To get things going

Collective learning – dialogue – dead ends – ways forward – needs must – look to the larger – global imperatives

This is a conversation between a teacher (Robert L. Fielding) and a student (R) about the collective learning that has taken place since man took his first step on Earth.

R: You say man and his first step, but you could have said woman and her first step, couldn’t you?

RLF: Certainly, it’s just that it’s more usual to use the masculine.

R: So it’s a habit?

RLF: More than a habit, a convention, I would say.

R: Which is little more than calling it a habitual habit – one that most people conform to. Would you say that is nearer?

RLF: Yes, I suppose I would.

R: Isn’t it curious that we should begin that way, with something most of us do, almost without thinking?

RLF: I can’t see that it is really curious, no.

R: If you think about what we said we were going to talk about – collective learning – then do you now see that it is a curious, almost coincidental way to begin.

RLF: Would you like to elaborate?

R: Yes. Well, when you referred to humankind’s steps as man’s steps, it struck me that much of what we do in the course of our daily lives – things we could say we have learned from each other, we do almost without thinking.

RLF: I see what you mean. Yes, it is curious, now that you come to mention it.

R: We should look at those things we say we have ‘learned’ and those things we have merely imitated, shouldn’t we?

RLF: What would be the purpose in doing that, do you think?

R: Well, it seems to me that humankind is in a fix.

RLF: What do you mean by that?

R: Look around you – our planet – the planet that supports all of us, is endangered, chiefly by our actions, and yet we insist that we are the only form of life on Earth that consciously learns and passes on what we have learned to successive generations.

RLF: What have we done? Where did we go wrong?

R: Well, to begin with, I don’t think apportioning blame is too important – the important thing is learning where we erred and how, and when, and then seeing if we can either put things right by relearning, or seeing if we can repair the damage we have wreaked on our planet.

RLF: Where should we start? What can we use to begin?

R: Funnily enough, I would begin in the kitchen.

RLF: In the kitchen, why there?

R: To look at a few things there. To begin with, let’s look at the fridge – the refrigerator, if you prefer.

RLF: What significance can you find in a fridge?

R: To me, the fridge illustrates such a lot about humankind.

RLF: How?

R: That fridge is more or less like millions of other fridges, isn’t it?

RLF: Very similar, yes, but what’s your point?

R: Well, it illustrates how we have come to mass produce goods, doesn’t it?

RLF: Yes, it does, and I think it also illustrates how science and technology have changed our lives too, doesn’t it?

R: It certainly does. A fridge is basically a heat exchange mechanism, taking heat out of the food we put into it – similar to an air-conditioning system, if you like, which removes heat from a room and replaces it with cooler air.
But the fridge illustrates so much more than technology, although it certainly does that well.

RLF: What else does it illustrate? You will have to say what you mean.

R: The fridge stores food so that what we eat remains fresh, even though we bought the food a week ago or more.

RLF: That’s obvious, yes, but what of it?

R: Don’t you see, it illustrates what we have become.

RLF: I’m not sure I understand you.

R: Before the fridge was invented, before electricity was invented to power the fridge, what did we do with our meat?

RLF: Well, I remember my mother having to buy meat on a daily basis – she bought the meat she cooked later that day.

R: Why?

RLF: Because she had no means of keeping it fresh from one day to the next.

R: But you lived in a country with a cool, temperate climate, didn’t you?

RLF: Yes, we lived in England, which can be very cool.

R: And yet your mother bought the meat you ate every day?

RLF: Yes, that’s right, she did.

R: Like everyone else?

RLF: Yes, like everyone else.

R: Your mother had to buy meat, didn’t she?

RLF: Yes, from the butcher’s shop.

R: Like everyone else?

RLF: Yes, like most people, I should say.

R: Who would not have to buy meat?

RLF: I suppose those who kept animals – farmers and smallholders.

R: People who reared animals, and then slaughtered them for their meat?

RLF: Yes, or kept them for the milk they produced.

R: And if one family slaughtered a beast – say a sheep – did they eat it all at once, or did they manage to keep it fresh to be eaten later?

RLF: I think people used to preserve meat by salting it – covering it in salt to stop it from getting infected.

R: But not all meat was treated this way, I think I am right in saying.

RLF Right, yes. Most would have to be either sold on or eaten.

R: And if some was sold on, as you say, someone must have bought it.

RLF: Bought it, yes, or exchanged something for it, in the absence of any coinage.

R: We have a saying, that the best place to keep meat fresh is in the belly of a neighbor.

RLF: What does that mean? How can that be possible?

R: Think about it. One farmer slaughters a sheep, which is clearly too much for the plates of his own family table.

RLF: So?

R: He invites all his neighbours round and they eat it all together.

R: Yes, and then when someone else slaughters a beast for the table, they have an obligation to invite the folks they dined with the other night over to eat, and so on.

RLF: Yes, I see now. Meat is never wasted, that way.

R: No, but now we have the fridge – what does that signify – the changes in how men and women lived?

RLF: That way of saving meat would soon become unwieldy – you would have to remember whose food you had eaten, when you had eaten it and so on. It would become too complicated to continue that way, wouldn’t it?

R: Probably not while folk lived in small, isolated communities – hamlets, if you like. It would be easy at such times.

RLF: But still, it would be wasteful too. I mean, if there weren’t enough of you in the hamlet to eat a whole beast every time one was slaughtered, what would happen?

R: Then people would have surpluses of food that they needed to exchange food for
things – tools and such, and they would make contact with people from other communities close by.

RLF: And so soon, animals would be slaughtered and then distributed – sold – to neighbours.

R: Who in their turn would have items to exchange. Don’t you see now how the fridge illustrates how far we have moved from those early days when we ate whatever we slew.

RLF: As society grew more functionally complicated, it would no longer be possible to sell as soon as a beast was slaughtered. Fridges, when they arrived, gave us some breathing space, between slaughtering and eating.

R: And more than that. Once we had refrigeration, we could accumulate meat as a commodity to be sold when the price was higher, or when there was more demand.

RLF: And when demand rises…

R: So do prices. The birth of what we call economics.

RLF: And you got all that from looking at a fridge in your kitchen?

R: What I got was a way of looking at the subject of our discussion – collective learning. A lot of it, even most of what we learned, probably came out of necessity.

RLF: Or if not absolute necessity, then out of the way things were at the time.

R: Exactly. No man or woman ever woke up one morning and said to themselves, ‘I know what we’ll do today, we’ll invent a fridge!” The way we do things is a product of the conditions that prevail at the time.

RLF: Sure, and in the same way, nobody says, ‘Gee, I wish we had electricity, then we could have some means of keeping meat fresh so that we wouldn’t have to eat next door every night of our lives.' But do you think we have always learned that way, from necessity?

R: As life grew more and more complex; as more and more people did things other than produce food for consumption – as money started to be the medium of exchange instead of goods – food, tools and such, so that link between stomach and head would be broken.

RLF: Which link do you mean?

R: The link between hunger and producing food – that link. As that link weakened, and let’s face it, that link has never been as weak as it has become. A teacher doesn’t add up her hours of work in one week and think about how much food she can buy, does she?

RLF: Maybe not, but she knows what she can do with her salary – how far it will go – what she can do with it, or get with it if you prefer.

But where does this get us? What can we say about our subject; collective learning, and where it might have gone awry, does it?

R: I’m not sure. I think we’ve made a good start. We have gone from producing – growing and rearing – what was vital for life – food – to producing stuff that is plainly unnecessary for life, strictly speaking.

RLF: I’m not sure you are right there. I think you’re going off at a tangent – in a sort of ‘back to Nature’ sense. Mankind can’t freeze in the dark just because we have left some Utopian agrarian paradise. We have learned, and what is learned cannot be unlearned.

R: I agree. We cannot ignore progress, can we?

RLF: We can’t, but we can bring more rationality to what we do – to how we prosper.

R: How?

RLF: By considering what effects some of the things we do would have on where we live and how we live.

R: But if we couldn’t see that back then, how can we see it any clearer today?

RLF: We probably couldn’t then because the things we did would not have had the same impact as they do today.

R: This argument seems to be taking A Malthusian leaning to it, don’t you think?

RLF: How?

R: By our realization that as population soars, so do the demands made upon the soil beneath our feet.

RLF: Do you mean that our problems stem from our burgeoning population?

R: In part, yes, but also in part due to other factors besides the number of mouths to feed.

RLF: What other factors?

R: Well, look around you. What do you see? Look out of the window – what do you see?

RLF: Nothing much, the street is full of parked cars.

R: Exactly, and, like the fridge in our kitchens, the automobile illustrates another level of our development. What did we do before the internal combustion engine was invented?

RLF: Before the infernal combustion engine, as my father used to call it? Why, we walked, of course, or rode horses.

R: Or we did neither.

RLF: What do you mean?

R: We stayed home. We worked locally – in the home, in the village or hamlet.

RLF: But then that couldn’t last, could it? I mean, as populations increased, people would be forced to look elsewhere to earn their living.

R: Until we get to the point where we are today. But, as you say, there’s no turning back, no unlearning. We move around a lot more than we did even when I was a kid. It’s so noticeable that we travel further.

RLF: Why?

R: Because we can, that’s why!
Robert L. Fielding