PS – Is it me, or does Orwell’s 1984 become more and more relevant every day?
PPS – I have some thoughts rambling around in my head about how my new path as a doctoral student differs from my path as a science teacher. It’s finally beginning to settle in. Expect something soon with regards to that. I just need to find the time to write something longer, and for now, I have about nine journal articles to read. So, that’s lesson #1: the journal articles never stop coming. Good times.
The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that “the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity . . . there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America.” In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.
Where to start on this one? I actually had a teacher tell me the other day that “all poor kids are lazy”. She’s been teaching for about three decades. I was really stunned and immediately called her out on it. And yet this idea persists. This piece places that comment into a larger ideological frame, and one that is incredibly disappointing, especially for a teacher to hold.
I’ve always felt that the Left in this country gets it wrong when they talk about how “if we only had social structures that were just, everything would be Utopian”, and the Right gets it wrong when they say, as Ayn Rand did, that “personal responsibility is the only thing that matters”. I know that those are gross oversimplifications, but it seems that we would all get a lot more done if we had more conversations that negotiate the middle. How do we create educational structures and policies that are both just and allow for individual hard-work to be rewarded? What does that even look like? Help me understand this. What am I missing?
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Carl Sagan, Mogwai, and amazing film scenes in a video about our insignificant significance. Good times. Happy weekend.
1. I will no longer have paper access to Orion. I need to subscribe.
2. It isn’t enough to just close your classroom door and ignore the larger political reality.
So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success†in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative†option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.
Read the whole thing. It’s very strongly worded, and he eventually gets right down to the idea of suicide. Environmentalists love to make fun of the fact that true environmentalists should just kill themselves (so that you no longer consume). If you have read any Camus, you would know that this is most definitely not an option. Both Camus and Jensen advocate the same thing: active revolt.
Ultimately, this is why I couldn’t stay in my job much longer than I did. I didn’t believe in much of the standardized crap that I was forced to teach, and I didn’t see the larger authoritarian frame changing anytime soon. I’ve spent the last few days reading emails on the Earth Science Listserv of teachers debating whether or not it makes a quantitative difference to have kids highlight their Reference Tables for the New York State Regents Exam. The whole conversation just exhausts me. This is what we’re talking about? Really?
So, where to next? I’ll let you know when I figure it out.
Evolution is an inescapable fact, and we should celebrate its astonishing power, simplicity and beauty. Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of aeons past. Given that, in most cases, we don’t live long enough to watch evolution happening before our eyes, we shall revisit the metaphor of the detective coming upon the scene of a crime after the event and making inferences. The aids to inference that lead scientists to the fact of evolution are far more numerous, more convincing, more incontrovertible, than any eyewitness reports that have ever been used, in any court of law, in any century, to establish guilt in any crime. Proof beyond reasonable doubt? Reasonable doubt? That is the understatement of all time.
Personally, I’m happy to have Dawkins back on the scene. He always keeps it interesting for me. I appreciate that he’s now moving past an easy critique of religion and on to making the evidence-based argument for evolution. Rhetorically, this is where the conversation needs to be made, over and over and over again.
From a teaching perspective, I never once had a parent call me out on my teaching of evolution. I think this was mainly because I spent so much time teaching about science as a way of knowing based on evidence in the observable natural world and never positioned religion against science. Oh, and it probably helped that I taught in a reasonably progressive suburban town.
Still, I worry about the fundamentalist bend of some atheists, Dawkins definitely included. As always, cue the South Park:
Lately, there are bigger fish to fry. I’m interested in building relationships with all types of people to get things done, especially around environmental issues. This seems to make more sense to me. Still, I get where Dawkins is coming from. But I also see his reaction as a reaction against reactionary religion. Got it?
If you are trying to read this with your reader, I know that it’s spouting word salad. There is something wrong with Wordpress and we’re working on it. In the meantime, the page works fine, so if you see a blog post from me in the reader, just go to the webpage instead. I’ll let you know when all is back online.
In the meantime, enjoy this amazing video that couples two things that I love: tornadoes and trains!