Purpose and Context
Margaret Mead quotes are helpful to the effort: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." "Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him."
Tomorrow I meet the students in my class Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility (a responsibility you can sustain and which is enough to get us to sustainability). I try to imagine how they see the world. When they were young and first understood the concepts of the United States and the Presidency, it was Obama who they saw exemplifying what this meant. The United States was a force for reason - even if faulty, even if the things it did sometimes made little sense, it seemed like we were trying to help. We had environmental laws. We ;had international allies. We honored agreements, and we honored diversity, believed in equity, and wanted everyone to feel and be included. These young people, I tell myself, must feel as if we are all falling down a high mountain.
I feel that way but I also remember when this nation began that climb up that mountain in earnest, and how it was fueled by disgust and anger and a fierce loyalty to the truth and what’s right. I remember when the country got up on its hind legs and barked and kept barking until even Richard Nixon had to move. We can do it, and we can do it again.
It helps to read in the New York Times (print, Op-Ed) today that pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has found that “few Americans live at the extremes…only 13 percent of Americans hold views that could be categorized as “strong liberal” and only 11 percent as “strong conservative”. Years of looking at polling data has convinced her that “People in the American center are likely to be heterodox in their viewpoints.” They take some ideas from the right and some from the left, and in her view it is “paired with a belief that as broken as things are now, there is hope things can get better in the future.” It helps me to think of people as more complicated because that makes it harder for evil leaders to divide us. It makes me think that arguments are important, as this indicates that most people are in the center, and most people are choosing what to think rather than choosing which herd to be corralled with.
That encourages me to have hopes for engaging when there is any opportunity, and attempting to use reason. I will try to frame it that way for my students, so that they can then spend their own time, as I have spent so many hours in mine, imagining things worth saying to people who really ought to hear them.
I feel that way but I also remember when this nation began that climb up that mountain in earnest, and how it was fueled by disgust and anger and a fierce loyalty to the truth and what’s right. I remember when the country got up on its hind legs and barked and kept barking until even Richard Nixon had to move. We can do it, and we can do it again.
It helps to read in the New York Times (print, Op-Ed) today that pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has found that “few Americans live at the extremes…only 13 percent of Americans hold views that could be categorized as “strong liberal” and only 11 percent as “strong conservative”. Years of looking at polling data has convinced her that “People in the American center are likely to be heterodox in their viewpoints.” They take some ideas from the right and some from the left, and in her view it is “paired with a belief that as broken as things are now, there is hope things can get better in the future.” It helps me to think of people as more complicated because that makes it harder for evil leaders to divide us. It makes me think that arguments are important, as this indicates that most people are in the center, and most people are choosing what to think rather than choosing which herd to be corralled with.
That encourages me to have hopes for engaging when there is any opportunity, and attempting to use reason. I will try to frame it that way for my students, so that they can then spend their own time, as I have spent so many hours in mine, imagining things worth saying to people who really ought to hear them.
Reasoning together sounds so pale, so damp, so ineffective. But when it is done well, there’s nothing better. No one can see how to settle the question of which woman is the mother of the baby until Solomon proposes cutting it in half and sees by their reaction who it is. Truth always exists behind and under the falsehoods covering it - it is always there to bring forth if we can find a way. We should not, I believe, limit ourselves to the academic forum style argumentation, or the lawyerly or manipulative styles. Reasoning is the exchange of thought and it can take many forms – it can be poetic, lyrical, evocative, allusive, casual, humorous – but it at best has an unshakeable loyalty to reality and the community of thought – which stems from and fosters respect for others. The attempt to share honest and pure perception of the world is a noble goal. By putting our minds together to have a conjoined power of perception we achieve what looks to me more like a better effort for human intelligence than making some machine to do thinking for us. To those of us who believe in reason, it can seem so magnificent that we cannot understand those who seem to sneeze at it, ignore it, and prefer unsubstantiated ideas over facts. They seem unreasoning, unwilling to alter their view of the world or even consider it. But we must remember the limits of our own reasoning powers, and that we may be blind to their reasons. In any case, to fail to engage because one assumes that an exchange cannot change minds is to belie the faith in reason we may think we have, which argues for trying.
When the reason to be out there engaging in reasoning with others is that you are filled with grief or anger about the violence being done to our personal and social health and wealth, not to mention the emotional quality of life and mental stability, and/or by the memory that there is something better and the wish to assert the dignity of the living individual, reasoning can be invested with even stronger force. It can be the path, the bridge, the lifting of the veil, that allows the connecting with others who feel the same way, when anger or grief alone cannot. The faith in connecting with others through reasoning together can channel the negative energy of disappointment into something helpful. When people are emotionally open to what makes sense, to utter it can cause the sudden collapse of noxious myth and the rapid return of the desire for the stability that comes from a closer adherence to reality. When people find a reason to agree, they can find a relief from the tension of conflict. They may have started out looking for that relief by ignoring or winning over you, but there is always the hope that it can be presented to them in a form that makes sense for everyone, and that they may accept it, even though everyone seems primed for an unavoidable conflict.
After I make this little speech, arguing for faith in the effort to convince Americans to restore democracy, decency, DEI, and the effort to stop the poisoning of ourselves and our planet, I will ask the students to write about what is worrying them: the environmental, public health issues, the unsustainable practices, that most bother them. They will do that in silence for just a few minutes, and then I will ask them to write down a few questions they have about those issues, and then, still without any group conversation, to make an attempt at solving some or all of the problems they identified.
I tell them that for a group to work well thinking together, to reach its full potential, every member has to think for themselves, and bring what they can bring to the group effort. Groups composed of members who come to follow others, to soak up conventionally received ideas, don't tap into everyone's unique experience, expertise and imagination. Those groups are more fun and more productive. Then we put our ideas on the board and see what it looks like as a set of problems, and we consider the questions we have, and we enter what I unashamedly call the Solution Space. I don’t think it’s too silly to call it that, but if it is, the students have been kind over the years not to mention it. (They do seem to like it).
Each student has now been sitting there – in these new days of AI we have to make them put down the electronics and use pen and paper (how ironic that the advances have brought us back to this) – sitting in their own thoughts. They have come to the class to discuss environmental issues, and now they are going to sit with them and solve them. I tell them that when you think about environmental issues on your own, and try to solve them on your own, it’s overwhelming. But if you can form groups and work well together, pooling your ideas and energies, there’s no limit to what can be achieved, as the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said. I like to say it’s the kind of synergistic energy that, if tapped, can turn things around.
At some point we realize that all the things we say we can do to solve the problems are not enough, and we can’t see how we will ever do the big things – get millions to do them – get companies to stop pulling toxic things out of the earth and instead get them to stop producing waste, to reuse all the wastes already produced, clean up the contamination and compensate the victims. Get nations to stop making war. Change the economic system so enterprise profits are equitably shared, people make durable products for need and substitute clean for toxic production. These are some big things and it seems overwhelming when you are alone and you contemplate such matters. But 24 students have signed up for the class. That’s more than enough to make one feel as if one is not alone. Reason alone tells us, if we use it, that we are all in this together. But when we really are all in the same room then you can feel it, and that’s the kind of feeling we need to generate the motivation to climb back up that hill and restore and then improve the laws and programs that make sense, that are protective and not psychotically extractive.
The restoration of sanity and hope seems a good step towards restoring what was helping to keep the world safe, and expanding and evolving them as is our duty, and having others in the room who want to see this world saved is one of the paths back to sanity and it certainly generates a sense of hope. I feel lucky and hope that anyone reading this with expertise to share will go out and find a way to teach the young people who need to hear what you know, about how to preserve and protect and help this world to flourish, to see its verdant vitality grow and spread, and not be neglected or crushed by the uncaring passage of something blind to what we have.
When the reason to be out there engaging in reasoning with others is that you are filled with grief or anger about the violence being done to our personal and social health and wealth, not to mention the emotional quality of life and mental stability, and/or by the memory that there is something better and the wish to assert the dignity of the living individual, reasoning can be invested with even stronger force. It can be the path, the bridge, the lifting of the veil, that allows the connecting with others who feel the same way, when anger or grief alone cannot. The faith in connecting with others through reasoning together can channel the negative energy of disappointment into something helpful. When people are emotionally open to what makes sense, to utter it can cause the sudden collapse of noxious myth and the rapid return of the desire for the stability that comes from a closer adherence to reality. When people find a reason to agree, they can find a relief from the tension of conflict. They may have started out looking for that relief by ignoring or winning over you, but there is always the hope that it can be presented to them in a form that makes sense for everyone, and that they may accept it, even though everyone seems primed for an unavoidable conflict.
After I make this little speech, arguing for faith in the effort to convince Americans to restore democracy, decency, DEI, and the effort to stop the poisoning of ourselves and our planet, I will ask the students to write about what is worrying them: the environmental, public health issues, the unsustainable practices, that most bother them. They will do that in silence for just a few minutes, and then I will ask them to write down a few questions they have about those issues, and then, still without any group conversation, to make an attempt at solving some or all of the problems they identified.
I tell them that for a group to work well thinking together, to reach its full potential, every member has to think for themselves, and bring what they can bring to the group effort. Groups composed of members who come to follow others, to soak up conventionally received ideas, don't tap into everyone's unique experience, expertise and imagination. Those groups are more fun and more productive. Then we put our ideas on the board and see what it looks like as a set of problems, and we consider the questions we have, and we enter what I unashamedly call the Solution Space. I don’t think it’s too silly to call it that, but if it is, the students have been kind over the years not to mention it. (They do seem to like it).
Each student has now been sitting there – in these new days of AI we have to make them put down the electronics and use pen and paper (how ironic that the advances have brought us back to this) – sitting in their own thoughts. They have come to the class to discuss environmental issues, and now they are going to sit with them and solve them. I tell them that when you think about environmental issues on your own, and try to solve them on your own, it’s overwhelming. But if you can form groups and work well together, pooling your ideas and energies, there’s no limit to what can be achieved, as the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said. I like to say it’s the kind of synergistic energy that, if tapped, can turn things around.
At some point we realize that all the things we say we can do to solve the problems are not enough, and we can’t see how we will ever do the big things – get millions to do them – get companies to stop pulling toxic things out of the earth and instead get them to stop producing waste, to reuse all the wastes already produced, clean up the contamination and compensate the victims. Get nations to stop making war. Change the economic system so enterprise profits are equitably shared, people make durable products for need and substitute clean for toxic production. These are some big things and it seems overwhelming when you are alone and you contemplate such matters. But 24 students have signed up for the class. That’s more than enough to make one feel as if one is not alone. Reason alone tells us, if we use it, that we are all in this together. But when we really are all in the same room then you can feel it, and that’s the kind of feeling we need to generate the motivation to climb back up that hill and restore and then improve the laws and programs that make sense, that are protective and not psychotically extractive.
The restoration of sanity and hope seems a good step towards restoring what was helping to keep the world safe, and expanding and evolving them as is our duty, and having others in the room who want to see this world saved is one of the paths back to sanity and it certainly generates a sense of hope. I feel lucky and hope that anyone reading this with expertise to share will go out and find a way to teach the young people who need to hear what you know, about how to preserve and protect and help this world to flourish, to see its verdant vitality grow and spread, and not be neglected or crushed by the uncaring passage of something blind to what we have.
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