My functional new word: Enlightendigenous
In my book I talk about something that people respond with knee-jerk sayings that show they don’t know what they’re talking about because they hurt their own cause. Still, they can’t stop themselves from being know-it-alls and saying it. I found a way to fix the problem with a new word.
The problem response comes when I mention Enlightenment values of (according to Steven Pinker)
“reason, science, humanism, and progress” and how they helped in the past and could help now. I found that there was another Enlightenment value of stewardship that we lost.
The knee-jerk response is to call Enlightenment people “dead white men,” as if their being white or male disqualified them from being worth listening to.
My counter-response is to point out that some historians found that the Enlightenment derived from Europeans finding cultures practicing Enlightenment ideals and adopting them. Europe didn’t then practice those values. They learned them from others, then restored them. As I wrote in my book:
Europeans and American colonists began to learn new world practices and beliefs, which didn’t derive from as strict dominance hierarchies. “Especially with the Spanish conquest of the Americas,” recounts Dawn of Everything, “suddenly, a few of the more powerful European kingdoms found themselves in control of vast stretches of the globe, and European intellectuals found themselves exposed, not only to the civilizations of China and India but to a whole plethora of previously unimagined social, scientific and political ideas. The ultimate result of this flood of new ideas came to be known as the ‘Enlightenment.’”
To avoid the knee-jerk response of people saying values like “reason, science, humanism, and progress” come from dead white men, implying there’s something wrong with them, I point out that historians show these values came to Europe from indigenous cultures. To avoid having to repeat this point every time someone tries to discount an idea for coming alternatively from the Enlightenment or indigenous culture, I created the new word Enlightendigenous, which describes something as arising from Enlightenment thought and indigenous wisdom. If people don’t like Enlightenment thought, they can still like something Enlightendigenous since it also derives from indigenous wisdom, and vice versa.
I hope that when I say a value, like stewardship, is Enlightendigenous, I mean it comes from both traditions so people can find something they value in each. Here’s another passage from my book, describing a historical instance of Enlightenment values coinciding with indigenous wisdom where I could have used the term Enlightendigenous:
These three discoveries alone didn’t cause the Enlightenment, but they contributed significantly: “Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Wilson, John Adams, Thomas Paine, and other founding fathers were acquainted with Indian peoples, tribal governments, and indigenous theories of governance” wrote historian Robert Miller (in “American Indian Constitutions and Their Influence on the United States Constitution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (March 2015) 32–56.). Indigenous wisdom contributed to the Enlightenment and American democracy. Miller continued,
Indian nations and peoples impacted the formation of the current US government, the Constitution that created it, and several specific provisions in that document . . . The hundreds of years of interactions between native nations and English and American colonies, states, leaders, and the United States founding fathers shaped the political thinking of both sides and even influenced the development, drafting, and ratification of the US Constitution.
Slavery led to growth of markets for products like sugar and tea that were unnecessary, but which the home markets couldn’t stop buying. I considered them close enough to addicted to say that while these three discoveries may have brought the Enlightenment, they also led to pollution, addiction, imperialism, and depletion.
Here’s a representation of Kondiaronk, a native American that Europeans learned from, contributing to European enlightenment:
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