Kendall,

An MS in environmental philosophy. An examination of world views in a second MS (English Lit--my focus was American Indian literature and culture) and how we (Europeans and European Americans) view others and make assumptions about them.

When you start looking at a history of ideas, and how they grow or build, you see patterns emerge. There is a wish for places in the world with idyllic and possibly childlike (in their innocence) inhabitants. Those "Ur" cultures I mentioned. There is a pseudo-anthropological wish that perhaps in the South Pacific, or the Amazon jungles, or various isolated pockets of the world, there might be people who do not have the full range of "enlightened" emotions as the jaded Europeans. Rima in Green Mansions, for example. Children raised by wolves. And innocent cultures on tropical islands.

This in general turns out to be wrong. It's unfair, or calculated based on a different set of symbols. When Columbus "discovered" the new world, he said the people there were naive and childlike, and didn't believe in "God" because they hadn't built churches with spires to dot the horizon. The symbols of the new world transactions and emotions were unrecognizable to Columbus. That doesn't mean that many of the things he was looking for didn't exist. But I think those images of discovery and conquest from Columbus and many others persisted and became part of the cultural lore. Remember the chimps in the beginning of 2001, A Space Odyssey? All of those other cultural things like jealousy and murder and rape are there, if you watch what everyone is doing, and for long enough.

Not all cultures go through the same paradigm shifts, and if they do, not necessarily at the same time. Not everyone in the world was thinking along the lines of the European philosophers and scientists.

SRS