As a home educator of a 4th grader, when I'm not pulling my hair out with frustration, I am trying to find ways to help bring order out of the natural 4th grader's chaotic view of the world. That attempt often leads me to 5AM rambling thoughts about chaos and order in general, which may or may not make sense, but bear with me as I share some of my musings.
Above images from Yeatsvision.com http://www.yeatsvision.com/Geometry.html
The big picture first: most of human endeavor is an attempt to bring order of out the overwhelming and scary chaos of the universe. We enjoy our games, with rules galore, to such an extent that we can become obsessed and addicted. We pursue our educations and our careers, also pinnacles of attempts to bring order to knowledge and commerce.
As an aside, my 4th grader has asked me persistently since he was a first grader, who invented school? And what punishment did they give that guy?
Back to the big picture: we take the overarching human attempt to create order out of chaos to be noble and praiseworthy to the highest level, since it's self-evident that disorder brings a host of ills; look at those poor "savages" who live in squalor and disease. In general, we call all our human attempts to bring order, "civilization" and see the opposite as barbarous and uncivilized. In fact, there are those who believe that our attempt to overlay reality with human order, civilization, is the source of all good, and believe that unquestioningly. I have to admit personally that I probably can't exist in a world without clocks and calendars and street lights, but I can admit that those constructions are human overlays to the reality of this planet, and are not themselves the actual passage of time or the actual interaction of traffic. I can envision a time or a place without those constructions. I don't say I'm entirely comfortable with that vision, but I know that human civilizations actually do rise and fall, so "things fall apart," thank you Yeats and Achebe.
I worry that there are some of us, high-level decision makers, who take the human constructed order-making activity (I'm intentionally avoiding the word "civilization" because it's loaded with meaning for us all, and I'm trying to step outside the box for a minute) for granted, and assume that all humans embrace order as a basic good. I'm of the opinion, inspired by my 4th grader, that not all humans think order and rules and patterns and traditions and generally-agreed-upon human constructs are really so noble and praiseworthy. There is, within the human psyche of some, a deep resistance to having time patterns and date patterns and education patterns imposed on themselves, even when the full force of their own cultural traditions and history are brought to bear to train them to live and interact within these patterns. The movers and shakers, important decision makers who take civilization (okay, fine) for granted run into this resistance, and I worry that their first response is to declare war on it and feel justified that history will show them to be right and righteous in warring against what they consider evils that threaten out safety and security.
There, I've basically said it overtly so I might as well state this point, but it's hard: Warring on terror and terrorists is warring against those who are resisting having an alien pattern imposed upon them. This seems like it's stating the obvious but as our western civilization juggernaut rolls on through these centuries, resistance should be assumed. How the so-called civilized respond to the resistance becomes extremely important. If we don't ever question or admit that our civilization is merely one way that human beings have attempted to bring order to the chaos of the universe over humankind's tenure on this planet, if we portray ourselves as right and righteous and better merely because we are defending the patterns and traditions of of our western heritage, if we stand on that assumption in self-righteousness with pride and hubris, then we are most likely to continue to inspire suicidal resistance.
My subtitle is pride goeth before a fall, which brings me to the talk of apocalypse and 2012, which is something to consider for a future post, because my time is getting short for posting and I have to bring order, once again, to myself and my 4th grader.
Adding Yeats' poem here seems appropriate. I got the poem from here: http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
-end of poem-
From Wikipedia, I learned about gyre : "William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) used the term gyre in some of his poems, the most prominent being The Second Coming (poem). The gyre is two inverted vortexes that overlap quite considerably and they are a visual representation of the coming of a new era (Yates believed this happened every 2000 years). Generally the new era that comes is directly opposite of the era that has just past." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyre_(disambiguation)
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