Confessions of a Miseducated Man--Norman Cousins

These notes are in the nature of a confession. It is the confession of a miseducated man.
I have become most aware of my lack of a proper education whenever I have had the chance to put it to the test. The test is a simple one: am I prepared to live and comprehend a world in which there are 3 billion people? Not the world as it was in 1850 or 1900, for which my education might have been adequate, but the world today. And the best place to apply that test is outside the country — especially Asia or Africa.

Not that my education was a complete failure. It prepared me very well for a bird's-eye view of the world. It taught me how to recognize easily and instantly the things that make one place or one people different from another. Geography had instructed me in differences of terrain, resources, and productivity.

Comparative culture had instructed me in the differences of background and group interests. Anthropology had instructed me in the differences of facial bone structure, skin color and general physical aspect. In short, my education protected me against surprise. I was not surprised at the fact that some people lived in mud huts and others in bamboo cottages; or that some used wood for fuel and others dung; or that some enjoyed music with a five-note scale and others with twelve; or that some people were vegetarian by religion and others by preference.

In those respects my education had been more than adequate. But what my education failed to do was to teach me that the principal significance of such differences was that they were largely without significance. The differences were all but wiped out by the similarities. My education had by-passed the similarities. It had failed to grasp and define the fact that beyond the differences are realities scarcely comprehended because of their very simplicity.

And the simplest reality of all was that the human community was one — greater than any of its parts, greater than the separateness imposed by the nations, greater than the different faiths and loyalties or the depth and color of varying cultures. This larger unity was the most important central fact of our time — something on which people could build at a time when hope seemed misty, almost unreal.

As I write this, I have the feeling that my words fail to give force to the idea they seek to express. Indeed, the idea itself is a truth which all peoples readily accept even if they do not act on it. Let me put it differently, then. In order to be at home anywhere in the world I had to forget the things I had been taught to remember. It turned out that my ability to get along with other peoples depended not so much upon my comprehension of the uniqueness of their way of life as my comprehension of the things we had in common. It was important to respect these differences, certainly, but to stop there was like clearing the ground without any idea of what was to be built on it. When you got through comparing notes, you discovered that you were both talking about the same neighborhood, i.e., this planet, and the conditions that made it pleasant or hostile to human life.