The Fallacy of Composition: A Senseless Contradiction
I wrote about the Land Conservation movement a few years back. In light of education reform efforts it's worth revisiting the senseless contradictions inherent in many debates of this type.
The Land as Place...
The old paradigm has caused a polarity between conservation and development. Therefore developers 'greenwash' their plans to appease to conservationists. This becomes a political game.
So we educate learners to become one or the other; a developer or a conservationist. We thereby strengthen the polarization and it becomes a senseless contradiction that has no resolution in and of itself.
Like the cruise control directions to "set your speed a little slower than the person in front of you;" if everyone did this, we would slow all traffic to 35 mph as each repeatedly adjusts their speed downward in reaction to the continually slowing traffic before them. Why 35 mph? Because that is the minimum threshold for operating cruise control. Thus, the dumbing down of the majority, the mediocre mainstream, the leveling of minds to the least common denominator.
What we want adds up to what we don't want. This is known as the fallacy of composition. Oscar Wilde wrote, "Each man kills the thing he loves." We love the wilderness but each time we go there it becomes less wild, if only by a few more footprints. Synergy is always with us for good or ill. So we can't point fingers.
Rather we need to sidestep the old debate and focus on man's relationship to the land. 'Place' is the union of the land with people and their stories.
In 1957 President Truman spoke at a strip mall dedication. It was built on some land that his grandfather had farmed in the 1860s. He realized he couldn't stand in the way of progress but he also realized that progress "pays no attention to individuals." Growth expands needs. It is therefore in direct conflict with progress which is all about improving our ability to meet needs while keeping up with insatiable appetites for wants.
Demanding both unrestrained growth and unlimited progress is self-contradictory. We live in an age of accelerated growth and diminishing returns. A post-scarcity world is right in front of our noses.
We measure what we value. What we value we exploit but what we love, we defend. We become what we measure. We measure economic growth so economic growth is our primary purpose. Today the economic crisis is causing us to lose our sense of meaning and connectedness because we've been valuing and measuring the wrong thing.
Consumerism is the new citizenship that keeps our society healthy. We have more Malls than High Schools in the U.S. We've been tricked into believing that what we want in life can be bought in a store rather than learned by way of education.
We live in a society defined by laws (prohibitions) more than loves. A new paradigm must be defined and taught to produce a new generation with a healthy understanding of 'place' and our relationship to it. (posted 2/9/10)
