What is, and is not, truth to power

Bookworm has some timely thoughts on an issue that most of us, me included, ponder too little (she's more than a bookworm; she's an archeologist of the mind. As is her wont, that perspicacious friend starts with pop culture, but then delves deeper).

Other people have pointed out while discussing the standard examples of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi, that successful civil disobedience of the kind that they practiced depends on the restraint of the power being opposed. Where appeals to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" fall on deaf ears or meet with the puzzlement of an alien worldview, civil disobedience either fails or morphs into guerilla-style resistance. Gandhi chose well in going up against the British over colonial rule, rather than, say, the Nazis.

In other words, the Western intellectual legacy cannot be described as wholly pernicious, because (thanks in no small part to its widely derided but still potent Judeo-Christian power plant), it's been known to save lives. Peace activists of all stripes protest more in the West than elsewhere precisely because in the West, they can.

And those historians who point (rightly, I think) to the Iroquois Confederacy as one inspiration for America's Founding Fathers do not thereby devalue other seminal influences like the Magna Carta, even though some of them would prefer to read history as that kind of zero-sum game. Native Americans have been treated very shabbily indeed, sometimes as a matter of policy, as a chorus of great men would make clear, but it's not merely demographics that eventually overwhelmed even formidable warriors, it's also the flexibility of thought and willingness to learn from other cultures that are hallmarks of the Western tradition (more so than some others).

The experience of people in and around Boulder, Colorado would seem to reinforce this point. Writing about the interaction between people and mountain lions there, David Baron provides context by noting many different things, not least among them the following:

A renaissance of interest in Native American spirituality, combined with a mélange of mystical beliefs termed New Age, swept much of the nation in the 1980s. White suburbanites erected backyard sweat lodges, chanted and drummed, attended powwows, staged sun dances, and undertook weekend vision quests. Some real Indians resented the newfound interest in their traditions, charging cultural theft. (Native American anger culminated in a 1993 "Declaration of War" issued by a coalition of tribes against "non-Indian 'wannabes,' hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers and self-styled 'New Age shamans' and their followers...exploiting, abusing, and misrepresenting [our] sacred traditions and spiritual practices...") Still, many non-Indians who embraced Native American religion did so with pure motives: to cleanse the spirit, to seek life's direction, to live in harmony with Mother Earth.

The ironic coda to that vignette is that embracing the best of what you find elsewhere is an integral part of the Western (not to mention small-c catholic) mindset, and has been since the Romans embraced Greek achievement.