Video: Illuminations Launch Party
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Illuminations Launch Party, October 24 2022.
ZACHARY DAVIS: Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight for the Illuminations Launch Event. My name is Zachary Davis, I am the host of Ministry of Ideas, which is the, I guess you could call it the parent podcast of this new baby, Illuminations. I started Ministry of Ideas about five years ago, 2016 and it launched in 2017. And I worked on it the whole time that I was a student here at Harvard Divinity School.
So everything that I was learning in the classroom, I tried to incorporate and engage with in all the new episodes that I was doing, and pretty soon it became clear that every episode in some way was about religion, even without my intending it to be. So it's a great pleasure and beautiful feeling to come back to my alma mater, to be here with many beloved friends and mentors, and talk about how religion and science interact.
Here's how the evening should proceed, if all goes well. I'll share a few remarks, and then Maria Devlin McNair, who is the Ministry of Ideas managing producer and has flown in here from St. Louis to be with us tonight, will give you a bit of an overview of the series as a whole.
And then we will have the great pleasure of enjoying a conversation about plant consciousness and what it can mean for how we think about religion, how we think about science, and how we think about ourselves with Charles Stang, Rachael Peterson, and Matthew Battles.
Afterwards, I implore you to eat all the cheese from Costco that I brought in, every last cheddar bite, and we can get to know each other. I want to begin tonight by telling you about the first science bestseller. This was the Malcolm Gladwell, of its day, the exciting, massively successful book called Micrographia.
And since it was a 17th century, has a very long and delightful subtitle, check this out. Micrographia, Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses. With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. This was written and produced by an extraordinary person named Robert Hooke. And Robert Hooke really should be world famous.
He was one of these unbelievable geniuses. And from what I can tell, the rivalry with Newton led to his reputation being a bit smothered, but Robert Hooke was amazing and he loved this new invention, the microscope. This is the microscope that he would use.
And Micrographia, became a success because he made drawings, highly detailed, arresting drawings of all this weird stuff that he would put under the microscope. And I'm going to show you now some of the images that he produced, and even today, hundreds of years later, you can see why this was a best seller. Isn't that amazing?
So you're going to see that Robert Hooke had an absolute obsession with bugs. Absolute nightmare fuel. But he didn't just look at bugs, he looked at other marvels and wonders of the natural world with great care and attention. This is a snowflake. I think, this is frozen urine. I think this is a feather.
Just imagine being in London in the 1650s and getting this book and just seeing things you'd never ever imagined. So why was Robert Hooke obsessive about looking closely at things, at this unseen world? And why was he and his club, the Royal Society, working really hard to develop new methods of knowledge?
Well, it has to do with the fall of Adam and Eve. Our friend Saint Augustine, fifth century theologian, world historical genius had made a claim that the fall of Adam corrupted the human mind and mankind's powers of reason.
And the Reformation had reinvigorated Augustinian theology on the continent, and especially in England. And there were a lot of intellectuals who were deeply anxious about what it meant, yet they couldn't know for certain things about the world.
There were three problems that the fall occasioned. One, had to do with memory since that you couldn't really trust human memory, it just wasn't reliable. The second, it's just more broad, you can't trust the human mind, it's prone to error. And third, is that the human senses weren't accurate, again, you couldn't trust the human mind.
So you had a real crisis of epistemology, a real crisis of, how can we know what we know when we are all suffering from the effects of the fall? Well, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and other members of the Royal Society wanted to do something about this.
So they developed some methods to compensate for the effect of the fall. What do you do about the memory problem if you are interested in certain knowledge? Well, you keep really damn good records and you write about your findings with a Republic of scientists.
What do you do with the fact that our mind is just prone to error? Well, instead of going in knowing what you want to find, you create falsifiable hypotheses and you do experiments to try to protect against the bias that the mind is prone to. And what do you do about our feeble human senses? You use these amazing new instruments like the microscope and telescope and you invent all kinds of new instruments like the vacuum and other exciting, wonderful 17th century scientific instruments.
So in order to counter the effects of the fall of Adam, you see the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution was a response to a theological problem and it was motivated in part by this beautiful idea that God speaks His truth to us with two books. One, the book of scripture and the other is the book of nature.
And these scientists when you read their writings about what they were doing, their motivation had this beautiful spirit of devotion and prayer, that they were trying to draw closer to the divine source of understanding and love through an understanding of the natural world. We inherited a world with a particular story about the relationship of religion and science.
For two great reasons, to bad responses, to new scientific ideas, the Galileo trial and the general response to Darwin by many forms of Christianity. And that idea that religion and science are so dramatically different that they, at the very least, ought to have nothing to do with one another, non-overlapping magisterium for example or are totally opposed, eternal enemies, and one is on the side of truth that you can really know and the other superstition.
That has been a very strong story, a very powerful story and one that still has a lot of purchase. The project of this series Illuminations is to try to tell stories of friendship between religion and science. To tell stories about how there has been mutual inspiration, stories about how that same longing for the horizon of our understanding can pull you with a powerful spirit of curiosity and awe.
Now friends do fight sometimes, there are moments of tension, there are times where finding harmony seems difficult or it demands and invites serious wrestling. But I believe that we really need to think about both these categories in different ways if we're going to try to reach towards the world that we want to live in.
So with that, I would like to thank you all for being here and introduce Maria Devlin McNair. So Maria, received her PhD from Harvard University in English literature with a specialization in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. She is a writer and managing producer for Ministry of Ideas, and has served as a senior editor for Illuminations.
She's also the creator and producer of Shakespeare For All, which is an amazing, amazing course on all the major plays of Shakespeare. She's currently working on a book project, on ethics and Renaissance comedy. Maria has also become one of my closest friends and dear collaborators.
She is the kind of collaborator you all dream of because she's smarter than me, she works so hard, everything that we've done together has been a joy because of her. And I'm so grateful you can be here Maria, so please welcome her.
[APPLAUSE]
MARIA DELVIN MCNAIR: Thank you so much Zach, and I would also say that you're a dream person to work with. Very happy to be here tonight with you all, seeing some old friends and some new friends. Now that we've gotten a little bit of a microscope on the opening episode and ideas of Illuminations, I'm going to do a little bit of a zoom out to tell you about some of the vision behind the parent institutions as it were.
I loved this about ministry, that it had this sense of I thought of Ministry of Magic the first time I heard the title, this department all encompassing that encompassed all the ideas. And it really did in a sense, topics from modernity and capitalism, to the concepts of time and nothingness, to world affairs and children's books, to racism and the origins of morality, all the ideas.
But Ministry has another sense too that particularly drew me to work for this podcast, which is a form of care or religious vocation. And I quickly discovered that, that was the end goal behind each historical deep dive. Each exploration into the origins of our ideas about these topics.
The goal was to offer a form of care to the listener that would leave them better off in some way for having heard it. We need to have a better grasp of where our ideas come from and how they are manipulated by other forces so that when we are called to evaluate something, we're ready to do the duty of a citizen.
Being a citizen is a sacred calling and we can't be faithful to it if we don't have the historical knowledge and intellectual tools to exercise good judgment. That's how Zach explained the mission of the show in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. So in addition to offering history of ideas, how we come to think the way we do about these topics, the show is designed to share what we call secular sermons.
At its best, Zach said, a sermon calls forth better versions of its listeners, it condemns and asks them to be better but it also offers hope and strength. And as Zach mentioned, religious ideas play a big role in these episodes, partly because of this ethical, spiritual, motivation behind them and because religion is one of those things we need to understand. We need to understand the origins of our ideas about it and what role it's playing in the world right now.
It is a powerful force in the world right now, but there are increasingly parts of our population where it isn't well understood or attended to and that makes it harder for us all to talk to each other. So the purpose of Ministry of Ideas isn't to convert anyone but to make people aware of religion's social function and to let people know, as Zach put it, that they shouldn't be scared to have a worldview that includes ideas of love, goodness, redemption, and grace.
So those two purposes of spiritual inspiration and education meshed really well with the mission of the John Templeton Foundation. Sir John Templeton, established the foundation in 1987 to fund research on the big questions of human life. Today, the foundation explains, we share Sir John Templeton's optimism about the power of the sciences and other discovery oriented disciplines, to advance our understanding of the deepest and most perplexing questions facing humankind.
Our vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing, our purpose is to enable people to create lives of purpose and meaning, Templeton Foundation. Their major funding areas include life sciences, mathematical and physical sciences, human sciences and philosophy, and theology.
So we proposed this project that offered listeners a new vision of how these areas all intersect. So as Zach explained, for a long time a dominant narrative, there has been this conflict thesis of being eternal enemies and we wanted to use our skill and experience in uncovering the history of ideas to offer a richer, different story, about how these two have intersected historically in different areas and cultures, and how we can view the relationship today. And we're very happy the Templeton Foundation wanted us to do that.
So to create this new series, we interviewed scholars, scientists, ministers, practitioners who shared perspectives from many different faith traditions in areas of the world. Not to add up to a general survey course that you might take in college, but each episode meaning to present a unique, usually unfamiliar story, that reveals a surprising new way that religion and science can influence and challenge, and inspire each other.
So together, we hope they'll illuminate a different version of the future that these two knowledge pathways can have together. So here's a sample of some of those stories and perspectives.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- Religio is giving appropriate honor to God, but it's essentially like the other virtues this inherent attitude. And when we talk about science, scientia, also is a virtue for the medieval thinkers.
- I love working with speculative fiction theology because you get this combination of science, and imagination, and prophecy. We might use in literary terms, utopia and dystopia. In theological terms we call that eschatological.
- My religion tells me God made the universe, my science tells me how he did it. But more than that, my religion gives me the confidence that the universe is worth studying, and in that sense, discovering truth in science is an act of prayer.
- I was thinking about how the devotees of the temple spoke about technology and about divinity, and there seemed to be a technological sublime at work. So there was a sense of mapping divinity onto technology and technology onto divinity.
- Do you think that our Mormon faith allowed our mind to be more open to this radical possibility?
- Well, it made my mind one that is more open. I've been asked that question, what if it's proven that UFOs are from someplace else? Would I just say I accept that?
- The tradition of natural theology was basically a justification for the study of nature based on a better understanding of divine creation, divine wisdom. The study of nature is almost a form of worship.
- We're even starting to talk about green AI, so artificial intelligence that could be used to promote environmental health and justice. And not only that, but the possibility of dealing with congenital diseases from a Christian perspective and any other religion that I know of. The mandate to heal is so prominent and I think that technology AI is going to give us many more ways to heal.
- The project here is, understand ourselves well enough that we can come up with a moral philosophy that can enable us to live together peacefully. And that's to me, is the ultimate goal of this project of scientific self-knowledge.
- People don't need more facts and numbers, they need ways of taking it in, not just looking away. And I think when there's something so existential as the climate crisis, we can't face it without spiritual resources.
- God is always calling us to use our science, our technology to participate in these acts of renewal. It's emphasized that God's spirit is equipping people with certain kinds of artistic, technological abilities in order to work out the purposes and plan of God.
[END PLAYBACK]
MARIA DELVIN MCNAIR: So as we launch the series, we want to say thank you to the John Templeton Foundation, particularly John Cunningham, Harvard Divinity School, especially Gordon Hardie and the communications team, and Diane Moore and the Yale team, and contributing scholars in the Illuminations team. The list of the contributing scholars that we have so far, more are still to be interviewed and our Illuminations team. Right, so thank you all and thank you all for being here.
[APPLAUSE]
ZACHARY DAVIS: It's my pleasure to introduce now our panelists for tonight's discussion. Charles Stang, joined the faculty of Divinity in 2008. In 2017, he became the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at HDS. In 2021, the Center launched a new Initiative called Transcendence and Transformation, which is now entering its second year.
His research and teaching focus on the history of Christianity and the context of the ancient Mediterranean world, and on how ancient philosophical and religious traditions can and should serve as resources for contemporary thought and practice. Rachael Peterson, is a writer, Zen practitioner, and masters of divinity student here at HDS.
Before Harvard, Rachael led a decade long career in international environmental policy, serving as a senior advisor to National Geographic Society and the deputy director of Global Forest Watch. She currently co-convenes the plant consciousness reading group at the Center for the Study of World Religions with its Transcendence and Transformation Initiative. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, The Rumpus, Harvard Divinity Bulletin and elsewhere.
Matthew Battles, is a maker and thinker, whose work merges literary, scholarly in artistic forms of inquiry. His writing has appeared in such venues as the American Scholar, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times. His most recent book, Tree, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. He is currently working on a cultural and natural history of memory. The far-flung network of collaborators, he has created films, installations, and experiences from Boston to Berlin.
In January 2022, he joined the staff of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, where he edits the magazine Arnoldia, the nature of trees. So please welcome these three panelists and you can come up and take your seat please. While they're taking their seats, I just wanted to share that both Charlie and Matthew have been very important friends and mentors of mine, and I look up to both of them so much so it's a great pleasure to sit at a table together for this event with them and discuss these topics.
So to introduce tonight's topic, I wanted to play a clip of an interview that we conducted with one of the pioneers of plant consciousness, Monica Gagliano. And we interviewed her a few weeks ago, this is hot off the press as an interview clip. And she is a remarkable person. She has helped to introduce the idea that plants are more wondrous than we thought. And that we can learn a great deal by engaging with them. So I'm going to play this clip and then we can begin.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- So my name is Monica Gagliano, I am currently a research associate professor of evolutionary ecology at Southern Cross University. I was trained as any other scientist and then something changed halfway through my career, I would say, and I've said this many times, for me the plants they save, they rescue the scientist in me. And when I started working with plants, I didn't know anything about plants, I didn't belong to that area of research.
And so my question were quite innocent, like if it was a child that is exploring something new. But I guess, that was also the strength that allowed me to ask those questions without being too scared of asking the wrong question. You don't ask that. And for me, I didn't really what was the right question or the wrong question in the context of what is acceptable or not within a discipline, so I asked. And then I just followed the trail.
And in that following of the trail and in the asking and questioning, they transformed not just the scientist, which of course, is I don't even know anymore what it is now, in the sense that it's really I feel like it's really not fitting within the box, the structure of the academic science.
And of course, most importantly for me, it transformed the human being that I am. And in that sense, I think, this process which as I said, is ongoing has allowed me to enter more in closer contact with life in general. And plant life has been almost like a gatekeeper and a door for me to explore.
Each one of us must connect to the world if we want to the world because it's not the same if I tell you about, oh, my experience with the plants is this in that, you can take it. You can even go out and say that my experience of the plants is, and repeat what I said, but you don't have that experience. So you have knowledge but you have gained no wisdom.
If our structures, our religious structures, scientific structure, were to take a bit more of a humble approach but really not just pretending, then the priority will be the exploration with the intent of gaining wisdom, not the production of knowledge because if we really think about it, is after we produce all of this knowledge which is amazing, it's an amazing creative endeavor.
But after all of this knowledge, if all of this knowledge has brought us to this place where we are about to collapse our own planet, then maybe we don't need knowledge or maybe we don't need knowledge so much or maybe knowledge has been placed in the wrong position of values.
What does it mean to really appreciate this your humanity and the humanity of the people around you, and the beingness of those they are not human but they are here? And in that sense, they are no less or more, they're just others, different from us as humans.
And what I've learned from my work with the plants at the personal level is, plants and in general, the planet have so much to teach us that our arrogance gets put down on its knees immediately when you start really working with those others because there is no space for our arrogance.
And then you really get to touch parts of you which actually are everyone, everything, and all you're left is with a sense of awe because there is nothing else to do. So if we were to create from that place, we will have a very different world and we will have a very different society.
[END PLAYBACK]
ZACHARY DAVIS: So Charlie, tell us about this plant consciousness reading group.
CHARLES STANG: Sure. Well, first of all, let me explain how I find myself here because I am neither an expert on plants consciousness or science of any type. I am by training a historian of early Christianity, the formative period sometimes called patristics. But five years ago, I took on the role of the Director of the CSWR and I convened a series there called Matter and Spirit, Ecology and the Nonhuman Turn.
I'm going to read one paragraph, I promised the rest of my remarks or not-- will be more extemporaneous, but this was the mission of that series. Recent work in the humanities in the social sciences has generated new interest in the age-old, religious question of the relationship between matter and spirit, and its relevance for the environmental crisis we now face.
Quote-unquote, " Vibrant materialists," such as the political theorist, Jane Bennet, have asked us to revise our view of matter as an inert object we manipulate and invite us to think instead of the vibrancy of non-human and allegedly inanimate things, that is, their agency and creativity.
This promises to cultivate a different ecological sensibility and different sorts of political interventions in the environmental crisis. Environmentalists, for one, have revived interests in spirits or they have revived their own interest in spirits. Actually, interest in spirits have never died down, but anthropologists have taken it seriously again.
And they're taking these phenomena seriously if not literally as occasions to widen our notion of agency. Perhaps humans are just one expression of a more widely distributed agency, an agency spread across the full spectrum of this alleged antimony between matter and spirit.
The decentering of the human is sometimes called the non-human turn or the more than human turn. So could it be that by shifting our focus away from the human, to the more than human, we actually summon an ecological imagination that better safeguards humans, precisely by displacing them from the center of all our inquiry?
So we hazard to guess that questions such as these might help us reinvigorate our thinking about religion and ecology. What can these fields of inquiry teach religious studies about cultivating an ecological imagination, and a potent activism? And what can religious studies in turn, contribute to these fields?
So that was the mandate of that series five years ago. And under the banner of that, Matter and Spirit series, we hosted a range of thinkers whose work raised questions about our more than human world and specifically, about plants and what we're calling their consciousness.
I'm just going to name a few of the people that darkened the doors of the center in those first four years. Eduardo Kohn, author of How Forests Think, Robin Wall Kimmerer, who's trained as a scientist, wrote an influential book on moss, but is also an Indigenous practitioner and who has tried to bring those two worlds together in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass.
We hosted Robin along with Richard Powers, the novelist and author of The Overstory, which tries to tell the history of a group of humans from the perspective of trees. We hosted Michael Marter, who's trained in Western philosophy and tries to excavate from the Western philosophical tradition a rich archive of thinking about plants and their distinctive mode of being and thinking.
We also had Graham Harvey here, who cut his teeth as a scholar of contemporary paganism but has more recently shifted to be one of those leading what's called the neo-animist movement. So a reinvigoration and a reclamation of that category of animism, I'll say more about that.
Rachel Sussman, photographer who wrote a book called, The Oldest Living Things On Earth . And finally, David Abram, who is actually the Visiting Scholar of Ecology and Natural Philosophy at the CSWR this entire year. He's author of the Spell of The Sensuous, and Becoming Animal and is widely credited with coining the phrase more than human world and also a major figure in promoting what you might call neo-animist philosophy.
So that series lasted for about four years. And as it was winding down, we launched this initiative that Zach mentioned called Transcendence and Transformation, which included another series which I've mentioned very briefly on psychedelics and the future of religion actually, Matthew was just mentioning having heard an episode in that series.
That also brought the topic of plant consciousness to the fore as you might imagine because many of the speakers we had were either coming from or reporting on traditions of use of psychedelics or plant medicines that regard those plants as having very robust agencies and agendas.
So you see that especially among those traditions that are engaging with ayahuasca, we also had two members of the Native American church speak very powerfully about their views of peyotes wishes, and et cetera. So plant consciousness also emerged out of that series.
Now, why plant consciousness? How is plant consciousness possibly a topic in religious studies? If you were to ask my colleagues, what were the top 20 topics in religious studies, none of them would give you plants. How did we come to this? Well, one of the reasons why none of-- and I would include myself, none of my colleagues or I would ever propose plants as a central topic of religious study, is the fact that religious studies has been shaped by Christianity, and its two monotheistic siblings.
And Christianity has set the terms for the study of religion in the West. And Christianity does not have a rich archive of thinking about plant consciousness, quite the opposite in fact, and I'm going to make a sweeping generalization here. As a historian of Christianity and I can contest this, Christianity has actually deeply hostile to the topic of plant consciousness.
In general, the options for thinking about more than human agency in Christianity are rather limited. It's humans, gods, and what's between humans and gods are either angels or demons. So you can imagine where plant consciousness or animal consciousness fits into that scheme. Plant consciousness is either not real, in which case it's a superstition or it's very real, in which case it's demonic.
And in fact, the history of early Christianity spread through the Mediterranean and into Europe is filled with stories of the persecution of those who regard plants as having consciousness and agency. And of course, that's just in the first several centuries when we talk about Christianity's spread outside of Europe into the Americas and elsewhere, that story is very, very dark.
Now, so I think getting outside the monotheistic framework and perhaps even outside the whole framework of world religions, and looking at traditions from around the world that are often, for better or for worse, constipated under categories like animism, totemism, shamanism, folk religion or even Indigenous traditions. And I to just flag all of those categories are fraught, and complicated, and contested categories.
But if we just shift our lens to those from the perspective of the range of those traditions, the question of plant consciousness is front and center throughout them. So that's one reason why we can recover plants as a topic of religious studies. I've already mentioned this resurgence of interest in neo-animism. You may know that animism was a term meant to constellate a whole bunch of traditions around the world, so as to demote and denigrate them. This was not a compliment to call someone an animist in the 19th century.
In fact, it was largely a way of plotting certain traditions on an evolutionary scheme that would end spoiler alert with Christianity as the end of that evolutionary scale. But there's a group of people from or who are trying to reclaim the category of animism and that's what I'm calling neo-animist and some of the figures I mentioned earlier are leading that movement.
Finally, philosophers are taking plant seriously. I already mentioned Michael Marter. I don't have his book with me, but he's written, I don't six or eight books on this topic, working within the classic Western philosophical tradition. All right, from the Plato forward.
But a second figure I want to mention, and this actually was really for me the catalyst this summer, that I wrote, I think I texted Rachael in a lather this summer, having read Emanuele Coccia book, The Life of Plants, A Metaphysics of Mixture, cannot recommend this book highly enough.
So I have to say that philosophical conversation is the one that most animates me, I would say the neo-animist and the philosophical. But there's also a nascent movement within and among scientists and we just heard from Monica Gagliano. I'll just name three, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Suzanne Simard, I imagine it's important for you, who wrote actually the foreword to Monica's book, Thus Spoke the Plant.
Now, it's also curious to me that those are three women. I don't know quite how to read that, but they're insurgent voices from within science. So there is, I think, an opening here for a dialogue between religious studies and science around plants, but I'm going to voice one anxiety, maybe not or caution around this. And then I'll pass the mic to Rachael to talk about the group we formed.
As I am encouraged by the dialogue between science and these traditions around plant consciousness, I am also wary of sciences authorizing and deauthorizing voice. Science and religion, and here religion I mean largely Christianity, have largely been responsible for deauthorizing these traditions, rendering them either as superstition or nefarious.
Now science, certain scientists are interested in exploring the cracks in that edifice and I think that's good news. But I don't want to cede to science the authority to decide whether plant consciousness is real or not. And I think, it's important that we acknowledge that at the beginning of any dialogue, but because in some sense, it's about the limits of one of the members both any person in a dialogue of course, is limited but I'm going to focus on the limitations of science.
And here I'm going to ventriloquist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is trained in it and speaks very highly of it as an incredibly, sophisticated language of objects. That is to say, it presumes a subject object dichotomy. It treats its objects of inquiry as just that, objects. And therefore, that applies a certain lens to the material.
What you will find in people like Monica, Suzanne, and Robin and in their work is a questioning of that very frame and lens. And that's at the heart of the neo-animist ontologies and epistemology as well. That is to say, a suspicion that what we are dealing with here is not humans encountering a world of objects or that other living beings that maybe have some remarkable capacities, but that these plants, animals, and who knows maybe even those things we label inanimate, are persons, subjects just like us.
And that changes the nature of the inquiry, it changes the nature of the experiments that are afforded, and it changes the nature of the results. So I'll just say that things like objectivity and iterability become very complicated if what you're dealing with is something that is interacting with you as a person, and that is at the heart of Monica's experiments around plants, and it is a chasm between her and some of her colleagues.
And I think what's really exciting about Monica and some of these others, is that they're pressing on these really fundamental questions about what ways of knowing or yeah, what ways of knowing science can claim and what is revealed, and what is concealed by those ways of knowing? So thank you.
RACHAEL PETERSON: Excellent. Thank you, Charlie. You probably all saw me nodding my head, clearly I'm in vociferous agreement with much of what Charlie said. Thank you, Matt so much for having us, and Zach. So much for having us and everyone on the Ministry team.
As mentioned, my name is Rachel Peterson and I have the great pleasure of co-leading this plant consciousness reading group that we've started very recently, a few months ago here at Harvard Divinity School. And I lead it together with a wonderful colleague Natalia Schwein, who's a PhD student here in the study of religion.
When I think about this reading group, which meets every other week, and I see some members in the audience, hello, you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong on anything. So when I think about this reading group, I actually think about a book that Charles Darwin wrote in 1880 called, The Power of Movement in Plants.
He was one of the first to describe the way that plants grow in a circle. So now we have time-lapse photography, so we can see this but he actually stayed up all night and all day watching plants, believe it or not. And he called this elliptical circumnucation. So plants don't grow straight up, they actually grow in circles.
And this group I think is so beautifully circling around some really juicy questions that Charlie outlined, and trying to understand them from a multiplicity of disciplines. And notably those questions are how does taking plants seriously complicate our notion of the nature of mind, the nature of matter, and where those two meet? What do we call inanimate? What do we call animate matter, and why does it matter what we label matter?
And I just want to speak to something if I may put my cards on the table a little bit. I was so moved in your introduction Zach and you're speaking about the theological weight that early scientists felt. And I have to say for me, and I think I'll speak for some others in the group here, the stakes of this reading group even though it's just a reading group are quite high because I feel like this group is leading me into a fuller encounter with reality. Because in my worldview, I live amongst a multiplicity of intelligences and beings that have their own ways and their own predilections.
And if that is your worldview, the question then becomes, if I want to know plants, if we want to plants, what forms of knowing should we resort to? If we want to build ways of relating, what does relationship look like and feel like? And if we are to hear plants speak, what type of hearing could we cultivate? And what type of speech does this correspond to?
So these are all very big questions that we're circling around and for many of us in the group they're quite personal. And as mentioned, so one of the places that we started in this group, the place we started in this group is this wonderful book, Thus Spoke the Plant written by Monica Gagliano in 2018, and I want to speak a little bit about it.
So Monica, is mentioned as, she's an evolutionary ecologist, a very prominent research scientist who's looking into through experimental design, the cognitive abilities of plants, including perception, learning processes, memories, and consciousness. And she is part of this wave in science that really got its start in 2005 with this meeting. It was called the Meeting for the Society of Plant Neurobiology, and you heard that right, neurobiology.
So this was a huge meeting, it got a lot of attention because these biologists threw down, they were like, plants have brains or they have something very much like brains. The problem is that our definition of brain was too limited. If you look at their root structure, they're doing things like electrical signaling and hormonal exchange, that mirror in some ways what we do with our brains.
And so what I think is so interesting about Monica's book is that she is one of the key people designing the experiments to test some of these hypotheses. However, when she published this book in 2018, it was her coming out of the closet book where she says that actually, she got a lot of the ideas for her experiments and was able to interpret the data for her experiments by directly apprenticing to plants.
So in the book, she talks about, going on vision quest style experiences, in some cases ingesting psychoactive plants, having plants speak to her directly to tell her how to design these experiments. And as Charlie said, if you're operating in the paradigm of Western science this becomes very problematic because you need to structurally design very controlled experiments that can be replicated by many, many people.
And this is such a beautiful book. I think for us to start with because on the one hand in the group, we want to understand what's going on in science. And especially we want to understand some of the operational definitions that are being marshaled around things like consciousness, very fraught, let's put a pin in that one, thinking, intelligence, communication, cognition, information.
These are all words that are being used to describe physical properties in plants that are being studied, so how? On the one hand, we want to understand that, but on the other hand, we don't want to lose sight of non-ordinary, indigenous, animist ways of understanding. And so she models a very interesting marriage of those two ways of knowing in this book. And bringing in a little bit, this question of, how does the study of religion fit in here?
We had a very rich conversation around the genre she's writing in. So she claims that this book is she calls it a phytobiography, a book written by and for plants. And for anyone in the room who studies religion and who has read accounts of Revelation, this book reads a lot to me like an account of Revelation, like the plants told me to do this thing, I was deputized by these plants to go carry out these experiments.
So we had a very rich conversation around the affordances and limitations of the category of Revelation as it relates to this area. So throughout the rest of the year, we've been as I said, spiraling and we're going to move, hopefully soon away from this reflection on the current trends in science to more animistic and indigenous accounts of relating to plants, as well as, I hope perhaps in the spring semester, philosophical and religious engagements with plants.
Michael Marter, just wrote a wonderful book about plants in Hildegard from Bingen's life for example there's great scholarship on plants endowism as well. So I think this group due to its vast multiplicity, it's such a rich group. We'll be spiraling around lots of different types of literature over the coming year. I could say much more but I think I'm going to just pass it off now and we can have a conversation. All right, Matt.
MATHEW BATTLES: Wow, I mean, this is really just so bracing. Charles, I really appreciated your overview, it was such a heady mapping of the territory that you've been exploring and Rachael, your questions are so provoking particularly around this question of what do we take as the models for these phenomena that we have all of these norms and assumptions built around consciousness, intelligence, thinking, knowing, interacting agency?
I also want to say congratulations Zach on launching this thrilling project. But I'll back up a little bit and just introduce myself since, I think, probably I'm the least known quantity here. So I edit a magazine about trees, that's published by the Arnold Arboretum, which is part of Harvard University. It's a Harvard leases the land for the Arnold Arboretum, some of you may know, it's 1,000 year lease for which Harvard has paid Boston $1.
I suspect there's probably a medieval legal historian in the room, it's the odds are good and you'll know that that's a common law, tradition the 1,000 year lease, a way of giving somebody something without really giving it to them. And that's the state of the Arnold Arboretum, and yet it also has had an impact on the institutional culture of the place from the very start. That there's a thinking that's engaged in the long dare that's engaged in deep time.
And the trees, some of which date to the origins of the Arboretum in 1872, some of which indeed are older and were on the property before that, they're significant actors in telling that story, interpreting that story as time goes on. And so when I'm thinking about plant consciousness and thinking about coming here to talk about it, I was remembering an experience I had just last week.
And I went out into the landscape to take a photograph of a tree for an article and I pass through the katsura collection. Now some of you may the katsura tree, it's an ornamental tree here in North America, it's hard to distinguish it from maples, it's a medium sized tree. It has beautiful, yellow color in the autumn but what really distinguishes the katsura which comes from a predominantly Japan East Asia in this season is that, it exudes this marvelous aroma.
It's some of it described as a cotton candy it's also called the birthday cake tree because it smells like a birthday cake baking. Now, this turns out to be connected to this molecule that the tree is exuding as it breaks down its sugars at the end of the season, maltol, which is also exuded by birthday cakes when they're baking or cotton candy, when it's being swirled in the cotton candy machine.
Now, the first fossil evidence of katsura is 23 million years ago. And so what does the katsura tree smell like, right? Maybe it's the birthday cake that smells like katsura. And as I was passing through and some of the oldest trees in the Arboretum are these katsura. There's this magnificent 149-year-old tree that the main trunk of which died years ago, and this incredible crown has grown up, and it's just such a charismatic presence.
And I couldn't help but think, what a world to live in? Where this tree that came along a long time before birthday cakes, shows up on a fall day and gives me this experience. I mean, I couldn't help but think about it as a generosity and I think, that when we delve into these questions of plant consciousness, I want to see us as in proximity to her in dialogue with qualities like generosity.
At the same time, I'm struck by your caveat Rachael, to be careful what's the cart and what's the horse here that we're not taking a telescope and turning around and making a microscope out of it, looking through it the wrong way? I think, about Suzanne Simard's really inspiring work on the mother tree.
But again, trees have been doing this work since long before there were mothers, in essence or maybe they're the starting point for that. So at the same time, and I think that this gets to the questions that you're engaging with so powerfully in the reading group, when we think about the consciousness of plants and whether there is such a thing and how we engage in it, we might want to ask ourselves, how does our own experience of the world arbores?
In what ways are we already plants? I mean, we call the branching neurons in our brains dendrites after all. It's interesting to me too that the structures in insect brains that are the centers of the collocation of sensory input that turns into what insects use as memory for finding their way in the world for instance, neuroscientists call those mushroom bodies.
So we have recourse to these metaphors. And Hannah Arendt, I think, said that metaphor is the way the world poetically brings itself together. And these metaphors are creative and fruitful and they do a great deal of work. So as an editor of a tree magazine, I'm really interested in not only the stories that we tell about trees, but the tree stories tell.
I guess, ultimately, I would like that magazine to be a magazine for trees that's my model, the trees could be my readers and that's an impossible proposition and yet it's a reach goal, nonetheless.
ZACHARY DAVIS: I love what you said about generosity, Matthew. And in preparation for this conversation, I began to read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and it's a glorious book, it's a beautiful book. And one of the insights that I found myself coming back to in the days since I've been reading this is, how developing a relationship of reciprocity with the natural world can really transform the way you live elsewhere too.
And I think, a lot about the crisis of loneliness that many, many Americans and people around the world are experiencing. And it makes me think that part of that crisis I think, is because we've internalized even treating other human beings as objects in our quest for control and extraction.
And I wonder if we have been trained to even think of one another as resources to mine because we have learned to think about plants and animals as resources to mine. And so by praying with a prayer of gratitude before harvesting a crop, maybe that trains you to reach out to your brother or sister with greater love as well.
RACHAEL PETERSON: Can I follow on that? So I think, a lot about this term that E.O Wilson introduced, the late great biologist. He coined this term eremocene, and it means the age of loneliness. And he proposed this as an alternative to the anthropocene, which is, of course, the age of the human.
And when he uses the age of loneliness, he is referring to the biodiversity crisis and the loss of species. However, I think, loneliness is not just a function of the number of more than human beings around us, it's also a function of the quality of our attention to them.
And so I think in addition to not being instrumentalising, we should and I'm following the wonderful philosopher, David Abram, who is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions as Charlie mentioned, reinvigorate the senses is a way of knowing.
Not just a discursively or scientifically relating to plants but relating to plants from the plantness within ourselves, which is material, which is chemical, which has to do with smells and sights and pheromones. So, yeah, I think, that in loneliness I don't want to just point towards instrumentalization but also a lack of a sensuous relating that I would like to see reinvigorated in our culture, yeah.
MATHEW BATTLES: That's wonderful. I've been struck since I started working with the Arboretum, which predated my joining the staff as editor, as part of a group that Zach and I were both a part of, metaLAB here at Harvard an experimental humanities group. One of our first projects was-- several of our first projects involved the Arboretum, we're trying to visualize the data of the collections and understand ways, come up with ways for visitors to the Arboretum to experience the collections a little bit more tangibly.
I think going about trying to answer your question, Rachael now the wrong way as I look at it now, through visualization, through mapping, through app based experiences. But one of the things that struck me about the Arboretum throughout that time is that, it's a really interesting institutional setting for the collision of very different forms of knowledge. There are scientists working there, there are labs where scientists are working on the evolution of flowering plants, that there's a great deal of ecology done at the Arboretum as well.
But there are the people who keep the plants, who tend the plants, who propagate the plants, who graft, and sew, and collect, and bring back living plants to steward in this new place. And who passed that relationship along over the generations. And I just find it endlessly fertile and fascinating to see the intimacy of these two forms of knowledge in dialogue with each other, not always in dialogue with each other to be sure, and not always comfortable dialogue.
Plants people have very different ways, horticulturalists have very different ways of doing and looking at plants than scientists do. But that not connection that dialog does I think, give us a glimpse sometimes of the return to the sensuous and return to intimacy that you're talking about even in the setting of a scientific institution. And I think it's interesting to play with that and extend that, how much further could that-- how much more diverse could that intimacy, that dialogue, that collaboration become?
ZACHARY DAVIS: So Charlie you mentioned that Christianity has historically been hostile to treating plants as subjects. And it's my understanding that Rachael both you and Matthew practice Buddhism, in some forms and I wonder if you could speak to how those practices have informed your relationship with plants and maybe how it might help Christians think differently about plants.
RACHAEL PETERSON: Wow, OK. I'm going to get a little nerdy here, I'll try to be brief, but it means I'll get to say my favorite line in Dogen's Shobogenzo, here we go. So this my thinking about plants in Buddhism and Zen in the form that I practice it goes back to debates in Zen, in China and Japan, all the way back to the sixth century.
And at that time, you see a lot of this, the Zen leaders, practitioners, philosophers, debating basically the soteriological status of plants. By which I mean, can they become enlightened? Can trees and plants achieve widowhood? And the understanding at the time was, there was this thing called Buddha-nature and it permeated everything, but you needed a mind to access it.
And so the debates actually looked very similar to the ones we have today, what has mind? Where do we draw the line between sentience and insentience? So only sentient beings could achieve Buddha-nature basically or achieve Buddhahood because they could only access Buddha nature by training the mind.
And then Dogen comes along in the 13th century and puts forward a worldview that I follow. And he totally flips this ontology on its head, and he says, no, Buddha-nature is not something that permeates phenomenon, it is all phenomenon. All phenomenon is Buddha-nature, that's why for him trees preach the dharma and mountains and rivers, he says in The Mountains and Waters Sutra they express the ancient Buddha way.
So he puts forward this radical, non-dual ontology that basically says that everything is already awake, and that's important for me because when I practice Zen, when I'm sitting in zazen, my experience of the natural world is very non-discursive, it's something that can only be experienced. Even here talking about it feels really weird. I don't know.
There's a quality of awakeness to everything that is such that it doesn't make sense to draw any distinction between sentients and insentients. Yeah, and that's something that I think that can only really be experienced deeply in practice, but I'm going to call on my other Zen to bail me out here.
ZACHARY DAVIS: I think that was so beautiful.
RACHEL PETERSON: Oh, I forgot to say my favorite line though.
ZACHARY DAVIS: Oh, you do.
RACHEL PETERSON: Oh, my gosh. OK, so Dogen said in the Shobogenzo, if I were to explain Buddha-nature without getting too involved, I would say fences, walls, roof tiles, pebbles. So he's throwing down by saying the most seemingly insentient things have Buddha-nature, just to give you a flavor of how radical he was, yeah.
MATHEW BATTLES: I mean, I'm inspired in those moments of wordless practice on the cushion to encounter a question like, can a plant have consciousness, as a koan? And this is an important part of certain Zen traditions, is koan study. The study of these short, originally literary parable like stories often of teacher and student encounters.
Maybe, I mean, the most famous one, of course, is the sound of one hand, but vying with that is the one where the student asks, Joshu, does a dog have Buddha-nature? And Joshu, answers moo, which is negation, which is not no. It is sort of not. And this becomes a koan of just a great price and moments.
And one encounter is it, carries it around, tries to vomit it out like a molten iron ball, and it just keeps coming back. And so that same koan in relationship with plants can I think, bring us to a wordless encounter. Something extra ideational in which we begin to participate in or at least, tune into that interobjective or intersubjective possibility of mind, that actually mind is something-- consciousness is something that's made among the many beings amid and in dialogue, in intimacy among the many beings.
And Charles, you were talking about Eduardo Kohn earlier. Kohn writes about the ways in which forests think, and it's the title of his book, and goes into some detail. I mean, there's a lot in the book about Percy and semiotics which we don't need to get into here, but the ways in which organisms in the forest, in interaction with each other are generating ideas in a way that to Charles Sanders Peirce would have been very immediate and intuitive, I think, that these are ideas that are being generated.
Kohn talks beautifully about mimicry in the forest and that a leaf insect that looks like a leaf down to the coloration, that looks like fungus spots and insect holes in the body of the insect, that the insect and the leaf are co-producing leafiness as a concept, as a possibility in the world, as a formal invention that keeps efflorescence, that keeps arborising into the world.
And that thought is not yet done. That thought is still being thought. And so that's-- and then I realized that I need to go back to the breath of why I'm sitting on the cushion.
ZACHARY DAVIS: There's a provocative idea that Robin Kumar mentions that, did we cultivate wheat or did wheat cultivate us?
RACHEL PETERSON: Yeah.
ZACHARY DAVIS: And I actually quite like the idea that I'm being used in a reciprocal relationship of love by all of these fruits that I help spread in various ways. I think, I'll ask one more question then we can have a question or two from the audience. So Charlie, how have your deep readings of this topic over the past few years changed your life? And seriously, how do you think the ideas could revolutionize our society if more and more people took them seriously?
MATHEW BATTLES: We have 30 seconds, Charles.
CHARLES STANG: I'm going to first of all invoke a neighbor. Well, two neighbors. Well, I live in Belmont so technically he's a bit of a far neighbor but I'm thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. And I'm thinking of Emerson's call, I think, it's in his journals around the time he wrote Nature, that wonderful first foray of his into thinking about the intimacy about the world.
In the journals he says, we need a new animism. And then so, as I was listening to these two colleagues talk so beautifully about the Zen tradition and the resources it affords, I was thinking about resources closer to home. And one of the ways in which I've been inspired is to think-- it's one of the reasons why I like the philosophical excavation of the Western or the excavation of the Western philosophical tradition for these resources.
And frankly, it's not just the philosophical tradition but realizing that actually, there is a deep, animist conviction and practice around plant consciousness that is indigenous to Europe and is, in fact, indigenous even to New England. So I just want to say, it's close to hand.
It is no exaggeration to say that this series Matter in Spirit that when I decided to launch it, I had no idea that it would change my life. It has absolutely changed my life. I am now not just a-- I am an animist in thought and practice. And that animism sits alongside some other religious and philosophical traditions I try to constilate and navigate.
Curiously although, I texted Rachael and said, we have to do this thing on plant consciousness. It's actually not plants that are the most vibrant for me, not yet. So it's other more than humans that are, what's the word? Guide, teach? Teach me, and I've been reluctant to talk about that partly because I'm from the Midwest and we generally are reluctant to talk about our own inner lives.
But then I translate to New England, which is not exactly any better, so it takes some practice to talk about that. But also because I feel as if these sorts of things, I would say there's been a cultural shift in the last five years, certainly in the last 10. I've noticed people speaking in this way, speaking more openly about these sorts of things. And it's reflected in the explosion of literature.
OK, now what will that mean for the transformation of the culture? I don't know. I mean, in some way, I actually think that the vast majority of the globe is already, and has ever, and has always been what we're calling animist. It is actually some thin crust of the world with which we perhaps largely identify because we're at an institution like Harvard or because we're literate and educated people in the West.
I think, we tend to think that we're actually the norm. I think, we're actually an extremely small minority on this point. And certainly if you just glance backward in history we disappear rather quickly. So in some sense it's been rather gratifying to realize that on this point, I'm actually in alignment, in communion with the vast majority of my human brothers and sisters now and throughout history. And that means that there are incredible resources, proximate and distant that I might draw on to deepen this practice and experience.
ZACHARY DAVIS: Thank you, Charlie. Any questions from the audience? Yes.
MOHAMMED: I am very new to this, my name is Mohammed, and my question is, how do we reconcile what we already have in religious traditions about plants with what you guys are talking about? So when we look at Islam, for example, there is a tradition that there are certain things that you can do that will outlive you like having moral children, or building a mosque, or planting a tree for example.
So that somebody can use the fruit, and even when you're dead you will be getting a reward from, it's called sadaq ajani or in Buddhism, as well, the Buddha tree where the Buddha got enlightenment or in Christianity the burning bush. All of these there are a lot of things there that I've been thinking about as I listened to you guys, how do we reconcile the two? And why is there so much presence of plants compared to other objects in these traditions?
CHARLES STANG: Can I take that very briefly? Just to say there was a name that flashed up on the screen earlier, I believe it's one of the scholars that you all have collaborated with you all his name is, Munjed Murad.
ZACHARY DAVIS: I was going to mention that this topic, and this research, and this episode is because of Munjed's interest.
CHARLES STANG: Oh, is that right? OK.
ZACHARY DAVIS: So he's the producer for this episode.
CHARLES STANG: Oh, wonderful.
ZACHARY DAVIS: And it's because of Islam has resources.
CHARLES STANG: Well, you have to do some retrieval and resource model, it's not just waiting there. So he works on a tradition that is alive and well today in Jordan. A tree there that is said to be so old as to have given shade to the Prophet Muhammad. And is actually given the title of a witness, I believe, I think, it's Shaheed but I'm not sure. I can't remember exactly. I was on his dissertation committee, he just finished.
So there's a case of someone who's trying to marshal the script, both the scriptural and the deeply Orthodox threads of the tradition to build up something like an Islamic animism. But as you might imagine, he's also sailing against some very strong headwinds, as is anyone who tries to do that project from within a Christian fold.
I don't know of anyone, I'm sure there are, but I simply don't know of anyone working on it in so to speak Jewish theology and thought. But there are headwinds because in both these traditions, there's an anxiety about the agency of the more than human that, I don't want to say ultimately limits, but it has historically limited any engagement with the question of plant consciousness. So it's going to take creative thinkers from within these traditions to reimagine what's there.
MATHEW BATTLES: I mean, I think that's intensely compelling to think about. What's coming to mind is, it may be a little bit of a dodge of your question, your provocation that I think, gets back to what you were saying earlier Charles about animism, which is also to look at what's happening and to think about how we participate in and steward very carefully the cultivation of traditional knowledge in public discourse and public life.
I'm thinking about a ethical doctrine that's emerged in Ecuador among indigenous groups in Ecuador, which goes by the name sumak kawsay it's also translated into Spanish as buen vivir and roughly means plenitude and life, and the sense that as we've been talking about living things get together and make a world, and that there's an ethics to that, and an aesthetics to it.
And it's become one of the major, I think, it's fair to say philosophical and doctrinal sources for changes that have been made to the Ecuadorian Constitution to acknowledge the consciousness of the non-human world and the agency, and the standing in legal terms of the non-human world.
And so alongside the question of how resources are marshaled from within living traditions that are dominant in our world, I'm also interested in the question, how these as we cultivate neo-animism, how are they in dialogue with indigenous knowledge in ways that also honor, and uphold, and empower those thinkers, and those carry that knowledge?
Not as mere archives of some past, some legacy to be mined, much less commodified, but as themselves agents not only intellectual but political agents in our world. And I don't know if that's-- it feels to me complementary to your concern.
ZACHARY DAVIS: Any last question? Otherwise, I'm going to ask mine. So final question, which is to bring us back to this relationship of these huge categories, whose boundaries are difficult to ever fully comprehend of religion and science. And Charlie, you mentioned a nervousness about the way that scientific authorities are able to give a stamp of approval or disapproval.
And certainly, Monica mentioned this in my conversation with her is that, all of her scientists think she's kooky, and they don't really respect her, and they don't treat her seriously. And so it's shunted into the realm and the term of mysticism. And I myself am wrestling with little encounters with what you talked about Rachael which is, sometimes reality is beyond expression.
And yet how then do we build a world together when the ineffable is the reality? But we have to make metaphors we have to create some language. So a question for the panel to wrestle with in 30 seconds is, do you think we can move past the terms religion and science, to develop ways of speaking about reality that might conform closer to what subjective interrelationship with the non-human feels like?
MATHEW BATTLES: Take it away.
RACHAEL PETERSON: Oh, no I'm not going for that.
MATHEW BATTLES: I have a vision that comes to mind actually and so I just want to throw out there and see what you make of it. Inspired by your invoking Suzanne Simard. And think about her descriptions of the early experiments she did to identify the relationships among trees in a forest, which involved very hands on material, experimental science in the field with tubing, and pumps, and meters piping isotopic gases into the soil and seeing which trees took them up.
And that produced knowledge that didn't exist before in the terms in which we think about scientific knowledge production but it also, I can't help but feel like it's sacramental in a way as well. There's a transubstantiation that's going on there in very real terms.
And so I have this notion that, if you think about a graduate course in ecology going out and trying to replicate that experiment, well, what if we did an experiment like that? Not to go through the paces of knowledge production but to encounter that into being of those organisms, sacramentally.
And what other kinds of practices could we imagine that might-- where the end product is not a paper but a transformation in one state, which might be numinous, which might be evanescent that's something that I'm inspired to.
ZACHARY DAVIS: Cataclysms of care.
CHARLES STANG: Hmm, that's catchy.
ZACHARY DAVIS: It's my job to come up with catchy titles for podcast episodes.
CHARLES STANG: I want to say two things about Monica's book. One is that, the question of whether her experiments can be replicated is obviously an important one for the scientists who are trying to verify her experiments. But it's also gets at a really interesting question, which is, if we take Monica seriously, she's actually in relationship with the plants, which is likely to mean that she is going to see and she's going to get something different out of the plants than someone else.
Now that will sound bonkers to certain scientists. But if we can't even take that premise seriously as to think with then I think we're never going to be able to see the potential in Monica's work or any of these other scientists who are asking after that, those epistemological gaps. Now you invoked mysticism, that's very complicated category.
ZACHARY DAVIS: Are you a scholar of mysticism?
CHARLES STANG: No, no. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to do that.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
ZACHARY DAVIS: Forgive me Charlie, forgive me.
CHARLES STANG: So sorry, I also I don't like the opposition of there's scientific knowledge and there's mysticism, or the only way we can put language to something is through science and if we can't do it that way then it's ineffable. There's a lot of affable language that we can put around things that aren't yet--
[LAUGHTER]
--a phenomena, but there's one experiment Monica speaks about early in the book which really struck us in the reading group which is, she put together three species that are of plants whose interactions are extremely well known. I can't remember them off the top of my head, I'm sure you can.
RACHAEL PETERSON: Bean, corn-- that wasn't bean corn, squash?
CHARLES STANG: No, no. That's [INAUDIBLE].
RACHAEL PETERSON: Reading group help me out.
CHARLES STANG: Chili.
RACHAEL PETERSON: Pepper.
CHARLES STANG: Basil.
AUDIENCE: Basil.
CHARLES STANG: OK, you know what? We'll just forget it. I thought I'm the guy who shouldn't know these things.
RACHAEL PETERSON: We're humanities scholars.
CHARLES STANG: OK, the point is this--
ZACHARY DAVIS: Did you not do the reading?
CHARLES STANG: I did but the kind of details they fall out. There were three species whose interactions are very well known to anyone who works with these plants. She isolated them in such a way that all the known modalities by which they communicate with each other were eliminated. And yet, the interactions were observed.
Which points to the fact that there is some modality of communication we don't yet understand. They're still communicating, we simply don't quite have-- we don't know how. Now, that experiment was roundly rejected by a series of journals because it did not propose and it did not hypothesize, a modality and then test for it.
It said, here are the three known modalities, that none of them obtain, there must be something else. And they said, well, I'm sorry that's not how we do science. Now that was very interesting to me. I have no view as to whether that should or shouldn't be accepted in a scientific journal, I leave that to the people who referee those journals. But it was fascinating to me because I took that experiment to be really significant because it pointed to something we don't yet know.
So if you want to talk about the root of mysticism is muen, to close your eyes, or close your mouth around things we do not know or we should not share. What is it about the prospect of the unknown in that experiment that triggered the anxiety that it seemed to trigger and why? So that was a fascinating episode in Monica's life as a scientist.
RACHAEL PETERSON: I remember when we read that in the group and we did read it even though we can't remember the plants. I think, I off the cuff called it a form of apophatic science because it was leaving open the possibility of the unsayable, the unspeakable, the unknowable mystery. And the word humility comes to mind and that's what Monica used and, of course, humility is the enemy of science.
And I'm struck by when Monica's criticized the words that often get used or she's romanticizing the data. And romance implies relationality, which is exactly what you're asking about. So if you ask me, I'm quite pessimistic about the affordances of the scientific enterprise itself from within itself to accommodate relationality.
But I do think people like Monica and Robin are modeling a way forward with these knowledge products that are giving us the relational narrative, and the praxis that they engage outside of the discourse of science that they're also involved in. So that pairing of ritual and relationship with the scientific paradigm through different products. Yeah.
CHARLES STANG: Chili, fennel, basil. I'm sorry.
RACHEL PETERSON: For the record.
ZACHARY DAVIS: And now I'm hungry. Please join me in thanking these wonderful panelists.
[APPLAUSE]
And thank you all for joining tonight. It's been a great pleasure to have you. You can listen to Illuminations by going to your podcast app and making sure you're subscribed to Ministry of Ideas. We will be dropping a new episode every two weeks starting tomorrow.
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