On connecting nations and cultures;
Eric Wolfe:
Concepts like "nation," society," and "culture" name bits, and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they have been abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and to increase our share of understanding.
Many of us grew up believing that the West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Such a developmental scheme is misleading, because it turns history into a moral success story, a race in time in which each runner passes on the torch of liberty to the next relay. History is thus converted into a tale about the furtherance of virtue, about how the virtuous win out over the bad guys. Frequently this turns into a story of how the winners prove that they are virtuous and good by winning.
The point is more than academic. By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall, in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls. Thus it becomes easy to sort the world into differently colored balls, to declare that "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." In this way a quintessential West is counterpoised to an equally quintessential East, where life is cheap, and slavish multitudes grovel under a variety of despotisms.
Inevitably, perhaps, these reified categories have become intellectual instruments in the prosecution of the Cold War. The ghastly offspring of this way of thinking about the world was the theory of "forced draft urbanization," which held that the Vietnamese could be propelled toward modernization by driving them into to the cities through aerial bombardment and defoliation of the countryside. Names thus become things, and things marked with an "X" can become targets of war.
(Europe and the People Without History, pp. 3 - 7 passim)
On integrating time:
Howard Zinn, The Politics of History
On systemic thinking:
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed
On integrating body and mind:
Morris Berman, The Body of History
On learning and Understanding:
Howard Gardner,
On libertarian education
Paolo Friere
For ideas on how to do these things, try 3. One Method
Return Home