I have had a great thrill teaching this class and from what my student have told me first hand, I can only assume that they did too. I get great pleasure in hearing the students say “That was fun” referring to research projects, students whom at the beginning of the term I made the unfair mental assumption were students not interested in school. And the work speaks for itself; you don’t have to take my word for it. Look at our research posters. Does this look fun?
My favorite thing to do is to do research, find research that blows my mind, and then share that research which in turn blows other peoples minds. And so - right now, I want to attempt to blow your minds. Students, take note: being a teacher and watching peoples heads explode is an adrenaline rush 1,000 more satisfying than any video game or illicit substance you might get access to in the future.
I have a question: please be honest, because there is no judgement upon how you answer. Do you all think that we, as a community, can turn Cape Cod into a proverbial “Garden of Eden?”
So - my big lesson to you all is that history is not linear and neither is culture. Yes, there is a technological linear advancement, but sometimes these advancements are drawbacks in disguise. Take, for example, the invention of the Atom Bomb. Or to a lesser extent, the invention of the printing press which enabled Martin Luther to distribute his 95 thesis, which split the Christian Church in 2 and started wars and conflicts that continued for hundreds of years. To think of it another way, when a war occurs, there is a winner and a loser. Usually, things get better for the winner and things get worse for the loser. History is not linear and neither is culture.
This means, that hypothetically, there were moments in the past, even in the ancient past, that were way more prosperous than 2023 and it means there were moments in the past that were way worse than 2023.
So let’s think about the date October 12th, 1492, when Columbus sailed near a small Archipelago of hundreds of small islands near the Caribbean Sea. He was petitioned by the Spanish crown to find a new route to the Asian Markets. In exchange, he was to be made governor of any new lands discovered and receive 10% of any revenues gained in them. It was on one of these Bahamas islands that he came in contact with the Lycayan, a branch of the Taino, the indigenous people of the region, an Arawak-speaking people, their population at the time being estimated to have reached some 2 million, which is roughly 1/4th of today’s New York City.
In his journal, Columbus noted that the Taino were “HEALTHY AND HAPPY” and that “Antisocial Crimes were virtually Unknown”. He described their islands as “earthly paradise, a land of riches and abundance, where the native peoples led lives of simplicity and freedom similar to those enjoyed by Adam and Even in the Biblical Garden of Eden.”
Now … here on Cape Cod, we are technically an island. We don’t have the abundance of resources the Taino had because we don’t have the rainforest, a place where you can wake up and start walking around collecting fruits off trees and medicinal herbs from the ground. We have New England in February, and it’s pretty hard to grow stuff.
But we do have a year round population that is under 200,000. We also have a different type of abundance. We have access to technology and materials that the Taino of 1492 would look at and think was some type of proverbial witchcraft (and when you think about how the internet works economically, the Taino of 1492 have a point). We have so many materials that the majority of people don’t even know how they’re made, what they’re made of or where they came from.
So if the Taino can create a society with an abundance of resources and is so peaceful that antisocial crime is pretty much unheard of …a proverbial “garden of eden” … why can’t we? Why can’t we build, what John Winthrop called “a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people upon us”?
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