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Ran has mirrored a great article by Ianto Evans from The Hand-Sculpted House, about how humans and other-than-humans live with each other, rather than in isolation, in various saner societies around the world, and some suggestions on how we might renew that relationship. - Jason

“Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals,” this article begins, once again committing the fallacy Daniel Quinn called “The Great Forgetting,” corrected by his admonishment, “We are not humanity.”  You might correct that statement to say, “Domesticated humans do not like to think of themselves as animals.”  Animists have no trouble whatsoever with that kinship.  But the bulk of the article concerns the author’s experience comparing the intelligence of human children to apes, and discovering that the apes came out ahead.  According to the mythology of the Enlightenment, our intellect makes us uniquely unique, “the paragon of animals,” as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet’s mouth.  That cornerstone of our self-definition relied on a carefully guarded ignorance, the tautological “fallacy” of anthropomorphism, and a common commitment to never actually test the assertion.  Now that someone has broken that, we can see clear evidence that intelligence does not define us.  In fact, what defines us uniquely (but not as uniquely unique) seems to lie in our sociability.  We make relationships with all our relations.  Yet, our domestication relies so heavily on ripping our lives out of their fundamental matrix of social relationship—put simply, domestication’s antisocial agenda quite explicitly strips away our humanity. - Jason

Thanks again to Scout for this summary article from New Scientist about some of the “uniquely human” traits that we’ve since found in other-than-human animals.  Humans have our unique characteristics like any other species, but the idea that we have some kind of unique uniqueness that sets us apart from the rest of the living community marks perhaps the foundational delusion of our domestication. - Jason

Urban Scout scouted out this piece of news: researchers have found that bacteria living in the clouds make it rain.  And all that time, you laughed at animists who talked about the spirits who brought the rain.  Who laughs now? - Jason

I read about an event, not a powwow because it involved different tribes dancing together rather than competing, described as evidence of a native animism renewed, because as the humans danced together, a pair of bald eagles appeared to dance with them.  I had no idea that those dancers included the Seneca, or that it took place so close to my own home, in northwest Ohio.  Neither did I realize that this year’s events take place next weekend.  We have some obligations to see to Saturday morning, but Giuli & I intend to make every effort to come for what we can. - Jason

I may have a new favorite author.  I’ve read enough of Keepers of the Game and Way of the Human Being to love them both, each in their own unique way, yet it barely occurred to me that both had the same author.  Calvin Luther Martin describes himself as a recovering historian running out of words, but if so, he’s spilled more than enough of them for the rest of us along the way. - Jason