Tag: History

Education and Ambiguity Awareness: A Polyvalent World

Sleepwalkers and sleepwalking are both destructive and constructive and show us the ambiguity in all phenomena.

The World War I chronicle of Professor Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, from 2012, is described this way:

On the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station, Europe was at peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that resulted would kill more than fifteen million people, destroy three empires, and permanently alter world history.

The Sleepwalkers reveals in gripping detail how the crisis leading to World War I unfolded. Drawing on fresh sources, it traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts among the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade.

Distinguished historian Christopher Clark examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.

How did the Balkans—a peripheral region far from Europe’s centers of power and wealth—come to be the center of a drama of such magnitude? How had European nations organized themselves into opposing alliances, and how did these nations manage to carry out foreign policy as a result? Clark reveals a Europe racked by chronic problems—a fractured world of instability and militancy that was, fatefully, saddled with a conspicuously ineffectual set of political leaders. These rulers, who prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism, stumbled through crisis after crisis and finally convinced themselves that war was the only answer.

On the other hand, the great science writer and intellectual Arthur Koestler (died in 1983) in his own book, The Sleepwalkers, (originally, 1959) argues that the revolution in cosmology associated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, et al depended on visionary thinking, a kind of “sleepwalking.”

Lastly, the classic novel, The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch (died in 1851) condemns sleepwalking as the basis of Europe and Germany’s descent into nightmare.

Important works by Broch are The Sleepwalkers (German: “Die Schlafwandler,” 1932) and The Guiltless (German: “Die Schuldlosen,” 1950). The Sleepwalkers is a trilogy, where Broch takes “the degeneration of values” as his theme. Various generations are depicted as sleepwalking through their times and eras without any ability to “see past” their time, place, era. They were “sleepwalking.” This made them liable to demagogic deceptions and recruitment.

On the other hand, the experience and story of Kekulé (died 1896) and his scientific discoveries prodded by dreams and reveries and sleepwalking give us a story that argues against seeing sleepwalking as always negative:
Kekulé’s dream and “good kinds of sleepwalking.”

Friedrich August Kekulé, later Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz (7 September 1829 – 13 July 1896), was a German organic chemist. From the 1850s until his death, Kekulé was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure.

The new understanding of benzene (C6H6), and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé’s honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper.

Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory.

He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).

Kekulé’s story of “dreaming up” the structure of benzene (C6H6) gives us another historical example of Arthur Koestler-type “good sleepwalking” ie visionary dreams and reveries that really enhance “objective” concrete scientific analysis and not only art works.

It is educational to see the inner ambiguity of words and phenomena (such as sleepwalking) because this duality and “polyvalence” applies to many cases.

Education and the Problem of Historical Denials

There’s a deep reason that guarantees the insipid feel of most historical courses and textbooks used in schools at all levels. The problem is that the underlying savagery of history is never really faced but is always fudged over. The books and courses in schools of all levels tend to be “tangential” to any reality.

One of the underlying “motors” of all history is the land question in its two aspects:

1. The National Land Question

Which groups and buccaneers grabbed which land?

Thus North America (USA & Canada) was “taken” by European settlers and various kinds of “ethnic cleansing” took place. (See, say, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee).

Parallel processes took place everywhere including China, Russia, etc.

The truth of these historo-crimes at the root of all history is then avoided “forever.”

This makes all discussions of who got what and why, where and when escapist at best.

2. The Private Land Question

Countries like those in Central America were characterized by the fact that when the European empires such as Spain were removed from “ownership,” handfuls of elite families took al the best farmland and parlayed that into political power. Those the top coffee growers have dominated Central America for centuries and the landless and indigenous are in a permanent emergency. Questioning this distribution leads to mass murders such as under Guatemala’s Ríos Montt (died 2018) in the 1980s.

These two “land questions”—the national and the private—are at the core of all world history and this means that failure to put these truths on the table of educational analysis, leads to “let’s pretend” “denial detours.”

There is a fundamental historical dishonesty that governs the educational process and since “the truth will make you free,” it follows that “the untruth will make you unfree” (i.e., “captive mind” syndrome everywhere).

Education and Causality Changes

Scientific classification
Kingdom:Animalia
Phylum:Chordata
Class:Mammalia
Order:Primates
Suborder:Haplorhini
Infraorder:Simiiformes
Family:Hominidae
Subfamily:Homininae
Tribe:Hominini
Genus:Homo
Species:H. naledi
Binomial name:Homo naledi
Berger et al., 2015

The box above shows you, if you reflect for a moment, how involved and hierarchical taxonomy can be. The box refers to the tremendous fossil finds around 2013 outside Johannesburg, South Africa by Professor Lee Berger of Witwatersrand University and his team and associates in caves nearby.

The fossil finds are determined to be “homo” and not “australo” as you see in the table above (to the right of the word genus).

The PBS NOVA program “Dawn of Humanity” (2015), is about the story of these fossil finds and the interpretations of the finds which are deeply instructive for all knowledge-seekers, students, etc. because they leave behind any idea of a linear clearly branching “tree of life” in favor of the “bushiness” of evolution (no clear tree structure) and the whole process finally seen as a “braided stream.” This refers to a geological concept of the multiple pathways and reticulations of glacial ice and snow melt going down a mountain valley to a lake. The rivulets, channels, are crisscrossing in a “fluvial” flow pattern that is so complex one doesn’t know exactly which “exact” water went into the lake. If you say the lake is “homo sapiens” (humanity) and the swirling bushy tangled flow is the evolutionary raw material, some final causality is elusive.
When a “braided stream” (this kind of glacial water flow) metaphor gets fused with a “bushiness” one, then one sees that the random factors and endless crisscrossing obscures linear mono-causal explanations as we always imagined.

If you imagine a time when these concepts are applied to history, economy, and society you can begin to sense many “causality revolutions” in front of us where today’s textbooks will seem charmingly naive.

Every student, enrolled or not, should ponder the concepts of “braided stream” taxonomy (shown in the initial table above) and “bushiness” as opposed to tree structure. The student might also “walk around” these metaphors and ask what they imply for the “fractal geometry of nature” (a twig is like a little tree or branch on a bigger tree or branch and so on).

Essay 28: The World Understood As “Grievance Machine: Missing Education in Symbolic Wounds”

Standard textbooks on history always give a narrative of kings and battles, routs and rallies. Some mention various vested interests.

Books never seem to grasp the deep truth that history everywhere is a national and personal “dignity quest” while food and job/wage insecurity are certainly co-factors that cannot be ignored.  Slogans like “Make America Great Again” play to this hunger for another “championship season.”

Amartya Sen of Harvard gives us a useful overview of this “dignity story” when he writes:

“The devastating effects of humiliation on human lives can hardly be exaggerated. The historical ills of the slave trade and colonization (and the racial insults that were added to physical and social injury) have been seen as ‘the war against Africa’ by the Independent Commission on Africa, which identifies Africa’s principal task today as ‘winning the war against humiliation’ (the chosen title of its report). As the Commission argues, the subjugation and denigration of Africa over the last few centuries have left a massively negative legacy against which the people of the continent have to battle. That legacy includes not only the devastation of old institutions and the forgone opportunity to build new ones, but also the destruction of social confidence, in which so much else depends.

“Africa which gave birth to the human race and was responsible for many of the pioneering developments in the growth of world civilization, was turned into a continent of European domination and the hunting ground for slaves to be transported like animals to the New World.”

(Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, 2006, Allen Lane Penguin Books, page 86.)

This has also led to the proliferation of counter-narratives which are perhaps too “Afrocentric” and thus distort things going the other way.

The 20th century psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and others use the phrase “symbolic wounds” and it must be seen that such wounds lurk everywhere in human society and memory and world history, past and present, which cannot be even remotely grasped without acknowledging the centrality of these scars.

The contemporary French thinker Pierre Nora has tried to explore these nightmare-memories in the collective mind and should be considered in this humiliation/dignity epic tale that governs much of human “thinking.”