Gaining Perspective

Though at the end of my last post I promised to talk about turkeys, I'm still waiting on an especially promising book on that topic to arrive via interlibrary loan, so that subject will have to wait until next time. (Fear not! I promise an abundance of turkey-related facts, lore, and musings very, very soon.)

For this outing, I wanted to talk about the topic of perspective. How do we look at ourselves in the grand scheme of things, relative to the vastness of space? I started ruminating on this topic lately due to the time of year: around this time of year there was a Core 9 lecture I'd give (since 2011) about Comparative Religions and I never could seem to find space to include an example about potential common ground between religious and non-religious worldviews. I thought one of the more promising avenues was by exploring how both a theistic worldview and a more dominantly scientific worldview can both tend to portray humans as quite minuscule in relation to the cosmos all around. There are three examples that I think demonstrate this tendency the best.

The first is from the Hindu Bhagavata Purana, an enormous collection of stories reinforcing devotion to the many forms of the god Vishnu, including one of his more playful forms, Krishna. (If you are interested in getting a translation of these stories, you can find one here and also here). In the most famous series of stories involving Krishna, the god incarnates among humans in order to destroy a demon. He is born miraculously to a human mother (Yashoda) and from the time of his birth carries a number of miraculous (not to mention mischievous) activities. In one example, as a toddler he places a clump of dirt in his mouth and Yashoda quickly steps in to dig it out. When she pries open his mouth, she instead sees the entire span of the universe and beyond, the creation and destruction of galaxies, swirls of constellations, and so on.

Here is an image from a series of Indian comics:

Here is an artist's depiction of mother and child together, with her vision in the background behind them:

Scholar of Indian religions Wendy Doniger has written about how this and other narrative in Hinduism accomplish the blending of the "microscopic and telescopic" views of human existence. On the one hand, what could be more mundane than a parent stooping to pick something of a child's mouth? At the other end, what could be more grand than the swirl of stars? To blend these views, the microscope and the telescope, is the special province of myth and it leaves poor Yashoda's mind blown. Krishna, even as a baby, sees her distress and removes the vision from her eyes.

Out of the Jewish theistic tradition, we have Job's encounter with Yahweh. For those very few of you who do not know poor Job's plight, he has lost his livelihood, his home, his family, and his health as the result of a wager between God and Satan (who in the original text is not the figure of ultimate evil he becomes in Christian tradition, but rather an agent of testing who works for God). Job has the opportunity to question God, who appears (as is often the case in the Hebrew texts) as a raging storm. Here is William Blake's interpretation of that encounter:

God's reply to Job puts the poor beseeching human in his place: "Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it? Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid the cornerstone, while the morning stars sang in chorus and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (Job 38: 4-7). [As an aside, the reference to "sons of God" is probably a sign of the influence of the cultural context of the Hebrew narratives. Mesopotamian religions as a whole conceived of councils of gods with one lead god. This is also visible in God's relationship with Satan in this same text.] Like Yashoda, Job's mind reels as God goes on for chapter after chapter, reiterating again and again how big the universe is and how little Job is. Put in his place, Job meekly slinks away.

Moving out of the realm of religious writings, forty years ago last month, NASA launched the space probe Voyager 1, which has become the first human-made spacecraft to reach interstellar space. (You can still check its mission status, if you're interested, along with its successor, Voyager 2.) In popular culture, the later consequences of the probe's journey were fodder for the plot of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. As the probe was leaving the solar system in early 1990, its cameras were turned around to look back towards earth and take one last image of what our planet looks like from four billion -- that's billion -- miles away. This is what that looks like:

Can you see us? We're that tiny bluish-white speck toward the lower right corner. The image has become known as the "Pale Blue Dot" photo and was the inspiration for Carl Sagan's book of the same name. In that book, Sagan reflects on the image in this way: 

                    Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone
                    you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human
                    being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and                     
                    suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic
                    doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator
                    and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple
                    in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer,
                    every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every
                    "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived
                    there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Besides demonstrating how a single human -- along with his/her thoughts, dreams, aspirations, joys, pains, etc., etc. -- is swallowed up next to the expanse of everything that is, the three examples also employ similar imagery. It's dirt in Krishna's mouth that reveals the cosmic wonder to Yashoda. Job, as he grovels before God, says that he "repents in dust and ashes." For Sagan, our entire species is a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." On this point, we could add the observation of Kurt Vonnegut (another Secular Humanist) in Cat's Cradle humans are "mud that got to sit up and look
around." No doubt this goes to show that humans are but specks in the scope of all time and space, and would do well to remember that when tempted towards thoughts of grandeur. If you think that you're tiny and small compared to all that exists, you're right. We should all gain a healthy dose of humility from the perspective each example offers.

On the other hand, each story uses the seemingly lowliest of the low -- the very soil and ground beneath our feet -- to transport us to contemplation of the highest of the high. Doniger would refer to this as the flip of lenses between microscope/telescope and this metaphor may provide us with an affirming interpretation of the message behind these tales. Let us remember what we learned in my last post from Wendell Berry: every particle of dirt, as the source of life, is sacred. If we are but specks of "dirt," even metaphorically, can't the same be said of each and every one of us? Being small does not mean being insignificant.

When Yashoda looked in Krishna's mouth, she did not choose to see the cosmos in a speck of dirt, but by taking to heart that story's lesson, along with the lessons of Job and the Pale Blue Dot, whenever we look at even the tiniest grain of dirt, dust, or mud, we can use our newly-gained insight to view it as just as majestic and grand as the burgeoning of galaxies, the death-throes of stars, the trembling of the universe itself. Each of us is nothing. Each of us is everything. We are specks of dust. We are giants.

Next time (unless something else intervenes), there will be turkeys! Until then, take care.

The Big Picture

Over the last several weeks, my wife and I have had something of an ongoing book club. It all started with my discovery of a list of classics in environmental writing and has expanded since then. Recently there were two books we read that, though they come from very different fields, struck me as having amazing parallels in their commentaries on modern life.

The first book was Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America (1977). Berry argues that the increased mechanization of agriculture and the "get big or get out" mentality have caused a shift in American farming. No longer about the generational commitment to the land and connections to a larger community, farming has instead become a highly specialized business. The shift has had profound consequences for our food system and cultural perception of the earth. With the advent of efficiency and technology as the standard, Berry suggests that agriculture has absorbed and adopted the values of soulless production and consumption. Instead, Berry wants us to return to the notion of farming as an art, as practically a religious profession that threads together "cult" (as in devotion), "culture," and "cultivation." This would mean smaller farms, less technology, and more localized, family agricultural endeavors. In his words, "a healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safe-guards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace" (47).

The second book was John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down (1992). This text is a classic of alternative education that attacks our system of compulsory schooling (K-12, 8am - 3pm, distinct subjects separated by Pavlovian-bells, desks in assembly-line rows, etc.). Gatto argues that our school system, though ostensibly intended to teach reading, writing, math, and so forth, actually has a "hidden curriculum" of instilling obedience to authority, conformity to social class, and reflexive consumerism for the next generation in the market economy. As a thirty year veteran of public school teaching, Gatto maintains that these factors are an open secret and that we have learned to shrug even as we realize that compulsory schooling doesn't work: students are bored and teachers complain about teaching, but we have convinced ourselves that this way (even though it only dates to about 1850) is the only way. The solution? Get rid of school. Here's what he suggests: "It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy...when children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cell-blocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them" (23).

So what do these two books have in common? (First, by way of full disclosure, they lean into my area of bias, as my family homeschools and my wife works at a small-scale, organic, family farm.) Both authors are pointing to how entrenched systems of thought come to hold sway over our behaviors and outlooks. I know that, at least for myself, growing up I thought we had to go to school to learn and that to get food you had to go to the grocery store where it came in neat cellophane packages. These "have tos" are what post-modern philosophers like Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault called doxa, the unquestioned assumptions that undergird the architecture of society. No one questions these assumptions because they are buried so deeply that everyone takes them for granted. Bourdieu and Foucault both argue that social institutions have the most control not when they are big and powerful, but when they are invisible. People do not question what they do not see. Does "school" really equal "education"? Does "agriculture" really equal "farming"? Or does the second term in each pair potentially point to something greater and more expansive? If nothing else, Berry and Gatto pull back the veil to reveal the assumptions behind our agricultural and educational institutions and suggest they ought to be interrogated like everything else. It is always good to ask the questions, "Does it have to be this way? Is another life possible?"

Both authors reveal another problem in society: the lack of holistic thinking and an inability to appreciate the "big picture." In agriculture, Berry thinks this is the extraction of farming from the cultural web of human relations and knowledge to the point that it becomes a specialized profession. For Gatto, this is the isolation in school of different fields into supposedly separate areas - science from literature, politics from philosophy, demarcated by arbitrary bells and placed in distinct rooms. These phenomena are not unrelated, as Berry points out:

              That the discipline of agriculture should have been so divorced from other
              disciplines has its immediate cause in the compartmental structure of the
              universities, in which complementary, mutually sustaining and enriching
              disciplines are divided, according to "professions," into fragmented, one-
              eyed specialties. It is suggested...that farming shall be the responsibility
              of the college of agriculture, that shall be the sole charge of the professors
              of law, that morality, shall be taken care of by the philosophy department,
              reading by the English department, and so on (47).

Now, look at what Gatto says:

               The first lesson school teaches is the un-relating of everything. Everything
               (history, reading, language, dance, math, economics, etc.) is out of context
               and order. Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek.
               Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and the school obsession
               with facts and theories, the age-old human search for meaning lies well
               concealed (2-3).

Both point out the tendency toward fragmentation in our societal attention-spans: focus on the part, not the whole. In contrast, life is a single cloth with each segment interdependent with the others; Berry and Gatto show that when we extract single aspects and reduce them to isolated realms, it costs us, both in terms of understanding those single aspects as well as the larger world around us.

Both even invoke the power of soil or dirt as a way to talk about the issues they say we face as a people. Berry writes, "The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life" (90). Though speaking metaphorically, Gatto says this, "After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves" (105). In both statements, I detect a stirring call for far-reaching humility and respect for the inherent abilities and strengths we -- humans and the rest of the natural -- all possess together, and the beauty that can result if we acknowledge one another in this way.

Besides writing books, Berry and Gatto have both engaged in a number of projects to bring their views into wider application. Berry and his farming program in Kentucky have recently created an agreement with Sterling College to promote sustainable agriculture. Gatto has a series of lectures and videos on the problems with compulsory schooling as well as alternative methods of education.

I realize that many will greet these ideas as quite radical. Having friends in both agriculture and education, I'm sensitive to that fact and think there are ways we can all work together to reconsider the ways we have all done things over the decades. For me and my family, I'm grateful that the realms of nature, farming, and education so often overlap. For us, education often looks like this:

And this:

And our classroom often looks like this:

And this:

We are very fortunate. But I also wonder, if we would all think about nature and education as not being discrete, segregated entities, but an atmosphere that permeates us all, how different life would be. When next I write, as a related piece, perhaps I will reflect on my time volunteering at the farm that employs my wife. Specifically, that farm has a lot of turkeys. A lot of turkeys. And I have come to see the turkey as a very interesting animal, indeed. So, until next time, which may very well be turkey-time (at least as far as this blog is concerned), take care, and remember, the ways things are is not necessarily the way they have to be.