Currents #4: How to speak snakish
These summertime Currents were selected by Milda Autukaitė, while she was preparing for her first Associate Director role at the Leicester Conference.
Milda is a Principal Consultant at the Tavistock Institute. She writes: ‘I consider myself quite curious when it comes to new things or trends. But I’m not a true ‘early adopter’: I am interested in protecting the past as well as exploring the new’.
As a psychologist interested in group dynamics and behaviour, I am very much interested in what innovations, social trends and political narratives do to us, our societies and communities.
This summer I read a wonderful book by Andrus Kivirähk, The Man Who Spoke Snakish. It is not just an excellently written novel. You start reading it as a fairy tale, a myth, and all of a sudden you realise it tells you about today too. About recurrent dynamics in society: emerging splits, denigration of the past, the crowning of new leaders, the killing of heroes, dependency and idealisation of the ‘foreign light’.
The Man who Spoke Snakish made me think that in tectonic social changes, it is so common to attack the ones representing the change, but also the ones who are the last holders of older traditions.
I personally started thinking how much gratitude we have for those who hold some important things for us, because they refuse to let things go and protect them from the collapse, refuse to follow what is trendy.
At this exact moment I came across a wonderful article about one of those people: scientist Carol Ruckdeschel. She is looking after dragons for us today.
We went hiking in Italy with my friend, in May earlier this year. As we couldn’t do the route we planned, due to too much snow on the ridge, we asked AI to visualise how we can get back to where we wanted. We got a perfect map. We were very excited. Felt powerful, smart and innovative.
The only problem we encountered later: the route didn’t exist!
We were lucky to use our own intellect before ending up anywhere too far where we would need a rescue team.
Remembering this little adventure, two moments stayed with me: an older Italian lady, running down the hill, who stopped, laughed at our AI map and carefully explained the possible route. And the Romanian guy, who just picked us up from the road while we were walking and less romantically commented on what was promised by the AI generated map.
Milda said: ‘It is all about people at the end of the day. As I continue to enjoy the summer, I am thinking that I want to preserve my ability ‘to speak snakish’ and maintain my connection to nature (though also be able to plug into everything new!)’.
