Cooling down an overheating world.

The presumption that other Ways of Being have been superseded by modern Western civilisation is not one which is necessarily endorsed by life itself.

If the forms of society which underwrote the industrial revolution can be characterised as 'hot' societies, then it may be time to return to a cooler mode of Being.

The Ways of Australia's First Peoples can be seen as being concerned with maintaining the privileged position our form of life already enjoys, rather than seeking to improve on an eternal life design.

It may well be, as our planet begins to run a dangerous temperature, that other Ways have been slowly reclaiming back to their fold a more fundamental human inheritance.

For a very long period before the advent of neolithic transformations, my view is that we interpreted experience by means of systems of complementary opposition. Our cosmos, including ourselves, had two interrelated parts. Think yin-and-yang.

Better still, think Wurlurru and Kingili as found with Warumungu First Peoples in Central Australia, as this is a much richer source of food for thought. It is as though Australia’s First Peoples have kept faith with our original Ways.

Working backwards from what is know of extant Ways of life, we can gain not only a clearer view of what life was like in non-agrarian times, but also form a means of critiquing dominant Ways in our own times.

Myths abound of what life had to be like before the advent of farming, villages, and horticulture. Even modern professional anthropologists operate with conceptual devices which recapitulate neolithic myths.

“The Paleolithic” was – we are led to believe – characterised by small groups of hunter-gatherers living a ‘brutish’ life only a notch or so above that we ascribe to animals. Some myths depict people as eating rotten wood or even stones prior to the advent of horticulture.

This false depiction of viable alternatives serves to reinforce the choices which have been made by certain groups when they moved away from previous Ways of Being.

The picture of “non-agrarian” alternatives, based on working backwards from what is known, appears to be entirely different to that of the small bands of cave dwellers etc. Far more likely, there were forms of globalism based around some sense of a commonality of Being.

Life was connected by extensive networks along which messages of one form or another could – and did – flow.

Our cosmologies enabled us with systems of signification which took in the whole of life, including where we – as part of the larger whole - fit into life.

Any attempt to insist on a single universal characteristic of our cosmos is unbalanced. “The Universe” consists of two complementary opposite hemispheres in my way of thinking.

Underlying this means of thinking is a realisation that mental operations of an entirely abstract kind systematically exclude parts of life which are not only of value, but which part of a truly vital mix.

Rather than seeking to treat those parts as being of no significance – a waste produce to be dumped and forgotten – a better means of thinking requires us to find the counterbalancing location for that which would otherwise be excluded in order to privilege one part.

This two-sided means of relating with life is more stable – if less spectacular - than that resulting from excursions into one-sided abstraction.

Our Being was signified according to cosmologies characterised by systems of complementary opposition.

These systems were not static in the sense of everything being in perfect balance.  There was a dynamic asymmetry – such as is found in the opposition between passive and active.

The multiple dimensions of life as mapped by these cosmologies may attribute a relative superiority to one value – active, for example, vis-à-vis passive.

But these dimensions are mapped as part of a complex configuration – marked by complementary opposition (that is, as having two hemispheres). The superior pole of one dimension in one hemisphere is counterbalanced by a superior pole on another dimension which is located in the opposite hemisphere.

Ethnographic literature provides examples from the lives of First Peoples which demonstrate the degree of care which is taken to ensure that life’s relationships are kept in the proper balance.  And these life relationships extend beyond human-to-human relationships.

Any attempt to privilege one – beyond a relative superiority – would require the downgrading and demotion of the other.

For example, the masters of fire may be associated with Wurlurru and the masters of water with Kingili. Both parts are necessary for a full life. Neither alone can provide a full life.

In Warumungu wirnkara (Dreaming) narratives, fire was obtained from 'on high' by one part of humanity (Wurlurru) and  then given to the other half (Kingili). Rainmakers tend to found amongst the Kingili side of life, and they seek to ensure rain falls where required. Both Dreaming narratives envisage the two extremes - a massive conflagration and a massive flood. By attending to their respective and interrelated cosmic maintenance duties, both extremes are avoided.

If modern Western life is cast, due to the industrial revolution, in the role of the masters of fire, then what we require to heal our planet is not more of the same from that side of life, but the return of a counterbalancing part of life which has been excluded or marginalised for too long.