I have a beef with David Orr.
Don’t get me wrong. I agree with everything he has to say in his otherwise wonderful and provocative book Earth in Mind. In the many years since its publication, it’s point remains (unfortunately) pressing, particularly the part where he suggests the siloing of education by field specialization is wrongheaded and undermines the potential solutions and innovations that a more interdisciplinary approach to knowledge would certainly yield. Or, as Orr puts it:
Much of what has gone wrong with the world is the result of education that alienates us from life in the name of human domination, fragments instead of unified, overemphasizes success and careers, separates feeling from intellect and the practical from the theoretical, and unleashes on the world minds ignorant of their own ignorance. (17)
I applaud Orr’s stating, clearly and succinctly, that the institution of education is best positioned to reverse the process of cultural decline. The state of education as I remember it and see it in the children of this era corroborates his position. I see the value in his proposition that the answer to this problem is “not to abolish or diminish formal education but rather to change it” (25).
I also agree with his highlighting that this proposition “requires breaking free of old pedagogical assumptions, of the straitjacketing of discipline-centric curriculum, and even the confinement in classrooms and school buildings.” (33)
Yet my beef remains. It is a blind spot in his argument; its softest, tenderest spot. Paradoxically, this blind spot also illustrates his point, declares itself loudly as it mimics the very problem he seeks to resolve in the balance of his book.
His proposal for the curriculum of the future is loudly declared as such:
No student should graduate from any educational institution without a basic comprehension of things like the following: · The laws of thermodynamics · The basic principles of ecology · Carrying capacity · Energetics · Least-cost, end-use analysis · Limits of technology · Appropriate scale · Sustainable agriculture and forestry · Steady-state economics, and · Environmental ethics. (14)
The omission is glaring. Do you see it?
I do.
I’m a student of literature. Based on David’s work I can see that he is too, even if his stance is most assuredly that of the environmental advocate. His book is littered with quotations and allusions invoking the words and authority of centuries of philosophers and authors. Weisel, Nietzsche, Bacon, Melville, Orwell, Snyder, Miller… the list is huge. Open a page, plop your finger down, and the odds are good you’ve landed within 2 inches from an authorial shoutout or a quotation of some kind. By quantity alone, these invocations are the allegorical backbone of his rhetoric.
And yet: literature didn’t make his list.
I’m sure we can all see why. Literature has suffered a bit of an application crisis. As a part of the great lump of subjects we call “the humanities,” fields like History and Anthropology operate within the realm of the real. We learn about our humanity from its past. Sociology tells us about our present. Literature tells us about these things too, but not via the realm of the real. Its realm is the imagination, and a limitless and ambiguous realm it is.
Where history tells us of the Battle of Hastings, which took place in 1066 in a field outside a town we now call Battle, UK, its discourse in the realm of the real is quantitative. We get years, geographical coordinates, and some impressive technological kit to help us to dig up artifacts that will either verify or challenge the truth of that history.
If we look to literature for the Battle of Hastings we find some first-hand accounts, some fiction, some poems. All appeal to the moment, but none are as easily verifiable as fact. All are subject to interpretation.
Yet for thousands of years, literature and the arts have been fundamental to how we experience the qualitative of these quantified events and ideas. If we, as occupants of the twenty-first century, wish to experience the Battle of Hastings rather than simply be aware that it happened, we might look to this poem by Marriott Edgar.
But a poem is a consciously artistic endeavour. It’s not intended to be literal, and often revels in obscure language. It’s intended to be enjoyed, experienced. “Poetry is the music of the soul” as Voltaire put it. And as music to the soul, and since we all have souls (except for perhaps some of our ex-partners), literature gives us an important discursive tool that should not be ignored: a common ground of understanding that goes beyond the surface. Stories, be they poetry or prose, can turn a farmer’s field into a pivotal moment in history, gravitas intact. History and economics can’t do that.
This is how Orr uses literature in his argument. He’s talking about abstract imperatives, but without the appeal to the soul that literature puts in his authorial tool chest his arguments would lose their potency. They are the keys to his rhetoric – ethos, pathos, logos, whatever. He gets it through the deployment of other people’s words. It’s not brain surgery. This isn’t an indictment of his technique. Indeed, the approach is both well warranted and persuasive. It’s just good writing. And, as any good writer will tell you in a book they have no doubt written on the subject: good writing starts with wide reading. Your communicative output, whether you’re a physics professor or a celebrity author of popular horror novels, is a reflection of the time and energy you’ve put into furnishing your inner library.
Our parents begin this process when they spoon-feed us stories at bedtime, teaching us our alphabets and phonics with alliterative nonsense. “Barber baby bubbles and a bumblebee.” It continues when we are force-fed our first Orwell and Shakespeare as students. “Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (Hamlet III iii). But many lose interest in literature upon entering adulthood, taking on more serious and ‘adult’ pursuits like the contemplation of an atom or the analysis of a financial statement.
But it’s too late. By the time we get to adulthood, we’re all readers. We’ve drunk the Kool-Aid™ of literature, and it has done its nefarious work without us realizing it. We can understand the subtext when we see it, we can parse cultural reference points without even realizing we’re doing it. We know who Melville was enough to get, at least, the gist of what someone is doing when they drop one of his quotes just the way Orr does. We are all students of literature.
So when Orr says of his list: “collectively, these are the foundation for the capacity to distinguish between health and disease, development and growth, sufficient and efficient, optimum and maximum, and ‘should do’ from ‘can do’” (14), but he fails to include literature in his list, he’s leaving his assertion that literature should be there as an unspoken implication available only to those willing to look between the cracks. “Of course, literature,” he might say. “I mean. Obviously.”
But the field of literature needs a hero right now. If the number of times I’ve been asked to justify my adherence to its study is any indication, its presence at the core of our ability to communicate the ideas and innovations we find in any field of study is implicit to the point of invisibility. And if Orr is content to dress his arguments in Melville without acknowledging the debt to which his allegory is owed, then he is part of the problem he seeks to resolve.
And that is my beef with David Orr.