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Renouncing Human Hubris and Reeducating Commonsense

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Abstract

The thesis of this paper is that we are now in the early stage of a revolution even more transformative than the Copernican. That great upheaval brought about a radical shift in the way men and women conceptualized their place in the universe. The revolution now under way entails a sea change in the way we think about ourselves in relation to the planet we inhabit—itself not a simple matter—and also the reeducation of our attitudes, values, feelings, emotions, patterns of behavior, and modes of living. All of which is to say that it requires us to become very different people from the ones we now are.

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Notes

  1. Kuhn (1957, 2).

  2. Ibid. 190.

  3. Ibid. 199.

  4. Ibid. 44.

  5. Wilson (2012, 49).

  6. Wilson (2014, 50).

  7. Ibid. 50.

  8. Ibid. 51.

  9. Ibid. 51.

  10. Ibid. 82.

  11. Ibid. 83.

  12. Ibid. 84.

  13. Ibid. 84.

  14. Ibid. 92.

  15. On this last point see Whitehead and Rendell (2015, 61–63).

  16. Whitehead and Rendell, Cultural Lives, 21.

  17. See, e.g., Kolbert (2014).

  18. McKibben (2006, 51).

  19. The climate change we have brought about also appears to be responsible for the increasing number of devastating boreal wild fires (New York Times, 5/11/16).

  20. Carson (1962, 297).

  21. Wilson (1996, 191).

  22. L’Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition in English Jan. 24, 2001, p. 11.

  23. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis, May 2015.

  24. Mckibben, End, 55.

  25. According to Ridley (2003), “defining human uniqueness has been a cottage industry for philosophers for centuries.”

  26. I use the male pronoun deliberately here.

  27. See, e.g. Ridley, Agile; McKibben, End.

  28. McKibben, End, 56.

  29. As anthropologist Ortner (1974, 67–88) once put it.

  30. See McKibben, End, however, for a discussion of some of the possibilities.

  31. Rousseau (1979 (1762), 38).

  32. Dewey (1961 (1916), 4).

  33. Illich (1970).

  34. Rousseau, Emile, 64.

  35. Ridley (2000, 221).

  36. Pinker (1994, 4).

  37. Pinker, Language, 5.

  38. Pinker (2002, 53).

  39. Ridley, Genome, 94.

  40. For a full account of Victor, see Lane (1979).

  41. Rousseau, Emile, 61.

  42. In note (iii) to his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, written in 1754, Rousseau discusses some earlier “wild children.” See Roussseau (2011 (1754)).

  43. Ridley, Genome, 221.

  44. Pinker, Language, 4.

  45. Peters (1972, 1–23).

  46. Pinker, Blank, 24.

  47. Ridley, Agile, 3.

  48. Ibid. 81.

  49. Ibid. 81.

  50. Barker (2015).

  51. Oyama (2000).

  52. Ibid. 40.

  53. Ridley, Agile, 146.

  54. Ibid. 263.

  55. Stein (1980).

  56. See, e.g., Wilson, Search and Social Conquest; Whitehead and Rendell, Cultural Lives.

  57. In what follows I restrict myself to human learning and leave open the question of whether my points apply to the learning of other species.

  58. E.g., Whitehead and Rendell, Cultural Lives, 5.

  59. Martin (2002). Cultural Miseducation.

  60. A culture’s capital clearly falls under my heading of cultural assets. Whether the concept of cultural capital as usually understood embraces all of a culture’s assets or merely a subset I leave to others to decide.

  61. See Mannheim’s (1952, 276–320) formulation of the sociological problem of generations.

  62. Dawkins (1976).

  63. And then developed by Dennett (1995), and elaborated further by Blackmore (1999).

  64. Brooks (2014).

  65. E.g. Pinker (2011).

  66. Wilson, Social Conquest, Ch. 7.

  67. Ibid. 59.

  68. Wilson, Social, 194.

  69. Martin (2002).

  70. Mayer (2016) identifies many of the secret transmitters of anti-climate change messages; describes their methodologies—including the death threats; and estimates their impact.

  71. Tommasini (2016).

  72. Breitman (2016).

  73. De Waal writes that sheep “remember one another’s faces” and investigators speculate that “a flock which to us looks like an anonymous mass, is in fact quite differentiated.” See De Waal (2016, 72).

  74. See De Waal, Smart Enough, for discussions of the “umwelt” of other organisms.

  75. And also from the consciousness-raising groups of second wave feminism.

  76. Julia Roberts, October 5, 2014, Conservation International.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA

    Jane Roland Martin

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  1. Jane Roland Martin
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Correspondence to Jane Roland Martin.

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I wish to thank Ann Diller, Susan Franzosa, Barbara Houston, Beebe Nelson, Jennifer Radden, E.O. Wilson, and the editors of this special issue for helpful comments on an early draft of this essay.

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Martin, J. Renouncing Human Hubris and Reeducating Commonsense. Stud Philos Educ 36, 283–298 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9559-7

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