Looking beneath the surface

After I made a throwaway comment about having to “think like an adult” now that I’m finishing up my CAPE and had to do “Caribbean Studies” and “Communication Studies”, I was asked to elaborate by friends who’d decided to enter the real world right after CSEC.

As a science student, I’d thought the “soft” subjects would be a real distraction from the real “stuff”. But over the last two years, I think CXC made a real good decision to make the subjects compulsory for everyone doing CAPE. From primary school, we’d done “social studies”, which introduced us to history and other topics that offered a glimpse of the world around us. Then up to CSEC they’d promoted those topics into separate subjects such as geography and economics and such. But after CAPE I discovered that up to then we had merely been describing the world and presuming that this was how it was. And how it would always be.
But in CAPE we were exposed to the revolutionary (for me) view that we’d merely constructed our social world. And if we take time to analyse that world, all we would see is change and transformations. And if things just remained as “the status quo” there had to be social forces working behind the scene to keep them that way. In a word, we were offered tools of analysis.
Whether it was Karl Marx with his insistence on looking at our world “historically” and looking at the “social relations of production” or Michel Foucault’s insight on the power relations inherent in all relationships, things would now never be what they “seemed”.
I presume this was how adults look at the world. It certainly is how my dad and his friends carry on! Before then, physics had hinted at levels of reality beyond our consciousness… pretty much what my Hindu background had insisted on. But that was in the “physical” realm.
And I guess one could not be too taken aback with Sixth Form physics where Heisenberg insisted that wave-particle duality was all in our mind and not in the world “out there”. Or that what we experience is just four per cent of the universe and we’ll never know for real what the 96 per cent dark matter and dark energy “really” was.
But the social world? That was mind blowing. Feminist thinking has really opened my eyes as to how the world is structured to keep one or another group oppressed. Not just females. And it’s not just relations at the personal level. I marvel at how modes of thinking, wrought as far back as the days of slavery, still dominate our thinking.
So now I just can’t pick up the newspaper and read that the U.S. VP and Chinese president visited the Caribbean. You are now forced to ask, what’s behind the sudden interest? Does being an adult means to be perpetually looking beneath the surface? Anyhow, it’s back to the grind for more exams this week. I like the theory part of physics; it’s the maths that makes it boring. So imagine maths as maths alone!!