Back to basics

Had a nice chat with a coworker over lunch today about cultural knowledge, and how with all this technology we can operate (and survive, for now) at a high level without knowing how things work.

Take food, for example. I think in so many cases, the connection between food and plants and animals is lost. Barbara Kingsolver talks about kids who didn't want to eat vegetables that had fallen on the ground outside, as if all their potatoes and carrots hadn't been in the ground in the first place, and hadn't been covered in dirt themselves before they were washed off. It's as if food is generated spontaneously and just appears clean in a grocery store or in a restaurant.

I heard somewhere that if you talked to an Inuit (or maybe it was another Native American tribe), anyone in the tribe could tell you how to build an igloo, how to skin a seal, what the designs on their parkas signify, and so on, whereas I couldn't begin to know all of the things we've learned collectively as a society. I don't know how to build electronics or a lightbulb. I can use a computer, but don't totally know how they work at a base level.

That's not a bad thing in itself, but I'm disturbed by a couple of things:

1. That if we had to start over, I'm not sure we could build what we have again. I feel like civilization is building this massive structure, and people's knowledge is moving up and up and after a point, we won't know how to get back to the bottom. We imagine one thing to stand for another and another and another until we can't remember what it signified in the first place.

2. We (or at least I) no longer really have the means to fully assess the implications of a lot of our actions or decisions. I have shares in a mutual fund, but don't really know what sort of business practices I'm supporting. Or, I buy a laptop - granted mine is supposedly a 'green' one - but I don't really know what it means to have equipment built from one sort of metal or another. You hear about diamond mines in Africa, but we could be strip mining all manner of beautiful places to make me something I might not have wanted if I knew.

In any case, everyone doesn't have to know everything. That's the benefit of society, of civilization.

My coworker said she'd be tempted to teach her kids useless things like the classics, that we should bring back cooking and wood shop into the schools, but that's my point - that it isn't useless. I want to know how everything works. I've gotten to a point where I want to start exploring backwards. I think it's healthy to know how to build a table, grow your own food and bake bread from scratch. That's why I'm going back to school: to do real things in the real world. Or, maybe it's simple things in a basic world. I want to understand the connection between the things I do, to act responsibly to the best of my knowledge.