The Higher Foolishness: virtue signaling, land acknowledgment, indigenous knowledge

Although I have not been active on campus since retiring nearly a quarter-century ago, I remain on some e-mail lists that occasionally open my eyes to things that I would really rather not know. Thus I recently received an e-mail in which the signature, as so commonly, specified “pronouns: she/her/hers, they/their/theirs” but also included a  sentiment that I had not come across before: “I gratefully and respectfully acknowledge that I live and work on the native land of the Tutelo and Monacan people. (to learn more: https://native-land.ca/)”.

The specification of pronouns was not new to me, of course, though this particular instance seemed confusing: does this individual  answer to the plural form as comfortably as to the feminine one? What would that signify?

The land-acknowledgment sentiment was new to me, however, so I informed myself more by visiting the website of the National Museum of the American Indian [1] as well as the link [2]  provided in that e-mail signature. By now I have learned that such land-acknowledgments have become a not-uncommon part of the politically correct academic landscape [3]; in other countries as well.

The Canadian site immediately offers a multi-colored map of North America with native names superposed,; I was naturally surprised to find no mention, however, of Tutelo or Monacan, the two peoples specified in that e-mail signature (by a writer based in Virginia).

 Rather naturally, this led to questions about the reliability of the data. For one obvious thing, to what date could any such land assignment refer? Did not tribes move around, and had there not been occasional violent conflicts between them and associated displacements?

Above all, the question is obviously raised of when, and from where, the first humans entered North America.

I believe those questions remain rather open. A long- and dogmatically-held belief was that the first human settlers were the so-called Clovis people, named after remains of various tools and bones found initially around New Mexico and later in many other regions. They were presumed to have crossed from Asia via a land bridge across what is now the Bering Strait, earlier than say 15,000 years ago; but claims have been made of far older sites of human habitation elsewhere, including in South America.

At any rate,  we cannot be certain about the ancestry of today's American-Indian tribes, or of those extant half a millennium ago before the settlements by Europeans and others during the last few centuries. Perhaps these recent settlers displaced people who had themselves  acquired their territories through violent displacement of earlier inhabitants?

We simply do not know; so these contemporary land-acknowledgments are best described as virtue signaling.

Virtue signaling is a standard part of today’s political correctness. Another example is the lavish admiration directed at anything that can be described as “indigenous”. For instance, in a book review of Noah Whiteman’s Most Delicious Poison, in the New Scientist of 18 November 2023:

“[A] history of the societal impact that toxins have had. . . . their use has been defined by exploitation of Indigenous people.

Those living in the Amazon basin, for example, were never compensated for the sophisticated knowledge they passed to Westerners about curare, a toxic preparation that colonisers and settlers called ‘flying death’. Yet the tubocurarine within found profitable use during the 20th century as a muscle relaxant during surgery.”

But was the knowledge “passed on” by some  deliberately intended action that would call for gratitude, or did the colonizers just observe that  spear- or arrow- tips held a highly toxic substance? In any case, knowledge of the toxicity hardly constitutes anything “sophisticated” — that stems from what Western science and medicine discovered through chemical-molecular manipulations of which the Amazonian Natives knew and understood nothing.

Innumerable volumes have been written, of course, about the exploitation of resources in underdeveloped regions by the actions of more advanced nations. The very word “exploitation” tends already to pass moral judgment and signal the virtuousness of the writer. However, in many or most instances, the indigenes themselves had made no comparable use of such resources as, say, ores or diamonds.

Attempts to have indigenous people treated tangibly in an equitable way are surely not helped by misguided discourse about “sophisticated” indigenous knowledge. Nor by the politically correct absurdity of capitalizing “indigenous”, presumably to indicate that these people are respected as fully as are Westerners. That sort of thing seems to have begun when the New York Times decided, a few years ago, that the adjective “black” needed to be capitalized whenever it might apply to certain “people and cultures of African origin” [4].

All this brought to mind David Starr Jordan’s 1927 book, The Higher Foolishness [5]. When I first  came across that book long ago, I assumed that “higher” was a dig at much of what happens at institutions of higher education, but Jordan’s focus is  much broader: he defines the higher foolishness as “sciosophy”, which he derives from classic Greek words for “shade”  and “knowledge”, to signify “the mere shadow of knowledge”; and his first examples are such things as seances and ghosts.

His main point a very sound one, is that reliable knowledge can only be based on tangible evidence.

Such things as land acknowledgments and other forms of virtue signaling are based on nothing objectively tangible, they are created in the service of a particular set of ethical, moral, or religious beliefs and values.

Universally available historical and contemporary evidence demonstrates rather conclusively that unanimity is not humanly attainable over ethical, moral, or religious beliefs and values. Campaigning for practices prescribed by one particular ethical, moral, or religious belief is inevitably partisan and thereby divisive. History indicates that differences over partisan ethical, moral, religious, social, or political beliefs and values are likely to result in violent conflicts or totalitarian regimes.

The only alternative is intellectual tolerance of beliefs and values, and practical compromises over tangible actions: circumstances that characterize cultures and countries that have achieved a modicum of democratic, non-totalitarian governance.

The vacuousness of land acknowledgment, that it is just meaningless verbiage in service of feel-good virtue-signaling, can be seen in the fact that it is literally impossible to apply properly in almost all the humanly inhabited regions in the world.

The best claim for meaningful land-acknowledgment would come in Australia, where it is virtually certain that the ancestors of present-day indigenous Aborigines were the first human beings ever on that continent. New Zealand's claim would be almost as good, since the Polynesian ancestors of the Maoris were very probably the first-ever humans there.

But we simply do not know when the Americas were first settled by human beings, as already noted above; there are also considerable uncertainties over occupations during the last millennium [5].

Further: any notion of land acknowledgments in Eurasia would be quite absurd, since there have been innumerable migrations and wars and conquests during the last few thousand years in those regions.

As to the Middle East, some people might find it amusing to suggest that present-day “Palestinians” should acknowledge that, some two millennia ago, Jerusalem and surrounding areas  belonged to the Hebrews, Israelites, Jews.

An even knottier  problem is presented by Africa: Should today's Homo sapiens acknowledge gratitude to all the earlier species of Homo?

And once that problem has been recognized, one realizes that it applies in other regions as well, since remains of Homo erectus have also been found in Indonesia and other parts of South Asia; and perhaps also in parts of Europe. And then one needs to decide whether today's humans owe acknowledgment to Neanderthals, Denisovans, and perhaps other not-yet-known precursors.

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[1]        https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/informational/land-acknowledgment

[2]        https://native-land.ca

[3]       For instance at Northwestern: https://www.northwestern.edu/native-american-and-indigenous-peoples/about/Land%20Acknowledgement.html;
or Princeton, https://inclusive.princeton.edu/initiatives/building-community/native-american-indigenous-inclusion/land-acknowledgements;
or Pacific University, https://www.pacificu.edu/life-pacific/support-safety/equity-diversity-inclusion-and-accessibility/land-acknowledgements;
and innumerable others, including such groups as the National Environmental Education Foundation, https://www.neefusa.org/who-we-are/about-neef.
     The practice also has proponents in Australia and New Zealand.

[4]       Nancy Coleman, “Why we’re capitalizing Black”, 5 July 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html

[5]        Patrick Huyghe, Columbus was Last: From 200,000 BC to 1492: a heretical history of who was first, Hyperion, 1992

[6]        David Starr Jordan, The Higher Foolishness, Bobbs-Merrill, 1927