"Forgive This Tribe:" The World Is Not for Us

This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings.

—william james, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

"I am not one and simple, but complex and many."

—virginia woolf, The Waves (1931)

Car ici-bas il n'ya pas du tout de fins. Toutes ces choses que nous prenons pour des fins sont de moyens. C'est là une vérité évidente. L'argent est un moyen d'acheter, le pouvoir est un moyen de commander. Il en est ainsi, plus ou moins visiblement, de tout ce que nous nommons des biens. [For here below there are no ends. All the things that we take for ends are means. That is an obvious truth. Money is the means of buying, power is the means of commanding. It is the same, more or less visibly, for all that we call the good.]

—simone weil, Attente de Dieu (1942)

We who make thinking our business have a task to last us for our time.

—hans jonas, "Technology and Responsibility" (1973)

The artist is the canary in the coal-mine.

—joni mitchell, Woman of Heart and Mind (2003)

A disruption in monsoon patterns, a shift in ocean currents, a major drought—any of these could easily produce streams of refugees numbering in the millions. As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

—elizabeth kolbert, Field Notes From a Catastrophe (2006)

Forgive this tribe

—bjÖrk, "Earth Intruders," Volta (2007)

I begin by discussing where we start from, those of us who labor in the university classroom for the benefit of our students. My starting place looks back, however, at the history shared by both groups. Teachers in the humanities, in the sciences, students who embark on college life according to a notion of betterment broadly or narrowly defined, all of us have moved through the educational structures that preceded our current position, structures assuming that the "abstractions" of cognitive deeds affect the actuality of human conduct, given the many years we must consign to learning the shapes of thought. But, since the doing well implied by "benefit" requires that we should acknowledge what goodness demands of us, we ought to recall that—with regard to the writing weighed so heavily by universities, regardless of discipline—our students originate from a high school system where, in general, to craft essays is to generate thesis statements whose evidential materials prove their truth-value. Taught to figure an equals sign between thesis and evidence, the student moves, necessarily, in those small spaces that equalities circumscribe. Yet, if uninformed that this essayistic model amounts to one among many, that its application functions to aid the student in achieving entry into college or into the work force beyond any high school, the nearly fledged writer is guided to confuse deduction with equivalence, to mistake the thesis-driven formula, opportunistic due to its localized use, for the essay itself. The danger here ramifies by the student's being led to understand that his knowledge of essaying has reached its end. But that danger persists for the college professor, too. As her membership in scholastic activities often appears to enforce her dedication to the customary argument that "this" can only be antithetical or equal to "that," the essay's developmental arc—leading out from how a writer thinks under the surfaces of what her textual evidence seems to say—becomes lost, forgotten, as though its prime begetter, Michel de Montaigne, had never been.

In my own case, after teaching for thirteen years in...