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Title: Serendipity and Convergence: Comments on Moira Laidlaw’s
Pursuit of Counterpoint
Author: Chet Bowers, Eugene, Oregon, USA
Serendipity has been the dominant feature of my academic career. Indeed, it
accounts for saving me from the fate that Friedrich Nietzsche warned about: Which was
to become an academic with a strong penchant for following the herd. The series of
serendipitous events has now led to a convergence with many of the values and ways of
thinking that are expressed in Moira Laidlaw’s pursuit of counterpoint—which I take to
be achieving an understanding of wholeness and thus interdependence in a world still the
dominated by the West’s over-emphasis on a mechanistic and human-centered world.
What were the events and circumstances that led to the serendipitous pathway did
not take account of personal planning? It may have started in being born during the
depression, and in having my father die before my birth—which led to being adopted into
a working class family where there was no discussion of higher education. To skip a
number of years and character forming experiences, this led me initially to pursue a
graduate degree in European intellectual history at the University of California. As no
one in my home environment had mentioned that the study of German would be essential
to completing the degree, I soon learned that I needed to shift my focus—which led to
studying with Professor Frederic Lilge who allowed me to pursue what amounted to an
interdisciplinary doctoral degree within the college of education. The series of
serendipitous events led to obtaining the doctorate with a deep grounding in the sociology
of knowledge of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and the phenomenological
sociology of Alfred Schutze. My awareness that the philosophers I was studying in the
Department of Philosophy represented ethnocentric ways of thinking, that their mode of
thinking privileged a print-based based form of consciousness over orally-based cultures,
and that their taken for granted anthropocentrism created an impenetrable zone of silence
around environmental issues, can be traced back to the shift that led to being grounded in
an interpretative framework that emphasized the role of language in constituting what
people take to be everyday reality. It was only a small step to shifting from the language
of sociology to the alternative realities of different cultural language systems—and from
there to an understanding of the metaphorically layered nature of the language/thought
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connections that continues the colonization of the present by earlier thinkers who were
unaware of environmental limits.
Reading the works of Ron and Suzanne Wong Scollon was also the outcome of
serendipity—and it lead both to the ideas of Gregory Bateson and to an understanding of
the colonizing impact of assuming that words such as individualism, intelligence,
progress, freedom, and so forth, have a universal meaning. Basing a critique of Paulo
Freire's pedagogy on the Scollons’ field study of the mindset of the Fort Chipewyan of
Northern Alberta led again to another series of serendipitous events—including becoming
involved with the Peruvian NGO, PRATEC (the Andean Project for Peasant
Technologies), in helping to clarify the cultural colonizing effects of Western
technologies such as computers and as well as Western approaches to educational reform.
If I had followed the pathway of most people in the field of educational studies I
would not have encountered the ideas of Bateson, studies in the area of cultural
linguistics, the literature debating the cultural transforming characteristics of print and
now computers, and the nature and ecological importance of the world’s diversity of
cultural commons that represent alternatives to an individually-centered consumer
dependent lifestyle that is rapidly degrading the natural systems we depend upon. Had I
succeeded in my original quest of a graduate degree in intellectual history or pursued a
doctorate in philosophy I would have ended up perpetuating the orthodoxies shared by
colleagues in these respective fields. In short, while being able to critique different
aspects of the consumer/industrial culture that is overshooting the sustaining capacity of
natural systems, my thinking would mirror the thinking of other academics in these fields
who still assume that language is a conduit in a sender/receiver process of
communication, and who remain largely unaware of how the root metaphors that carry
forward the misconceptions of earlier thinkers continue to frame their own patterns of
thinking—and continue to maintain the same areas of silence and marginalization.
Instead, the pathways not taken have led to being able to think within a
conceptual framework that takes account of a culturally diverse world, the colonizing role
of language, the cultural roots of the ecological crises—and the role that education plays
in perpetuating the crises, the need to recognize the community-strengthening and
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ecological importance of the environmental and cultural commons—including the
ideologically driven economic forces that are enclosing them
What stands out for me in Laidlaw’s Pursuit of Counterpoint is how her thinking
is grounded in her own embodied experiences as opposed to the abstract reality that is the
artificial construction of a print-influenced form of consciousness. Other prominent
features of her thinking include the value she places on giving voice to the students’
embodied experiences, and the importance of fostering critical thinking. Her quote of
David Bohm’s warning about accepting a fragmented view of the world, as well as the
different ways in which she urges that educational/social reforms be based on an
awareness of wholeness, also stood out as significant. I find that my pathway, marked as
it was by serendipitous events and encounters, now converges with her experiences of
wholeness. However, my pathway through a different literature and series of culturally
diverse experiences has led to using a somewhat different vocabulary for articulating how
the similarity of our ideas can lead to a theory of educational reform that addresses how
different cultures can find their way back to living within the limits and possibilities of he
ecosystems that are now on the verge of catastrophic collapse. As Gary Snyder pointed
out in one of his books, the Western science/technology/market-based culture that is a
major contributor to the ecological crises represents only a small part of human history
and knowledge accumulation--which is a point that we tend to overlook in thinking that it
is the cutting edge of progress.
What are the key features of this science/technology/market-based culture that is
changing the earth’s climate, the chemistry of the world’s oceans, and the availability of
potable water (to cite just a few of features of the ecological crises)? Basically, they turn
out to be the sources of the conceptually and morally fragmented world that Laidlaw and
Bohm warn about. Linguistically and conceptually, they can be located in the dominant
root metaphors—that is, the meta-cognitive schemata or interpretative frameworks that
frame the taken-for-granted patterns for thinking of Western elites whose vocabulary,
with its historically influenced analogs, frame how most Westerners think. These root
metaphors include the idea of the autonomous individual, patriarchy, anthropocentrism,
mechanism, equating change with a linear form of progress, economism, and, now,
evolution (which is now being extended to explain how cultural patterns which scientists
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now refer to as “memes” must now meet the same test of Darwinian fitness). The deeply
held root metaphors (interpretive frameworks) both illuminate and hide, and what they
illuminate is series of separations: the individual is separated from traditions (that is,
culture), community is separated from the other participants in the local ecologies, the
environment is reduced to what can be exploited, and organic processes are interpreted as
having component parts which can be re-engineered to improve profits and external
sources of control. Collectively, these root metaphors are the basis of thinking of market
activities as the expression of progress, which makes it unnecessary for there to be any
self-limiting principle on transforming the cultural and environmental commons into
profits. This, in turn, leads to new forms of dependencies for those who must participate
in a money economy. The theory of evolution, when extended to take account of cultural
memes, thus provides the illusion of scientific legitimation for the globalization of the
“survival of the fittest ethos of market liberalism. When critical inquiry is framed in
terms of these root metaphors, it then reinforces the idea of the autonomous individual,
change being progressive in nature, and an anthropocentric world—which, ironically, are
the same assumptions that underlie the industrial/consumer oriented culture that many
educational reforms are critical of.
One aspect of rectifying the double binds that educational reformers are in, where
they take for granted a vocabulary whose meaning was framed by analogs that reproduce
the misconceptions and prejudices of earlier thinkers, is the need for educators to reframe
the meaning of such words as individualism, intelligence, community, tradition, progress,
and so forth, by relying upon ecology as the root metaphor. Just as it took hundreds of
years to become aware of the analogs that carried forward the prejudices and
misconceptions of earlier thinkers about how to think about the attributes and possibilities
of women, the process of getting classroom teachers and university professors to become
aware of how language carries forward the misconceptions of the past may take longer
than the deepening ecological crises will allow. But we need to begin the task, which will
be made especially difficult by the bias that is reproduced in how many educational
reformers think about the purpose of critical inquiry—which they assume leads to
changes that are inherently progressive. Few recognize that the men and women who
develop new technologies and consumer goods also rely upon critical inquiry to solve the
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technical problems and to figure out how to create new markets. Educators need to
realize that critical inquiry must also be used to identify what needs to be conserved in
this era of political and ecological uncertainties where both democracy and sustainable
ecosystems are increasingly being imperiled.
Wholeness, in terms of thinking about educational reforms, can also be
understood in terms of recognizing the interconnections between sustainable cultural and
environmental commons. Both aspects of the commons represent what is shared and
sustained intergenerationally largely outside of the money economy and other systems of
exclusion. Both aspects of the commons go back to the beginning of human history, exist
in attenuated form in every community (rural and urban) and culture. They are also as
diverse as the local culture and bioregion. The environmental commons include the
water, plants and animals, soil, water, air, silences, and so forth that have not been
privatized or turned into commodities and exploitable resources. The cultural commons
include the intergenerational knowledge, skills, and mentoring relationships that range
from the preparation and sharing of food, healing practices, narratives, ceremonies,
creative arts, craft knowledge and skills, language, to the culture’s approach to civil
liberties. That some culture’s lack a well developed tradition of civil liberties is also part
of their cultural commons. Thus it is important to recognize that not all the narratives
and practices that are part of the local cultural commons meet our standards of social
justice. The important point, however, the important point is that the local cultural
commons represent alternative to the growing dependence upon a consumer lifestyle that
has an unsustainable ecological footprint. Renewing the diversity of cultural commons
also represents resisting the global spread of market forces that require the autonomous
individual who has become morally and conceptually freed from the traditions of
community--which many educators mistakenly view as one of the social justice goals of
education. What these reformers overlook is that the intergenerationally connected
communities (assuming their traditions of local decision making are not based on
prejudices and forms of exploitation) are sources of mutual support, self-sufficiency, and
more inclined to take into account the prospects of future generations. These
characteristics can also be seen as expressions of wholeness rather than as sources of
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fragmentation that lead to the exploitation and impoverishment that billions of people are
now experiencing as their cultural and environmental commons being destroyed.
The pedagogy that addresses both the ways in which the language of the
curriculum often reproduces the misconceptions of earlier thinkers, as well as the need to
help students understand the differences between participating in their local cultural
commons and the market mediated relationships and activities, is consistent with
Laidlaw’s concern with giving voice to the students’ experiences, and to learning to think
critically about what needs to be conserved (intergenerationally renewed) and what needs
to be changed in order to live a more ecologically sustainable existence. What is too
often missing in emphasizing the students’ experience as a source of knowledge and
empowerment is that most of their cultural experiences are taken for granted—including
experiences that are based on ecologically and intergenerationally destructive
misconceptions. To make the point more directly, classroom teachers and professors
need to be mediators whose role is to help students make explicit dimensions of their
experiences that would otherwise be part of what they take for granted—and thus never
give voice to. The mediator role of the teacher/professor is to encourage the students to
do what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz referred to as doing a “thick description” of
their embodied/culturally mediated experience. To cite several examples, the student
would be encouraged to describe (give voice to) the differences in their experience
between face-to-face and computer mediated communication, between being mentored
and being a customer, between eating a meal with the family and friends and eating at a
fast food outlet, between an artistic performance and being a consumer of someone else’s
performance, between conceptualizing and carrying through a task and working on an
assembly line, and so forth. Most students simply move between the cultural commons
of their family and community and the market/consumer oriented culture without anyone
helping them to frame the questions that should be asked about the differences in
relationships with others, their control of time and thoughts, being treated as an object
and experiencing their own powers of origination. The process of helping students
recognize the questions that need to be asked does not involve giving students the
mediator’s answers, and it does not involve promoting the idea that all aspects of the
scientific/technological, and market based culture should be rejected. Rather the process
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of giving voice, which requires becoming explicitly aware of what might otherwise be
taken for granted, leads to developing the conceptual basis for exercising communicative
competence about which aspects of the cultural commons and the industrial culture are
ecologically sustainable and contribute to the well-being of the community. Again, the
educational goal is the achievement of the experience of wholeness and understanding.
There is another aspect of the teacher’s/professor’s mediating role that will not
generally become part of a constructivist approach to learning. That is, few students will
have the conceptual background necessary for understanding the various cultural forces
that are enclosing what remains of the cultural commons. These forces of enclosure need
to be understood both historically and in terms of the influence of ideologies, elite forms
of knowledge, religious beliefs, technologies, and the diverse impacts of colonization.
The starting point in obtaining an historical and cultural perspective on the many forms of
enclosure that are exacerbating the ecological crises, and that are undermining what
remains of the self-sufficiency traditions of local cultural commons, should always be the
students’ embodied/culturally mediate experience. This is necessary if students are to
realize how historical forces have a direct connection with how their lives are being
limited or empowered,
A pedagogy that addresses ecojustice issues faces a major obstacle in becoming
widely understood and practiced. And the primary reason for this is that most professors
and classroom teachers are unaware of the silences in their own education. They also
have an identify investment in perpetuating the cultural assumptions their careers have
been based upon. That many of the cultural assumptions (root metaphors) are the same
ones that underlie the current globalization of an individualistic, consumer-dependent
lifestyle go largely unrecognized because of their taken for granted status. As most
teachers and professors tend to view their knowledge as being so advanced that other
should learn it, there is the problem of how to get them to recognize that their cutting
edge thinking happens to perpetuate the paradigm that is putting our collective future at
risk. How do we get them to recognize Albert Einstein’s warning that we cannot use the
same mindset to correct the problem that created it in the first place? This is the
counterpoint that need to be addressed—which will be difficult because of the current
emphasis on the authority of individual judgment rather then on the sense of wholeness
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that comes from recognizing that the individual is nested in culture (with all its explicit
and taken for granted traditions), and that cultures are nested in natural systems. As
Bateson pointed out, humans cannot survive if the ecosystems they depend upon do not
survive—which will be the future test of whether we have moved beyond the fragmented
world of individualism to a morally coherent and ecologically informed approach to
wholeness.
A list of books written by C. A. Bowers, including online books that can be downloaded
without charge, as available by going to his website. Just Google C. A. Bowers, and go
to online articles and books.