It Takes Too Long for Ideas to Spread
The pace of life is faster all the time. How can schools keep up?
[in this article: books, Indigenous knowledge, colonialism, capitalism, extraction, the Enlightenment, original sin (lack of), degrowth, Canadian geographical developments, Kitty Genovese, meme spread, Ancestral Pueblans, learning disabilities, and some shade thrown at sports and celebrity news.]
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is my favourite kind of book, at least at this point in my life. It is a strong, thoughtful, challenging look at fundamental human history and civilization.
Past iterations of books like this that I’ve loved include books that this one refutes - a sign of an evolving field - such as Guns Germs and Steel and Sapiens, and that one by Steven Pinker claiming the world was getting nicer and nicer. Jill Lepore’s These Truths (an updated look at American history), A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Blood Rites and Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich, and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli are not so global in their approach, but they are detailed and thoughtful looks at large things. I love those books. I think about them all the time.
The Dawn of Everything has a fascinating thesis: that the field of history, the Eurocentric one, makes a bizarre and irrational leap when it presents the period prior to recorded history and discovered archaeology as a Giant Nothing where people were not doing anything. It’s easy to see it when it’s pointed out, and the explanations for why this unfair and unreasonable notion is widely held is compelling. Guess what? It was European childishness and trauma-based dehumanization (aka Christianity, Colonialism and Capitalism).
There’s another - and I think bigger - revelation and argument in the book. It proposes that the dialogue between Europe and North America that happened at contact was the actual spark that set off the Enlightenment in Europe. My mind blew its doors off: ohhhhhh! THAT’s a fun idea! It’s a well-argued and compelling thesis, and makes more sense than the idea that the stunted and hobbled European culture of 1500 CE would suddenly have big, great insights. We know that those great new ideas (“the Enlightenment”) were mostly made of other people’s uncredited ideas (Islam and the East). We also know that these great insights were immediately followed by 500 years of extraction and inhuman pillaging and destruction.
The book proposes that the European reaction to being shown their culture’s flaws by outsiders (Indigenous American orators) was to plunder the ideas and then denigrate the people who had thought them - thanks, Rousseau. It’s a radical set of ideas, but it’s nicely explained. And it also backs up another New Thought I love - Rutger Bregman’s proposal that humans are not actually originally sinful, that people’s basic, untraumatized nature was cooperative and sensible; that the cannibalistic, planet spoiling insanity that’s sinking our ship currently is not inevitable.
One of the ideas that struck me in that degrowth book last summer - Less Is More, by Jason Hickell - was the recommendation that the world adopt more of the practices and approaches of Indigenous cultures into governments and systems. Yeah right, I thought: yes, that’s good advice; no, it will not happen. But as a start, The Dawn of Everything offers a compelling vision of what Indigenous thought had to offer - and a way to include it (i.e., notice that it’s already here, already known).
I loooove learning about North American Indigenous history: it’s like alternative history, except it’s not fiction. The Dawn of Everything shares - and demands we acknowledge - the huge and growing body of knowledge currently being generated and found. I love knowing that the original Americans were numerous and complicated, that an entire ‘nother hemisphere of human civilization happened. That what the Europeans found was a full, real place - like another planet - and not, as it was presented when I was young, an empty hemisphere with some stragglers lazing around.
Last month my partner and I visited Mesa Verde National Park, and walked among buildings and towns from about 800 to 1200 years ago. The Dawn of Everything added another level of information to this physical evidence: the people of the past weren’t primitive or basic or unenlightened; they had a completely alternative way of seeing the world and thinking about it. They made decisions to live how they lived, and that way was more human.
Delayed Information Is a Problem
For years I’ve noticed and been really bothered by how advances and additions and revisions in human knowledge can be kind of buried for a generation before they become commonly known. Information is CENTRAL to the concept of education, but educational institutions (school boards, ministries - the larger parts) have a sluggish conservatism about school that relies more on a generational pace for change. Not always, by any stretch - in many cases schools are near the front of some progress - but in important ways. I want to explore this.
Decades of Crucial Information, Unused
Here’s an example: I finished public education in 1989. Not long after, I started working with children who had ADHD and various learning disabilities. As a 20-year-old, I had to be educated entirely in these concepts. It wasn’t hard - the concepts seemed intuitively true. But they were not commonly understood at all at the time, and I spent much time explaining what I’d learned to others. I watched the knowledge grow. I remember being excited that someone on the TV show Everybody Loves Raymond had ADHD - in the late '90s. It was a watershed moment.
Which is to say, MY teachers seem to have known nothing about LDs and ADHD. Nobody ever applied the labels to kids who, in retrospect, clearly could have benefited from the insight. I had never known AT ALL that there were aspects of school one could be naturally ill-suited to without meaning one was a stupid failure.
I had failed and felt really stupid in math classes for eight entire years of public education, and chose my university options by looking for the ones that didn’t mind that I was mathematically incapable. I thought I was stupid, my teachers thought I was annoying, and my father thought there was something wrong with me.
Here’s the thing, though: LDs and ADHD had not just been discovered - they’d been named and discussed in the early 1960s. The places I worked - largely summer camps - had been founded in the early 1970s by activist parents. Like, when I was a child. And I didn’t hear about any of it until I was 20 years old.
Which means no adults around me ever spoke about it, and likely didn’t know. Which means that all of the kids I saw get pushed into the “Bad Kid” category, which led to a lifelong poor self-image, suffered because people don’t keep up with what’s going on in the world.
Humankind
Another example: two summers ago, during the pandemic’s first period, I read and fell in love with that Bregman book, Humankind. In it, he debunks some of the seminal “people are mean” studies: the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Kitty Genovese story, the Milgram experiments. You should read it - none of these stories, which we know from school and popular science, are quite true. They each misrepresented the facts of the experiments or situations in order to preserve an ideology - the idea of Original Sin, the belief that people are crappy.
The following year, I learned from a colleague that more than one of those stories are still covered in high school social science textbooks. The teacher I spoke to took in the contrasting story I told him - I work in a place where people share lots of ideas, and he’s a friend. But how many people would read that text before it was corrected? How many people would learn those stories, and the compromised lessons to be gleaned from them, before they get corrected? If I have to guess, I’ll say the process will take another 10 to 20 years. Isn’t that maddening? I think it is, in this time when technology and ideas change and evolve so, so quickly.
The pace of modern life is quick, and new ideas are important. When I was a kid, I was informed as a fact that neurons do not regenerate, and that the brain cannot change. Wrong! I was taught that Indians were people from the past, and not taught that genocidally-intentioned residential schools were devouring and degrading Indigenous children right at the same time I was making a cardboard headdress “to learn about Indians.”
Nunavut?!
In my early days of teaching, I had a coworker who asked to copy my black-line master copy of a map of Canada (these were so valuable before the fast internet, you can’t imagine). I gave it to her, explaining I’d drawn in the line for Nunavut, the new territory in the North that had been created six months earlier. She laughed, stunned, and could not believe I was not joking. She had never heard about it. She was teaching geography to little kids, and she did not know her own country had added a whole new territory. She wasn’t a jerk or anything, she wasn’t drunk or really old or burdened with five children at home. She probably watched Entertainment Tonight each night - why would they mention Nunavut?
“Common Knowledge” Takes Way Too Long
Education is still relying on the old method of information dissemination: a discovery is made and then takes 20 years to become common knowledge. It’s a conservative approach, which is not necessarily bad in all cases: you don’t always want to rush into things. But the balance is way off. How many students will take the Stanford experiments to be revelatory?
Some of this new information is important to know in general, but more of it is actually crucial if we’re actually going to try and address the big, pressing issues facing us, like climate change. Kids learning information from adults who are only watching entertainment news (or Insta, or sports, or whatever) will be disadvantaged when we have to radically reconsider our lifestyles. They’ll be mad, and we’ll lose years and years to temper tantrums and populist nonsense-thinking (sound familiar?).
I have some recommendations that could help, if anyone wants them.
Responsible people shouldn’t watch entertainment news or sports at the expense of paying attention to real information. That’s like eating candy instead of food and expecting to be healthy. Get some balance.
Teachers (and administrators) should be freed of the ridiculous aspects of their jobs, and encouraged to keep learning. A large chunk of a teacher’s job has nothing to do with teaching, and everything to do with proving to the government that teaching is happening. (More on that complicated mess later.)
If you want to add to this list, share your thoughts. Click the comments button below. Hopefully this is all heading towards conversation.
Next time: Fiddler on the Roof, as a Film Studies/English unit.
Be well,
jep
November 2021
It Takes Too Long for Ideas to Spread
With permission, I'm copy/pasting comments from Blain Neufield on FB to this page (tech issues, now solved).
Blain:
I’ve now heard positive things about the Graeber and Wengrow book from a number of people I respect. Your post was the tipping point, so I’ll have to get it now. Thanks.
Overall I really liked this post. My comments focus on a couple of “quibbles” I have with it. But please read them in the context of overall sympathy with your perspective.
Regarding: “…makes more sense than the idea that the stunted and hobbled European culture of 1500 CE would suddenly have big, great insights.”
This strikes me as an odd way to characterize Europe during the Renaissance. Before the “discovery” of the Americas, Europe had been undergoing an intellectual transformation for many decades (economic, intellectual, and technological changes led to, and partially were caused by, the expansion of international trade—it was the desire for new trade routes to the east that famously motivated Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic).
And things would only accelerate after 1500. I haven’t read the book by Graeber and Wengrow yet, and I don’t doubt that the contact with indigenous peoples in the Americas (and elsewhere) had a profound impact on European self-understanding and thinking. I’m sure that many non-European insights were appropriated (stolen) by Europeans. But many of the changes that did occur can’t plausibly be seen to have been caused by interactions with non-European peoples. In fact, I don’t think contact with the Americas had any significant impact on, let alone caused, some of the main events in Europe during the 16th and early 17th centuries (the period *before* the Enlightenment).
In the early 16th century, the Reformation occurs, which shattered the European-wide commitment to a single “authority” on all matters concerning the “truth.” This event (with its subsequent Wars of Religion), combined with the invention of the printing press, revolutionized the intellectual environment of Europe. Written tracts could be produced in great numbers and distributed widely. New ideologies, philosophies, ways of thinking arose. Add to this the rise of “modern science” (Copernicus, Bacon, and so forth). (The latter development was influenced by ideas from other parts of the world, especially the Muslim world, but also greatly changed thanks in part to the shattering of intellectual hierarchy and authority in Europe.)
The Enlightenment of the late 17th century and the 18th century emerges out of these developments (the rise of the empirical “scientific method” with Bacon, the rise of “modern philosophy” with Descartes, the breakdown of unified intellectual authority with the Reformation, etc.). It is during this period that the perspectives of non-Europeans infiltrate into (and, I’m sure, in many cases are appropriated by) European thinkers. The idea of a “state of nature” – with radically different notions of what “primitive” peoples are like (often appealing to mistaken beliefs about the indigenous peoples of the Americas and elsewhere) – plays an obviously important role here. It provides an intellectual tool for thinking about, and criticizing, existing political and social orders (from Hobbes through Rousseau).
I think that Graeber and Wengrow note that many critiques of European society were formulated from a non-European (North American) perspective (at least this is what I gleaned from a review I read elsewhere). They observe that these critiques had been attributed to European intellectuals adopting the “guise” of non-Europeans in order to make their criticisms in a politically safe way (much as Montesquieu pretended to discover letters from a “Persian” that were critical of the politics and society of France). Graeber and Wengrow suggest that in fact these critiques really were offered by non-European commenters (real people, not fictional inventions like Montesquieu’s “Persian”), and that European intellectuals appropriated them for their own purposes (and then obscured or denied the original sources). If this is correct (again, I’m basing this on a book review), then it’s vitally important that that fact be added to our understanding of the Enlightenment. It’s important to recognize this truth (such a commitment, of course, is itself an Enlightenment one). But to suggest that this is what “caused” the Enlightenment strikes me as implausible.
I also disagree with the claim that “those great new ideas (“the Enlightenment”) were mostly made of other people’s uncredited ideas (Islam and the East).” The “mostly” here seems way, way too strong. There definitely were ideas from other parts of the world that influenced Enlightenment thinkers—and it’s important that this be recognized and more widely known. In the past little or no credit had been given to those non-European influences. (I also think that the boundaries between “European” and “non-European” thought are quite blurry. You mention Islam – of course, much of Islamic philosophy, e.g., “Avicennism,” was shaped by Aristotle. And Ibn Tufayl’s “Philosophus Autodidactus,” influenced by Avicennism, in turn had a important impact on European literature and philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries, something not generally known today.) But I don’t think it’s accurate at all to swing so far as to downplay the genuinely novel contributions of the Enlightenment. While I think I share your irritation with “Enlightenment triumphalists” (like Pinker), I don’t think opposing that outlook requires dismissing the Enlightenment as “mostly” a parasitic movement.
Finally, I found the dig at Rousseau a bit puzzling. Maybe I misunderstood it. But of all the major thinkers of the Enlightenment, Rousseau was the harshest critic of European treatment of non-European peoples (he once said something to the effect that it was a tragedy that Europeans went to Africa to plunder and not to learn). His “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” inverts the traditional European hierarchy: European civilization corrupts and destroys human freedom and what is innately good in human beings (it replaces “amour de soi,” love of life, with “amour propre,” pride, and hence envy). The indigenous peoples are happier and freer than Europeans, according to Rousseau. (He didn’t think European civilization was beyond saving – hence his “Social Contract.” But he was disgusted by European hierarchy and hypocrisy – things he thought “primitive” non-Europeans were either free of or at least suffered from to a far lesser extent.)
Jeff:
Wow, thank you! That’s fantastic to read. Of course there’s little nuance in my broad sweeps and irritated-with-everything pronouncements, and I appreciate your clarifications hugely.
Seems like comments are not being allowed - please know this is a glitch. There's no "paid" version of this. I'm working on it. :)