December 19, 2014 - 08:47
Nathália Santos
Jody Cohen
Paper #13
12/18/2014
Ontological Enlightenment
The lack of connection with the Environment generates problems that go beyond Climate Change, as an incomplete understanding of the concept of equality, fraternity and even liberty. Being those last three, the main pillars of the Age of Enlightenment. This is why for this essay I promote the term Ontological Enlightenment, a mix of Education and Change using Ontology as main pillar. It’s important to clarify that Education is something already consolidated in you. After Educating someone about how to behave towards the environment in the Elementary School, is necessary to Change what was learned.
Let’s start with Empathy. We learn that before judging someone, we have to “walk on their shoes”. Ursula LeGuin portrayed on The Ones Who Walks Away From Omelas how empathy can be a problem. As the residents of the town, we believe our happiness depends on the pain of a child, or in our case, our planet. Do the people from Omelas actually grasp what is going on with that kid? Is the impact of that kid being felt by anyone, directly? How exactly are the ones who walk away different from the ones who stay? They are empathic with what the kid is going on and they run away from that hypocritical world. Maybe that’s why they don’t act. Cause empathy exists because of inequality. The kid is not a priority for them, because somehow the ones who walks away believe the happiness of a whole town depends on the pain of that kid. That’s where the Ontological Education takes place, learning that the importance of each one is the same, that empathy is a feeling that should not exist if everyone has the same thought. Not just in human relationships, but also in relationships with the environment.
The environment isn’t doing well right now and Elizabeth Kolbert in her book The Six Extinction, shows how the next mass extinction is being speeded up by human beings. In chapter six, she reports a series of tests that proved the Coral Reefs would disappear thanks to something called Ocean Acidification, provoked by chemical reactions of greenhouse gases we emit and the water. That was the first time I realized that our actions have such a negative impact. Kolbert gave me the information, but that did not stop me from maintaining some bad habits and did not made that one of my priorities. So how exactly could we enlighten people in a way that the environment stops being the scenery and start being part of the main characters on the Play of Life.
“Don’t litter!” I can clearly recall the day my father said that. “The trash you throw here ends up on the drains, what helps the flooding and makes that river water even dirtier.” I never considered myself an environmentalist for never littering after that, I just learned a habit after logical reasoning. Not because I cared about that damn river, but because I had that dirty water entering my house and damaging furniture. Just like that, Van Jonesappeals to the personal problem, to attack the public one. Green Jobs would be both sustainable and help poor people. But the environmental change is not Jones focus. Like me, he just killed two birds with one stone. Van Jones is trying to promote change.
However, how do we define change? Analyzing it under the Transtheoretical model, created by James O. Prochaska, it happens in 5 stages: Pre-contemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action and Maintenance. Starting by denial, then the realization of the advantages of changing and the other names are pretty much self-explanatory. Kolbert takes us out of pre-contemplation, by making us acknowledge the problem, but she doesn’t guide us through the whole changing process; this might have not been her objective, but I still think she wastes her opportunity to prompt us to act. Preparation is Jones failure and his “change” is not directly on the environmental side, but on the social one. Even so, he fails because he doesn’t plan ahead. What thing may fail during my plan, is one of the things he should have asked himself.
Another person that deals with Ontological change is Heidegger. He is an Educator and wants to change the way early Education is presented to kids. He challenges the modern view of Education by saying we misunderstood the concept of paideia. More than just “Liberal Arts Education”, paideia, under Heidegger’s vision involve an acknowledgment of the importance of the environment. Not allowing Sciences or Humanities as the only answers like Bruno Latour argues in Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.
Bruno Latour puts the blame of the lack of connection with the Environment on the current human mindset and subversion of the sense of objectivity. Physics models, for instance, are accepted by the community due to their applicability, because they are most useful abstraction, however, they are being taken as absolute truth and the Scientific Thinking is being linked to objectivity.“Purity is not what science is made of: behind the force, the wings of angels are still invisibly flapping” (Latour). Newton studied Physics to try to prove the existence of God and was considered an Enlightenment thinker. He has a part of Physics named after him, despite his original thought of angels producing the forces of his Newtonian Mechanics due the applicability of his laws in aviation for instance. Even after we know the world does not behave as Newton described, we still take his word and teach that Physics in every school. We take his three physics laws as catholic people take the 10 commandments.
Latour devoted his fidelity to another “God”, I’d dare to say: Gaia, not the Greek Goddess, but the living being of which we are parasites. Like Avatar’s Pandora we all play out role with the same importance. For each animal lost, even the ones that try to hurt us, we mourn and then thank for the sacrifice. How would we change the current mindset where the economy dictates the concerns to the Avatar one. To Latour’s one. How do we promote change from here?
The way to use such information to enlighten people is start teaching ontologically at schools and adapting the change process to older people. Step by step. Changing is hard and needs to be a guided and collective process. First let’s show the problem, as Kolbert successfully did. Then let’s mimic Jones and present arguments that would be enough to convince anyone to change. Let’s prepare a change that involves more than just the American dream. Let’s change the mindset. Let’s stop with empathy, living in the past. Then let’s act keeping in mind why we changed in the first place. Not because we learned from the past, the past is gone. Not because we are scared of the Future, the future is still to come. But because real liberty and equality are the ideals by which we are supposed to live.
Works Cited
Kolbert, Elizabeth. "Greening the Ghetto: Can a Remedy Serve for both Global Warming and Poverty?" The New Yorker (January 12, 2009).
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Print.
Latour, Bruno. "Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene." New Literary History 45, 1 (Winter 2014): 1-18.
LeGuin, Ursula The Ones Who Walk Away from Ormelas. The Wind's Twelve Quarters. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
Thomson, Iain. “Heidegger on Ontological Education, or How We Become What We Are”. Inquiry, vol.44, no. 3, pp.243-68.