The Hierarchy of Knowing

Human babies are born possessing a collection of reflexes. Most of us, for instance, are born with a rooting reflex, a stupid name for the instinct to nurse. Scientists have identified the startle reflex, the grasping reflex, the step reflex, and a half dozen other behaviors and skills that are considered innate survival instincts with which most of us are born.

In this way, we are like other animals, or even plants, driven by instincts that help ensure our survival. What sets us apart is that as we grow and mature, we develop our human cognitive capacity that differentiates us from the other living things in that we have the ability to override our instincts through the application of thought-processes that allow us to act based on reason(s) rather than mere reflex.

Humans, for instance, do not directly experience the earth's magnetic fields the way migratory birds instinctively do. Yet we know about them because of our ability to reason. Zoologist Donald Griffin is credited with discovering echolocation -- the use of echoes to orient in space -- in 1944, even though bats, whales, and some birds and rodents have been exploiting it for millennia. Obviously, Griffin didn't discover anything. He likely wasn't even the first human to figure it out: humans who have been blind since birth are profoundly aware of their surroundings, some even employ a form of echolocation, and have probably been doing so in some capacity for as long as Homo sapiens have existed. Yet we say that Griffin discovered echolocation because he arrived at it through reason rather than mere instinct.

Our prejudice, however, is that since those animals (and those blind humans for that matter) didn't discover echolocation, because they arrived at their abilities through instinct rather than reason, that they can't be said to know it the way (sighted) humans can. 

In the same way, when a plant grows upward toward sunlight and downward toward water and nutrients, we, in our prejudice, have a hard time saying that the plant knows how to grow. We tend to just say that plants "grow," without crediting their knowledge. It's this prejudice about what it means to know that stands at the heart of our belief that humans are cognitively superior to other species, and that adults are cognitively superior to babies or young children. In our hubris, we define "knowing" as a purely conscious cognitive function, one that involves not knowing, then reasoning our way to knowing, and we tend to dismiss any knowing that comes through instinct or inspiration or intuition or some other manner that is not reasoning.

We all don't feel that way, of course. A reading of Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass shows us that a hierarchy of knowing is a relatively recent and mostly Western way of being. It's one that emerges from the so-called Enlightenment, an era that brought us both science as we know it as well as colonialism. And while we've all benefited from the reasoning of the scientific method, we've also all suffered from its evil twin: superiority. It's what causes us to inflict ourselves, often violently, on children and cultures and nature "for their own good," usually with disastrous consequences.

What a baby knows, what a bird knows, what blade of grass knows, is all knowledge. It matters not that it was arrived at by reason, instinct, inspiration, or intuition. 

Our schools, however, are built around the hierarchy of knowing. Reason is placed at the top. Indeed, a child's instinct to move, to connect, and to play is quashed. A child's inspirations are, at best, seen as cute, but off-topic. A child's intuitions are deemed inferior to the "real" knowledge being delivered to them by the colonialism of "for their own good."

This morning, in the midst of writing this, I sat outdoors for a half hour as the sun rose. A murder of crows flew over me, heading west. A cottontail scampered from one shrub to another. And the trees stood over me, tall and quiet role models. This is the wisdom, of which reason is but a small, fallible part of all the knowing there is.

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