kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
Sent: Sunday, May 7, 2023 12:00 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: A Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities
Ken:
I will argue that all human beings live in environments that sustain them: access to water, food, and medicine. If they don't, they will become extinct. Second, they then create the gods and goddesses that balance survival with the environment they have. The first time I went to the Sahara Desert, I wondered why humans chose to live there. And the first time I went to Cornell at Ithaca in the early 1990s, during an intense winter, I said the same thing: the place was not created for human beings to live! But they live at Ithaca and live in the desert!
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: Sunday, May 7, 2023 at 10:53 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: A Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities
hi augustine
i am not totally in agreement in your reading of the europeans or the africans.
one might say not that it was or is the african spiritual beliefs that made/makes him live in harmony with nature, but the other way around. i.e., people learned to live with the forests, some like pymies in the forest, but most clearing the land or forext, chopping down the bush and burning it, etc, as happens now. from the necessities of living came the spiritul beliefs as justifications.
the same for all people, everywhere.
i prefer to think of beliefs following, not initiating, structures of living and power.
so when europeans came, it wasn't with "scientific minds." they were also "believers," though generally christians, and some as missionaries. in french, the words for the colonial enterprise were "la mission civilisatrice," the civilizing mission. so, they believed in their guns and the power to impose their educational and economic orders on africans, and called that "civilization," not science, though they must have also believed their science made them superior as well as did their ships, guns, and tall buildings.
living in harmony with nature...frankly that is a contemporary concept. i doubt any people on earth really thought that way until the onset of the modern ecological crisis we humans have brought on.
if you look at the smoke on the savanna nowadays from people burning off the bush, as had been done for centuries in the plains and forests, you might hesitate to call it living in harmony with nature. humans dominated their natural environment everywhere. when we became too successful, the fish began to disappear, the animal and insect special to disappear. we used ddt, and the poison facilitated getting rid of mosquitoes and so on.
harmony for hunter gatherers? even that i'd want to question.,
ken
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
From: 'Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 6, 2023 8:30 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: A Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities
tThanks for sharing.the africans had believed in the idea of, the evil forest, Gods ds forests anforest and the Kings forest. igbo dudu, igbo olorun and igbo oba butwhen the europeans came visiting with their scientific minds they reasoned that God could not have been inthe forest and that there was no evil in the forest and the king could nt have owned the forest so they wet in and ravaged the forest, call it environmental degradation but its the afrivans spiritual belieffs that makes him live in harmony with nature. tis theme has been explored bt Wangai mataai,nobel laureate from Kenya in her book,The challenge of Africa.
On Sat, May 6, 2023 at 11:18 PM Olasupo Laosebikan <olaose20@csu.edu> wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: The Galileo Commission <info@galileocommission.org>
Date: Fri, May 5, 2023 at 4:01 AM
Subject: A Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities
To: olasupo laosebikan <olaose20@csu.edu>
But we... who are we?
Plotinus, Enneads VI, 4
Dear Galileo Commission Subscriber,
We are writing to solicit your support for our Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities, which follows on from the 2014 Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science and the 2018 Galileo Commission Report, Beyond a Materialist Worldview: Towards an Expanded Science. The new document – already signed by over 100 scholars, including Dr Iain McGilchrist, Dr Anne Baring, Prof Keith Ward FBA and Prof Jeffrey Kripal - is a corresponding call to expand the Humanities to recover the depth dimension of human spiritual identity. We argue that there is good evidence to refute the claim that we are merely 'hackable animals' (Yuval Noah Harari) or at best complex biological machines in need of an upgraded operating system as proposed by Transhumanism.
We contend that this impoverished view of the human has contributed to a spiritual vacuum and widespread mental dis-ease that has undermined our sense of purpose and meaning and led us to neglect the vital inner aspect of human existence. Our capacity for attention has been fragmented, and we have lost touch with our centre, root and ground.
We argue that a recovery of a deeper spiritual understanding of the human being as proposed by the likes of William James and Sir Alister Hardy FRS is vital to the future of our culture and that the emerging post-materialist understanding of consciousness points the way.
With every good wish,
David Lorimer,
Marjorie Woollacott,
Co-Chairs of the Galileo Commission
Dr Athena Potari, author of the Call
81 Larcom Street
London London SE171NJ
UNITED KINGDOM
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