From Newton's children to the Diver's clothes

Where is the truly radical located within the movement? Sustainability practitioners and theorists are easily pigeonholed with the well-intentioned social scientists of past and present, despite an often times fundamentally different orientation to the world. In turn, many a modern day social scientist sees a home in sustainability; yet how often is it really the new and radical movement that is perceived, and how often is the enticement merely the similarities, the few commonalities with that which existed previously? Academia as institution will surely conform the movement to its structures before it shifts its structures to accommodate the movement. Knowing this, how many deeply rooted, even born into the movement, still mean to venture and practice in the academia?

And where is the truly radical thought located? In moments, in cultural experience, in dissonance and approaching harmony. For sustainability such thinking has real results. For academics it is cause to paint me a relativist, yet, as perhaps only Rorty seems willing to admit since Dewey more clearly grasped Pierce than James’ well-intentioned abuses, it is a silly way of talking to someone, calling them names in this way, and if we must then consider relativism is positivism since the scientific method is slim on inherent value (truth) but fat on consequence:

“positive science can only rest on experience; and experience can never result in absolute certainty” – Pierce

There is no approaching the ideal of truth; it is more like recalling a dream to a friend, and the friend agreeing on the feeling, the tone of the dream – truth seems as vaporous and intimate.

I’d like to have a conversation here with educators, teachers by profession and calling, committed to their craft, and the various slight of hand ethics we must today take up to justify one of the oldest professions in a civilization where to be politically correct is to be at all times politically neutral…

* first image School of Aristotle, fresco of Gustav Spangenberg

*second image Primary School in "open air", in Bucharest, around 1842. Wood engraving, 11x22cm