Opinion | Education and Ethics in an Obedient Patriarchal Universe

In matters of ethics, I am very radical. It is not a presumption. I give as an example the thought that human beings should treat themselves and others as an end and never as a means to achieve something. Do you, dear reader, think the same? Excellent! Welcome to the group of radicals!

Why do I call myself radical if it is nothing more than a fundamental principle of ethics, prevalent and accepted? Well, that doesn’t subtract from the radical, the absolutely radical. You see, to admit that we are ends and not means signifies, according to me, accepting that, at birth, we are already fully worthy; i.e., ethically, we do not have to do anything to be worthwhile. And something better: no effort adds value to us; not even education does that. We cannot add value; we are all we can become. In other words, if we were to believe that human beings are here to fulfill a mission, it would already be mission accomplished.

Maria Montessori agreed with this when she said that human beings are born as a paragon of virtues and that the environment created by adults distorts us. Furthermore, she thought this was not only in the ethical sense but in all senses. She said and even demonstrated that if we left children free, surrounded by the necessary conditions for their flourishing, they would learn everything they need: reading, writing, mathematics, history, geography – everything. They would even orient themselves toward moral sentiment, ethical reasoning, and the mysteries of spirituality.

In Montessori were remnants of ancient philosophies and religions arguing that humans are in this world after renouncing that inherent perfection. In reality, it would remain in us as a hidden or forgotten treasure, buried under all kinds of distractions and falsehoods that prevent its shining. The best thing would be to shovel all those aside and find our fullness. Discover. Education and human communication, in general, would help us liberate each other, revealing us as the ends that we are: finished beings, people whose meaning is fulfilled not outside but inside.

Education would, I repeat, take away what buries us, uneducate us, unlearn us, and allow us to live together without any promise to each other of being better, without pretending that anyone behaves in a predetermined way. From this perspective, only those who master the problematic path of not wanting others to change can be teachers.

In a sense, Maria Montessori saw in teachers that universal spirit (which we usually associate with the mother) for whom children are perfect and lack nothing. This view coincides with the biblical myth in which God the Creator recognizes the goodness of humans and sets them in a state of paradisiacal completeness. In this myth, the protective spirit unfolds in the figure of the restrictive God (associated with the father) who sets laws and punishments to separate his creatures from the maternal environment, throwing them into an external world (which He also created). Humans, unprepared to live there, are forced to change and improve.

This is how they start to learn they are not enough; they must pursue some ends and, inevitably, position themselves as a means to achieve them. God always says that the only end is to fulfill His law and punish those who don’t. Some know the law because God dictates it to them. Others decipher it with their reasoning. Still, others warn that creation has a cyclical order and that the law is revealed in its repetitions and changes. Certainly, among them prevail those who believe that behind the cycles is the governing God, but there is no lack of disenchanted people who, ceasing to believe in ghosts, affirm that everything is matter.

For them, this matter – which has no external cause but is eternal or comes from nothing – has an intrinsic law governing it. It (matter) reveals that law mathematically and statistically. Human beings can know it but not modify it. That is, we are conditioned by the flow of nature, which we cannot influence in any way. However, this flow is so complex and full of “infinite” variables that it creates a feeling of freedom. Thus, we feel like a fish in water, even though we are subjected to all the environmental conditions. Our consciousness is no more than a phantom effect of matter with no relevance except that of enjoying or suffering the environment in which we testify to our survival or collapse. Being a means or an end does not really depend on us but on that natural determination.

Another scientific position (because, as the reader has already realized, it is science we are discussing) suggests that matter – in its ductility – can produce conscious human beings capable of taking matter and modifying it, not to the extent of changing its laws but of leveraging it for their benefit; Gathered in conscious societies, humans realize what is best for them, and they draw up new ends repeatedly, and test (within the limits of material law) new forms of organization to achieve them. This perpetual, stormy dialogue between growing consciousness and solid matter creates human history. The fish has built a boat and travels in it, using the rudder and sails to go faster, farther, and more safely than its fins and resources would allow.

This sounds good. However, it is still curious that matter acquires consciousness and can create its own end and means of achieving it. I don’t know about you, but to me, the fact that matter sustains itself seems a kind of levitation, as miraculous as something having arisen from nothing. The mysticism of matter, I would call this. But I wonder: won’t believing this requires a lot of faith?

Faith: What nourishes it? We ourselves? Hmm… I feel that something is missing. The idea of a radical ethic comes to my aid: could it be that this too, like every root (radical means from the root), must receive its nourishment from the outside? If I see myself and my fellow men as beings with full worth, on what basis does that value lie? Do the roots of a radical ethic supply themselves, or must they extend toward a source? Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great German philosopher, refused to talk about ethics, saying that the origin of ethics is beyond language comprehensibility and, therefore, it was simply better not to discuss it. Since then, those who want to talk about ethics and understand means and ends risk falling into the ridicule of appealing to the existence of an ineffable being (of whom one cannot speak) who gives it support and meaning and justifies the fact of valuing ourselves for our purposes. So, the indemonstrable God arises again. For the benefit of this brave and ridiculous position, it can be said that, although it is as absurd as all the others we have seen, the qualifiers of absurdity and indemonstrable do not sit so badly with it: the faith that sustains it, and the very Being that justifies it can recognize, without much shame, its lack of evidence and all logic.

Aware of this, Blaise Pascal, the great seventeenth-century philosopher, mystic, and scientist (the one discussed in physics books), challenged the world to decide, not about the existence or non-existence of God (one as unprovable as the other), but something more straightforward (and simultaneously more pious and tremendous): the benefit of believing. If both options were equally likely, why choose the one that implied the biggest loss? After all, to believe in God and win means to win all; not to believe and lose was to lose all.

Obviously, not many of Pascal’s fellow scientists were convinced about the mystical benefits of the bet, and the controversy between the law of matter and the law of God increased (i.e., between a self-sustaining ethic, so to speak, and a transcendent one). For the millions of unwary people who could not decide, Pascal’s option practically translated into choosing heads or tails in what to believe. I think there can be nothing sadder. In fact, Karl Jaspers, another German scholar, warned that human beings, previously burdened with questions, were now drowning in answers: laws, reasons, dogmas, a kind of totalitarianism of judgment that made it impossible to decide anything with a bit of freedom or taking a breath. Then, amid that sea of ideas, Jaspers found God. He did it in the simplest way possible, almost without thinking: just saying “God exists.” With that single sentence, without intending to add anything (enunciated not as a religious dogma but as an existential expression), Jaspers opened himself to a non-restrictive, lawless afterlife. God was without determinations; i.e., he was not a specific God, he was not a particular type of God, he was that God of whom one can only say that He exists. Yes, that’s all. That God who exists (and of whom nothing else could or should be said) was a God who spared us the anguish of defining Him. This freed us from our dissertative discourse (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent) that wants to determine reality, eternity, and life “as if we had created them” (in the words of the great Spanish philosopher María Zambrano). That single phrase “God exists”, without further ado, exempted us from all this (and incidentally, responded to Wittgenstein and his famous idea that “It is better not to speak about which nothing can be said”).

For Jaspers, human beings who decide to free themselves from their oppressive conditionings are capable of loving each other and of communicating and solving their problems from a deep existential level, without judgments of any kind (not even ethical value judgments) that continue to define them (finally, no means, ends, and such things). Jaspers’ confidence in this type of communication is such that his friend Hannah Arendt, another great philosopher, exclaimed, “In your life, your philosophy reflects how human beings can talk to each other even in the conditions of the flood.”

In short, that was Jaspers’s thinking. Surely, some readers will find him motivating (for them, I recommend his short book Philosophy from the Point of View of Existence, published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica de México). However, the truth is that most of his contemporaries did not believe those two words were anything more than the same old dogma, that they could be the liberation of an entire era overwhelmed by conscience and reason or anesthetized by cynicism and violence.

In such a world, there was only one possible respite, a position where everyone should think what they wanted, that everything was true: that we are only means, only ends, only matter, only spirit, or whatever we want. This postmodern philosophy is still in force and criticized by many people. Still, it is the only one realizing the human impossibility of taking the bull by the horns and decided to take the horns by the bull to show us the ridiculousness of our audacity.

Based on the above, I want to end this article with my personal and postmodern perspective. To start, I think that all the confusion and suffocation of ideas causing crises throughout the twentieth century are a consequence of the events narrated by that old patriarchal myth: a humanity that attributes to the mother the inevitable impulse to overprotect her progeny, suffocating them by giving them an end value for which they have to do nothing to be perfect. This obliges the father to exercise cunning and science to tear the infants from her arms and establish laws that will throw them into the world of always unfulfilled purposes and keep them busy all the time to prevent them from returning.

In reality, we humans are – as we have shown – beings without much capacity for consideration, still unreasonable, fragile and defenseless, ill-mannered and unclothed, and prematurely forced to earn our bread: real street children thrown into the clutches of a world for which we are not ready.

As immature animals, we deserve to allow ourselves to recapitulate a new flood without first having to mediate the destruction of the world. To do this, we must abandon our primitive roles (it is evident that women and the new generations are already doing it) and attempt something new. This time, our inspiration would be a Genesis no longer starring the patriarchal God but a Maternal God (I call her the Maternal God and not the Goddess or Creator with intentional androgyny). In this new version, the beginning would be the same: the creation of an overflowing nature and the shelter of its youngest and most fragile creatures in an Eden– eternally loved just for being themselves. There, the tree of knowledge would grow along with the infants. Mama Dios (another of her names) would spend the first few years of their life taking care of them, educating them (about social norms, collaboration, emotional intelligence, active listening, etc.), teaching them how to grow the tree, talking as much as possible about what the world is like (showing them pictures, of course), and then, as they age, allowing them brief forays into it. Finally, when she felt them ready, she would take them to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and, giving them her blessing, would watch them leave, but not without reminding them “This is your home, come back whenever you want,” and a last and sobbing, “Do not get lost.”

Oh, and one last thing: the snake would be present, of course, only now it would campaign for animal rights.

Andrés García Barrios Writer and communicator. His work brings together experience in numerous disciplines, almost always with an educational focus: theater, novel, short story, essay, television series and museum exhibitions. He is a contributor to the Sciences magazines of the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM; Casa del Tiempo, from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and Tierra Adentro, from the Ministry of Culture. Contact: andresgarciabarrios@gmail.com

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0