Education today is still completely parochial and we will now give an example of making education completely cosmopolitan (i.e., based on global “inputs”).
There’s a Japanese critique of the entire Western tradition of technology-and-man defeating nature. We will come to the Japanese critique in a moment. First, we remind the reader of Western ideas of man as conqueror of nature: think of Sophocles’ classic play Antigone where perhaps the most famous choral ode in Greek drama occurs, “Ode to Man” which celebrates man’s techno-rise (our word technology derives from Greek “techne”):
“Humanity has built
ships to conquer the seas, crafted plows to tame the earth, bent animals to his will, raised houses to defeat the rain and the snow.”
Nearly everything is
about humanity asserting its will over nature.
One finds a restatement of this conquest-of nature theme in fellow Greek dramatist Aeschylus in his great Prometheus Bound, where he criticizes the men of old in their pre-Promethean ignorance:
Prometheus:
“They handled all things
in bewilderment and confusion. They did not know of building houses with bricks to face the sun; they did not know how to work in wood. They lived like swarming ants in holes in the ground, in the sunless caves of the earth. For them there was no secure token by which to tell winter nor the flowering spring nor the summer with its crops; all their doings were without intelligent calculation until I showed them the rising of the stars, and the settings, hard to observe. And further I discovered to them numbering, pre-eminent among subtle devices, and the combining of letters as a means of remembering all things, the Muses’ mother, skilled in craft.
“It was I who first
yoked beasts for them in the yokes and made of those beasts the slaves of trace
chain and pack saddle that they might be man’s substitute in the hardest tasks;
and I harnessed to the carriage, so that they loved the rein, horses, the
crowning pride of the rich man’s luxury. It was I and none other who discovered
ships, the sail-driven
wagons that the sea buffets. Such were the contrivances that I discovered for
men.
“Greatest was this: in the former times if a man fell sick he had no defense against the sickness, neither healing food nor drink, nor unguent; but through the lack of drugs men wasted away, until I showed them the blending of mild simples wherewith they drive out all manner of diseases…It was I who made visible to men’s eyes the flaming signs of the sky that were before dim. So much for these. beneath the earth, man’s hidden blessing, copper, iron, silver, and gold—will anyone claim to have discovered these before I did?
“One brief word will tell the whole story: all arts that mortals have come from Prometheus.”
(Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, University of Chicago Press, Aeschylus II, 1956, pages 155-156)
One can begin to see how
“Promethean man” culminates in Francis Bacon’s (died in 1626) admonition to “place
Nature on the rack so that man might force her to tell her secrets.”
Thus, the Western
tradition comes close to a war on nature itself.
Now we come to a
critique of this from Japan on the other side of the Pacific:
Natsume Sōseki (died in 1916), the greatest writer in modern Japanese literature, has a protagonist in the 1913 classic Kojin (“The Wayfarer”):
“Constant motion
and flow is our very fate.”
“Man’s insecurity stems
from the advance of science. Never once has science, which never ceases to move
forward, allowed us to pause.
From walking to rickshaw, from rickshaw to
carriage, from carriage to train, from train to automobile, from there on to
the dirigible, further on to the airplane, and further on and on—no matter how
far we may go, it won’t let us take a breath. How far it will sweep us along,
nobody knows for sure. It is really frightening.”
(Sōseki, The Wayfarer, Tuttle Books, 1967, page 285)
This sense of things that Promethean/Baconian man will place mankind in a runaway train with no brakes or endpoint is a critique that makes us think. The counterargument that we know of no other way out of poverty is “co-valid” and we have a kind of legitimate “argument without end” which cannot be easily dismissed. We cannot really divide the world into proponents of science/technology on the one side and Luddites on the other. That is too simplistic. There are legitimate concerns about de-humanization through modern science and technology in Adorno and Horkheimer, say, who fear a global shipwreck based on this “runaway train with no brakes or endpoint.” The current climate change crisis comes to mind.
Our main point here is not to enter this
argument or to take sides but to show the reader how a cosmopolitan “post-parochial” education might look
and how this kind of meta-intelligent pedagogy would be deeply “eye-opening”
and help the Wittgenstein process where “light dawns gradually over the whole”
as we have seen.
Cosmopolitan Re-Education That Includes Movies and Songs
Another
dimension of cosmopolitanism in education is the complete assimilation of
movies and songs into the analysis (i.e., all-media cosmopolitanism). here’s a
movie example that continues the argument between the conquer nature position
and de-humanization fears.
Think of the movie Things to Come.
Things to Come is a 1936 movie masterpiece based on an H.G. Wells sociological sci-fi masterpiece.
In the last minutes of the movie, there’s an exchange between “John Cabal” (played by Raymond Massey) who looks at the stars and says, “All or nothing. We must conquer all of it or disappear. No rest for man in general.”
The
other man (“Passworthy”) radically differs: “we are such small little creatures
and cannot live that way.”
The storyline of this movie:
A global war begins in 1940. This war drags out over many decades until most of the people still alive (mostly those born after the war started) do not even know who started it or why. Nothing is being manufactured at all any more and society has broken down into primitive localized communities. In 1966, a great plague wipes out most of what people are left but small numbers still survive. One day a strange aircraft lands at one of these communities and its pilot tells of an organization which is rebuilding civilization and slowly moving across the world re-civilizing these groups of survivors. Great reconstruction takes place over the next few decades and society is once again great and strong. The world’s population is now living in underground cities.
In the year 2035, on the eve of man’s first flight
to the moon, a popular uprising against progress (which some people claim has
caused the wars of the past) gains support and becomes violent.
