One capable of operating in the dark

Shortly after life became complex enough to need psychophysics, it started doing something interesting: it began contributing to the sounds around it. Before life, all sounds on Earth – crashes of waves, susurrations of the wind, crackles of lightning – were noisy in the sense that they provided a constant flow of acoustic energy scattered almost randomly across the spectrum (with the exception of the occasional low moaning sounds of wind across hollow stones or the brief tone of singing sands blowing across dunes). But with the presence of increasingly complex multicellular life and the development of listeners, the sounds of Earth began to change. Vibration sensitivity arose because of an evolutionary rule of thumb: whenever there is a niche rich in resources, something will emerge to fill it. Early vibration sensitivity arose as an early warning system telling of changes in water currents around simple organisms. Shifts in these local water currents could mean anything from a wave passing by to the approach of a predator or the presence of prey organisms nearby. But once organisms grew complex enough to actually listen to their environment, there was an entire sensory niche open for exploitation. Animals could make sounds. This was a leap in animal behaviour complexity. Unlike vision, which relies on passive detection of light energy, usually from sunlight, sound provides a whole new communication channel, one capable of operating in the dark, around corners, and without being dependent on line of sight. Sound was suddenly not just an early warning system, but used as an active way of coordinating behaviours across long distances between and within species.

(page 16)

Horowitz, S. S. (2012). The universal sense: How hearing shapes the mind. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.

Words bring us together

“‘We are volcanoes,’ Ursula K. Le Guin once remarked. ‘When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.’ The new voices that are undersea volcanoes erupt in open water, and new islands are born; it’s a furious business and a startling one. The world changes. Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one’s humanity. And the history of silence is central to women’s history.

Words bring us together, and silence separates us, leaves us bereft of the help or solidarity or just communion that speech can solicit or elicit. Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable whole that can’t so easily be blown down in the wind. Stories and conversations are like those roots. For a century, the human response to stress and danger has been defined as ‘fight or flight’. A 2000 UCLA study by several psychologists noted that this research was based largely on studies of male rats and male human beings. But studying women led them to a third, often deployed option: gather for solidarity, support, advice. They noted that, ‘behaviourally, females’ responses are more marked by a pattern of ‘tend-and-befriend’. Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.’ Much of this is done through speech, through telling of one’s plight, through being heard, through hearing compassion and understanding in the response of the people you tend to, whom you befriend.”

p. 60

Solnit, R. (2017). A short history of silence. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 60-86). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

The word discrimination means two contradictory things

The word discrimination means two contradictory things. Perceptually to discriminate is to distinguish clearly, to perceive in detail; sociopolitically, it’s to refuse to distinguish clearly, to fail to see past the categorical to the particulars and individuals. Racism is a discrimination driven by indiscriminateness or at least by the categorical. Of course this is a categorical statement that contains its opposite. Categories are also useful and necessary to antiracism: subprime mortgage sellers targetted people of colour who therefore lost a far higher percentage of their net worth in the 2008 crash; schools, recent studies conclude, often punish Black children more harshly. But these are descriptions of a group’s conditions, not its essence.

The idea that a group is an airtight category whose members all share a mindset, beliefs, eventually culpability, is essential to discrimination. It leads to collective punishment, to the idea that if this woman betrayed you, that one can be savaged; that if some people without homes commit crimes, all unhoused people can and should be punished or cast out. […] discrimination has been increasingly made illegal, but habits of mind are not regulated by laws.”

p. 222

Solnit, R. (2017). The pigeonholes when the doves have flown. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 222-226). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.