| I have argued that society is organic.
That we have perhaps lived past the usefulness of certain metaphors of
organism, particularly certain heirarchical metaphors, doesn't convince
me that human society is itself either accidental or arbitrary. I have
said on another page that I think it is possible to think of the music
of Bach as the fulfillment of human nature. Cities, hospitals,
libraries, shopping centers, and even universities, can also be thought
of as fulfillments of human nature. The human is the cultural, I would
argue. I have just finished discussing Frederick Douglass's
autobiography with a class. One of the things we talked about was
Douglass's discovery that his enslavement meant to deprive him of
humanity by depriving him of culture. He declares that it was the
language of argument, which he learned from a book called "The
Columbian Orator," which gave him the means first to articulate his
hatred of unfreedom and his anger at those who had enslaved him, and
second to understand the depths of his misery and to form the intention
to escape. To recapitulate, Douglass's owners wished to dehumanize him
of depriving him of culture; Douglass fought back by acquiring culture,
even if that meant that he had to become a part of the society which had
enslaved him, and it is interesting that he completed learning to read
by asking questions of boys on the street. Douglass is a wonderful
example of the proposition that human empowerment, however it expresses
itself, occurs within culture, and uses language, involves a text. That
is what I believe Aristotle meant when he argued that humans are by
nature political, and it is what I mean when I say that I believe human
society is organic. To skip to the end of the argument, we possess human
nature as individuals, to be sure, but human nature is in itself
corporate, it seems to me; it starts with DNA. Everybody's is different,
to be sure, but nobody who possesses human DNA grows up to be an oak
tree. I would be the last person to deny the educational worth of the
master/apprentice model, since I have spent much of my life being
somebody's apprentice to my very great good.
[Posted At Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, 8 March 1998] |