Humainologie creative dialogue May 18 on Building Empathy by Looking into Global Connection

"Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation." - Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed#Synopsis “Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral” - Paulo Freire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire “Any investment in our territory can be accused of being stained with our blood and with terrible damage to our mother earth. Currently there are 20 leaders threatened with death.” - Indigeneous Community Embéra from Jiguamiandó, Colombia. Two related articles: https://pbicanada.org/2022/01/04/embera-reject-mining-on-their-lands-say-that-any-investment-would-be-stained-with-our-blood/ https://pbicanada.org/2022/04/23/nomadesc-warns-of-climate-change-as-canadian-companies-invest-in-extractivism-in-colombia/ San José de Apartadó, Colombia, the peace community where Michaela Sollinger serves as an international peace presence, recently celebrated its 25th anniversary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr4WjL-immU Michaela will facilitate our creative dialogue this coming Wednesday May 18. Manuel Rozental plans to be present as well. Our topic is Building Empathy by Looking into Global Connections You have received a 4-point proposal for a Calgary peace museum that Manuel has contributed as reference material for our dialogue. Below this email, I have appended my synopsis of a book that Manuel mentioned in that proposal. Keeping in mind that concept from Abe Lincoln, that the philosophy of the classroom in one generation is the philosophy of the government in the next, we might consider annual exchange visits involving children and young adults from Calgary and Colombia, with the peace museum as the place where the youngsters present their experience in the cultural exchange program. Connect that with the curriculum for grades 1 through 12 that Mahendra will tell us about in June, and the Calgary peace museum would already have a foundation that the Glenbow or City Council would surely want to support! Please do not remain silent about your idea for the Calgary peace museum at the dialogue on Wednesday because it may be the break-through we need to make this project a success. Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is something we might look into as we move toward the opening of a Calgary peace museum. Here is a nine-and-a-half-minute video on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpkjdbh7ALI As a good question for our Wednesday session, I would ask this: Suppose a Calgary fossil fuel corporation offered 35 million dollars to get the peace museum started. How should we respond? Think creatively. I won’t suggest that you think deviously, but neither would I discourage it - as long as you think creatively. Here is the Zoom link provided by Shinobu: Topic: Humainologie Dialogue Session Time: May 18, 2022 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Jun 2022 May 18, 2022 06:30 PM Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86356492764?pwd=bCtWeDdGUExOdUVIQUt2eUdqbWVZZz09 Meeting ID: 863 5649 2764 Passcode: 12345 Lest we forget, the world is torn by violence we humans are inflicting on one another, and the front page of the New York Times today reminds us yet again of how close to home and how urgent this matter is, and how necessary are our weekly dialogues. https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/05/16/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf Arthur Book: (Michel-Rolph Trouillot) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel-Rolph_Trouillot was a Haitian historian whose focus was first on Haiti itself, and then on the history of the Caribbean. Three of the five chapters in this book examine “silencing” as it applies to important chapters of Caribbean history, including the silencing of the Haitian revolution (1791-1804). Slaves of African ancestry had risen up and overthrown their white “masters.” Just months before the insurrection, a French colonist had “reassured his metropolitan wife of the peaceful state of life in the tropics. He wrote: …’We have nothing to fear on the part of the Negroes; they are tranquil and obedient.’” Even after the fact of the uprising, the stark reality of what had happened did not quite register in the European awareness. In that same chapter (Chapter 3, “An Unthinkable History”) the author points out our tendency to ignore those facts which do not fit with our preferred way of thinking: “When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse.” My synopsis will focus on the two chapters (Chapter 1, “The Power in the Story” and Chapter 5, “The Presence in the Past”) in which he develops his conceptual framework. This book has influenced the concept of “history” ever since it was published. The author emphasizes that interpretation of both the past and the present are constantly in flux. The notion of “the fixity of pastness” is a mistake that has led many historians, American historians in particular, to abandon the role of public intellectual. I am very much aware of the importance of having intellectuals actively involved in giving form and meaning to our times. Noam Chomsky, for example, has had a profound influence on my own life and work. Trouillot emphasizes the unfortunate consequences when serious historians are absent from public discourse. “Since historical controversies often revolve on relevance – and therefore, at least in part, on the positioning of the observer – academic historians tend to keep as far away as possible from the historical controversies that most move the public of the day. In the United States, a few have intervened in the historical debates that made news in the early 1990s: the alleged role of Jews as slave owners, the Holocaust, the Alamo, the Smithsonian exhibits on the American West and on Hiroshima, or the Virginia park project [reference to a planned Walt Disney theme park on the history of slavery in America]. But many more qualified historians have kept public silence on these and similar issues. That silence even extends to debates about the national standards for history that academics seem to have abandoned to pundits and politicians.” That particular form of “silencing the past” is only one of those referred to in this essential book. “Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).” To illustrate the foregoing with my own examples taken from recent history: The discovery of mass graves at the sites of residential schools uncovered past actions in which there was intentional silencing at the source. In Catholic school systems elsewhere, as depicted in “Philomena,” a movie based on a true story, there had been actual destruction of archives, shrouded in a conspiracy of silence among those who knew about it. When mass graves are discovered, there is a retrieval of facts from the past, but what narrative will arise from this? Silence is again an option. And even if a useful narrative arises, will it be ignored by the public? Will that narrative translate into meaningful action, “the making of history in the final instance”? Interpretation of both the past and the present are constantly in flux. The production of history involves both the act and the interpretation of the act, and this duality is fluid. Furthermore, each of us is involved in the process of creating the facts of history and in the process of interpreting those facts. “History is always produced in a specific historical context. Historical actors are also narrators, and vice versa.” We can assume that the histories that were written in 1930 about American slavery would differ from those written in 1990; and we can predict that all those past histories would differ from a history of American slavery that might be written thirty years from now. Here it is important to introduce the concept of authenticity. Historical authenticity “resides not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-à-vis the present as it re-presents the past.” As an example of a failure of authenticity, Trouillot again mentions the history of American slavery “theme park” that Walt Disney had planned (an idea that was widely criticized when it became known). “When we imagine Disney’s project and visualize a line of white tourists munching on chewing gum and fatty food, purchasing tickets for the ‘painful, disturbing, and agonizing’ experience promised by the television ads, we are not into The Past. And we should not ask these tourists to be true to that past: they were not responsible for slavery. …The trivialization of slavery – and of the suffering it caused inheres in [that kind of theme park].” Further to the theme of authenticity, the author refers to both the importance of research into the Holocaust and the abhorrence that this history inspires in many Germans today and writes: “But no amount of historical research about the Holocaust and no amount of guilt about Germany’s past can serve as a substitute for marching in the streets against German skinheads today. Fortunately, quite a few prominent German historians understand that much.” “The map is not the territory” was the way Alfred Korzybski had expressed it. Interpretation of both the present and the past will always be ambiguous. And yet we must continue our efforts to understand, to interpret history even as we engage in the process of making history. If we get hung up on a need for some eternal and unchanging “truth,” we miss the choice of a dynamic intellectual approach to better outcomes. In the words of the author, “Positions need not be eternal in order to justify a legitimate defense. To miss this point is to bypass the historicity of the human condition. Any search for eternity condemns us to the impossible choice between fiction and positivist truth [referring to logical positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism], between nihilism and fundamentalism, which are two sides of the same coin. As we move through the end of the millennium, it will be increasingly tempting to seek salvation by faith alone, now that most deeds seem to have failed.” Here in Calgary, like human beings everywhere, we are making history day by day. This book can help us understand the process and how to do it most imaginatively and effectively.