![\"natural](\"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/kids-star-gazing.jpg\" "\\"kids-star-gazing\\"")
natural curiousity suppressed by cultural imprinting?<\/p><\/div>\n
Preface\/Introduction:<\/p>\n
I would be happy if my grandchildren and all of the children of the rising generations, would have good access to hearing about ‘another worldview’, ‘another way of understanding’ and ‘another way of carrying oneself in the world dynamic’.\u00a0\u00a0 The crowd that inhabits the surface of the earth has more staying power than people it is composed of, who rise up into it, stay for a while, then decline and are regathered within nature.\u00a0 This \u2018crowd dynamic\u2019 is not something each new generation is the causal producer of. \u00a0We come in as innocents in the manner that one enters into a skipping rope, if you don\u2019t get your behaviour attuned to what is already going on, you will be \u2018run over\u2019 by a truck, not just a rope.<\/p>\n
What I understand today is so far away from the \u2018stories\u2019 that were used to shape me in my youth, and the evolved versions that are being used to shape those growing up today, that I now\u00a0 look upon anarchists, and political extremists as \u2018part of the establishment\u2019 (i.e. as being limited in their ideas in the same way as ‘the establishment’)\u00a0 My eyes glaze over when I read Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent) though not so much for Howard Zinn (A People\u2019s History of the US). \u00a0\u00a0While I agree that the media feeds us propaganda, that in turn shapes whether we shall have war or peace or continue to support free-market capitalism, Zinn goes deeper than questions such as \u2018Is the US justified in its action, or is Iraq justified in its action?\u2019. \u00a0Zinn questions the legitimacy of the \u2018sovereign state\u2019 as the primary instrument of order in the world, and I too believe that our cosmology must have within it, a perspective on the wisdom of instituting sovereign states and property ownership (the foundation of the sovereign state) as our dominant mode of social organization.<\/p>\n
Zinn says;<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor—inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing— permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own.\u00a0 I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.\u00a0 Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.\u201d\u00a0 – Howard Zinn, \u2018A People\u2019s History of the United States\u2019.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As we do our thing, children around the world are being raised and educated not only without questioning the wisdom of organizing on the basis of \u2018sovereign states\u2019, but as Zinn notes, they are being inculcated with nationalistic fervor.<\/p>\n
How old should a child be, before one can share with him philosophical awareness?\u00a0 Certainly, the local brand of philosophy is being infused into her by the skipping rope technique.\u00a0 If he doesn\u2019t get in step, he is in trouble, and by getting in step, he is \u2018walking the philosophical talk\u2019 of the present day culture he is inextricably, mercilessly situationally included in (his\/her situation may be that of a poor family in a rich man\u2019s world, a black race in a white man\u2019s world, a female in a man\u2019s world).\u00a0 He has no choice but to \u2018take his place\u2019 or \u2018make his place\u2019 in such a situation.<\/p>\n
How does one share with a child, as he\/she is going to school and \u2018pledging allegiance to the flag\u2019, one\u2019s concern for the downside of sovereigntism as noted by Zinn and articulated by Einstein in the terms that \u2018Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of the world.\u2019<\/span>?<\/p>\n
We \u2018sign off\u2019 on giving permission to \u2018the educational system\u2019 to give our children a high pressure infusion of suspect philosophy, without having equipped him in advance to critically reflect on what he is being \u2018fed\u2019.<\/p>\n
He knows \u2018we love him\u2019 and wouldn\u2019t intentionally do him any harm, so he trusts what we have authorized others to infuse in him and thus to shape who he is, prior to his having developed his own powers of philosophical critique.<\/p>\n
We do this because we want him to be able to \u2018get along in the world as it is\u2019.\u00a0 Of course this is what is perpetuating \u2018the world as it is\u2019, with all its faults, and it does more than this, it sets him on a course that he is later highly likely to question the wisdom of.<\/p>\n
Now, Noam Chomsky can argue that \u2018an elite concensus has control over the mass media\u2019 so that \u2018dissidents are marginalized\u2019 and \u2018consent is manufactured by the elite\u2019 to, for example, take the country to war in Vietnam and Iraq\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 But such a proposition, however true, passes right over Einstein\u2019s above-cited proposition; i.e. who says it is a good idea to have countries?<\/p>\n
We have communities and these communities can span a continent and involve a global web of relations.\u00a0 We have \u2018nations\u2019 such as the Iroquois nation which had five different \u2018peoples\/tribes\u2019 who, together, had developed a \u2018constitution\u2019 called \u2018The Great Peace\u2019 or \u2018The Great Harmony\u2019 and we have nations within nations as in Canada whose Parliament has declared “That this House recognizes that the Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois form a nation<\/em> [a group of people who share culture, ethnicity and language] within a united Canada.”<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
The \u2018sovereign state\u2019 is an 16th<\/sup> century ‘secularized theological concept’ that should not be confused with \u2018nation\u2019 and \u2018community\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Law historians see it as the inevitable device born to facilitate European colonial expansion into Africa, the Americas and the world.\u00a0 (See D\u2019Errico et al at http:\/\/www.umass.edu\/legal\/derrico\/nowyouseeit.html<\/a> )<\/p>\n
So, Zinn deepens the inquiry as Einstein does and as John Lennon does in \u2018Imagine\u2019 (\u2018Imagine there\u2019s no countries. \/ It isn\u2019t hard to do. \/ … You may say I\u2019m a dreamer \/ But I\u2019m not the only one\/)<\/p>\n
In mentally lifting those sovereign state boundaries that were used as a colonizing device to seize and declare ownership of land, the nations and communities don\u2019t go away, but as Zinn suggests, without thinking of the borders and the nationalism, there is more of a tendency to think of the children of the world as \u2018our children\u2019 even while we are in dispute with their parents, as may happen within the community\/nation.\u00a0 Why should men destroy the children of those adults we are in dispute with by bombing their cities and burning their villages?<\/p>\n
There are some clues here as to the different foundations of the different cultures that the child within our culture never gets to see, or to receive teaching on.<\/p>\n
White children kidnapped by the Indians were accorded the full rights of any child within their indian community, while Indian children kidnapped by Whites were often treated as slaves or as second class citizens.\u00a0 By living with the Indians, the kidnapped white children overcame the stereotypes of Indians given to them by their white parents and came to see individual Indians as \u2018individuals\u2019 with distinct and complex characters.\u00a0 \u00a0For those of us who have lived with other cultures, even as adults, the cultural\/ethnic\/racial stereotypes similarly give way and we see them as richly complex individuals.\u00a0 Since the public is prone to media stereotyping and since many people, including school teachers, have not lived within other cultures, the potential for cultivating (from early childhood on) mass beliefs that \u2018we are better than you\u2019 \u00a0is large.<\/p>\n
Amerindians were \u2018stateless\u2019 people who believed that \u2018man belongs to the earth, the earth does not belong to man’. \u00a0They believed that we are all strands in the common web-of-life and thus they have the expression \u2018Mitakuye oyasin\u2019, meaning \u2018we are all related\u2019 or \u2018all my relatives\u2019 (including ‘grandfather’ [the whole ball of wax]).\u00a0 If we are all strands in a mutually interdependent web-of-life then the contention that ‘one is better than the other’ doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense. \u00a0This opens the door to a critical questioning of what \u2018morality\u2019 means in our culture and in others.<\/p>\n
When should our children be allowed to reflect on the underpinnings of the notion of \u2018good\u2019 and \u2018evil\u2019? \u00a0On the scale that ranges from \u2018good\u2019 to \u2018evil\u2019 where shall we plot those of the \u2018civilized\u2019 European races, and where shall we plot \u2018the aboriginal savages\u2019?<\/p>\n
Does \u2018good\u2019 and \u2018evil\u2019 apply to people, or does it merely apply to \u2018behaviour\u2019. \u00a0Can \u2018good people\u2019 like the white colonizers who treated captured Indian children like slaves score higher on the \u2018good-to-evil\u2019 index than those \u2018bad-assed Indians\u2019 who treated captured white children as full brothers?<\/p>\n
Morality and ethics are a complex topic.\u00a0 The notion of \u2018absolute good\u2019 and \u2018absolute evil\u2019 were embraced in the western European culture but not in the Amerindian culture.\u00a0 The western child may be taught that \u2018stealing\u2019 is always \u2018bad\u2019 and that those who steal must be punished, but soon he will be introduced to \u2018Robin Hood\u2019 and to \u2018Jean Valjean\u2019 who appear to be \u2018good men\u2019 in spite of their \u2018bad behaviour\u2019, a topic which would naturally lead to reflection on \u2018property ownership\u2019 (an unknown concept to Amerindians who had no words for it in their language before the colonizers arrived).\u00a0 Do we open the door for our children to question \u2018property ownership\u2019?\u00a0 Someone might then say they have \u2018Marxists\u2019 or \u2018Communists\u2019 for teachers, forgetting that the Amerindian cultural tradition is another way of understanding how to organize the social dynamic without dependency on ‘property ownership’.\u00a0\u00a0 Borrowing the land from the ‘not-yet’ (the unfolding living-space dynamic) or from the grandchildren-still waiting in the earth for their turn at life,\u00a0 and committing to return it to them in good shape (by ‘treading lightly upon it’) is radically different from seeing the land as something local that can be exploited as the ‘owner’ pleases.<\/p>\n