THESIS - CHAPTER FIVE - CONCLUSION

Meditation is to be aware of what is going on – in our bodies, in our feelings, in our minds, and in the world… Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects. Please do not think we have to be solemn to meditate. In fact, to meditate well, we have to smile a lot.

- Thích Nhất Hạnh, spiritual leader and one who knows that without mud there is no lotus

I sent the four prior chapters of this thesis in their earliest draft form to my oldest friend in the world. He knows, if anyone does, where I come from and what motivates me. His response was very generous and said that the work read as sincere. However, ultimately, he was bewildered by the whole thing. He could not understand what stuck so fully in my craw about Descartes and this treatment of him. While he assured me that he followed my reasoning, he insisted that he came up dry trying to imagine why all of this so clearly bothered me and, perhaps more, why I couldn’t just let it go. He reported that when he arrived toward the end of the final section, where it talks about “the meaning of life,” that he laughed out loud and thought, “Chris just gets stuck on things!” Then he proposed that I may wish to better evaluate my relationship to Western civilization, science, and modernity, particularly the excesses of capitalism and the social injustices entwined therein. Well, I sat with that for about a week.[1] It all seems clear to me and clearly spelled out in this work. And I don’t think I can’t file it any sharper or polish it any clearer, though it seems I must try.

While prone to confusion and often blind to my own motivations, I believe I try to remain committed to not making things worse. Not making things worse seems like a fraught and challenging journey at best and only infinitely more difficult when we insist upon forgetting (and label that “remembrance”) or try to convince one another there are ducks on the moon. It does strike me as wonderfully odd that I regularly come across disparagements of almost any notion of “truth.” Using the term seems to necessitate pre-emptive caveats and apologies. What I never hear any conflict about is lying or being lied to, misleading, intentionally or otherwise, or being mislead ourselves, or just trying to avoid the worse outcomes of common confusion. Most of us, I feel, are heavily emotionally, psychologically, and biologically invested in having our personal sense of the world correspond pretty tightly to the world. So it seems we are reasonably committed to getting our sense of things right, or at least not terribly wrong. Similarly, I cannot find people opposed to asking questions (“Where do ducks go when it gets cold out?”), evaluating answers (“Hey, turtles survive below the ice in the muck at the bottom of lakes, why not ducks?”), or attempting to persuade others of one or another answer (“Well, has anyone ever seen a duck under the ice?”) This is what the majority of the humans in my world spend the majority of their time doing, whether for work, casually on social media, in their private life, or all of the above; and yet its just as easy to find someone ridiculing “reason” or “logic” as it is “truth.” Still, pursuing truth (a sufficiently close connection between how I think the world is and how the world actually is), to me, seems less like closing one’s self off to minority views or other ways of knowing than a meaningful acknowledgement and appreciation of them. As suggested by my friend, much of this thesis rubs uncomfortably against and even pulls away from what appears to be a strong consensus. (Or, I would love to hear a case for the reverse.)

Discussion of Descartes’ philosophy seems trivial. It certainly struck me that way at first. And yet, because of how it connects with and mirrors so very much, it now feels to me to be nearly all that matters.[2] We celebrate the life of environmentalist John Muir (1838-1914), who reminds us that "[w]hen we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast … to everything in the universe" (Cronon, 1997, p. 245). Doing so, we somehow miss that this is a respectable paraphrase of the insight gifted by an angel in a dream to a certain “rationalist,” who published the same some two centuries earlier and used it as the basis for his entire philosophy – a perspective and approach said to have inspired modern science. And we tell ourselves that it is in defiance of Descartes and those he inspired that we employ phenomenology and phrases like “my truth” or “lived experience”. We do this knowing, even if nothing else, that so much of Descartes’ life’s work was prefaced on the observation that the most reliable certainty there can be, and therefore the basis for all knowledge, is one’s own consciousness.

As this research showed, invocations of this person’s name appear inescapable within Environmental Education literature. This alone suggests the relevance of this topic within just this field. This research, however, was not concerned with an obscure collection of vague anecdotes or tangential endnotes from unknown sources; instead, what is presented here are a set of ideas leading scholars (people I admire and respect within a field I believe to be critical) who frame these as axiomatic and use them to form the foundation of essays, chapters, entire books, and the bulk of a discipline and movement. And, though I am one of them in any real sense (I have read the work, speak the language, am invested, and already on-board), I find so much of it so challenging and bewildering. However, I don’t believe my confusion comes from being so perfectly indoctrinated by science and scientism and as a result cannot hope to grasp anything different. (However, this could be the clearest symptom of the illness.) That feels like a terrible misreading of my upbringing and of the culture and of human history. I would be fine with all of this, and these ideas would just stack almost imperceptibly among the tremendous mountain of things I don’t understand and that I believe are wildly disjointed; except that this field and so much of this work arrives at a time and place where we are attempting to have a global conversation and build a global consensus around what are said to be the most important questions with which humanity has ever contended. As unsolicited and regressive as it seemingly presents, my sense is that we are determined to work from a common premise that feels as limiting as the perfectly serviceable and well-intended “five senses” or “miasma.” And, though feeling as I do, I am trying not to rush for the exit as I have done in the past. Taking inspiration from my herons (not in their raucous housebuilding, mating, or child rearing, but in their nourishment-seeking), I am trying to better embrace and find the wisdom in patience and stillness and, for a change, stick around to have these messy conversations.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] I am so glad I did not write about how much I hate recycling or that I believe going organic or vegan or transitioning to entomophagy would have the opposite impact to what most hope and claim. Some things are probably best left unsaid.

[2] Further research I would love to pursue, if you don’t beat me to it, would include:

• Where and when popular disgust toward Descartes emerged within Environmental Education discourses?

• Why and how faith, God, angels, revelation, dreams, and nature appear to have been so cleanly (as if by a skilled surgeon) removed from the story of Descartes and his philosophy in certain contexts?

• Why Descartes, a Catholic pursuing truth by doubt, makes no reference to the parable of the Apostle Thomas; “the doubter” who is, as a direct result of his dogged skepticism, the only person ever gifted with touching the resurrected incorporeal body of Christ, Logos, Light of the World, Son of God?