David Orr, What is Education For?
The problem is in knowledge. We have taught ourselves some terrible and false things about what we are as a species and how we "naturally" relate to our environment. It is time to untangle our thoughts and be very clear about what we are facing. We are facing an organization of knowledge that legitimates the destruction of the environment, racism, classism, etc. To solve this myriad of problems we will have to begin to think and behave outside the rules laid down by our present order. It is time to challenge this belief system head-on.
From about 1500 AD until the end of the eighteenth century, western Europe was integrated around the early modern state. Within that cultural order, the bourgeoisie, today's "investor class," were a stigmatized population group. Today, they run the show. Through music, art and especially the educational system we are socialized to aspire to their status. Their conception of "freedom," the high dollar lifestyle, bombards us from the time we can look and listen. But before we go any further, the question needs to be asked: How did we come to live in their world?
At the end of the eighteenth century, the democratic/bourgeois revolutions shook Europe and America. The argument of divine design that had propped up the king and landowners was deconstructed by the thought generated out of the French and English "Enlightenment." "Enlightenment" intellectuals argued that God had nothing to do with social hierarchy. They argued that what people naturally do is compete, and that social hierarchy could be legitimately determined only by competition in the free-market. People compete for resources, thereby destroying the earth, because they believe in this doctrine.
"Enlightenment" thinkers also reconceived history. They formulated an origin narrative for man out of Evolution to verify their conception of what the natural behavior of our species is. Culture, they argued, was a reflection of biological status. In this vein, they asserted that human history is the gradual movement of the apes out of trees, to the first primitive tribal people, to small agricultural villages to walled cities and finally to the so-called highly evolved civilization of the so-called "white" European cum American. Social hierarchy was and still is said to exist based on one's scale on the evolutionary ladder. People are racist and classist because they believe this.
Let it be said that the world we live in is not a result of an inherent biological condition of being. The world we live in is generated through the mythology of the Enlightenment and most profoundly out of our present origin narrative of Evolution. Just as the bourgeoisie and their cadre of intellectuals deconstructed the argument of divine design that propped up the king and the landed gentry, part of our project is to deconstruct the bourgeois world-view. If we don't get beyond this mythology we will continue to destroy the planet and continue to be trapped in this destructive, racist paradigm.
Human beings are not purely biological beings. Our species is a fundamental rupture with other forms of biological life in that we humans are the species, selected by Evolution, to auto-institute (i.e., to create and define), through language and narrative, our modes of social reality. We have socialized ourselves in the terms of a narrative that is making us behave in ways that will surely lead to the extinction of our own species. Having defined ourselves as purely biological beings, we have set about manifesting this self-fulfilling prophecy. What we are doing today, in this culture, is absolutely analogous to what all other human "cultures" have done, i.e., socialize its subjects to see the world a certain way. It should be clear that our present social behaviors are as much based on myth as any previous historical collective.
That we, humans, and not God or Evolution, are the authors of the social order has profound implications. Our past strategy of anchoring social hierarchy upon extra-human agencies (God, gods, ancestors, spirits of nature, Evolution, etc.) in order to legitimate hierarchy and other inequalities must be brought to an end. Such inequalities and hierarchies are no longer necessary or acceptable, once discernible as human constructions. We have a lot of work to do.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2002
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited