317. Cultivating Humanity in a More Natural Way feat. Charles Foster

The prevalence of spending ample time indoors, engaging in screen-based activities, is narrowing our experiential landscape.

As we constantly underutilize our sensory capabilities, we are missing out on the rich and vibrant information available from the colorful world around us.

To thrive in a multi-dimensional world, reawakening our senses, enhancing our awareness of diverse experiences, and cultivating stronger connections with other species and nature are key.

Charles Foster is an English writer, traveler, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister, and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel, theology, law, and medical ethics. His latest publication, Cry of the Wild: Eight Animals Under Siege, explores the complexity, beauty, and fragility of wild lives living alongside humans.

Charles and Greg talk about our potential to unlock additional sensory experiences, how to increase our “empathy muscles” by studying other species, nurturing our ability to see otherness, and the need for cultivating humanity in education.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How should we think about reconstructing education to cultivate humanity in a more authentic way?

42:47: We need to teach the principle that relationships are everything, not just human relationships, but relationships with the non-human world. We need to say that the relationship between things is the web and weave of the cosmos and that anything which defeats that insight—whether it's the atomism of modern sociology which asserts that everyone is an island unto himself or whether it's things which lock us up physically in our rooms or on our screens—we've got to say that those things strike at the very heart of the way the universe is meant to be and that radical measures are therefore needed to restore relationship to its central place, not only in our philosophical understanding of the world but also in relation to our personal lives.

On the theory of mind

11:53: Direct experience is what we should be after, rather than a cognitive set of conclusions about what another person is thinking. So the theory of mind is a specifically adult human way of appreciating what, if we were non-adult humans, we would be able to have naturally.

Is there a way we could foster a better relationship with the non-human world and instill this connection in our children?

43:59: Relationship breeds an appetite for relationship, and if we go out into green, we will learn to love green, and that green is better than the gray of the breeze blocks from which our houses are made. There also needs to be a part of the compulsory curriculum in which people just go out and lie in a field or climb a tree. If you have had a childhood marinated in greenness, not only are you far less likely to suffer from ADHD or depression, but you're also far less likely to become, when you are an adult, a major trasher of the natural law.

The business of observing is a two-way conversation.

11:53: The whole business of observing is necessarily a two-way conversation; that's what relativity is all about, and it seems to me that exactly that principle applies at the level of a human looking at the bird that he's studying or the human looking at the rock that he's studying as well. Unless we enter into a conversation which allows both the observer and the observed to be changed, our perspective is going to be distorted by the fact that we have fallen prey to the delusion that we can be objective.

Show Links:Recommended Resources:

• The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Oxford
• Charles Foster's Website
• Charles Foster on Twitter

His Work:

• Cry of the Wild: Eight animals under siege
• Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide
• Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness
• The Screaming Sky
• In The Hot Unconscious: An Indian Journey
• Choosing Life, Choosing Death: The Tyranny of Autonomy in Medical Ethics and Law
• A little brown sea
• Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction