I know it is about 10 years after I was supposed to, but I am reading Guns, Germs and Steel. It presents a very enticing method of understanding how things are the way they are. Jared Diamond explains how plants became domesticated and manipulated. First a wild plant is identified as edible and someone gets the idea to plant it and continues to gather the seeds. By selecting the plants with the nicest fruit or biggest grains to be replanted, the plant begins to change from its original form in the wild. It becomes domesticated. Eventually corn that had cobs as thick my pinky, starts growing cobs as thick as my wrist.
In class, I find myself continually surprised when a student complains about having to imagine something or tell me why. They say: "I hate it when the question asks me "why" because it is never in the book". I always liked when I got to think outside the parameters of some stupid textbook. I loved making things up. If I recall, I was not the only one in grade seven who liked to think creatively. Yet, I hardly ever encounter them here.
The culture and the education system seem to encourage uncritical thinking, regurgitation and memorization. This is, after all, a country in which the study and teaching of philosophy was illegal for an extended period of time. Those who questioned authority where imprisoned, forced to leave the country or killed. The history of of the oldest University in the Americas is one of martyrdom. The campus is filled with tributes to academics who where killed for their belief that they should be able to speak out against the government. Doesn't it follow that this extended exposure to domination would lead to a population that is made up of people that have thrived because they do not ask questions and they do not challenge authority?
Yet, there are very few species of wild plants or animals that can be domesticated and it is the wildness of this place that is truly fascinating. Yes, people have learned not to ask too many questions, but life is in overdrive here. Eventually all things revert to some sort of natural law and equilibrium. The traffic for instance. It is an enormous living creature that is all id. It is a daily struggle to keep a small apartment clean even in the quietest, cleanest parts of the city. Elephantine leaves continually fall off of trees and hit you in the head; fruit trees grow compulsively without any nurturing. It seems every second woman you see is pregnant and every dog is in heat. Things are metabolized so quickly here that a building left empty for a month looks like it has been that way for a year.
Many, or perhaps most, of the twenty million people that live on this small (by Canadian standards) island live in serious poverty. Yet there is far more than enough to go around. The wealth is just as opulent and affecting as the poverty you see here. Try as I might to understand why things are the way they are, it always comes back to wildness. "All is vanity" says Solomon. Good people starve to death every day and evil people often live in palaces. It's fun to play around with notions of how Hispaniola got to be the way it is, but its wildness will always elude you. There will always be a motorcycle heading the wrong way in a traffic jam on a one way street. I laugh with joy each time I see squash so big it would take both of us just to carry it home and a chainsaw to hack it up.