In Saturday’s Fresno Bee, Andrew Fiala, Director of the Ethics Center at Fresno State, wrote a whole-hearted column defending the place of enlightenment in our nation’s constitution and educational system. Although I have worked hard to become a reputable and responsible product of that system, his column left me feeling torn, like someone standing with the Great Continental Divide running between each foot.
I admire and like Dr. Fiala: he came to speak at Lindsay’s Cultural Arts
Center last fall about the cultural roots of violence, and his research appeared
to me to be useful and important. In
writing a regular column for the Bee, Fiala is spreading that usefulness beyond
the university’s bounds, much like what I try to do with my column in this
paper. I see him as an ally.
But
Saturday’s piece traced a fault line
that runs through this country’s mentality between the so-called enlightened
and the so-called unenlightened, a strike-slip fault like the San Andreas where
each side inexorably moves in the opposite direction of the other, tearing up
the zone between them. In defining and
defending “enlightenment,” Fiala was trying to describe the sometimes invisible
place of liberal values in this otherwise conservative region. But knowledge, that hoped-for product of
enlightenment thinking, does not always lead down a liberal path, or even a
progressive one.
Over the last 100 years some of the
world’s greatest political tyrants have been highly educated (Cambodia’s Pol
Pot, for example.) Universities have
produced some of the hardest-line conservatives the world has known, and not
just in the area of national defense. Decades
of promulgation of the Green Revolution and the structure of agribusiness
around the world have destroyed native cultures and ecologies whose knowledge
bases and ways of living were sustainable.
They were replaced by what is not sustainable at great cost to people,
places and the future of the world. The
hope I once had for enlightenment thinking has been replaced by a giant
suspicion of academics not unlike that of the Trump followers.
“Enlighten the people generally, and
tyranny and oppression will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day,” Fiala
quoted Thomas Jefferson. I love to quote
Jefferson and often do, despite being chastised by the politically-correct foes
of racism who apparently remind Fiala as well as myself of Jefferson’s
ownership of slaves. But enlightenment
of people does not eliminate the source of tyranny and oppression, which as
often comes from someone who considers himself (or herself) more enlightened
than the people referred to above. It
might prepare them better to resist or eventually conquer tyrants and
oppressors, but it certainly does not erase those evil spirits from our days.
Four decades ago, when I was a
26-year-old student new to UC Berkeley (notably a land grant college,) I was
escorted by an elderly, retired economics professor to the north side of the
campus to read the inscription on the ag building, Hilgard Hall. His name was Paul Taylor, and he’d devoted
his life and his career to defending both the family farm and the rights of
farm laborers, protecting the acreage limitation and residency provisions of
federal reclamation law until they were decimated by enlightenment thinking and
politics in 1992.
The inscription reads “To rescue for
human society the native values of rural life,” a sentiment which bridges the
leaking divide between two ways of knowing.
It is academic acknowledgement of the value of those who might not be
seen as ‘enlightened.” It is an
intention, a statement of purpose and responsibility, not just a declaration of
virtue.
It also expresses understanding of a
potential danger – that human society might become torn from its sustaining
roots – as well as indicating the tonic needed.
Forty years after reading the inscription, I still think it shows the
way to become continent again.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy
Wischemann is an agrarian advocate who is editing a book of writings on
Agriculture and the Common Good with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston. Thanks to Jim Likins and Ronald Abee for their
comments this week. You can send your
stories of rural life c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
No comments:
Post a Comment