Center for Global Justice

view our brochure (PDF)

Embodied Mind, Earth Ethics, and Grassroots Globalization: A Case Study in Popular Education

Matthew Ally
City University of New York, U.S.A.

If you think you have a solution to the problem of consciousness, you haven’t understood the problem.
-Susan Blackmore

How well we come through the era of globalization (perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world.
-Peter Singer

Only beings who can reflect upon the fact that they are determined are capable of freeing themselves.
-Paolo Freire

It seems to me that Western society today is moving in two distinct and opposing directions. On the one hand, mainstream culture led by government and industry moves relentlessly toward continued economic growth and technological development, straining the limits of nature and all but ignoring fundamental human needs. On the other hand, a counter-current, comprising a wide range of groups and ideas, has kept alive the ancient understanding that all life is inextricably connected. At present, it is only a minority voice, but it is growing in strength…
-Helena Norberg-Hodge.

I teach a philosophy course with a promisingly vague title. It’s called, “Great Issues in Philosophy”. Needless to say, a course like that provides a great opportunity for the educator to focus on whatever issues he or she deems ‘great’. Of the many great issues in philosophy, I chose two for a couple of recent rounds of the course. The first issue is the problem of consciousness (a more avant-garde naming of the traditional concern of the “philosophy of mind”), and the second is the ethics of globalization. In what follows, I want to touch briefly on three things. First, I want to say a bit about the nature of consciousness—about what it’s like, what it’s good for, and about some of the things philosophers and cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have to say about it these days. Second, I want to say a bit about the nuts and bolts of globalization—again, about what it’s like and how it works—in order to highlight certain of the conflicting ethical implications raised by the direction it is headed. Third, I want to share a bit of my recent experience in and beyond the classroom thinking and arguing and asking and wondering with students about consciousness, ethics, globalization, and social change, and more importantly, about the connections among them. Placing these ‘great issues’ side by side in a single course—in the context of an historically black, major urban two-year college where a vast majority of students are socio-economically underprivileged first generation college attendees, many of whom are from the far corners of the world, a substantial percentage of whom are just this side of remediation with basic reading, writing, and critical thinking skills, and a goodly portion of whom fail ever to complete their two-year degree—has given me an unexpectedly fruitful opportunity to tease out some of the connections, and to think about what those connections might have to do with the challenge of popular education in this rampantly globalizing world of ours.

My purpose here is to facilitate a conversation, not to make a case or defend a thesis. My hope for the workshop is to discuss some of the theoretical and practical issues raised when the educator treats the ‘classroom’ (whether in a two-year college, a vocational-technical school, a conventional four year college, or a more unconventional grassroots learning environment) as at once a site of formal and popular education; as a place where learners can pursue their legitimate desire to better their own circumstance and a place where the educator can pursue his or her legitimate desire to elicit from students a clearer understanding of the world they live in, of what this world is really like and how it works and how it got that way, of whether and to what extent it can be improved, and how. To this end, I will approach things somewhat informally and a bit impressionistically. This approach, I believe, will better serve our heuristic and critical dialogue—which matters more than any mere argument could—and is in keeping with the promise of transformative engagement that is the lifeblood of popular education.

Think first, if you will, about consciousness. What is consciousness, really? What is mind? What is it to be conscious? To have a mind? Until fairly recently, these sorts of questions had been all but eschewed from psychology, and were asked in only restrictive and conventional ways by philosophers concerned with abstract reflection on the nature of thought, perception, apprehension, and to a lesser extent, emotion. Since the late 1980s, however, these questions have been asked and answered in increasingly interesting and complex ways from a broad range of angles—philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neurobiology among them—nearly all of them committed to a materialist, or more precisely, a physicalist paradigm. Physicalism, most simply put, is view that reality is physical and that all real phenomena can thus be explained in physical terms. That is to say, according to the physicalist all phenomena are finally reducible to the interrelations of matter and energy, and can be wholly explained without appeal to any non-physical or supernatural entity or force. Whether or not physicalism is ultimately a satisfactory or correct theory of reality and knowledge (and it is both an ontological and an epistemological theory), our world is rife with scientific and technological ‘successes’ made possible by adherence to its fundamental premise, and all ongoing scientific research programs and projected scientific progress are equally dependent upon it. For this reason, among others, physicalism warrants sustained philosophical consideration. In the context of the problem of consciousness, this is just a fancy way of reminding us that minds are not just in the world; they are situated, rooted, embodied, which is to say, they are of the world, somehow…

Perhaps the best way to start to think about consciousness is just to acknowledge, frankly and forthrightly, that it’s weird. It’s weird to be conscious if you think about it—which is a big ‘if’, the first of several to be overcome in a discussion of these sorts of things—and the more you think about it, the more you look at consciousness, the more you try to understand mind and its nature and function and source, the more you examine your experience of it (if, indeed, it can be separated from your experience) and try to imagine the conscious experience of other conscious beings (if, indeed, there are other conscious beings), the weirder it gets. Take my word for it. To be sure, it’s not a bad kind of weird, and none of this is meant to suggest that there is necessarily anything mysterious or magical or inherently inscrutable involved—though there may be and, in any case, it often seems or feels that way. Consciousness is just weird like all the other juicy great issues are weird, issues like origins and endings, or time and space, or cause and effect, or self and other, identity and difference, or good and bad and evil, or beauty and truth and justice and peace. Consciousness is at least as weird as all those things because what Augustine suggested of ‘time’ in particular is more or less the case with most great issues: we all know just what they are…until we try to define them.

This is certainly true of consciousness. When we try to define consciousness we tend to start to mumble, at least at first, “Well, it’s…it’s hard to define…it’s what you experience when you…it’s like when you experience what you….You know…like seeing that pencil…hearing those birds…” We tend to glom onto some aspect of our sensuous experience, and posit a comparable experience in others and call that consciousness and, in any case, quickly find ourselves all muddled up. But in certain contexts, as Aristotle knew well, definitions are highly overrated and sometimes unattainable, and this may be one of them. Sometimes defining things is counterproductive. After all, the Latin term definire means, literally, “to make finite,” “to limit”. Sometimes it’s more helpful just to think expansively and describe a thing a bit, and all you need to do that is to talk about your experience of it, and perhaps tell a story or share an anecdote. Then people say, “Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about. That’s what it is,” and nearly everyone is satisfied.

So ask yourself, Am I conscious now? Please bear with me. Are you conscious now? It’s a “yes or no” question—at first, at least—but take a minute or two to ask it before you answer.

Now, assuming you answered “yes”—if you didn’t, perhaps you are what neurophilosophers call an eliminative materialist, or perhaps you’re just tired—ask yourself, What does ‘I am conscious’ mean, really? What is it, exactly, to be conscious? What distinguishes conscious states from other sorts of states? Conscious ‘things’ from other sorts of things? What is it like to be conscious? To be you? Take another few minutes simply to ponder these questions. If you are disinclined to do so, or consider the exercise in some way silly or pointless or perhaps disconcerting, you are not alone, but please, humor me. Try to do it anyway. Many people find it helpful to write down their thoughts on the matter.

Here’s another question. Maybe hold your hand out in front of your face while you ask it, or if that’s too weird, run your fingernail across the weave of your pant-leg, or take a sip of a very hot beverage or a bite of fresh fruit or strike a piano key or the tap the side of a glass with a pencil. “What is this consciousness?” What’s going on here? Is that your mind? Is that your brain? Is that your body? Is that something wholly or partly other than your mind or brain or body? How could tea smell so good? How could a couple pounds of mushy wet gray tissue do that? Perhaps this is a good place for a bit of specificity. As Paul Churchland makes abundantly clear, “On this matter…there is especial cause for wonder.”

For the human brain, with a volume of roughly a quart, encompasses a space of conceptual and cognitive possibilities that is larger, by one measure at least, than the entire astronomical universe. It has this striking feature because it exploits the combinatorics of its 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion synaptic connections with each other. Each cell-to-cell connection can be strong, or weak, or anything in between. The global configuration of these 100 trillion connections is very important for the individual who has them, for that idiosyncratic set of connection strengths determines how the brain reacts to the sensory information it receives, how it responds to the emotional states it encounters, how it plots its future behavior. We already appreciate how many different Bridge hands can be dealt from a standard deck of merely fifty-two playing cards: enough to occupy the most determined foursome for several lifetimes. Think how many more ‘hands’ might be dealt from the brain’s much larger ‘deck’ of 100 trillion modifiable synaptic connections. The answer is easily calculated. If we assume, conservatively, that each synaptic connection might have any one of ten different strengths, then the total number of distinct possible configurations is, very roughly, ten raised to the 100 trillionth power, or 10 100,000,000,000,000. Compare this with the measure of only 10 87 cubic meters standardly estimated for the volume of the entire astronomical universe. Each individual human is a unique hand dealt from this monumental deck.

These are staggering figures to find between your own ears. So it must be born in mind (whatever that means) that we are dealing with a rather unusual and wildly complex sort of mushy wet gray tissue. Still, one can wonder just why and how a physical brain, or a physical anything no matter how complicated it is, could bring about the intangible qualitative experience you associate with your favorite hot beverage or a bite of a peach or an ‘A’ note or the tinggg of a knife on glass. How can it give you that warm safe feeling, taste so good, cause you to relax the instant you hear it? How could a ‘thing’ do that to you (whatever you are)?

That’s what neurophilosophers call “The Hard Problem.” David Chalmers gave the problem its name in a now famous article (infamous to some!), “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” In his first book-length study of the problem, he puts it this way:

…Consciousness is surprising. If all we knew about were the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex systems, there would be no compelling reason to postulate the existence of conscious experience. If it were not for our direct evidence in the first-person case, the hypothesis would seem unwarranted; almost mystical, perhaps. Yet we know, directly, that there is conscious experience. The question is, how do we reconcile it with everything else we know?

In short, “The Hard Problem” is the problem of why and how brain-states (or body-states, as I prefer) are accompanied by a qualitatively rich and variegated subjective experience. Given everything we do understand about the physical universe, why doesn’t it all just happen ‘in the dark’, without experience at all? Why this ‘extra’ bit that we call consciousness, and how does it come about?

Picture a nearby river, or some place you’d rather be, or the town you grew up in. Now think of democracy, or history, or your favorite dessert, or international law, or a broken shoelace, or clean air, productive soil, adequate shelter, nutritious food, potable water. Each of these thoughts is associated with a complex family of family of feelings, ideas, sensations, perceptions, memories, etc., and each of these associations can be correlated with a wide range of bio-chemical interactions, and each of these correlations can be described in terms of a range of molecular bonds and atomic exchanges, and so on and so forth down the physicalist tree. Nonetheless, and whatever the significance of this apparent reduction of lived experience to sticky stuff, you can make yourself conscious of all these things, you can ‘bring them to mind’ almost instantaneously. And you can do this without budging from your seat, seemingly by a cognitive fiat, a mere act of inward will, and in the privacy of your own mind without anybody being able to tell that you’re doing it. If that’s not weird, I don’t know what is.

And it gets weirder still. Consciousness seems to have a will of it own too, or at least a will that doesn’t exactly feel like your will—though it is not even clear to neurophilosophers and neuroscientists what your will is, or whether you even have one at all! Don’t think of a white horse. Do not think of a white horse. Just block all white horses from your mind. Don’t think of child labor. Do not think of small children working in factories…It’s hard not to think of something you’re told not to think of. It seems almost impossible, in fact. It’s as if consciousness doesn’t like to be told what to do. It wants, at times, to be the boss of you. Consciousness, I think, is a bit of a control freak. That’s weird too, and I will return to it.

In the burgeoning field of consciousness studies philosophers and cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists are saying all sorts of weird things about consciousness. In fact, much of the current discussion of consciousness seems hell-bent on showing that many (most?) of our “commonsense intuitions” about conscious experience—such as our capacity for memory, the act of paying attention, basic sense perception, our sense of self, and even our cherished free will, to name a few—are quite mistaken, that they are illusions. As Susan Blackmore often reminds us, it is important to bear in mind that to call something an illusion is not to say that it is not real, but that it is not what it appears to be. I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say that if you found yourself in a room full of neurophilosophers and neuroscientists and told them what you think consciousness is and what you think it does and how you think it does it, you would likely find yourself corrected and re-corrected from all sides with a barrage of theoretical models and empirical data telling you that the way you see it is outmoded, that you unreflectively employ a small army of historically prominent but now empirically falsified intuitions, and that generally you just don’t get it. And what they’re really saying, if you listen carefully, is that consciousness is even weirder than you think.

My point is not to dwell on the weirdness of consciousness—though it definitely repays the dwelling, and in unexpected ways. I just want to remind you that we’ve all got it, even if we can’t really say what it is. We all know what it’s like to have it, even if we can’t define it very well. And whatever it is, there seems to be no escaping it while we’re here. So enough about the weirdness of consciousness. Let’s make use of it to think about what it’s like here. Specifically, what about globalization?

First off, I should say that I will not review in any detail the catalogue of ills caused by neoliberal globalization. In this context, we all know what they are and we all know that they are unacceptable. Still, a few points of clarification are in order regarding. I have been helped in this regard by a number of perspectives. David Harvey, for instance, hits the theoretical nail on the head when he writes that,

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skill within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.

The root ideas behind the current form of globalization make protection of property, markets, and trade, in effect, the essential elements of a fundamental anthropology. In other words, these three things above all others become the key conditions for the possibility of human flourishing. Such flourishing is understood to be, in essence, a purified consumerism. At the risk of oversimplification, globalization in its neoliberal form would make humans of us simply by making consumers of us. The neoliberal is a humanist of sorts, for he or she holds that to be human is in the last analysis to own, to buy, to sell, in short, to consume. The humanist’s task is just to make this consumptive ideal a reality for all, and, not incidentally, to make it possible for an infinitesimal portion of humanity to profit enormously.

The apparatus to bring about this consumptive reality is largely in place and functional. A recent well-known report of the International Forum on Globalization identifies the following “Key Ingredients of the Globalization Godel”:

Promotion of hypergrowth and unrestricted exploitation of environmental resources
Privatization and commodification of public services and of remaining aspects of the global and community commons
Global cultural and economic homogenization and the intense promotion of consumerism
Integration and conversion of national economies, including some that were largely self-reliant, to environmentally and socially harmful export-oriented production
Corporate deregulation and unrestricted movement of capital across borders
Dramatically increased corporate concentration
Dismantling of public health, social, and environmental programs already in place
Replacement of traditional powers of democratic nation-states and local communities by global corporate bureaucracies

This list is not exhaustive, but the ingredients are indisputably key in the neoliberal model. This is how it works, at least for the aforementioned few. Moreover, and perhaps more important, these ingredients are not just ideas, they are real ongoing practices set in motion and sustained by those who would make the ‘transcendental’ ideal human-qua-consumer a global reality. To what end, we might ask.

But we already know. In his provocative essay, “Are We Happy Yet,” psychologist Alan Thein Durning quotes the retailing analyst, Victor Lebow, who declared,

Our enormously productive economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…We need things consumed, burned up, warn out, replaced, discarded at an ever increasing rate.

The prescription, recommended more than fifty years ago in the wake of World War II, turns out to have been a prognostication, a dream now largely fulfilled in the so-called developed world, especially in the United States. Happily, there are signs of recognition that the dream may well be our worst nightmare.

But I have strayed too far from the impressionistic informality promised at the outset. For the real object of our concern as educators is not what we know—or think we know—but who we teach and learn with, and how and why. The question in the present context is, once again, not so much about definitions as it is about descriptions and expansive thinking and stories. As it is with consciousness, so it is with globalization; I hate to say it, but globalization is weird too—if you haven’t already noticed. It’s not weird in the way that consciousness is weird. The illusions involved are of a quite different sort. But in a sense, it is fair to say that globalization is weird because consciousness is weird. It will take a few brush strokes to show what I mean by that.

Did you hear that scientists have created remote-controlled flies? No kidding. “Using lasers to stimulate specific brain cells”—I quote from a recent Associated Press article—“researchers say they were able to make the flies jump, walk, flap their wings and fly…Even headless flies took flight” when the correct neurons were stimulated. You can just feel the excitement in the laboratory. “Hey guys, watch this!” Zap! Boing! Eureka! And this research could “lead to a better understanding of overeating and violence in humans.” Well, that’s obvious. They didn’t say more…

Did you hear that Paraguay’s Congress “rejected a proposal to protect the last Indian tribe in South America [outside the Amazon region] to have avoided contact with outsiders…The group lives deep in the untouched forest of northwest Paraguay…hunting pigs and anteaters with spears, and growing subsistence crops.” The land they live on is owned by logging companies and beef-cattle ranchers. "A very rapid and violent cultural change will be forced on these people," said Jose Zanardini, an Italian anthropologist who has worked with the Ayoreo for several years. He notes that “[the tribe] will be forced to undo thousands of years of history in one or two years, and [to] go from being hunters and gatherers to working as day laborers [overnight].” Well, that’s progress…

A town in Iowa, incorporated by followers of an Indian guru, with a population of about 200, has become the first all-organic township in the United States. “The city council has voted to ban the use of synthetic pesticides [, herbicides] and fertilizers within the city limits…The ban covers everything from lawns [to gardens] to shrubs on both residential and commercial properties […and…] follows earlier action to grow and sell only organic foods within the city limits.” And this, mind you, is happening at the edge of a region of the world that, through the miracle of agro-industrial technology, manages to export 35 metric tons of soybeans each day. That’s 28,000,000,000 pounds of soybeans a year. I did the math over and over because I couldn’t believe it myself. That’s a lot of tofu from the heart of the ‘breadbasket’, not one ounce of which can be sold in Vedic City, Iowa…

The International Monetary Fund recently reported that “economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa reached an eight-year high of 5% last year…Inflation meanwhile fell to its lowest rate in 25 years.” Poverty reduction goals, of course, have not been met. The IMF warned “that African economies are still not growing fast enough to reach poverty reduction targets and that many [African economies] are not business friendly.” Of course, it is well-known—or it should be—that “the IMF regards a better climate for investment by business as essential for promoting stronger growth and poverty reduction.” Not growing fast enough. Not business friendly. Still poor…Hmmm…

Here’s a good one. “Imagine the planet wired [the whole planet wired] for a nearly continuous readout on its vital signs, shared by all. That's the essence of a White House plan announced…The new ‘Strategic Plan for the U.S. Integrated Earth Observation System’ envisions linking nearly 60 nations within a decade to gather and share information from satellites, ocean buoys, weather stations and other surface and airborne instruments. ‘Whether it's agriculture, or land use, or water planning, or transportation, or energy, there's a lot of data about the environment that has to be collected,’ said John Marburger III, President Bush's top science adviser…Many of the measurements already are being gathered. The new effort will focus on linking them in what Marburger called a planetary ‘system of systems.’” Is that supposed to help? And can we have confidence, really, until we have in place a functional ‘system of systems of systems’? I’m not sure we can, at least not until we have a system of systems of systems of systems…

Think big. That’s the rule. In fact, what is now the world’s largest gold mining company—I won’t name names—planned to relocate three glaciers (yes, move them) in order to get at the estimated $9.35 billion worth of gold beneath them. Though Chile’s chief glaciologist calls them glaciers, the mining company prefers to call them “ice fields” or “ice masses” or “ice reservoirs” or, my favorite, “glaciarets.” These terms are preferable because, as a company spokesman put it, “everybody knows a glacier is something important, permanent, that must be protected, unlike a simple ice mass or reservoir,” which obviously isn’t important. Chilean environmentalists worked hard to stop the plan and in the end the company agreed to get the gold without touching the ice. The company has not explained how it will achieve this remarkable feat, but the glaciologist helpfully reminds us that “a glacier is a mass of ice that moves slowly down a mountain.” Perhaps the mining company should just wait until the ice gets out of the way…

I was running recently along a dirt road that winds through a nearby deciduous forest, trying to ‘stay healthy’ and ‘lower stress’. I breathed in the mixed aromas of fresh Spring blossoms, some from indigenous trees, some from strains brought from very far away, and with a vroom! and a whoosh! the scents suddenly mingled, not altogether well, with the stench of fresh car exhaust produced by the cutting edge internal combustion engine of a massive SUV that roared past, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. Internal combustion engines, of course, have not changed in their essential function for 100 years, and not one of them is manufactured at a single site, and all of them spew fumes that include a complex potpourri of molecules, some of which have been, until recently, sequestered beneath the sands of near and middle eastern desserts for millions of years, and some of which were, like it or not, secured for my inhalation by various subtle and not-so-subtle means of coercion. Some of those molecules, no doubt a surprisingly large number if there were a way to measure it, will one day find their way home. The atmosphere tends to move things in an Easterly direction, for now anyway…

On my way home from the same run, I saw four boys, one of them not more than eight years old, the other three, in their early teens. It was still daylight, sunny and warm. The little boy was looking up at the sky, pointing frantically, “Look at the moon! Look at the moon! Guys! Guys! Look at the moon!” He was desperate, clearly, but the big boys didn’t look up. They didn’t even hear him. Didn’t even see him. You know how big kids are. One of them was on a cell phone talking animatedly about what “she said”. The other two were talking about some kid who got beat up or should get beaten up or something. I couldn’t quite make it out as I passed, feeling old. I continued running and wondered whether the little boy knew that people live in space all the time now. I wondered if he had ever heard of the International Space Station. If he had seen pictures of it. If he knows that men, and perhaps women, will walk on Mars in his lifetime, and perhaps even live there for a while for some reason. I wondered if the kid who got beat up was okay. And I looked up. The moon was there, just over Bull Hill, in broad daylight, with human footprints and six American flags on it…

So where am I going with all this? Let’s recap. We’ve got remote controlled flies to help us lose weight and be nice. A living culture snuffed out by loggers and ranchers in Paraguay. An organic town in Iowa near a zillion pounds of pesticide-laden health food. A booming economy in poverty wracked sub-Saharan Africa. Plans for a sort of global CatScan on a planet where one can simply watch deserts wax and glaciers wane and tides rise higher and water tables fall lower. A mining company that wants to move a glacier because it’s really just a big ice cube and gold is what really matters. Spring blossoms and car exhaust in the New England forest. People living in space. Some poor kid who’s going to get beaten up if he hasn’t already. And footprints and flags on the moon. What does all that have to do with the study of consciousness? What does that have to do with the ethics of globalization? It’s fair to wonder.

In teaching “Great Issues in Philosophy”, I knew going in—as I do with all classes at my college—that I would have a majority of students for whom difficult possibilities, such as not being able to pay this month’s rent or mom’s medical bills or little brother’s bail, or of being denied a welfare check due to a student financial aid error that started at the Social Security office when they couldn’t reach the registrar, or of becoming or remaining [sic] homeless, or of being deported tomorrow or shot today, loom large along side the dream of getting an education and getting “somewhere.” Indeed, the college’s promise is plastered all over the buses and subways of New York City, “Start Here, Go Anywhere”, and it’s a promise students want kept. And I knew that the meaning of the dream itself is, for most of them, a far cry from the dream of popular education, education by the people of the world and for the people and for the world, education that promotes critical understanding and positive social change. Most of my students tell me they’re in school “to get a better job” or a “bigger piece of the pie.” I didn’t want the students to see things in pieces. I didn’t want them to think, “Well, we’re studying consciousness (whatever that is) for the first part, and globalization (whatever that is) for the second part, and ethics (whatever that is) for the third part,” as if they’re taking three separate mini-courses three mysteries, “and then I get the grade and that’s one more requirement fulfilled, and…” I wanted, and still want them, to be able to imagine all the connections, and ideally to experience some of the connections among these seemingly disparate issues.

What are the connections, you might ask. How can one imagine, let alone experience the connections between this weird thing called consciousness and this weird thing called globalization? To be sure, the connections seem obscure at first glance. After all, what is ‘closer’ to us than our own consciousness, our private mind, the subject of all our experiences and innermost secrets? And what is ‘farther’ from us than the whole earth all at once , the planetary world, the transnationalobject of all our talk and hand-wringing about globalization? And it gets worse. How much more abstract and arcane can a question be than the question, What is consciousness? What is the mind? And how much more concrete and down to earth should a question be than, What are our global ethical obligations, right here, right now, in this rapidly, recklessly, yet still redeemably changing world? What possible connection could there be between these sorts of questions? Again, it’s fair to wonder.

Perhaps this is a good place to begin again. We are all conscious, we all live on this planet, and it is this planet, this Earth, that provides us with most of whatever there is to be conscious of, whether it’s remote controlled flies or ancient cultures or disappearing glaciers or footprints and flags on the moon. Give it a second glance, and it seems almost silly to imagine that consciousness and globalization and ethics are separate; it seems almost absurd to imagine that mind and world and morality are disparate phenomena, separate concerns. They are integrally, deeply, utterly connected. Of course they are, but you can say the same thing about shoes and socks and feet. So who cares? So what?

The students in the two recent sections of “Great Issues in Philosophy” seem to care a great deal—okay, most of them do—if they are given the opportunity to, and these students are representative of the people, the source and goal of popular education as I understand it. They came to care, in part I think, because the weeks they spent sitting in a circle looking at each other and looking at the details of contemporary neurophilosophy and neuroscience have made them profoundly aware, hyper-conscious, of everything. My task as educator was just to help them learn to help themselves [sic] to cultivate and experience a deep curiosity about their own minds. That inwardly oriented curiosity has fed almost inevitably in almost every case, even if not always smoothly, into a more expansive and outwardly oriented curiosity about other people’s minds and other people’s experience, and about the big world around them, again, about what the world is like and how it got that way and what really matters to whom and why. And almost every student came to ask, in one way or another, what is to be done? In short, the connections are ethical. The connections are about relations, with and toward oneself, with an toward others, with and toward one’s place, one’s neighborhood, one’s community, one’s world, one’s planet. Seeing the connections is, above all, a matter of moral imagination.

Those underclass, ‘unskilled’ urban community college students paid their tuition and (by their own report) bought something quite unexpected: time to think about ‘weird’ things like consciousness and globalization and ethics in an open dialogical atmosphere, with challenging but accessible information. They managed to notice on their own that globalization—mind you, not some fantasy TVland global-village-meets-international-community-group-hug, but real-world globalization, just as it is, with all its folly and shortsightedness and mendacity and violence—is, in large part, an expression of the ‘control freak’ aspect of human consciousness that I mentioned above. It is important to recall that consciousness, human consciousness at least, tends to abhor apparent chaos, perhaps to a fault. Where it sees order—real or imagined—it embraces it, at almost any cost to the organism. Where is sees disorder—again, real or imagined—it rebels against it at almost any cost to the organism. The students concluded, largely on their own, that neoliberal globalization is just what consciousness aspires to at a planetary scale, if you will. When consciousness is given the opportunity to perceive the world, the planet, in pieces, when it doesn’t take advantage of all the rest of its finer qualities and capacities—like curiosity, patience, perspicacity, subtlety, memory, anticipation—and fails to perceive itself as in and of and with this world, something like neoliberal globalization is what you are bound to get.

Consciousness necessarily fans out beyond itself. That’s what it does best, in fact. Give it this globalizing world to be conscious of, and let it think holistically like it wants to by nature (analytical rationality is, after all, a quite recent evolutionary trick), and it just might fan out into something more like a global ethical consciousness, an ‘earth conscience’, if you will, that might think twice before turning flies into robots or turning anyone else into robots; one that might opt to preserve rather than to destroy a disappearing culture; one that might opt for placing sustainable rather than impossible demands on the soil, air, and water; one that might face squarely questions of the limits to growth and the root causes of poverty; one that might not fall prey to the illusory temptations of a planetary diagnostics in a time when the ailment is know and the prognosis is bleak and the prescription is clear; one that might see immediately that the idea of moving a glacier is as absurd as it sounds; one that lets the scent of Spring blossoms be and looks up when a child points at the moon, and wonders at the footprints and forgets about the flags.

The students I teach, and with and through whom I learn so much, really get these sorts of connections. They see them, they can discern them largely on their own, and this in spite of—though I am tempted to say due to—their underprivileged social status and their sub-standard and tacitly reactionary educational background. Their initial confusion about why the world is the way it is and how it got that way and where it is headed is not so recalcitrant as I imagined it would be, even given the ‘greatness’ of the philosophical issues we dealt with. Granted, the subject matter of a “Great Issues in Philosophy” course lends itself to the cultivation of this sort of awareness, but I am convinced that it can come about in any class, and in any less conventional learning environment, even if not quite so intensively. And the time is ripe. There is in human experience a fundamental lived intimacy between oneself and others—albeit an increasingly fractured intimacy in this hyper-mediated world of ours—that extends now from the local to the global, from the nearness of one’s immediate place to the nearness [sic] of this place called Earth. Even if this latter connection ordinarily goes unnoticed, and even if it is not entirely unique to these times, it is at least accessible to practicing educators and active learners in historically unprecedented ways. This may be the true promise of globalization, the opening of a complex and shifting space for an ethic of place, an ethic self-awareness as world-awareness, of local sensibility as global sensitivity. I might call it an Earth Ethic, if it were up to me, but that’s just a name.

Whatever the name, I have witnessed in these students’ experience a movement toward radical conscientization which, as we know, is a necessary moment of anything worth calling grassroots globalization. As Paolo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed,

Conscientization is the deepening of the coming to consciousness. There can be no conscientization without coming first to consciousness, but not all coming to consciousness extends necessarily into conscientization.

My experience teaching Great Issues in Philosophy has shown that one route to conscientization is the study of consciousness itself, “coming into consciousness” by coming at consciousness as an ‘object’ worthy of personal, philosophical, and scientific examination in its own right. The “deepening of consciousness” Freire invokes then follows naturally as we turn to problems of globalization. And the connection between the ‘issues’ is none other than an ethical connection, again, a matter of moral imagination. By examining consciousness, students learn to look carefully at something that is oddly inscrutable. They learn to assume that illusions will crop up in the most unexpected places. And they learn to admit that the stories people tell about a thing, a day, a world are perspectival, sometimes promissory, always overdetermined, and in all likelihood a little bit weird…

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, like it or not, we educators are agents of the globalization of consciousness and of the conscientization of globalization. After all, there is consciousness, such as it is, so given enough time some sort of globalization is inevitable. Once again, that’s just what consciousness does because it is of the world. World-making is its deepest aspiration. The question is, which world will we make and according to whose aspiration?

NOTES

Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, London, 2004, p.1.

Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002, p. 13.

Paolo Freire, The Politics of Education, South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1985, p. 68.

Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1991, p. 180.

Paul M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason and the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995, pp. 4-5.

David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, No. 3 (1995); reprinted in Jonathan Shear, ed., Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.

David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford University Press, New York and London, 1996, p.5.

In the preceding discussion I have intentionally emphasized what neurophilosophers and neuroscientists call ‘introspective’ or ‘first-person’ methods. Debate rages over whether and to what extent introspection has a place in the proper study of consciousness. For a broad range of views favorable to introspective methods in neuroscience, see the papers gathered in the special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6:2-3, 1999; reprinted in Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear, eds., The View From Within: First-person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness, Imprint Academic, Bowling Green, OH, 1999.

See Blackmore’s Consciousness, op. cit. This is without question the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the field of consciousness studies in print (and also the best classroom textbook I used in a classroom setting). For a condensed and highly readable introduction to the field, see Blackmore’s Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, London, 2005.

David Harvey, Neoliberalism: A Short History, Oxford University Press, London, 2005, p.2.

John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander, eds., Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible, Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 2004, p. 34.

See Alan Thein Durning, “Are We Happy Yet?” in Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, eds., Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco,1995, p. 69.

“Scientists Create Remote-Controlled Flies”, Associated Press, 9 April 2005.

“No protection for unusual tribe”, Reuters, 7 April 2005.

“Maharishi Vedic City becomes all-organic city”, Associated Press, 19 April 2005

“Africa Hits Record Growth – IMF”, BBC News, 15 April 2005.

“President Bush Wants to Wire the Earth”, John Heilprin, Associated Press, 19 April 2005.

“In Chile, Going for Gold Means Digging under Glaciers”, Eduardo Gallardo, Associated Press, 24 February 2006.

Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, M. Bergman, trans., Continuum Press, New York, 1970, p.109.

To leave comments on this paper: click here.

To read comments already contributed: click here.

index of papers