Head, heart and what we know

Fort Walsh Historic Site - Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan

In her book, Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit, Lynn Gehl tackles the very basic question of how knowledge is acquired, how truth is arrived at. 

There must be any number of ways of stating the question: intuitive vs. rational, factual vs. imaginative, materialist vs. superstitious, traditional vs. scientific come to mind. But most of us would understand what’s being investigated if it were put in terms of “head knowledge, heart knowledge and the search for meaning.” So let’s use that descriptor.

An example: Building pipelines, drilling wells, sinking mines, damming rivers on traditional indigenous homelands has generally been defended in terms of head knowledge: economic data predominantly. The same head knowledge has excused the flooding of ancient burial grounds (what’s the problem; they’re all dead?), the sinking of a mine (there’ll be plenty of jobs for locals), the running through trap-lines and hunting grounds of a pipeline (jobs, jobs and monetary compensation), etc. 

Heart knowledge is not data-verified; it’s a combination of individual heart (affinity with nature, beauty, art, family, home, etc.) and external heart (sense of the sacred, of community, of faithfulness to a cultural history, of the preservation of harmony, etc.) In modern western nation states like Canada, head knowledge generally trumps heart knowledge when political choices must be made. Quite obviously, the upshot of such a politic cannot but hold adaptation, even assimilation, as a core objective. Data, after all, is proof—in the laboratory-scientific sense—while heart knowledge fails on those terms . . . every time. Data apply to everything and everyone. “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” thinking.

Another example: The efficacy of money as a key to happiness arises from head knowledge; it’s eminently logical that if having enough money to own a house brings some satisfaction, then a windfall that allows one to own twenty houses and to fill them with every luxury imaginable would be key to enormous happiness. Heart knowledge would caution that such dreams (resulting in gambling and risk ventures of all kinds) if unbalanced by heart knowledge are gateways to disaster. Heart knowledge would at least weigh the dream against family values, cultural values, personal health, and faith factors; huge lottery winnings have a record of instigating enormous family, community and personal disruption.

Obviously, I’ve simplified the question. Some authors pit liberal thought against conservative thought, others culture/tradition against rationality/facts. Observed in the everyday, the chasm between liberal and conservative outlooks (bordering on hatred at the extremes) defies explanation in its severity, but reinforces the idea that each of us—through whatever background, influence, temperament, environment apply—has a relatively stable grasp on a truth. Most certainly none of us can claim that we came up with our truth on our own; nobody lives in a vacuum.

In the end, I expect that nothing can beat a thoughtful skeptic with a heart. When we polarize our outlooks on life to the point where we can say with a straight face, “he’s a conservative” or “she’s a liberal,” for instance, I think we’re generally talking nonsense. A parallel in our political lives pits socialism and capitalism as two opposite schools; in fact, our politics and our economies are both socialist and capitalist. In a similar way, we are shaped by culture, tradition and community values (heart) and by the enlightenment and the scientific method (head).

The subject of head/heart impinges directly on the Truth and Reconciliation process in Canada. As in other colonized nations, it’s always been hard to agree on the truths that will normalize settler/indigenous relations. Perhaps it’s because head knowledge predominates in the settler population and heart knowledge in the indigenous? The upshot would be clear: settlers generally “wouldn’t get” indigenous truth, and indigenous folk similarly “wouldn’t get” the white man’s truth. A tragedy: a couple of centuries of cross-purposes and not getting any closer to the sweet spot where head and heart together create a satisfying peace.