We went to the movies yesterday. The show started with a preview of “Monument Men,” George
Clooney’s flick about a group of art experts whose mission was to save European
art masterpieces at the end of World War II. Clooney describes the mission as (paraphrasing),
“saving the foundation of our civilization.” Then, the movie began: “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a true story about self-absorbed
criminals who operated under the dictum, “the best way to get rich is to ignore
the rules.” This wasn’t a
cautionary tale, but a celebration of a con man’s success. The protagonist, who was responsible for
stealing more than $200 million from investors, wound up spending less than two
years in jail and is now being promoted on b national news and elsewhere as a
“motivational speaker.” Interestingly,
this movie celebrating sociopathic greed had the biggest crowd of any we’ve
been to this winter.
When we got home, we got the news that three people had been
killed during a shooting at the Columbia Mall, near where we used to live. We were reminded during the news
coverage that there had been at least one public shooting incident—in a school
or other public place—every day last week. Later, I read that a Penn State-Altoona student from Russia
had been arrested that same day for building a weapon of mass destruction in
Altoona, about 45 miles from our home.
That got me looking for facts. Between December 2012—the month of the Sandy Hook/Newtown
elementary school massacre—and December 2013, there were 12,042 gun deaths in
the United States (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html). Mother
Jones reported that, during that same year, at least 194 children have been
shot to death; of these, 103 were murders, 84 were accidents, 3 were suicides,
and 4 had unclear motives (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/children-killed-guns-newtown-anniversary). Within a single year, the death of so
many children at Sandy Hook has faded from the public consciousness—and
conscience. We simply don’t
connect with those lost lives. We
don’t see them as our children, our neighbors, our fellow citizens. They became, in just a year, statistics—facts
out of context of the reality of daily life, while murder in public places
became an almost routine part of life in America.
We know that culture is changing not just in America, but
around the World as a new global information society matures. However, that’s no excuse for the way Americans
have become accepting of everyday violence in our society. What holds a democracy together is not
just the idea of individual liberty, but the understanding that we live in a
community: we establish government so that each of us can protect all of
us. Today, we seem to be turning
responsibility for community over to the so-called free market. Corporate and industrial interests,
rather than community interests, carry the day. It is time for us to ask: what is our proper relationship—as individual
Americans—to the community in which we live? Wendell Berry has made that question the focus of his work
for many years. In It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson
Lectures and Other Essays, he writes:
For humans to have a responsible
relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a
place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by
its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow
members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the
need to grant a sort of pre-emptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the
neighbors, with whom we share the world.
As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And in affection we find the
possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy. (Kindle version, pp.
13-14)
How, in this global economy, can we create affection—a
pre-emptive sympathy--for our local community and the neighbors who live in it
with us? How can we imagine our
place in this new environment?
Here’s a thought:
William Irwin Thompson some years back wrote about a model for
understanding our place in the world—the “expanding communities” model. It assumed that, over the history of
human existence, humans have had to expand their understanding of their
relationship with the world. It is
a cultural process that mirrors what we all go through as we mature. As small children, our immediate family
is our community. As we grow, that
expands to our neighborhood, our school, our town, and then as we grow, we
become part of broader communities—our state, our nation, our region, etc. With each step, we assume a broader public identity and personalize or privatize
the older identify.
Let’s take that idea of expanding communities as the basis
for a civics-oriented general education that begins in pre-school and continues
into graduate education. Early on,
the goal would be to help young children imagine and gain an affection for
their school as their public community and for their family as their private
community. In elementary school,
we would help students imagine their relationship to increasingly broader
communities, and, in high school, help them see their role as citizens, voters,
tax payers, workers by teaching civics, the Constitution, and how we have, as a
society, solved the problems of democracy. Then, as we move into college, we would focus on ensuring
that students imagine the impact of their chosen professional in the community
and help them develop a sympathy and affection for how they will contribute to
that community.
Such a curriculum must also include a service component—certainly
from high school forward and, perhaps earlier. The purpose is to engage students in a community so that they
begin to develop an awareness and, one hopes, an affection for being part of a specific
community. Ideally, a year of
service—not necessarily military service, but many avenues of service to the
community—could be a natural transition from high school to college or
vocational training. Similarly, upper
division internships and practica in professional programs would help students
better understand the professional community that they are preparing to join.
It has been a while since educators have seen that kind of
continuity as a common thread of responsibility across institutions. Industrialized education has tended to
fragment learning, making general education a sampling of disciplines, separate
from their professional studies, rather than a preparation for exercising one’s
profession in the community. Too
often, general education is like Monument
Men—an attempt to save the past—rather than a way to help students of all
ages and interests to imagine their community and their role in it. Our job, as Berry notes, must be to
help students imagine their place in the world so that they can develop a
responsible relationship to it. In
this context, “affection” stands as a context for learning that motivates and
guides students. “Knowledge
without affection,” Berry writes, “leads us astray. Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope” (p.
34).
