Healthy Birth, Healthy Earth Reflections 3: Tradition and Science

During several sessions, we heard about the need to resurrect and preserve the traditional forms of midwifery. We also heard about the need to synthesize the traditional ways with science. Michel Odent spoke of this mixing some In his call for a new metaphor to drive our lives, one away from domination and to symbiosis, of which I wrote here. The other expressed beautifully by Romiro Romero from Colombia was the need to incorporate the medicine of today with the healthy traditions of the grandmothers. He wants us to plant new seeds which we will see sprout fully in nine generations.

I've written on traditions and science before. But let's put this in context. People in modernity wanted to cast off the traditional knowledge. For Kant, enlightenment was the breaking free from self imposed chains of listening to others. For Descartes, we had to throw out all of our previous beliefs and build them on the foundation of knowledge. We must remember that these philosophers and others had good reason to make these calls. The Church and the political reality had grown oppressive, untrue to human nature.

Yet, what we are reminded of by people like Romiro or Angelina from Mexico, is that we have thrown out the baby with the placenta--literally. We yank the baby from the womb to cast it immediately away from mother's milk  into a cold, scientific instrument to weigh and measure and classify and organize it. That is the domination of subjective rationality which I have attacked in previous blogs and other writings.

Traditions, rather, living traditions are people discussing-yes, arguing, but also clarifying and developing-- agreements--wisdom--about the good life and good practices. Living traditions are about loving life. So when the Catholic Church in previous centuries, and other witch hunters, denied life to individuals, it was no longer living. What we desperately need are to revive and resuscitate these living traditions to learn from them, as I argued in my book. This resuscitation requires a wholistic vision. We must reject the inhuman values of modern science and replace them with the human values of living traditions--of the indigenous people of Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Scotland, the Lakota and the Cherokee.

These new values mean that we do science differently. And they mean a rejection of capitalism.

They mean simpler, but not primitive, lives.

And they must be grounded in the ground--living with the earth, loving the earth, for we are flesh of the earth, living earth breathed to life by God with each breath of each atom.

Please join us: Heal Thy Birth; Heal Thy Earth.