A Commons Humanity-Healing Education (ACHE) for Motivated Activism and Protest (MAP) to a Shared, Sustainable World

• In Event: Responding to the Climate Crisis: Decolonial Imaginaries and Regenerative Education

Proposal

“Intersectionality” is a framework for conceptualizing a person, group of people, or social problem influenced by a number of discriminations and disadvantages. Understanding the negative impact of intersectionality on any society is critical to understanding the increasingly necessary healing-human, problem-solving education on countering premises, that spans many cultures, their histories and worldviews in an expanding diverse world. An education that also develops the necessary emotional and social “intelligences,” without which, humanity will no longer be able to sustain on this planet. That pedagogy must include environmental and experiential life-learning with a grounded empathetic understanding starting at the planetary level, developing critical connections across purposely-constructed-politically-divided cultures, and even, the corpus callosum of the brain itself. Understanding this intersectionality premise is essential to understanding the growing emotionally motivated counter-movement of activism and required protest of so-called current technological ‘progress’, purposely driving and ignoring the highly visible evidence worldwide of existential-threatening realities. This is no ordinary protest but an interpersonally shared human “Commons” protest that must succeed in order to achieve a shared planet of sustainable resources for the survival of all healthy life forms on Earth.

This transformative pedagogy must support the way that healthy human brains actually learn best, especially at younger ages. It is by connections made in the brain’s neuron synapses directly to the human empathetic “heart and spirit’ we share in common, the key, not only to all future learning success, but to an underlying globally healthy mental and spiritual state. Understanding these social-equity assumptions of education, rests on the critical essential belief that every human child is initially naturally and brilliantly imbued with curiosity and an innate love of learning. This is the modus operandi of the natural nascent brain, which is dependent on fast growth and interconnected learning in order to survive and thrive. Destructively interfering in that initial development, which is fostered best by providing material safety, healthy caring support, nurturance and love, fosters the deepest and worst damage to intertwined human emotional/mental and physical growth. In particular, the current breaking and machining of the human mind away from interpersonal emotional intelligence and natural empathy development, towards reinforcing inequity and inhumane economic values, destroys the very learning of “connection” or valuing of all life. That healthy caring is the motivation and the driving force of modeled learning for diverse collaborative problem-solving that results in a sustained mutual care of the planetary Commons for ALL life.

Yet, the key and now overarching role of “economic development” models, dominating political and economic power driving a globalizing model designed along neo-liberal, patriarchal values, remains cleverly hidden as “natural free-market forces” used to subvert that very understanding of human intersectionality. An historic social imbalance, at its roots, fertilized by technology under a banner of neutrality claimed ‘progress,’ that has empowered an economic-power ruling class, one now able to both define and enforce, while at the same time vehemently and forcefully denying, all other intersectional systems under its now more centralized informational-educational control. Subsequently these same historically insulated economic “Winners” carefully obfuscate the actual, deep inequity and bankrupt profit-only ‘values’ that underlie and economically-propel an increasingly destructive human existence for the rest of the increasing “Losers” of the shared-in-Commons planetary resources, necessary for survival. The same values begun long ago with the first defining premise supported and taught by patriarchal religions and brute enforcement of false innate-superiority-by-gender-defining characteristics. The historic foundational basis used for all other models of superiority over others based on race, place, religion and multiple cultural differences, claimed falsely on “merit” premises, but one still preached as “innate” and thus “immutable.” Ironically, but as a clear example:actual anti-life results of patriarchal religious ‘Pro-Life’ movements, designed to control all women’s ‘biology’, bodies and actions including all “other genders”’ bodies and defined characteristics subservient to patriarchy’s defining ‘masculinity’ resting on power-authoritarian assumptions, at its definitional base.

Questions then need to be asked: why and for what have we created this expanding neo-liberal era of globalization? When the education it designed and increasingly demands, itself dominated by political and economic non-professional educators, still resulted in dramatically increasing scientific fact-based causal evidence of planetary resource destruction and Climate Crises? That environmental destruction not only a by-product but as a direct result of the primacy of a ‘progress’ defined in ever more planet-resource-bankrupting, violence-increasing, ‘technologically-neutral’ terms. Terms and definitions that politically and economically, needed now to be forcefully hidden, refuted and outright violently denied especially ‘educationally’, considering the counter-factual, overwhelming scientific evidence. Subsequently, the old root religious patriarchal values that had always been claimed for “innate” superiority of all kinds, buttressed always by threat of enforcement and authoritarian violence, are the actual “values” powering this economic and political ‘Right-to-Rule’ authoritarianism, despite the actual scientific/technological reality of a world increasingly more unfit for the survival of the greater whole of humanity, under those same authoritarian values.

Imagine instead, a counter foundational premise of human “morality” based instead on the more widely truly innate characteristic observed in all human children, with gender not-so-restrictedly-defined and increasingly by violence enforced, of the human infant’s predilection towards “fairness” and against ‘unfair’ treatment of any “other”, no matter their different apparent characteristics defined by their “biologic” category (Paul Bloom, "The Moral Life of Babies", The NYT Magazine, May 9, 2010) of gender, race, ethnicity etc. A Positive Psychology Feminism (Janice Haaken, Hard Knocks,2010) valuing life “service” in pursuit of growing resource health and connected human Commons’ values where the “health” of the whole is far more important than the wealth of the entitled, ever smaller ‘elite’, obscenely rewarded for their winning-at-all-cost traits. A currently clearly demonstrated increasingly inequitable, authoritarian, anti-life and physical/mental human-health damaging reality that must be seen, felt and understood in all its created enforced systems of intersectionality, to be actively fought in productive ways, together. The alternative is a deadly one, creating increasing planetary destruction and human dysfunction – as pathologies of rabid disparity replication always do - like cancers to the greater whole-body “Commons” politic and individual human mind.

Author

• June Gorman, TEF-Global.org,