Man vs. Nature

The universe is chaotic. We are floating in a frigid airless expanse full of scorching radiation and speeding rocks the size of many countries. To make matters worse, things are continuously changing; weather is marginally predictable, resources run out, geological events alter the face of the planet, suns explode, the universe expands... Our reality hangs on by a thread, or at least it seems.

A natural reaction to this is one that we, in our civilization, embraced some millennia ago: to create safeguards against the forces of change; to remove, or at least reduce, the unpredictability of the natural world. Such has been the charge of technological innovation, and we have had great success, at least in the short-term. We have managed to control the flow of water in order to maintain a steady supply of food. We have developed ways of tapping into chemical energy stored in the earth to keep our towns lit at night and our homes a comfortable temperature.

We have made the necessities of life so consistently available that people have time now to fret over what sort of shoes might go best with their new designer handbag. The chaotic has become rather static, and we have filled our lives with new sorts of worries that never occurred to our ancestors.

There is a major psychological consequence for this shift. In a static reality the universe is knowable; it is possible, in theory, to acquire a grasp of all that is, to become knowledgeable. And we have been at it for some time now. We hold in high regard those who are best at knowing, and feel ashamed of what we don't know.

Naturally, our educational system reflects this. We are taught to seek knowledge, operate within a structured, rigid construct, and pursue a particular ideal character, regardless of our individual uniquenesses. We are assessed only on our organizational skills and our mental capacity for- and dedication to- collecting details, while genuine understanding, and the tools to acquire understanding, is often neglected entirely. With our sense of self now reliant on knowledge, we cling to our internal libraries of static information, protecting them, occasionally to our detriment.

This mental game of acquisition has a physical parallel; there is a material outcome of this training. In the tangible world, many of us in our society find ourselves obsessed with objects. Our civilization is built on the idea of a life full of stable and secure possessions, cordoned off from others. We are protective of what is ours, and fence in our corner of the world, mirroring the confining and limiting nature of our intellectual reality.

There is a conflict. We are products of the universe, and the universe is continuously in flux. Our nature is to work within this chaotic sea of change, but yet we fight to control it, and ourselves, and we waste a tremendous amount of energy doing it. We limit ourselves to something static and almost immediately obsolete in the quest to bolster an ego whose foundation is unnatural.

But there is another way. We can choose to value the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, with no judgment for where one might find themselves on that journey. We can teach our children the processes by which they might seek understanding, and trust them to find their own understanding. We can embrace diversity, flexibility, and the creative nature of exploration.

I am a science teacher. I teach students to pursue truth, their own truth, through empirical methods. I work to encourage them to seek truth on their own terms, coaching by presenting them with challenges to their ideas and asking them to consider the quality of their methodology. My classes are science methods courses that, incidentally, lead to some new knowledge and understanding.

But the knowledge is not my primary concern. I, like most of my peers, was not instructed in this way. Science, as I once conceived of it, was a collection of information. My memories of science from public school involved memorizing periodic tables, anatomical structures, and right hand rules. I was successful, and I felt good about myself as a future scientist, but not because I knew how to do science. I had memorized the "scientific method" and could regurgitate it verbatim, but I had never knowingly applied it myself.

It wasn't until I had been teaching for several years that I finally learned that I was actually a pretty good scientist. As details started escaping me, replaced by conceptual conjectures and analytical exercises, my notion of science started to resemble the pursuit that it actually is.

But the real breakthrough for me occurred when I chanced upon a group in Seattle teaching physics instructional methodology in a whole new way (to me), and my eyes were opened. They were putting the learning in the hands of the learner, simultaneously handing responsibility and respect over to the students. Everything that they were doing seemed RIGHT to me; it was what had been missing from my own education. When I began applying this in my own classes, the response from students was incredible, though particularly so from the younger students, who are less indoctrinated in the knowledge and teacher-pleasing games of industrial-model classrooms.

With some, however, it was excruciating. To be expected to create their own conclusions is terrifying, particularly for those who have already acquired a substantial body of information and now consider themselves to be excellent students by 'traditional' standards. Again, I have found this to be more common with age, and have heard stories of furious educators walking out of such an instructional demonstration feeling toyed with at not being handed "the answer." But this should be, and is in reality, the norm in science.

I heard something beautiful the other day from a professional on the cutting edge of science education. She said, "if you're not comfortable with uncertainty, then you cannot do science. And this reminds me of the universe, in that it is vast, and fundamentally unknowable, though we can certainly do our best to approach an understanding.

I talk about science because it is the area that I have studied most. This is but one road and one skill set. There are paths for all of us, but the unifying idea is the search; the journey. If we honor each person's path through life, we can begin to do something bold and transformative for society.

Here are some of the possible changes that would take place in the world if we stopped fighting to control possessions and embraced the journey, the chaos, so as to finally begin working with the nature of things instead of against it.

I propose that we shift our paradigm. We should move from a vision of the world as discrete, static, and controllable to one that embraces the continuous flow of things. Our innovation has been sorely limited by an insistence on attachment to what came before. Our capabilities have been bridled by an artificial perimeter to our reality, and those who have broken out of the box have either been heralded as genius-heroes or crucified for their heretical objection to their contrived containment. We have shown what we can do when we put our minds to something, now the next step of our social evolution is to step back away from our egos, view the world and ourselves as we truly are, and return to the endless flow of change.