Until recently I taught a course at George Mason University entitled "Our Common Future". The premise of that course was that if we intend to build a sustainable future we are going to have to change the basic patterns of our lives. These changes must be models of how we intend to live in the developed west in an atmosphere of free choice. To that end I ask students to consider the following:
Consider: Arnold Toynbee in a speech at ?Earth Conference One? in 1988 at Oxford University said, ?What has been needed for the past 5000 years is a global body politic composed of cells on a scale of the Neolithic-Age village-community.. a scale on which the participants could be personally acquainted with each other, while each of them would also be a citizen of the world state.? Anuradha Vittachi in his summary of those proceedings stated, ?perhaps that is the experiment we were, without realizing it, trying out at Oxford. We had come from all over the planet and knew ourselves therefore, to be a group of citizens of the world; we were also a community the size of a Neolithic village, ... The solution then that we offer our fellow citizens might not lie in the conclusions we came up, with as in the experience of living together like this..? The experience he was talking of was coming together on a college campus.
It is important for students, to be reminded of the habitat that they now enjoy: If they live on campus they share space with one or more of their compeers. They eat in common dining facilities and do their laundry in common Laundromats. Their library is a shared space far greater then they could ever hope to acquire, and the media center that they share is a part of their tuition. They also share gyms and pools and theaters. Labs and observatories and computing power. They have pooled their resources to gain access to Professors they could never meet one on one. Most importantly, learning was the basis for their congregation. For most this is but a passage to what is imagined a more proper or ?better? manner of the rest of their lives. They would do well to think it through again.
Consider: Arnold Toynbee in a speech at ?Earth Conference One? in 1988 at Oxford University said, ?What has been needed for the past 5000 years is a global body politic composed of cells on a scale of the Neolithic-Age village-community.. a scale on which the participants could be personally acquainted with each other, while each of them would also be a citizen of the world state.? Anuradha Vittachi in his summary of those proceedings stated, ?perhaps that is the experiment we were, without realizing it, trying out at Oxford. We had come from all over the planet and knew ourselves therefore, to be a group of citizens of the world; we were also a community the size of a Neolithic village, ... The solution then that we offer our fellow citizens might not lie in the conclusions we came up, with as in the experience of living together like this..? The experience he was talking of was coming together on a college campus.
It is important for students, to be reminded of the habitat that they now enjoy: If they live on campus they share space with one or more of their compeers. They eat in common dining facilities and do their laundry in common Laundromats. Their library is a shared space far greater then they could ever hope to acquire, and the media center that they share is a part of their tuition. They also share gyms and pools and theaters. Labs and observatories and computing power. They have pooled their resources to gain access to Professors they could never meet one on one. Most importantly, learning was the basis for their congregation. For most this is but a passage to what is imagined a more proper or ?better? manner of the rest of their lives. They would do well to think it through again.
posted by Will Watman at
11:23 AM
