So. Here’s the story so far: I was just minding my own business, and then Arlene Goldbard, a thinker/writer/activist I have very nearly met, “tagged” me. I’ve been anointed to take part in a “meme” begun by Laura Axelrod, who probably everyone but me has heard of. If you haven’t heard of her, you have now, which is the very nature of memes.
The meme consists of five questions, which aim at revealing one’s passion in the world. This is somewhat embarrassing, because I’m not so sure I have a passion, except perhaps for the old computer RPG “Baldur’s Gate,” which isn’t something we speak of in public. The very first question, in fact, puts in a space of embarrassed silence: “What is your area of expertise?” Ummmm…I don’t think I have one. Was this in the manual? “Rule number one: you should always have at least one area of expertise. Developing a fallback area of expertise is always a good idea as well, in case of obsolescence.” I am, against all reason, a generalist. My river of knowledge is very, very wide, but only about an inch deep. Is there no place on earth for me?
So, I began to plan out a long, wandering, introspective post about the quandaries involved in being a generalist, and further, one burdened with ADD, Asperger’s Syndrome, and a general melancholia. I was going to ask big questions, such as “What is it about current society that so necessitates and values specialization?” And “What is the essential difference between these people who work so hard at something they’re passionate about while enjoying the success that brings, and I, who merely tries to get from one day to the next without feeling suicidal?” And “Would it be okay if I just skipped on all the big questions and stepped out to have a sandwich?”
But, in the course of my research, I stopped in at Laura’s site to check out the genesis of this meme, and she reminds us that this is a “get to know you” exercise, and should be “breezy and fun.” I am not ordinarily one who folks would think of as either breezy or fun, but I certainly will do my best to conform. Though I am tempted to remind us that mutation, too, is held within the nature of the meme.
In any case: onward!
Name your area of expertise/interest: My job on the planet, if I can be said to have one, is that of “system buster.” Humans are very good at creating systems, and then expecting everyone to play along. We’re expected to play by the rules, even if the rules make no sense, or if their sense has been lost to the passing of the ages. Those in power, we might note, know of humans’ need to conform to these expectations, and use that knowledge toward the ends of manipulating us into doing things that no one in their right mind would do.
System busting, for me, involves looking underneath those rules and expectations, and attempting to discern the assumptions that underlie them. Often, when you can grasp those assumptions and communicate them, it causes people to experience a sort of cognitive dissonance. If they can effectively satisfy the dissonance, it tends to nudge them back toward that “right mind.” Such minor enlightenments, we know, have an effect on the world. We abolished slavery in just that way, for instance. We’ve created enough cognitive dissonance in citizens that civil rights came for a period to hold our national attention, and the rights of women, and the ecological plight of the earth. Now, we’re starting to look at large organizations such as governments and multinational corporations, and the ways in which they subjugate whole populations and put the grab on resources for their own short-term profit and power.
There is much yet to do.
My own area of system-busting involves schools. Schools, we’ll note, are edificial structures. My head hurts.
How did you become interested in it? I was a public school teacher for enough years to get a bellyful, and then a teacher educator for a few more years than that. It became evident to me that no change was possible from inside, so I quit. Bored, guilty, depressed. Many years later, I started writing about it. And now, podcasting about it. A few people are even listening. Most are pretty supportive.
How did you learn to do it? I learned to examine assumptions in grad school. I knew all along that I didn’t perceive the world as many did, but I just felt guilty about it. I learned this early in life: the way I saw things must be wrong, because no one else saw things that way. A brilliant lady by the name of Donna Amstutz gave me permission to start thinking for myself, and I really bloomed for a few years. That’s easier, though, when one is ensconced in the monastic cell of grad school. In the real world, your forehead gets bloody when you keep banging your head on society’s brick walls.
Who has been your biggest influence? Everybody so far has been mentioning Paolo Freire, and of course he is considered to be something of a god in my field of adult education. I also love Myles Horton. I wish I was able to maintain my conviction as he did every day of his life. I am an empathic person, so when I start talking about schools with someone who disagrees with me, I feel bad for making them uncomfortable. Activism and global empathy are perhaps not such a good combination. And that old bugaboo, the existential quandaries that come with Responsibility. My favorite all-around intellectual is surely Joseph Campbell, or maybe Bill Hicks. Both have wide-ranging minds that bring together all sorts of ideas within a realm of mystical sensibility. And, I’m rather proud that no one up to this point, surely, has identified a single group to which both Joseph Campbell and Bill Hicks comfortably belong.
What would you teach people about it? None of us has all the answers. Together, though, if we deny fear and reach toward our highest values, we can do anything.
Okay folks. There’s my answers. Now, I tag Meredith and Matthew Wayne Selznick. I’m supposed to tag five people, but let’s remember that I’m an introvert. Any other readers who wish to be tagged may consider it done.
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Hey folks.
Boy, this podcasting bug is really nibbling away at me.
In addition to the podcast of The Spirit of Education, I’m now working on a podcast of a children’s novel I wrote a draft of years and years ago. It’s called The Trolls of Lake Maebiewahnapoopie. Feel free to have a listen!
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Hey folks.
I just recently found out that this site is censored in China! Apparently, we here at The Spirit of Education are a bit too left-leaning for the Chinese government’s taste!
Here’s a link to an organization who tests and keeps track of such things. You can go there yourself, and see what you look at every day that Chinese citizens aren’t allowed to see:
http://greatfirewallofchina.org/test/
Now, I’m not supposing that this site is big enough or influential enough to have garnered the individual attention of whomever over there makes these decisions (unlike, say, www.freetibet.org). Surely, there is some computer program scanning sites for a list of dangerous words that acts as a gatekeeper between writers utilizing the web and our Eastern friends.
I wonder what those dangerous words might be?
China, of course, has long tried to limit the conversation through the use of censorship. They’re certainly not alone in that, but they proffer a blatant example.
Here in this country, of course, we bathe in the glory of a “free press.” “Free press,” for those not in the know, is Orwell-speak for the idea that our government, along with the corporate sphere that it supports, has come up with much more sophisticated ways of controlling the conversation.
As more people find their voice through this democratized medium of the Internet, of course, they will have to work harder to do so. Destroying net neutrality was one of their attempts. I wonder what the next one will look like? Has anyone else noted that we’re no longer creeping toward fascism, but making giant, Dick Cheney-sized leaps?
Let’s be careful not to assume that censorship only happens halfway across the globe. How long do you suppose it will be before your favorite website disappears because it is, say, “aiding and abetting the terrorists” or somesuch? Well, that’s probably just a conspiracy theory. More likely, your favorite news source or opinion page will remain at its home on the web, only you, mysteriously, won’t be able to locate it.
“You know it’s the end of the world, when….”
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Hey there folks,
Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve been here at the site: no news to regular readers, of which there have been none, since I left somewhere in mid-July of last year. I once thought it might be fun to have a regular column, but now I see that I’m not built for those things that require our everday attention…like a well-run blog does…but only for those things that can be attempted and then be done with. Perhaps I won’t begin any more projects that don’t have a finish line in sight.
It now appears that my shot at a blog wasn’t so much a hope to be a blogger as it was a way to channel the excess writing energy that always seems to follow a book project…you still have those synapses firing, and need a place to direct the flow. Now, however, I’m busy with other things. Where I once thought I wanted an audience for my everyday thoughts and opinions, now I find that if I share them with my wife, I feel fulfilled.
In any case, other projects call.
I wanted to tell you about one of those projects. Recently, I’ve been investigating the possibilities inherent in podcasting. Many, I’m discovering, have harnessed the power of podcasting in order to create audio versions of their books. These, they offer to “readers” on the web. Entire dot com businesses have sprung up to connect these authors with listeners. Look at the offerings, for instance, at podiobooks.com.
So, I shelled out a hundred bucks or so for the necessary equipment, and am in the process of recording the book for anyone who might be interested…which up to now involves only my mother and my sister and my wife. If the book is worthy, I have faith that it will attract other listeners as we go forward.
The first show is “in the can,” as they say (not the trash can, nor that other can, but the can). Right at this moment, it’s not available, because I’m still awaiting permission to use a musical intro that I fell in love with and have pursued rights to. But it will be available soon, with that music or with another piece of music. Or, hell, maybe I’ll perform the soundtrack myself on the didgeridoo. Who knows? Either way, it’s coming. It will be available here at the site, at least for an interim period of time. Eventually, I hope to have it hosted at podiobooks.com…though obviously the fine folks there will have something to say about that.
I’ve set up a new blog to structure the podcasts, show notes, and any discussion in which folks may want to engage. Though there is little there yet, it will hopefully be bustling with activity soon. You can find it here: www.spiritofeducation.com/podiobook. Within the next couple of days, hopefully, the first show will be up and available for download. It’s an mp3 file that you can listen to on your ipod or other mp3 player, or simply at your computer. Isn’t technology amazing? It used to require a whole studio, replete with technicians, to do what we can do now with our personal computers.
To those of you who chose to sup regularly from that which is “Education in Flatland,” thank you for your kind attention. Perhaps, on another day, we’ll meet here again.
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I don’t know if y’all are aware or not, but this website made its debut as an e-book version of my new book, The Spirit of Education.
Now, the book itself is available.
Here’s a capture of the cover:
Ain’t she a beauty?
There are a number of ways you can get a copy; go to my order page if you’re interested.
It would be nice to make a few bucks on the book; I spent a year and a half of my life working on it. The bucks are not the driving force behind the book, however; it’s still available, for free, on the site. You can read it here.
It’s been quite a journey getting this thing birthed and out in the world. Now, it’s charting its own path, hopefully reaching the dimly lit corners of a schooling society where it is most needed. My only role now is chatting it up from time to time, mailing it to folks who want a copy, and maintaining the site. It’s gotten some nice reviews from a wide spectrum of readers: professor-types, educators and administrators, and interested lay-folk. Not many education books can claim such a diverse readership.
Then again, most education books are boring. This one is not :)
If you’ve been feeling, as I have, that things have gotten totally out of control in this world, and that there is little hope for bringing it back into alignment with anything that makes sense, I recommend you read this book. I’ve found within myself and within humanity (though I remain mostly a middle-aged curmudgeon) some cause for hope. Such will surprise no one more than it did me.
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I am one of the few Americans who was able to leave the day-to-day grind of a full time job for a period of time in order to pursue a personal learning project. I left the working world as of January 1, 2005, and only recently returned. I had a book to write. It’s done now. I’ll announce that soon. But right now, I want to write about this idea of sabbaticals.
Virtually no one, as I say, has this opportunity. I’m a lucky one to be able to afford to: not because I have a great job and make lots of dough, but because I was adopted as a teenager by a man who did. He died a couple of years ago, and suddenly I had a bank account that would support me through a few months of non-remunerative work.
The book I wrote during those months is in many ways the culmination of my life’s work as an educator. I’m not a teacher any more; public schools are just too hard. I left that realm years ago, frustrated and guilty. Since then, though, I haven’t found my niche. I was just marking time, in fact, until I turned up dead, a middle aged man accomplishing not much in a world that was too painful for him to do much except slog through.
I’m better now; thanks for asking. Most of the reason for that is this time I was able to create to write the book. I worked through my bitterness and guilt at my various failures as a teacher. I looked at schools and their purpose, found it to be one that I couldn’t support, and understood at a deeper level the instincts that had led me to leave. I found those instincts to be correct.
The whole time I was a teacher, I was uncomfortable with the program. I was uncomfortable with my part in it. I could express some of those discomforts, but I had never worked through an analysis of them very completely. So when I faced the moral crisis of being an educator, it was myself I found wanting. I was never as good a teacher as many; I deserve plenty of those feelings of failure. But in many ways the failures belong to others as well. Schools are not healthy environments. They’re not healthy for teachers, they’re certainly not healthy for students, and in fact (I argue in the book) they’re not healthy for a society. I had the right idea to leave. My discomforts weren’t a personal weakness, but my strengths beginning to make themselves known.
But all this was a swirling melange in my head until I had the time to sort it all out and put it into the form of an argument in the book.
This time was important to me. I am better because of it. I am healthier. I now have more energy to put into the various drudgeries of human existence, and can even find moments of happiness. I have more energy for my work, and feel better doing it. I have more to give to my family.
It seems to me that an evolved society would find ways of creating these times for everyone. It would find ways of building sabbaticals into the system. This isn’t the same as a vacation; we need vacations, sure, but that’s not what this is. A sabbatical is a time to remove oneself from the world, temporarily. It’s a time to focus on oneself, undertake a learning project, complete a personal task, mine one’s experience for what is most important. When we return to the working world, we are more complete, more whole. We’re better.
Which is another way of saying that we are more who we are.
In many ways, a sabbatical is more like “work” than working is. It takes a great deal of time and energy to undertake this project of refining oneself. But that is, after all, the work we came to the planet to do. We didn’t choose this incarnation because thousands of burgers needed flipping. We didn’t come because a few people needed someone to hawk them a new insurance policy. We didn’t come to “build equity.” We came because our soul needed a few more experiences within the refiner’s fire. We came to discover who it is that we are.
A sabbatical is one tool for getting there. Having just completed my life’s one sabbatical, I recommend it. Let’s find some ways to support others through their own.
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Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Pile on many more layers and I’ll be joining you there.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
And we’ll bask in the shadow of yesterday’s triumph,
sail on the steel breeze.
Come on you boy child, you winner and loser,
come on you miner for truth and delusion, and shine.
–Roger Waters
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Recently, a new gospel of Jesus Christ was unearthed, said to rival in import the Nag Hammadi library and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s the Judas Gospel, and purports to be a record of Jesus’ last days amongst his disciples. It especially features one of the darker characters in the orthodox Bible, Judas. Not unexpectedly for a book called “The Gospel of Judas,” it puts a different spin on the character of Judas, and reinvents his relationship with Christ.
These discoveries always provoke uneasiness in Christians—those Christians who depend upon God’s word as a foundation of their practice, anyway—when what we thought was solid knowledge surrounding the life of Christ and his teachings turn out to be approximations of knowledge that have been given the appearance of solidity by the intervening centuries of tradition.
Therefore, I’ve compiled this list of frequently asked questions about the Judas Gospel. May it guide our thoughts and prayers through the coming months, when all sorts of self-appointed experts will be telling us what we should glean from this newfound text.
What exactly is the Judas Gospel anyway?
The Gospel of Judas is a document that was written most probably in the latter 2nd century, about the same time that the four gospels that we know from the standard Bible were written. It was written on papyrus in the form of a “codex,” a sort of bound book, rather than on less wieldy scrolls. It’s about 25 pages long, give or take. It tells us about Jesus’ last days.
Who wrote it? Judas?
Just as the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not written by those men themselves, the book of Judas wasn’t written by Judas, though parts of it are claimed to have been adapted from his personal journal.
Where did it come from?
The Gospel of Judas was found, as are many of these old Biblical and extra-Biblical texts, in a “Coptic jar,” an earthen pot used to store Coptic scrolls and the organs of Egyptian mummies. The jar was found deep in a cavern in Egypt, where the arid desert air had kept it preserved, nestled next to a well-preserved liver and what appears to be a mummified chicken heart. Whose liver it might be is still being argued. Both King Tutankhamun and Larry Hagman were early favorites, until it was pointed out that the timeline supports neither hypothesis. Lord only knows how or why the chicken heart might have been involved; perhaps it was part of a pagan ritual used to keep safe the holy text. (This fact in itself should make us worry about the pedigree of this text). The Coptic jar was unearthed in Egypt the mid-1970s.
The 1970s? Why are we only now coming to hear about it?
As is becoming common knowledge, the find didn’t go directly from the Coptic jar to the hands of researchers. It took quite a circuitous path, in fact. Due to an Indiana Jones-like adventurism and no small amount of greed, the text went from its cave to an ancient relic dealer in Cairo, from Cairo to a bank vault in Bemidji, Minnesota, where it mouldered for 14 years awaiting a buyer. Later, it was stored for some number of months in an intramural locker at Yale University. Once, before it was recognized as God’s word and was known only to be an ancient papyrus manuscript, it was accidentally left at a Burger King. The restaurant manager recognized the document shouldn’t simply be thrown away, but he didn’t go so far as to lock it in the office; rather, he set it next to the deep fat fryer. It is known that at least two pages, and possibly as many as six, were used to line plastic trays that carried customer’s Whopper and fries. It is unsure how many pages were lost during this time; two pages were retrieved from the trash, somewhat ketchup-stained, by a rather breathless antiquities dealer.
In the end, of course, the manuscript was recognized for what it was, translated, and published in inexpensive trade editions for the world to see. As one might legitimately wonder, given the nature of the text, this may or may not be a good thing.
Why is it so controversial?
For many reasons. Foremost amongst them, at least in the mainstream press, is the fact that Judas appears within it not as a traitor, as we’ve conceived him to be, but as the most deeply spiritual of the disciples, in fact Jesus’ favorite disciple. According to the new gospel, Judas didn’t betray the Son of Man, but was asked by Jesus himself to turn him over to the authorities. Jesus knew that he must be crucified. Such was the prophecy. But Pilate turned out to be something of a bungler. In this gospel, this man who is destined to condemn Christ to crucifixion reads like an early-day Jacques Clouseau. Under Roman law, religious and political agitators are to be killed, and Jesus certainly fit the profile. But Pilate seemed ever on the wrong trail, sniffing after the wrong clues and, when challenged by his superiors, making excuses. Ultimately, Jesus had to take matters into his own hands, and conspired with Judas to be revealed to Pilate’s soldiers. In this view, Judas was not a traitor, but was taking his part in ensuring the divine plan. This can’t have been an easy task, to hand over one’s savior and best friend to be killed, and then being vilified by generations of believers ever afterwards. Who wants to be the genesis of such phrases as “the Judas kiss,” “Judas Priest!” or even Cary Grant’s “Juday Juday Juday”? Jesus himself tells Judas, “[Y]ou will be cursed by the other generations—and you will come to rule over them.”
This is controversy enough, one would think. It challenges our Biblical worldview: either the orthodox gospels or this new gospel must be incorrect. The Biblical history, however, is already muddled: in Matthew (27:5), Judas hangs himself after the betrayal; in Acts (1:18), he meets an even more graphic end, worthy of Hollywood’s best special effects people: “Now this man acquired a field in reward of his wickedness; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out.” Possibly these bad endings were imagined by the disciples in retaliation for Judas being the teacher’s pet.
To be fair, this “controversy” might simply be seen as a case of sour grapes on the part of vindictive Christians: we thought we had finally pinned the rap on a bad guy in the New Testament, somebody that we could all agree was unworthy of forgiveness. After all, he betrayed our savior, didn’t he? And for a paltry 30 pieces of silver?
But even this story may be apocryphal. Though 30 pieces of silver isn’t worth what it once was, due to inflation, it wasn’t all that much money back then, either. It was enough, say, to take in a movie, go out for Italian food, maybe have a couple of beers. But since movie theaters hadn’t been invented yet, and no one had heard of beer (Irishmen hadn’t been invented yet either), and even Italian restaurants were scarce in that part of the world, the 30 pieces of silver argument has never been wholly accepted by scholars.
This new view of Judas, taken alone, isn’t enough to discount the gospel as a valid source of information.
Is that it? That’s the only controversy?
Far from it. The true controversy is much deeper. Think of it: Judas came from Judea, the land of the Jews. All the other disciples, and of course Jesus himself, came from Galilee, a suburb of Nazareth. In a worldview that doesn’t begin with Judas acting as a traitor, we are no longer able to blame this man in particular, or the Jews in general, for killing Christ. The consequences for this worldview are profound. If this new document is the “gospel truth,” we’ll have to rethink our idea that Christianity is a whole spankin’ new religion. Without our current view of Judas, Christianity is just a largish Jewish sect. Could that be right? I think you know what I’m saying.
Wow. Any other controversies?
Minor ones. The author of the Judas Gospel, unfortunately, was quite a bit more chatty than other noted gospel authors. He didn’t appear to take seriously a gospel-writer’s goal of writing an official history, with an appropriately solemn tenor. He included trivial details of Jesus’ life, such as the fact that not only did he drink wine, on occasion he would sip a whiskey sour. He noted that Christ frequented the theatre. While this doesn’t ruffle the feathers of most modern readers, that is because we have no real understanding of the ancient Roman arts. Drama wasn’t very well developed at that time, and tended to degenerate into gossip-fests, political buffoonery, and sight gags. It was, let us say, the ancient equivalent of The National Enquirer combined with The Three Stooges. Jesus was said to “get a hoot” out of such displays.
Also, the gospel informs us, somewhat scandalously, that Jesus ordered a BLT during the last supper, though it is unclear that he actually received one (service was rather poor at the last supper, adding to the general sense of unease of the get-together). The Jews of the day of course were shocked by this, since their God had forbidden them to eat anything with cloves or hooves. The Catholics were also nervous about it, because while they weren’t positive they were pretty sure that the Last Supper had fallen on a Friday. Protestants of the day were more lax about it, of course, but they had little voice, their founder not being expected to arrive upon the planet for a thousand years or more.
These little details have the effect, of course, of bringing Jesus down to a more human level. He is divine, yes, but also comes across as rather human, prey to occasional human foibles. He also laughs easily and often, and not always at appropriate times.
Jesus…laughs?
He laughs when the apostles take themselves too seriously, inviting their anger. He laughs at the absurdity of human existence. He laughs, at one point, when Thomas makes an inadvertent pun about the exodus: “The Egyptians dyed in the Red Sea.”
That doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know. The Jesus I know is more sober, more serious.
True. In many ways, the Jesus presented in the gospel isn’t the same person that we see in the orthodox Bible. He says things that are, well, blasphemous. He doesn’t lay down a lot of rules; rather, he teaches about the divine mysteries. He doesn’t die for our sins; rather, he tries to show us how to enter the mystery, and thus find our own salvation, our own transcendence. He talks of “light” and “luminous clouds” and “stars,” along with other new-age mumbo jumbo. He seems to see the body as being unreal, mere “clothing” for the divine spirit. He says as much to Judas: “[Y]ou will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” Obviously, these are dangerous ideas.
Why are we only now seeing the Judas Gospel?
The Judas Gospel was long thought to have been completely eradicated. It was denounced as heresy by Irenaeus in the year 180. Irenaeus later became a saint, so he must have known what he was talking about.
Upon it being proclaimed heretical, most copies were destroyed. It is thought that the Library of Alexandria, the greatest library of the ancient world, may have been burned simply to ensure the eradication of this one book. It is only through blind chance that this single copy survived. And, as we know, though it survived for 1600 years in the desert, it nearly didn’t survive its few decades of being cast about the modern world. Ironically, the deadly sin of greed nearly did for the gospel what the holiness of Irenaeus couldn’t do.
Sum all this up for me. Should I read the gospel? Should I take it seriously?
Unfortunately, in the modern world, most people are able to read, and most are able to access information quickly and cheaply. Where once it was easy for priests and holy men to keep a lid on explosive and misleading information, now it’s everywhere. So yes, sure, read it, but be prepared to stifle anything heretical that might arise in your mind as you do so. Where once we relied on saints to tell us what God wants and what Jesus meant (and to deny us access to conflicting information), in the modern world we have to rely on lesser experts, and who knows what their agendas might be?
As Christians, however, we can take that banner up for ourselves. We can become our own experts. When they put us on shaky theological ground, it up to us to denounce heresies. Let us not build our house upon the sand! And, if just possibly these really are the words of our Lord, surely we can see that some of them must be sacrificed for the greater good.
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As a former elementary school teacher, I follow with some interest—and no small amount of frustration—the grousing that we do, in such a public way, about what we should teach our children in school regarding humankind’s origins.
Like most of these terribly public debates, people tend to fall into one of two camps. The first group believes that we ought to teach creationism—specifically, a creation story out of the Jewish Torah. I don’t know exactly how a Jewish creation story was chosen as the best one to teach. It could just as well have been, one might presume, a Mayan creation story, or a Shinto creation story, or a Sumerian creation story. But no: a Jewish creation story is the thing. Everyone is clear on that. It’s assumed that when one speaks of creationism, one is speaking of this 3500-year-old Jewish myth. If you were to ask, “Now, is that creationism as an Australian Aboriginal might conceive it?” people would look at you funny. There is no Rainbow Serpent in this story. Instead, there is a “Spirit” that “moved upon the face of the waters.” Again, I don’t know why.
Other folks hold that we ought to teach a more rational, scientific story about our origins, evolution. Evolution, of course, has been the focus of research by innumerable scientists for more than a century now, and has become a pillar of the scientific worldview.
Most of those engaged in the debate, however, know very little about either history or science. Evolution, by these folks, is thought to be an idea limited to one man: Charles Darwin. Darwin lived from 1809 through 1882; like all people who lived in his time and place, he had plenty of funny ideas himself. Other folks do know a fair amount about the science of evolution; that doesn’t however seem to make them any more sane as they make their arguments. Science, far from being a mode of investigation that one approaches with one’s mind fully open, has in many ways become its own religion.
And so, as we know, the debate rages. Simplistic views of both “sides” of the argument reign supreme: man was delivered from the wombs of apes! God created the world in six days! Proponents from both sides sound like carnival barkers, trying to lure the curious and naïve into their dark and musty tents. True believers paste symbols on their cars: fish, or fish with legs.
Isn’t it interesting that we’ve taken a curricular decision and turned it into a political debate? We’ve often done this before, of course. We did it in the 60s and 70s with “new math.” Then we did it again in the 80s and 90s with reading instruction, with the sides of evolutionists and creationists being taken in that debate by whole language enthusiasts and phonics sergeants. Legislatures stepped in to take their parts; they had their own two bits to add, they seemed to think, to learning theory. In the popular mind, one’s beliefs about reading instruction came to define their moral sensibilities: some folks were literalistic, Hooked on Phonics-as-bible thumpers, and some folks were relativistic “if it feels good do it” whole language hippies. But even those debates didn’t prepare us for the current passel of crazies who propose to mandate their worldview for the rest of us.
For a long time after I left the teaching field, I simply ignored these issues. Engaging in the debate seemed pointless, because it really was a debate, in the worst sense of that word: people weren’t communicating, they were rattling off talking points. They weren’t sifting ideas for our best attempt at the truth, they were spewing dogma.
This is what monotheism does for us. It gives us a single god. That god might be the one in the creation story that moved across the face of the waters, or it might be the god of science, answering all questions with a smooth rationality unencumbered by its own strangling assumptions. Christianity and scientism both create their true believers, who are more than willing to use their powerful gods to pummel others. “There is only one God!” humans have often shouted at one another. “And ours is it!”
To me, the question of our origins is a tantalizing one, and an important one. But the way we frame the debate allows very little of interest to squeak through. Where real questions have only tentative answers, both sides of the creationism/evolution debate have what they deem to be final answers. Proponents of either side suck every bit of life out of the question in their attempt to have it answered and done with—not only for themselves, but for everyone. Both arguments, it seems to me, boil down to the same thing: that we’re so clever a species that we now know the mind of god, whether that god be an all-powerful being or the inner workings of a material universe. I wish to question that presumption. We are a clever species, yes, but it is only our ignorance and our audacity that leads us to assume that we have a final understanding of the universe, and of our place within it.
A few liberal-minded people want to break the monotheistic hold on truth; they wish to solve the dilemma of what we teach in schools by having it both ways: let’s teach evolution and creationism. “Teach them both, and let the students make up their own mind,” they say. But that’s no answer. “Making up one’s own mind” in this case is nothing more than a license to be stupid. It’s like asking third graders who they would vote for in a presidential election. They’ll have an answer, no doubt, but that answer will have more to do with what their parents think than what the students, through their explorations, have learned. They’re not equipped to answer the questions of presidential politics or humanity’s origins because both are too large for their experience to circumscribe. Though they’ll have answers, they’ll be meaningless ones. Whatever they believe, it will be literalistic and faith-based.
“Literalistic and faith-based,” of course, is a pretty good description of the views of the adults around them as well. Few have done any real research into the question. And this, I think, is why we’re in the midst of the struggle. Not because we’re ignorant (though we are), but because we have these literalistic, faith-based answers shoved at us from every corner. In fact, the creation/evolution question is only one of many questions that we treat exactly the same way: abortion, gay marriage, whatever issue of the day that comes along, each of which is more appropriately dealt with in the private sphere than the political one. Participation in these questions requires nothing of us: we don’t have to educate ourselves about them, or probe our beliefs, or stretch our minds even the slightest bit. In fact, those things are discouraged. The answers have already been prepared for us. They’re prepackaged, pre-scripted. It falls to us only to choose which “side” to be on.
In other words, the evolution/creationism debate is one of those emotional issues that is tossed up to us every now and again for us to slaver over. It keeps us separated, each side feeling superior to the other, and fighting over inanities. Meanwhile, issues that really should be a part of our political discourse go unnoticed: issues like the use and misuse of political power, the use and misuse of military power, the use and misuse of corporate power.
Those larger issues, we don’t hear much about. We don’t hear much about them in the mainstream media, except for the particularly egregious examples that inevitably come to light, and that are spun for us using the “bad apple” metaphor. There is no national debate, for instance, about how much we ought to teach our students about what presidents—either of countries or corporations—do when their power is unchecked. There is no street corner and coffee shop debate on the twin perils of capitalism and consumerism. We tend not to have debates on the worthiness of the literally hundreds of military adventures we’ve had around the globe since World War II, mostly because we don’t really know about them, or have only vague notions of what it is we’re doing in these places that we probably can’t point to on a globe. And you certainly don’t hear much about these things in schools. If, on occasion, some teacher breaks rank and raises these subjects, he or she is quickly dismissed, at least figuratively and often literally. “Rogue teachers” with “political agendas” is how we frame that little bit of free thought. To be “political” in schools is right up there in the category of deadly sin. This, in schools, which are themselves a multibillion-dollar tool of political control (but we certainly don’t talk about that).
But those power structures—political and economic—are perfectly comfortable letting us rage on about the creation/evolution debate. Again, it keeps us distracted. But more than that, it doesn’t particularly matter to them which one we end up teaching, because in the end they’re both the same.
That might be a big pill. On the surface, they seem quite different. But let’s look at the root assumptions that underlie both, and see if we still believe them to be so different.
In the world of creationism, humans are the product of a loving God. He created us in His own image. In His infinite wisdom, He created a garden for us, full of the sustenance we require, but among these fruit trees was a tree of another sort: “the tree of knowledge of good an evil.” This tree was off limits. To eat of this tree was the one sin in all of this new world. Well, we all know what happened. We ate the forbidden fruit, and thereby coined a cliché.
Our sin wasn’t so much that we did what God told us not to do; one has to think that God, being omniscient, knew that we would eat the apple. Our sin, rather, was craving knowledge. It was a sin of hubris: we aspired to be like God. He had knowledge of good and evil, and we wanted that knowledge for ourselves. I speak of “we,” here, though the people actually involved in this little morality play are dead now. Still, the rest of us bear the mark of original sin. We can’t help but be sinners because we want to exist in the image of our Father. But wait a minute…weren’t we already created in His image? Does anyone else find this confusing?
Ultimately, the church gives us the argument that we have to accept our guilt not because we are who we are, but because we have the stain of this original sin upon us at birth. We are imperfect creatures. Having been born into sin and imperfection, as individuals we’re not in control of our own destiny.
Evolution, of course, makes much more sense than this 3500-year-old story. Or at least it claims to. It posits us as mere physical creatures—no pesky souls involved, stained or unstained—who have emerged over millions of years of natural selection. We can hoot and howl and beat our chests to illustrate our superiority, but it’s all just a great mammalian show: at root we are base creatures. Whatever weaknesses we have, those are products of evolution as well. If we’re stupid or jealous or homicidal, well, that’s just the way we were made to be by our evolutionary imperatives. In other words, we are imperfect creatures who aren’t in control of our own destiny.
Isn’t it interesting that two views, which we ordinarily consider to be quite opposite, both relieve us of our personal responsibility for being who we are?
But that’s not all; another commonality exists between these supposedly opposing viewpoints; this one doesn’t focus on our weakness as a species, but our grandiosity.
Evolution assumes that we are nothing more than physical bodies inhabiting a purely physical system. Early humans, through the vagaries of natural selection, happened to have the adaptations they needed to survive within this physical system while other species didn’t. Though the dinosaurs were adaptive enough and powerful enough to inhabit the earth for hundreds of millions of years, they were no match for a newly-cold, comet-struck world. Mammals, however, were. Early humans weren’t special in any way; they were just another species trying to survive. They didn’t do anything particularly novel: they ate, and shivered, and farted. But they did have an adaptation that the dinosaurs didn’t have: they could find ways of keeping themselves warm enough to survive while natural selection continued its work. Other creatures were undergoing the same process, of course, all the while: viruses, for instance, and African violets, and bandicoots.
But completely at odds with the idea that we are mere animals, inhabiting the world just as our primate relatives (or violets, or bandicoots) do, popular conceptions of Darwinism intimate that natural selection has worked tirelessly toward the end result of creating something that in some way transcends the system: us. Isn’t that fun? We enjoy seeing ourselves as an end result, the height of perfection, the logical result of all those eons of nature’s mucking about with the possibilities inherent in DNA.
Surely, however, if evolution works as well as we think it does, then humans aren’t an end state, they’re just another step along the way toward whatever comes next. I’m sure we’d like to think that this is true only inasmuch as it can solve some of our problems: perhaps evolution could continue its work and take away our wisdom teeth, which seem to cause so many problems. Perhaps it could solve our problems of cancer or acne or cellulite. But we don’t see it bringing our species to the point where ordinary humans are obsolete or beside the point, do we? Surely we who can split the atom and go to the moon and order things from e-bay won’t go the way of the dodo bird.
Evolution, we believe, has given us our great big mammalian brains that set us apart completely enough that we can come to know the world in a different way than other animals. Our big mammalian brains are so developed that we can look into the inner workings of the universe and come up with theories such as, well, evolution. In the end, the worldview that gives us Darwinism also gives us the satisfying but basically wrong idea that we can observe the world as if it were outside of us, as if we weren’t a part of it. In our minds, we have severed ourselves from the natural world. This allows us to see ourselves as the assayers of the realm, beings whose understanding of our environment is so great that we can sort it and organize it as we see fit, and use it to our own ends.
In this way, Darwinism—and scientific rationalism generally—places us precisely at the top of the hierarchy of life forms inhabiting the planet. It follows that the resources of the planet are at our disposal, since we’re seemingly the only ones smart enough to use them. As the only intelligent species on the planet, it simply makes a sort of sense to us that we use it to our own ends. It makes a sort of sense that we breed irresponsibly (after all, we’re just surviving, as the fittest); that we divvy up the earth into parcels that can be bought and sold, and extract whatever resources we need (no other species being intelligent enough to fence off and defend their acreages, or figure out what mineral rights are for); that we use other forms of life to our own ends. As the apex of life on earth, as its greatest showing, isn’t it our right to hunt species into extinction, turn endangered animals into boots and handbags, and raise food animals in inhumane conditions?
The odd thing about this is that it is exactly the same spot in the hierarchy that the Jewish creation myth placed us in, those 3500 years beforehand. Right in the first chapter of Genesis (1:28), it says
…and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
In other words, we as humans are to breed irresponsibly (be fruitful and multiply) divvy up the earth into parcels that can be bought and sold and extract whatever resources we need (fill the earth and subdue it), and use other forms of life to our own ends (have dominion over…every living thing).
This, may I say, is disturbing news. Darwinism, however threatening it may have been to the status quo of the religious world, dropped without much of a ripple into the worldview of the Old Testament.
The mythologies of Darwinism and of creationism, then, as different and distinct as their proponents wish them to be seen, don’t really offer anything different as far as humankind’s place in the world goes. They haven’t shifted the framework through which we understand ourselves, or our environment. They’re different versions of the same story, one that glorifies our collective ego by placing it in a position superior to the rest of the physical world. Somehow, though evolution describes our descent from divinely created beings to the end product of an ancient primordial soup, we’ve managed to retain our status as the best thing happening on the planet, the rightful inheritors of the earth.
And this is mightyfine with the powers that be. That’s right where they want us to be, unquestioningly inhabiting a worldview in which it’s the natural order of things to take what we want from the environment and ignore the consequences. Where we don’t particularly concern ourselves about the oil and minerals we pump and tear from the ground, or the forests we raze, or the wildlife we kill while we’re doing it. They want us believing that it’s our right to do these things. They want us agreeing that a profit made by a very few white guys is sufficient reason to mine the earth for all she’s worth. They don’t give a rat’s ass how we come to that agreement: if we feel we’ve been given those rights by a loving god, that’s fine with them. If we prefer to think that we’re the fittest and are thus surviving at the expense of the less fit, that’s okay with them too.
(Though that good old-fashioned Old Testament God really gets the heart pumping, doesn’t it? Sometimes it’s easier to manipulate people with their emotions fully engaged. Science tends to get a little too rational. Maybe, on second thought, we ought to go the creationism route. Can we rally behind that? Do I hear an amen? Oh, and by the way, just ignore what you hear about the increasing desertification of the planet, or the environmental degradation caused by fossil fuels, or the extinction of species. Or the shrinking ice caps. Or the collapse of coral reefs. Or the disappearing aquifers. That’s just the liberals, the tree huggers, the pinko commie fags. They don’t know a good thing when they see it. They’re standing in the way of progress. What’s good for the CEO of a major corporation is good for America!)
The thing about creationism, though, and the thing about our popular conceptions of Darwinism, is that neither is very satisfying. They’re not satisfying intellectually, and they’re not satisfying spiritually. How different would our world be, were we to finally get past these surface debates regarding creationism and evolution and address the 3500-year-old assumptions they both share? We need to talk about the basic ideas that we teach in schools, sure, but we also need to examine the assumptions hidden within them. In the case of evolution vs. creationism, neither idea ends up being a terribly good one, not so much because of the ideas themselves, but because of the paradigm within which they find their meaning. We need some new assumptions, a new lens through which to view those ideas. Then, both might make more sense.
What if our basic assumptions about ourselves and our world were different? For instance, we might assume a humanity that is in charge of its own destiny, that collects data about the degradation of the environment within which it thrives, takes it seriously, and has the will to do something about it. We might come up with ideas that reflect not a humanity at the top of a hierarchical pyramid, but rather a humanity that is a single node on an infinite web of being, dependent for our own well being on the well being of every other node. Perhaps we would begin to see ourselves as a small but vital organ within an increasingly self-aware body of the earth. We might revive the idea of panspermia, which suggests that the seeds of life came from extraterrestrial sources, and arrived here perhaps by accident or perhaps by design. Either of those notions would bring with them the next great Copernican revolution: where Copernicus relieved us of the idea that the earth was the center of the universe, panspermia would relieve us of the idea that earth is the center of life. Perhaps we’ll begin to consider consciousness, not matter, to be the basic building block of existence. Within that worldview, perhaps we arose by some as yet unacknowledged tropism of a conscious universe.
These ideas, of course, are already out there. None of them are THE ANSWER, but we’re not at the point where it’s reasonable to be determining THE ANSWER anyway. At this early point in our development, the only thing that makes sense is amassing possibilities, holding them for a bit, weighing them, seeing what they have to offer us. The concept of panspermia, for instance, is as old as the ancient Greeks, and over the past couple hundred years has on occasion been picked up and reconsidered. There is no slam-dunk evidence that it is correct, but certainly there is evidence that it’s a possibility. That would chap the ass of those who wish to debunk the idea of extraterrestrial life, wouldn’t it? Of course aliens exist: we’re aliens! How’s that for a complete overhaul of a worldview?
But we tend not to hear about these ideas. I think there are many reasons for this. These kinds of issues, as we’ve already noted, come prepackaged for our consumption; ideas outside the dominant paradigm aren’t amongst the multiple choice answers provided us. When we do hear of them, we tend not to consider them seriously because those interested in preserving the status quo propagandize against them. At another level, even if these ideas show up within our personal space, we tend not to see them simply because we’re so well trained in examining the world in certain ways: we are bound to our paradigm, blind to options that lie outside of it.
The basic questions posed by our existence are by no means answered. We’ve only begun to make our first tentative probings toward answers. We’ve certainly reached no plateau in which those answers might have achieved the level of knowledge. All of the answers we’ve come to are at best hypotheses. They don’t speak to the true mystery of our existence: Where did we come from?
The only truthful answer to the question of our beginnings at this point is “I don’t know! Nobody knows!” We’ve created a few concepts toward an answer, sure. We’ve probed far enough into the question of evolution, for instance, to reveal a web of life more complex and beautiful than any creationist might have imagined. But to mistake the broad sketches of outline we’ve come to in the last hundred years for solid answers to questions that span all of time is not just intellectually sloppy but full of hubris. Science is a powerful tradition, but it’s only a tradition, and a particularly human tradition, replete with all the foibles that humans bring into every human enterprise. Theology might have divine origins, and certainly has millennia of thought behind it, but it too is only a tradition. Ultimately, our knowing must be deeper than either can demonstrate. Rumi, 750 years ago, said as much: “Science and theology would be just whims of the wind, If you knew full surrender.”
In the end, the way in which we answer the question “where do we come from?” has a profound effect on everything that follows it. When we “know” the “answer” to that question, we suddenly know who we are. We know what we’re doing here. Moreover, we have the basis for answers to every decision that follows. Every religious question, every political question, and every personal question is held within the space of that one basic idea.
It’s therefore a question that shouldn’t be answered, at least until we have a lot more data to base that answer upon. A lot more.
And we certainly shouldn’t let others answer it for us. Listening to others’ ideas is one thing; allowing ourselves to be indoctrinated to them is another.
Taking this approach doesn’t deny the truth of evolution; its truths are obvious. We can see it happening. But to make the leap of faith that it is the only thing happening seems an extreme one. In our rationalistic blindness, we can’t accept the notion that in the billions of years that preceded our arrival, there might have been some agent of change other than the natural forces we’ve come to understand that might have had a hand in our development. We can’t seem to find room in our worldview for any intelligence that may have preceded us. We don’t accept that the universe might be dynamic in ways that we don’t yet understand. These are problems of taking literal, scientific words and trying to give them a mythical dimension.
Nor does this approach deny the truth of creationism. If we take the time to examine the Jewish creation story in a mythological sense, its truths are apparent as well. All mythologies hold this sort of truth. It’s only the habit of taking a mythology and reading it literally—reading it as it was never meant to be read—that is the problem. That’s the opposite problem of the one we’ve just mentioned: it’s taking mythical, metaphorical words and trying to give them scientific import.
What this approach does do is break the hold of our current paradigm, in which answers are too easy, where truth is too quickly assumed to be known. It breaks the hold, a bit, of those who would have us believe that it’s their right to take whatever they can from the earth and leave it ravaged, ugly, and possibly uninhabitable. It breaks the hold, a bit, of those who want to keep us powerless by telling us that as a species we’re not truly in charge of our own destiny. Humanity is in its adolescence, and those folks want to keep us there. We’re like the teenager who doesn’t want to be responsible for the damage he’s caused: “It wasn’t my fault!” But, adolescents or not, we are in charge of our own destiny. We are responsible for the choices we make, and for the values we hold. We are responsible for the size of the footprint humanity leaves upon the earth. We’re even responsible, now that consciousness has been thrust upon us, for choosing the next steps in our evolution. What will those next steps say about us as a species? Will they reflect our highest values, or will they reflect our basest instincts?
When we start having debates about whether we should teach kids evolution or creationism in schools, I suggest we keep in mind a third option: just possibly, we might start telling kids the truth. Things like this: “We don’t really know how it is that humans came to be here, but here are some ideas for us to explore. Perhaps you’ll discover other ideas in your search for understanding. Watch out for the anthropocentric thinking that often accompanies this quest.” Or like this: “Humans are one part of a relatively fragile ecosphere. We’ve been here quite a bit less than one percent of the time that the dinosaurs lived on the earth, and even in that short time we’ve damaged that ecosphere, possibly irrevocably. We’re already responsible for a great number of extinctions, and many more are all but destined. If we don’t change our behavior, one future extinction event may well involve humans.” Or even this: “There is a great deal more to life, despite what you may have heard right here in school, than getting a job and taking part in the great consumerist enterprise that America has become. As we better understand where we’ve come from, all this will start to look pretty pathetic.”
Of course, when we start telling kids the truth, we can be sure that things will get ugly. Those who determine school curricula—and here I’m not talking about those who ostensibly determine what is taught, like school boards, but those who really do, like transnational corporations and the political infrastructure they buy—will not be happy to hear these truths.
Until we do have more knowledge of our origins, it is the personal responsibility of each of us to answer the question for ourselves. But no simplistic “this is what I learned in school” answer will do. “I don’t know” is a good start. After a lifetime of consideration, this truthful answer might be amended only slightly: “I don’t know, but….” By that time, we’ll have answered it as best we can simply by the ways we’ve lived our lives. Just as every question is held within our answer to “Where did I come from?” every decision we make in some small way answers the question for us. Everything we do says “This is who I am,” and has something to say about whether we think we’re creatures who have been put here to be tested by an angry, Old Testament God; or creatures who must struggle to remain at the top of a Darwinian food chain; or creatures who have delved deeper into the mystery than either of those two options afford.
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Boy, it’s been a busy couple of weeks here. I just started working for a living again, for one thing. Much is coming from that, which I want to discuss later. It’s all very relevant to the sorts of things we’ve been visiting about here.
More importantly, I am completing final edits on the book. I hope to have it done and off to the printer by the end of the week. In a few weeks, it will be available here for the first time. I’ll write more regularly once that job is finally off my plate. What a year and a half that journey has been.
Both the new job and the book edits have kept me, as you may have noticed, from posting much on the site. But do not despair! More will follow. For one thing, I just had an article returned from The Sun. Boy, this traditional publishing thing is something I just don’t have the energy for. So I’m gonna put that up today, for your edification and enjoyment. It’s adapted from the book, and concerns the evolution/creationism debates. Everyone except my sister (who has a belly full of my ideas about evolution and creationism) will find something of interest within it.
Onward….
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