CONTINUED FROM Part I—Perceiving Gaia

There is one short, flawed section where Buhner strays into politics. “I can hear the objections now,” he predicts as he launches into a screed against regulation of “government, schooling, and licensure.” He asserts that innovations in all fields “have been driven primarily by the unschooled, the unlicensed, the eccentrics who live outside the center.” He differentiates the unschooled geniuses from the “sober, well-prepared ones” who lack imagination, quoting Paul Krugman:

“Experience has made painfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer.”
—Paul Krugman

Surprisingly, this echoes Robert M. Pirsig’s complaints in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“It’s this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.”
—Robert M. Pirsig

And so we are in a different book, one that, like Pirsig’s, has unexpectedly engaged the American Dream. Buhner laments a day not long ago when “[v]estiges of the great experiment of the American republic still remained.” We watch him go from a paragraph that begins, “Years of training, licensing boards, continuing education credits, and training based on reductive science do not in fact produce better or safer outcomes,” to the next, which says in its entirety, “This is why the health care system in the United States is the most expensive on Earth. . . and why its outcomes are so poor.”

But other countries with publicly-funded health care and better outcomes, such as Canada, also have licensing, training boards, continuing education, and reductive science. If I may venture to say so, American health care is expensive because health is priced as a commodity in a capitalist market. It has poor outcomes because doctors are expensive and junk food is cheap, among other reasons.

In an otherwise good book, I could do without the misguided political rant. Normally I’d let it go at that. But this book was written in 2014, and it needs a corrective. We are living in a different time, the time of Trumpism and QAnon. It’s no longer helpful to say, with Buhner:

“I am about to suggest that you give up trust in experts and begin to trust yourself. . .”
—Stephen Harrod Buhner

In the last part of this review, I’ll offer some reflections on what this means for Buhner’s ideas about perception.

Continued:

Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Part III: Learning to Trust Yourself

Related Topics

On Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Part I—Tragic Flaws
Public and Private