This has deeply shaken his faith (and that's what it truly is) that the administration is working intelligently (or at all) to protect Americans from terrorism.... Dwayne Monroe
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I didn't mean to cut off discussion about one to one encounters. My mind was on other projects...
As a matter of fact I have one to one encounters all the time, almost daily. I also have one work buddy I have been helping get through night classes at a local community college.
But this semester something fascinating happened. I had suggested he try anthropology to fill out lower division units. Last week I asked how his semester was turning out and he said he probably flunked anthro. I was shocked. What anthro? It turned out to be physical anthropology. Shit, why didn't you say anything, I could have helped you at least get through it... Nobody likes physical anthro. I meant cultural! Damn...
As the conversation progressed, it turned out that he couldn't get around the core historical confrontation in physical anthropology between human evolution and the bible. So here we were back to the Scoopes trial in Oakland in the 21st Century.
This guy is not a fundamentalist. He was raised in Oakland and went to traditional Black churches on Sundays, and for weddings, funerals, etc. I also know that behind these traditional christian beliefs is a period in his twenties and thirties (he is now in his fifties) when he had drug and alcohol problems and went through two marriages. He used traditional religion and his church as support to get out of those scenes. So Christianity had a more personal meaning to him.
I told him that if he had to repeat the class, he was going to have to figure out a way to live in two worlds, one for the class and one for his beliefs.
So here is a significant problem, a giant hurdle.
I called up my bio-physics buddy and ask him how to get around this scene and he suggested the historical approach and a book called The Death of Adam, by Greene, Iowa State Uni Press, 1959. I ordered a used copy (nine bucks or so) and got it today at work. Here is a passage from page 13:
``In vain did Newton and his colleagues seek to restrict science to the study of the existing order of nature, its beauty, regularity, and wise contrivance. As the principles of the new mechanical philosophy were applied to the study of the earth's crust and its productions, man himself not excepted, there was a growing realization of the mutability once assumed, a vastly extended time perspective and a sense of the relativity of human conceptions followed as attempts were made to explain nature's phenomena in terms of her daily operations. The habit of regarding the physical environment as subservient to the sentient creation then lost its hold, and the adaptation of living organisms was seen to be a matter of dire necessity rather than of a wise contrivance. Chance and struggle, the antithesis of pre-established harmony and providence, claimed a share in the process of creation as biologists sought to understand the production of new varieties and species. Throughout this entire process of discovery the search for workable scientific explanations was colored and often confused by a sustained effort to save the great doctrines of revelation and creation which had oriented Western man to his universe for centuries and had infused science itself with meaning and purpose...''
Sounds too mannered and high flown doesn't it. The point is, if you care how your friends view the world, then it is much more difficult to deal with these hurdles.
What makes Joe different is he is going back to school more than thirty years after high school. This is the first time he has ever confronted the classic evolution v. creation conflict in such stark and poignant terms.
I am of two minds here. First of all this is just about as good as it gets in education or in a life of the mind for that matter. Here is a guy who is beginning to face one of the most important intellectual controversies in western history, in just as raw, naive and sincere terms as it was first encountered about four hundred years ago. Whether he realizes it or not, he has the opportunity to discover and therefore recapitulate in his own terms the core revolution of science and its application to the world of humanity and society. Behind this immediate discovery lays another, the fundamental ontological change from a fixed world of immutable forms and unvarying processes, to a transformational world so animated and dynamic that it has almost nothing fixed, immutable or given to it in advance.
But on the other hand, I am pretty sure this kind of discovery won't happen because I've never seen it happen. And then, also the whole idea that people change their beliefs based on anything external to those beliefs seems highly unlikely. In fact it is probably this very immutability and fixity of a once and for all creation, that makes it such an attractive conceptual frame to people tossed about in the waves of meaningless change and arbitrary allocation of fates.
Instead of bugging Joe about this, I decided to read the book and maybe some ideas will fall out from the history itself...
Chuck Grimes