In Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Consuelo “Connie” Ramos is living in a mental institution in the twentieth century when she’s visited by a person from the future. That person, Luciente, teaches her how she can leave her body where it is but travel in mind and spirit to the year 2137. She is at first unimpressed by what she sees: people living in small huts, tending vegetable gardens. It reminds her of the poor village she grew up in in Mexico. But Luciente shows her how they live comfortably and in harmony with their environment, how they use technology but without letting it use them, how they learn and teach each other.
Connie wanders the town with Luciente and one of her partners, Jackrabbit. Noticing a group of children working in the gardens, she asks why they aren’t in school. “That is school,” Luciente replies, drawing closer so that Connie can watch and listen for awhile. An old man is showing the children the shape of the leaves on the pea flower, explaining how to identify legumes.
Connie is still a bit mystified:
As they strolled on, she said, “But they can’t possibly learn as much that way as they would in a classroom with a book!”
“They can read. We all read by four or so,” Jackrabbit said. “But who wants to grow up with a head full of facts in boxes? We never leave school and go to work. We’re always working, always studying. We think, what person thinks person knows has to be tried out all the time. Placed against what people need. We care a lot how things are done.”
Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, page 123
There’s a complete world in this short response, and it’s worth lingering over, noticing all its parts the way we might notice the leaves of a pea flower. First, work and study are not distinct categories. To study is to complete some work; to work is to extend your study. The children learn about legumes while weeding, so that the work and the study are one. This is an intentional connection between learning and doing that sees in work not only its output but the understanding and knowledge that are necessary to the work. As more than necessary; as the privilege and joy of it.
Yet what we learn, what we know, has to be tried out, acted on, explored in the world. It’s not enough to know that legumes have alternate leaves if you can’t see it for yourself. Plants are not static: they wither in heat and succumb to bugs, they grow fast in the sun, they exchange genes with their neighbors. The old man tells the children that once they are done weeding they can go look at a tree that evolved a bit like a legume; the plants are learning and changing from each other, and we people must learn and change with them. Real knowledge is in and of the world, not apart from it.
And that knowledge must be placed against need, against what is needful. Knowledge is not distinct from need, but contingent with it. In another passage, Connie observes a council meeting in which people discuss whether to expand their fields by razing part of the forest; some argue in favor, noting that they are still importing too much food and need to be more self-sufficient. Others argue that the forest is still recovering from past clearing, and the trees are needed to protect the water table. It’s ultimately decided that instead of clearing the land, they should talk to a graingrower from a nearby town about how they might increase their yield without expanding the fields. Need is not always easy or straightforward to determine, and people won’t always agree on what is needful. But we cannot attend to our needs if we never even bother to collectively consider them.
Lastly, how things are done is at least as important (perhaps more important) that what is done. You can grow a bunch of peas while also diminishing the soil, teaching no one, mistreating the farm workers, and sending all the profits off to people who never set foot in the dirt. An attention to needfulness and knowledge necessarily invites an attention to the work itself, not only the output of the work.
Our language about work has become intensely output focused in recent years, and for reasons: to talk of the impact of the work without talking of the process is very convenient for capitalism, which is always trying to externalize any effect not profitable. We measure revenue going up; never mind the people injured in the process, or the pollution released to the air, or the neighborhoods no longer inhabitable after fracking has spoiled the ground water. An attention to output necessarily means an attention to some outputs, not others; but who gets to choose which outputs matter, and which don’t?
Back in the twentieth century, Connie is subject to medical experiments designed to make her palatable to the patriarchal society in which she lives. Her doctors care only for the outputs they’ve deemed needful, and neither Connie nor her fellow patients are given an opportunity to argue. Her glimpses into the future teach her not to expect that things will work out, but to know that only by acting in the present is any future world possible. What person thinks person knows has to be tried out all the time. Not later, but now.