Tomorrow, Today - Authority, Academia, & the Invention of History with Peter Michael Bauer

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

In this episode we're joined by Peter Michael Bauer of Rewild Portland to discuss the  authority of academia and the development of narratives. Many recognize the shortfalls and the politics academia injects into how research is done and how outcomes are presented, but how bad is it, really? How can we present an alternative to this model, and is there any validity in the authoirty that comes with the academic authority assigned through degree-granting institutions? Follow Peter on Instagram @PeterMichaelBauer & you can find Rewild Portland @RewildPortland

Welcome back to tomorrow today. This is Andy, and I'm here with my lovely co-host. Flashnin. Oh, yes, that's my birth name. Thank you. Flashin. That's what everyone knows her as. Flash.

I'm the Flash. Yeah. Speaking of flashing. Oh, good. Actually, I have no way to tie flashing into what we're talking about. Thank God because I got real worried. Yeah. I guess, yeah, I got nothing.

We are talking to or today, how am I, what the hell is my problem? Today, I forgot how the English language works. That's okay. So you guys get to hear me have a stroke. And it's fitting given the previous episode or we were talking about dealing with death. Do you accept your own demise right now? I might. Okay, good.

But you know who doesn't accept my demise? Is it Peter? It's Peter. It's always Peter, by the way. It's always Peter. So we spoke with, or I personally. spoke with Peter Michael Bauer. What a flex.

You may know him from Rewild Portland. He also had a brief stint doing really fun, weird stuff as a hunter-gatherer in Portland. Okay. So that was cool. But that's actually not what we're talking about. As much as I like to talk about rewilding with him, we're actually talking about the role of academia when we're talking about authority on subject matter. the whether or not there's a validity in that and kind of the complications of that whole process given the fact that our academic structures are biased in a number of different ways, whether it's through alumni relationships or seniority, race, class, all of those different things playing into who gets into academia and what opportunities are available because of things like scholarships, internships, internships that are unpaid and all of these different pieces that can play into why despite schools.

reaching out and supposedly trying to provide some diversity in their their student body, most academics are white dudes. So like real ivory tower shit. Yeah, basically. That's a short way of saying what I just spent like five minutes saying. Just thought I'd come in a bit. I'm just going to cut out everything from Welcome to Tomorrow today to you just saying, ivory tower shit.

So you are an ivory tower queen. I am, but monarch really, but a czar. A monarch. A monarch. Just really blend them together. It's very 2020. of you. Yes, I think so. I think so. I am an academic, and I do fall into the, you know, middle class white category, so I can't say that I'm out there, you know. Fighting the system.

Yeah, or, you know, breaking through barriers that haven't already been broken through. But it feels good as a woman. It does. It does. I mean, everything feels good as a woman because women are just better, but. Okay. So that is very helpful as we try to figure out, why is this a big deal on how do we define, I don't want to say authority, because that's really not the right word. Yeah, integrity, qualification, any of these things. You know, we have kind of two main facets when we talk about academia, and especially the stuff we're doing with this podcast. The whole point of this podcast was to be like, we want to talk to people doing cutting-edge

research. How is that changing your future? But there's academics, there's pop science writers, and then there's people that are non-academics that are doing equally rigorous work. And how do you delineate between these categories? and how do you basically fact-check them or trust that their qualifications, especially given the infrastructure that creates those qualifications? Right.

I mean, I think it comes back to our conversation about Wikipedia too, right? Do you trust Wikipedia as a source? Can you use it as a source? And what the research suggests is that Wikipedia tends to actually be more factually accurate because it doesn't come with the biases of academics, right? So I think understanding, and this is true, not even in this particular conversation, but understanding the information that you're being given and where it comes from, I think is a very important part of understanding why facts are presented in a certain way and why bias does enter academia.

And it does in a lot of ways, you know. I just finished a book on Jack the Ripper, actually. This is like sort of an aside. But it was about the women that were murdered that were considered Jack the Ripper's canonical victims. And it's by a social historian. It's a very, very good book. It's called The Five. You really couldn't make it a whole episode about talking about.

death. I couldn't. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. You're like, you know what? Fuck Peter. This is about death. Listen, Peter, sit down. Okay. I've got something to say about Jack the Ripper. But it's true. So it was written by a social historian and you can tell just how the facts are presented that it's written by a social historian who studies women's history, who's talking about classism and women's rights in a time where those things were very, very relevant to how you lived your life or didn't live your life, you know, in some cases. You know, it's not just about getting the Jack the Ripper facts. You can look those up anywhere. It's about this particular academic win in looking for these particular stories to present a very particular viewpoint. And that viewpoint, I think, is largely very successful, but it's also very biased in one direction. And it points to the fact that when we talk about history narratives, and this goes back to our conversation with Chris Fuchs, is that there is no such thing really as objectivity, as much as we.

try to pretend and assert that there is. I mean, not to say if I were to say, Jack the Ripper is about a stoner and he was ripping bong hits, like, that may have some, you know, thinner ice that it's standing on. But if you can defend it. But exactly. If I can defend it, then Jack the Ripper just got like way fucking cooler. And how did those women die exactly? You know.

The mysteries of the universe. Yeah. Maybe he was using them as like the newest bong. Oh, wow. That is bleak. That is bleak. I mean, what end do you think they would smoke it out of? Okay.

Okay. Dear God. Okay. Anyway, to bring us back. But it is true. And I think, you know, we talked about it with Dr. Fuchs. We talked about it a little bit, I think, in some of the earlier episodes where we're talking about history in particular. You know, there's no one objective narrative that's accepted.

We do have, you know, the winner writes the history, right? So when you have, you know, colonialist history, you have colonizers, that's often the accepted. trajectory of how we understand history. And then in school, it gets broken down. You learn dates and names and names of battles, and that's sort of what it gets distilled as. But when you start unpacking any of those histories, you do find that there are multiple sides. Anybody can experience an event and then have someone else experience it totally differently. And you can do that in your modern life, too, just by misunderstanding something that's happening around you. And we've all done that. It's like a big TV trope, too, where everybody misunderstands what's happening and then they all meet in the middle.

Maybe it was just puff, puff passing. You've been waiting too long. You've been waiting too long to say that. And the joy in your faces you delivered, it disturbs me. I'm just thinking of the logistics. It's kind of like a water bong now if your body is like 80% water. Does that mean you have to let them cool down first so that you get the real effect? We at tomorrow today do not condone using people as bongs.

I just want to make that very, very clear to everyone listening and also because the lawyers are starting to bust down into this room. I don't know what you're talking about. I would never suggest such a thing. And just clarifying for the record that we're not condoning that at all. I mean, there's only one letter difference between bone and bong, and I don't know what that means, but I feel like it means something. It doesn't. It doesn't mean anything at all. It doesn't mean.

I need a break. Okay. Poor Peter. How did this episode become about this? I think he'd appreciate it. We'll never know. Hunter Gathers probably tried it. I don't know that they were smoking an enormous amount of marijuana.

wanted to be honest with you. Maybe. Okay. Hear me out. Maybe. That's true. You have no authority on history just because you're a fucking ivory tower. That's true.

Okay. We circled right back to it somehow. Tearing you down. We made it. We made it. So the point here is that in this conversation, we really dive into like, how do we assign authority and how complicated that is because on one hand, academic credentials are based in, like, actually doing work in a sense knowing what you're talking about.

but alternatively, if you took the syllabus from every class you're required to take to get your anthropology degree or to get a PhD in anthropology, who can prove that? And how do we validate that? And then how do we challenge the infrastructure that allows for rich white people to be able to basically buy their way through school because they can take a lower class load, not have to do work on the side, take unpaid internships, all these different things that can affect how they're able to get through school or get into a good graduate program. all these things, it's really a catch-22. Right.

And I don't believe we really come to a solution on that. But I think the conversation itself is important to have, especially as we continue to speak with more academics on these subject matters and to think about that within this context. You know, we're running into it too, just as in a general sense, you know, where we see this uptick in podcasts. And you know, how many history podcasts are there? How many agroecology prepper podcasts?

I don't know where you guys fall anymore are there. And, you know, how many man hours it takes to build that kind of knowledge, that kind of content. And whether you do it well or whether you don't do it well. And who's can validate it because, you know, one of the things that becomes really apparent is the delivery process is often more important than the content itself. And you see this on YouTube. Like the, I got like the YouTubeification of content, like where you can have very good content and not know what the fuck you're doing. As long as it looks like you know what you're doing and you've pulled something from someone else and you know how to do. that literal thing because you've read the instructions, but you've got a good camera,

you've got good editing skills, and it can come across like you're an actual authority on a subject matter, and that's really frightening. Yeah. I mean, hopefully you are a subject matter. I know. I don't know anything. About anything? Every podcast, I've just learned that like seven minutes before. Just Wikipedia.org. Thank God we did that interview. I was like, I guess I've been doing a pretty good job. Dodged a bullet there. So yeah, that's really. That's pretty much it. If you enjoy listening to Peter, he's got rewilding Portland, or rewild Portland, rather, and you can find him on Instagram and all those good social media places. Great guy. I also interviewed him on my other podcast, so I'm not biased by any means, but go check that out too.

Shameless plug. Shameless plug. As a producer of high quality podcasts with low content quality, I highly recommend that episode. Do you highly recommend it? Do you get that? Do you see what I did there? I did. Okay, I did. Don't worry. I'm going to make him teach me how to make a bong out of a bone. Actually, that sounds pretty dope.

A bong. Okay, that sounds less dope, but you had me and then you lost me again. These five weird tricks, you'll never try again. What happens next will blow your tits clean off? Blow them off like Jack the Ripper. No, absolutely not. No, no, no. Jack the Tripper.

We need an HR, I think. That's what we're coming down to. Oh, Jack. Jackie. Jackie Gleasing. We've lost control of Andy kids. I want to start his microphone off. Peter, thanks so much for coming on.

Can you introduce yourself for our audience? Yeah, my name's Peter Michael Bauer. I'm the director of Rewild Portland. It's a nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon. Our mission is to promote cultural and environmental resilience through the education of earth-based arts, traditions, and technologies. I'm also a podcaster or teacher and writer, I guess, like some sort of creative, I'm a basket weaver.

A smattering of things, I guess. Not very good at any one of those things, you know, but like just good enough to sort of do them. Just enough. You just have to be better than the people you're teaching. That's all you're going to do. And I kind of joke about that, but also that kind of is the framework of this conversation a little bit, this idea of like academia.

So one of the things you didn't bring up in that you're actually really great at, So I'm going to compliment you on it is like researching, especially around anthropology. So first I want to ask kind of how you got into that and maybe a little bit about your background in academics or however you want to describe it. I, where do I start? So I was 16 and I read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, which is a fictionalized story, but includes factual information about history. And it's sort of a really good conglomeration of the kind of best anthropology and history known in the early 90s, right?

I think it was written in 1992. I read it in 1996. And by that point, he had a bunch of other books out under the same sort of vein. And I read all of those. It was a good way of sort of, you know, as a fictional book, it was a good way of driving an interesting narrative with cool history. stuff interwoven into it and philosophy and things. So that was sort of my introduction to history and it really made me want to read more. Unfortunately, it was a fictional book. So there was no like bibliography in the back. You know, the main character in Ishmael is like a telepathic

gorilla. And the guy's like, how do you know this information? And he's like, just go to your library and look up any like, you know, anthropology books or whatever. But he doesn't never say specific ones. And so I did exactly that. I went to the library and started kind of pouring through, or not even the library. Here in Portland, we have a bookstore called Powell's. And

it's actually supposedly or was at one point the largest quote unquote manmade attraction in Oregon. Like it was a huge bookstore. Before Amazon, right, before you could just order things online. We're talking like a three story, four story warehouse. Oh, that's awesome. That takes up

a whole city block of books. So the anthropology section was like, you know, half a floor. It was huge. And so I went there and I just started like pouring through books and I became addicted to reading. I don't even remember some of the first ones I read because my favorite books now are ones that have come out in the last 10 or 15 years. So this is in the 90s.

But one in particular that stuck out to me was a book called, that sticks out to me today. It was a book called Savages by Joe Kane. And it was a play on the pejorative because the book was about oil companies exploiting indigenous land in Ecuador. And the savages or whatever in the book are the oil companies or whatever. That's sort of a good thing that doesn't happen anymore. Right. Yeah. So and then the other, the flip side to that was, you know, some books by Tom Brown Jr., which later I've discovered were not true.

but some of the stuff in there was pretty genuine in terms of inspiring me to learn more about, you know, indigenous people, indigenous living. You know, I wanted to figure out how to step away from essentially the culture of civilization that has been destroying the planet or, you know, causing the sixth mass extinction for many years. And so just researching, you know, how do people live in a sustainable way? How do you do it? Or, you know, now I don't even like the word sustainable. How do people live in a regenerative way, you know, or. in a relative form of balance, even though balance, you know, obviously over thousands of years,

whatever that means, changes dramatically. But how can you, you know, adapt with ecosystems and not destroy them? How can you be a part of them rather than cause an extinction? It's not like every living thing is like causing an extinction. So why are humans causing the extinction? Why are we, why did our population grow to nine billion or whatever? And bears didn't, right? Like what's going on there? What are the mechanics of our living and subsistence strategies? And so, yeah, just pouring through anthropology. I mean, I just went, you know, lots of new books were coming out, and I was reading all of those. And then when I was 19, I decided I was going to give college a try. So I had dropped out of high school because essentially I read Daniel Quinn's books. And I was like,

there's a sense of urgency of collapse in those books. And I thought, you know, I mean, they were making us research things that had no relevance. And in my, from my perspective, you know, I was having to write papers on, you know, they wanted me to compare and contrast like a terrorist organization or what is labeled as a terrorist organization in like the Middle East or something with like a government in the Middle East. I don't know. It was just like it didn't seem relevant at all. Even though now I'm fascinated by all facets of history and contemporary times and I would totally be into reading about that stuff. what I felt I needed most was an actual knowledge of how to live in a way that was in alignment or even just like how to subsist at all.

Like, you know, as a 16-year-old going, I don't even know one plant from another. I don't even know how to identify like farmed vegetables in a field, let alone wild plants or invasive species or what kind of what can I eat. And so I was thinking, you know, I could stay here and get a high school diploma, which will be worthless in the apocalypse or whatever, you know, not the apocalypse, but the collapse of civilization, or I could drop out of high school and start going to survival schools and actually learning to take care of myself in a meaningful way. So that's what I did.

And so once I was kind of on that track, so I was like 16, dropped out of high school, ran away from home, started going to different schools around the country, different gatherings. And at that point, continuing to just pour through anthropology and archaeology and meeting archaeologists, meeting anthropologists, meeting indigenous people talking to them. And then I started, I was like, I'm going to go to college. So I started at Portland Community College and I signed up for, I was like, I can only really do what interests me. It's always been a challenge. School has always been a challenge for me doing things that I'm not interested in.

I hear now that that's a symptom of ADHD. I've never been diagnosed with ADHD. I have been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, which is a similar kind of thing. So I went to Portland Community College and I signed up for two classes. It was anthropology of the northwest coast of North America and Native American history. Actually, the class was called Native American Indian history, which seems sort of like redundant or whatever. But maybe it was... Listen, they were trying to be PC at the time.

Yeah, maybe they were working on changing the name over or something, you know. And I really, it was the funniest part about that class was that I just argued all the whole time with both of the professors from each of those classes. because they just hadn't read any contemporary anthropology. And by that point, I had just poured through books for the last three years, right? I wasn't good at debate and I didn't have those, like the knowledge, like internalized, right? So I couldn't really argue with them well. One of the arguments I had was with a professor who was making fun of animism. And Daniel Quinn, you know, that was one of my introductions to all this stuff was like a deep sort of understanding of animism.

And to me, animism is like a isn't a belief system. It's a way of perceiving. And, you know, if you look up the old school dictionary definition of animism, it's like the belief that everything has a spirit. I don't believe in spirits, but I consider myself an animist. So to me, it's like a scientific framework of perception. And I think that anything else that's built on top of that is like a cultural narrative. So if you're looking at it from a cultural narrative and not the like core of perception, then you're going to misinterpret what. animism is, right? And this is all more, again, this is contemporary animism. This is like, you know, Graham

Harvey's book animism or the like, you know, the handbook of contemporary animism, which is much more based in perception than just like a basic, you know, the basic understanding that it's a belief that everything has a spirit. But back, back then, there wasn't a lot of this sort of like dialogue around it. So, you know, the professor's up there and he's like, I mean, animists are kind of, you know, my girlfriend's an animist. She even thinks this like podium is alive. How ridiculous is that? Or like this CD or whatever, you know. And I'm, I really. my hand and I was just like that's not what animism is blah blah like I don't believe in spirits yada yada and he was like I didn't understand his response and he didn't understand my thing he was

like well that's just like a Christian saying they don't believe in God like to them it's just God exists or whatever and I was like what the fuck is he talking about I was like no I literally I don't believe in spirits it's not like I think they're real or anything I just you're not just redefining the term right yeah yeah I mean in a sense I think we were I think the early I think we were redefining animism in that era. I'm sorry, I meant the term spirits. Totally. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Exactly. Anyway, so, you know, it was just that kind of stuff where, and then in the second class, we had to read a book called the Patriot Chiefs and automatically, like, just the title alone, the Patriot Chiefs. This is going to be good. You know, so I wrote a three-page paper about how there's no such thing as patriotism

outside of nationalist societies and there's no such thing as chiefs. That's like an invention, right? And that, you know, leadership's, leadership, yes, but like the way that it, you know, everyone has a chief and like, you know, it's just like, and the word chief, you know, like just all these different things. Anyway, I wrote instead of, she wanted us to compare and contrast, Tacumsa's tactics with King Phillips tactics. And, you know, essentially like a Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X or, you know,

that kind of thing, right? And I was just like, this is a garbage thing. I'm just going to, instead, I'm going to review this book and tell you why you shouldn't actually be, like, having people read this book and doing this exercise. Like, it's actually outdated and this whole notion, like the framework of this entire thing is wrong. And she gave me like a C minus or maybe a C plus and was like, not exactly. I remember like looking at the paper, not exactly what I was looking for. Like, yeah, no shit.

This is like, you know, a classic like white, blonde woman who was like, I'm part Cherokee or whatever, you know. Yeah, yeah. Maybe, sure, okay, I don't want to like judge based on your history, but it was clear that she was just like a, you know, sort of it was, now it's sort of a joke when even more than when people said that kind of shit in the past. You went through school, it didn't work out, but you're still, I guess you could say active in this idea of research and trying to dig through, weed through the stuff that exists right now in terms of academia. and the reason why I want to have you on is this whole podcast was framed on this idea of getting knowledge that's being researched today in front of people instead of it having to go through these channels and like, you know, synthesized by news media or whatever into textbooks that is written for public education, which then puts a certain bent on it because of the way our educational system is set up. And instead just kind of like cutting right to the source and talking about how that impacts, how we think about history. think about the future and how thinking about history differently through new research is really important in understanding what our future looks like. Now, what you're doing is basically in some ways the same thing.

I'm really curious about what you're doing and why you think it's important to provide an alternative narrative to just relying on the traditional process of academic knowledge or, I don't even want to say academic knowledge, but like research to getting in front of people. Yeah, I mean, this is just such a important and challenging topic. Yeah, I mean, you're just immediately, my mind is going in a thousand different places. And I think I want to start with just the notion of legitimacy. So in order for states or, you know, in order for systems, not just states, but in order for systems to operate, they have to have legitimacy, right? So in order for a group of people to come together to solve a problem, there has to be legitimacy agreed upon within the group, right? And this is something that's outlined beautifully in Joseph Tainter's book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, which I love bringing up all the time. Because I feel like it's just one of the most important books ever written, really, if for people in our position to understand how collapse works.

But also systems, not just states, but systems in general. So, you know, it's the collapse of complex societies, which is mostly around state societies. But, you know, quote unquote, non-complex or simple societies can collapse too. So, you know, what's the framework of all of that? Well, one of the things that societies need is legitimacy. And there are different forms of legitimacy. So, you know, academia is one form of legitimacy. But even then there's challenges to its legitimacy, right?

And one way that you can cause a society to collapse is to delegitimize it. And we see this a lot with, you know, religions de-legitimizing each other, right? Like societies that are built on notions of how the world is operating, right? Like what is the dominant belief system of a society that keeps it going, right? Like if you're in a system, like a church system that relies upon tithes or, you know, donations or whatever, right? like the people who are giving that money have to believe in the legitimacy of that system to give it. So if a different religion, for example, challenges that, that's a challenge to that system. And then what are they going to do in response, right?

They can try to delegitimize the other religion or whatever, right? So like, this is just, you know, what's been going on between groups of people for a long time on different scales, right? And state societies are no different. They oftentimes, you know, they have to legitimize slavery. They have to legitimize the military. They have to legitimize pouring fucking chemicals all over food, right? Like there's a legitimization that has to happen in order for it to function. And as soon as people start to delegitimize or not believe in the actions of a state,

they either have to change them or they're going to collapse, right? And so we see this like elections. Yeah, right. That's exactly right. And that's, you know, so we see that happening in the United States right now, right? Where we have, you know, people are like, oh, there's the Russians are. meddling in the election. Well, what even was that?

What were they doing in the election? They were delegitimizing the so-called democratic process, right? By creating extremist ideas and then saying, you know, that they weren't real or that, you know, election fraud. Like all of these things delegitimize the notion that the state is built upon, even if that's bullshit to begin with, right? Do people believe in it? So there's like this, as an anarchist, you know, that doesn't want, that would prefer for stateless societies, you know, there's part of me that's like, yes, that's awesome that they're delegitimizing the state. But if you're looking from the right wing perspective, they're

delegitimizing it and sort of, you know, encouraging fascism as opposed to like collective anarchism or something, right? And so it's not necessarily great. But yeah, we see that happening even just right now, like on the new, I don't want to get too much into this, you know, political topic or whatever, right? But just as an example, right? Like the, you see this happen. with two different sides of what is legitimate arguing with each other. You have like Fox News, you know, on the one hand saying they they think law enforcement is legitimate when it's like murdering black people and illegitimate when it's like, you know, breaking into the ex-presidents house and stealing the, or not stealing, but taking back their

documents or whatever, right? And so you have to like, each narrative is going to try to delegitimize the other narrative. And it's just something that happens with any system that is in. competition. And it's unwinding. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And it's a symptom of the unwinding of that, of that system, right? Okay. So there's legitimacy, which is a, which to me, it comes back to legitimacy. When I think about academia, I think about its legitimacy and anthropology, because there's two, you know, there's academia and anthropology and they're sort of intertwined, right? So you have, is anthropology a legitimate practice? Is academia a legitimate institution? And,

my answer would be yes and no to both, right? Like there's things that I find legitimate about it and things I find illegitimate, but also those come from my own personal narratives, right? And I think about, you know, anthropologists who should not have any legitimacy at all, who are unethical, immoral, and do damage to the groups of people that they're supposedly like interested in studying and learning about, you know, the classic example is Napoleon Shagnon, who went down, lived with the young, Onami people gave them weapons created conflict by like you know they did in their culture you don't talk about ancestors and he wanted to like map lineage of all the people living and so he went to a group of people and asked them to tell him about other people's ancestors and who they were and they did and he

gave them weapons like guns and then he went and machetes and shit and then he went and talked to the other group and he was like hey these people told me who your ancestors were who were their ancestors and then he gave them weapons and then of course they were pisses at each other and so they fucking started fighting. Is that a legitimate practice? No, that is totally fucked up, right? And then he came back and wrote a book called the fierce, Yanonami, the fierce people, which like blew up.

Because everybody wants to believe that humans are innately violent, horrible animals because it reflects civilization. Basically, it reflects the society. It legitimizes the violence that we enact on each other, right? So think of began about legitimacy. People don't want to have their framework delegitimized if it makes them have to have a whole new identity, right? Then you're in an identity crisis.

There needs to be something offered to jump over to a different identity, a different way of living, a different narrative, like right there. So people can jump onto it like a life raft or something, right? Like, I mean, this is all metaphorical. I don't know. So you have like an institution like academia that, you know, he was, Napoleon Shagnon was like put on the board of the Academy of the National Academy of Sciences or whatever, right? And Marshall Sallens like resigned when that happened and wrote a whole letter about how

fucked up it was and how only they only care about the military and proving shit to the military, like these narratives of humans being violent, because then that helps legitimize soldiers killing other people, right? So this comes back into academia too, because if Napoleon Shagnon was acting within the academia world, which he was by writing this book, by writing papers, by, you know, interacting with it and being promoted, you know, or not promoted, but like elevated and then therefore his legitimacy being elevated, then you can. can look at legitimacy as something that can be invented or to you know or disinvented or whatever right like it's it's an invention it's not necessarily a pure fact right it can just happen based on um intentions right like a state wants to maintain its monopoly on violence so anything that can do that any narrative that can help it along and so most scientific research within academia is funded by these narratives right like it's funded by the military it's funded by the

the state. It's funded by Monsanto or Bayer or whatever the fuck they are now. So you have to think about that when you're thinking about is academia legitimate. Where is the money coming from? Why is this being funded? You know, what narrative are they pushing? And oftentimes, you know, because many scientists, many anthropologists don't want to push a narrative. They're really trying to be aware of their bias. They're trying to understand the funding. They're trying to understand how they might be affecting it. And there's way to not, right? Everybody has bias. Anything that we do, we're going to see through our own lens. But anthropology is a double-edged sword in that sense because it can help us, while it can do damage

in certain ways, it can also help us to dismantle our own worldviews by seeing other peoples. And that's where I find the beauty of anthropology is in self-analysis. And so in terms of legitimacy, what is the, you know, when I'm looking at academia and all of these things, I'm wondering about what is the narrative behind it and how what are my own biases and how does this narrative challenge my own bias and make it so that maybe I don't see the world in black and white but a gray you know and I can try to interpret things and not carry as much bias and be open and be fluid about those those things right so I mean I have lots of problems with academia so I dropped out of both of those classes right the ones I taught like the college courses I took I dropped them almost at the end of

end of both of them because I was just so frustrated. I just couldn't put myself through it. I don't have any academic credential. That's another form of perceived legitimacy is academic credential. Is it real legitimacy? Well, Napoleon Shagnon was, you know, had gone through academia and had academic credentials. Was he a legitimate anthropologist? In my opinion, no. In my opinion, he delegitimized anthropology by breaking all of these rules. and ethics around how to actually study people without bias, right? He created these situations, and he was a member of this institution that has legitimacy. So how do you create legitimacy without bias, right?

I mean, that's kind of the challenges. So I think the point that consistent through all these examples is that centers of power leverage their ability to not necessarily be the focal point of how to define power, but using examples to define the other to their power. So if we are not this violent tribe, then therefore we are the other thing, which is by definition in this case, a non-violent society.

And I think we can see that play out in all these different factions. Now in academia, it becomes a little bit more complex because of the fact of how it's funded. And then the way, and something we haven't talked about yet, is how academia is designed,

designed to not just perpetuate a certain narrative, but also a certain type of person who can explore those narratives. Totally. Because of that bias, are less likely to see that narrative playing out in front of them, despite the fact that we think of academia as being this progressive, you know, whatever, space. Totally. There's also an element, too, of specialization. So, you know, the bigger things tend to get, the more specialized you have.

So in academia, there are people who are very specialized at a particular topic and don't know anything about another thing that might be completely integrated into that. For example, like anthropology and biology. You know, those are two completely different areas of practice that are interwoven and enacted on top of one another, right? Like, you can't separate culture from biology, but that's what's happening, you know. And so for somebody like us, right, like, well, maybe I don't know. I feel like a generalist in a sense, even though I have taken on the label of anthropologist because I don't know why, but I'm a historian anthropologist because I feel like I get the most from anthropology, but I still, I feel like I have a generalist knowledge where I don't just

study anthropology, right? I'm like reading all these other books on biology, different animals, plants, and to sort of see how they all come together. How does this big picture come together? And a lot of people aren't looking at the big picture at all. They're narrowly focused on their one little thing. They might write a paper that is super influential for me because I see how it intersects with this other thing that they might not even know exists. You know, and that example that just popped my head is this book called The Caveman Mystique by Martha McCoy.

And it's really good. I interviewed her on the rewiling podcast. But she talks about the sort of social Darwinism that can come up with. people who are studying social biology, like, you know, boys will be boys. And then they sort of project that notion into prehistory with images of like a caveman dragging a woman by the hair after like hitting her over the head with a club or whatever, right, like these sorts of images. But she didn't know anything about like rewilding or how this might impact our community in terms of like this larger movement around sort of understanding the history and understanding social biology and stuff.

And so her research, even though it was specific to this one little thing, has like greatly influenced me in my rewiling journey. And that's just like one small example, you know. But, you know, when you start thinking about legitimacy and for somebody like me, you know, I, to call myself an anthropologist, then I have people messaging me on Facebook that are friends that are, you know, have gone through the institutions and have a piece of paper that they paid for that says anthropologist on it or whatever, you know, being like, actually, you can't call yourself an anthropologist because you didn't go to school for four years.

and pay money to do it. You know, and so again, there's this notion of legitimacy that comes back to these kinds of things. But you could also look at it the other way, right? So there are people who have the legitimacy who I don't think should that went through that paid for the paper. And there are people who don't have it who should have legitimacy, right, for their own. And then the same is true the other way. So how do you, you know, where people who don't have the paper,

might be illegitimate. People who have the paper might be legitimate. How do you gauge who has legitimacy and who doesn't? And what is that, you know, what does that look like? I don't, I mean. Authority on authority. Yeah. Getting real meta. Yeah. So while I'm critical of academia and I myself will not participate in the academic sense, I feel it is a great benefit to society to have people researching and specialized in doing these kinds of things, not society. I don't know what that means. It's a great benefit to people and our potential to transform our society to something that is better. And I don't mean like working within the system. I mean to create a different society that's actually functioning in a way that's regenerative and more egalitarian per se.

But yeah, so, you know, like going to the library, being able to look at some of these books and read them and have my perspective changed and then how do we translate that out. And so when you were first saying this. The other thing that popped into my head at the beginning of this was Jared Diamond and how, you know, he's a pop culture writer who's translating out research from academia to the public, right? And he's another example of somebody who I don't think is legitimate, who I don't think should be doing that. And his bias comes from, you know, the military, like all of the same things we are talking about. He is a benefactor of the state. And so, of course, he's going to write from bias and talk about how great it is.

It's the same with like Stephen Pinker, you know, these guys who have received all of the great. I mean, it's like a classic definition of like white privilege, even, you know, or just like wealth privilege or in academic privilege in that sense, where they, they have this form of legitimacy that allows them to project illegitimate ideas that don't reflect the majority of people's experience or existence living within a state. one of the things you brought up and I think is really important and I think should be explored a little further is like you define yourself as a generalist and I would too. I in in the spirit of complex systems no one's really a generalist. You're a specialist generalist. Like you know like I would consider myself a generalist but to somebody else. They're like what do you mean you're a generalist like you you know research civil pasture systems and indigenous cultures like that is a very narrow wind But from my perspective, like, you know, some of the episodes we do on my other podcast, The Port Poles Almanac, is looking at pairing, understanding of like silver pasture and foraging and pastoral systems

and looking at historical records, archives, and being able to pair an agricultural ecological ecological knowledge with very academic pieces that say, oh, these are the plants they found. and you can construct a worldview and a lifeway from that if you understand how those plants and all these other resources would be utilized, that a lot of those specialists don't have that knowledge. So from that perspective, I'm like, no, those are the specialists. I'm the generalists. I think of generalists.

In ecology, they tend to be treated as like they're the filler piece. But in my opinion, I think generalists are actually, they're the cross-pollination piece. They're what adds more to the system, not just filling in the gaps, but creating new things because of their specialization in generalization. Right, exactly, yeah. And I think that plays into, you know, some of those shortfalls of academia is that you have these hyper-specialist people. And like you were saying, you could write an entire book or paper on the subject matter

and totally be ignorant of something that was hugely impactful on why the thing you're writing about happens, but it's outside of your specialization. And that could be a huge problem. Yeah. Well, and I think it lends itself to lots of arguments with people too, in particular things like rewilding where you're you're, you know, connecting all of these different topics together and somebody who's an uninformed who's a specialist might not know, you know, a particular thing and then be like, well, that's not true. And you're like, actually here's like the whole thing around it or whatever. It makes me think of, you know, again, it comes like Jared Diamond's book collapse, right? Like there's this, you know, the way that he used. all of this academic research and stuff to present an argument. But in response, all of the people who, the different data, data, whatever, that he used to present his argument was, you know, multiple different sites all over the world. But there are archaeologists who work in all of those and anthropologists who work in

those environments and some of the actual stuff that he used who disagreed with him 100%. And so they wrote their own book, a collection of essays from archaeologists and anthropologists that worked in the field of every particular place that he used and wrote their own book called questioning collapse, which is amazing. And again, it comes down to like this legitimacy, you know, of bias and how a pop cultural person can take their own bias, take scientific papers from academia, and then just go off the rails. The problem, of course, or, you know, one of the problems is that collapsed your Diamond's book sold millions and millions of copies. I guarantee that questioning collapse has probably sold like 10,000. You know what I mean? Because it's not pop

culture. And it's not written in a particular way. I mean, it's just, and so it's really frustrating because you have misinformation or disinformation continuing to legitimize the state in particular ways. Like one of the weirdest parts about collapse. And this has to do with like, you know, just a contradictory statement of legitimacy, Jared Diamond talks about how, you know, there was a colony on Greenland, a Viking or whatever. There's no such thing as Vikings, but there was a Danish or whatever, you know, Norwegian like colony on Greenland that existed for like 500 years and then eventually, you know, collapsed or whatever, right? And they moved away. And now there's just like remnants of it. I mean, and he uses that in as an example.

of collapse, but then at the same time, talks about, like, reveres the United States as a non-collapsed society. But we're, you know, it's, it's only 250 years old here. So how the fuck is he gauging, you know, the value of it. Anyway, it's just stuff like that. That's just like weirdly contradictory, poorly, poorly conceived notions. So all of this stuff is like covered in, in question and collapse. But no one's going to read that book, you know.

Yeah. And it brings up, to get back to academia, this idea of, you know, authority, authority has this really concise way of dealing with information and also the ability in the capacity to accelerate getting that information as like general, as canon, we'll say. Totally. It can very quickly turn things into canon under the guise of the expertness of the people driving that content. Now, the challenges, then, as we've talked about, is there are these shortfalls of it. Alternatively, that just because somebody claims to be an expert without academic credentials, doesn't necessarily, even if they're working as a public figure, which you would think would come with some accountability, they're able to kind of skid by on some pop science or whatever it might be.

So I guess what do we, what is the, I don't want to say what's the way forward, but how do we find a middle ground where there's accountability on the authority of knowledge of a subject in a way that's accessible to the average person, if that makes sense? Yeah. I mean... Not that I expect you to have the answer. Sure. I know we've talked quite a bit about this subject in the past, and I'm sure you have some thoughts.

Yeah. I was starting to write an essay once called Grandma's, not gurus, that was like... Essentially around this notion of like believing in experts versus, you know, or those promoting themselves as experts versus those silently being experts. You know, one of my greatest teachers is essentially like invisible on the internet, anything. It's like a thing where if you know who she is, then you just know. and she's one of the most knowledgeable people in basket weaving in the world probably. She's an amazing basket teacher, although she denies that. You know, and I think I've just always sort of looked at her as a role model for like sharing knowledge on a level where you have like not even necessarily like a deep sense of humility.

I mean, she definitely has that. But there's this level of just like person ability of like, um, not seeking glory or something. I don't know. And to me, that's like, you know, when I think about, like, legitimate versus non-legitimate, I think about, like, what are the person's intentions? You know, what are they getting out of this thing?

I'll say, and I think what you're suggesting, probably fits into it pretty well, but the concept of, like, heterarchy, where it's, like, the community is assigning you that knowledge or the expert of that knowledge, with the expectation that like they can withhold that power at any given time, which not to say that's perfect by any means, but I think it's definitely better than what we have now. Totally.

I mean, there's, it's really challenging and I've been thinking about this a lot because of, you know, the political spectrum that we are seeing right now in the United States, you know, this, the people believing in the delegitimization. of different aspects of the government. And like, while I'm down for that, on the one hand, on the other hand, it's like what they're putting their legitimacy in is fascism. And so, you know, how do you even start to educate people around that? And I think that there's a fundamental thing we haven't even talked about here,

which is essentially the Prussian school system, compulsory schooling, that was created. in the early 1800s in Prussia and then exploded with the formation of nation states because of its success in creating nation states and nationalism. This goes to the heart, I think, of, you know, it's so complex, right? So my mind is going in a lot of different places. But basically, there has to be an indoctrination from the state in terms of like how to even perceive what legitimacy is and how to make people believe in it. And so there's a huge level of manipulation that's going on.

And in order to manipulate people, you have to not let them know they're being manipulated, right? So that's like this huge thing of like people not even understanding that they're being manipulated. So in order to not have to have somebody not be manipulated, you have to train them specifically to be easily manipulated, which means you have to detrain like intuition. You have to detrain certain things, you know, ways of thinking about yourself and self analysis or cultural analysis. You have to intentionally remove those types of things, right? So the Prussian school system was all about removing people from their families because, you know, the objective was to create nationalists that identified more with a nation state than they did with their own families.

And so compulsory schooling was a way of removing children from a family business, for example, putting them in a school to train them to work in a factory for a nation. And it was greatly successful and then was exported everywhere in the world. So like all of our school systems are essentially to train people to be workers in a factory and identify with a nation state as like daddy instead of their family, right? Like President Daddy Trump or whatever. You know what I mean? And it fucking worked. And it's been working for a really long time. And of course, then the challenge is like it's so easy to manipulate people now because they have no fucking clue that they're being manipulated or any fucking clue on how to understand or self-reflect any kind of manipulative types of behavior.

Right? So like, I think that becomes really evident when you look at the people, how people have changed since COVID. Oh, yeah. Like you were still connected digitally 24-7 and in many cases still working. but just that little bit of independence has led so many people to realizing their identity isn't who they thought they were. And we're not talking about like, you know, 2, 5%. You're talking like 20, 30% of the population is like very much reconsidered who they were. And they still have to go to work for most of it.

And, you know, that I think at points, you know, as you were talking, all I could think of is that stupid George Carlin skit about like, think about how dumb. the average person is and then like remember half of the people are dumber than that but then like if you were to if you were to ask somebody like are your friends smarter or stupid they would not say their friends are stupid right so like they have this first real world hands-on experience of saying the people I'm surrounded by are intelligent people are they different than the rest of the world no then why would you assume the rest of the world is not intelligent like it it highlights that very clear disconnect of um the way we've been, as you said, trained and the way we understand the world outside of that context. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think about, you know, articles on the internet. You know, how do people

tell the difference between fake news and real news, right? Like, and this, this comes back to this notion of like, and this is important because it's the same with academia. How do you read into an article? You know, for example, well, let me come back to that. You know, say you find a news article online. What is the legitimacy of the article? Is it peer reviewed? You know, is it somebody read a thing, read an academic journal and then wrote an essay about it and they didn't really interview? You know, how many times are you reading a news article and they're talking about a new study that came out? And they're like, this biologist said this thing. They weren't a part of the study. I swear to God, I read, we interviewed a biologist who in parentheses, you know, who wasn't

actually a part of the study of this article about this topic. It wasn't even a specialist in, yeah. Yeah. And you're like, well, why the fuck are you even interviewing? Who is this person? You know, like, and why did you pick them? You know, and they're just trying to fill the story or whatever, right? Or maybe they know somebody they want to give them a boost or whatever. But they're like, oftentimes, they're not even talking to the authors of the study because the authors are going to be like, I don't, what you said here, how you're taking the abstract or the conclusions and presenting them isn't exactly what we want, right? Most studies, if you read them, they're written very open-ended, right? They're like, this could be, you know, like, let's say eating, I'm just

going to make something up, 100% making this up. We, you know, we conducted a study and we found that, you know, the placebo versus non-plicebo groups, if you eat three bananas a day, you know, you might be less depressed. Like, we found that, you know, like three bananas a day, between this, you know, there was a 5% increase of happiness among these people. who have depression or whatever. I don't know, right? Yeah. And so it could mean that eating more bananas,

it might make you happier or whatever. I mean, like, and then you, and then an article comes out that says, eating more bananas makes you happier. That's how it works, right? Like, there's no actual, like,

understanding of, like, this was just a, this wasn't a definitive statement coming out of this scientific journal. It's like, this might be a thing. We did a study. This is what happened.

Exactly. Whereas then the news article, that comes out is going to say, eating more bananas makes you happy, right? And that's not what the study said. And this is why I'm always like, anytime you read us about a study, go read the study. Because even the framework, again, when we talk about manipulation and setting people up, you have an academic journal that's following these sort of guidelines of like not being definitive, right? And then, which is, in my perspective, not being manipulative. They're being honest about a thing, being fluid about not having the certainty of it, right, versus the mainstream projection

of certainty. And that's, you know, I think people, this comes down to like a fundamental psychological thing about the state and what the benefit of the state provides is certainty. Because you cannot have, like what the state does is it produces an amount of food on an annual basis with great certainty, an annual crop, right, with as much certainty or more certainty than other forms of subsistence. A friend of mine was like, how come, for example, how come states are based on grain and not nut trees? Like, nut trees provide way more calories and nutrients and blah, blah, and fats and things than grains. Well, that's because trees have mast years. There's no way to predict with

certainty how much crop you're going to get annually. Grain in an acre, you know, a measured space, you can predict that relatively or more so to get that certainty, right? And so I think there's like a level of psychology. And I, you know, maybe this is just like a deeper human psychological thing. I don't know. Maybe this is why some people started building states to begin with was for this sense of certainty. But essentially what that is is like a false notion of protection against hunger, protection against starvation. Of course, the reality is that states and agricultural peoples end up going through famine way more regularly than people without that certainty because it's actually in a long,

from a long, long, long term perspective, it's potentially more uncertain than a diversity of foods because if there's a dry year and your crops fail, you're going to starve. Whereas if there's a dry year, there's different things in the environment that are available for people to consume when they live in smaller populations as hunter gatherers, for example. It may thrive in that condition. Exactly. So I don't know. There's something about that certainty of translating academia over to the public.

And I think that that makes our job really challenging because people do want, I feel, in general, people necessarily don't want that certainty, but have been trained to expect certainty. And it makes them feel comfortable or something, right? And the sort of dis-ease that people get when we're like, yeah, this might be a thing we don't know, you know. people want those they just want to be told what to do right we're just they just eat more bananas that's what they wanted they wanted to just be told what to do rather than like self-reflection self-experimentation which to me is you know something that I think is innate in people and is trained out of them we're trained to just listen to the authority rather than become an authority ourselves and become questioning you know question all of the sources of the information and have a

language that is based around fluidity as opposed to certainty. And I think that, to plug your work, I think that plays into this concept of rewilding. We've definitely, I think, covered what I wanted to cover on the academic side, but I do want to talk a little bit about rewilding and kind of how that plays into this concept of authority. Yeah, I mean, and to link this to your question, too, about how to, you know, relate this or how to how to bring these notions to the general public. There's lots of ways of doing that. To me, there was a school in Portland that started called the Portland Underground Graduate School.

I don't, it's sort of on hiatus at the moment, but that's where I started running my rewilding one-on-one classes and eventually transitioned them back to rewild Portland. In my 101 classes, it's interactive. Yes, I'm a teacher. Yes, I'm talking. Yes, I'm bringing the content. But we make it about how people are interpreting. it or how people are seeing it. It's not just lecture. It's questioning. It's bringing up things that,

you know, I have like required reading or recommended reading or whatever I send out every week. And at the first part of the class, what we do is talk about what stuck out like emotionally. Did this anger you? Did this upset you? What was going on in your head, you know, and why? And we kind of move through the material that way first. And then I'll do a thing and then we do question and answer. And it makes it And then people get to mingle. So there's a sense of community that is built around being inquisitive, right? And people ask questions to each other and they're talking about this. And so it makes education a community-led thing, even though in a sense I'm the one up there leading it.

It's still in the hands of everybody that's showing up there as a community. I'm just being the one presenting information, right? And definitely, you know, the first thing I do is talk about my bias. And I'm like, the first thing I do is, listen, I'm going to, I'm going to hate on agriculture a lot accidentally. Let me let me tell you just going into this that we'll like talk more about what we mean by agriculture as we go through this because I'm going to end up hating on it. And I don't mean to do that. There's a lot of like language around all of this that needs to get like teased out for you to actually understand what I'm talking about because of my own, you know, because of the language from where I came from. You know what I mean?

Yeah. That's one of the things that, you know. So I'm like, and then if you see a bias that I have like, like, let's talk about it, you know. And that can only happen when you're in community, which I think to go back to my original question of like, how do we deal with this? I think you mentioned like the idea of like the grandmother, but I think the bigger, the bigger concept is the community.

Totally. The community can hold that accountability because you can't escape it, whereas in the modern world, much like everything in capitalism, where the person can fund something and be disconnected from it. You can call Comcast because your internet sucks. And you're not yelling at Comcast, you're yelling at Joe makes minimum wage. Totally. So you don't because you don't want to be a jerk.

And that connection is lost. And creating that connection, I think, ties all of these things together. Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's one reason why people are like, are you going to write a book? Why don't you do pre-recorded classes and stuff? And I may end up doing that stuff. But for me, the joy of teaching is interacting with students and interacting on people who become friends.

You know what I mean? Like who are dorky and love to research this kind of stuff too and end up, you know, going down a specialized rabbit hole and then bringing it back and sharing it with me. And I'm like, oh, this is so good. This like fits perfectly into this part. And, you know, it ends up expanding the generalized generalists, knowledge, group knowledge or whatever, right? And group memory, which is a huge thing too. Peter, this has been fantastic.

For folks that want to hear some more of your thoughts, support you, any of those kind of cool things, Where can I send them? You know, these days I just send everyone to my Patreon. All of the rewiling podcasts are there. You know, they come out two weeks early for patrons, and then they're open for anybody after that if you're interested. And then, of course, I teach rewilding 101 classes through Rewild Portland. So either one of those avenues is a great way to connect.

And social media, Peter Michael Bauer. I'm on all the things. ReWild Portland. Yeah. All those, like everyone else. Yep. TikTok. Follow me on TikTok. I did see you were on TikTok, so I'm looking forward to watching you cook some roadkill or something.

Yeah, I should be that on one. Well, thanks for having me on. Thanks so much.