God, its great to have you back. Enjoyed the tour of Paxi, and now this! The paragraph comparing Bush to Bin Laden produced an explosion of laughter that startled my family. But it’s spot-on, isn’t it?
I spent 1989 in the Kingdom of Tonga on a Fulbright Lectureship, at ‘Atenisi (= Athens, in Tongan) University. The founder and director (and therefore my boss) was Futa Helu, the first Tongan ever to attend a university. He had studied at Sydney, where he ¨majored in philosophy under the tutelage of John Anderson, protagonist of the “realist position.” According to Anderson, there is only reality (time and space), with nothing above it and nothing below it. This ruled out heaven, hell, god, the soul, the afterlife all the delusions that plague the traditional Tongan imagination.
Futa based his entire pedagogy on the realist position. ‘Atenisi students became fervent atheists, just as they had been fervent Christians before matriculating (believe me, no Christianity is more fervent than Tongan Christianity). Most importantly, the realist position had vast implications for education. When it came to investigating the universe, whether natural or human, there were to be no taboos. No questions, no lines of research, were forbidden. It was understood that “the real” was infinite, and infinitely complex. It was assumed that we can never get to the bottom of anything, whether we’re talking about the atom or the human psyche. Education must be “critical” rather than “technical,” and this meant studying the Greeks first, from Thales (the first to present a non-mythical cosmology) onward. Heraclitus, who first posited an infinite (in time & space) universe, and who was the first (and last, until most recent times) to see reality as process rather than substance, was considered the pinnacle of western philosophy.
It goes without saying that ‘Atenisi was (and still is) unique among third-world educational institutions for its emphasis on true liberal arts education rather than marketable skills training. And alumni claimed that they had found this “critical” education more useful (because more universally applicable) for gaining a living than any narrow technical curriculum. More importantly, it gave them the freedom to lead “lives of dignity and significance,” as Futa liked to put it.
All this within the framework of an exuberantly atheist world-view. Personally, I found it irresistible, for it gave me a fully articulated system in place of my earlier muted, quasi-instinctual convictions about atheism. But of course it takes courage to be an atheist, especially (as Dawkins points out) in my homeland today. At every turn, I must resist the impulse to share the joy, the fresh air, the clarity of vision that comes when you awaken from the nightmare of religion. These are dangerous times.
The irony is that the ‘Atenisi outlook is not far from the outlook of those who founded the American republic. Their ultimate goal, too, was liberty symbolized not in the staid, grim, matriarchal colossus of Bedloes Island (that later corruption of the idea), but in the young Liberty, whose laughing face, with her dishevelled tresses flowing in the wind, appeared on some of the earliest U.S. coinage.