of non-colonial texts. (Also worth checking out, and perhaps more helpfully, the wikipedia page on 'Colonialism')

So just like 'defund the police' does not, apparently mean, defunding the police but pursuing a variety of other policies sooner than expanding the police.

Back to my guiding articles, this one provides helpful questions that I will answer:

1. How many authors of colour have you read?
2. How many books do you own by (local) indigenous authors?
3. How often do you read female authors?
4. Have you ever read a book by a queer author?
5. If you have read a book about colonialism, were indigenous voices centred in the story? (Do not use the movie “Green Book” as an example)
6. How many books have you read where the main character is from a marginalised group?
7. Have you ever read an intersectional feminist text before?
8. Put your money where your mouth is: how often do you buy products directly from marginalised groups? (I don’t mean that $2 boomerang you got at some discount store here…)
9. Have you read a book that was translated from a non-European language?
10. How often do you engage with local minority groups in your community?

and my answers:

1. Uncountable, more than 30, mostly from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Americas.
2. Five.
3. Slightly less often than male authors, unless it includes articles.
4. Yes. But I feel inclined to point out this includes authors like Oscar Wilde, Plato, Chuck Palahniuk, Brett Easton Ellis etc.
5. I've never read a book about colonialism. Unless 'The Open Veins of Latin America' counts, or 'Our Word is Our Weapon' counts, or 'Mexico Profundo' counts and if those authors are considered indigenous or not. Dark Emu and it's author are contentious on multiple fronts...
6. If 'marginalised' includes groups like 'women' then again it would be uncountable and would include texts like 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'The Wizard of Oz', 'Postmortem' by Patricia Cornwell. Beyond that, yes, I've read Ursula K. Le Guin's stories, stories about refugees and stories about people marginalised in their home countries like Vietnam, Afghanistan, China etc.
7. No, unless Kimberley Crenshaw papers/essays/articles count. If 'text' implies book then only feminist without intersections.
8. I couldn't quantify the frequency, in Mexico it's hard to tell what qualifies as a marginalized group.
9. Too many to count. But presumably this would then exclude books written by marginalized and indigenous people who do not speak a non-European language, like those in Latin America, North America and Australia...?
10. Presently I am the local minority group in my community. But at least once a month. Historically it largely depends on whether I am invited/welcome or not. Isn't engaging local minority groups a hallmark of the colonial process? (admittedly "engage" is multi-valent)

So I suspect the article where I sourced these prompt questions from, is basically targeted at 'Karens' or white women that fear they are in danger of being perceived as Karens. (The one that offered a definition of decolonizing your bookshelf that also spruiked baby-pink and white merch). This would probably be remedied simply by continuing to buy the Oprah's Book Club 2.0 recommendations.

For me, I could potentially treat this exercise as an indulgence that I already had in the bank. I also notice that regarding the issues of intelligibility, the 10 point prompt list of questions in no way direct one to the book lists the articles offer. Which is a relief, because I have no interest* in reading a bunch of texts that have withstood little-to-no test of time given their recent publication and that I cannot exclude as an exercise is mainly focused on trying to accrue and maintain esteem.

Now the wikipedia introduction on Colonialism suggests it is distinct from but related to imperialism. So the question does remain as to whether 'actively resisting colonialist notions' applies to Persian, Egyptian, Kush, Greek, Roman, Carthaginian, West African (Songhai, Mali etc), Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, Middle Eastern and Ottoman, German, Russian, Comanche, Maya, Mexica, Inca etc. texts? Are imperial notions colonial notions if identical? Get me a Venn diagram please.

What of European texts from non-colonial states? Did Poland ever have colonies? What about the Norse, where they established colonies in Iceland without displacing an indigenous population, much as the Maori did in New Zealand? Of course, many of my ancestors come from the British Isles, which were colonized by the Roman Empire and the Norse...so...profits?

Are our (Europeans or the descendants from European colonies, perhaps excluding non-white Hispanics or not) use of Indian numerals for example, a colonialist notion or not? and anything else that came to Europe via the silk road, or Middle East like (ahem) Christianity? Do English speakers actively resist our use of Norse weekdays (Monday-Sunday) but not hours, minutes, seconds (Sumerian), and what of the year that marks with questionable accuracy the birth of a Palestinian Apocalyptic Preacher Jew but comes largely from his Greek followers eventually managing to convert a Roman emperor?

This intelligibility issue is real, and a real obstacle for me, particularly for rising to a challenge in good faith. 'Colonialism' is probably too vague to be useful, as described in my source articles, and if my understanding is correct then this exercise of decolonizing your bookshelf has been undertaken and excelled at by figures like James Lindsay, Andrew Doyle, Douglas Murray, Helen Pluckrose and Jon McWhorter and the result that indicates that that exercise isn't rigged are projects like New Discourses, and books like 'Woke Racism' 'The Madness of Crowds' and 'Free Speech and Why It Matters' where people are reading this material, going deep and arriving at a conclusion that the diagnosis and/or prescription is flawed. 

So what I am instead going to do, to 'decolonize my bookshelf' is actually just look for pre-colonial, pre-columbian texts from, well... it's a big world out there separated by a vast ocean.

*Incidentally, I have read some of the suggested books anyway, or seen film adaptations like 'The Hate U Give.' to assume engaging these texts would be powerful or transformative assumes little of these articles' readers.

How Much Decolonizing is enough?

 “Anti-Americanism is in the process of being consecrated into an ideology.

The term 'anti-American' is usually used by the American establishment to discredit and, not falsely -- but shall we say inaccurately -- define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they're heard and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.

What does the term 'anti-American' mean? Does it mean you're anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to free speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans? .....

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti- Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not good you're evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.” ~ Arundhati Roy, War Talk

So questions naturally arise: how much is enough? It would seem to me the threshold for getting the lion's share would be low, with the big insight being that there is culture outside of Europe, for which one counterpoint (take your pick) should be sufficient.

The other thing, and the reason I put "Bookshelf" in scare-quotes, is that I've never read any version of the Christian Bible. Just bits and pieces here and there, which I suspect is common, because it renders scripture intelligible, allows people to avoid the questionable, inconvenient and unobserved bits but also because I'm not a Christian, I wasn't raised Christian, and I am not persuaded and quite skeptical of authors like Tom Holland, Jordan Peterson or social commentators that promote the thesis that Western Civilization is based on "Judeo-Christian" values (as opposed to 'Greco-Judeo' values or 'Greco-Egypto-Judeo-Sumerian' values, or 'Primate/Social Species-Values'). 

Furthermore, I haven't read Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, nor Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution (or whatever), Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, Voltaire's Candid... that's why I share a thought by Indian author Arundhati Roy that I've loved since first reading it back at the dawn of this millennium, that I feel serves up a useful criticism of group identities in general, and applies here to trying to delineate or even comprehend group identities as being meaningful, statistical clusters. 

It's the question of what is actually colonizing my bookshelf? When you have out-of-Europe texts ranging from Meditations by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Das Capital and the Communist Manifesto by Marx, Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault, The Prince by Machiavelli, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, the Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer and the King James Bible...

Keeping in mind, that I suspect the average person of European decent, has read none of the texts mentioned. They're far more likely to have read Harry Potter, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Memoirs of a Geisha, IT, Salem's Lot, Kujo, The Catcher in the Rye. The Slap. Room. The Handmaid's Tale. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Is that what needs decolonizing?

One can, by reading purely authors of European descent come to the conclusion that all humans are equal in dignity, that racism is bad, that political economy needs scrutiny and demands reform and that we as people should endeavour to ever expand our circle of altruism.

Nobody Likes Being Told Who They Are

"Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people" ~ Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language

Spain is in many places, not to say most, very thin of people, and almost desolate. The causes are:

1. A bad Religion
2. The Tyrannical Inquisition
3. The multitude of Whores
4. The barrenness of the soil
5. The wretched laziness of the people, very like the Welsh and Irish, walking slowly and always cumbered with a great Choke and a long Sword
6. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors...
7. Wars and Plantations

 ~ Francis Willoughby, A Relation of a Voyage Made through a Great Part of Spain, 1673

Of the two most puissant monarchs of that world, and, peradventure, of
this, kings of so many kings, and the last they turned out, he of Peru,
having been taken in a battle, and put to so excessive a ransom as
exceeds all belief, and it being faithfully paid, and he having, by his
conversation, given manifest signs of a frank, liberal, and constant
spirit, and of a clear and settled understanding, the conquerors had a
mind, after having exacted one million three hundred and twenty-five
thousand and five hundred weight of gold, besides silver, and other
things which amounted to no less (so that their horses were shod with
massy gold), still to see, at the price of what disloyalty and injustice
whatever, what the remainder of the treasures of this king might be, and
to possess themselves of that also. To this end a false accusation was
preferred against him, and false witnesses brought to prove that he went
about to raise an insurrection in his provinces, to procure his own
liberty; whereupon, by the virtuous sentence of those very men who had by
this treachery conspired his ruin, he was condemned to be publicly hanged
and strangled, after having made him buy off the torment of being burnt
alive, by the baptism they gave him immediately before execution; a
horrid and unheard of barbarity, which, nevertheless, he underwent
without giving way either in word or look, with a truly grave and royal
behaviour. After which, to calm and appease the people, aroused and
astounded at so strange a thing, they counterfeited great sorrow for his
death, and appointed most sumptuous funerals. ~ Montaigne, "On Coaches" Chapter 6 of Book 3 of the Essays of Montaigne. First published 1595.

Nobody likes to be mischaracterized. This seems the most worthy candidate of 'colonial notions' to be 'actively resisted'. I can think of a notable exception being 'Bart vs. Australia' the premiere of which, and reaction I lived through, I was 11 at the time, and had only one 11 year old friend with the prophetic insight that it was hilarious, and time has proved that friend right, its hilarious for its mischaracterization.

Generally though, nobody enjoys being mischaracterized. So I want to introduce a concept I only learned about by virtue of living in Mexico and wanting to learn more about Hernando Cortes: The Black Legend which is basically anti-Spanish propaganda, anti-Spanish bias. 

After the British Empire, Spain are the other major colonial power in history. The black legend creates a colonialist narrative paradox, given that colonial powers could have antipathy to each other, and so while I'm not really aware of what the Spanish said about the English, I get that they were upset, I am now aware of all the shit English speakers say about Spain. 

This is relevant because, well there's an easy out from history which is to simply say that a source was biased, particularly if the source is from a colonial power. The thing is, that we can adjust for bias - a justifiable and laudable act of resistance - the first ever book I bought about Greek mythology had a forward with the most memorable part of that book which said something like (paraphrasing) 'only Christianity gave an account of the world that is unquestionable.' or something, which to me at least, indicates an overt bias, especially because it isn't true. It didn't mean that the author was therefore disqualified from giving an English language account of the twelve labours of Heracles. 

The three quotes at the top of this section all involve characterizations, Samuel Johnson's might actually have been true contemporarily, but I don't know. Willoughby's is likely anti-Spanish propaganda a documented case of the black legend. (It's hard to imagine that a multitude of whores in the 17th century would leave a country desolate and sparsely populated). The third is from Michel Montaigne, and is a fairly accurate account of the Spanish conquest of the Incas. By contrast here's the contemporary English wikipedia account:

The question eventually came up of what to do with Atahualpa; both Pizarro and Soto were against killing him, but the other Spaniards were loud in their demands for death. False interpretations from the interpreter Felipillo made the Spaniards paranoid. They were told that Atahualpa had ordered secret attacks and his warriors were hidden in the surrounding area. Soto went with a small force to scout for the hidden army, but the trial of Atahualpa was held in his absence. Among the charges were polygamy, incestuous marriage, and idolatry, all frowned upon in Catholicism but common in Inca culture and religion.

The men who were against Atahualpa's conviction and murder argued that he should be judged by King Charles since he was the sovereign prince. Atahualpa agreed to accept baptism to avoid being burned at the stake and in the hopes of one day rejoining his army and killing the Spanish; he was baptized as Francisco. On 29 August 1533 Atahualpa was garrotted and died a Christian. He was buried with Christian rites in the church of San Francisco at Cajamarca, but was soon disinterred. His body was taken, probably at his prior request, to its final resting place in Quito. Upon de Soto's return, he was furious; he had found no evidence of any secret gathering of Atahualpa's warriors.[12]

Montaigne's understanding is published 62 years after the events that took place on the other side of the Atlantic, there's almost no evidence in Montaigne's essay that he demonizes the Inca (or the Mexica/Aztecs which he addresses in the same essay) and only some little evidence that he demonizes the Spanish regarding the minds of Pizarro and Soto, but probably due to ignorance. 

The point is, to take Rudyard Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden' as a characterization of Europeans is as much a mischaracterization of Europeans as using the Mexica/Aztec ruling class' practice of human sacrifice to characterize all indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. In the figure of Montaigne at least we can see a pre-Enlightenment thinker whose attitude to the civilizations of the Americas is more or less identical to post-Enlightenment thinkers today.

Anytime and in any direction we use a broad brush (say, an autoethnography) to characterize people, it's almost certain to miss everyone.

Similarly Helen Pluckrose has spoken of her studies, witnessing William Shakespeare's Othello taken out of its historical context and mischaracterized as racist, where the central scandal is supposedly Othello's mixed race marriage, whereas the actual controversy is the mixed-religion nature of the marriage. (The 12th century work Chanson de Geste from which RPG nerds get the word 'Paladin' is all about Catholics fighting Muslims and marrying and converting and fighting each other, similarly the mythical African Amazon Queen Calafia for which Hernan Cortes likely named the states of Baja California in Mexico and the California known for In-n-Out burger, is converted to Islam, then defeated in battle and married off and converted to Christianity).

A more recent example was Same-Sex Marriage in Australia. Up until 2017 if one looked at the legislation of Australia, and it's High Court rulings, Australia could be characterized as homophobic, but this would be a mischaracterization of the prevailing sentiment among the Australian public. (It likely is a fair characterization of Australians that they would sooner have lower interest rates than their neighbours' dignity) It is probably an accident of history largely that Australia's legislation on Same-Sex marriage dragged its feet so far behind public sentiment, and other wealthy industrialized democracies. (interestingly, long after writing this paragraph that my lived experience gave me personal access to; this podcast was released that opens with precisely a study of how bad people are at predicting historical opinions based on current circumstances - the example they highlight is that polls have been asking Americans whether they would vote for a woman president since 1978. Take a moment to answer the question yourself, I'll put the actual 1978 results in white text you can highlight to read: 74% of Americans said they'd vote for a woman in 1978.)

Montaigne's not likely to be characterized as 'colonial' but it feels more likely to me that there's more of Montaigne in the Commonwealth and United States institutions than there are Rudyard Kipling, even if there's never been and never likely to be a Disney adaptation or Andrew Lloyd Webber broadway production of any of Montaigne's essays. 

So, if I learned anything from investing hours in engaging with an antivax friend over the summer, it was a stark reminder that it is possible to mischaracterize oneself also. This seems chiefly to be one of Europeans' historical failings, perhaps to deal with the cognitive dissonance that arise from conquest and colonization naturally. Spain has a counterpart/offspring of 'The Black Legend' which is 'The White Legend'

The consequence of the positioning of those who allude to the Black Legend in order to, in reality, defend the White Legend, has been to silence any criticism of the past: We were marvellous, and anything negative anyone has to say about us is fruit of the Black Legend. And without the possibility of criticism, the science of History loses all meaning

— Esteban Mira Caballos, Mito, realidad y actualidad de la leyenda negra (reality and actuality of the black legend)

But mischaracterizing oneself is commonplace, like the illusion of superiority or the illusion of asymmetric insight. These are good reasons to try and read heterodoxy and to be comfortable with uncertainty. It's also a good reason to be quite sceptical of autoethnography and standpoint epistemology.

Motivated History

"Investigate what is, and not what pleases." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt (The Attempt as Mediator of Object and Subject) (1792)

Yeah so maybe, in a fit of racism, reality is itself a colonial narrative that needs resisting. But I'm going to share my own colonial narrative about how I myself resisted a tempting narrative. I was watching this clickbait titled video Youtube threw up at me:

And for the first time since I learned of him way back in 2002, I had one of the most influential figures in my life described as a lefty. Miyamoto Musashi, left handed? I'm left handed! Da Vinci was left handed! Musashi is the polymathic Da Vinci of Japan, where Hokusai is Japan's prolific Michelangelo. 

It all makes sense. But, some guy claiming Musashi was left-handed once, is insufficient for me, much as I desperately want to connect with Musashi. So I googled this claim, and came up with a very unreliable internet forum thread on Aikiweb:

Miyamoto Musashi developed a two-handed style, using swords in both hands. He developed this after seeing some Portuguese fight with sword and dagger. When he was fighting with one sword, he was right handed.

It has little to no relevance to Musashi being left-handed, apart from that yes indeed, Miyamoto Musashi developed a style of fighting with a sword in each hand. But it was further news to me that Musashi might have been inspired by the Portuguese form of fencing. Because as a gaijin, I too reached the inevitable breaking point with Nihonjinron or the Japanese obsession with Japanese uniqueness.

Anyway, accumulating this extra spurious claim I decided to head to "Old-Faithful" wikipedia and it's wonderful '[citation needed]' keeping us all safe from our own credulity:

The two-handed movements of temple drummers may have inspired him, although it could be that the technique was forged through Musashi's combat experience. Jutte techniques were taught to him by his father—the jutte was often used in battle paired with a sword; the jutte would parry and neutralize the weapon of the enemy while the sword struck or the practitioner grappled with the enemy. Today Musashi's style of swordsmanship is known as Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū.[29]

Interesting, but wasn't I trying to find out if there was any way of verifying his handedness?:

At the moment of his death, he had himself raised up. He had his belt tightened and his wakizashi put in it. He seated himself with one knee vertically raised, holding the sword with his left hand and a cane in his right hand. He died in this posture, at the age of sixty-two. The principal vassals of Lord Hosokawa and the other officers gathered, and they painstakingly carried out the ceremony. Then they set up a tomb on Mount Iwato on the order of the lord.

So when he died he held his sword in his left hand, leaving his right for a cane. That seems to be the sum total testimony of Musashi being left-handed. Whereas when Musashi painted himself:

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Miyamoto_Musashi_Self-Portrait.jpg

Bam. Right handed, wakazashi (short sword) is in the left. Furthermore, there's like zero testimony of Musashi ever fighting southpaw, goofy, reverse-gripped etc. He didn't write in mirror script like Da Vinci, but then again, he did, because all Japanese write top-to-bottom, right-to-left. However, like Da Vinci calligraphy (handwriting) attributed to Musashi survives, and I'm learning to ask questions like 'does handwriting analysis indicate left-handedness, or anything to indicate he was naturally left-handed and forced to be right handed?'

There's still a temptation though, to commit the Narrative Fallacy, in attributing Musashi's innovation into a two-sword style to a repressed or natural left-handedness that made him effectively ambidextrous. 

This is where I notice my bias, my desire to believe that left-handers are basically the most interesting people in the world. Like me. My inability to let go of the myth that lefties are more creative than righties.

So the narrative fallacy can be exposed by the obvious control that of all the potentially left-handed Samurai (we can expect somewhere betwixt 6%~10% of the population) contemporary to Musashi, a period where many were wandering the country trying to make a reputation for themselves and establish a school of swordsmanship and/or be taken into the service of a lord, no other leftys did.

Furthermore, a well documented pugilist like Marvelous Marvin Hagler fought from a switch-hitter stance and frequently switched up to Orthodox in a unique footwork style analogous to Musashi's dual wield school, and Marvelous was naturally right handed.

Whether Musashi was born left handed or not is inconclusive and likely inconsequential. The way to bet, given population base rates, is that he was right handed, which would also explain why he was really good at fighting with his right hand instead of poor or average.

But this incident brought up some other potential hypothesis as to how he got the idea of fighting with two swords:

1. He was inspired by his early training in the Jutte. (His father)
2. He developed it out of direct experience from the 30+ duels he won.
3. He was inspired by the two handed drumming techniques of temple drummers.
4. He was inspired by seeing Portuguese men fighting with sword and dagger.

They are all certainly plausible hypothesis, and given Musashi makes no testimony to his inspiration himself in the Book of Five Rings, nor to my knowledge any of his other surviving texts, they are all untestable. 

A colonial mindset might latch onto hypothesis number four, taking pride in the notion that Europe taught Japan's most famous swordsman and martial philosopher, in a nation famous for swordsmen, a superior sword fighting technique.

A member of a martial arts school might latch onto hypothesis number one, because it emphasises the value of martial arts instruction, the importance of lineage and training and practice.

An arts-student and music major might latch onto the third because it makes the arts look like it has transferable real-world applications. 

And a Japanese nationalist might gravitate to the 'spontaneous inspiration' of hypothesis number two because the credit is purely, chauvinistically on the Japanese dude.

History is full of opportunities to cherry pick like this. Which colonial narratives are fucking known for and lead to pseudohistory and the present need for scholarly revision using the historical method as debated under historiography.

In the case of "from what did Musashi derive his inspiration?", the answer is: unknown. We can't know.

What's important is that we catch ourselves thinking/feeling 'I'd like to believe it's...' and force ourselves to accept uncertainty rather than create it, or worse: to cherry pick speculation when attempting to educate others. 

I would suspect it is something we are all prone to, given that motivated reasoning is pretty much a default, as is confirmation bias. It's something to be wary of when talking about 'resisting colonialist narratives' because as near as I can penetrate this is based in critical theory, which is obsessed with power structures, and leads to the current rampant production of pseudo histories in the service of somehow liberating oppressed and marginalized groups. 

On the Subject of Owning People

I just want to share my personal view. I'll use probably the easiest and most accessible example:

I know people who at one stage in their life if you or anybody asked them who their best friend is, they would have answered 'Jesus' and by that they meant 'Jesus of Nazareth' just to be clear to my friends that live in Mexico. 

If Jesus was a historical person, and he probably was, based on the testimony of Paul/Saul of Tarsus who says he met people that knew the man - I feel that Jesus the man, is not the property of Christians. As in they don't own him, he isn't theirs. Christians are just people that for some reason or another believe Jesus to be the anointed one.

With persons that are both historical and religious figures, of course it gets complicated by supernatural beliefs, like that that person's essence lives on in an eternal soul, and they are besties or equal to the supernatural creator of the Universe so they can do things like 'walk beside' people and be their best friend.

So yeah, if that person feels I'm talking shit about what they believe to be a real and actual best friend (who is also completely incapable of defending their own reputation) I see how people can get a bit proprietary over other people.

I saw a screen capture of a tweet admonishing white people not to discuss the Will Smith slapping of Chris Rock because 'this is between black folks' or something. I did not investigate further, because frankly I have little time for smarmy youtubers dunking on the fringes of far-left and the worst examples of keyboard warriors. But it seems this proprietary view can even apply to living persons. 

For me, the notion of dividing up the world and saying 'you guys have Europe and you guys have Africa and you have the Americas...' etc. just doesn't fly. I object on the grounds of rigging. That's where I would object to curated lists that present some current and likely perishable orthodoxy. This is the Chinese Communist Party's guided tour of Tibet, "just tell me what to read" is passive, like getting a list of textbooks from an educational institution, not an exercise in "actively resisting colonial notions within narrative."

I love Abraham Lincoln, but I don't own him. Thus if somebody was to discover the historical fact that he ordered the largest mass execution in U.S. History, that's not damage done to my property. 

I'm of the view that history, in particular, is a process of discovery, not curation. Now history as curation probably is a "colonial notion".

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it” – Winston Churchill

My Problem with "Erased" or "Forgotten" by History (Contains pedantry).

So memes abound:

sourced here: https://ifunny.co/picture/RN1wyucS8?s=p

sourced here: https://ifunny.co/picture/the-most-fascinating-thing-about-sister-rosetta-tharpe-isn-t-Zp9kkpDq6?s=cl

If I start of with a pedantic truism, if a person was truly forgotten or erased from history, there would be no way to actually know it...because we couldn't refer to history to establish they were missing from it. So obviously the complaint is more along the lines of 'why does everybody know Chuck Berry, but not Sister Rosetta Tharpe?' but there are also historical figures that have been the subject of earnest attempts to erase them from history, perhaps none more noteworthy than Pharaoh Akhenaten. 

But while 'forgotten' is relatively passive, 'erased' implies intent. 

In recent history, a historical milestone transpired that briefly blew up on my socials - the first ever photograph of a black hole. Go science. These stories included a lot of coverage of Dr. Katie Bouman a vital and necessary contributor to this astronomical undertaking. The implication I got at the time, was that it was like 'yeah! see women can take astronomical photos too!' As though there was this prevailing misogynistic attitude that a woman couldn't possibly do science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM). 

What I noticed, is that I can't name anyone who was credited with taking a photo of an astronomical phenomena. (Well, not since Galileo observed the rings of Saturn, if that counts) It isn't like a name is credited on the team that took a photo of the horse-head nebula, the crab nebula, the surface of mars... Is there a statue of the person who discovered Pluto? Was it torn down when Pluto was relegated to planetoid? Are there more statues of Goofy's dog 'Pluto' than there are of the person who discovered Pluto? 

I would also dare say, that Dr. Katie Bouman is now on her way to being 'forgotten by history' for some meme that will do the rounds in 2050.

My problem being, that in a rush to righteous indignation, people who make claims about forgotten history or erasure, never do the disconfirmation exercise. Who was history's first US Naval gunnery officer? How many famous US Naval gunnery officers can you name? Who was the first ever submarine captain? Who was the first ever fighter pilot? Can you name more fighter pilots (eg The Red Baron, Chuck Yeager) than movie fighter pilots (Maverick, Iceman, Goose, Captain Marvel and other Captain Marvel, Will Smith and Bill Pullman in ID4, that Clint Eastwood one, Robotech, Macross Plus...) 

At this point in time, there's a lot of fucking history. There's a lot of historical figures. Furthermore, history is constantly being revised to try and get at the truth even if that is revising down the amount of certainty over historical persons and events, it's an ongoing process.

Undoubtedly there are people that have been forgotten and/or erased from history. A clear-cut example that comes to mind is the disparate estimates of pre-columbian populations of North America, with a consensus around 50~55 million (and some arguing for 100 million) being killed by the diseases introduced by Europeans. With prevailing technology etc, some large number of people are unknown to history. And of course, the whole 'pre-historic' part of history.

The curation of the who's-who of history is a process I have no insight into. I just suspect, that if there's a historical pantheon of women in STEM, Dr. Katie Bouman probably won't make a short list that includes Mary Anning, Mary Sommerville, Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, Hypatia, Florence Nightingale, Marjorie Lee Browne... 

My problem is generally the charge, or implied charge that a cabal of gatekeepers is keeping us from hearing about historical figures that belonged to contemporarily marginalized groups. In my own lifetime, over the course of my education, I've watched Captain Cook go from the guy who discovered Australia, to the guy who circumnavigated New Zealand and mapped the east coast of Australia but is suspected of using a Portuguese rutter. I don't know what the consensus position on Captain Cook is these days. Maybe check wikipedia.

From here, let's now imagine a library of non-fiction books. We are standing outside that library conducting a survey, on our smart phone it will display the details of any book in that library and if we swipe or shake the phone it will randomly select another book in the library to display. Each time a pedestrian passes by, we ask them what they know about the book our phone is displaying. After stopping each pedestrian on their way to the new Carl Jr.'s that opened up down the street gives us 'No' after 'Never heard of it' do we conclude that these books have been forgotten by history? That the library doesn't want people to know about these titles?

Who was Zachary Taylor and what did he do? 

Zachary Taylor was the 12th president of the United States of America. A cishet White man. We know there have been 46 presidents, could you name them all? Did history 'erase' or 'forget' the ones you can't recall off the top of your head? There were at least 7 Henry's to be king of England before the most famous one, what do you know about Henry VII? Henry II? Henry III? Were they Tudors, or Yorks or something else?

Here's some names from history, count how many you recognize and could give a brief description of/best known for (n/43): Tycho Brae, Napoleon III, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Charles X, Isabella of Castile, James K Polk, Aethelstan, Maria Theresa, Isambard Brunel, Casimir Pulaski, Illiam Dhone, Joseph Haydn, Innocent III, John Marshall, Pedro I, Jan van Leiden, Ivan IV, Leo Major, William Walker, Andrew Carnegie, Wojtek, Chris Burden, Frederick II of Austria, Frederick II of Prussia, Fritz Duquesne, Pedro II, Dmitri I, The False Dmitris, Zoe Porphyrogenita, Basil the Macedonian, Talleyrand, Sejanus, Jack Sheppard, Santiago Genoves, Robespierre, Xenophon, Haakon Haakonsson, Elizabeth Bathory, Victor Lustig, Henry Morgan, Aaron Burr, Didius Julianus, Constantine XI...

It's a trick question, because one of them is a bear. But these are all the European historical figures that have been featured on Jack Rackham's youtube history channel one of my favorites. As such, I feel because all his videos are entertaining, and all of the subjects of his videos are fascinating, each of them is in some way shape or form 'worth remembering'. 

Platforms like youtube wonderfully have democratized this process of gatekeeping history. Another channel I enjoy is Forgotten Lives, a channel that is less entertaining, but no less interesting and features exclusively women from history. 

The history is there, in so far as it is there. Forgetting might be the norm, but Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are better known than most of the United States 46 Presidents, and however many supreme court justices, and bajillion CEOs. 

I mean, I don't for example, find it odd that a randomly selected Australian might more easily recall being taught about Prime Minister Gough Whitlam or Bob Menzies, without being able to say a single thing about Wang Mang or a single Indian Monarch, though they may know Mao or Gandhi. Despite China and India being two of the most populous and significant nations in history. 

And within a country's boarders, it stands to reason for me, that far more of a majority ethnic group's contributors to history will be forgotten than minorities. That marginalized groups will have less candidates for the history due to their historical exclusion, hence their candidates will tend to be leaders of rebellions and 'the first x to...' 

For me, 'actively resisting colonial notions...' is for one thing, vague and unintelligible, and for another thing, dubious especially if using definition number 5. But 'actively resisting propaganda' is laudable in the favour of a telling of history that attempts to approach the objective truth. History and competent historians have never been more accessible than right now.

Unfortunately...

The Troubling Trend of Pseudohistory

 “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” ~ Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Anti-racist

"The public are on my side, and they are the people who count." ~ Gavin Menzies, Author of 1421.

"Pondering why Dark Emu was so well received, Sutton and Walshe write that its success appears to indicate a profound lack of knowledge about Aboriginal people and history, “or an unconcern with facts and truth themselves, or a combination of these things”. Whichever, they say, “the situation is troubling”. Sutton tells Good Weekend he believes reading and accepting Dark Emu has become a search for “moral recovery” for some white Australians of goodwill. Walshe says it has become something like “a pilgrimage”. They also question why no one asked Aboriginal people still connected to traditional practices, or anthropologists, whether Pascoe was right." ~ excerpt from 'Debunking Dark Emu' article in the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age.

 “I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, via a since deleted tweet. (sourced/reported here)

 “I was just trying to give my people a myth to live by,” ~ Alex Haley, sourced here.

So in my business schooling days, I learned of a technique called 'BOBS' for increasing the effectiveness of complaints. I won't expound it here, but it's an acronym that combats common intuitions that would appear to strengthen one's case but in fact weaken it. The 'O' for example stands for 'Own your point of view'.

A popular intuition is to blurt out something like 'Everybody hates pineapple on pizza' because more is better right. The problem being you've left yourself open to quiet unassuming Paul saying 'I like pineapple on pizza.' in a way you wouldn't have been if your complaint had been 'I hate pineapple on pizza.'

I suspect in the same way, too many people in an unregulated media market have the intuition that 'it's more likely to persuade the jury I'm the victim if I just gloss over the fact that I was drunk.' or 'I'm more likely to get the job if I tell them I invented Twitter.' A very Machiavellian 'the ends justify the means' intuition.

During my latest residence in Australia spanning the first year of the Global Pandemic, I had two people recommend/assert it was a matter of necessity, that I read 'Dark Emu', (before I was able to track down the suggested reading lists,  my novia in Mexico is really into Indigenismo type stuff so while I got her a more substantive gift I suggested my mum could buy it as a gift for her and then proceeded to read it when I left Australia for Mexico.)

I had many problems with the book when I read it, I emailed my thoughts to one of my friends who recommended it - albeit not to my credit - problems with author Bruce Pascoe's methodology. It was basically that while he appeared to have a brilliant methodology for his books central thesis - to rely on the testimony of early colonial inland explorers of Australia and their encounters with the indigenous people of Australia (we could assume a colonial white supremacist bias, so any testimony of Aboriginal sophistication is extra credible. Stupidly I didn't entertain the possibility that they could be completely ignorant also, like my competence to describe Mexicans or Japanese based on my travels there). 

I did have a problem with the fact that whenever author Bruce Pascoe then goes on to characterise the Europeans, all notations disappear, and it becomes an autoethnography.

I also found it tedious on first reading, with Bruce's voice being really folksy and antiquated using expressions like 'I'll eat my boot' and 'have a cuppa and a yack' that while I'm sure is genuine self-expression on the author's part, I found twee, cartoonish and alienating. 

The big red flag for me was when Bruce Pascoe kind of cites Gavin Menzies, (on pg. 155 of my edition) author of a full-blown discredited pseudo-history. I read on ghoulishly anticipating a mention of Graham Hancock, the lost city of Atlantis, and Ancient Astronauts.

But as far as the content regarding Aboriginal Economy, it seemed he'd actually bothered to research that: he had photos and stuff, and it made sense to me. (I mean it didn't make sense to me why he found the English characterising Aboriginal structures as 'Huts' not 'Houses' was such an egregious affront, but I'm not an architect, I don't know what architectural feature divides houses and huts.)

Anyway, a few months later (that is a few months after I read it, but years after it was published), articles like this started appearing. And a book 'Farmers or Hunter Gatherers?' was published, where two actual scholars collaborated.

I would describe myself as 'not Bruce's target audience' for Dark Emu, because my view regarding native title, reconciliation, reparations etc. is well summarised by straight white male Carl Sagan:

If there is life, then I believe we should do nothing to disturb that life. Mars then, belongs to the Martians, even if they are microbes.

And though I can see an unflattering comparison between the world's oldest culture and potential microbial life on Mars, my position is this: I don't care how sophisticated or not Aboriginal farming practices were pre-contact. What Britain did was wrong. We stole all their land. I am not for example of the view that deforestation is okay if caterpillars haven't figured out flying buttresses yet. As I wrote to one of my friends that recommended Dark Emu:

I am far more persuaded by the Humanist or MLK school of civil rights, than Anti-Racist, and for me the dissappointment was in reading an excellent use of history to recharacterize not just Aboriginals but, for me in light of Gobeklitepi, all of humanity with this living resource of just how much humanity is capable of, and how early, and much of the beliefs and preconceptions I updated were non-controversial, they simply made sense when presented to me. The opportunity missed is in recharacterizing European settlers as scared, ignorant and lacking the technologies the indigenous people possessed and had refined over 80,000 years. Whatever the inverse of Hanlon's razor - that's what Bruce wielded in writing about the Colonists, I'm sure the malicious, racist post-hoc narratives exist, I just don't think I spent a decade living in a climate inappropriate townhouse in Kew because of white supremacy. I think ignorant people ill adapted to a land imported their tech from England. 

And so when the article came up asking if Dark Emu had been debunked, I felt somewhat validated by Dr. Sutton's criticism:

 More than anything, he felt that Pascoe had done the Old People – as Sutton refers to them – a monumental disservice, resurrecting long-discredited ideas of social evolutionism that placed hunter-gatherers lower on the evolutionary scale than farmers. To Sutton, it was a rebirthing of the colonial philosophy used to justify Aboriginal dispossession in the first place: that people who lived lightly on the land had no claim to it, that farmers were more deserving of dignity and respect than hunter-gatherers." ~ From the SMH Article.

(Where I can't take credit, is not seeing the problem in Bruce's methodology of completely excluding Aboriginal voices from his thesis, with the sole exception of his own.)

So, Dark Emu in comparison to a book like Guns, Germs and Steel, which actively resists colonialist notions by refuting the notions themselves, Dark Emu appears to resist colonialist notions by accepting them, reviving them and then trying to make a dishonest case that Aboriginal culture and economics check the boxes of sophistication by antiquated colonial standards.

But the real, I don't know if it's a concern, more of a turnoff, is the making shit up. A text like Dark Emu shall ever be vulnerable to anybody doing source methodology - fact checking any of the claims, Dark Emu is a book that accepts the premise that "economic sophistication" is the currency of dignity, then spins the claims of economic "sophistication" out of whole cloth. (Actually this isn't fair, it is spun out of a polyblend of fabrications, de-contextualization, exaggeration, cherry picking, and double standards with facts.)

Dark Emu though is small potatoes relative to the 1619 project however, I haven't read any of the 1619 project, I'm just aware it has been fact checked, and the head of the project Nikole Hannah-Jones has been described as viewing 'truth' as whatever aids the emancipation of the oppressed. My understanding is that many are comfortable with revising history through equal and opposite mischaracterizations, rather than attempting to asymptotically approach what actually fucking happened.

Personally, I have little or no interest in double standards. My most charitable reading of the Ibram X. Kendi quote is that in a fuller context it might be a particularly loose argument for reparations rather than an argument for literal reverse-racism.

To me, the colonialist notion is basically selecting the narrative that makes you feel good. We invented that. We civilized these people. We never did anything wrong. 

In contrast to history youtubers like 'Forgotten Lives' and 'Jack Rackham' and 'Crash Course World History' one channel I recently stumbled across was 'Hometeam History' which I've barely scratched the surface of in terms of content. It's not unusual for Youtube channels to make source criticism difficult (a good example of somebody demonstrating source criticism behavior is Paulogia's recent attempt to source a claim of a peer reviewed 'miracle') and this is the dark side of the democratizing effect of Youtube:

Given my interest in history, what was news to me in this video was not the debunking of the 'top 10 lies told about Africa' but the actual 'top 10 lies' allegedly made by European and Arab writers, which I'll reproduce here: 

10. All Africans live in mud huts. 9. Africans never invented the wheel. 8. Africans never sailed the seas. 7. Africa is a "dark continent" (inferred to mean Africa has no history worthy of note) 6. Africans have unsophisticated forms of spirituality. 5. Africans are the dumb brutes of warfare. 4. Egypt is the oldest civilization in Africa. 3. Africa never had its own civilizations. 2. Africa has no writing. 1. "The very egregious lie" that black people sold their own during the Atlantic slave trade.

I could say so much about this particular video being not very good. But to me its biggest deficit is that the lies told are themselves unsourced. It doesn't follow a structure of 'Xenophon wrote that the Africans had not invented the wheel in x CE' for example. On top of this there's the vagueness surrounding the concept of 'top 10' what's the criteria? egregiousness? frequency? persistence? 

I'm almost 40 and the only one of these lies I'd ever heard was number 1. But if you watch the video, I'll let you debunk the debunking of the 'lie' for yourself. What it suggests to me is that the context of a white Australian living in Mexico is very different, a context in which the default is really for people to have no real exposure to and subsequent opinion of African history. 

From the context I do have, it seems more likely a candidate for a 'lie' would be that Europeans didn't enslave Europeans. But recent shows like Vikings and Norsemen, HBO's Rome and classic movies like Ben Hur and Spartacus (and Gladiator might arguably be a 'classic' by now) give ample opportunity to realise that whites enslaved whites. Or you know, read the Bible, you don't have to get very far into the book of Exodus before God tells the Hebrews how to keep Hebrews as slaves.

All of this is to say, there's a very human instinct that runs something like 'well they made shit up and didn't bother to fact check it, so I'm going to make shit up and it's not cool/not fair to fact check me.' add on top of that just general incompetence and the Dunning-Kruger effect - we now live in an age where it's possible for people with no relevant credentials whatsoever to appoint themselves the person to achieve some laudable and ambitious goal, whether it be the appreciation of African history and culture, Aboriginal history and culture or Philosophy in the case of Abigail Thorne's PhilosophyTube channel where in 2013 a 20 year old appointed herself a competent tutor for the world over the simple and narrow subject of philosophy.

I have to navigate many an intersection of ignorance and confidence in my information intake, and for this I am grateful for my own brief colonial education in the subject of history where I was shown Rosie's Secret and taught a valuable lesson about gullibility and the importance of critical thinking, along with the relative unimportance of production values, branding, packaging etc.

Just to cap out this section, as a result of 'dipping my toe into decolonizing my "bookshelf"' Youtube's algorithm eventually threw up a video 'The First Buddha was a Black Man!' and 'King James! The Black King Who Had The Bible Translated Into English!' Respectfully, I'd suggest that these videos are definitely on the psuedohistory side of the boarder, but from a perusal of the content of the channel I'm going to assume the channel's curators are sincere and well intentioned. Thus, I must disclose that my visceral reaction was to find them so bad and clumsy as to be hilarious, and wanted to believe they were shitposting, much like I wanted to believe the Insane Clown Posse's song 'Miracles' was satire, rather than sincere. 

The claim about King James being black was so bizarre that it did introduce me to 'Black Hebrew Isrealites' which is the probable origin of these claims. The probable original epistemology used was likely revelation, because it appears akin to Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith's claim that American Indians were a lost tribe of Israel punished by God to have red skin. (My source on this is Southpark).

All in all, I feel a need to flag psuedohistory, or qualify that I am not interested in it because wording 'decolonizing your bookshelf' as 'actively resisting' leaves the door open to fabrications, embellishments, cherry picking, double standards and baseless revisionism, so long as it isn't "colonial". Which given all these intellectually dishonest practices are documented colonial practices, requires pretzel-like mental gymnastic contortions. 

Or you know outsourcing the intellectual pretzel making to Herbert Marcuse who coincidentally to my chosen metaphor was of German descent.

Defining "Open Mindedness"   

Does it work? ~ Lee Kuan Yew's rule.

Even though I'm of colonial stock. Decolonizing remains a curious idea, and I resolve to be open minded. Though, having moved in (or rather, around the periphery of,) new-age circles for a few years now, I feel an experience-based-need to define what 'open mindedness' means to me: 

It's a willingness to examine the evidence for virtually any claim. 

There are intellectual cultures and subcultures of 'received wisdom' and 'informed attribute' where claims are simply asserted and the only real quality control is that some authority figure reserves the absolute right to make unjustified assertions. In such sub-cultures, it is my experience that 'open minded' is understood to mean 'accept without question.' Or as youtuber Theramintrees recounts from one of his professional development training services 'to be a bucket, not a sieve.'

If I were to parody this definition of open-mindedness it would be after the stab wound patient dies despite burning sage and placing quartz crystals on them and removing by hand the badness from their aura, the alternate medicine practitioner turns to me and says 'keep an open mind.'

The beautiful colors blind people's eyes,
The appealing music stun people's ears
The delicious flavors make people's mouth numb,
To indulge in hunting makes people's heart wild,
To pursue rare treasures makes people's behavior improper.
So, as the sage attends to the inner world, not the outer world,
Throw away the latter and adopt the former. ~ Tao Te Ching, Chapter 12.

So I am aware that there are racist/sexist thought quite accepted in academia that try to revive stereotypes that things like logic, reason, work-ethic, punctuality, rationality, empiricism, even mathematics etc. are not bounties of humanity available to all but are tools of oppression imposed by dominant groups (colonial powers) on those they have come to dominate.

In that sense, while being lazy, and willing to give up 'work-ethic' something I rarely manifest, I'm not particularly champing at the bit to give up reason, rationality, skepticism, empiricism, punctuality etc. So I doubt I'll actually 'decolonize' my bookshelf or mind by these definitions of whiteness, as the world of ideas is not a zero-sum game where my awareness of and ability to practice rationality or reason to the fullness of my competence is at the expense of using intuition, or metaphor, or allegory etc. For example for some years I have worked on-and-off on building my emotional competence, and it has enhanced rather than reduced my ability to be reasonable, it is quite beneficial to reasoning to be aware of your own and others' emotional states as useful data.

So the project is more as described here in this NPR article, though, it has a distinctly United State's context, where I guess it has this problem of the taint of colonization. Ideas that are founded on the writings of 19th and 20th century Europeans like Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Beauvoir...

Okay So I'm just going to begin in Africa

Zi gong (a disciple of Confucius) asked: "Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?"

The Master replied: "How about 'shu' [reciprocity]: never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself?"

--Confucius, Analects XV.24 500 BCE

The first thing is deciding where in the world to start decolonizing, this is the hard task of trying to spot blind spots, to focus on what I don't know that I don't know. 

For me personally, Asia has been pretty well represented in their own words through culture, education, interest etc. But Asia is a large region with a long history. In my formative adulthood I read Confucius' Analects, The Tao Te Ching from Taoism, Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Baghavad Gita which is part of the Mahabharata which I haven't read in its entirety, nor seen performed. I'm much better read in Japan's martial philosophy, with the Go Rin No Sho (Book of Five Rings), The Yagyu Family's Art of War by Yagyu Munenori, The Unfettered Mind by Takuan Soho, The Gateless Gate a collection of Zen Koans, Hagakure and the dubious 'Bushido'... 

In this inventory exercise, I am vaguely aware of what I haven't read - the Mahabharata, the Tales of Prince Genji, Mao's Little Red Book, any of the vast array of Chinese Poetry, anything from the Korean Peninsula, anything from Viet Nam, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka...

Furthermore, what cultural tomes are most relevant? For example, DC and Marvel comics versus the Shonen Jump cannon? And what's important here, what a culture produces or what resonates with a culture? Who am I getting in touch with: the 40 year old salary man reading My Hero Academia on his Tokyo subway commute, or a leading Japanese academic thinker with his Nihonjinron paper read by a few Japanese academics? (Most likely from my reading, an extinct Japanese citizen of a particular class that likely died out when Commodore Perry opened Japan with his gunboat diplomacy and ushered in the Meiji restoration).

Fortunately, the influence of Japan upon my bookshelf has made me aware of the pitfalls of treating any people as a homogenous group. If it isn't true of Japan, where education really pushes the homogeneity idea, it probably isn't true of anywhere.

At this resolution though, I wasn't getting anywhere, so I visualised the world in my head and was like check, check, check, check, check... Africa. My biggest blind spot is Africa. I began logically with a google search of 'African philosophers' hoping to discover a novel (to me) worldview that had lain in my grasp this whole time. I love different worldviews.

1. The Maxims of Ptahhotep (check it out here) 

If you are a leader, / Take responsibility in / the matters entrusted to you, / And you will accomplish things of note... ~ Vizier Ptahhotep, 9,1.

Granted it isn't mind blowing stuff, but it is impressively old, and it's one of those things that our leadership still can't get a handle on 4,320 something years later. The Maxims of Ptahhotep are of intrinsic interest because they were composed somewhere in the vicinity of 2,375~2,350 BCE. (For context, this work is almost 2,000 years older than the Old Testament.) 

Here's some more excerpts sourced from Wikiquote, but I couldn't find an online translation of the entire Maxims. 

Do not be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned. For knowledge has no limits, and none has yet achieved perfection in it. Good speech is more hidden than malachite, yet it is found in the possession of women slaves at the millstones. ~ Maxim no.1

To resist him that is set in authority is evil. ~ no.31

 Do not repeat slander; you should not hear it, for it is the result of hot temper.~ no. 23

So again, nothing mind-blowing, but where in that period of history of better known philosophers between the Greeks and Germans repeat similar ideas, it is fairer to say that they were not producing anything mind blowing. 

I also cannot find an offline English translation and collection of these ancient maxims. I mean, this is the collected wisdom of a 96 year old advisor to absolute Monarchs of Egypt. Absolute monarchy's a tune that survived into the European Enlightenment at least.

2. The Immortality of Writers (check it out) 

 ...Those writers known from the old days, the times just after the gods. Those who foretold what would happen (and did), whose names will endure for eternity. They disappeared when they finished their lives, and all their kindred forgotten. They did not build pyramids in bronze with gravestones of iron from heaven. They did not think to leave a patrimony made of children who would give their names distinction, rather they formed a progeny by means of writing and in the books of wisdom they left...[3]

They gave themselves [the scroll as lector]-priest, the writing board as loving son. Instruction are their tombs, the reed pen their child, the stone surface their wife.....Man decays, his corpse is dust. All his kin have perished; But a book makes him remembered through the mouth of its reciter. Better is a book than a well built house...

So this quick google-wikipedia exercise is already far more rewarding, illuminating than the booklists recommended by the articles. Ironically the author of this text is forgotten, lost to history. Just the words and their contents live on. That's still good for something from 1190 BCE. But the wikipedia article points out that it is notable for its rationalist-skeptical outlook, because it favors this form of immortality over building fancy tombs for the Egyptian afterlife.

I don't in any way shape or form identify as African, let alone North African. But there's more compositions of identity available than the superficial. It's great to hear a voice from an orator advocating a rationalist-skeptical world view. That makes me feel immortal to know there were Spinoza's before Spinoza and that Spinozas will keep popping up.

3. Kocc Barma Fall

 "If you want to kill a proud man, give him what he needs to live everyday. In the long run you've made him a serf." ~ Attributed to Kocc Barma Fall in 1993 movie Guelwaar

In the context of the film, this maxim is levelled at foreign-aid-dependence. Perhaps a poverty trap. I haven't seen the film. But Kocc Barma Fall is one of those thinkers where one has to reserve the right to be unimpressed. Kocc Barma is interesting though and I wish I, as an English speaker could access more information about him. Because my impression is that he's kind of a Confucian or Lao Tzu figure.

Again, I cannot source the knowledge claims in this video, and it piques my interest, but here is the wisdom behind his unique hairstyle with 4 tufts of hair:

1. You shall love your wife but you shall not fully trust her.
2.  A king is not a reliable relative.
3. Your dead child will never look at you as his own father.
4. Any country needs an elder.

And I found this blog with a different wording of the four maxims:

1. Love women, but never lend your confidence to them
2. The king cannot be kin
3. The adopted child is never a true son
4. It is good to have an old man in a village

I feel once upon a time I found more English translations of Kocc's proverbs, but it was at Kocc that I was definitely feeling the disappointment in exploring African philosophy (due to accessibility) and was also for the first time unambiguously unimpressed (by the content). 

It's worth noting Wikipedia's chronological jump from 'The Immortality of Writers' is a jump of some 2500 years to Kocc Barma Falls, jumping clear over Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. But in 16th century Wolof, we appear to have a philosophy that distrusts women, the young and kings as well as welfare. Kocc Barma Falls could be quoted by Republican Candidates quite lucidly, and there perhaps is one of the key things I find valuable about exploring the wider world and digging into history, which is the disillusionment of black-and-white/all-or-nothing thinking, aka splitting, where the world is viewed as one where everything was a Utopia until these uniquely bad horrible Europeans who think they are so great come along and fuck everything up.

4. Ahmad Baba al-Timbuktu (check him out)

So once again, prepare for disappointment, frustration and to be unimpressed. As I was. There's little to nothing on Ahmad Baba's actual output despite him authoring 40 books. His Wikipedia page focuses on a singular opinion, which I'll get to in a moment. But here's how the wikipedia page on Africana philosophy describes him:

One of the foremost scholars of Timbuktu was Ahmed Baba (1556–1627), who argued against what he called "racial slavery".[17]

Which I read as an early abolitionist in the West African region, keeping in mind that this man lived contemporaneously to 1619 when the first slaves arrived in non-Spanish or Portuguese American colonies. But his dedicated wikipedia page elaborates:

Ahmad Baba made an effort to end racial slavery and criticised the association of Black Africans with slaves, particularly criticising some Muslims adopting the narrative of the Curse of Ham, found in the book of Genesis.[14]

However, Ahmad Baba was not an advocate for ending the slave trade generally. Rather, in writing the Mi'raj al Su'ud ila nayl hukm mujallab al-Sud, he sought only to reform the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade with the goal of preventing Muslims from enslaving other Muslims.

According to William Phillips, al-Timbukti essentially advocated religion-based slavery instead of racial-slavery, with Muslims of any ethnicity being immune from being enslaved.

So frustratingly again, there's no clear path to digging any deeper. This was probably a progressive view in the context of the times, essentially deconstructing a stereotype that Black Africans weren't Muslim. But alas, it's a terrible reason to not enslave people, you know, because "they could believe in the same book as you", compared to the more compelling reason that you shouldn't enslave anybody, ever, period.

5. Zera Yacob (check him out)

 "If I say that my father and my mother created me, then I must search for the creator of my parents and of the parents of my parents until they arrive at the first who were not created as we [are] but who came into this world in some other way without being generated."

So Zera Yacob's wikipedia page is one of the first linked to the Africana Philosophy page's Pre-Modern section that feels substantial. Above is a quote of a cosmological argument for God. This is kind of respectable, likely impressive in its own time, but not impressive in the Post-enlightenment-Modern era because we can immediately recognise the fallacy of composition that plagues all cosmological arguments. 

I would be interested in reading more from Zera if I can get my hands on it, and after Ahmad Baba, it's refreshing to see this from Zera:

"what the Gospel says on this subject cannot come from God. Likewise, the Mohammedans said that it is right to go and buy a man as if he were an animal. But with our intelligence, we understand that this Mohammedan law cannot come from the creator of man who made us equal, like brothers, so that we call our creator our father."

Zera does bump up against the intelligibility of 'decolonize' that I have mentioned before. Because of this interesting tid-bit:

Around 1510, Abba Mikael translated and adapted the Arabic Book of the Wise Philosophers, a collection of sayings from the early Greek Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle via the neo-Platonic dialogues, also influenced by Arab philosophy and the Ethiopian discussions.

I don't know enough about the spread of Islam into Africa, whether it was imperial, colonial or purely ideological or some combination of any of the three. But "European" influences were creeping into Ethiopia even as early as the 17th century. I have no problem with cultural appropriation and cross pollination as such. It's only an issue with that mission of 'actively resisting colonial narratives'. But it might not be an issue because the colonization of Africa depends on the definition of colonization.

I guess for the record, what is good enough for me in terms of 'precolonial' is anything that predates New Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa (1884-1914).

6. Yoruba Martial Philosophy (check it out here and here)

"One of two things befits an Eso: The Eso must fight and conquer or the Eso must fight and perish. An Eso must never be shot in the back, his wounds must always be right in front. One that wears a coronet must never flee in battle." ~ translations of the Emi Omo Eso proverbs.

Now if there's any philosophy I'm particularly interested in, it's martial philosophy. For one thing, it tends to have the reassuring burden of having to be a practical philosophy, which either works or you die.

The Emi Omo Eso proverbs of the Eso Ikoyi warrior caste of the Yoruba's of West Africa. I'm basically replicating the content of the wikipedia entry already though, because the content is light. Where I would love to find lengthy treatises for the instruction of Eso's young in analogous traditions of Musashi or the Yagyu's, there's just the proverbs above, that paint a very Spartanesque code of honor similar to 'come home with your shield or on it.' 

It's interesting to see similar martial codes arise regarding a cavalry unit, as opposed to the Spartan phalanx, and it appears to deal with the age old problem of having to cooperate with people who could kill you, because they could kill you. So you get these codes of essentially the necessary self-restraint to cooperate to mutual benefit. That page helpfully links to chivalry and bushido. Elsewise, the information is sparse. But I'm just dipping my toe in.

So more on writing scripts and linguistics later, but I'm going to spell it 'Ashe' for expediences sake. Ashe appears to be a philosophy that deals with metaphysics. Maybe a cosmology. It appears most closely related to my pre-existing conceptual map to concepts like karma and dharma out of South Asia, though clearly distinct, with an animist flavor.

"The recognition of the uniqueness and autonomy of the ase of persons and gods is what structures society and its relationship with the other-world.[2]"

I won't pretend to understand this philosophical concept, nor set my ambitions on ever understanding it. But here finally is a description of something that I'm glad to see, because I'm getting tired of Jordan Peterson's Christian Chauvinism that the Enlightenment and West is built upon the unique 'made in God's image' concept. 

The source doesn't seem very good, being a 1989 book about Yoruba Art and 'Thought' but I'll take it. Ashe as described appears to necessitate the acknowledgement of individuals, and potentially the uniqueness and contingency of every point in the universe.

Ashe is something I'd like to go deeper on, though it may not be as old as Abrahamic creation myths, nor go as deep. I found a...not great but more expansive video on the subject. But I'm less interested in the metaphysics of a force that cannot be demonstrated to exist, and likely doesn't outside of phenomenology. I'd be more interested in terms of learning how to extrapolate from the ashe philosophical concept to behaviors like how flora and fauna get treated, systems of law etc.

The wikipedia pages on Yoruba religion are not great nor consistent. I would emphasize that I don't regard this as the fault of the subject, rather an accessibility issue. I found this under 'Olodumare' sub-heading though, which is very similar to my understanding of the Confucian ideal, also the Aristotlean pursuit of virtue:

Perhaps one of the most important human endeavors extolled within the Yoruba literary corpus is the quest to improve one's "Ìwà" (character, behaviour). In this way the teachings transcend religious doctrine, advising as they do that a person must also improve their civic, social and intellectual spheres of being; every stanza of the sacred Ifá oracular poetry (Odu Ifa) has a portion covering the importance of "Ìwà". Central to this is the theme of righteousness, both individual and collective.[7]

 Again the sources aren't great, it appears to link to a blog. So having wet my toes in a centuries old tradition I'll leave Yoruba philosophy there, open to finding a book in a museum gift shop some day and learning more, or hopefully when people have exhausted the rather contemporary decolonized book-lists more interest grows in Pre-colonial Africa.

7. Inaccessible Mentions

A collection of values and practices that people of Africa or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings. While the nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups, they all point to one thing – an authentic individual human being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental and spiritual world[4] ~ Wikipedia excerpted definition of 'Ubuntu philosophy'

So here is a great imbalance in terms of my project: simple accessibility. I self describe my research project as merely "dipping my toe" but in some sense, that's all I can do. Go to the Wikipedia page 'List of Ancient Greek Philosophers' and just give that list a bit of a scroll. It is long to the point of being unwieldy. If someone with a life-long ignorance of European philosophy persuaded by my suggestion of reading heterodox were to mirror my exercise and 'dip their toe' into Greek philosophy, a google and a wikipedia list would quickly drown them. I suggest someone is better off going to the Google info panels and just starting with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. 

I can, without investing any more money than necessary for internet access, read English translations of Plato's Republic, The Duc de Rochefoucald's Maxims and my ongoing project of reading the collected essays of Montaigne. European texts, potentially because of "the tendency to prize and acknowledge certain types of authors and narratives over others," the wealth available on wikimedia commons resulting from Europeans translating European texts into English well enough (and long ago enough to enter the commons) makes it super easy to go deep.

The Africana Philosophy page lists less than ten names for all of Africa before we reach the Modern era. Now, granted the propensity to sign and or attribute work to a single author might be a European preconception. The Pre-modern section also contains philosophical traditions such as Bantu Philosophy which promised an interesting, potentially unique take:

According to Tempels, the primary metaphysical category in the thought of Bantu-speaking societies is Force. That is, reality is dynamic, and being is force.

Tempels argues that there are three possible views of the relationship between being and force.

1. Being as distinct from force, that is, beings may have force or may not.
2. Force as part of being, that is, being is more than force, but dependent upon it.
3. Being is Force, that is, the two are one and the same.

He argues that members of Bantu-speaking cultures hold the last view of force.

Yabba dabba do! A philosophy that is not built upon the concept of "being" that is super interesting... however I ran into this:

"Bantu Philosophy has been criticized, primarily on the ground that conclusions are gross generalizations which seek to characterize the thought of an entire continent, which, it is argued, it is fundamentally impossible to do in any meaningful way.[citation needed]"

Without citation it's worth an outsider checking out just how large an area the Bantu language group covers. Which is a lot. Like more than all of Europe depending on how we are feeling about Russia (and how Russia feels about Eastern Europe). It's frustrating because if there is indeed this vast group of peoples with a vastly different philosophical root to 'cogito ergo sum' or Platonic forms or whatever, one book published in 1945 by a Belgian Franciscan Missionary is frankly insufficient.

Likewise, Nana Asma'u appears a very interesting 19th century African scholar and poet, but her English wikipedia page does not feature a single quotation translated into English. A little dig through the sources cited did yield this as one of the two poems I could find (brace for disappointment):

The usurers will see their bellies swell bigger than gourds
In size and exposed to Ahmada.
They will rise on the Last Day as if possessed of the Devil
The Qur�an told their fate, Ahmada.
The stink of the adulterer is worse than the stench of
carrion:
He will be driven away, so that he is far from Ahmada.
The slanderer, the hypocrite
And he who gives false witness will not see Ahmada.
With their tongues hanging down to their chests, they will
be exposed
For they will not get salvation from Ahmada. (vv. 40-44)

Fire and brimstone stuff, not too impressive when removed from her historical context. (From my limited understanding, regarding women Islam was very progressive compared to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Byzantium, but if compared to 1st, 2nd or 3rd wave feminism of the 20th-21st century...well.) And much to my chagrin I downloaded a whole pdf after google searching for a bit, in search of quotes. It turns out to have beautifully preserved the script it was written in, which near as I can tell is 'Fulfulde Ajami', a language I do not speak or read, and I feel relatively few people do. But that's the obstacle, I can't draw a comparison between this poet and a famous and frequently translated poet like the Sufi Mystic Rumi, who's work I like very much, to the point of being truly influential. 

What remained on my list generated from the initial Wikipedia page, are some 19th century scholars who start to react/be influenced by European colonization of New Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa. I don't know the strict definition of 'Modern' but for me it's when I start to get actual photographs that I begin to lose interest on account of the likely entanglement with 'colonial notions' even when reacting to, critiquing or actively resisting. 

My focus is, and remains on how a Eurocentric bookshelf may have impoverished me.

Africa: Obviously not just Philosophy

I'm sure anybody that has read this far, that knows a bit about Egypt, noticed I missed the funerary text: The Egyptian 'Book of the Dead' and I know philosophy in particular is mostly entangled with religion in most places in the world. It's just that I identify as an atheist. I'm furthermore not the kind of atheist that has ruled out Christianity through exposure to it but will still give astrology and quartz crystals a go. So it's more that for me personally I don't go 'oh wow! SUPERSTITION!!!' anytime, ever. 

That said, the Book of the Dead is certainly of historical interest, particularly for comparative religion, just like the religions of other ancient river civilizations like the Sumerians and the mysterious Indus Valley. The 42 negative confessions of Maat are refreshingly unfixated on blasphemy and livestock as a potential pre-cursor to the 10 commandments and what not.

Philosophical traditions are merely something I'm personally interested in. There's also a whole world of aesthetics, but that is not an aspect of Africa I am wholly unfamiliar with. Though Egypt obviously does a lot of work for the continent in terms of occupying mental real estate, I was familiar with monumental architecture like that of Timbuktu, and the aesthetics of African people like the Masai, the Zulu, the Mali, Songhai etc.

There is interesting stuff I've discovered though in the domains of history and linguistics. Less so on linguistics so let me include this I found fascinating:

Though not a linguistics buff, this short educational video about the proliferation of scripts in West Africa is for me the kind of thing that is creativity fuel. A great general concept to have lodged in my knowledgorium to consider in future problem solving scenarios: that I may have already rail-roaded my range of solutions by starting at the level of how something real world (like the anatomy with which we produce sounds used in speech) is the ground and the script is just the map. Here's numerous concrete examples of the map-ground distinction flowing out of West Africa. It likely has fruitful applications to fields like computer science and coding etc. 

There's also possibly an illuminating trade off there. Clearly a language like English doesn't utilize the full capacity of sounds a human being can produce. We've lazily dropped a bunch of things or failed to develop them that we find regularly used in other languages. (Like Japanese syllable 'Tsu' was one of the first I had to learn, and my mother and sister for some reason cannot pronounce 'Tzatziki' the popular Greek dip.) 

Evidently though, in some cases where peoples are using a more versatile tonal language, it can prove a hindrance to developing a script. Of course, the script you are reading is in the realm of 'good enough' at representing our spoken language, and certainly does not capture the diverse ways in which English is spoken. For example if you google the word 'sloth' it will have attached with it "/slôTH,slōTH/" and up until Sandi Toksvig came out as pronouncing it the second way on the last season of BBC's Qi, I had no idea anybody pronounced 'sloth' slōTH.

There's a whole world of stuff that English can't do, which is broader than just my second and third languages have taught me, nor my exposure to Aboriginal place names and dreamtime stories growing up Australian.

Also, Africa is a wealth of Pre-Abrahamic religions insofar as they have been preserved. I am definitely an advocate of comparative religious studies, as I view it as a good curative for parochialism and also a good prophylactic against superstitiousness. But it also definitely interests me less than a single author trying to scribble out a coherent philosophical view on questions big or small. 

Again Egypt I feel occupies much mental real estate in the colonies, most products of the colonies are familiar with at the least Horace and Ra, if not Toth, Anubis and Isis. I imagine most people can picture the Egyptian pantheon with its various animal headed deities, and have probably either been, or been with a girl who has painted the eye of horus as makeup for a party.

Less, but still a significant amount of people might be aware of Haitian Vodou "voodoo" and be aware it has its roots in West and Central Africa, thanks to early 90s video games like Gabriel Knight, The Secret of Monkey Island and pop culture like True Blood or in the case of Australians, John Safran's run on ABCs Race Around the World which showed a man biting off the nutsack of a goat. 

Given how vast and diverse and old Africa is, there's going to be a lot of religion and folklore, something I'm always open to, but personally not being persuaded that anything supernatural exists the interest is limited to creative inspiration. Something that has been mined by institutions like Dungeon's and Dragons.

Then there's history, like I earnestly don't believe that it is common knowledge that one of the wealthiest Monarch's ever was Mansa Musa, mind you, I don't believe most people have ever heard the expression 'as rich as Creosus.' On that front, nothing does as good a job of downloading a whole bunch of West African history into my brain as one of my favorite podcasts ever (well worth earmarking for your next 2 hours of idle recreation):

Which brings me to...

Why *I* Suspect "Decolonization" has little to no relationship with "Pre-colonization"

"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", or "I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me." ~ Terance

There's a cognitive distortion called 'splitting' that I'd describe as when a person cannot construct ideas like the following:

1. Pizza tastes good, but is not healthy.
2. Bran tastes bad, but is healthy.

Because tasting good, is good, and being healthy is good. So how could something be both good and bad? This example might seem ridiculous, but this kind of thinking is present in people who cannot believe that cigarettes could possibly be bad for them (or more charitably, as bad as they say), and like, vegans claiming tempeh is 'really good' (as distinct from 'really good for you' or at least better for you than pork rinds). Not to mention all the vegan smokers out there. (Sorry vegans, I know you take pretty much constant shit.)

But history is most often hostile to splitting. One of the few historical players universally considered 'bad' are the Nazis, everybody including post war Germany agrees, so defeating the Nazis is good, but the Nazis are defeated by The British Empire and the Soviet Union. Hopefully, history has disillusioned us of any illusion that either the British Empire and the Soviet Union are simply to be regarded as 'good' and that only 'bad' followed from each empire's collapse.

It appears to me, that people of European descent, who identify as 'white' don't have the same standard of splitting to contend with, at least recently - like late 20th century recently. 

It's pretty clear that Europe and "Judeo-Christian" is capable, if not fond of, producing characters like Ivan the Terrible, Cesare Borgia, Emily Bathory, Vlad the Impaler, Robespierre, Delphine LaLaurie, Torquemada, Columbus, Mary Tudor, Richard III, Darya Saltkyover, Henry Morgan, Francois L'Olonaise etc. without having to go anywhere near Hitler and Stalin.

What I'm very sympathetic to, is the experience of engaging with people who argue in bad-faith. The self-deceptive. The intellectually dishonest. 

Over the summer months I corresponded with a vaccine-hesitant friend, and noticed flagrant inconsistencies - for example if I sent a video by Dr. Todd Grande, a clinical psychologist who views anti-vax as a conspiracy theory, the fact that he was not a medical doctor was disqualifying, even when he is commenting on the psychology of anti-vaxxers. However with Dr John Campbell, an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, not being a medical doctor is of no consequence.

So, there are annoying people in this world that will look at the Spanish conquest of North and Central America, and upon learning that the Maya and Mexica (Aztec) practiced ritual human sacrifice, will wash their hands of any need to understand the character of the Spanish conquest and say, the characters of Hernan Cortes and Christopher Columbus. A kind of logic that goes something like 'this person didn't pay their parking tickets therefore no need to investigate their murder.'

And I can totally imagine the dishonest minds eager to dismiss the horrors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade upon discovering that the slave trade pre-existed European contact. (Someone trying to create a Pan-African pride for example, has an impossible task when Africa is as diverse and divided as Europe, Asia and the Americas. All the way back to ancient Egypt enslaving their Nubian neighbors to the south. It is a worthwhile endeavor to explore this history though, having rewatched the Prince of Egypt, the story of Exodus even Disneyfied* for a general audience is appalling slander.)

How I conceptualize it, is by imagining that when the Nazi regime started to deport European Jews, Romany etc. if a more entrepreneurial Britain turned up and said 'we'll buy them, transport them, breed them and work them as livestock so you don't need the mess of deathcamps.' A deal that proved so lucrative it caused the Nazi's to rapidly expand the criteria for deportation in order to supply Britain's demand for slave labor.

All history really denies us, is splitting, as in Europe = bad, Indigenous = good, or Europe = good, Indigenous = bad. The picture just gets more complex generally with investigation where there is, hopefully unsurprisingly, good and bad in all parties.

Youtube appears to have a particular niche, for example, of African-Americans reacting to Thomas Sowell videos about slavery, where you can see people in real time begin to process a de-simplified narrative. [1],[2],[3],[4],[5],[6],[7].[8] 

(I would disclaim, that I strongly suspect the people that populate these videos are highly self-selected, and not necessarily for open-mindedness. I have it by Coleman Hughes that repeated polling demonstrates that black people are generally politically Democrat, and socially conservative. So it strikes me as reasonable to expect a large online subculture of black people who are highly critical of calls to 'defund the police' and what not. Furthermore, on subjects more economical where I have some training, like public education etc. I'm unpersuaded by Thomas Sowell's stance, but simply don't know or understand enough to refute him or debate him, I just remain skeptical. So while Sowell on history appears much more rigorous than most Youtube historians - certainly I am more inclined to trust his published research than a channel like Hometeam History, I don't treat Sowell as the gospel. I just wouldn't debate him, much as I would never debate Chomsky on account of my being a "tomato can" to those heavy weights. I would like to see Sowell debate someone like Mark Blyth though.)

By contrast, having over the course of writing this, seen more of 'Hometeam History's videos, I'm more inclined to think his channel is 'not-bad' in general, it may even be the best in the short-history-bites of Africa genre. But it could easily be bested by an identical channel that puts the name of the subject of the video in its video title and/or description (Like Jack Rackham's Life and Times series or Lost Histories) so it can easily be compared to a wikipedia entry or otherwise fact checked...but I digress.

The point is that Hometeam History appears to struggle with the cognitive dissonance of actively resisting a colonial notion (like Europe had to civilize the world) and the uncomfortable parts of history (Like slavery being the rule, not the exception). But in this video on Hometeam History:

The video as near as I can tell is just a discussion of a single paper, which I managed to find here which is fine, (Hometeam History makes it really hard to check its sources, and it's links to more general explanatory documents are all either insecure or broken, at least in my region) it's a pretty rarefied and specific topic, the stuff PhD's are usually made of, and this video is a passion project of an individual with unknown qualifications speculating on a topic that fits his own brief.

Anyway, he says (transcribed by me):

"I thought it would be interesting to discuss the human rights advanced by Igbo society, before the interaction or influence of any outside group. So what was the human rights situation in Igbo land? Well before we get into that I think we need to address the elephant in the room, if you will, most if not all ancient and medieval societies practice the enslavement of other human beings and this reality usually did not at all contradict any moral standard they may have held. This of course applies to Igbo land so kindly keep in mind my previous statement about how the idea of human rights evolved over time."

What's wrong with this statement/request for context? In my view absolutely nothing at all. It just is a sentiment that needs to be applied - unfortunately for fans of splitting - to colonial powers too. The idea that human rights evolve, will be a problem, or at least cause cognitive dissonance, for some people. 

It is a relatively easy thing to predict the psychographic profile of the person for which this will be a problem: it is any person that thinks the solution to a long standing near-intractable problem is actually simple and just lacks commitment. i.e. "we're right, you're wrong and everything would be fine if you can just admit you are wrong."

For example, people who think the world just needs to stick to their holy book** and all the problems would go away. Helpfully, the Atheist Experience has put together a 54 video long playlist of calls they've taken from people attempting to refute, rationalize and or justify biblical slavery.

I have been introduced to thinkers (well, thinker) that do not believe that the Mexica (Aztecs) practiced ritual human sacrifice. It is understandable to me; we're talking about a people who've had human sacrifice thrown in their face by the colonial powers and Christian missionaries for 500 years. Furthermore, I have come across a conflation between preserving indigenous customs, traditions and practices and believing in an indigenous cosmology, which makes the legality of human sacrifice a bit of a problem. (Think: if military reenactors felt one could not truly reenact a historical battle without actual human casualties, and so then tried to prove the medieval wars of Europe or the US civil war had no casualties). Alas, I have been presented with no compelling case whatsoever to explain away all the archeological evidence of Mesoamerican human sacrifice nor how to confidently dismiss the written testimony that predicted those archeological finds centuries after they were committed to paper.

Furthermore, horrific as the Mexica ritual sacrifices appear to be, I again contextualize it as a cultural practice relative to cruel and unusual capital punishments employed by other states. (stoning, the breaking wheel, burned-at-the-stake, death by elephant, hanged drawn and quartered, boiling, flaying, gibboting...all nasty stuff). Lest we forget, Christianity the worlds largest subscribed to religion can be lucidly described as (and has been by Christopher Hitchens) "a cult of human sacrifice". The 'Good News' of Christianity is that the anointed one, immaculately conceived, was sacrificed, that's what makes him Christ the redeemer. Yeah okay, he's fully human and fully God whatever that means, and 1 + 1 + 1 = 1...

Some kind of actuarial thinking needs to be considered also with the complexities of history to weigh the pain and suffering caused by a deliberate but misguided practice like ritual human sacrifice and the sheer stupid ignorance of bringing small pox across the Atlantic. 

Still living through a period where so much suffering is caused by ignorant people acting as a disease vector (the fucking global pandemic if you don't know what I'm talking about) that suffering caused by ignorance is real, then imagine what it is like when the mortality rate jumps from less than 2% to like 90% in the pre-smallpox-vaccine era. All other crimes of conquest put aside.

It's the Power-Rangers-confronting-an-annoying-monster-in-the-park-causing-him-to-become-giant-then-destroying-half-the-city-in-a-giant-robot-battle approach to ending ritual human sacrifice.

One thing that was curious, was when I came across interest in the mythical Amazons, originally sent to me because they thought I'd appreciate the art-style. To me, at the time, the question of whether the Amazons ever existed was strange, like equivalent to 'do centaurs really exist?' or 'do dragons exist?' and the Amazon video was interesting in presenting the theory that the nomadic Scythian people were the basis of Amazonian legends, which I can imagine is about as satisfying as being told that dinosaur fossils are the 'real dragons' for anyone hoping to discover a Martial-Matriarchy. Here's a more in depth video on debunking the Amazon myth, though broadly the conclusion, and potentially the sources are the same. Similarly, I believe history offers no substantial or conclusive evidence for the existence of Shield Maidens outside of legend. So the search for matriarchy might turn to the future rather than the past.

That's all to say, I still don't see my way to tolerating double standards. If Europeans can come to terms with the ugliness in their history, so too everyone else. It's the human condition. It may be an argument from personal incredulity, but I cannot see another approach to history that isn't intrinsically racist, or at the very least condescending.

It might be that our bookshelves are colonized, populated by texts that were prized by the colonial powers. In the reading lists on offer, there is an apparent denial that Asia, the Middle East, Polynesia, Africa, Australia and the Americas have anything pre-colonial to offer.

So my suspicion is that it just relates to a particular conception of how the world works, likely, critical theories:

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."[2] 

Mmm...deliciously vague. Where wherever one finds inconveniently yet more history not just of people enslaving people, but sacrificing prisoners of war to their gods, or confining women for the duration of their menstruation or insisting they conform to gender roles and marrying them off as part of a property transaction, one is going to get collisions at the intersections. So better to just recommend a bunch of non-scholarly works that were published in the last couple of decades, or apparently better yet, years. 

*I'm aware that Prince of Egypt is a Dreamworks production, not Disney.

**In practice if people would just stick to their interpretation of their holy book.

My Trouble with Oral Traditions

 "Whenever an old man dies, it is as though a library were burning down." ~ Amadou Hampâté Bâ

"We are puzzled as to what service all this writing serves. The Indian needs no writings; words that are true sink deep into his heart where they remain; he never forgets them. On the other hand, the white man loses his papers, he is helpless." ~ Four Guns, an Oglala Lakota tribal judge of the 19th Century.

"This is a good hour to relate to you how we celebrated
the sun dance in days long past, to make you see it in your mind
in all its ancient awesomeness.
Just telling about it makes me a little uneasy. Formerly we
didn’t talk much about it even among ourselves, and then only on
solemn occasions, when twelve old and wise men were present to
make sure that what was told was right, with nothing added and
nothing left out." ~ John (Fire) Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions as told to Richard Erdoes, "Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions" Ch.12.

So oral traditions, appear to have a number of drawbacks. The first and most obvious is a lack of paper trail, there's no 'version history'. 

Furthermore, I sympathize with Amadou Hampate Ba, it's a false analogy, as probably Four Guns would demonstrate. Losing an elder is a serious drawback, like the cultural equivalent to spilling coffee on your laptop after a few months of not backing up the hard-drive, but losing a repository of an oral tradition, or an elder of the tribe is not the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria burning down, it's more like just potentially losing the collected books of Diogenes the Cynic, not him and hundreds more authors. 

It was one of those things that I naively collided with in my proximity to the indigenismo scenes here in Mexico. I was baffled to see elders whom have so many responsibilities and still transmit so much orally put at risk in the Covid pandemic, particularly when in my view these traditions face numerous succession issues already. 

Oral transmission at least is fragile. There's also just the question of bandwidth. Imagine if a meteor hit the earth and wiped out just about all of humanity, and it fell to you to quickly transmit to a child the history of humanity. (and particularly if you did not want the people of the future to not repeat colonialism's mistakes).

Can you imagine problems with orally transmitting a last-will-and-testiment? Just ask a Sunni or Shia scholar about the Hadith of the Pen and Paper.

Then conversely, there's the advantages of the written word. 'Voices of the Past' is a very cool historical Youtube channel that reads written accounts. I'm yet to come across a single oral tradition that can handle anywhere near the level of detail of a journal entry or letter home.

Having a physical primary source can also definitively settle any question of what was 'said' albeit, what was written. 

Then there's the massive advantage of being able to append with commentary. With oral transmission, rather than append one's own commentary it seems more likely that one would just change the oral tradition. Here I'm likely using an argument from silence, because I've never come across an Oral tradition that transmitted information like 'Homer said Apollo sent a plague among the Greeks, Zorba commented that he thinks it more likely Apollo sent the plague among the Trojans, then Dimitris thinks Apollo sent the plague to both, Ana says it wasn't Apollo it was Artemis.' 

My first copy of 'Sun Tzu's Art of War' came not just with Sun Tzu's treatise, but commentaries by other famous Chinese generals. 

Having last year for the first time read Prince Frederick of Prussia's 'Anti-Machiavelli' translated, I would dearly love to get a copy of Machiavelli's 'The Prince' that has Old Fritz' commentary on every chapter after every chapter of the prince.

I suspect though with oral transmissions, one of two things happen depending on the character of the recipient - 1. The original lesson is overwritten as it were, when the student comes to transmit the lessons on with their 'amendments' attributed as the original tradition. 2. Changes to the tradition happen unconsciously, unintentionally based on how we actually remember shit.

As part of this decolonization exercise, I've already come across one high profile and consequential limitation of this lack of paper-trail:

Donald R. Wright, a historian of the West African slave trade, found that elders and griots in The Gambia could not provide detailed information on people living before the mid-19th century, but everyone had heard of Kunta Kinte. Haley had told his story to so many people that his version of his family history had been assimilated into the oral traditions of The Gambia.[22] Haley had created a case of circular reporting, in which people repeated his words back to him.[23][24]

So for context, the author Alex Haley is searching for his ancestor that he believes was taken from Africa in 1767 a century outside of the range of elders and griots' oral traditions. Wright as a historian is in a position to avoid the confirmation bias shown by the author, in that he's interested in specific figures other than the author's postulated ancestor, so he observes that the elders and griots in The Gambia don't know of anybody from the time period but Kunta Kinte. 

The major point is the 'circular reporting' because, well, I don't claim to understand an oral tradition, but the 'tradition' part seems to involve having to establish that a whole bunch of people are telling the same basic story. Like claiming I met my girlfriend over the summer holidays when my family went to Canada, is something I said, but it isn't an oral tradition until hundreds of my descendants are telling the tale of how I met my mysterious girlfriend in Canada during the summertime of their ancestors youth.

It appears in a very short space of time, Alex Haley was able to inject an oral tradition containing historical claims into The Gambia. 

A bit over a year ago, my partner said to me 'check this out' and invited me to look over her shoulder at an online class she was taking. It was in Spanish, so I could just see images, as she explained to me he was saying the Spanish brought their pre-conceptions of human sacrifice with them and painted the indigenous people's of the Caribbean and Americas with them. In short, that the practice of human sacrifice in the Americas was made up by Europeans. Libel and slander.

This struck me as an extraordinary claim, and frankly, a fringe belief. Now the Sagan principle that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' sounds nice, and is often quoted, but I don't know exactly what Carl Sagan meant by that. What it has come to mean to me, is that an extraordinary claim is one that runs against the consensus or is otherwise hard to believe. 

What I've come to think of as 'extraordinary evidence' is that not only do you have to provide evidence for the claim, you have to also debunk all the evidence running against the claim. Students in that session I was asked to 'check out' to their credit asked the teacher about the physical evidence, and nothing that was translated to me described anything short of handwaving.

So this is almost the sum total of what I can access about the teacher, taken from a website that publishes his books:

"He is a renowned ethnohistorian and writer of numerous books on the study and teaching of pre-Hispanic cultures and the development of the Indigenous Communities today.

With a methodology based on the criticism of sources such as codices, chroniclers and historical documents and their contrast with the oral history consulted directly in the indigenous peoples, his studies have allowed to complete the correlation of the Julian, Gregorian and Mexica Calendars ." ~ [translated by Google, bad automated translations of Spanish grammar to English grammar may bias one to think something is more suspect than it warrants.]

There's no possible way *I* can do source methodology, the best I can muster is to see if he has any citations on google scholar, (he doesn't) and I can leaf through the copies of books of his we have, to see if he uses notes (he doesn't, just short bibliographies, by contrast Bruce Pascoe's 'Dark Emu' does cite his sources through notes and has a 15 page bibliography and has been plausibly refuted by actual scholars.) Or whether wikipedia entries on the Mexica (Aztec) Calendar mention him or cite him or his books as a source (they don't). 

And it sets up this unfortunate situation, regarding a question like Mexica/Aztec practice of ritual human sacrifices where on the one hand there are primary written sources by eyewitnesses, secondary sources of friars recording the testimony of native eye-witnesses and archeological evidence consistent with the primary and secondary sources. On the other hand is the 'oral history' consulted by some guy from indigenous peoples 500 years after the events. (To put this span of time in context, the location of and existence of whole physical Mesoamerican cities got forgotten in the same period, only to be rediscovered when someone bumped into them or attempted to plough a field.)

While it seems plausible that my google translation of 'criticism of sources such as codices, chroniclers and historical documents' as an application of a critical theory approach, or perhaps even source criticism, I begin to suspect that 'criticism' is more that he doesn't like the historical documents and prefers the "oral history" he has located.

If not romantically entangled with a student of his, I'd be content that no significant number of people nor significant people, take the man seriously. He appears to be an astrologer that has sold some books to people who are into astrology. It seems unlikely he has even an analogous impact to Terrance McKenna, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tole or in the Espana-sphere Alejandro Jodorowsky.

But it is a prime example where the elevation of an oral tradition (which is a thing, oral 'history' is not) is consequential. 

When archeological finds corroborate contemporary written testimonies, including damage to ribcages consistent with a stone knife extracting a heart, hundreds of skulls with cavities consistent with the display racks etc. suggesting an oral tradition subject to 500 years of colonization and Catholic missions (and I don't know where one would find the indigenous group that could transmit the necessary and authoritative oral tradition, given that the area was the earliest to be conquered and colonized by the Spanish and is now Mexico City, not a rural area in say Chiapas) can tip the scales back into 'reasonable doubt' territory 

I view the claim as akin to Reverend Lovejoy claiming that the obvious explanation for the collection plate money to be under his daughter's mattress is because Bart has somehow snuck his bedroom into the Lovejoy house.

"Use your imagination people!" ~ Reverend Lovejoy.

Again, being descended from a European background, I don't view the actions of Hernan Cortes, Christopher Columbus, Cesare Borgia, Edward Longshanks, Richard III, Vlad the Impaler etc. etc. as anything I vehemently need to deny in order to live with myself, nor to appreciate the achievements of Europe and its various (and variously civilized) civilizations. 

I can understand, marginalized indigenous groups buying into colonial notions like 'social evolution' by trying to deny those colonial notions, rather than actively resist them - by you know, acknowledging that Europeans are exceptionally savage brutes themselves, and it never stopped them from building civilization.

MOHANDAS GANDHI was once asked: “What do you think of Western civilization?” “I think it would be a good idea,” he replied. ~ CBS News Special, “The Italians” 1967 (exchange probably apocryphal)

Ritual human sacrifice is a serious charge, and rather than the flawed heuristic of 'believe victims' I prefer that serious charges be taken seriously. 

There's two parties of concern:

1. The victims of ritual sacrifice.

2. The practitioners of ritual sacrifice.

I can understand how a person not practicing cognitive empathy might think its just nicer to believe that nobody was ritually sacrificed. But this erases the victims from history, and I remind people that if the Mexica did indeed practice ritual sacrifice, they were probably not filled with shame over it, but sincere religious believers that felt they were honoring the gods and possibly the sacrificed too.

As in, it is likely that if I travelled back in time and witnessed such a sacrifice, and said 'hey there's this guy that's saying you guys never sacrificed anyone' they wouldn't be all 'thanks for glossing over this grisly bit of business' but more like 'someone's talking shit about us?' or just simply 'heresy!'

In a situation of uncertainty, and unknowability, concluding one way or another carries with it the risks of disrespecting someone. But there's just substantial concrete evidence, all on one side of this question that I have seen with my own eyes such that the risks aren't even. 

We (Europeans) also don't tend to think it is nicer to pretend the Holocaust never happened, the Chinese are not fans of some Japanese's take/recollection of the Nanjing Massacre.

A less emotive analogy might be if a history buff approached me and said 'I found in archival documents, a bunch of evidence that one of your maternal great-grandfathers murdered a man in cold blood.' and I said 'well my grandparents or parents never mentioned that so it can't be true.' (I have no idea who either of my maternal great grandparents are. It's not implausible that one of them murdered someone.)

There appears to be this prevailing myth at least among lay-people like me, that is something like when you have a writing system (aka literate) it degrades (perhaps via nueroplasticity) our ability to relay information orally with any acceptable fidelity.

A kind of notion that when playing a game of "telephone" we'd ace it every time if we only weren't made so unfit by reading and writing.

As such, but for the introduction of writing systems, oral traditions are an equally reliable method for preserving information over centuries.

So in a strong form (and probably straw man) version of the oral tradition fidelity, we can observe at least that no culture on earth preserve a tradition of their people's actual migration consistent with harder scientific disciplines like archaeology, geology and genetics. Oral traditions for example haven't answered the open question of how and when the first people migrated into the Americas.

Instead we find creation myths involving blood seeping into the earth and people springing up, feathered serpents making people out of corn, and life being breathed into clay and then it being necessary to make a woman out of a rib from the clay man rather than just using more of the abundant clay and then a serpent tricking someone into eating an apple by telling the truth and then it being necessary to curse apple eaters to biological reproduction, and gods spying on gods and then ejaculating onto wool and the sperm becoming people etc.

There are however exceptions:

"The Gunditjmara believe that the landscape's features mark out the traces of a creator, Budj Bim (meaning "High Head"), who emerged in the form of the volcano previously called Mount Eccles. In a spate of eruption, the lava flows, constituting his blood and teeth, spilled over the landscape, fashioning its wetlands. "High Head" still refers to the crater's brow, which can be accessed only by Gunditjmara men wearing special emu-feather footwear.[10]" ~ from wikipedia page on the Gunditjmara (An Australian Aboriginal people)

The volcano in question erupted some 30,000 years ago, and there's archeological evidence that the region was occupied by humans at the time the volcano was active.

"Stories are used to preserve and transmit both tribal history and environmental history, which are often closely linked.[35] Native oral traditions in the Pacific Northwest, for example, describe natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis. Various cultures from Vancouver Island and Washington have stories describing a physical struggle between a Thunderbird and a Whale.[39] One such story tells of the Thunderbird, which can create thunder by moving just a feather, piercing the Whale's flesh with its talons, causing the Whale to dive to the bottom of the ocean, bringing the Thunderbird with it. Another depicts the Thunderbird lifting the Whale from the Earth then dropping it back down. Regional similarities in themes and characters suggests that these stories mutually describe the lived experience of earthquakes and floods within tribal memory.[39]" ~ sourced here.

Again, as an athiest, it is impressive that an event like a volcano eruption can be preserved through oral tradition for 30~40,000 years, and earthquakes and tsunamis for multiple generations. However, I don't believe any god but one identical to Spinoza's (ie. the natural world) revealed itself to the ancestors of the Gunditjmara people in order to create an exclusive Mens-only club with a dress code, nor that a thunderbird dropped a whale from the sky and caused an earthquake.

I feel it is worthwhile imagining the world from the perspective of ancient people that thought they directly experienced divine beings, that they saw Zeus' hurling lightning bolts down because he was throwing a tantrum up there. That they saw the Rainbow Serpent migrating across the sky between billabongs. That they felt the earth shake as Namazu writhed underground.

However, I tend to attribute causation to meteorology, refraction, tectonics etc. Furthermore, I should point out  I haven't dug far into the source material, so for example, I have no idea how an oral tradition dated a volcanic eruption so far in the past (or indeed I don't know a single thing about how Aboriginals kept track of time, like to my knowledge there's no Aboriginal oral calendar or oral almanac). Seemed worth a google, and it seems like what I guessed.

I don't know if I'm reading a historical fact transmitted via oral tradition, or a creation myth transmitted via oral tradition from which it has been concluded the historical inspiration is a volcanic eruption from 30k+ years ago. 

Much like the Scythian people are thought to be the inspiration for the Amazon myth and dinosaur fossils are thought to have inspired dragons and griffins.

It may seem like a difference without distinction, but in my head I characterize the first as 'this is what happened' and the second as a 'that must be what you're referring to!' which is more of a problem the more discreet a historical claim is made.

Insisting on the historical 'soundness' or 'reliability' of oral traditions is also a very colonial notion, because "Judeo-Christian" foundations are in turn founded on oral traditions, the earliest parts of the Old Testament being compiled 750 years after the events described in the book of Exodus, the New Testament has the Pauline epistles dated to 20~30 years after Jesus death. (I'm deferring to these Youtubers as well as wikipedia's 'authorship of...' pages) it's not like Europeans, particularly conservative Europeans aren't heavily invested in the reliability of oral traditions.

For many religious people of predominantly European descent, oral traditions are the foundations of their reason for being.

We know oral traditions to be unreliable though, because their reliability can be tested. I don't quite have my head around all the technicalities, but to establish an oral tradition, it appears that the tradition part has to be documented. And documentation allows us to test reliability. 

Law may have a 'presumption of innocence' but I don't feel history can be charged with a 'presumption of accuracy' where only through having documented discrepancies can we prove history inaccurate. An example being Cortes' account of Cuahtemoc's death:

There are a number of discrepancies in the various accounts of the event. According to Cortés himself, on 27 February 1525, he learned from a citizen of Tenochtitlan, Mexicalcingo, that Cuauhtémoc, Coanacoch (the ruler of Texcoco), and Tetlepanquetzal, the ruler of Tlacopan, were plotting his death. Cortés interrogated them until each confessed and then had Cuauhtémoc, Tetlepanquetzal, and another lord, Tlacatlec, hanged. Cortés wrote that the other lords would be too frightened to plot against him again, as they believed he had uncovered the plan through magic powers. Cortés's account is supported by the historian Francisco López de Gómara.[18]

According to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a conquistador serving under Cortés who recorded his experiences in his book The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, the supposed plot was revealed by two men, named Tapia and Juan Velásquez. Díaz portrays the executions as unjust and based on no evidence, and he admits to having liked Cuauhtémoc personally. He also records Cuauhtémoc giving the following speech to Cortés through his interpreter Malinche:

Oh Malinzin [i.e., Cortés]! Now I understand your false promises and the kind of death you have had in store for me. For you are killing me unjustly. May God demand justice from you, as it was taken from me when I entrusted myself to you in my city of Mexico!

Díaz wrote that afterwards, Cortés suffered from insomnia because of guilt and badly injured himself while he was wandering at night.[19]

Oral traditions don't preserve these discrepancies, as they change and evolve, they appear to erase the previous tradition, unless documented. 

For example, this section opened with a quote from John Fire Lame Deer where he refers to the sun dance being transmitted as an oral tradition. I've read his whole book, and though mostly Lame Deer is the source on Plains Indian culture, there are sections where Leonard Crow Dog is recorded, who's book I haven't read but he is credited as bringing the sun dance to Mexico. I have witnessed three sun dances, all by the same group, and beyond a few vagaries, I don't know the history of the group I've seen perform. 

Evidently Lame Deer was happy to commit to the printed word details of the sun dance prior to the 1993 Lakota Summit V's declaration of war against exploiters of Lakota spirituality: 

"Whereas sacrilegious "sundances" for non-Indians are being conducted by charlatans and cult leaders who promote abominable and obscene imitations of our sacred Lakota sundance rites; ... We hereby and henceforth declare war against all persons who persist in exploiting, abusing, and misrepresenting the sacred traditions and spiritual practices of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people."

The secret might be out, and with my universal realist worldview I tend to side with Crow Dog's mission of preserving the customs of the people (including by opening it up to other populations like Mexicans), but I shall not propagate my own knowledge of what I've observed and what I've read, because like the Lakota Summit, I have the near human universal antipathy to new age hippies.

Suffice to say, what I've witnessed vs what Lame Deer describes have both substantial similarities and substantial differences. The number of days over which the dance takes place is the same, but the duration of the dances is different. The preparation of the dance space is completely different. When the dancers purify themselves in a sweat lodge differs. The dancers offerings also take place over a completely different length of time and the methods are much narrower, as well as what is permitted in terms of interactions.

It may seem like nitpicks, but that seeming will only last until somebody has chastised you for some imagined transgression that apparently really matters. Or reduced a grown man to tears.

Obviously on the matter of religion, there's an ill-defined line to walk between showing respect for other people's beliefs and culture, and observing beliefs you don't hold. 

Anyway, Lame Deer commits to writing many phrases that indicate a sacred practice like the sun dance is not monolithic, it has to change and adapt with the times and alludes to variation between groups.

The oldest transmitted oral traditions probably belong to the world's oldest living culture in the Aboriginal people of Australia. I also much prefer the hypothesized Proto-Indo-European people as the source of common shared myths like the dog that guards the underworld, the storm god defeating the serpent and the world tree, as much more plausible than the Jungian 'collective unconscious' favored by Jordan Peterson or Joseph Campbell.

In summary, my problem with oral traditions is: when they are elevated (without any demonstration) to hold the same properties as written accounts. We all owe a great debt to oral traditions for preserving global culture that would otherwise be lost to pre-history, a good distinction I again obtain from youtuber Theramintrees is that traditions exist in service of the people, people don't exist to serve the traditions.

A Brief Stopover in Australia (& New Zealand)

"This [Aboriginal] perspective dispels any illusion that individual thinkers hold the keys to human coexistence." ~ Morgan Brigg and Mary Graham, The relevance of Aboriginal political concepts (1): The current pandemic and the importance of ancient wisdom

 ‘I’m just trying to knock on the door of the philosophy department, and ask “when are you going to start taking seriously Aboriginal knowledge as philosophy?”’ ~ Stephen Muecke, Co-Author Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology

"Some of my best friends are Aboriginal." ~ Eddie Perfect, 'Dwayne's Song'

Lest given all the bashing I've done on Jesus and pals in this post thus far have you saying 'tohm first remove the log from thine own eye' I thought I'd just cover pre-colonial Australia, and to a lesser extent NZ our neighbor I've never been to and know next to nothing about.

Let's make no bones about it: Australian colonialism is one of the most horrific and shameful executions of colonialization in human history.  

Australia, land of Terra Nullius, Stolen Generations, White Australia Policy, Children Overboard and other historical black eyes.

There are no small victories to cling to either, Aboriginals didn't practice slavery, human sacrifice or widow burning. If there ever was a candidate for 'splitting' the British and subsequent Australians bad, Aborigines good, is probably the best candidate. The Dutch, the British, the French came and saw a culture that had found a sustainable equilibrium for over 50,000 years, and the British came to stay.

I'll always remember the epiphany I had on or around 30th November 2006 when I read on wikipedia's home page that South Africa had legalized same-sex marriage. I was like 'woah! South Africa? Didn't they have apartheid?' then quickly realized the only reason Australia didn't have apartheid was because we didn't need it. I'd read Nelson Mandela's 'Long Walk to Freedom' by then so knew that if the whites are 90% plus of the democratic vote, your country doesn't get anything from apartheid. 

To this day, Aboriginal Australia really has no representation in Parliament. 

Anyway, I haven't mentioned any pre-colonial or "decolonizing" book titles from Australia in this section yet, but it's relatively easy and entertaining to dip one's toe into pre-colonial Australia. I feel probably the best jumping in point is Babakuieria:

(Edit: This video link died, I hope not because it was linked to in this post, as I support the 1986 approach. Anyway, other links here, here and here.)

This was made in 1986, and I think for all the excellent satire within, a subtle point of the satire that might be missed but is good cognitive empathy is that in the power-dynamically switched Aboriginal voices it portrays ignorance and naivete on the part of the oppressors, not malice or supremacy. 

There's loads of books on Aboriginal dreamtime stories and songlines, I was introduced to mostly the one's of the form 'how the kangaroo got it's tail' or 'why the koala doesn't drink water' in primary school. I believe primary education has improved on this front, and kids are taught the name of the traditional owners of the land they are on. I believe in some places kids are even taught an aboriginal language whether it be their own or the traditional owners'.

A good resource might be the Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia.

Fun (as in engrossing, engaging, entertaining) resources might be First Australians, Redfern Now, Ten Canoes and Rabbit Proof Fence. Also, I would just recommend Nick Cave's movie 'The Proposition' because it's the best 'Western' set in Australia. I cannot recommend the very Bazzy, Baz Lehrman epic 'Australia'.

Australia also has National Indigenous Television (NITV) and programs on other national broadcasters like 'Message Stick' (okay, now defunct but hopefully is archived and accessible somewhere on Australia's digital television.)

Most of this material mentioned pre-dates the mainstreaming of far-left memes that came around in 2016. So I recommend them because they don't preach or lecture, they are not based in critical theories that are hard to get on board with if you believe an objective reality exists and constrains our beliefs...they simply illustrate both the living and historical Aboriginal culture and serve to raise the dignity and esteem of Aboriginals.

New Zealand too has probably much more successful and better known films like Whale Rider, Once Were Warriors, Hunt for the Wilder People etc. New Zealand has a treaty, unlike Australia.

Somewhere in 'Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast from Seattle's Sweaters to Maine's Microbrews' there's a page or spread dedicated to Australian white's that notes (paraphrasing, I couldn't get my hands on the source) 'Every Australian white person's heart is heavy with the plight of Aboriginal Australia' and it is in my view an apt-description broadly speaking of public sentiment.

Books, when people come to them early enough or at the right time, have the power to be transformative. And for a lot of readers, this is the right time — witness the many anti-racist book lists circulating on social media. We must recognize the inherent value that good literature has, and the ability of language to strike an emotional chord. But someone, at some point, has to get down to the business of reading — as Lauren Michele Jackson writes at Vulture. Simply handing someone a book cannot automatically make them care. ~ Juan Vidal, "Your bookshelf might be part of the problem" npr.org

The clash of public sentiment, the general desire for reconciliation with the Aboriginal people vs the facts on the ground, is somewhat identified in my opinion by Juan Vidal in his article on de-colonizing your bookshelf, though I would say I'm agnostic as to the strength of the first claim about the transformative power of literature. 

I'm not going to source this next point, largely because I can't be bothered and I don't anticipate it being a strong sticking point; but Sarah Pascoe in one episode of Frankie Boyle's New World Order a BBC political comedy panel responded once to Greta Thunberg something to the effect of 'We were all taught about climate change when we were in school too. Then we grew up and got busy.' or something like that. 

I suspect, based on my own interactions, and part of my enthusiasm to engage in a decolonizing of my bookshelf is because a common psychological defense is that dissent or disagreement or apathy is always a product of ignorance - "if you had just read [if it comes to it...Hegel in it's original German] you'd agree with us." 

I am someone who is open to discussing 'systemic racism' provided what the 'system' is is up for discussion. Riding off Sarah Pascoe's comment re-climate change and the realities of 'adulting' or whatever, in Australia's case the big systemic obstacle to reconciliation is that the vast majority of Australian's lives revolve around the servicing of mortgage debt in order to speculatively profit off of rising property prices. I would be unsurprised if more Australians are ignorant of the purpose and function of negative gearing, than are ignorant of Australia's colonial history and the injustices and savagery it contains. I am extremely confident this is the case when it comes to Australians I can reach. Very few could make the connection between doing the responsible thing Australian adults do and buy an extremely expensive home, and the inertia on closing the gap between Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders and the rest of Australia.

As for Aboriginal philosophy, philosophers etc. well, firstly it is constrained by a lack of writing systems, to delve into the pre-colonial. It's constrained to artworks, archeology, linguistics and oral traditions etc. 

Growing up in Australia, and being middle class enough to have eaten salad from a wooden bowl, I've watched enough ABC and SBS to have been routinely exposed to the disclaimer "the following program contains images of deceased persons which may be distressing to indigenous viewers" or something to that effect. Which is a particular constraint in some subset or totality of Aboriginal cultures - a taboo against mentioning the deceased. 

I don't know enough as to if this renders it impossible to identify influential Aboriginal thinkers from pre-colonial times. Famous indigenous figures like Lionel Rose, King Billy and Marvelous, Eddy Marbo, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Truganini etc. are preserved in history and memory largely through colonialist notions, like documentation and eschewing the taboo of mentioning and publishing images of dead people.

Enough excuses though, here's what I found, and I'd couch this as 'books/articles I wish I had read instead of Dark Emu':

Firstly there's no wikipedia page that describes 'Aboriginal philosophy' the first subheading of the Australian philosophy page is titled 'Indigenous perspectives' and it firstly suggests 'Aboriginal religion and mythology' and otherwise simply contains:

Australian indigenous traditions attribute moral authority outside the individual to The Dreaming, which is bound up with the relation of human society to land.[1]

So I'm yet to come across any material that would correct my view that pre-colonial Aboriginal philosophy is intertwined and indistinguishable from religion.

The Dreaming is worth taking an interest in. In the pursuit of heterodox thought to "European" philosophies though, it has limited appeal. As an atheist, I don't think the Dreaming happened, a concept like 'everywhen' is useful, and one could even draw analogies to Einsteinian relative space-time, but it is functionally akin to a kind of 'prehistory' where any certainty of chronology breaks down. 

So I turn away from wikipedia and on to google, where I found interesting articles about:

"Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology" Krim Benterrack, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe. 

The same article also mentions a more recent publication "George Dyungayan’s Bulu Line: A West Kimberly Song Cycle." described as: 

The book is an experimental translation of oral poetry, and was a collaboration between Dyungayan, a Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains and Dr Stuart Cooke, and was heavily influenced by the methodologies of Reading the Country.

Stephen Muecke shows up again as the author of the paper "Australian Indigenous Philosophy" here's the abstract which describes what I am coming across:

In his article "Australian Indigenous Philosophy" Stephen Muecke discusses the fact
that neither Australian philosophy nor Indigenous Australian philosophy exists as a field of study. Settler Australians have imported their philosophical traditions and have left it up to other disciplines to undertake the translation work of knowledge in the long-lived Indigenous traditions.
Here, anthropology, history, and cultural studies have taken up the challenge. Muecke revisits his 2004 book Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy in order to refine some of his arguments about philosophical practice and the damaging periodization into "ancient" and "modern" cultures in colonial societies like Australia.

One of the scant but promising articles I found here, categorized by Australia's public broadcaster under 'religion' and links to some 9 other articles I will work through, so far I've read four, and have to invoke my right to be unimpressed, probably the crux of the issue is stated within the article itself:

There is no single or authoritative source of truth for Aboriginal political philosophy. All perspectives are valid and reasonable in the context of relational responsibilities and ethical conduct. Our modest contribution is to explicate a particular constellation of Aboriginal political concepts that are particularly relevant in our time.

I also suspect the Aboriginal co-author of this series, Mary Graham who teaches "Aboriginal history, politics and comparative philosophy" at University of Queensland, would have come across the problem of authority a field such as Aboriginal philosophy has. This is somewhat demonstrated in the ABC radio Podcast featuring the two authors as guests, where I feel co-host Waleed Aly asks the pertinent questions and I'm left with the impression that as yet, the field of Aboriginal Philosophy is interesting but incoherent, or alternately simply plagued by mischaracterization given the quagmire the four participants get into over what and why liberalism. (I actually do feel an obligation to warn potential listeners that co-host Scott Stevens seems to have a predilection for what can only be described as "wank")

Hence what reads as immodest, but I'd identify as the 'modest contribution' described above, is that the articles are a near-word-salad of assertions about Aboriginal philosophy, very academic but it's hard to find any actual content in the articles themselves. The subheadings on the parent document gave me an inkling that they might be in the mould of "continental philosophy".

I am convinced that there is much to learn yet from the living culture of Aboriginal Australia, even confined to something like standpoint epistemology, I feel this is probably why I feel I get more out of Redfern Now, Ten Canoes and probably could from an anthology like 'Growing up Aboriginal in Australia' or ABC programming like 'You Can't Ask That: Indigenous' are valuable resources worth a squizz.

Here's a concern though...

Voice of the Voiceless

Oh dear... it seems that some people still live under the long and undeserved patriachal society....

Cross out the 'mankind' etc etc... you sexists (in this, I am referring to the ones who wrote the article)!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pontificating.wiki (talk • contribs) 07:44, 2 August 2008 (UTC) ~ From Wikipedia entry: Bunjil Talk Page.

So I want to touch on a piece of cynicism that arises in me unbidden. I cynically believe that there's something very attractive about a cause for which the subjects of those causes are so marginalized that it is hard for them to supply the demanded presence for the cause.

I get especially cynical when it is incredibly easy to get on that cause. For example, the core of my marketing strategy for my exhibitions was writing personalized invites. Someone could, and is welcome to, cynically interpret this as what it was - a marketing strategy intended to get people to turn up to my exhibition.

Writing some 1,100 invites over the course of 8 exhibitions was hard work, so even with the most cynical interpretation of my action, the fact is that I did it. I wrote all those invites. 

By contrast, if somebody cynically does something that costs them nothing, like changing a profile picture on Facebook or not challenging assertions or unsound arguments when they are tribally aligned... I get very cynical.

So I'm naturally concerned when wealthy white people jump on a cause for which it is relatively hard to get the subjects of that cause to be present every time the cause is invoked. I wrote about this in my uberpost on representation. Aboriginals are like 2% of the Australian population and they aren't evenly distributed across every square kilometre of Australia. 

Aboriginal people have a voice, the aforementioned NITV, there are Aboriginal intellectuals, athlete celebrities and Aboriginal bodies. etc. It's just very easy to find spaces in Australia where there are no Aboriginal voices and it is subsequently very easy to speak on their behalf.

Australia has so very many platforms available to talk about Aboriginals where a speaker will not suffer the inconvenience of having an Aboriginal present to talk about themselves.

For example, I got it into my head that Aboriginal society was free of homophobia and even had a traditional form of same-sex marriage. I think largely through my exposure to Melbourne radio station 3CR's Queer programming, particularly 'Queering the Air' for which I receive their social notifications.

From memory it was sometime around the debacle of Isreal Folau's sacking by Rugby Australia after posting religiously motivated homophobic content to his instagram account and watching friends struggle with the intersections of religious freedoms and prejudices. At some point in the outcry on my socials, someone shared an article suggesting that homophobia in the bible was the result of a mistranslation going from Hebrew to Latin to German to English or something. It isn't, the article was an example of another intersection people pay little heed to - Gay people that want to keep their Christian faith without the self-loathing. 

At that point, something sparked in my brain that was like 'I bet there's actually no evidence to support Queer friendly Aboriginal culture.' The Aboriginal reconciliation cause had just been appropriated by the LGBT crowd. Aka, another example of applied splitting.

A little digging and we find the very little-to-nothing that substantiates Queer culture claims on Aboriginal history:

Good old wikipedia. ABC's youth radio program 'the hook up' article, and this op-ed in The Advertiser which refers to the Uluru Bark petition of 2015.

The last one gives a great example of the tug-of-war for the voice of the voiceless. The fleeting context being the 2017 same-sex marriage legalization process in Australia. Australian's overwhelmingly supported and support same-sex marriage, but there were two sides to the campaign and the Op-ed from Murdoch owned press 'The Advertiser' can be I feel fairly interpreted as a minority religious conservative attempting to wrest Aboriginal voices into his own cause. Fact checking the factual claims of the op-ed, I found an almost equal and opposite opinion piece from New Matilda (it's not a response to the Op-ed, but a response to the Bark Petition).

All of which doesn't point to any truth about a homogenous mainland tradition. I'm inclined to think Aboriginals probably reflect the sexuality demographics of any other population on Earth which tend to be consistent, and defer to 'The Hook Up' article having learned my lesson from Dark Emu, that an absence of linguistic evidence where linguistic evidence is expected suggest genderqueer traditions are confined to the Tiwi Island culture.

What it does point to is the abundant space from which motivated people can speak as the voice of the voiceless. From the New Matilda op-ed:

“There are several reasons I am incensed to see this petition… first and most … it's because the Arrernte are named as being one of the groups of which support has been derived for this petition.

“I am Arrernte and I say plainly and clearly that THESE PEOPLE DO NOT SPEAK FOR ME. Indeed, I strongly doubt that they speak for many, if any, of the groups they have named and the fact that they have named these groups is a rude and despicable act.

“They have not consulted, they have not polled and they have certainly not discussed widely.

“They have claimed authority on this stance while having none and I am so offended by their actions that I am calling it out."

In which case Aboriginal Australia are a good example of another kind of voicelessness distinct and apart from the voicelessness of marginalization. The voicelessness of a group identity that is not authoritarian-heirarchical. From the ABC series on Aboriginal Political Philosophy (3): Autonomous Selfhood:

Becoming a person requires asserting one’s autonomy, including by accepting or refusing the obligations and requests made on the self by kin and Country. Self-regulation and thus socio-political ordering arise through the enactment of autonomy rather than the command-obedience power relations that are often imagined as necessary for order in Western political thought. Aboriginal ordering is an emergent rather than hierarchical form of order; it requires autonomous agents and thus is produced through, rather than compromised by, autonomy.

I'm not sure what the passage describes exactly, but in relation to the New Matilda voices, it suggests that the Aboriginal tradition is broadly speaking, an autonomous one, where ties probably then go to the same-sex marriage camp, but it's also going to mean that the Identity group is bound to have ripe-ripe cherry voices ready for cynical outsiders to cherry pick. 

The safe ethical path is probably to seek expanded rights for all, not to appropriate causes to bludgeon others with.

South Asia: Splitting as a Litmus Test?

Recently I watched Netflix movies 'The White Tiger' which doesn't appear on any of the decolonization lists despite being adapted from a book of the same name, and the Netflix movie 'Gangubai Kathiawadi' which is adapted from a chapter of 'Mafia Queens of Mumbai' and a while (years) ago I read 'The God of Small Things'.

It was this recency bias that had me asking why these books were not on any of the decolonize your bookshelf recommended reading lists.

The obvious out is in the description of decolonizing your bookshelf "This includes the tendency to prize and acknowledge certain types of authors and narratives over others." And 'The White Tiger' and 'The God of Small Things' are both acknowledged with the literal prize: The Booker Prize.

The Booker Prize itself, is literally a prize for citizens of the Commonwealth - British colonies. So that's why, these Indian authors wrote something that colonialists approve therefore they don't count, even if, in all three examples there are literally no Europeans perspectives represented in the narratives...(Actually going by recollection, one of the female protagonists in the God of Small Things goes off to America and marries what I assume to be a white dude before divorcing him and returning to India, and the White Tiger is told through the narrative device of an email sent to then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, apart from that they are pretty much all Indian stories).

So for what nefarious reason would a colonial prize be awarded to The White Tiger and The God of Small Things? Could it be because both tackle aspects of India's internal dysfunction (as does Gangubai Kathiawadi)?

I suspect that's more why these days you wouldn't put it on a 'decolonize your bookshelf' list, because what people may be too fragile and simply too dangerous to take an interest in the ongoing legacy of a cast system.

Personally though, I see the ability of someone to look to criticizing their own house as a milestone on the road to decolonizing. An analogous non-fiction work 'Straight Jacket Society' (English Title) or 'The Bureaucrats Code' (Original Japanese title) by Miyamoto Masao which was a landmark expose of Japan's governmental dysfunction is I think indicative of Japan's post-war autonomy given it's focus on the uniquely Japanese problem created for themselves out of the post-war US occupation.

Having now drawn an analogy between self-critical (and for you splitters' benefit, celebratory) Indian and Japanese authors, I now reflect that Japan and India are probably the two most fetishized foreign cultures by Europeans.

Orientalism: Manifest Splitting

The above video is largely about Buddhist Hell traditions, but it apparantly felt compelled to pre-empt some Western Buddhist enthusiasts being shocked to discover that Buddhism has a very old tradition of quite detailed and horrific hells. 

[T]he term "Orientalism" to refer to a general patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies. In Said's analysis, the West essentializes these societies as static and undeveloped—thereby fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied, depicted, and reproduced in the service of imperial power. Implicit in this fabrication, writes Said, is the idea that Western society is developed, rational, flexible, and superior.[2]This allows Western imagination to see “Eastern” cultures and people as both alluring and a threat to Western civilization. [3]

I must disclose that on a bookshelf somewhere in a box in a shed, is my copy of 'Orientalism' and I think I maybe got 10 pages in. It wasn't that the subject was uninteresting or even threatening, it was that it was dry. Drier than hard tack. My eyeballs couldn't keep lubricated to track across the page. I'm also a big fan of Henry George, though I am confessedly unable to read his book 'Progress and Poverty' for the same reason.

I am too tempted to define 'Orientalism' as a belief in practice that "In Rand McNally people wear hats on their feet and hamburgers eat people." which is to say, superficial observations are confused for actual insight, like in Babakuieria where the Aboriginal journalist determines old white men's betting on the ponies to be a religious devotion.

It's tempting to think that Orientalism is on the rise again, but I suspect the specifics of Orientalism are based on standard human nature, it's not coming back, in contrast to something like race essentialising which was a thing, then after the midpoint of the 20th century started to go away and then thanks to the critical theorists, is making a comeback in the 21st century.

I suspect the psychological underpinnings are identical to many people's romantic experiences, where they initially see someone and find them attractive and compelling, then if they take an active interest in that person they discover their favorite band is 'Imagine Dragons' and their favorite book is 'Eat Pray Love' and they voted for Gary Johnson. 

What might be new is that it is no longer White Westerners doing the Orientalising, or fetishizing of foreign cultures, or more broadly solely white westerners making the assumption the "other" culture is necessarily opposite, or at the very least different, rather than presuming things are the same.

Jordan Peterson recently released an interview he conducted with Richard Dawkins, misleadingly titled 'Delving into difficult truths' to be charitable the initial discussion is over flack they've both received from critics and that might be the 'difficult truths' JP refers to. I cannot exclude my impression however that JP still 'begs the question' when he presumes to be in possession of 'truths' particularly of the mytho-poetic kind, and it's very refreshing to hear some old school Dawkin's militant intolerance of bullshit. Particularly when Dawkins points out that the symbolism of trees is not a great mystery, given that trees are everywhere.

That's all a very roundabout way of saying, it's irrational to adopt the Orientalist mindset that other human cultures need be radically different. 

So again, I think Orientalism is a worthwhile diversion that has some explanatory power as to why the suggested literature for decolonizing one's bookshelf has nothing to do with pre-colonial texts, texts that thus far demonstrate we have more in common than a naive orientalism expects. I also suspect that many people translate resisting colonialist ideas and narratives into the colonial idea of Orientalism. The dangers of vagueries.

Last Stop North-America

One thing we are particular about in our sex beliefs is when a woman has her period. We call this isnati —dwelling alone. Formerly a girl had to stay in a little hut by herself for four days, her mother going there from time to time to feed her. We didn’t think that menstruating was something unclean or to be ashamed of. On the contrary, when a young girl had her period for the first time her parents treated the event as something sacred which made her into a woman. After the first isnati they gave her a big feast, invited everybody and had a give-away of presents. ~ John Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions.

Sounds good right? Progressive. Keeping in mind that giving away presents is the direction with which one gains esteem in North American Indian culture aka a "Potlatch"

But we thought that menstruation had a strange power that could bring harm under some circumstances. This power could work in some cases against the girl, in other cases against somebody else. If a girl was tanning the hides of certain animals during her period she could break out in boils. She had to abstain from a number of things, just as a man had to abstain from sexual intercourse for four days before a vision quest or some other religious ceremony. A woman shouldn’t come near a medicine man’s holy bundle or take part in a ceremony when she had her time. Our young women don’t dwell apart anymore during their periods, but we are still careful that their power shouldn’t clash with that of a medicine man. It could harm them both. ~ John Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions.

(Before embarking on this section, I'm going to use the term 'Indian' to describe the original inhabitants of what is now the continental united states of America. If this makes you uncomfortable, you may be helped by this handy explainer. It's worthwhile to keep in mind, that so often when things go wrong, it's because a butterfly in a university somewhere flaps its wings and writes an academic paper that then gets taken up by people around it that go to fancy dinner parties, the kind of dinner parties many people aspire to, and faster than you can blink everyone you know is eating desert with a knife and fork, skittles with a spoon.)

I am so fucking sick of autoethnographies. Autoethnographies are awful. Never heard of an autoethnography? Well you've almost certainly heard of one - Mein Kampf, Hitler's book, the most impactful and influential autoethnography yet written. 

Think 'auto' as in 'autobiography' and 'ethnography' as 'generalisations about a people'. An autoethnography is what the author's opinion of their own or other people's culture presented as fact.

Though I'm sick of autoethnographies, having read 3 in less than a year: 'Dark Emu', 'Mexico Profundo' and 'Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions' I'd recommend all three of these books, just for the intrinsic interest therein, not because they convey to the reader knowledge of anything beyond the opinions of the authors.

I can rank order these autoethnographies too: the best is 'Mexico Profundo' it is a conversational book that is also constructive and informative, it is very upfront about being an autoethnography too, as in it is just the author's opinion with the intention of stimulating a discussion. It doesn't claim to be anything more than it is. Then we are into tallest pygmy territory. 'Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions' is better than 'Dark Emu'. 'Dark Emu' should be studied in schools like famous Airplane crashes should be studied by Aerospace Engineers. 

I'd be splitting hairs as to which out of Dark Emu and Lame Deer, are the most racist works. Dark Emu is only flagrantly racist towards Europeans, it's very much two books wedged together, one book an unfortunate but well intentioned psuedohistory regarding pre-contact Aboriginal economy that can be unravelled through source-criticism or source-methodology and has been to my satisfaction, and the other book a vitriolic anti-white autoethnography.

By contrast Lame Deer seeker of visions is pure vitriolic autoethnography. It is subsequently quite safe for white people to read because as with all standpoint epistemology, when somebody else tries to read your mind, you are well positioned to judge their level of insight. What we are left with with Lame Deer, is fascinating insight into his lack of insight. Unfortunately this raises a question as to how much insight Lame Deer has into his own experience, community, culture and history. 

I've come across this before, the Japanese are big on a homogenous national identity, and it is my experience that having been raised and educated to believe Japanese people to be a homogenous people, my Japanese friends never lack confidence to generalize their own experiences, preferences, opinions and quirks out to the entire population. Even when they've been raised and educated abroad.

While I don't think John Lame Deer can be wrong about his own life experiences, preferences and opinions, I'm not confident he can be right to assert that these also describe his neighbor. 

So let's get Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions out of the way...

Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, Not Just Racism and Quackery

The books tell of one soldier who survived. He got away, but he went crazy and some women watched him from a distance as he killed himself. The writers always say he must have been afraid of being captured and tortured, but that’s all wrong.

Can’t you see it? There he is, bellied down in a gully, watching what is going on. He sees the kids playing with the money, tearing it up, the women using it to fire up some dried buffalo chips to cook on, the men lighting their pipes with green frog skins, but mostly all those beautiful dollar bills floating away with the dust and the wind. It’s this sight that drove that poor soldier crazy. He’s clutching his head, hollering, “Goddam, Jesus Christ Almighty, look at them dumb, stupid, red sons of bitches wasting all that dough!” He watches till he can’t stand it any longer, and then he blows his brains out with a six-shooter. It would make a great scene in a movie, but it would take an Indian mind to get the point. ~ Chapter 3: The Green Frog Skin pg 43

Money is hard to understand, most people don't understand money. That doesn't prevent them from successfully using it to obtain goods and services. The problem with the autoethnography specifically, and standpoint epistemology (generating knowledge via subjective perception) in general, is that it places people in an incredibly easy position to falsify its claims.* 

Which is what makes Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions a relatively safe read for European audiences. Of course John Lame Deer does come across as a humorous guy, though he certainly puts the "Lame" in jokes at least by late 20th century, early 21st century standards of humour, even 21st century lack of humour. But the above passage could easily be subjected to a simple substitution. Just replace 'soldier' with 'Black man' and money/green frog skins with some racist stereotype like fried chicken, watermelon, grape soda or Nike sneakers.

Much like Dark Emu, Lame Deer's book is filled with these cartoonish characterisations of white people, though unlike Bruce Pascoe, Lame Deer is good humoured about it. And thus, while it contains little insight for European self-reflection to chew upon, it is indisputably honest:

I once heard of an Indian who lost a leg in an industrial accident. He got about fifteen thousand dollars in insurance money. In no time his place was overrun with more than a hundred hungry relatives. They came in old jalopies, in buckboards, on horseback or on foot. From morning to night a pick-up truck was making round trips between his place and the nearest store, hauling beef and bread and crates of beer to keep all of those lean bellies full. In the end they bought a few scrub steers and did their own butchering. The fun lasted a few weeks, then the money was gone. A day after that the relatives were gone, too. That man had no regrets. He said he wished he’d lose his other leg so that he could start all over again. This man had become quite a hero, even to other tribes, and he was welcome everywhere. I made up a new proverb: “Indians chase the vision, white men chase the dollar.” ~pg44

 This story, I must confess, offends my sensibilities. It has the exact same emotional impact as the scene in Million Dollar Baby, when Hilary Swank's family eventually show up to visit her in hospital, after a day spent taking in the theme parks before visiting their paralytic daughter. Her mother puts a pen in her paralysed daughter's mouth to try and get her to sign a legal document giving her mother control of her finances. The only difference between that seen and the story of the man having opportunists burn through his compensation is intent. 

It's essentially a story of a pot-latch, so it's not hard, culturally to comprehend that the amputee with the compensation payout felt like a big chief for a couple of weeks. My inflation calculator says $15,000 in 1979 is worth $61,220 today. This story could have taken place in the 60s or 50s though, since Lame Deer simply recounts it, which could translate to blowing through $180k in a couple of weeks.

They are also wagging their fingers at us when we have a give away feast. What they are trying to tell us is that poor people can’t afford to be generous. But we hold onto our otuhan, our give-aways, because they help us to remain Indians. All the big events in our lives birth and death, joy and sadness can be occasions for a give-away. We don’t believe in a family getting wealthy through inheritance. Better give away a dead person’s belongings. That way he, or she, will be remembered. ~ pg.48

I think the man's wish that he had lost his other leg, is meant to convey some kind of virtue, and certainly from a stoic perspective, it is much healthier than feeling resentment towards the opportunistic relatives. It just in no way impressed me. Compare it to a story that reads 'I knew a man who lost his leg and only got fifteen thousand in compensation. Poor as we Indians are, we all pitched in what little we had to help this man. Relatives arrived to cook, clean and maintain his property, and even though he had this big payout, they were determined to make that money last until the end of his days.'

Or 'I knew a man that lost his leg in an industrial accident and got fifteen thousand. Even though it was supposed to help support him in his recovery and rehabilitation, while he couldn't work, he took that money and used it to buy back land that had been taken from his people and gave it to his relatives to own in perpetuity.'

This story is challenging in the sense of presenting to a business owner that wants to do right by their Indian employees, maybe selfishly so they can sleep at night, they should take away the lesson: okay these Indians will confuse compensation for causing a permanent debilitating injury with winning a glorious battle and throw a pot-latch, to compensate for a seeming lack of prudence, we're going to have to hold these funds in escrow to prevent them from blowing through their compensation and winding up broke with one leg.

It isn't challenging in terms of actively resisting colonialist notions and narratives. Even if we charitably interpret the outcome 'he was welcome everywhere' as 'he ate for free for the rest of his life.' Which by Lame Deer's own characterization was already the case:

I knew a well-educated Indian who had come back to his reser¬ vation after working for many years in a big city. With his life savings he opened a cafeteria and gas station. All day long the cars lined up. “Hey, Uncle, fill her up. I can’t pay, but you are rich; you let me have it free.” And the same thing over at the cafeteria: “Say, Uncle, let me have one of them barbecued-beef sandwiches. Don’t bother to write up a bill for a relation of yours.”

The owner had done very well living and working in the white man’s way among white people. But now he was an Indian again, back among Indians. He couldn’t say “no” to a poor relative, and the whole reservation was just one big mass of poor relatives, people who called him Uncle and Cousin regardless of the degree of their relationship. He couldn’t refuse them and his education couldn’t help him in this situation. We aren’t divided up into separate, neat little families—Pa, Ma, kids, and to hell with everybody else. The whole damn tribe is one big family; that’s our kind of reality.

It wasn’t long before this Indian businessman was broke and in debt. But this man was smart, white-educated. So he found a way out. He hired a white waitress and a white gas-station attendant and spread the word that he had been forced to sell the business to white owners. From then on he did well. Everybody paid, be¬ cause they knew white men don’t give anything away for free. ~pg.45

That story directly precedes the story of the amputee. The colonialist notion I have to actively resist is the notion that 'I see what the problem is here...' There's certainly something to think about in the Indian 'Punch Up Not Down' economics. That's interesting. I am perfectly happy to recognize that it might work under conditions of complete cultural hegemony and an economy based entirely on hunting and gathering and war raids of your neighbours. 

The honesty I appreciate is that Lame Deer, perhaps naively, just admits to stuff like in the above story that the community were actually capable of paying for gasoline and food, but the community would bankrupt and indebt an enterprising member of their community, even if in the long term it meant they lost the utility of a gas station and cafeteria, for their short term gratification. Creating as a community the precise circumstances where only white capital could thrive.

It's kind of the Australian 'Tall Poppy Syndrome' on steroids. And there are European analogies to the pot-latch, like the Athenian Naval Fleet, where private citizens were expected to finance the building of ships, one way to dodge this civic duty was to prove in court that another Athenian citizen was wealthier than you, if your allegation proved false, the safe guard was that you would be obliged to swap estates with the accused ie. take on the smaller fortune. 

Anyway, everything I've taken here is just from chapter 3, which even to me feels biased. But my distinct impression is that every page of the book just about contains some broad brush generalization of Indian's and or white people. Even though it is a short book with many fascinating insights, the egregiousness of the stereotypes made it exhausting to read.

There are two things wrong with this statue. Crazy Horse never let a white man take his picture. He didn’t want white peo¬ ple to look at him. He died fighting before he would let white soldiers shut him up in a stone guardhouse. He was buried the way he wanted it, with nobody knowing his grave. The whole idea of making a beautiful wild mountain into a statue of him is a pollution of the landscape. It is against the spirit of Crazy Horse.

Mr. Fools Crow, one of our most respected medicine men, says, “This mountain doesn’t want the statue to be built. The ghost of Crazy Horse doesn’t want it. It will never be finished.”

Godfrey Chips, our youngest medicine man, told me, “This man Crazy Horse, in the beginning he was a peaceful man, but when he sees that all his people are massacred down the line, well, he had been given a power, so he starts to fight with it. He used to be gentle, but life made him into a man-killer. The hate was in him. He never liked the white people and he died that way. So his spirit told me he doesn’t want them to build a tourist mon¬ ument of Crazy Horse.” ~pg 96

I'm inclined to agree that the destruction of nature required to make Mount Rushmore cannot be atoned for with a further destruction of nature to create a statue of Crazy Horse. But I highlight this excerpt because Crazy Horse is someone I identify with, but what Lame Deer appears to admire most, is Crazy Horse's hatred of whites. At least that was the impression left on me.

I identify with Crazy Horse because he so clearly breaks the notion that Indians are a homogenous people. From wikipedia:

 ...he was a queer man and would go about the village without noticing people or saying anything. In his own teepee he would joke, and when he was on the warpath with a small party, he would joke to make his warriors feel good. But around the village, he hardly ever noticed anybody, except little children. All the Lakotas like to dance and sing, but he never joined a dance, and they say nobody ever heard him sing. But everybody liked him, and they would do anything he wanted or go anywhere he said. ~ quoted from 'Black Elk Speaks'

So just as Miyamoto Musashi stands out as very atypical for Japanese, and Da Vinci and Michaelangelo stand out as atypical Florentines, Crazy Horse stands out amongst Indians because he was atypical, unconventional.

Now onto the quack medicine:

 As for sex medicines, the little female wild sage helps a woman during her menstrual cramps. A certain kind of skunk cabbage, if you make a liquid of its boiled roots, is a birth-control medicine. It has to be taken with some care. Too much of it and you can’t have any children. But some tribes use it. If a man is weak and can’t get it up, a certain snakeroot could be a big help. One plant, if just one tiny seed of it is given an old man, can keep him going the whole night through. I won’t describe or name it, otherwise the whole place would be overrun by white men from the big cities looking for these seeds. They’d go crazy with this herb, and I’d catch hell for telling about it. ~pg. 171

There are some animals, a kind of gopher, very fast, with a black line down their faces. They got a lot of power; they can hypnotize you, even kill you. The power is in their eyes. They live with the prairie dogs. They are real subway users, traveling underground. They are so fast, your eyes can hardly follow them. Your eye is still here, he’s already over there. They tell a funny story about a man who wanted to get one of these creatures. He was told to be fast. Shoot it and then run like hell, grab it before it disappears into its hole. The man made up his mind to be real quick about it. He shot and ran like the dickens. Something hit him in the seat of his pants—his own bullet! The earth from a gopher hole is also very powerful. It can protect you in war, make you bulletproof. I use it for curing certain illnesses. ~pg.132

This was probably one of the biggest insights I got from reading this book. Let me be clear though - ethnobotony is a thing, though I'm not sure if the field as a whole merely documents, or both documents and assesses efficacy. 

At any rate, one probably should not try and use this autobiography/autoethnography of a medicine man to become qualified as a medicine man for reasons of it being too light on detail. 

I'm also completely open to psychosomatic or psychogenic conditions being identified and treated by idiosynchracies in the culture. Particularly after watching this interview:

It's fascinating. But the key insight I got was that alternative medicine is almost entirely based on anecdote. It's that last part, the 'I know of a certain something that believe me, can keep a man going all night but I can't tell you' that embodies a pattern that Lame Deer repeatedly uses to try and impress upon the reader of the secret awesome powers of indigenous medicine and indigenous visions. 

I am not impressed at all. But it shattered a glass wall for me. I had the sudden epiphany that all alternative medicine operates like this 'My friend's sister's uncle had stage eight cancer but then he cut out the dairy and he was completely cured.'

Pete Catches was suffering from a sickness, something inside him, and he had a dream that he would lie underneath the sun- dance pole and get cured. But his vision also told him that nobody was to come near him at this time.

He told me later what happened. As he was stretched out on the ground, believe it or not, in a few minutes there was some¬ body down in the earth, about twenty feet beneath the surface, walking around there, roaming. Pete could hear him, see him, feel him. There was somebody down there and pretty soon he was coming up, breaking through the earth and rock, hitting his round belly, stretching out his arms, looking at Pete. He was coming to doctor him.

And just at this moment one of the dance leaders took it into his head to show off before the tourists and cameras, waving his eagle fan above Pete, pretending to do a medicine ceremony, wanting to give the spectators their money’s worth. Pete had told everybody to keep away from him, but maybe this man forgot, and that being beneath the earth went away, backed down. It didn’t like all that tourist stuff. Pete was so sad he could have cried. ~ pg.211

Yeah okay, maybe. But it isn't impressive, these delicate conditional visions. These stories of fish that got away but we should have seen it, it was massive!

Quack medicine is a colonial notion. Part of the reason homeopathy has any legs today is because given that it is taking drops of water, for a while it actually outperformed "Western" medicine. The various medicine systems of the world I'm happy to concede are every part the equal of or superior to heroic medicine. One of the bizarre achievements of Europe was that it miraculously got good when they started trying to determine if any of it worked. When they developed germ theories of disease, chemistry, double-blind randomized trials to control for placebo effects and so on. 

And nothing is, and nothing has stopped ethnobotany, or accupuncture, chiropracty etc. from subjecting themselves to empirical validation. The latter two show no demonstrable effects, ethnobotany I imagine is hit-and-miss. And where it hits, I'm betting western medicine has gone 'woah this works, specifically this active ingredient and if we extract that it works even better, and if we rearrange this molecular structure it becomes twice as potent and half as toxic.'

That's the bad of this book out of the way. It isn't only racism and quack medicine.

To me in this undertaking, Lame Deer is functioning as a storyteller, perhaps analogous to a West African Griot, or an Eastern European singer of Epic Poetry. It is certainly a great way to read heterodox.

Above that, one of the great insights I got, was that being a medicine man of the Sioux nation does not imply any greatness of character. Lame Deer is self described as a wild man, a rebel without a cause. 

This might to some puritan ethic seem like more disparagement, but in Lame Deer's honest accounting of himself, we see an alternative to the intuition 'might makes right' a very anti-ad hominem culture.

The medicine man, does medicine. While I might be sceptical of that medicine or purported power, that's it, and that is refreshing. 

The Lakota-Sioux medicine men perform their craft in the same way that there's nothing to exclude a violent offender prison inmate from producing excellent pottery. 

The education Lame Deer can provide on the ways of his people are everything spiritual and sacred, but not moralizing. This compared to the abuses uncovered most famously with Catholic clergy, but also Protestant and Southern Baptist. 

They might be someone you trust to oversee a sweat lodge or sun dance, to hold onto a sacred pipe, but you wouldn't necessarily lend them your car. 

I really like this division between spiritual and moral authority. I'm still not a 'Oh wow! SUPERSTITION.' type guy, and I'm sure contrary to Lame Deer, there have been numerous revered leaders of upstanding character that were also medicine men. It just isn't necessarily so.

Anyway, I do recommend Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions. It's interesting, accessible, honest (though not science) and brief.

*excluding an appeal to the unconscious, and while there's certainly something to Freud's 'He does not believe who does not live in accordance with his beliefs.' I find it is best to keep that to the observable behaviour interpretation. The trouble with standpoint epistemology, is that if someone is like 'I know you love chocolate and broccoli soup.' and you say 'no I don't' and they say 'You have false consciousness you love chocolate and broccoli soup, but it's unconscious, you don't realize you love chocolate and broccoli soup.' and like.., maybe, but by appealing to the unconscious we create this tricky situation where I have no insight into my unconscious mind, but somehow you do. And that somehow, near as I can determine is the cognitive distortion 'mind reading' a subtype of 'jumping to conclusions'. 

Alternate Indigenous Voices:

The American Indians are another group that I have my concerns about a 'Voice of the Voiceless' type opportunity to be seized upon by naïve but well meaning white people, the kind of people that have adopted 'Latinx' even though overwhelmingly the Latino people of the United States reject this term. Should Latinx prevail, it will be a colonial imposition that says more about the discomfort of a predominantly white social justice movement than the people it attempts to describe.

I certainly do not see Lame Deer as the be-all-end-all authority on even his own people. His book is at direct odds with the Lakota V Summit declaration. 

Here's an alternative voice, a man who perhaps embodies the anti-colonial sentiment of Ho Chi Minh who went to Paris to learn how to defeat his French Colonizers. Though, more so the native voice appears to have learned how to live together. The guy is self-educated and more aware of European culture than, I'd guess 99% of people of European descent. Though at this stage of the game, that's probably pretty much everyone. Anyway, interesting guy:

I would have also liked to share another video from the same interviewer titled 'Native Americana' but I'm guessing the guest requested the video be made private.

One thing that struck me in the face as obvious in hindsight, coming to Mexico and getting in a relationship with a woman descended from Yaqui, is that the original inhabitants of the American continents no more observe the modern day national borders as the colonial powers acknowledge the borders that pre-existed their colonies. Indians lived in and occupied the Northern States of Mexico, a great documentary about the present struggles of the Yaqui of Sonora, Mexican American Indians if you will that just fell this side of the line, so they not only have to deal with your standard native title issues, preservation of culture but Narco traffico and a government that cannot enforce its own supreme court rulings.

That Documentary is Yo'eme Labrynth. 

Going back a little ways, the documentary 'Reel Injun' not only explores with indigenous voices the history of the depiction of Indians in Hollywood, but suggests actual Indian made movies about Indian culture many of which are still on my to watch list: Smoke Signals 1998, Dance Me Outside 1994, Atarnajuat - The Fast Runner 2001, Skins 2002.

So that's a bunch of Indian content that is hopefully fairly accessible. Furthermore they are relatively contemporary voices. I tried watching Reservoir Dogs, Taika Waititi's I don't know brainchild about Indian kids trying to escape the reservation, and it just wasn't particularly entertaining. I think it's an attempt to transfer the Waititi magic onto a Showrunner that isn't Taika Waititi and from a completely different cultural context than New Zealand.

Sundance, Simulacrum? And The Oracle of Delphi

Despite referring to Sundance and the Oracle of Delphi I'm going to start this section with 'The Sword of the Stranger' a 2007 Japanese Animated Feature, about a little boy that finds refuge with a wandering samurai.

The protagonist is a little boy, on the run from a Chinese Alchemist that needs him as a blood sacrifice. The main antagonist is the aforementioned Alchemist, who requires the boy to fashion a new batch of immortality pills. Spoiler, we never really see the ritual that turns little boy into pills, but this clip depicts the monumental apparatus required for the ritual.

I bring this up to serve the purspose of substitute imagery, so I can avoid divulging any "secrets" as described in detail in Lame Deer's book, of the Sun Dance. 

Just keep in mind, massive ritual mechanism.

Now onto the Oracle of Delphi, at the temple to Apollo. Religion for Breakfast did a great exploration of a hypothesis that the Oracle's prophetic visions were caused by a gas leak into the cave where the various oracles gave their prophecy:

I embed the video because it's super interesting. The particular part I want to pull out though is the speculation that the Oracle wound up wording their prophecies vaguely in order to protect the reputation of the shrine. Like the famous 'If you march to war a mighty kingdom will fall.' Multi-valent, that is, open to interpreting as predicting the outcome of both a successful and failed military campaign.

A contemporary translation might be: 'Running against the incumbent will cause the premature end of a political career.' But is it the incumbents or the challengers?

I can't recall what the exact term of art is whether it's a "good guess", "having it both ways" or what not. These things evolve preety naturally however.

British Hypnotist and Magician, Derren Brown did a special called "The Man Who Contacts the Dead" where he followed around psychic medium Joe Power. It's a pretty entertaining documentary if you like that sort of thing, but the "gotcha" is elusive. Derren and Joe even agree to a laboratory style experiment to test his self proclaimed powers and Joe backs out with extreme prejudice at the eleventh hour. 

Curiously, this is after he has already locked himself in by his own admission to the metaphysics of his claimed power to contact the dead - claiming that he can literally see the ghosts standing beside their relatives. 

It comes to mind because aside from using the common cold reading tactic of being deliberately vague and open to interpretation like the Oracle of Delphi. 'When you stop seeking what you want you'll find you'll have what you need.' wooooooooooohh spooky, how did they do that? 

Another way, applied specifically to testing, is rendering psychic claims unfalsifiable because the "energy" of any sceptic present will interfere with the psychic powers. 

In this sense, I am brought to Sun dance. I love Sun Dance, every time I go I have a ball, I feel good, it's a great time. All the benefits are I feel, easily explained with ordinary psychology, physiology etc. For me it's basically camping. It's not amazing, that camping feels good.

Sun Dance is larger than the Sun Dance itself, and in many ways the best stuff is happening away from the dance. Think like a festival around a sporting event.

I enjoy supporting the dancers. But what I'm going to write about now, might seem awkward or uncomfortable for people who participate in Sun Dance.

Firstly, the Sun Dance I have attended and witnessed differs substantively from what Lame Deer describes. I'm not sure if I'm applying the terminology right, but I suspect its a fair appraisal that the original Sun Dance, like many religious rituals and traditions around the world is a symbolic recreation of a culture's cosmology. Like the pagan maypole represents the world tree or a phallus or whatever.

I'm reasonably confident, that the Sun Dance I have witnessed is an imitation of a symbolic representation and thus may qualify as a simulacrum. Like a painting of a photo of a thing. A perfectly functional simulactum mind you. It is not hard to see its function as a community glue, and for me at least it is not hard to see the functionality of the original sun dances for the life of semi-nomadic warrior peoples.

But built into the function of this huge mechanism - is delicacy.

Let's sub in for the Sun Dance the huge alchemy engine from Sword of the Stranger. Something so elaborate and complex and delicate, that it is almost certain to go wrong. Like if you wound it the wrong way, or if a dog peed on it, or the balance and alignment was slightly off, if the water is too low it overheats and if the water is too high it floods, if you leave it running in neutral it won't start again, etc. etc.

And then imagine that the instruction manual is largely an oral tradition distributed incompletely across more than one chief engineers. Such that they often admonish you with seemingly arbitrary and often contradictory instructions.

Such that, almost inevitably, Sun Dance is doomed to fail, and this permits an easy reconciliation for when you take two immortality pills and drop dead in the next year.

Paradoxically though, given all the things that go wrong, there are equally often remedies to be had. Say if someone spills the sugar, the lead engineer can toss salt over their shoulder. etc. It's never the end of the world. I found myself at one point trying to imagine, for all the transgressions, the screw ups, the stuff ups, the people that forgot to wash their hands before operating the rotary crank etc. the dance goes on, for all the delicacy, I couldn't imagine what would actually stop the dance. What would have the chiefs throw up their hands and say 'you've screwed the whole thing! That's it, pack up everyone, go home. Better luck next year.'

Leaving us with a reputation preserving apparatus similar to the Oracle of Delphi. Just this time instead of saying 'yeah, what did you think I meant?' it's more like - if bad stuff happens despite participating in Sun Dance, you have recourse to 'ah it's because Pepe spilled the sugar bowl on day 2.' and if good stuff happens you have recourse to 'yeah there were some cock ups but chief threw salt over his shoulder every time so it's all good.'

My feeling is, all of the artifice is unnecessary, even detrimental. But I guess that's a question of demographics and hence the importance of the concept of simulacrum.

Forget about the huge alchemical engine. It's just a cartoon, it isn't real. Sun dance if anything is akin to a gruelling foot race, over four days where supporters set up a camp in the middle and the runners run around them as you cheer them on and offer support.

Without any mystical or supernatural veil, Sun Dance is intrinsically a good and beneficial thing for the people in and out of the dance.

Then comes the non-smokers problem, and the question of demographics. The non-smokers problem is this - In a corporate office, the smokers are the glue, the hubs that connect the social nodes. They have relationships forged in smoking across departments and up and down the rungs of the corporate ladder.

There's literally nothing stopping non-smokers from gathering outside in the gazebo at 10.30 for 15 minutes and chatting with whoever turns up. It's just that non-smokers don't. So through some quirk of human psychology, a tradeoff is created where you either accept the health and cosmetic costs of smoking, or forego the social benefits of smoking. Only on paper is it theoretically possible to not smoke and socialize outside of your department.

And with sun dance there isn't strictly nothing stopping the non-superstitious from reaping the full benefits of Sun Dance (personally, I actually think the US and Mexican armed services should offer all recruits not just Sun Dance and the requisite vision quests etc. but all indigenous warrior initiation rights, because these rights evolved for a reason.) what there is is an enormous amount of social pressure to bow to hats on poles as if they were the literal embodiment of the king of the universe.

I was told after this year's event, that one elder had reduced a grown ass man to tears asserting that some transgression was going to cause the death of a relative.

As such, there's almost certainly selective pressure when it comes to Sun Dance, and especially a spin-off Sun Dance not strictly attached to a Plains Indian tribe, to attract a superstitious crowd and repel people satisfied with the physical, material plain. Like, that aspect is no picnic for me.

Without superstition, could this largely holistically beneficial tradition be carried on? I am now going to consciously supress the urge to share my characterization of the new age crowd.

What I find invaluable is being able to witness a social spiritual ritual and contemplate such challenges and possibilities. Alas is it impossible to create a copy of a symbol, while admitting it is but a copy? More to my interest, is can the benefits be derived en masse by the demographic that can actually engage in the ritual with relative psychological safety? People who don't think their grandmother will die because a pilot light went out.

At any rate, you can count experiencing a living culture as part of my decolonizing process.

 The last thing I'll share on it, is my literal ability to see the world through different eyes. I'm sure my superstitious friends would feel some comfort in assuring themselves I just don't get it. I'm looking with my head not my heart* sort of thing. But I do get fully into Sun Dance. When the first dancers successfully complete their offerings, I'm often moved to tears. Affective empathy in that moment, and I have transcendent experiences to draw upon, and know what it is like.

My first year, one of the dancers, basically ate shit (safe for work, it's a skating term) and I reacted much like one naturally does in those moments, and it pulled me right out of the symbolic world back into reality. Nobody else seemed to react though, no doubt through experience. They'd turned off their instincts to run after a little old lady who falls down the stairs. See if someone is okay.

Three years on, I can blink and see what everyone else is seeing, what the believer sees, and then blink and see what is actually going on. Like the ninja weapon episode of South park. It's really valuable to, in that context at least, switch perspectives so easily.

*This is another thing, why I value engaging with a living culture. When my athiest self clashed with this supernatural undertaking, I had the culture shock of not understanding that people really didn't understand my non-belief. It's really stark that Christianity may well be the biggest religion in the world, but it has been in decline for quite some time now. Really since the enlightenment. Such that, Christians are generally very familiar with non-believers, and don't tend to treat them like they are from out of space and speaking pure gibberish. Not so with other belief systems, particularly I guess if adopted by basically a first generation of believers. It's like questioning the belief system is incomprehensible. So it's not even the old chestnut of 'it's because you are looking with your head, not your heart.' it's like 'what do you mean "what do you mean by energy"?'

Off to the Yucatan: Mexico Profundo

For the same reason I eliminated from the text the footnotes and exact bibliographic references that we tend to assume demonstrate seriousness and rigor in an academic work. [Trans. note: wherever possible, references have been added for the English-lnguage edition.] I decided to write freely, less constrained by the daily habits of research in the social sciences, with the aim of reaching, in a simple, clear and direct way, a larger reading public than that accustomed to reading academic books." ~ Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Introduction, Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization.

All I know about how I feel about Mexico Profundo is that it is my favorite of the three autoethnographic works I read in 2021. Largely because it is gentle, conversational. Dark Emu is the worst, as it is first and foremost a likely pseudo-history, regressive even for the times in which it was written, and an autoethnography largely on the question of what the colonial population is. Furthermore it is not upfront about being largely a speculative personal narrative. Then comes Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, it is a regressive autoethnography, but it is transparent all claims issue from the narrator John Lame Deer, and it is at times endearingly humorous, if not funny. Like the humour of an elderly relative.

Mexico Profundo is an easy read, but consider the opening quotation. Intention aside, the removal of footnotes and references is in the service of whom? Having read the book, and the English at that which has references, there was nothing so contentious in it, that I wanted to fact check a claim. I simply do not know what the book would have looked like in the alluded to academic style. Academic papers are in my experience, punishing to read, but my impression is that this isn't because of nesting footnotes and presenting data, rather the strategic attempt to say almost nothing in the most complicated way possible or as Michael Lewis put it when talking about his relationship with Daniel Kahneman subject of his book 'The Undoing Project' "these guys write from a crouching position." Academics write defensively to try and box out criticism.

But my feeling is there's a genuine dilemma with no clear answer. On the one hand, footnotes can give a work of pseudo-science a false sense of trustworthiness and reliability, Youtube channel Folding Ideas illustrates this in his video essay on the Geocentric documentary "the Principle" about bogus pseudo-science institutes certifying other pseudo-scientists to build up an artifice of credentials, and in the phenomena of Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, we have a case study in footnotes and references provided in abundance that (hyperbolically speaking) nobody bothered to check for some alarming amount of time. A bluff that bore out.

On the other hand, a wider reading audience not used to fact checking or source checking now has a frictionless reading experience where claims can be made, speculation speculated upon and opinions opined without any speed bumps. My personal preference is weighted towards the 'please don't do me any favours.' and the concession of 'readers interested in pursuing in depth any of the themes' having access to a bibliography of further reading, is in my view ethically insufficient.

Allowing for losses due to translation, there is a difference between 'readers interested in pursuing...' and 'readers tempted to take my ideas seriously' where the overlap is insufficient to discharge a duty of care. My experience of Indigenismo in Mexico is one very much in line with “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that." Mill's sentiment that applies appropriated or not. This is why it takes me so long to make this caveat about Mexico Profundo. Indigenismos in Mexico tend to have spent no time learning anything from non-indigenous sources and many have but a set of memorized factoid about indigenous culture, at least those able to discuss the subject with me. 

Mexico Profundo is dense but also immensely casual. I would stress treating it as the author intended, as an introduction to ideas and concepts. 

I would point to as an example of bad faith Bibliographies, Philosophy Tube's Antifascism Explainer - something I found to be an invaluable resource. What I would direct you to myself is the 'Bibliography' Philosophy Tube includes in the video description, that I interpret and intuit as intended to give weight to the video as well thought out and thoroughly researched. Being familiar with the content of that video, I can say at no point is it clear for example where in the presentation anything is substantiated by 'Manufacturing Consent' or 'Hobbes Leviathan'  Burgdörfer's "Sterben die weißen Völker?” whatever the fuck that is. (Google tells me the title translates to 'Are White People Dying?' a question one devastating war and 8 decades later we can confidently answer) Functionally for me, these bibliographies work as the fallacy 'Argument from Authority' a kind of 'trust me, I've read these and you probably haven't...if you want to refute me first go do a doctoral thesis level of reading.' 

And I've seen enough personally, of Philosophy Tube to be confident myself that confidence in Abigail is confidence misplaced. Including Abigail's self confidence. 

All of this is digression though, I guess it just serves to say, autoethnographies - essentially op-eds of anthropology, are precarious at best. I have problems with the methodology, the epistemology, but specifically Mexico Profundo is likely benign. It doesn't have the specific failings of Dark Emu and Lame Deer Seeker of Visions - namely racist vitriol and outrage.

That said I reject the premise, but not entirely. The book examines the profound or deep 'Mexico' versus the 'Imaginary' Mexico. The ongoing collision of two civilizations living simultaneously atop one another, an interesting idea applicable to a country like Australia, double exposed on top of an existing and ancient culture.

Where I reject the premise is the somewhat arbitrary designation of what is profound and what is imaginary. It simply places too much agency in the probably fuzzy-bound civilizations of "Western" and a collective "Indian" civilization. There are significant differences between Spain and Britain, Spain and Europe, Spain and Portugal for one. On the other side take for example pre-Columbian Mexican civilization - there is no one thing, there are a bunch of city states and a trade network, civilizations that will be lost or dead, yet live on in the new civilizations that arise like Olmecs and Teotihuacan. The boarders only bare resemblance to the modern state of Mexico by virtue of geographic features like coastlines:

By Bleinz - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45117228

I subsequently put it to you, that pre-Columbian Mexico can lucidly be designated an 'Imaginary Mexico' that failed to take into account the Profound depth of the world - namely that Europe existed and wouldn't keep it's mitts off forever. Furthermore, this map of Meso American civilizations is but a snapshot, the situation was dynamic. Civilizations and subsequent cultures and languages rose and fell. 

So in that sense I reject the premise, the designation that only the "westernizing" faction that has held governing power since conquest and post independence is trying to superimpose an imaginary vision of Mexico, whereas the Indian cultures of Meso America are "keeping it real."

To me, a better framework is simply the clash of civilizations, the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of implementation and an exploration of whether planning without consultation is a fruitless and cruel exercise. 

As a case study, take "goodwill" projects to vaccinate an indigenous population - these were poorly implemented, a failure to use cognitive empathy to anticipate that strangers rocking up and injecting unknown substances directly into children's arms is fucking terrifying, Alien abduction level shit, even if you know it to be a net positive that will help arrest the decimation of indigenous populations through introduced diseases.

Vaccination programs aren't wrong. There's arguably nothing worse in terms of outcomes that colonialism did to the Americas than spread diseases.

This is really interesting to contemplate, and a timeless lesson for progressives today - "knowing better" isn't enough. Approach and execution count, you cannot skip the crucial step of making your case to the satisfaction of others before you simply inflict your confidence on them.

An alternate conceptualization of the premise of Mexico Profundo, is an anti-false consciousness argument. Where the attempted importation of Western Ideology to Mexico (and by analogy, United States, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Tibet, China...etc.) isn't confounded by false consciousness, but because it doesn't work, it clashes with whatever pre-exists it. It isn't fit for the environment. Gramsci's wrong, cultural hegemony isn't what is going on and indigenous resistance is proof.

That I'm all on board with, largely because the weight of evidence supports it. 

In attempting to generalize the Indian cultures of Mesoamerica, Mexico Profundo in some ways does a disservice to the non-Mexican readership in denying them one of the most valuable decolonizing insights: Mexico's indigenous culture is more than just the Mexica or Aztecs. Hence the use in Mexico Profundo of the collective term Indians. 

One of the parts I enjoyed most thoroughly was useful definitions of indigenous resistance. Specifically what comes to mind when I think about why I liked this book is the term 'appropriation' and it's subsequent definition:

A second process of cultural resistance is appropriation. Here, the group takes as it's own cultural elements that were foreign and come from the imposed, dominant culture. For the appropriation to take place, it is necessary for the group to take control over those foreign cultural elements, so that it can put them to service the groups own ends and it's own autonomous decisions. I have already mentioned the cases of horses among the nomadic people of the north. 

One hidden gorilla for me though, is that I could attribute (under the author's proposed dichotomy) much of the failures of Imaginary Mexico to a lack of appropriation. Importing shit without adapting it to local conditions and culture. Like trying to introduce the sport of ice skating, without innovating it into roller blades to use a crude metaphor.

I highly recommend Mexico Profundo, last to be treated here but top of my list. It's introductory, a true conversation starter, thought provoker, a humble offering that is rich. Compare it to what I find entirely consistent with bad faith and intellectual dishonesty in Bruce Pascoe's failure to answer his critics.

Professor Pascoe was forewarned about the story’s publication and was sent it, but said on Saturday he had not yet read it. The criticism could be put down to “differences of opinion” about the facts, he said, and that was OK.

“I think what is happening, and I’m saying this without having read the [whole] book or the [Good Weekend] article, is that we’re having a difference of opinion about history,” he said.

“We’re looking at the same facts and we’re having a difference of opinion about the facts. That’s not a bad thing. I think Aboriginal people have been wanting to have this discussion for 250 years, so I think it can only be positive.”

...

 “I’m in touch with a lot of archaeologists and anthropologists in Australia and overseas and they keep sending me corroborating material.”

Mr Pascoe would not disclose the names of those experts as he did not want them to be targeted.

“I don’t want people being rung up and drilled about their current research,” he said. “That’s how the last war was conducted. I’m not going to go to war. I want us to have an intellectual discussion.”

 ~from the above linked SMH article.

This is a tactic worth recognizing. Flip the shoes around and imagine a proponent of Terra Nullis (the idea that Australia was uninhabited when claimed by the British Empire) responding to criticisms that the indigenous people of Australia are, in fact, human beings with 'I haven't looked at any of these claims myself, but it seems we're having a difference of opinion about the facts and that's okay.' 

My feeling is that I am reassured in the introduction that Guillermo Bonfil Batalla is honest and upfront. He genuinely does welcome discussion criticism and feedback. Pascoe does not, he sounds identical to a fraud, probably having first and foremost defrauded himself. I don't know if Bruce Pascoe is a pseudo-historian, his response though is certainly a pseudo-response. He sounds remarkably similar to Gavin Menzies, full blown pseudo-historian. 

In defence of Pascoe, Hanlon's Razor likely applies. I think he proposes what he proposes to fulfil an emotional need wrapped up in his personal identity that has become intertwined with a group identity, his work is motivated likely by an internal conflict that I cannot know but neither exclude. Hence he has obstacles that Bonfil Batalla doesn't face and isn't tested by, we know Meso-American cultures had variously agriculture, sanitation, infrastructure, politics, law, martial arts and philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, religious ritual etc. And a benefit of generalizing different cultures into a collective Indian identity is that the it occurs more naturally that the cultures that live in stone 'houses' are equal in dignity and esteem to the cultures that live in 'huts' and 'tents'. And so forth with everything else Pascoe finds Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander dignity to be contingent upon.

Our Word Is Our Weapon

“There once was a brown horse that was brown like a bean, and he lived in the home of a very poor farmer. And the poor farmer had a very poor wife, and they had a very thin chicken and a lame little pig. And so, one day the very poor farmer s wife said: We have nothing more to eat because we are very poor, so we must eat the very thin chicken. So they killed the very thin chicken and made a thin soup and ate it. And so, for a while, they were fine; but the hunger returned and the very poor farmer told his very poor wife: We have nothing more to eat because we are so poor, so we must eat the lame little pig. And so the lame little pig s turn came and they killed it and they made a lame soup and ate it. And then it was the bean-brown horse s turn. But the bean-brown horse did not wait for the story to end; it just ran away and went to another story.

Is that the end of the story? I asked Durito, unable to hide my bewilderment. Of course not. Didn't you hear me say that the bean-brown horse fled to another story? he said as he prepared to leave. And so? I ask exasperated. And so nothing you have to look for the bean-brown horse in another story! he said, adjusting his hat. But, Durito! I said, protesting uselessly. Not one more word! You tell the story like it is”

― Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings

I have not reread Our Word Is Our Weapon for many many years. Decades probably. Marcos was a huge influence on me in my teens, and as the persona has been retired, I fear Marcos has somewhat been forgotten. He was introduced to me as 'the new Che Guevara' but in many ways is kind of an anti-Che:

[The revolutionary]..throws off whomever is sitting on the chair [of power] with one shot, sits down and … [t]here he remains until another Revolutionary … comes by, throws him off and history … repeats itself…[T]the rebel...on the other hand...runs into the Seat of Power…, looks at it carefully, analyzes it, but instead of sitting there he goes and gets a fingernail file and, with heroic patience, he begins sawing at the legs until they are so fragile that they break when someone sits down, which happens almost immediately.

and of course, his ability to effectively retire when his purpose was served:

In May 2014, Marcos gave a speech in front of several thousand onlookers as well as independent media organizations in which, among other things, he explained that because back in 1994 "those outside [the movement] did not see us…the character named 'Marcos' started to be constructed", but that there came a point when "Marcos went from being a spokesperson to being a distractor", and so, convinced that "Marcos, the character, was no longer necessary", the Zapatistas chose to "destroy it".

The first half of Our Word Is Our Weapon introduced me to Chiapas one of the southern most and poorest states in Mexico. The second half consists largely of stories narrated by knight errant beetle Durito to Marcos drawing on Cervantes and Mexican Indigenous folklore. 

Our Word is Our Weapon is excellent, and Marcos is super cool, in many ways, it probably embodies th ideal of any decolonize your bookshelf project. The offspring of a wider worldview. Just read it.

Black America - Conservation Status "Least Threatened"

For a relatively new collective identity, produced largely by the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, this culture is colossal in size and reach. It is far more accessible than African Philosophers. And many of the thinkers most aligned with a process of decolonizing bookshelves I've touched on or alluded to in my previous post: It's Never Been Cheaper To Be A Racist (And That's A Bad Thing) Albeit Robin Di Angelo also features prominantly.

Such that exposure to Black Thought for me at least, is somewhat automatic. Just by following Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes. The presence and reach of Sowell and Crenshaw. Speaking as an Australian, I feel confident that most Australians are more aware of Black culture, than Aboriginal culture. Australia is somewhat culturally colonized by African Americans, something harder to observe if you've lived your whole life on United States Soil. Maybe think of the cultural influence of Japan.

Soft Black Power

Blues, Jazz, Miles Davis, Motown, Hendrix, The Jackson 5, Soul, Funk, Rap, Hip Hop, R&B, Neo Soul. Michael Fucking Jordan... this exercise is pointless. 

Undeniably, African Americans have been given short shrift. Like many wouldn't even know that Michael Jackson basically forced MTV to play black artists. If New Zealand punches above its weight in the medium of film, Black America is the Mike Muhammed Mayweather Tyson Ali Jr. of music, sport, visual arts and literature. 

This culture has global reach even as an oppressed minority in it's own country.

Bookshelf though...bookshelf, bookshelf, bookshelf you say. 

Certainly I've heard of Toni Morrison, heard her speak. I've seen movie adaptations of her books. I haven't read her books though. I've read essays by Ta Nahesi Coates, articles, but not one of his books. I feel we can all set our watches as to when the predominant use of Ibram X Kendi's 'How To Be An Antiracist' will be regarded as anti-black racist propaganda, such is the promise of it's quality, it's now infamous regrettable excerpts and quotes.

Maya Angelou, I've read some of her poems. Watched her perform them. I mean, it's poetry. That artform has never colonized my mind to begin with unless hip-hop counts.

De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Black Sheep that shit blows my mind. The English language appropriated remixed and reborn. Mind explodes with possibilities. Moonlight is a perfect film. I haven't seen La La Land, but nothing deserves to beat Moonlight to best picture. It's beyond the probable. 

I haven't seen Nope, but I enjoyed US, and Get Out, the remake of Candyman, which Peele only produced, suffers from the accompanying educational materials about "reclaiming" a story written by an English Author originally set in working class public housing of England. 

There's just too much to cover, and due to the influence of Black America on global culture and Politics (witness the exporting and appropriation of Black Lives Matter to the UK, Australia and no doubt everywhere else, preceding that the global popularity and celebrity of Obama...) I just doubt almost anything I choose would not be something people in the English speaking world would not have effortlessly been exposed to. We know Douglas Murray listens to Nicki Minaj.

So I'll talk about The Hate U Give, which did appear on the initial how-to articles for decolonizing your bookshelf. It's a YA novel, and I haven't read it, because I'm a grown arse adult. But I did watch the movie adaptation.

I have very few problems with it. Similar, but not as extreme as 'Dear White People' the Netflix series, it potentially qualifies for Poe's Law - which is it could almost pass as satire.

The Hate U Give I learned is adapted from Tupak Shaqur's 'Thug Life' philosophy it's an acronym 'The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucksup Everybody.' Or something like that, and in that I'm very much behind the core message of The Hate U Give. It's very much in line with Chomsky's line:

“Everyone's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: Stop participating in it.” - Noam Chomsky.

Having read some Chomsky (he's prolific) I'm almost sure in context this will be referring to state sponsored terrorism, like drone bombing civilian targets undermining social welfare programs through CIA backed coups etc. but I can interpret it as reacting to terrorism in a manner that perpetuates terrorism - thereby participating it. A cycle of violence begetting violence.

This certainly appeared to be the moral of The Hate You Give.

The premise of The Hate U Give is, a police shooting of an unarmed black man witnessed by a black girl he was giving a ride home from a party. 

One thing I liked and appreciated about the premise of this movie, is that it didn't get cartoonish about it. 

Cartoonish can be good and/or bad. Like I just watched Indian action thriller RRR, the whole movie is cartoonish, and I understand Bollywood villains to often be cartoonishly evil, and set in British Occupation, the main antagonist, and every antagonist is ridiculously cruel and evil in RRR. Yet I'm fine with that, because as mentioned before hand, the whole movie is over the top ridiculous, and like the British Occupation of India was brutal and violent and cruel and oppressive and Gandhi showed the world that not through over the top ridiculous action, but civil disobediance.

When cartoonish is bad, is in the 2022 remake of Australian Youth Soap Opera "Heartbreak High" where in one scene I'm almost certain was inspired by real events is tidied up to have a police officer single out an Aboriginal character and escalate to violent take down without any real altercation between the victim and the police officer. It's simply tidied up so it is unambiguous that the police officer just hates Aboriginals and attacks them from behind the badge, and that becomes cartoonish.

By contrast, the pivotal police shooting involves a young black male ignoring police instructions and reaching for a hair-brush, a dark hand held object. In this way it resembles many of the high profile killings of unarmed black men from Mike Brown to Jacob Blake in Kenosha - which is to say, non-compliance and resisting arrest are almost always factors in these tragedies. It would be tidier to have a cartoonishly racist cop single out a law abiding black youth and murder him in cold blood, but that doesn't occur. A more ambiguous scenario is offered for our consideration.

Likewise, there's no belief or ideology that goes unchallenged in The Hate U Give. Slogans and maxims like 'If you can't see my blackness, then you don't see me.' isn't portrayed as an oh-snap moment to a cartoonish white guy claiming to be colorblind. Instead, rather than simply affirming that he sees her blackness, he affirms that he sees her. 

One of the protagonists friends expresses sympathy for the officer, suffering a trial by media and recognizes that he is also a victim of the shooting, which gets her admonished. But it isn't a straight up lecture directed at the audience, the door is left open at least in the film to questioning whether the officer deserves the punishment heaped upon him.

It also deals with black-on-black crime, codes of silence. The Hate U Give is actually, by contemporary standards a very nuanced, thoughtful, watchable film. It is one of the least ideological voices in the whole Black Lives Matter cultural moment I've come across.

Lost and Loss

Black culture, being that of African America is a colonial culture. The damage was done. The Atlantic Slave Trade happened, people from numerous cultures were forced together, lost their language, lost their lineage, and were forcibly interbred with their captors. Culture was appropriated from Africa, but also from England, at least according to Thomas Sowell. 

In this respect, there's a connection between Black America and American Indians - history and culture were lost. In the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, Indigenous texts were destroyed, where they existed, whole cities and whole civilizations were lost, and European influences imposed themselves on Indigenous groups.

As such, there's a whole lot of heritage that simply cannot be known, and I just don't know if efforts like 'Home Team History' in their mission to create a Pan-African identity, have conceded that it is likely going to be an invented identity rather than a recovered identity. The exact same thing goes for Indigenismo in Mexico. 

The same thing goes for the pre-Roman indigenous people's of the British Isles. The Picts, the Bretons etc. where I have no idea if I have any heritage or not. Because then comes the Roman occupation, bringing in genes and heritage and culture from all over the Empire to garrison Hadrian's Wall, from North Africa to Persia. Then much, much later come the Saxons, and the Anglos. By Voltaire's time London is already multicultural. The late Elizabeth II has Black, Muslim and Jewish ancestry.

Owing to identical ancestry points I'm actually related to everyone who has ancestors in Europe from 1,000 years ago. So where is my heritage? The thought of myself as indigenous to somewhere had never occured to me until recent years. I'm indigenous probably to a vast geographic footprint, overlapping numerous cultures, and most of that cultural heritage is lost.

Fortunately, most cultures have common ancestors too. Judeo-Christian is a load of hooey. Syncretism is the norm and Judeo isn't the original source of Western Cultural Identity, it isn't even that original.

The Taboo Appropriation

"Alternative facts" was a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States. When pressed during the interview with Chuck Todd to explain why Spicer would "utter a provable falsehood", Conway stated that Spicer was giving "alternative facts". Todd responded, "Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods."[1]

Conway's use of the phrase "alternative facts" for demonstrable falsehoods was widely mocked on social media and sharply criticized by journalists and media organizations, including Dan Rather, Jill Abramson, and the Public Relations Society of America. The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian, particularly in reference to the term doublethink. Within four days of the interview, sales of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four had increased 95-fold, which The New York Times and others attributed to Conway's use of the phrase, making it the number-one bestseller on Amazon.com.[2]

Conway later defended her choice of words, defining "alternative facts" as "additional facts and alternative information".[3] ~ Wikipedia "Alternative Facts"

This exercise has been plagued by nebulosity. Ambiguity. 

Something that frustrates me are my memories of laughing at Sean Spencer's tenure as Press Secretary back in 2016. The surrogates sent out to just do...any job of reconciling outrageous claims with reality. Conway's contradiction in terms "Alternative facts" earned, rightly momentary derision. Then a subset of self-same detractors of the past administration began advocating for 'other ways of knowing'. 

Now I turn my eyes eastward to look to "the West" or Western Europe, a nebulous fuzzy bound concept bounded variously by the Persian Empire, Carthage, the Byzantine Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Grenada and other Moorish Principalities. That has variously included Isreal and Palestine and North Africa or not, and has been under various totalitarian rule - Before Hitler and the Third Reich there was the Napoleonic Empire and before that the Holy Roman Empire, and the Unholy Roman Empire, and Rome was a Republic, then a dictatorship and so too did Greece produce democracies and tyrannies and whatever the fuck Sparta was. 

So there's a question of what "Western Values" are? Do they have to be distinct, stable-over-time and originating in the former Western Roman Empire?

Mr Beat has a pretty good summary of the hokum:

I'm put in mind of when Australia was debating a preamble to a potential republic constitution in 1999:

With hope in God, the Commonwealth of Australia is constituted as a democracy with a federal system of government to serve the common good.

We the Australian people commit ourselves to this Constitution:

proud that our national unity has been forged by Australians from many ancestries;

never forgetting the sacrifices of all who defended our country and our liberty in time of war;

upholding freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and the rule of law;

honouring Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the nation's first people, for their deep kinship with their lands and for their ancient and continuing cultures which enrich the life of our country;

recognising the nation-building contribution of generations of immigrants;

mindful of our responsibility to protect our unique natural environment;

supportive of achievement as well as equality of opportunity for all;

and valuing independence as dearly as the national spirit which binds us together in both adversity and success. ~ proposed preamble.

The proposal was not popular. It was resoundingly defeated in the referendum, but it could have been worse - it originally contained these words:

 Australians are free to be proud of their country and heritage, free to realise themselves as individuals, and free to pursue their hopes and ideals. We value excellence as well as fairness, independence as dearly as mateship. ~ emphasis mine.

It seems likely to me that given the media attention given to then Prime Minister John Howard's finger-off-the-pulse insistence on including "mateship" and the bad taste it left in all but the AM radio listening blockhead crowds, people voted down the preamble in the referendum without actually being aware the above statement had been removed. (stereotyping there, working in a call centre for 8 years taught me that the other side does exist but in terms of direct face-to-face interactions, I am very well insulated.) 

But the words I emphasized are in their totality what tends to grind with people of all stripes, and this is my assertion: That in thoughtful individuals the asserted intrinsic values provoke somewhat naturally the question "Who doesn't value excellence? Fairness? Independence?" Then tac on it then PM John Howard's insistence the vague concept of "mateship" that being somewhat Australian slang kind of gives away the game of trying to unfairly snatch up what are human universals.

This is my hot and very sloppy take - accounting for my not being a historian let alone a really good historian - There's a cluster of interdependent but almost accidental historical events owing mainly to Greece. Socrates starts questioning authority and is almost predictably put to death. Aristotle basically invents science, and initially science is terrible - light comes from the eyes hits objects and absorbs it's forms, everything is made of fire, water, earth and air, Beavers are fish and so can be eaten on fridays, Giraffes evolve by stretching their necks to reach leaves, it doesn't make sense that everyone isn't ambidextrous etc. But crucially it has this self correcting mechanism, you test things and if they do not work, you stop doing them. 

Christianity comes, science leaves and takes refuge in the Islamic world for a while, Islam drops the ball (some time after the 11th century publication of "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" but the attribution is difficult, given that the Islamic Golden age continues until a contentious 14th~17th century CE) and Spain retake the Iberian Peninsula (between 8th and 15th century CE) and with it, a bunch of Greek books giving Western Christendom a second chance to generate knowledge through a scientific process. (Please note, not being a historian I presume there's some overlap between Christendom getting it's second chance and Islam dropping the science ball and it was plausibly independent.) Later Galileo uses science to directly contradict revelation but gets put on trial and sentenced to house arrest uttering the all important phrase 'Yet it moves', Newton formulates physics inspired by Islamic experimental methods then spends the majority of his energy on alchemy. Then we get "the Age of Enlightenment" Cesare Beccaria, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire etc. 

The strong epistemologies eventually muscle their way past revelation into Western Christendom and the regions through intra and inter competition start to embody (unknowingly and independently) Musashi Fucking Miyamoto's 19th prescript from the Dokkado/Way of Walking Alone "Respect the Buddha and Gods but do not rely on them." Western Christendom starts relying (or perishing) on empiricism and rationalism, and benching Jesus and Mary whenever the chips are down. 

Basically, these societies become hostage to Darwin (and others') observation - Do what works or perish.

I'm presuming you reading this, are probably a member of a western audience. Test my assertion yourself - who would you give more credibility to - a Military Historian that attributes conflict outcomes (successes/failures) to material and psychological factors, or one who attributes it to the proper praying to the true god(s)/The presence or absence of auspicious omens of god's favour.

Of course, we can reconcile the two by simply asserting that God favours the scientists. Spinoza's God whose holy text is the physical world itself.

In "the West" there is certainly crystal healing, considered an alternative medicine, but there is no crystal warfare. Various militaries of "the West" may permit personnel to pray, to carry good luck charms, but the institution itself relies almost exclusively on what is proven reliable when it comes to equipping and deploying.

"Western values" *I* interpret as a euphemism, much like "Judeo-Christian" born of a marriage of convenience between conservatives that tend to be, or enamoured by, Christianity but don't want to explicitly acknowledge that a big part of the cultural dominance of Western Europe over the world correlates negatively with how seriously Christianity and revelation as an epistemology is taken.

I assert but cannot prove, that the big taboo for resistance through appropriation is to take the Colonial constitution of knowledge "so that it can put them to service the groups own ends and it's own autonomous decisions." 

There is a very necessary aside here, that perhaps the reason Colonial constitutions of knowledge weren't adopted, was because of a propensity of Colonial personnel to make shit up, leap to conclusions about the indigenous populations, characterizing them as godless savages or something, making it hard for the oppressed to observe how Colonial powers managed to get there in the first place with devastating technology.

Nevertheless it's a taboo of appropriation best encapsulated by Audre Lorde's "The Master's tools will never dismantle the masters house." though this is certainly a multi-valent statement and there's no evidence Audre Lorde was talking about epistemic tools like empiricism, rationalism - her short list "of exclusion, absence, invisibility, silence, and tokenism" could form a lucid criticism of self-defeating activist tactics today. Here's an article that demonstrates how open the essay title is to interpretation. "Capitalism cannot be resisted with Capitalism" defies the recent history of China.

Some examples - 

Firstly a positive example, a friend recently sent me a trial subscription to the "Waking Up" app. a meditation application that helps define, train and understand mindfulness. Sam Harris a prominent atheist has appropriated spiritual practice and basically removed all affiliation with superstition. Much like the legacy of Socrates questioning authority, and developing the Socratic method, as preserved by Plato, over in India it appears there was an equally significant accident of history which was the development of meditation. Something way more ancient than the Buddha, probably prehistoric, maybe out of the Indus Valley River Civilization. 

Harris is not the first to appropriate it either, Buddhism appropriated it from Hinduism, and Buddhism really left India, and spread to South-East Asia, China and Korea and Japan, fragmenting like all religions and philosophies and music genres into sects. I'm really most familiar with Japan, and when Buddhist monks bought Zen to Japan, it was with some horror that martial practitioners and philosophers were like 'this Zen state of mind is phenomenal for killing people.'

The Waking Up app. I'm sure is neither the first, nor the exclusive meeting of Meditation and Empiricism, but it caused me to reflect on my own introduction to meditation, a book an ex leant me compassionately to help me cope with the stress of being dumped by her. I can't recall the title, but it was no small thing to have it pointed out to me that I could sit in a chair. 

With the smart phone-social media induced demand for an explosion in mindfulness, this may not seem revelatory at all. But I was effectively locked out of the benefits of meditation throughout my adolescence because it was treated as other, and available only to a self selecting group of New Age hippies.

More recently, I got an introduction to Kundalini Yoga, a practice I feel that is begging for a Bruce Lee type to come in and eliminate the extraneous, dogmatic and arbitrary. Maybe it's already done, in terms of the yoga sessions my mum does at a gym, since she's never given me the impression it is important to wear certain clothes, repeat a mantra in a language you don't speak etc.

Another potential candidate I feel is non-dogmatic Calisthenics that though having ancient origins, is adaptive and evidence based.

Anyway, another concrete example - being aware of the devastating impact of European diseases spread to the Indigenous populations of the Americas, I was shocked by the reaction of my local Indigenismo groups to the global Covid-19 pandemic - namely, near complete and total denial, coupled with superstition and quackery. 

It was for me baffling, in particular, these groups still transmit a lot of their group specific knowledge orally. If elders die, it's like the local library burning down. Yet two groups one of the Lakota style and another of the Mexica/Aztec style, did nothing. They wound up getting lucky, clear proof that the old gods are the true gods, but I submit this rejection of the germ theory of disease, the revelations of the microscope, DNA sequencing, statistics even. As an example of the taboo of appropriating an evidence based approach to non-colonial cultures.

The aforementioned false-equivocation of preserving heritage and what would we call it...heritage literalism. 

There's an extent that the kind of commentators that invoke "Western Values" look to China, Japan, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa etc. and more recently contentiously Turkey and Russia as basically "Western" countries. At least, I feel it is very unlikely that these are the countries in mind when expressing concern/alarm over immigration and outside cultural influences. Yet there are obviously distinct cultural and ethnic identities, it's just on institutional levels there's no disdain for writing things down, using the internet, breaking down complex practices into incremental, digestible lessons etc.

It's in the colonized identities I find this disdain, and with it, an accompanying frustration, constant criticism of people's dedication etc. 

I attribute the rejection of evidence-based approaches, to an intertwining of identity with practice. I am So-and-So and therefore, our traditional medicine must work, for if it doesn't, then I don't know who I am.

And yeah, embracing experimental methods can certainly coincide with existential dread. It's a super vulnerable step to take, that carries with it the inherit risk that your concept of self is composed entirely of delusion. And yet you are still you. It's curious to think about adopting the experimental mind set in a culture that is expanding versus one that is contracting - like the Mongolian Empire, Carthage and Rome, the British Empire, US and Post Ping China versus brutalized occupied and colonized cultures that are often stripped of their military and the culture is reduced to performative aspects.

It appears when you are seizing land, you stop caring about what makes you you.

It's a doozy of a taboo. 

Conclusion: History is Anti-Fragile, in the Long Run

 “The frog in the well knows nothing of the sea.” ~ Japanese Proverb.

Yes it all comes back to Mill, but if one looks outside the anglosphere, or "the West" we can find that nature simply reveals itself to anyone who cares to observe. 

The race to decolonization has no finish line. A term even when constrained to the bookshelf truly deserves the adjective 'unintelligible.'

Having basically had enough, the flaws of my exploration seem likely most salient to me. I'm impressed by my foresight to quantify my own efforts as dipping my toes in, somewhat contradicting the Dunning Kruger findings. 

The pertinent question remains, how much decolonizing of a bookshelf, is enough? The answer is probably, very little, not even dipping the toes, as I have described it to get the major return of: white people are not the centre of the universe.

However, on this front, I feel most kids growing up in the 21st century will be exposed to Japanese comics and cartoons and African American culture, and in ~90% of cases, that should be sufficient for a white kid to extrapolate out an openness to all cultures, though granted an Amazonian Tribe might be more alienating than ethnic and language groups that have basically integrated if not dominating popular culture. 

Equity cannot be achieved by decolonizing a bookshelf. An amateur economist once pointed out to me that abundance creates scarcity, opening up the bookshelf to everything everywhere all at once, leaves one severely short on attention. For 18 months I allocated attention to the highly accessible Essays of Montaigne, with competent translations, Montaigne's a rewarding slog. He and he alone demands a lot of attention., not as a statement of worthiness mind you, but of capacity. 

The average Joe I posit, will not read Montaigne's Essays, nor Des Cartes Meditations, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Plato's Republic etc.

More likely, is that you'll be exposed to a few cherries, cherry picked from the works. There are rewards to reading a whole work, but a rudimentary understanding of the thesis I feel is in most cases sufficient. Life is full of 'The Lion King's, which is to say, a story that follows the plot beats of Hamlet, but requires no knowledge of Hamlet.

On that front, it does not seem practical or feasible to me, to say, demand a scholar whose doctoral thesis is on the writings of some Western Philosopher, Military General, Statesman or otherwise Intellectual, need to create a kind of equity by dedicating equal studiousness to the writings of al-Ghazali, Dōgen Zenji or obligated to producing a parallel and equal doctorate on a much harder to access oral tradition of a non-western culture. 

I do not deny that this is probably a valuable exercise, that likely would produce both better scholars and scholarship, but the more practical and feasible way is just to have experts collide with each other. In this sense, history including histories of thought, histories of philosophy etc are Anti-fragile, history get stronger when stress is applied to them.

Currently, I feel, history is being stressed by pseudohistory, I believe the practice of history will get stronger for it. It probably already has, and the big way history gets stronger is people talking to and questioning each other, stressing the notions thru theories that people have accepted. 

Can history get stronger under the stress of literature and fiction being posited as a viable substitute for history (or physics for that matter)? Again I feel ultimately the practice of history will get stronger. 

Counterintuitively, history as a subject is one of the least monolithic. Even though what happened, happened and cannot be changed. Just what we think happened changes all the time. However, this does not mean that it is an incoherent shit-show. History is (sorry for the "Western" analogy) more of a ship of Theseus, there's certainly such a thing as England, but England is not an eternal intrinsic concept, evidence of such is that I as an offspring of the British Isles, find it very odd to consider my heritage "indigenous" to there. So too with everywhere, be it Mali, Commanche, Aztec, Maori, Qin, Pict, Visigoth...even in the exceptional cases like Aboriginal Australia where cultures persist for tens of millennia, I'd still bet against an eternity, should evolutions of language, culture, territory (for migration and occupation) ever be determinable, say through the invention of time travel.

Like if the contemporary Gunditjmara (and I have to plead ignorance as to whether the language of these peoples are already lost) and we travelled back 4,000 years to interact with their ancestors, I feel there's a fair chance that the language would be near unintelligible after 4,000 years of evolution and adaptation. Consider for example this passage from Beowulf:

Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. ~ Buh?owulf, how English wast spraken and wroten 10th~11th Century. 

Given time, I'm sure, linguists can do wonderful things, like reconstruct proto-languages. But I doubt linguists have a problem with being colonized.

But what of what the average Joe should be exposed to? In that case yes, tidbits, nuggets, should be from everywhere. For the attention scarce spin a roullette where it can come up with a quote from Rawls to a quote from Nana Asmu'a. 

I do suspect there's a reason this doesn't currently happen so much, and that reason is context. Even translated, the wisdom of Kocc Barma Fall or Nasreddin may not be immediately apparent. 

That's the ancient world, is it time for Australians to pay more attention to China's contemporary intellectual thinkers? From Sun Yat-Sen to Wang Huning at least. Yeah, if another culture is telling us what they are thinking, it's foolish not to listen to them.

So there's a lot of good to be drawn from the unintelligible concept of decolonizing your bookshelf. Where "Western thought" stops, there is something viable buttressing that fence. That's our heritage too. This exercise may be over, somewhat arbitrarily, but it has only served to peak my curiosity and likely further inoculated me to the naïve idealism that gives birth to such trite suggestions as reading an incredibly recent, incredibly homogenous list of books and thinking that will transform society.

With a sense of serendipity, this morning I listened to Yale Professor Timothy Snyder's second lecture on the History of Ukraine, and it seemed somewhat pertinent:

Once or twice a year someone comments on a blog post, and in anticipation of a comment of the form "TL;DR, assertion assertion assertion." a heroic act of telling me to shut the fuck up, I would guess as I surmised when my attention was first captured by this alluringly vague notion of decolonizing my bookshelf - that it's not an exercise one is supposed to do, or if doing, think about because it would fuck with the story from the above lecture, the stories that fuck with the past 'Once things were good, we were innocent, then the fall [in this case colonialism] and what we need is for times to be good again.' 

The first premise being that there was a paradise, and that above all cannot be scrutinized. It's a pity, because you can't find the pearls in the shit pile of history with all it's slavery, imperialism, misogyny, oppression, ignorance, foolishness etc. if you refuse to acknowledge that there's a shit pile.

Stay curious.