∞
On Telling Stories
Posted for your consideration; words from two authors whose writing I find helpful, followed by a little commentary from me.
“Knowing on some intuitive level that we humans are guided by story, he ultimately called for the telling of the universe story. He felt that it was only in such a comprehensive scale that we could situate ourselves fully. His great desire was to see where we have come from and where we are going amid ecological destruction and social ferment. It was certainly an innovative idea, to announce the need for a new story that integrated the scientific understanding of evolution with its significance for humans. This is what he found so appealing in Teilhard’s seminal work."
“I’m one who dwells outside the camp of literary theory—so far outside that I can’t pretend to know much of what goes on there. I know scarcely more about deconstruction or postmodernism, say, than bumblebees and hummingbirds know about engineering. I don’t mean to brag of my ignorance nor to apologize for it, but only to explain why I’m not equipped to engage in debates about literary theory. What I can do is express my own faith in storytelling as a way of seeking the truth. And I can say why I believe we’ll continue to live by stories—grand myths about the whole of things as well as humble tales about the commonplace—as long as we have breath.”
A few years ago my wife and I, along with another family at our university, established a scholarship for Native American and First Nations students who wish to study to become storytellers. (Feel free to add to it by giving here if you are so inclined.)
Some people have since asked us why we did not invest our money in something more practical like helping individual students get into business or medical school. After all, that's where the money is, and higher income can correspond to greater independence and greater influence.
We see their point, but we both have committed ourselves to what might be considered storytelling disciplines because we think that stories shape lives and communities. A free society depends on good investigative journalists, good attorneys, and good public schools. A thriving society depends as well on good art and literature. And while religion has its downsides, it also has very strong upsides, and communities draw great benefit from healthy faith communities that remind us of our values, that give us places to congregate, to engage in commentary and contemplation, to welcome new life, to sustain commitments, to help us to mourn.
We often talk about the importance of STEM disciplines and healthcare, but I think we would do well to pay a little more attention to the way that good storytelling shapes healthcare (and the way bad storytelling makes us doubt good health practices like vaccination, for instance.)
I am persuaded that stories shape communities. They take what we have received from the past and transform and transmit it. If I am right, then I am prudent to invest in good storytelling. In the case of Native American and First Nations communities, I know just enough to know that there's a lot I don't know. And I'd like to know more.
I've been working with Bio-Itzá, a small Maya Itzá environmental group in Guatemala for the last decade, and I am constantly learning from the stories of their few surviving elders who grew up hearing the Itzá language spoken. The preservation of those words and stories means not just the preservation of a few tall tales, but the preservation of everything that is encoded and deeply rooted in those stories. The stories are cultural and ecological palimpsests, and when the Itzá elders tell them, they are passing on far more than mere words.
So my wife and I are committed to helping others to tell their stories. Because "we are guided by story," and "storytelling [is] a way of seeking the truth," and "we'll continue to live by stories."
“Knowing on some intuitive level that we humans are guided by story, he ultimately called for the telling of the universe story. He felt that it was only in such a comprehensive scale that we could situate ourselves fully. His great desire was to see where we have come from and where we are going amid ecological destruction and social ferment. It was certainly an innovative idea, to announce the need for a new story that integrated the scientific understanding of evolution with its significance for humans. This is what he found so appealing in Teilhard’s seminal work."
-- Mary Evelyn Tucker, in her preface to Thomas Berry’s The Sacred Universe. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) (emphasis is mine)
“I’m one who dwells outside the camp of literary theory—so far outside that I can’t pretend to know much of what goes on there. I know scarcely more about deconstruction or postmodernism, say, than bumblebees and hummingbirds know about engineering. I don’t mean to brag of my ignorance nor to apologize for it, but only to explain why I’m not equipped to engage in debates about literary theory. What I can do is express my own faith in storytelling as a way of seeking the truth. And I can say why I believe we’ll continue to live by stories—grand myths about the whole of things as well as humble tales about the commonplace—as long as we have breath.”
-- Scott Russell Sanders, A Conservationist Manifesto. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009) (emphasis is mine)
*****
A few years ago my wife and I, along with another family at our university, established a scholarship for Native American and First Nations students who wish to study to become storytellers. (Feel free to add to it by giving here if you are so inclined.)
Some people have since asked us why we did not invest our money in something more practical like helping individual students get into business or medical school. After all, that's where the money is, and higher income can correspond to greater independence and greater influence.
We see their point, but we both have committed ourselves to what might be considered storytelling disciplines because we think that stories shape lives and communities. A free society depends on good investigative journalists, good attorneys, and good public schools. A thriving society depends as well on good art and literature. And while religion has its downsides, it also has very strong upsides, and communities draw great benefit from healthy faith communities that remind us of our values, that give us places to congregate, to engage in commentary and contemplation, to welcome new life, to sustain commitments, to help us to mourn.
We often talk about the importance of STEM disciplines and healthcare, but I think we would do well to pay a little more attention to the way that good storytelling shapes healthcare (and the way bad storytelling makes us doubt good health practices like vaccination, for instance.)
I am persuaded that stories shape communities. They take what we have received from the past and transform and transmit it. If I am right, then I am prudent to invest in good storytelling. In the case of Native American and First Nations communities, I know just enough to know that there's a lot I don't know. And I'd like to know more.
I've been working with Bio-Itzá, a small Maya Itzá environmental group in Guatemala for the last decade, and I am constantly learning from the stories of their few surviving elders who grew up hearing the Itzá language spoken. The preservation of those words and stories means not just the preservation of a few tall tales, but the preservation of everything that is encoded and deeply rooted in those stories. The stories are cultural and ecological palimpsests, and when the Itzá elders tell them, they are passing on far more than mere words.
So my wife and I are committed to helping others to tell their stories. Because "we are guided by story," and "storytelling [is] a way of seeking the truth," and "we'll continue to live by stories."
∞
Reason For Hope
Nearly every spring term I teach a class called “Theology and Philosophy in Dialogue.” I inherited the title and the course description when I started teaching at my current school in 2005. Each year the course changes a little, in response to my students and what I perceive to be relevant themes in our world and culture.
Apologetics and Postmodernism
When I first taught it, I made it a class about apologetics and postmodernism. By “apologetics” I mean the work of giving a reasoned account of one’s commitments; by “postmodernism,” I mean the suspicion that what look like reasoned accounts might have unexamined depths and layers to them. In the context of theism—and in particular Christian theism—apologetics has a long history that reaches back to the early years of Christianity. Saint Peter wrote in his longer letter that Christians should always be prepared to give a reasoned defense of the hope they bore within them. That phrase “reasoned defense” is a translation of the Greek word apologia, which can mean a legal defense, and from which we get our word “apologetics.”
When Saint Paul of Tarsus found himself in Athens, speaking to Stoic and Epicurean philosophers on the Areopagus, he tried to explain his beliefs not in the terms of his culture but in theirs. He doesn’t seem to have won many over to his views that day, but if nothing else was accomplished, at the end of the conversation it was clearer where Paul and the Greek philosophers were in agreement and where they disagreed. If immediate conversion was the aim of his speech, it wasn’t a great speech. But if he aimed to build a bridge of mutual understanding, I’d say he was pretty successful.
One of the keys to his success, I think, was familiarity with the culture around him. I’ve written about this elsewhere, so I won’t belabor it here, but I’ll just point out that Paul quoted two Greek philosophical poets, Epimenides and Aratos, and he did so in a culturally appropriate and significant place, since several centuries before Paul’s travels, Epimenides (who was from Crete) also traveled to Athens and also spoke on the Areopagus about the gods and salvation.
Understanding Atheism(s)
A few years after I started teaching that course, I shifted the course to take seriously the “New Atheists.” I figured that if my religious students graduated without hearing the strongest challenges to their faith, I, as a professor who teaches theology, was letting them down. I wanted them to know that soon they’d hear strong arguments against their religious heritage, beliefs, and practices, and that these arguments should be taken seriously. For my Christian students, I framed this as a way of living the commandment to love God with one’s mind.
Of course, only some of my students are religious, and some of the religious students aren’t Christians. (I’m at a Lutheran university in a small Midwestern city, so until recently most of them were at least culturally Christian; that’s changing quickly, though.) I wanted this to be a class that was helpful for everyone, so I started to turn this into a class about mutual understanding. I now teach my students how to distinguish between a dozen different kinds of (and reasons for) atheism, lest they make the mistake of oversimplifying the complexity of their neighbors and of themselves.
Understanding and Agapic Love
Arguments about religion can quickly become unkind. Many of us have been wounded in the name of religion, and those wounds heal slowly, if at all. How could we make this into a class that was—on its surface, and in its content—about theology and philosophy, while really making it about something like mutual care?
I just mentioned that great commandment: Love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength, Jesus said, echoing Moses. Then he added a second commandment: love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else hangs on these two commandments, he said.
Explaining those two commandments would be almost as hard as trying to keep them, so I won’t try to do so here. I’ll just point out that it’s fascinating to command someone to love someone else; that the love that’s called for here is agapic love, i.e. the love that seeks the good and flourishing of the beloved; and that the commandments are so lacking in specificity as to call for both extensive commentary and continued practice. They’re vague commandments, which means they require us to work them out in community, over time. And in all likelihood we’ll never get them right. That may seem like a weakness, but it also strikes me as offering the freedom to try and to fail and to help one another to try again.
Anxiety, Ultimate Concerns, and Societal “Stress Fractures”
Which brings me to the most recent incarnation of my Theology and Philosophy in Dialogue class. Over the last few years it seems to me that my students have become more anxious about their economic futures, more stressed about exams and jobs, more focused on education and work as competition for rank. I could be wrong, but as the stress and anxiety have grown, it seems like my students are so busy jockeying for position that they have a hard time putting the cause of their stress into words. On top of all this, here in the United States, it feels like we’ve been using stronger words so that we can give voice to our anxiety more quickly. We aren’t broken, but we’ve got lots of hairline stress fractures that are too small to see. We aren’t bleeding, but we’ve got a constant dull ache.
In other words, it seems like we’re fearful without being able to identify the object of our fear, and that has us prepared to see enemies wherever we look. This does not make it easy to love our neighbors as ourselves (unless we also have that kind of distrust of ourselves, which is a real possibility, I suppose.) And at least in the way Paul Tillich described God: whatever we regard as our ultimate concern functions as our God. When economic anxiety, jostling for rank, or fear of losing one’s place in the future, (these are all ways of saying the same thing, I think) take on the role of “ultimate concern” in our lives, they become our gods.
The course I’m teaching this semester still has traces of every previous semester’s influences. We talk a little about apologetics, and that’s a helpful way of teaching students about logic, inference, probability, and certainty. (Ask some of them about “doxastic certainty” or my “haystack problem” and you’ll see what I mean.)
And we still talk about postmodernism, though as my career has shifted from the philosophy of religion to environmental philosophy, ethics, and policy, I’m inclined to follow Scott Russell Sanders’ view (see note, below) that if we spend too much time theorizing and not enough time caring for the world we share, incredulity towards metanarratives can quickly become a new metanarrative that we fail to examine sufficiently.
And we still talk about atheisms. This semester I have sketched a dozen forms of atheism once again, and we’re now working our way through them.
Friendship, and “Best Construction”
But the aim of the class, more than anything, is friendship.
I told all the students that this was the case on the first day of class.
And here, I think, is where Theology and Philosophy can have a really helpful dialogue in our time. I teach at a Lutheran university, so it’s fitting to invoke Luther. In his Small Catechism, he offers some commentary on the Ten Commandments. His commentary on the eighth commandment is helpful. The commandment reads simply, like this:
This is hard.
“A Mutual, Joint-Stock World, In All Meridians”
It’s especially hard when we feel that others are getting ahead of us, and that we are in a competition with everyone else. If the world is a zero-sum game, then everyone run, and the Devil take the hindmost. But what if Queequeg is right? When Queequeg sees a fellow sailor drowning and no one moves to save the sailor, Queequeg leaps into the water to save his fellow. There is no question of whether they are of the same tribe, the same party, the same race, the same team. Queequeg is, as far as anyone aboard the ship knows, a cannibal. And yet the narrator, observing Queequeg’s agapic care for his fellow sailor, offers this comment:
It’s much easier to approach theological conversations with the idea that our theology is a weapon and that our enemies are those with whom we disagree. It’s so easy to forget what Saint Paul wrote, that we don’t fight against flesh and blood, but against far less tangible, invisible forces that would have us view our neighbors with malice.
Could we approach theology the way Queequeg approaches the plight of his fellow sailor? Is it possible to maintain one’s cherished beliefs while recognizing that one’s object of “ultimate concern” might be something we don’t yet see with certainty and clarity? I cannot speak for others, so I’ll just offer this confession: I’m aware of a capacity in myself to care more for my theology than for the God that my theology claims to describe. In simpler terms: my own theology can become so dear to me that it becomes an idol, displacing the very God I set out to love and serve. And how to I love and serve my God? So far, the best I can offer you is this: I should love God with all I am, and I should love my neighbor as myself. Does that seem unclear to you? It does to me. Which means I need all the help I can get in clarifying my vision. Right now I see in a glass, darkly.
The philosopher Jonathan Lear suggests a principle akin to Queequeg’s, and to Luther’s: the principle of humanity. He describes it like this:
Conclusion
It’s appropriate to me that I teach this course in Lent each year. Lent is a good time for self-examination, and that includes an examination of all kinds of pieties and supposed certainties. What is it that we hold to be of ultimate concern? What do we love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength? That might just be playing the role of a god in our lives. If so, does that God help us to love our neighbors as ourselves?
I could be wrong in all I say in this class. I enter it with “fear and trembling,” knowing that there’s so much I don’t know, and knowing that many of my students might be wiser than I am. I know they might have seen the divine far more clearly than I ever will in this life.
But oh, how I want them to live well, not to be entangled by anxious grief, not to be afraid of the future, not to be burdened by relentless suspicions and fears.
Yes, there are other subjects I could teach, and yes, there are other jobs I could do. But for me, right now, this one feels like a good way to reexamine my own ultimate concerns, and a good way to help others to do the same. May I do so without malice, with agapic love, and with the constant practice of putting the best construction on everything.
Amen. Lord, have mercy.
*****
Notes:
* Scott Russell Sanders: I'm thinking of his essay, "The Warehouse and the Wilderness," and in particular the opening pages of that essay. You can find it in A Conservationist Manifesto, beginning on page 71. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009)
* Ulpian's words are cited in Justinian, Institutes, Book 1, Title 1, Sec. 3.
* Lear has an endnote at the end of this sentence. It reads: “This principle is also known as the ‘principle of charity,’ and the most famous arguments for it are given by Donald Davidson. See his “Radical Interpretation,” in Inquiries Into Truth And Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 136-137; “Belief and the Basis of Meaning,” ibid., pp. 152-153; “Thought and Talk,” ibid., pp. 168-169; “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” ibid., pp. 196-197; “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” ibid., pp. 200-201.”
Apologetics and Postmodernism
When I first taught it, I made it a class about apologetics and postmodernism. By “apologetics” I mean the work of giving a reasoned account of one’s commitments; by “postmodernism,” I mean the suspicion that what look like reasoned accounts might have unexamined depths and layers to them. In the context of theism—and in particular Christian theism—apologetics has a long history that reaches back to the early years of Christianity. Saint Peter wrote in his longer letter that Christians should always be prepared to give a reasoned defense of the hope they bore within them. That phrase “reasoned defense” is a translation of the Greek word apologia, which can mean a legal defense, and from which we get our word “apologetics.”
When Saint Paul of Tarsus found himself in Athens, speaking to Stoic and Epicurean philosophers on the Areopagus, he tried to explain his beliefs not in the terms of his culture but in theirs. He doesn’t seem to have won many over to his views that day, but if nothing else was accomplished, at the end of the conversation it was clearer where Paul and the Greek philosophers were in agreement and where they disagreed. If immediate conversion was the aim of his speech, it wasn’t a great speech. But if he aimed to build a bridge of mutual understanding, I’d say he was pretty successful.
One of the keys to his success, I think, was familiarity with the culture around him. I’ve written about this elsewhere, so I won’t belabor it here, but I’ll just point out that Paul quoted two Greek philosophical poets, Epimenides and Aratos, and he did so in a culturally appropriate and significant place, since several centuries before Paul’s travels, Epimenides (who was from Crete) also traveled to Athens and also spoke on the Areopagus about the gods and salvation.
Understanding Atheism(s)
A few years after I started teaching that course, I shifted the course to take seriously the “New Atheists.” I figured that if my religious students graduated without hearing the strongest challenges to their faith, I, as a professor who teaches theology, was letting them down. I wanted them to know that soon they’d hear strong arguments against their religious heritage, beliefs, and practices, and that these arguments should be taken seriously. For my Christian students, I framed this as a way of living the commandment to love God with one’s mind.
Of course, only some of my students are religious, and some of the religious students aren’t Christians. (I’m at a Lutheran university in a small Midwestern city, so until recently most of them were at least culturally Christian; that’s changing quickly, though.) I wanted this to be a class that was helpful for everyone, so I started to turn this into a class about mutual understanding. I now teach my students how to distinguish between a dozen different kinds of (and reasons for) atheism, lest they make the mistake of oversimplifying the complexity of their neighbors and of themselves.
Understanding and Agapic Love
Arguments about religion can quickly become unkind. Many of us have been wounded in the name of religion, and those wounds heal slowly, if at all. How could we make this into a class that was—on its surface, and in its content—about theology and philosophy, while really making it about something like mutual care?
I just mentioned that great commandment: Love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength, Jesus said, echoing Moses. Then he added a second commandment: love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else hangs on these two commandments, he said.
Explaining those two commandments would be almost as hard as trying to keep them, so I won’t try to do so here. I’ll just point out that it’s fascinating to command someone to love someone else; that the love that’s called for here is agapic love, i.e. the love that seeks the good and flourishing of the beloved; and that the commandments are so lacking in specificity as to call for both extensive commentary and continued practice. They’re vague commandments, which means they require us to work them out in community, over time. And in all likelihood we’ll never get them right. That may seem like a weakness, but it also strikes me as offering the freedom to try and to fail and to help one another to try again.
Anxiety, Ultimate Concerns, and Societal “Stress Fractures”
Which brings me to the most recent incarnation of my Theology and Philosophy in Dialogue class. Over the last few years it seems to me that my students have become more anxious about their economic futures, more stressed about exams and jobs, more focused on education and work as competition for rank. I could be wrong, but as the stress and anxiety have grown, it seems like my students are so busy jockeying for position that they have a hard time putting the cause of their stress into words. On top of all this, here in the United States, it feels like we’ve been using stronger words so that we can give voice to our anxiety more quickly. We aren’t broken, but we’ve got lots of hairline stress fractures that are too small to see. We aren’t bleeding, but we’ve got a constant dull ache.
In other words, it seems like we’re fearful without being able to identify the object of our fear, and that has us prepared to see enemies wherever we look. This does not make it easy to love our neighbors as ourselves (unless we also have that kind of distrust of ourselves, which is a real possibility, I suppose.) And at least in the way Paul Tillich described God: whatever we regard as our ultimate concern functions as our God. When economic anxiety, jostling for rank, or fear of losing one’s place in the future, (these are all ways of saying the same thing, I think) take on the role of “ultimate concern” in our lives, they become our gods.
The course I’m teaching this semester still has traces of every previous semester’s influences. We talk a little about apologetics, and that’s a helpful way of teaching students about logic, inference, probability, and certainty. (Ask some of them about “doxastic certainty” or my “haystack problem” and you’ll see what I mean.)
And we still talk about postmodernism, though as my career has shifted from the philosophy of religion to environmental philosophy, ethics, and policy, I’m inclined to follow Scott Russell Sanders’ view (see note, below) that if we spend too much time theorizing and not enough time caring for the world we share, incredulity towards metanarratives can quickly become a new metanarrative that we fail to examine sufficiently.
And we still talk about atheisms. This semester I have sketched a dozen forms of atheism once again, and we’re now working our way through them.
Friendship, and “Best Construction”
But the aim of the class, more than anything, is friendship.
I told all the students that this was the case on the first day of class.
And here, I think, is where Theology and Philosophy can have a really helpful dialogue in our time. I teach at a Lutheran university, so it’s fitting to invoke Luther. In his Small Catechism, he offers some commentary on the Ten Commandments. His commentary on the eighth commandment is helpful. The commandment reads simply, like this:
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”Like the other commandments I’ve mentioned, it is only a few words long. And like those others, it leaves room for commentary. Luther’s commentary does something that I find very helpful. While the commandment is negative (“thou shalt not,” it says) Luther thought that alongside each negative commandment was something positive. So he writes:
What does this mean?--Answer. We should fear and love God that we may not deceitfully belie, betray, slander, or defame our neighbor, but defend him, [think and] speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything.”This is akin to what Plato offers in several ways in his Republic, and to Ulpian’s legal principle of “giving to each person their due,” (see note, below) but it goes a little further, with an agapic tinge: Luther doesn’t just tell us not to lie, nor does he tell us to be simply honest, but to put the best construction on everything.
This is hard.
“A Mutual, Joint-Stock World, In All Meridians”
It’s especially hard when we feel that others are getting ahead of us, and that we are in a competition with everyone else. If the world is a zero-sum game, then everyone run, and the Devil take the hindmost. But what if Queequeg is right? When Queequeg sees a fellow sailor drowning and no one moves to save the sailor, Queequeg leaps into the water to save his fellow. There is no question of whether they are of the same tribe, the same party, the same race, the same team. Queequeg is, as far as anyone aboard the ship knows, a cannibal. And yet the narrator, observing Queequeg’s agapic care for his fellow sailor, offers this comment:
Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.” -- Herman Melville, Moby Dick. (New York: Signet, 1980) 76
It’s much easier to approach theological conversations with the idea that our theology is a weapon and that our enemies are those with whom we disagree. It’s so easy to forget what Saint Paul wrote, that we don’t fight against flesh and blood, but against far less tangible, invisible forces that would have us view our neighbors with malice.
Could we approach theology the way Queequeg approaches the plight of his fellow sailor? Is it possible to maintain one’s cherished beliefs while recognizing that one’s object of “ultimate concern” might be something we don’t yet see with certainty and clarity? I cannot speak for others, so I’ll just offer this confession: I’m aware of a capacity in myself to care more for my theology than for the God that my theology claims to describe. In simpler terms: my own theology can become so dear to me that it becomes an idol, displacing the very God I set out to love and serve. And how to I love and serve my God? So far, the best I can offer you is this: I should love God with all I am, and I should love my neighbor as myself. Does that seem unclear to you? It does to me. Which means I need all the help I can get in clarifying my vision. Right now I see in a glass, darkly.
The philosopher Jonathan Lear suggests a principle akin to Queequeg’s, and to Luther’s: the principle of humanity. He describes it like this:
“The interpretation thus fits what philosophers call the principle of humanity: that we should try to interpret others as saying something true—guided by our own sense of what is true and of what they could reasonably believe.” -- Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. 4 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) (See note below)The Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer offers another commentary on the fourth commandment, the commandment not to take the name of God in vain. The Book of Common Prayer rephrases the commandment like this:
You shall not invoke with malice the Name of the Lord your God.
Amen. Lord have mercy.The rephrasing is a commentary on “in vain.” Invoking God’s name in vain is equated with invoking it with malice, that is, with the opposite of agapic love.
Conclusion
It’s appropriate to me that I teach this course in Lent each year. Lent is a good time for self-examination, and that includes an examination of all kinds of pieties and supposed certainties. What is it that we hold to be of ultimate concern? What do we love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength? That might just be playing the role of a god in our lives. If so, does that God help us to love our neighbors as ourselves?
I could be wrong in all I say in this class. I enter it with “fear and trembling,” knowing that there’s so much I don’t know, and knowing that many of my students might be wiser than I am. I know they might have seen the divine far more clearly than I ever will in this life.
But oh, how I want them to live well, not to be entangled by anxious grief, not to be afraid of the future, not to be burdened by relentless suspicions and fears.
Yes, there are other subjects I could teach, and yes, there are other jobs I could do. But for me, right now, this one feels like a good way to reexamine my own ultimate concerns, and a good way to help others to do the same. May I do so without malice, with agapic love, and with the constant practice of putting the best construction on everything.
Amen. Lord, have mercy.
*****
Notes:
* Scott Russell Sanders: I'm thinking of his essay, "The Warehouse and the Wilderness," and in particular the opening pages of that essay. You can find it in A Conservationist Manifesto, beginning on page 71. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009)
* Ulpian's words are cited in Justinian, Institutes, Book 1, Title 1, Sec. 3.
* Lear has an endnote at the end of this sentence. It reads: “This principle is also known as the ‘principle of charity,’ and the most famous arguments for it are given by Donald Davidson. See his “Radical Interpretation,” in Inquiries Into Truth And Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 136-137; “Belief and the Basis of Meaning,” ibid., pp. 152-153; “Thought and Talk,” ibid., pp. 168-169; “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” ibid., pp. 196-197; “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” ibid., pp. 200-201.”
∞
A Short Story: Mercy
For several years friends have been urging me to write a novel during the month of November as part of the NaNoWriMo movement, but I rarely have the time or motivation. Instead, today I have taken ten minutes to sketch out a picture of a short story, remembering that good stories have begun with less than this.
When we left the Earth we thought we had escaped. We were the wealthiest people on the planet, and we had access to the best technology in history. People were willing to do whatever we wanted because we paid well.
We planned a thousand-year trip, a one-way flight to another home. We made arrangements for terraforming ships to arrive a little more than a century before we would, and we took the slow route so that the world would have time to get started before we got there. We knew it would be hard, that after a long sleep we’d wake up to colonize uninhabited territory. We knew there was real risk, but we also knew that the risk on earth was growing with the population. We wanted a new life for ourselves and for our children. We were young, and healthy, and strong.
What we did not count on was the way technology would change. We thought we were leaving a dying world, and we were. As we left the planet the trail of smoke from our burning fuel was our last goodbye, our last contribution to an increasingly unbreathable atmosphere. We meant no harm, but we had to burn some fuel to escape gravity.
Who knew that when we left, the world we left behind would undergo such changes? The population collapse that we expected took place, and we were lucky to escape before it did. That much we foresaw. But we did not think anyone would survive long after we left. When the population decreased, the air and the water started to clean themselves up, at least a little, and the people who made it through that first year of suffering came out of it stronger and more committed to never letting in happen again. They moved more slowly and more carefully than we did. They focused their energies on cleaning up the mess we left behind. And they were pretty good at it, but not good enough. Some of what they did allowed them to survive another few decades, but they saw that the damage was done and the planet was not a place they could stay for long. So they came up with a new plan, to help not just a few people but the whole surviving population of earth to head to the only known survivable exoplanet, one that had been discovered by our investments, and that was already on its way towards being terraformed. They headed for the same planet we had already claimed for our own.
And they arranged to get here first.
I’m writing this while my husband is on the radio, talking with the military patrol that was waiting for us. They say we cannot come down to the surface, and I am trying to hold back my tears. We worked so hard for this, we bought this, we sacrificed everything we had for this, and now they are refusing us entry. They knew we were coming, and they have been waiting for us.
How can they do this to us? We’re the same people, the same species! Humans are nowhere else in the universe. There is no other home for us. The place we all left is uninhabitable, but now they are telling us that we must turn away. I don’t know what this will mean. Do they want us to go back? We cannot; nothing is there waiting for us. Have they found a new place for us to go? My husband has shushed me. The military officer is saying they do not know of other planets. Why are we not allowed here? Why can we not land on the other side of the planet? I know, I’m sorry. I’ll keep it down.
We are traitors, they say. We left them in their time of need, and we left destruction in our wake. They don’t trust us, and they will not let us land. Hasn’t enough time gone by? Can’t we bury the hatchet? Why won’t they forgive us? What are we going to do?
They say they will refuel us. This is their idea of kindness. We are being given enough fuel and supplies to return to Earth. Another millennium of sleep, and perhaps the Earth we left will welcome us home, they say, but we are not welcome here.
My husband is angry. He says that when our ship is refueled he plans to crash it into their city below. They say that they will stop us. They have boarded our ship and sedated my husband. They are about to sedate me, but they are letting me write this last sentence so that when we get back to Earth we will remember their mercy.
Copyright November 10, 2018 David L. O'Hara
A Short Story: Mercy
When we left the Earth we thought we had escaped. We were the wealthiest people on the planet, and we had access to the best technology in history. People were willing to do whatever we wanted because we paid well.
We planned a thousand-year trip, a one-way flight to another home. We made arrangements for terraforming ships to arrive a little more than a century before we would, and we took the slow route so that the world would have time to get started before we got there. We knew it would be hard, that after a long sleep we’d wake up to colonize uninhabited territory. We knew there was real risk, but we also knew that the risk on earth was growing with the population. We wanted a new life for ourselves and for our children. We were young, and healthy, and strong.
What we did not count on was the way technology would change. We thought we were leaving a dying world, and we were. As we left the planet the trail of smoke from our burning fuel was our last goodbye, our last contribution to an increasingly unbreathable atmosphere. We meant no harm, but we had to burn some fuel to escape gravity.
Who knew that when we left, the world we left behind would undergo such changes? The population collapse that we expected took place, and we were lucky to escape before it did. That much we foresaw. But we did not think anyone would survive long after we left. When the population decreased, the air and the water started to clean themselves up, at least a little, and the people who made it through that first year of suffering came out of it stronger and more committed to never letting in happen again. They moved more slowly and more carefully than we did. They focused their energies on cleaning up the mess we left behind. And they were pretty good at it, but not good enough. Some of what they did allowed them to survive another few decades, but they saw that the damage was done and the planet was not a place they could stay for long. So they came up with a new plan, to help not just a few people but the whole surviving population of earth to head to the only known survivable exoplanet, one that had been discovered by our investments, and that was already on its way towards being terraformed. They headed for the same planet we had already claimed for our own.
And they arranged to get here first.
I’m writing this while my husband is on the radio, talking with the military patrol that was waiting for us. They say we cannot come down to the surface, and I am trying to hold back my tears. We worked so hard for this, we bought this, we sacrificed everything we had for this, and now they are refusing us entry. They knew we were coming, and they have been waiting for us.
How can they do this to us? We’re the same people, the same species! Humans are nowhere else in the universe. There is no other home for us. The place we all left is uninhabitable, but now they are telling us that we must turn away. I don’t know what this will mean. Do they want us to go back? We cannot; nothing is there waiting for us. Have they found a new place for us to go? My husband has shushed me. The military officer is saying they do not know of other planets. Why are we not allowed here? Why can we not land on the other side of the planet? I know, I’m sorry. I’ll keep it down.
We are traitors, they say. We left them in their time of need, and we left destruction in our wake. They don’t trust us, and they will not let us land. Hasn’t enough time gone by? Can’t we bury the hatchet? Why won’t they forgive us? What are we going to do?
They say they will refuel us. This is their idea of kindness. We are being given enough fuel and supplies to return to Earth. Another millennium of sleep, and perhaps the Earth we left will welcome us home, they say, but we are not welcome here.
My husband is angry. He says that when our ship is refueled he plans to crash it into their city below. They say that they will stop us. They have boarded our ship and sedated my husband. They are about to sedate me, but they are letting me write this last sentence so that when we get back to Earth we will remember their mercy.
Copyright November 10, 2018 David L. O'Hara
∞
How I Write - A Quick Reply To A Young Writer
This morning I came to the office to find an email from a student at another college. They were writing to ask advice for a young writer. In my own college years writing often felt like a challenge to overcome, especially when I was writing simply to satisfy a course requirement. After I graduated, I discovered that writing helped me to think and to communicate more clearly. For the last few decades, I've written more and more, and in general I find it to be a pleasant activity. I lost my ability to write for a little while after I was injured three years ago, and the process of re-learning it has been good for my mind and my spirit alike.
The email I received was polite and kind, and I thought it worth my time to write a short reply even though I had other urgent tasks to get to. I never want to let the truly important abdicate to the merely urgent; tasks that clamor are not always the best tasks, and those opportunities that speak softly are not always the least valuable. Here's the email I received, and my reply. I've edited the email I received to protect the author's privacy and to highlight their question and some of my main points in boldface. I've edited my reply slightly as well, since I've got a few minutes to do so.
If you've got good advice for my correspondent, feel free to offer your advice in the comments below. (I'll delete advertisements, though.)
Dear Friend,
Thanks for your thoughtful question. I'm not sure I've got a one-size-fits-all process, but I'm happy to share what I've learned and what I do. I've only got time for a short reply this morning, so apologies in advance for the brevity of this note. I have some students coming by in a few minutes and I like to try to be present for those who are right in front of me as much as possible. I suppose it's sort of a spiritual practice for me, that "being present." The alternative (for me, anyway) is to spend too much of my time not being present, which usually takes the form of stress and anxiety about that which is geographically or chronologically distant. Anyway, while my students aren't here, I'm regarding this email from you as your "presence" in my office, so let's talk about writing...
...which I suppose we've already begun doing. For me, one of the most helpful things has been making sure not to regard writing as an optional exercise. (It's too easy for me to let the urgent crowd out the important.) Writing matters to me because it helps me to think and it helps me to be in conversation with others. If I don't give it at least a little of my time - on a regular basis, that is - then my ability to write begins to atrophy. Disciplines that matter - the ones that are most connected to our best loves - should be treated like respiration; they need to be regular and constant. If writing is a matter of loving your neighbor for you, then write regularly, just like you breathe regularly.
Of course, the metaphor breaks down, because we breathe involuntarily and always, whereas we only write occasionally. But it's at least a partly useful metaphor. Because I want to be ready to write, I keep a paper notebook in my pocket all the time, remembering the words from one of the Narnia stories (Prince Caspian, maybe?) Hmm. Let's see. Yes, here it is:
Yes, it was Prince Caspian. And here's one of my other tricks: I write after each book I read. With each book, I take time to jot down a few words and a few lines that really mattered to me in that book. Then, when I want quick access to those words, I've got them all in a single file on my computer, and I can search for the word "ink" or "scholar" and up comes this quote. My file of quotations from books is now 130 pages long. (Don't despair - I've been adding to it for 20 years!) It's a tremendous resource for writing, and it helps me to remember what I read and where I read it.
Two more quick things, since I've got to go:
1) My graduate school faculty told me that writing a 300-page dissertation seemed like a lot, but if I thought of it as a page a day for a year, it would seem much smaller, and much easier. They were right.
2) I find it helpful to write more than one thing at a time. I'll work on one thing for a while - maybe only a few minutes a day - and then I find my mind is tired of writing and thinking about that subject. So I will turn to another task, and I often find I have new energy. Oddly, I wrote my first book while I was also writing my dissertation. I'd write the doctoral thesis during the day, and then, at night, I'd write the book as a way of distracting my mind and relaxing. Now I find that if I'm working on only one thing I feel great stress. Will I finish it? What if I mess it up? These questions haunt me. But when I have many writing projects ongoing, I don't mind it very much if I run into a wall of writer's block on one of them. True story: I have written several books that I will likely never publish, and I have half-written hundreds of articles and books that I may never publish. But each one is still on my computer, and I often return to those half-written pieces to scavenge a few footnotes or paragraphs or choice words. The unfinished tasks aren't on the scrap heap; they're unpolished gems in my store-room just waiting to be set in a new piece of jewelry. I'm not ashamed of them even though I don't wear them in public; they're treasures even though most people will never see them.
I hope this helps. Keep at it! Writing has been a great source of food for my mind and a great nourishment to my convivial conversations as well. I hope you find it to be of similar benefit.
All good things,
Dave
P.S. Here are a few other things I've written about writing, and teaching writing, and the role of nature in teaching me how to write.
The email I received was polite and kind, and I thought it worth my time to write a short reply even though I had other urgent tasks to get to. I never want to let the truly important abdicate to the merely urgent; tasks that clamor are not always the best tasks, and those opportunities that speak softly are not always the least valuable. Here's the email I received, and my reply. I've edited the email I received to protect the author's privacy and to highlight their question and some of my main points in boldface. I've edited my reply slightly as well, since I've got a few minutes to do so.
If you've got good advice for my correspondent, feel free to offer your advice in the comments below. (I'll delete advertisements, though.)
Dr. O'Hara,
I'm emailing you on a rather odd premise. I am a second-year student [in] college, and an avid follower of yours on Twitter. Over the course of about six months I have admired your work from afar. I would like to say your passion not only for your students, but your work, is nothing less than inspiring. That being said -- without taking up too much of your time -- I would like to ask for your advice. I know that you have written and contributed to many books. I have started one of my own, and would like to know how you go about the process of writing? I know it is a rather vague question, but I am just getting to about seven thousand words and fifty plus seems daunting. Do you have any advice?
Again, I am sure you are a very busy man and if this isn't something you have time to entertain I wholeheartedly understand.
Thank you for your time!
[Signature]
Dear Friend,
Thanks for your thoughtful question. I'm not sure I've got a one-size-fits-all process, but I'm happy to share what I've learned and what I do. I've only got time for a short reply this morning, so apologies in advance for the brevity of this note. I have some students coming by in a few minutes and I like to try to be present for those who are right in front of me as much as possible. I suppose it's sort of a spiritual practice for me, that "being present." The alternative (for me, anyway) is to spend too much of my time not being present, which usually takes the form of stress and anxiety about that which is geographically or chronologically distant. Anyway, while my students aren't here, I'm regarding this email from you as your "presence" in my office, so let's talk about writing...
...which I suppose we've already begun doing. For me, one of the most helpful things has been making sure not to regard writing as an optional exercise. (It's too easy for me to let the urgent crowd out the important.) Writing matters to me because it helps me to think and it helps me to be in conversation with others. If I don't give it at least a little of my time - on a regular basis, that is - then my ability to write begins to atrophy. Disciplines that matter - the ones that are most connected to our best loves - should be treated like respiration; they need to be regular and constant. If writing is a matter of loving your neighbor for you, then write regularly, just like you breathe regularly.
Of course, the metaphor breaks down, because we breathe involuntarily and always, whereas we only write occasionally. But it's at least a partly useful metaphor. Because I want to be ready to write, I keep a paper notebook in my pocket all the time, remembering the words from one of the Narnia stories (Prince Caspian, maybe?) Hmm. Let's see. Yes, here it is:
“Have you pen and ink, Master Doctor?”“A scholar is never without them, your Majesty,” answered Doctor Cornelius.
– C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, ch. 13
Yes, it was Prince Caspian. And here's one of my other tricks: I write after each book I read. With each book, I take time to jot down a few words and a few lines that really mattered to me in that book. Then, when I want quick access to those words, I've got them all in a single file on my computer, and I can search for the word "ink" or "scholar" and up comes this quote. My file of quotations from books is now 130 pages long. (Don't despair - I've been adding to it for 20 years!) It's a tremendous resource for writing, and it helps me to remember what I read and where I read it.
Two more quick things, since I've got to go:
1) My graduate school faculty told me that writing a 300-page dissertation seemed like a lot, but if I thought of it as a page a day for a year, it would seem much smaller, and much easier. They were right.
2) I find it helpful to write more than one thing at a time. I'll work on one thing for a while - maybe only a few minutes a day - and then I find my mind is tired of writing and thinking about that subject. So I will turn to another task, and I often find I have new energy. Oddly, I wrote my first book while I was also writing my dissertation. I'd write the doctoral thesis during the day, and then, at night, I'd write the book as a way of distracting my mind and relaxing. Now I find that if I'm working on only one thing I feel great stress. Will I finish it? What if I mess it up? These questions haunt me. But when I have many writing projects ongoing, I don't mind it very much if I run into a wall of writer's block on one of them. True story: I have written several books that I will likely never publish, and I have half-written hundreds of articles and books that I may never publish. But each one is still on my computer, and I often return to those half-written pieces to scavenge a few footnotes or paragraphs or choice words. The unfinished tasks aren't on the scrap heap; they're unpolished gems in my store-room just waiting to be set in a new piece of jewelry. I'm not ashamed of them even though I don't wear them in public; they're treasures even though most people will never see them.
I hope this helps. Keep at it! Writing has been a great source of food for my mind and a great nourishment to my convivial conversations as well. I hope you find it to be of similar benefit.
All good things,
Dave
P.S. Here are a few other things I've written about writing, and teaching writing, and the role of nature in teaching me how to write.
∞
A Professor's Environmental Humanities Summer
Dear Students,
Do you know how your professors spend their summers? In a few days I will shift from my summer work to the work you're more familiar with: my work in the classroom. As you and I prepare to make that shift, I thought you might appreciate a glimpse at what I've been up to this summer.
When I was a student I knew very little about my professors' lives outside of the classroom. They were people I saw for a few hours a week, and whom I rarely saw outside of lecture halls. Every now and then I'd see one in a grocery store or walking down the street, and it was a bit of a surprise to see them living ordinary lives. On the one hand, I think it's good thing to give my students space apart from professors. It is helpful to have some boundaries, after all. On the other hand, the way we live our lives can be part of our teaching. This is one of the advantages of study-travel courses, and it's why I invite you to come to my office for tea and not just for formal advising. I hope you will see helpful lessons (hopefully good ones!) in the way we professors choose to spend our time, and that those spontaneous and organic conversations will offer more food for thought than I have time to offer in formal lessons.
Other than the science professors who spend a lot of time doing lab research, you might think we professors are simply on vacation in the summer. In part, you're right: we have three main responsibilities as Augie professors: teaching, scholarship, and service. And most of us are on a nine- or ten-month contract; we've chosen a life that pays us less in money than we might make in other jobs, and in return, we have significantly more flexibility with our time. That's a nice tradeoff for most of us, and it's one of the delights of being part of an academy.While most of us do use some of that time for rest after working hard for an academic year, we also use the summer to catch up on our scholarship, to learn more, to find new resources that will help us to serve our community, and to prepare to be better teachers.
Since I teach a wide range of courses (in philosophy, classics, religion, environmental humanities, Ecology, study abroad, and more) my summer is usually spent in study. This summer was no exception. This isn't a complete list of what I did, but it'll give you the big picture anyway:
After grading exams and Commencement, I started a week of meetings. The big picture: wrapping up the school year, and getting ready for the next. Meetings may not sound appealing, but we tend to get a lot done that makes the rest of the school year possible. This is also often a time when I get to meet with alumni, community leaders, and people who need my help with various projects. File this under "service," I suppose.
The first week: I taught a weeklong graduate class in philosophy for our Sports Administration and Leadership Master's program. This was an intensive 40-hour seminar on Plato's Republic and Augustine's Confessions. We discussed a number of things, like the roles of a leader; the difficulties of knowing anything with confidence and of making decisions when one doesn't know with certainty; and the important place of sports and playfulness in the ethical development of individuals and communities.
The second week: As soon as that class ended I hopped on a plane for Sweden, so I could participate in the EAT Forum in Stockholm. This was a remarkable experience, unlike any academic conference I've attended. EAT is a non-profit based in Oslo that aims to make science-based changes in the world's food systems. The EAT Forum is a place to meet and network with a number of influential, thoughtful people from diverse backgrounds, with the aim of making sure everyone on the planet has access to safe, sustainable, healthy food. They aim high, and I found the experience to be very helpful for me as a teacher and practicioner of sustainability; as someone who researches salmonid fish (salmon, trout, and charr, especially); and as someone who aims to improve our policies concerning those fish and their habitats. Three highlights of this Forum: (1) I met people I wouldn't likely meet anywhere else, mostly working on fishing policy; (2) The presentations were well-crafted, all of them aiming to teach briefly and to introduce a positive possible solution to a well-defined problem; (3) Chance conversations with people like Shafinaz Hossain, a woman from Bangladesh whose Business professor gave her an assignment: go home and look for a problem no one has solved, and regard it as an opportunity to start a business that helps people. What a great assignment! And what an impressive solution she came up with! (Well done, Shafinaz! I'm glad to have met you!)
The third week: Shortly after getting home from Sweden I was on a plane again, this time to Chicago, where I spent a week with 25 scholars - mostly religion professors - and with Dr. Eboo Patel and Dr. Laurie Patton. Dr. Patel is founder of the IFYC, and Dr. Patton is a scholar of religion and President of Middlebury College. This was a seminar put on by the Council of Independent Colleges. If all I did this summer was the EAT Forum or this week in Chicago studying Interfaith Understanding, it would have been a summer well spent. I learned a lot (ask me about it!) but here are some highlights: (1) Again, I met people I wouldn't have met otherwise, and that in itself is valuable; (2) rather than teaching how religions can debate one another, this seminar helped me think about how we can help our communities bridge differences without diminishing the importance of faith traditions and theology. To put it in the terms of my own tradition, it helped me to think about how to love my neighbor as myself. That's a vast oversimplification, so look for more from me about this in coming months. I'm really grateful for this opportunity to be a student learning how to help other students.
The fourth week: I had a little downtime at home, but not much. More meetings, and preparation for a long trip in July. I packed up my little Subaru with books and camping gear and started driving west.
The first week of July I spent studying Alaska Native Law at the University of Montana Law School in Missoula. No, I'm not an attorney, and I probably won't become one. But when I can, I audit law courses on environmental law in order to be a better teacher, scholar, and pre-law advisor. A few quick facts to help you see the complexity of the matter: there are 229 different tribes in Alaska; Alaska is the largest state in the United States, but one of the smallest by population; and the history of how the federal government has dealt with Alaska Natives is quite different from the way that history developed in the contiguous 48 states. Want to know more? Take my classes! Once this class ended, I was back in the Subaru, headed south.
The next two weeks were spent in Boulder City, Nevada, a city that was built as a home for the workers on the Hoover Dam. I was there on a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on the Hoover Dam. We spent two weeks working in archives, touring the interior of the dam, visiting sites of importance around the dam and in the Lake Mead and Valley of Fire parks; hearing lectures by experts from around the country; and reading and discussing historic documents and scholarly works about the dam, water, the desert, Native American history, geology and geography, and much more. As with just about everything else I've mentioned so far, it's hard to summarize all this without doing a great injustice to the value of this Summer Institute. Instead, here are a few more highlights: (1) As before, the people. Dr. Anthony Arrigo and Dr. Michael Green, who led the Institute, and the 24 other scholars from around the country who attended with me are some of the best parts of the institute. (2) Not much can beat direct experience for learning. As Aristotle said,
The fourth week was a little more relaxed: my wife flew to Nevada from a meeting she had in California, and we drove home together, visiting some National Parks (my first visit to the Grand Canyon!) and some favorite places in New Mexico, where I did my first Master's degree at St John's College. We didn't take too much time on the road, since I had the privilege of helping to officiate at the wedding of two beloved alums in the Augustana Chapel of Reconciliation. This is one of the joys of teaching: we get to watch our alums live and grow, and sometimes we get to participate in that growth in delightful ways.
Observing: If you follow me on social media, you know I like to look at the small things in nature. I learn from experience, and it is my hope that when we post simple images on Twitter and Instagram we are producing a searchable phenology database. Anyway, feel free to see some of what I have seen this summer here.
Tending my garden: This is both figurative and literal. Two months away from a garden allows a lot of weeds to grow, so my literal garden has needed work. There is great value in working with one's hands, especially if one's main job is theoretical and based in an office. I like growing some of my own food. As preparation for the coming year, I've also been catching up on home maintenance that I've had to put off during the past school year; and I've been making time to reacquaint myself with natural areas around Sioux Falls where I intend to do some more environmental studies teaching and research this fall.
Getting ready: I've been meaning to write this blog post for a month, but much of the month has been spent preparing syllabi, working on new projects, finishing up old ones, doing scholarly writing, and many other small things.
Sustainability: the last thing I'll mention is that I've taken on a new role at Augustana, that of Director of Sustainability. I've only been at this for a few weeks, so I''m still figuring out what this will mean for the coming year, but the short version is that I am looking forward to developing some new academic programs in Environmental Studies and Sustainability, and to making the whole campus culture and our practices more sustainable. What does that mean? Short version: I want our descendants to be glad we lived as we did, and I want us to be glad, too. This is another version of "love your neighbor as yourself." Want to know more about this? Let's talk.
When you get back to campus, (or if you're new to Augustana) please feel free to come by for a cup of tea or a quick chat. I look forward to hearing about the new things in your life.
Wishing you all joy in the new academic year,
Dr. O'Hara
Do you know how your professors spend their summers? In a few days I will shift from my summer work to the work you're more familiar with: my work in the classroom. As you and I prepare to make that shift, I thought you might appreciate a glimpse at what I've been up to this summer.
When I was a student I knew very little about my professors' lives outside of the classroom. They were people I saw for a few hours a week, and whom I rarely saw outside of lecture halls. Every now and then I'd see one in a grocery store or walking down the street, and it was a bit of a surprise to see them living ordinary lives. On the one hand, I think it's good thing to give my students space apart from professors. It is helpful to have some boundaries, after all. On the other hand, the way we live our lives can be part of our teaching. This is one of the advantages of study-travel courses, and it's why I invite you to come to my office for tea and not just for formal advising. I hope you will see helpful lessons (hopefully good ones!) in the way we professors choose to spend our time, and that those spontaneous and organic conversations will offer more food for thought than I have time to offer in formal lessons.
Other than the science professors who spend a lot of time doing lab research, you might think we professors are simply on vacation in the summer. In part, you're right: we have three main responsibilities as Augie professors: teaching, scholarship, and service. And most of us are on a nine- or ten-month contract; we've chosen a life that pays us less in money than we might make in other jobs, and in return, we have significantly more flexibility with our time. That's a nice tradeoff for most of us, and it's one of the delights of being part of an academy.While most of us do use some of that time for rest after working hard for an academic year, we also use the summer to catch up on our scholarship, to learn more, to find new resources that will help us to serve our community, and to prepare to be better teachers.
Since I teach a wide range of courses (in philosophy, classics, religion, environmental humanities, Ecology, study abroad, and more) my summer is usually spent in study. This summer was no exception. This isn't a complete list of what I did, but it'll give you the big picture anyway:
 |
| One of the lycaenids I photographed in my garden this summer. Actually a very small butterfly, but some small things can give you a big picture nonetheless, if you know what to look for. |
May
After grading exams and Commencement, I started a week of meetings. The big picture: wrapping up the school year, and getting ready for the next. Meetings may not sound appealing, but we tend to get a lot done that makes the rest of the school year possible. This is also often a time when I get to meet with alumni, community leaders, and people who need my help with various projects. File this under "service," I suppose.
June
The first week: I taught a weeklong graduate class in philosophy for our Sports Administration and Leadership Master's program. This was an intensive 40-hour seminar on Plato's Republic and Augustine's Confessions. We discussed a number of things, like the roles of a leader; the difficulties of knowing anything with confidence and of making decisions when one doesn't know with certainty; and the important place of sports and playfulness in the ethical development of individuals and communities.
The second week: As soon as that class ended I hopped on a plane for Sweden, so I could participate in the EAT Forum in Stockholm. This was a remarkable experience, unlike any academic conference I've attended. EAT is a non-profit based in Oslo that aims to make science-based changes in the world's food systems. The EAT Forum is a place to meet and network with a number of influential, thoughtful people from diverse backgrounds, with the aim of making sure everyone on the planet has access to safe, sustainable, healthy food. They aim high, and I found the experience to be very helpful for me as a teacher and practicioner of sustainability; as someone who researches salmonid fish (salmon, trout, and charr, especially); and as someone who aims to improve our policies concerning those fish and their habitats. Three highlights of this Forum: (1) I met people I wouldn't likely meet anywhere else, mostly working on fishing policy; (2) The presentations were well-crafted, all of them aiming to teach briefly and to introduce a positive possible solution to a well-defined problem; (3) Chance conversations with people like Shafinaz Hossain, a woman from Bangladesh whose Business professor gave her an assignment: go home and look for a problem no one has solved, and regard it as an opportunity to start a business that helps people. What a great assignment! And what an impressive solution she came up with! (Well done, Shafinaz! I'm glad to have met you!)
The third week: Shortly after getting home from Sweden I was on a plane again, this time to Chicago, where I spent a week with 25 scholars - mostly religion professors - and with Dr. Eboo Patel and Dr. Laurie Patton. Dr. Patel is founder of the IFYC, and Dr. Patton is a scholar of religion and President of Middlebury College. This was a seminar put on by the Council of Independent Colleges. If all I did this summer was the EAT Forum or this week in Chicago studying Interfaith Understanding, it would have been a summer well spent. I learned a lot (ask me about it!) but here are some highlights: (1) Again, I met people I wouldn't have met otherwise, and that in itself is valuable; (2) rather than teaching how religions can debate one another, this seminar helped me think about how we can help our communities bridge differences without diminishing the importance of faith traditions and theology. To put it in the terms of my own tradition, it helped me to think about how to love my neighbor as myself. That's a vast oversimplification, so look for more from me about this in coming months. I'm really grateful for this opportunity to be a student learning how to help other students.
The fourth week: I had a little downtime at home, but not much. More meetings, and preparation for a long trip in July. I packed up my little Subaru with books and camping gear and started driving west.
July
The next two weeks were spent in Boulder City, Nevada, a city that was built as a home for the workers on the Hoover Dam. I was there on a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on the Hoover Dam. We spent two weeks working in archives, touring the interior of the dam, visiting sites of importance around the dam and in the Lake Mead and Valley of Fire parks; hearing lectures by experts from around the country; and reading and discussing historic documents and scholarly works about the dam, water, the desert, Native American history, geology and geography, and much more. As with just about everything else I've mentioned so far, it's hard to summarize all this without doing a great injustice to the value of this Summer Institute. Instead, here are a few more highlights: (1) As before, the people. Dr. Anthony Arrigo and Dr. Michael Green, who led the Institute, and the 24 other scholars from around the country who attended with me are some of the best parts of the institute. (2) Not much can beat direct experience for learning. As Aristotle said,
“Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.” Aristotle, De Generatione et Corruptione, 316a5-10 (Basic Works, McKeon, trans.)Let me assure you that when you're studying the history of the dam and it's 115F outside, you have a better understanding of how the workers who built that dam (often in heat up to 140F!) suffered. (3) I spent a lot of my time researching the environmental history of the place, focusing - as is my wont - on fish and insects.
The fourth week was a little more relaxed: my wife flew to Nevada from a meeting she had in California, and we drove home together, visiting some National Parks (my first visit to the Grand Canyon!) and some favorite places in New Mexico, where I did my first Master's degree at St John's College. We didn't take too much time on the road, since I had the privilege of helping to officiate at the wedding of two beloved alums in the Augustana Chapel of Reconciliation. This is one of the joys of teaching: we get to watch our alums live and grow, and sometimes we get to participate in that growth in delightful ways.
August
I'll spare you the week-by-week of August, and instead I'll tell you some of the other things that have made my summer rich.
Family: I probably spent too much time away from home this summer, mostly as a result of having an abundance of good opportunities that only come around occasionally. It has been good to spend August at home with my wife and sons.
Reading: For most of the summer, I've read about a book a day. If you wonder at that, then you should ask me how I do it. I'd be glad to teach you. Or have a look at this Twitter thread, where I give a quick overview.
Observing: If you follow me on social media, you know I like to look at the small things in nature. I learn from experience, and it is my hope that when we post simple images on Twitter and Instagram we are producing a searchable phenology database. Anyway, feel free to see some of what I have seen this summer here.
Tending my garden: This is both figurative and literal. Two months away from a garden allows a lot of weeds to grow, so my literal garden has needed work. There is great value in working with one's hands, especially if one's main job is theoretical and based in an office. I like growing some of my own food. As preparation for the coming year, I've also been catching up on home maintenance that I've had to put off during the past school year; and I've been making time to reacquaint myself with natural areas around Sioux Falls where I intend to do some more environmental studies teaching and research this fall.
Getting ready: I've been meaning to write this blog post for a month, but much of the month has been spent preparing syllabi, working on new projects, finishing up old ones, doing scholarly writing, and many other small things.
Sustainability: the last thing I'll mention is that I've taken on a new role at Augustana, that of Director of Sustainability. I've only been at this for a few weeks, so I''m still figuring out what this will mean for the coming year, but the short version is that I am looking forward to developing some new academic programs in Environmental Studies and Sustainability, and to making the whole campus culture and our practices more sustainable. What does that mean? Short version: I want our descendants to be glad we lived as we did, and I want us to be glad, too. This is another version of "love your neighbor as yourself." Want to know more about this? Let's talk.
When you get back to campus, (or if you're new to Augustana) please feel free to come by for a cup of tea or a quick chat. I look forward to hearing about the new things in your life.
Wishing you all joy in the new academic year,
Dr. O'Hara
∞
Bristol Bay and Pebble Mine: Mutual Flourishing or Midas' Touch
My latest article on salmon and mining was just published in Ethics, Policy, & Environment. A proposed gold mine in Alaska offers a lot of financial wealth, but it also poses significant risk of environmental loss to the salmon population downstream, and to everything that depends on the salmon for food.
In this brief commentary I argue that we should prefer long-term mutual flourishing over the prospect of short-term financial gain for a few. The myth of King Midas offers an illustration of what is at risk: the gleam of gold can blind us to the importance of being good stewards of nature, and of being good neighbors and good ancestors:
It reads "When you pollute the last source of water, cut down the last tree, and kill the last animal, you'll realize that you can't eat money."
It would be good to learn that lesson before it's too late for the salmon - and for everything that depends upon them.
You can read my article here.
In this brief commentary I argue that we should prefer long-term mutual flourishing over the prospect of short-term financial gain for a few. The myth of King Midas offers an illustration of what is at risk: the gleam of gold can blind us to the importance of being good stewards of nature, and of being good neighbors and good ancestors:
"Not all mining is bad, but to choose a mine that offers gold in exchange for life and mutual flourishing is to display a clear symptom of Midas’ malady. In the ancient myth, King Midas wished for the power to turn all he touched into gold. Half a trillion dollars in ore under the tundra might make us forget what Midas suffered when his wish was granted: he gained great wealth at great cost. When he reached out for food, it turned to inedible gold in his hand. In the case of the Pebble Mine, the risk is not to the PLP, but to the people who are sustained by a four-thousand-year-old tradition of salmon harvesting, and to all the other birds, animals, and plants that depend upon the salmon."I'm reminded of a hand-painted sign I recently came across at a ranger station in El Zotz in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve.
It reads "When you pollute the last source of water, cut down the last tree, and kill the last animal, you'll realize that you can't eat money."
It would be good to learn that lesson before it's too late for the salmon - and for everything that depends upon them.
You can read my article here.
∞
Teaching Tropical Ecology in Belize and Guatemala
Two out of every three January terms my colleague Craig Spencer and I teach a course on tropical ecology in Central America. Right now I'm in the midst of preparing for our next trip there.
In this post I'll try to answer some of the questions that we are often asked about the course. Probably the most common question is "What do you do in your course?" The second most common must be "How can I teach a course like that?" I'll start with the first question:
What do you do in Guatemala and Belize?
The short answer to this question is a lot. I'll try to summarize.
Our approach to tropical ecology includes the standard elements you'd find in any ecology course: our students read a lot about the ecosystems and the prominent species of plants and animals they're likely to encounter. We teach them what we know about the systems we think we understand, and we tell them about the big gaps in our knowledge that we're aware of - knowing full well that we likely have blind spots we aren't aware of.
In Guatemala this means learning about the ecology of a dense forest growing on a karst plateau, and a deep lake where the water does not circulate much.
In Belize we study the mangroves and the barrier reef. The mangroves are like a porous filter between salt and fresh water, like a cell wall on a macro scale. They serve as a buffer against hurricanes; they keep topsoil from eroding into the sea, and they are a rich and colorful nursery for thousands of species.
The Importance of Human Ecology
We want our students to learn much more than the plants, animals, soil, air, and water, though. Perhaps more than anything, we want them to learn the human ecology of the places we visit. Ecology is not merely an academic study; it is, at its heart, the study of both the world and of our place in it. We don't just look at macaws, jaguars, vines, and ceiba trees; we look at the way our lives - even our visit to these amazing places - affect and are affected by these plants and animals. We don't stay in hotels; we rent rooms in local homes, and we eat meals with local people. We hire local teachers to teach us Spanish and the Itzá language. We study the history of the Itzá people, and we visit ancient ruins. We walk through the forest and camp overnight with local guides who can teach us what they know of that place. We spend time playing soccer with a local youth group, we talk with and listen to local teachers, nurses, physicians, forest rangers, ecologists, NGO volunteers, government officials, town elders, and children. If the ecology of the place matters, surely it matters because these people whose ancestors have lived there for so long matter.
In fact, even if you think they don't matter to you, if you're reading this post in North America these people do matter to you. If their ecology suffers, they will be forced to move to look for new sources of income and food. Simple-minded and disingenuous politicians will tell you this is a problem to be solved by erecting a wall on our border, but walls are a partial solution at best, and at worst, they are blinders that keep us from seeing the source of the problem; walls ignore the real illness and conceal the symptoms, as though willful ignorance were good medicine. The real question - in my mind, anyway - is why anyone who lived on the shores of Lake Petén Itzá would ever want to leave. The answer is that people leave beautiful homes when those homes cease to be liveable. Which means the medicine that is needed is one that treats the illness itself, and not just the symptoms. My students (I hope) return from our course no longer able to see Guatemalan immigrants to the United States as a mere abstraction. Break bread in someone's home and you will see that they are human, too, with lives as particular and intricate and important and rooted as your own. Only when we disturb those roots and strip away the soil must the lives be transplanted.
This is what I mean by human ecology.
Where do you go?
Our time in Guatemala is chiefly in central and northern Petén. Until recently, the landscape of northern Petén was dominated by dense forest, mostly old-growth lowland forests. Surface water is mostly wetlands that vary considerably from one season to the next. There are several small-to-medium-sized rivers, and small streams, but I think a good deal of the water flows underground in karst formations; the Petén has thin soil over a wide karst plateau. There is not much water flowing on the surface. In the center of Petén there is one very deep lake, Lake Petén Itzá. This is a gem in the forest. Flying over it on a sunny day you can see the shallows fade from pale green to rich emerald, and the depths along the north side of the lake plunge to amethyst and dark sapphire. The lake has no obvious inflow or outflow, except a few small streams flowing in from the south and west, and a little creek flowing out in the east.
In Belize we spend most of our time on one of the barrier islands that have no permanent residents. We use that island as a home base from which we can boat out to patch reefs, mangroves, turtle grass beds, deep channels, and the fore-reef. We snorkel with our students in all these places, slowly gathering experiences of similar species in diverse environments, so that the students (and we) can see both the ecology of small places and the web of relations between those small places. In mangroves, for instance, we might see juvenile caribbean reef squid that are a few inches long. When we see them on patch reefs, they might be five or six inches long, and in deep water they might reach eight inches. Each location gives us a glimpse of another stage of their life cycle.
Why do you do this? Aren't you a Humanities professor?
Even if people don't often ask me this, it's obvious that quite a few people think it. Yes, I'm a professor of philosophy and classics, and I teach religion courses, too. But for my whole life I have been fascinated by life underwater. My most recent book was the result of eight years of researching the lives of brook trout in the Appalachian mountains, and much of my research now has to do with ocean and riparian environments in Alaska. I don't do much of what would count as research in the natural sciences, but I do spend a lot of time observing nature. This is both because I find it beautiful, and because I think it's a bad idea to try to formulate ethical principles about things I haven't experienced or seen firsthand. Of course it's not impossible to write policies about things one hasn't done; one needn't commit larceny before writing a law prohibiting theft. But experience teaches me things I might not learn in other ways, and that can keep me from trusting too much in my own opinions. As Aristotle put it,
How Can I Teach A Course Like This? Can others participate in this trip?
The answer to the second of these questions is both yes and no. When I'm in Guatemala and Belize, I'm teaching. Unfortunately, this means I don't have time to bring others along and act as their tour guide.
However, the people I work with in Guatemala - the Asociación Bio-Itzá - would be happy to have you come for a visit. They're in the small town of San Josè, Petèn, Guatemala, right on the north shores of the lake. And this is the answer to the first question. Want to teach such a course? Get in touch with Bio-Itzá and they can help you set it up.
You can get to San José by flying or driving to Flores, then going around the lake by bus or car to San José, about a twenty minute drive.
In San José they have a traditional community medicinal garden. Just north of town is the Bio-Itzá Reserve, where you can go for guided walking tours or overnight stays. It's rustic and gorgeous. (Visits to the Reserve must be arranged in advance through Bio-Itzá.)
When you stay in San José you can easily take a launch (a wooden motor boat) across the lake to Flores, the seat of Nojpetén or Tayasal, the last Maya kingdom that fell to the Spanish.
Flores is a pretty place as well, and I like to take my students to visit ARCAS to see their animal rehabilitation center. (There's a great documentary about that place that was on PBS this year called "Jungle Animal Hospital.")
If you stay in San José, you can also take a short trip (about a half hour by car) to Tikal, or to Yaxhá, both of which are amazingly well-preserved Maya ruins. A little further past Tikal is Uaxactún, where you can see more ruins, and you can also visit a community that is trying to practice sustainable forestry.
This region is not like the tourist areas of Western Guatemala; it's more like the rural frontier of Guatemala, a long-neglected place that is now at risk of being overrun by slash-and-burn forestry, cattle farms, and oil development. It makes me think of the Dakotas over the last century; the population is small and indigenous, and most people in power in Guatemala seem to consider the forest to be a wasteland that is better burned down than preserved. I do not share that view, and while I know that more tourism will bring development and other risks to both culture and forest, the risks are already there in other forms. I hope that ecotourism will offer some counterweight to the other kinds of development that don't seek to preserve the biological integrity or cultural history of this place.
 |
| Sunrise on the Barrier Reef in Belize |
In this post I'll try to answer some of the questions that we are often asked about the course. Probably the most common question is "What do you do in your course?" The second most common must be "How can I teach a course like that?" I'll start with the first question:
What do you do in Guatemala and Belize?
The short answer to this question is a lot. I'll try to summarize.
Our approach to tropical ecology includes the standard elements you'd find in any ecology course: our students read a lot about the ecosystems and the prominent species of plants and animals they're likely to encounter. We teach them what we know about the systems we think we understand, and we tell them about the big gaps in our knowledge that we're aware of - knowing full well that we likely have blind spots we aren't aware of.
In Guatemala this means learning about the ecology of a dense forest growing on a karst plateau, and a deep lake where the water does not circulate much.
In Belize we study the mangroves and the barrier reef. The mangroves are like a porous filter between salt and fresh water, like a cell wall on a macro scale. They serve as a buffer against hurricanes; they keep topsoil from eroding into the sea, and they are a rich and colorful nursery for thousands of species.
The Importance of Human Ecology
We want our students to learn much more than the plants, animals, soil, air, and water, though. Perhaps more than anything, we want them to learn the human ecology of the places we visit. Ecology is not merely an academic study; it is, at its heart, the study of both the world and of our place in it. We don't just look at macaws, jaguars, vines, and ceiba trees; we look at the way our lives - even our visit to these amazing places - affect and are affected by these plants and animals. We don't stay in hotels; we rent rooms in local homes, and we eat meals with local people. We hire local teachers to teach us Spanish and the Itzá language. We study the history of the Itzá people, and we visit ancient ruins. We walk through the forest and camp overnight with local guides who can teach us what they know of that place. We spend time playing soccer with a local youth group, we talk with and listen to local teachers, nurses, physicians, forest rangers, ecologists, NGO volunteers, government officials, town elders, and children. If the ecology of the place matters, surely it matters because these people whose ancestors have lived there for so long matter.
 |
| Tikal |
 |
| The church in San José, Petén, Guatemala |
In fact, even if you think they don't matter to you, if you're reading this post in North America these people do matter to you. If their ecology suffers, they will be forced to move to look for new sources of income and food. Simple-minded and disingenuous politicians will tell you this is a problem to be solved by erecting a wall on our border, but walls are a partial solution at best, and at worst, they are blinders that keep us from seeing the source of the problem; walls ignore the real illness and conceal the symptoms, as though willful ignorance were good medicine. The real question - in my mind, anyway - is why anyone who lived on the shores of Lake Petén Itzá would ever want to leave. The answer is that people leave beautiful homes when those homes cease to be liveable. Which means the medicine that is needed is one that treats the illness itself, and not just the symptoms. My students (I hope) return from our course no longer able to see Guatemalan immigrants to the United States as a mere abstraction. Break bread in someone's home and you will see that they are human, too, with lives as particular and intricate and important and rooted as your own. Only when we disturb those roots and strip away the soil must the lives be transplanted.
This is what I mean by human ecology.
 |
| One of my students examining and being examined by nature |
Where do you go?
Our time in Guatemala is chiefly in central and northern Petén. Until recently, the landscape of northern Petén was dominated by dense forest, mostly old-growth lowland forests. Surface water is mostly wetlands that vary considerably from one season to the next. There are several small-to-medium-sized rivers, and small streams, but I think a good deal of the water flows underground in karst formations; the Petén has thin soil over a wide karst plateau. There is not much water flowing on the surface. In the center of Petén there is one very deep lake, Lake Petén Itzá. This is a gem in the forest. Flying over it on a sunny day you can see the shallows fade from pale green to rich emerald, and the depths along the north side of the lake plunge to amethyst and dark sapphire. The lake has no obvious inflow or outflow, except a few small streams flowing in from the south and west, and a little creek flowing out in the east.
 |
| My students leap into Lake Petén Itzá to cool off. |
In Belize we spend most of our time on one of the barrier islands that have no permanent residents. We use that island as a home base from which we can boat out to patch reefs, mangroves, turtle grass beds, deep channels, and the fore-reef. We snorkel with our students in all these places, slowly gathering experiences of similar species in diverse environments, so that the students (and we) can see both the ecology of small places and the web of relations between those small places. In mangroves, for instance, we might see juvenile caribbean reef squid that are a few inches long. When we see them on patch reefs, they might be five or six inches long, and in deep water they might reach eight inches. Each location gives us a glimpse of another stage of their life cycle.
 |
| My students watch the sunset in Belize |
Why do you do this? Aren't you a Humanities professor?
Even if people don't often ask me this, it's obvious that quite a few people think it. Yes, I'm a professor of philosophy and classics, and I teach religion courses, too. But for my whole life I have been fascinated by life underwater. My most recent book was the result of eight years of researching the lives of brook trout in the Appalachian mountains, and much of my research now has to do with ocean and riparian environments in Alaska. I don't do much of what would count as research in the natural sciences, but I do spend a lot of time observing nature. This is both because I find it beautiful, and because I think it's a bad idea to try to formulate ethical principles about things I haven't experienced or seen firsthand. Of course it's not impossible to write policies about things one hasn't done; one needn't commit larceny before writing a law prohibiting theft. But experience teaches me things I might not learn in other ways, and that can keep me from trusting too much in my own opinions. As Aristotle put it,
“Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.” Aristotle, De Generatione et corruptione, 316a5-10 (Basic Works, McKeon, trans.)I want to "dwell in intimate association of nature and its phenomena," and being able to formulate better principles is a nice side effect of doing so.
How Can I Teach A Course Like This? Can others participate in this trip?
The answer to the second of these questions is both yes and no. When I'm in Guatemala and Belize, I'm teaching. Unfortunately, this means I don't have time to bring others along and act as their tour guide.
However, the people I work with in Guatemala - the Asociación Bio-Itzá - would be happy to have you come for a visit. They're in the small town of San Josè, Petèn, Guatemala, right on the north shores of the lake. And this is the answer to the first question. Want to teach such a course? Get in touch with Bio-Itzá and they can help you set it up.
You can get to San José by flying or driving to Flores, then going around the lake by bus or car to San José, about a twenty minute drive.
 |
| Flores, Petén, Guatemala |
In San José they have a traditional community medicinal garden. Just north of town is the Bio-Itzá Reserve, where you can go for guided walking tours or overnight stays. It's rustic and gorgeous. (Visits to the Reserve must be arranged in advance through Bio-Itzá.)
When you stay in San José you can easily take a launch (a wooden motor boat) across the lake to Flores, the seat of Nojpetén or Tayasal, the last Maya kingdom that fell to the Spanish.
Flores is a pretty place as well, and I like to take my students to visit ARCAS to see their animal rehabilitation center. (There's a great documentary about that place that was on PBS this year called "Jungle Animal Hospital.")
 |
| Scarlet macaws being rehabilitated at ARCAS so they can be released back into the wild |
If you stay in San José, you can also take a short trip (about a half hour by car) to Tikal, or to Yaxhá, both of which are amazingly well-preserved Maya ruins. A little further past Tikal is Uaxactún, where you can see more ruins, and you can also visit a community that is trying to practice sustainable forestry.
This region is not like the tourist areas of Western Guatemala; it's more like the rural frontier of Guatemala, a long-neglected place that is now at risk of being overrun by slash-and-burn forestry, cattle farms, and oil development. It makes me think of the Dakotas over the last century; the population is small and indigenous, and most people in power in Guatemala seem to consider the forest to be a wasteland that is better burned down than preserved. I do not share that view, and while I know that more tourism will bring development and other risks to both culture and forest, the risks are already there in other forms. I hope that ecotourism will offer some counterweight to the other kinds of development that don't seek to preserve the biological integrity or cultural history of this place.
∞
Butterflies In My Stomach
This
week I’ve been helping a student with a lepidoptera project. The project is hers, and she's not in one of my classes, though she did take the Tropical Ecology class I teach in Central America this year.
Here is the danger of becoming a professor of Environmental Humanities: people begin to assume that you care about nature, and that you are willing to share what you know.
Both of these things are true, by the way. (Many of my photos of wildlife and nature are here, on my Instagram account. I do care, and I am delighted to share the little I know.)
Over the years, I have come to love insects. This has come about partly through my years studying trout, char, and salmon, and of the places they live. I've spent a good portion of the last decade walking Appalachian waterways from Maine to Georgia. Over that same time, I've walked hundreds of miles through the remaining forests of northern Guatemala and Nicaragua. As both a researcher and teacher I've walked through the mountains of the American West; and I've made similar excursions to the foothills of the Brooks Range, the Kenai Peninsula, and Lake Clark National Park in Alaska.
The fish that I love depend upon the insects, so, like so many people who gaze at salmonids, I have come to know many riparian insects.
Once you study the insects along the streams, you start to notice the other plants and animals that depend upon them, too. In Kentucky I have come upon a steaming pile of bear scat that was full of half-digested cicadas. I've started to notice the wings of insects, left behind by the birds that only eat the fleshy bodies of the bugs they catch.
From there, it's not a big leap to realize that if the fish and the birds and the plants need the insects, then so do I. Butterflies and other insects feed the larger animals my species eats, and they pollinate the plants that feed us. All of us have the actions of butterflies in our stomachs. Can you see the lepidoptera in this next photo? There are quite a few of them, resting on the bark of this tree in Petén.
Little six-legged creatures feed us all. The small things matter.
And so do my students, even if they're not currently enrolled in one of my classes.
So in the past week I’ve gathered a few hundred of my best butterfly photos to share with my student. This photo is one of the worst in photo quality, but it’s a great image nevertheless:
I took this nine years ago in the mountains in Kentucky while working on my book on brook trout. Three distinct species of butterflies are gathered here, sipping minerals from the ground. My coauthor Matthew Dickerson and I came upon this arboreal banquet by chance.
I wish I'd had a better camera with me. For now, the blurry image is enough to bring to mind that memory of hundreds of lepidoptera sipping and supping together on the forest floor, filling their bellies with the bare earth before flying off to pollinate flowers that, through a complex net of relationships, would someday fill my belly too.
 |
| Kentucky roadside butterfly banquet. Can you see the little one? |
Here is the danger of becoming a professor of Environmental Humanities: people begin to assume that you care about nature, and that you are willing to share what you know.
Both of these things are true, by the way. (Many of my photos of wildlife and nature are here, on my Instagram account. I do care, and I am delighted to share the little I know.)
*****
Over the years, I have come to love insects. This has come about partly through my years studying trout, char, and salmon, and of the places they live. I've spent a good portion of the last decade walking Appalachian waterways from Maine to Georgia. Over that same time, I've walked hundreds of miles through the remaining forests of northern Guatemala and Nicaragua. As both a researcher and teacher I've walked through the mountains of the American West; and I've made similar excursions to the foothills of the Brooks Range, the Kenai Peninsula, and Lake Clark National Park in Alaska.
The fish that I love depend upon the insects, so, like so many people who gaze at salmonids, I have come to know many riparian insects.
Once you study the insects along the streams, you start to notice the other plants and animals that depend upon them, too. In Kentucky I have come upon a steaming pile of bear scat that was full of half-digested cicadas. I've started to notice the wings of insects, left behind by the birds that only eat the fleshy bodies of the bugs they catch.
 |
| Butterfly wing, left behind by birds. Guatemala. |
From there, it's not a big leap to realize that if the fish and the birds and the plants need the insects, then so do I. Butterflies and other insects feed the larger animals my species eats, and they pollinate the plants that feed us. All of us have the actions of butterflies in our stomachs. Can you see the lepidoptera in this next photo? There are quite a few of them, resting on the bark of this tree in Petén.
 |
| Gray cracker butterflies, Petén, Guatemala. |
Little six-legged creatures feed us all. The small things matter.
And so do my students, even if they're not currently enrolled in one of my classes.
So in the past week I’ve gathered a few hundred of my best butterfly photos to share with my student. This photo is one of the worst in photo quality, but it’s a great image nevertheless:
 |
| Butterflies on the ground in Kentucky, 2008. |
I took this nine years ago in the mountains in Kentucky while working on my book on brook trout. Three distinct species of butterflies are gathered here, sipping minerals from the ground. My coauthor Matthew Dickerson and I came upon this arboreal banquet by chance.
I wish I'd had a better camera with me. For now, the blurry image is enough to bring to mind that memory of hundreds of lepidoptera sipping and supping together on the forest floor, filling their bellies with the bare earth before flying off to pollinate flowers that, through a complex net of relationships, would someday fill my belly too.
∞
2) Second, fill your toolbox—and your community’s toolbox—with bear poop. This is an inside reference my students will understand by the end of the semester, but I'll fill you in briefly: I take the time when I am in the wild to look at animal scat, because it is often a picture of what food is available to the animals, and that, in turn, is a picture of the problems the environment is facing. Paying attention to scat over time gives you a long-term picture of changes to the environment. Poop is a tool that is free, that is right in front of you, and that is easy to overlook as unimportant or distasteful. Bear poop that is full of salmon bones tells me one story; bear poop that is full of berries tells me another. I don't literally fill my toolbox with bear poop, but paying attention to negligible things like bear poop gives me new tools I wouldn't have otherwise. What does this mean for us?
Wicked Problems in Environmental Policy
When I first started teaching environmental philosophy courses I used anthologies of helpful articles for my core readings. These included articles about topics ranging from environmental ethics and philosophy of nature to animal rights, land ethics, and pollution.
The more I read, the more I realized how hard it is to do more than a simple survey of problems in a single semester. From early on, I started adding narratives to my classes, using texts by people like Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Henry Thoreau, Kathleen Dean Moore, and Vandana Shiva. I've also included sacred texts and poems from around the world, because while many of those narratives and poems don't solve the problems, the form of writing they use makes them a flowing spring of renewable thought-provocation.
Recently I've taken on an even broader approach to teaching environmental humanities courses by designing a course I call "How To Begin To Solve 'Wicked Problems' In Environmental Policy."
I won't explain everything here, because the topic is too big to explain in detail now, but I will try to explain what I mean by the title of the course.
The previous sentence is a picture of what the course is like: there's too much to cover all at once; there are too many elements to explain to do them all justice in a short space; so it's often more helpful to begin the process and to keep it before you as an ongoing matter than to treat it as a simple problem to be solved with a simple solution.
This is the nature of "wicked problems," after all. It's not that the problems are wicked or evil, but they are immensely complex, with many changeable parts or situations, and any solution that is offered will change the situation. An example might help to illustrate what I mean. Let's consider world poverty.
If we take poverty to mean simply the lack of funds on the part of the impoverished, then it is a simple problem to solve (even if it isn't an easy one.) All you have to do is find out how much money the poor lack, and give it to them. If poverty were simply a lack of funds, then filling that lack with funds would be the solution. But this solution fails to ask what caused the lack of funds in the first place, or why it matters. And it fails to acknowledge that handing over money changes the situation into which the money is given. Economists know that economic predictions are not a precise science. There are simply too many factors at play in human economic systems. As the 17th-century philosopher Mary Astell put it, "single medicines are too weak to cure such complicated distempers." [1] Some medicines have side effects, after all, and the same is true in economics, and in many other disciplines.
So how do I teach this course? I start with some problems I understand too poorly and some narratives that I know will be incomplete, focusing on two places where I teach and do research: Guatemala's Petén Department, and the headwaters of the Bristol Bay region of Alaska. In both cases, there is competition for certain resources, and the use of one resource can threaten or permanently impair other resources.
I don't expect my students can solve these problems for other people, but they are problems I've come to know more and more intimately over years of firsthand experience of the regions in question. So I tell my students stories about those places, and I try to introduce them (often by video calls) to people who work in those places. I want my students to get to know as many different stakeholders as possible, and to hear their stories in the context of those peoples' lives.
You might justifiably ask: if I don't expect my students to solve the problems, and if I myself don't have the solutions, what justifies teaching such a course? My answer is, first, that it is better to try than not to try, and second, that in looking at problems in which we don't feel a personal investment we can often learn to tackle the problems that are closer to home.
There's an ethical and political upside to this, too: once you see that certain problems are "wicked problems," you can start to see the ways that policy-touting charlatans try to pull the wool over your eyes. It is a very old political trick to win votes by claiming that wicked problems are simple ones, and that only you or your party can see the simple solution. This gives a strange comfort to voters who have been perplexed by complexity, and that comfort wins votes on the cheap, at the expense of humility, neighborly care, mutual struggle, bipartisan collaboration, and seriousness of thought.
I have more to say about this - some of it no doubt will be mistaken - but for now I'll wrap up this piece with a rough outline of what I propose to my students as a way to begin to solve wicked problems in environmental policy. Here it is:
1) First, identify the community of stakeholders.
a. Do so for their perspectives, for their interests, and for their tools.
b. Ask: Who are the stakeholders?
i. Go beyond the financial stakeholders or stockholders.
ii. Include everyone who affects, or is affected by, the policy under consideration.
c. Remember Charles Peirce’s idea: science is the work of a community, not of an individual.
d. Make concept maps, and use other kinds of visualizations of the problems.
i. This is a way of utilizing a broad range of tools. Don’t just use the tools others tell you are relevant; include the arts and the sciences alike.
ii. Drawing and sketching pictures will help you to see better. As Louis Agassiz said, “the pencil is one of the best eyes.” It is often better than a camera.
iii. Music, literature, poetry, and the visual arts may be just as helpful as the tools offered by STEM fields and policy-making professions like law.
iv. If you include the arts, you wind up including the artists; similarly, if you exclude the arts, you exclude the wisdom and insight of the artists.
v. Include ordinary daily practices. Learn to fish, even if you don’t plan to fish. Hike in the woods, even if you don’t like the outdoors. These are, in a way, practices of paying attention to the world.
e. Include other voices and texts in the conversation, not just the shareholders, but all the stakeholders.
f. Define “stakeholders” as broadly as you can. Include a community across generations. Include the departed and the not-yet-born if possible.
i. Traditions might be full of wisdom, so don’t ignore them, especially if they are specific to a place. Traditions may be inarticulate wisdom that is tested by time.
ii. Plan for seven generations. I sometimes think of this as the difference between planting those crops you will harvest this year and planting hardwood trees so that they will be old-growth trees long after you are dead. Humans – and other species – need both kinds of plants.
a. Do so for their perspectives, for their interests, and for their tools.
b. Ask: Who are the stakeholders?
i. Go beyond the financial stakeholders or stockholders.
ii. Include everyone who affects, or is affected by, the policy under consideration.
c. Remember Charles Peirce’s idea: science is the work of a community, not of an individual.
d. Make concept maps, and use other kinds of visualizations of the problems.
i. This is a way of utilizing a broad range of tools. Don’t just use the tools others tell you are relevant; include the arts and the sciences alike.
ii. Drawing and sketching pictures will help you to see better. As Louis Agassiz said, “the pencil is one of the best eyes.” It is often better than a camera.
iii. Music, literature, poetry, and the visual arts may be just as helpful as the tools offered by STEM fields and policy-making professions like law.
iv. If you include the arts, you wind up including the artists; similarly, if you exclude the arts, you exclude the wisdom and insight of the artists.
v. Include ordinary daily practices. Learn to fish, even if you don’t plan to fish. Hike in the woods, even if you don’t like the outdoors. These are, in a way, practices of paying attention to the world.
e. Include other voices and texts in the conversation, not just the shareholders, but all the stakeholders.
f. Define “stakeholders” as broadly as you can. Include a community across generations. Include the departed and the not-yet-born if possible.
i. Traditions might be full of wisdom, so don’t ignore them, especially if they are specific to a place. Traditions may be inarticulate wisdom that is tested by time.
ii. Plan for seven generations. I sometimes think of this as the difference between planting those crops you will harvest this year and planting hardwood trees so that they will be old-growth trees long after you are dead. Humans – and other species – need both kinds of plants.
 |
| Bear scat along a salmon river, Katmai Preserve, Alaska |
2) Second, fill your toolbox—and your community’s toolbox—with bear poop. This is an inside reference my students will understand by the end of the semester, but I'll fill you in briefly: I take the time when I am in the wild to look at animal scat, because it is often a picture of what food is available to the animals, and that, in turn, is a picture of the problems the environment is facing. Paying attention to scat over time gives you a long-term picture of changes to the environment. Poop is a tool that is free, that is right in front of you, and that is easy to overlook as unimportant or distasteful. Bear poop that is full of salmon bones tells me one story; bear poop that is full of berries tells me another. I don't literally fill my toolbox with bear poop, but paying attention to negligible things like bear poop gives me new tools I wouldn't have otherwise. What does this mean for us?
a. Identify the community’s tools, perspectives, and skills, and seek to integrate them into a tool-wielding community.
b. See the problem as broadly as you can. We tend to frame problems based on our perspective, so do what you can to gain the perspectives of others.
Emerson: move your body so that your eyes see the world from a different angle.
c. Try to gain as many tools as you can
d. Value experience and first-hand knowledge
i. Go underwater – that is, look at the world in new and unfamiliar ways, from unfamiliar vantage points.
ii. Travel – get to know the world differently, and get to know how others know the world. Don't just do tourism, but saunter, as Thoreau puts it.
iii. Learn the languages you can – even a little bit will make a difference. Words are tools, and they are lenses through which to see the world anew.
iv. Study “unnecessary” knowledge, and not just the knowledge others tell you is necessary – don’t let others tell you what tools are worth gaining.
v. Foster your curiosity. Don’t let it die of neglect.
e. Engage in labs, even in the Humanities – learn experientially.
3) Third, have what Peirce calls “regulative ideals”
3) Third, have what Peirce calls “regulative ideals”
a. Aim high, and have a direction. But
b. Recognize that the direction will change; this is like taking bearings while navigating. You have to keep adjusting as you move and as you discover the landscape
4) Fourth, don’t expect perfection
4) Fourth, don’t expect perfection
a. and don’t expect ultimate solutions. Expect that truly ‘wicked’ problems will continue to be problems, and that they will continue to change and to spawn new problems. Such is life.
b. Instead, expect meliorism, growth, improvement
c. Peirce uses some odd words to describe all this: tychism, synechism, agapism: chance, continuity, love. Someday, look these up, or ask me to define them for you. Vocabulary is a powerful tool.
5) Fifth, do expect growth, and strive to cultivate good things. This is the work of ethics.
6) Sixth, do expect to be part of a community that continues to work on the problems for a long time.
7) And seventh, don’t give up!
5) Fifth, do expect growth, and strive to cultivate good things. This is the work of ethics.
6) Sixth, do expect to be part of a community that continues to work on the problems for a long time.
7) And seventh, don’t give up!
Of course it is possible to solve environmental policy problems apart from a community; once you’re no longer a part of a community, “policy” takes on a simpler meaning, and so does “environmental.” But merely redefining words—or merely divorcing yourself from a situation—doesn’t solve the problem. Rather, those decisions only blind us to the problem. This is satisfying our own irritation rather than satisfying the needs generated by the actual problem.
*****
[1] Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Sharon L. Jansen, ed. (Steilacoom, WA: Saltar's Point Press, 2014) p.65.
∞
In terms of ethics and law: who has access to the information confessed, and what is the legal status of that confession? Is there anything like the privilege of confidentiality enjoyed by clergy who hear private confessions from their parishioners?
*****
Update, 22 May 2018: Irina Raicu just published a very thoughtful reply to this, entitled "Parenting, Politeness, Poets, and Priests" at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Her article is very much worth the time it will take you to read it. You may find it here.
The Ethics of Automation: Poetry and Robot Priests
Philosophy professor Evan Selinger posted a question on Twitter yesterday about whether there are jobs that it would be unethical to automate.
As I am a Christian, an ethicist, and a philosopher of religion, this is
something I’ve been pondering for a few years: is there a case to be
made for automating the work of clergy?
A
German company recently automated a confessional. On the one hand, this
might have great therapeutic effects. On the other hand, it raises a
number of ethical, legal, and theological questions.
In terms of ethics and law: who has access to the information confessed, and what is the legal status of that confession? Is there anything like the privilege of confidentiality enjoyed by clergy who hear private confessions from their parishioners?
On the theological and ecclesiastical side: can a
meaningful confession be heard by someone who cannot sin, or does
confession depend on making a confession to a member of one’s own
community and church? Can a machine be a member of a church, or does it
have something more like the status of a chalice or a chasuble –
something the community uses liturgically but that does not have
standing in the deliberations and practices of the community? Another
important question: can a machine act as a vicar? That is, can a machine
stand in as a representative of God and proclaim the forgiveness of God
as we believe those who have been ordained may do?
Despite
the many weaknesses of religion, one strength of religion is that it
moves slowly. Yes, this too is a weakness at many times, but it is good
to move slowly when declaring sainthood, for instance. That’s a
decision that we should make carefully. Think about it like this: if we
are saying that person X is an example of good conduct, shouldn’t we
consider that person very carefully, from as many points of view as
possible, and do so after that person’s life has ended and all testimony
has been heard? Similarly, most religious traditions take time to
consider carefully whether someone should be ordained as clergy. In my
tradition, we speak of this as the “process of discernment,” and it is a
process that can take years, and that involves the whole community.
The downside is that this process is slow. The upside is that it keeps
us from making rash decisions, or at least it helps us to make fewer
rash decisions. We aren’t perfect.
My
first, gut response to Selinger’s question was that we should not outsource the writing of poetry to machines. My concerns here are twofold: one has to
do with the danger of persuasion: not much moves us as powerfully as
poetry does. My second concern is about the importance of having out
arts be the expressions of the heart of our communities. But I could be
wrong: maybe robots should be writing poetry – their own poetry, from
one machine to another. I do not wish to deprive anyone of the right to
artistic expression, nor do I wish to deprive envy community of the
right to have its own forms of beauty. Still, I worry about the way a
machine could be used to produce arrangements of words, sounds, and
images that would persuade us to act as we should not.
My
second response to Selinger’s question is related to the first: poetry is
at the heart of most religions, and I find myself with a hesitant
uncertainty about whether we should allow robots to be priests.
It’s
not that I think we should be unwilling to automate the tedious parts
of clerical work. In fact, that might be a real boon to the community.
We have allowed automation in many areas that has benefited us: bank
tellers and airline pilots have given up portions of their work to
reliable machines, and the result has been convenience and increased
safety. Why could a robot not also tend the sick and the needy, read to
those in hospice, visit those in prison, and so on? As I've written before, my wife is an Episcopal priest, and her work can be very demanding. There might be some parts of it that could be automated, freeing her up for other work that only people can do.
My
concern is not about the feasibility of having machines do this work.
On the whole, I’m in favor of it. But I do worry that if we hand over
caring for others to our machines, we might do so to our own detriment.
We should use the technologies we have to serve those in need. Of this I
have no doubt. But we should not pretend that in so doing we have done
all that we must do. I agree with Dr. King and Gandhi on this: we
ourselves need to care for those in need. Caring for those in need is
not a one-way transaction that serves only the sick and the poor; it is
something that the powerful and hale need as well.
I
have more to say about all of this, so this post is a too-hasty start,
but I want to risk continuing Evan Selinger’s conversation rather than risk
neglecting it. Evan has raised for us one of the more important
questions the current generation will face, I think.
For
right now, I will end this post by returning to poetry and mythology,
which is, as I said, a powerful resource for thinking about how we will
act. We need poetry, and we need to reflect on it together to sort out
the good poems from the bad. I’ll mention it here for your reflection:
J.R.R. Tolkien reflected on the poems of Genesis by creating his own
myth of creation in the Silmarillion. One element of that creation story
that my co-author Matthew Dickerson and I often return to is the story
in which one of God’s creations imitates God in making more sentient
beings, without God’s explicit permission. Here’s the passage I have in
mind:
“The making of things is in my heart from my own making by thee; and the child of little understanding that makes a play of the deeds of his father may do so without thought of mockery, but because he is the son of his father.”
Might it be possible for us also to make sentient life in imitation of God "without thought of mockery," and, if so, might it be that those lives we make could write poems and become priests? As anyone who has read Tolkien's myth knows, this raises a new set of ethical questions that now have to be resolved.--J.R.R. Tolkien, Silmarillion, p 43
*****
Update, 22 May 2018: Irina Raicu just published a very thoughtful reply to this, entitled "Parenting, Politeness, Poets, and Priests" at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Her article is very much worth the time it will take you to read it. You may find it here.
∞
The Trace I Left Behind
This summer I spent several weeks in and around Lake Clark National Park doing research on trout, salmon, and char.
Sometimes I get quizzical looks when I say that I, a philosophy and classics professor, am researching fish. Let me explain.
I teach environmental philosophy and a range of classes in what I call "environmental humanities." These include courses in environmental ethics, nature writing, philosophy of nature, and even a course on environmental law and policy for first-year undergraduates, as an introduction to being a university student.
I also teach courses in field ecology, including a monthlong course in tropical ecology in Guatemala and Belize. I teach in Greece over my spring break, and this year we will be looking at the expansion of fish farms in the Mediterranean and how fishing has changed there over the last six thousand years.
Closer to home, I teach and practice what Norwegians call friluftsliv, or life in the free air. Whenever possible, I teach outdoors. Most years, I take my ancient philosophy students camping in the Badlands National Park to watch the Orionid meteor shower while we lie on sleeping bags under the stars.
In all of this, my aim is to make sure that nature is not an abstraction to my students, nor to me. I want to know the places the fish live, the grasslands the bison roam, the forests where the jaguar and the ocelot hunt, the tundra rivers where the Dolly Varden chase the salmon under the watchful gaze of the bears.
In other words, my aim is to stay in contact with wildness, and to do so in a way that allows me to take something valuable home: intimate knowledge. I am not a scientist, so I don't bring samples back to a laboratory. I do bring home photographs, and I do spend a lot of time making observations of the places I work, so that I can bring home notebooks full of writing to share with my students. And of course, I write books and articles to share with others.
This summer, I was sorely tempted to bring something else home from Lake Clark: a tiny fossil. I had chartered a float plane to take me to a fairly remote lake, and there my fellow researchers and I walked the shore to the mouth of a stream full of spawning salmon and rainbow trout.
As I often do, I sat down on the gravel and started to turn over rocks to see what invertebrates were living there. The salmon are bright red and eye-catching, but the bugs and spiders tell an important part of the story of a place, as Kurt Fausch has written about in his recent book, For The Love Of Rivers. Who was it - J.B.S. Haldane, perhaps? - who quipped that God has "an inordinate fondness for beetles." The world is full of wonderful, tiny lives that are easy to overlook.
I don't try to bring beetles home, but one insect tempted me this summer. Really, it was just a trace of an insect, just the trace of its wings, in fact. I can't even tell you what insect it was. All I can tell you is that somewhere near that river, probably millions of years ago, something like a dragonfly died in the mud, and the river graced its delicate wings with the cerement of silt. That silt took the form of the wings, those wings left a fingerprint - a wingprint - on the earth. And this summer, I found that print, that delicate, wonderful trace.
While my son and my friend and our pilot walked, I sat with that stone in my hand and thought about pocketing it. Here I was in the wilderness, and no one would know. It's one tiny stone in the largest state in the union; who would miss it?
Ah, but it is one tiny stone that does not belong to me. It is one tiny stone in a vast wilderness that belongs to all of us, and to all who will come after us. It is one tiny piece of rock with an incomplete fossil of a little odonata. The river there has held it and cared for it since time immemorial.
Now I am back in South Dakota, but a tiny trace of my heart remains along the strand of that stream in Alaska. It lies there, wrapped around that delicate trace of insect wing, and I will never find it again in that vast wilderness.
But perhaps someone else will. Until then, perhaps it is best not to let Midas' longings turn our hearts to stone too soon. Let's walk the shores together, I will continue to say to my students. And let's bring something intangible home in our memories. And let's do the hard work of leaving behind the beautiful, delicate traces that wildness has safeguarded for so many, many years.
Sometimes I get quizzical looks when I say that I, a philosophy and classics professor, am researching fish. Let me explain.
I teach environmental philosophy and a range of classes in what I call "environmental humanities." These include courses in environmental ethics, nature writing, philosophy of nature, and even a course on environmental law and policy for first-year undergraduates, as an introduction to being a university student.
I also teach courses in field ecology, including a monthlong course in tropical ecology in Guatemala and Belize. I teach in Greece over my spring break, and this year we will be looking at the expansion of fish farms in the Mediterranean and how fishing has changed there over the last six thousand years.
Closer to home, I teach and practice what Norwegians call friluftsliv, or life in the free air. Whenever possible, I teach outdoors. Most years, I take my ancient philosophy students camping in the Badlands National Park to watch the Orionid meteor shower while we lie on sleeping bags under the stars.
In all of this, my aim is to make sure that nature is not an abstraction to my students, nor to me. I want to know the places the fish live, the grasslands the bison roam, the forests where the jaguar and the ocelot hunt, the tundra rivers where the Dolly Varden chase the salmon under the watchful gaze of the bears.
In other words, my aim is to stay in contact with wildness, and to do so in a way that allows me to take something valuable home: intimate knowledge. I am not a scientist, so I don't bring samples back to a laboratory. I do bring home photographs, and I do spend a lot of time making observations of the places I work, so that I can bring home notebooks full of writing to share with my students. And of course, I write books and articles to share with others.
This summer, I was sorely tempted to bring something else home from Lake Clark: a tiny fossil. I had chartered a float plane to take me to a fairly remote lake, and there my fellow researchers and I walked the shore to the mouth of a stream full of spawning salmon and rainbow trout.
 |
| Salmon preparing to spawn |
As I often do, I sat down on the gravel and started to turn over rocks to see what invertebrates were living there. The salmon are bright red and eye-catching, but the bugs and spiders tell an important part of the story of a place, as Kurt Fausch has written about in his recent book, For The Love Of Rivers. Who was it - J.B.S. Haldane, perhaps? - who quipped that God has "an inordinate fondness for beetles." The world is full of wonderful, tiny lives that are easy to overlook.
I don't try to bring beetles home, but one insect tempted me this summer. Really, it was just a trace of an insect, just the trace of its wings, in fact. I can't even tell you what insect it was. All I can tell you is that somewhere near that river, probably millions of years ago, something like a dragonfly died in the mud, and the river graced its delicate wings with the cerement of silt. That silt took the form of the wings, those wings left a fingerprint - a wingprint - on the earth. And this summer, I found that print, that delicate, wonderful trace.
 |
| Fossilized trace of an insect's wing |
While my son and my friend and our pilot walked, I sat with that stone in my hand and thought about pocketing it. Here I was in the wilderness, and no one would know. It's one tiny stone in the largest state in the union; who would miss it?
Ah, but it is one tiny stone that does not belong to me. It is one tiny stone in a vast wilderness that belongs to all of us, and to all who will come after us. It is one tiny piece of rock with an incomplete fossil of a little odonata. The river there has held it and cared for it since time immemorial.
Now I am back in South Dakota, but a tiny trace of my heart remains along the strand of that stream in Alaska. It lies there, wrapped around that delicate trace of insect wing, and I will never find it again in that vast wilderness.
But perhaps someone else will. Until then, perhaps it is best not to let Midas' longings turn our hearts to stone too soon. Let's walk the shores together, I will continue to say to my students. And let's bring something intangible home in our memories. And let's do the hard work of leaving behind the beautiful, delicate traces that wildness has safeguarded for so many, many years.
∞
The Sentiment That Invites Us To Pray - Peirce on Prayer and Inquiry
"One of Peirce’s ongoing aims was
to reconcile religious life with the practice and spirit of science.
Given the great differences between religion and science—in both
practical and theoretical terms—this may have seemed like a fool’s
errand in his time, and even more so in our time. The spirit of science
is one of progress and fallibility, an open community whose only heresy
is an unwillingness to seek the truth, while the spirit of religion
includes a tendency towards conservative closure of inquiry and of
membership. While Peirce acknowledged these distinctions, he
nevertheless maintained that religion was not necessarily
opposed to science. Certain aspects of religious practice —and
especially the act of prayer—exemplify elements of inquiry. Rather than
causing thought to contract and community to become less important, as
is often supposed, practice in prayer may be a creative act, like
poetry, that can in fact lead to greater understanding of the world and
of one’s place in it. At its best, prayer arises from an instinct or
from a sentiment, and it affords comfort, strength, and—perhaps most
importantly—insight into the nature of the world...."
Read the rest here, in the latest volume of the Journal Of Scriptural Reasoning.
Read the rest here, in the latest volume of the Journal Of Scriptural Reasoning.
∞
Bluejay Linings
"Well, look at the silver lining!"
An accident two years ago left me with some injuries that occasionally keep me from doing what I would like to do. I shouldn't complain; my life's pretty good. But even little pains seem to draw all my attention. If my whole body is fine but I've got a blister on my small toe, I can forget the beautiful landscape I'm in and focus instead on the blister, or on the hiking boots that rubbed too much while I climbed a once-in-a-lifetime mountain. A splinter in my finger gets more of my attention than my wife's hand in mine does. Even small pain can keep my mind from noticing great loveliness.
Occasionally, my injuries keep me from being able to drive. When I cannot drive I rely on bicycling, and then I see much more clearly how much my city has been shaped by the automobile. We have very few taxis, and not much by way of public transit. Our city is in a place where land is cheap and abundant, and the sprawling grid of streets and of wide green lawns is a response to the availability of land: it's not a walking city, it's a city for driving. There are some nice bike trails, but they're mostly an afterthought that are designed for recreation and not for transportation. Here in Sioux Falls, the private car rules the road.
I own several cars, and my cars are also a response to the land here, and to its weather. The open prairie can get very cold in winter, and very hot in the summer. In my lifetime, automobiles have become better and better at insulating me from the extremes of weather. I can drive a thousand miles without feeling the air other than when I stop for rest or fuel. This usually seems like an advantage. Sometimes I wish I could talk with other drivers, but we are insulated from one another, too.
A few days ago someone told me that having to rely on my bicycle is a gift, an advantage. "Look at the silver linings," they said. When you bike, you get exercise! I think they meant to console me, and I'm sure I've said the same kind of thing to others, hoping to boost their spirits by pointing out that things could be worse. And I'll probably wind up doing it again in my lifetime. It's so easy to feel insulated from others' pain, and so hard to know the effects of our words on others. Argh. If I've done that to you, I'm sorry.
*****
Last January, as I walked through the forest of Petén, Guatemala with my students, I kept saying to them the last three lines from Gary Snyder's poem, "For the Children." Those lines form a sort of haiku at the end of a longer poem:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
I keep returning to that poem. Some of the hills are hard to climb, and I know that some of them will give me blisters. Others...well, someday those once-in-a-lifetime mountains will be climbable only in my memory.
For now, I'm trying not to let the well-intended words about "silver linings" rub me the wrong way, and to take them in the spirit they're offered in. They may be awkward, but they're meant to help.
From my three-wheeled vélo, uninsulated from the weather, I find I am also exposed to the sound of the birds. I haven't learned all the flowers yet, and I'm still working on the birdsongs, but I know many of their voices. In the last month I've learned where the bluejays live in my neighborhood. I didn't know we had bluejays near my house. I've seen them in our city, but only rarely. Now I've found two pair, and I'm starting to figure out which are their favorite trees. As I roll along quietly on my recumbent trike, the birds let me coast past them, eyeing me perhaps, as I listen for them high in the treetops of this prairie town.
∞
What's In A Name? Almanzo Wilder and El Manzoor
In her novel Little Town on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder tells why her husband was named Almanzo. It's a story that she learned in De Smet, South Dakota, but it reaches back a thousand years or so, through New York, and England, to somewhere in the Middle East, where Almanzo's ancestor had his life saved by "an Arab or somebody" named El Manzoor.
It's worth remembering that act of kindness shown to a Crusader, by a man with a Persian name. The Wilder family remembered that act centuries later. ("Manzoor" and variants of it are fairly common in Iran today. For example, the kind and brilliant former Director of the Toronto and San Francisco Operas, Lotfi Mansouri, was born in Iran and educated in California.)
This story makes me wonder: how might I live my life in such a way that another family will be glad to remember me a thousand years from now?
You can read the full text of my short essay about Almanzo and El Manzoor in today's Sioux Falls Argus Leader.
Since the essay in the Argus doesn't include my footnotes, here are the relevant citations:
It's worth remembering that act of kindness shown to a Crusader, by a man with a Persian name. The Wilder family remembered that act centuries later. ("Manzoor" and variants of it are fairly common in Iran today. For example, the kind and brilliant former Director of the Toronto and San Francisco Operas, Lotfi Mansouri, was born in Iran and educated in California.)
This story makes me wonder: how might I live my life in such a way that another family will be glad to remember me a thousand years from now?
You can read the full text of my short essay about Almanzo and El Manzoor in today's Sioux Falls Argus Leader.
Since the essay in the Argus doesn't include my footnotes, here are the relevant citations:
- The passage from the novel is from Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie. (New York: Harper Collins, 1971) 198-199.
- The passage from Laura Ingalls Wilder's letter to her friend can be found here: LIW to Miss Weber, 11 February, 1952. Cited in Ann Romines, Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. p.233.
∞
SPUnK: The Society for the Preservation of Unnecessary Knowledge
My brilliant and curious student James Jennings was interviewed by the brilliant and curious Hugh Weber on South Dakota Public Broadcasting's Dakota Midday.
James is a Philosophy and Classics major at Augustana University, and he's also the Prime Minister of SPUnK, a campus group I advise at Augustana University.
SPUnK - the Society for the Preservation of Unnecessary Knowledge - is devoted to learning about things we don't need to learn about, because we think unnecessary knowledge is worth preserving and promoting. We distinguish between those things students are told they must study in order to get a job, and those things that we study because there is delight in wonder, and in learning new things, even if we don't yet see their practical use. As both Plato's Socrates and Aristotle pointed out, the love of wisdom begins in wonder, and we seek knowledge not for some simple or material gain but for the satisfaction of wonder and out of a desire to know. Here's Aristotle:
This is what SPUnK is all about.
James and Hugh will teach you about paper towns, curiosity, education, Abraham Flexner, Albert Einstein, Rubik's Cubes, and other unnecessary knowledge. It's a short interview, well worth a few minutes of your time. Unnecessary knowledge is worth quite a lot more than a little of our time, after all.
* For two places Plato and Aristotle say this, see Plato's Theaetetus 155b and Aristotle's Metaphysics 982b.)
** Peirce writes about this in the first chapter of Justus Buchler's The Philosophical Writings of Peirce.
James is a Philosophy and Classics major at Augustana University, and he's also the Prime Minister of SPUnK, a campus group I advise at Augustana University.
SPUnK - the Society for the Preservation of Unnecessary Knowledge - is devoted to learning about things we don't need to learn about, because we think unnecessary knowledge is worth preserving and promoting. We distinguish between those things students are told they must study in order to get a job, and those things that we study because there is delight in wonder, and in learning new things, even if we don't yet see their practical use. As both Plato's Socrates and Aristotle pointed out, the love of wisdom begins in wonder, and we seek knowledge not for some simple or material gain but for the satisfaction of wonder and out of a desire to know. Here's Aristotle:
"Now he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant (thus the myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders); therefore if it was to escape ignorance that men studied philosophy, it is obvious that they pursued science for the sake of knowledge, and not for any practical utility.The actual course of events bears witness to this; for speculation of this kind began with a view to recreation and pastime, at a time when practically all the necessities of life were already supplied. Clearly then it is for no extrinsic advantage that we seek this knowledge; for just as we call a man independent who exists for himself and not for another, so we call this the only independent science, since it alone exists for itself."*Or, as Charles Peirce once put it, science is the practice of those who desire to find things out.**
This is what SPUnK is all about.
James and Hugh will teach you about paper towns, curiosity, education, Abraham Flexner, Albert Einstein, Rubik's Cubes, and other unnecessary knowledge. It's a short interview, well worth a few minutes of your time. Unnecessary knowledge is worth quite a lot more than a little of our time, after all.
*****
* For two places Plato and Aristotle say this, see Plato's Theaetetus 155b and Aristotle's Metaphysics 982b.)
** Peirce writes about this in the first chapter of Justus Buchler's The Philosophical Writings of Peirce.
∞
I Want My Religion To Be A Garden
Today my ecology advisee and I met while walking across our campus. Walking and talking, we ignored the formalities of her writing, and attended to the plants and animals around us. Soon we will need to return to the texts: to her reading and writing. But today we did that by attending to the garden around us.
I’ve entered a stage of my life where I am less concerned with the proofs and proof-texts of religion and more interested in the practices that I've inherited. Like William James, I’m more curious about the fruits than the roots. I want my religion to be like a garden. I hope it has good soil, but I’m likely to judge its health by what it produces.
Maybe this is why liturgy has come to be meaningful for me, just as poetry has. I know I won’t be able to command words forever, so I want to store up good words while I can. I’ve seen my elders lose their words as their minds age. I’ve also seen them retain their songs. Ten years after his stroke, as he was approaching the end of his life, Granddad couldn’t understand my questions, couldn’t remember my name, couldn’t say much about what he needed. But sometimes a spark of life would come to his eyes, and he would begin to sing. It was almost always a song he had learned eighty years before, when he and the twentieth century were both still young.
And there is deep wisdom in the return to ancient songs, and to ancient texts. Don’t return because you must but because you can. Don't return to slavishly obey them. Return as heirs who hold up inherited keepsakes to the light and consider the relics of our ancestors. What made them hold on to this, to save this for us, to pass this on to us? What role did it play in their lives?
Some of the relics seem silly at first, but they are often palimpsests of signs, layered meaning upon meaning. The Ark is a nice children’s story – as long as you leave all the death and violence out of it – but it’s also silly. Who believes you could make such a boat of gopher wood, and carry in it so many species?
But then I reflect a little longer and I think: it may be silly, but it is also a story of what we do, and of what we must do. We bring floods upon ourselves, and we fail to plan for them, and we mock those who do. I no longer reject the story of the Ark as unhistorical; now I think: we need more Arks, for the sake of the future. That is, I'm not as concerned with the roots of the story as with the fruit such a story might bear when I hold it up to the light. We need Svalbard seed banks all over the world. We need to make Arks of our gardens, we need buffer strips around our waterways so that we can make Arks of our oceans. We need national parks as Arks of refuge from our constant expansion. The world is not limitless, but we spend it like teenagers spending their first paycheck on a wild weekend, full of expectation that there is so much more to come, so much time for saving later on.
Some of the relics we've inherited are not things but rituals. I’ve heard priests joke that their job is to “hatch, match, and dispatch”: to welcome new lives into a community, to bear witness to new commitments, to help the community say goodbye to those we have lost. They joke, but we know there’s not much that matters more than these acts of love.
The ritual of Communion has become meaningful to me for a similar reason: love. Where else can I go to sit as equals with people from across the community, to take bread and wine with them, regardless of race, class, gender, income, age, or language? All are welcome, I am told, and I have seen it happen, if only briefly, on Sunday mornings. I admit it: I’d rather sip coffee, alone, with a book and some good music in the background, preferably with a good view of mountains, or water, or both. But I commit myself to this ritual of sharing bread and wine with strangers because I recognize that what I want and what I need are not always the same thing.
We need hospitality towards the stranger, philoxenia as the Greek language calls it, friendship towards those who are not like us. We need to remember that for some people “good Samaritan” was an oxymoron, since Samaritans were another nation who didn’t act like us, and who therefore could not be good. Then we need to become that oxymoron, and show such goodness to others that we give them the delight of learning that people like us can love people like them.
We need to cultivate a sense of awe, and wonder, if only because awe and wonder remind us that we are not the end of the story, nor even its beginning. We are in the middle somewhere, which means we have received an inheritance, and now it is ours to safeguard and to pass on to others.
We need to avoid making idols not because the idols are wicked but because once we focus our worship on what we have made we become worse than we were. Idols induce myopia. The shiny stones narrow our gaze, their brilliance blinds us to darker and gentler colors.
Money can become an idol, and because it produces money, work can become one of those idols, too. We need Sabbath-rest. We need it for ourselves and for our workers and for every field we till. We’ll be told we are fools for not maximizing our productivity, just as Noah was told he was a fool for focusing on the short-term need to build a lifeboat.
Noah lived to be nine hundred and fifty years old, we are told. Maybe the focus on productivity is an idol, too.
I want my religion to be a garden, a place where beautiful things can grow, things worth looking at for their own sake, as well as things that will nourish my family and my neighbors. A place where I must return, day after day, to see how things are growing; to see what needs to be fertilized, what needs to be pruned, what weeds need to be pulled; to see what old plants still blossom, what new plants are springing up from seeds borne on the unseen wind.
My gratitude to Ed Mooney, who reposted this on his Thoreau blog, Mists On The Rivers; and to Lori Walsh of South Dakota Public Radio for asking me to read this post on Dakota Midday on November 3, 2016. People like Walsh and Mooney make good gardening possible, and far more joyful.
*****
I’ve entered a stage of my life where I am less concerned with the proofs and proof-texts of religion and more interested in the practices that I've inherited. Like William James, I’m more curious about the fruits than the roots. I want my religion to be like a garden. I hope it has good soil, but I’m likely to judge its health by what it produces.
Maybe this is why liturgy has come to be meaningful for me, just as poetry has. I know I won’t be able to command words forever, so I want to store up good words while I can. I’ve seen my elders lose their words as their minds age. I’ve also seen them retain their songs. Ten years after his stroke, as he was approaching the end of his life, Granddad couldn’t understand my questions, couldn’t remember my name, couldn’t say much about what he needed. But sometimes a spark of life would come to his eyes, and he would begin to sing. It was almost always a song he had learned eighty years before, when he and the twentieth century were both still young.
And there is deep wisdom in the return to ancient songs, and to ancient texts. Don’t return because you must but because you can. Don't return to slavishly obey them. Return as heirs who hold up inherited keepsakes to the light and consider the relics of our ancestors. What made them hold on to this, to save this for us, to pass this on to us? What role did it play in their lives?
*****
Some of the relics seem silly at first, but they are often palimpsests of signs, layered meaning upon meaning. The Ark is a nice children’s story – as long as you leave all the death and violence out of it – but it’s also silly. Who believes you could make such a boat of gopher wood, and carry in it so many species?
But then I reflect a little longer and I think: it may be silly, but it is also a story of what we do, and of what we must do. We bring floods upon ourselves, and we fail to plan for them, and we mock those who do. I no longer reject the story of the Ark as unhistorical; now I think: we need more Arks, for the sake of the future. That is, I'm not as concerned with the roots of the story as with the fruit such a story might bear when I hold it up to the light. We need Svalbard seed banks all over the world. We need to make Arks of our gardens, we need buffer strips around our waterways so that we can make Arks of our oceans. We need national parks as Arks of refuge from our constant expansion. The world is not limitless, but we spend it like teenagers spending their first paycheck on a wild weekend, full of expectation that there is so much more to come, so much time for saving later on.
Some of the relics we've inherited are not things but rituals. I’ve heard priests joke that their job is to “hatch, match, and dispatch”: to welcome new lives into a community, to bear witness to new commitments, to help the community say goodbye to those we have lost. They joke, but we know there’s not much that matters more than these acts of love.
The ritual of Communion has become meaningful to me for a similar reason: love. Where else can I go to sit as equals with people from across the community, to take bread and wine with them, regardless of race, class, gender, income, age, or language? All are welcome, I am told, and I have seen it happen, if only briefly, on Sunday mornings. I admit it: I’d rather sip coffee, alone, with a book and some good music in the background, preferably with a good view of mountains, or water, or both. But I commit myself to this ritual of sharing bread and wine with strangers because I recognize that what I want and what I need are not always the same thing.
We need hospitality towards the stranger, philoxenia as the Greek language calls it, friendship towards those who are not like us. We need to remember that for some people “good Samaritan” was an oxymoron, since Samaritans were another nation who didn’t act like us, and who therefore could not be good. Then we need to become that oxymoron, and show such goodness to others that we give them the delight of learning that people like us can love people like them.
We need to cultivate a sense of awe, and wonder, if only because awe and wonder remind us that we are not the end of the story, nor even its beginning. We are in the middle somewhere, which means we have received an inheritance, and now it is ours to safeguard and to pass on to others.
We need to avoid making idols not because the idols are wicked but because once we focus our worship on what we have made we become worse than we were. Idols induce myopia. The shiny stones narrow our gaze, their brilliance blinds us to darker and gentler colors.
Money can become an idol, and because it produces money, work can become one of those idols, too. We need Sabbath-rest. We need it for ourselves and for our workers and for every field we till. We’ll be told we are fools for not maximizing our productivity, just as Noah was told he was a fool for focusing on the short-term need to build a lifeboat.
*****
Noah lived to be nine hundred and fifty years old, we are told. Maybe the focus on productivity is an idol, too.
*****
I want my religion to be a garden, a place where beautiful things can grow, things worth looking at for their own sake, as well as things that will nourish my family and my neighbors. A place where I must return, day after day, to see how things are growing; to see what needs to be fertilized, what needs to be pruned, what weeds need to be pulled; to see what old plants still blossom, what new plants are springing up from seeds borne on the unseen wind.
*****
Updates:My gratitude to Ed Mooney, who reposted this on his Thoreau blog, Mists On The Rivers; and to Lori Walsh of South Dakota Public Radio for asking me to read this post on Dakota Midday on November 3, 2016. People like Walsh and Mooney make good gardening possible, and far more joyful.
∞
Babel, in Paraphrase
Recently I have been wandering my city with a camera and sketchbook, looking at the ways our use and design of spaces speak about what we value.
Seeing often requires unhasty attention, or training, or both. I can't claim to have training in architecture, but I am trained in semiotics, and I suppose some of my grandfather's years as a toolmaker and my father's career as an engineer have rubbed off on me. Whatever the cause, I care about design.
The ancient story of the Tower of Babel (found in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis) is also a story about design, and semiotics.
It's also a story worth unhasty attention. One hasty version goes roughly like this: everyone on earth shared a common language and common vocabulary. The people, moving to a new place, decided to build a tower to heaven, so they baked bricks and began to build. But they did not finish it; their language became many languages, and they spread out in many directions, divided from one another.
The Bible has a number of stories like this, short tales that seem to be making some simple and clear point. But as we ponder them unhastily - which is what theologians often do - we become more aware of how little we know. The obvious becomes the obscure, and the quotidien becomes mysterious.
A simple story becomes an invitation to slow down even more, and to consider. Selah, it says to us.
At first blush, the story of Babel appears to be a story of human hubris, and of God frustrating that hubris. It could be a simple parallel to the expulsion from Eden, or to the flooding of the earth in the story of Noah: there are limits, and if you transgress those limits, you will make your lot in life worse.
Lately, as I've slowed down my reading, I've been noticing something else: the bricks. The Bible does not often talk about the ethics of technology. There are passages that speak of things like the ethics of weaving, of sharing resources, and of the production, preparation, and distribution of food. But there are not many passages that name a particular human invention in the context of ethics. One of those inventions is named in several places: bricks.
The passage in Genesis 11 talks about bricks as a substitute for stone. When I was young I often worked as a stonemason and bricklayer. That experience may be what draws me to this passage. Bricks are easy to make, and easy to cut. We can standardize them, which makes building walls much faster.
The downside of bricks is related to their upside: they're easy to break, or to cut, or to erode. They don't last as long as stone, and if they're not well-reinforced, they are not as resilient against natural disasters. Some ancient stonemasons figured out how to cut and lay stones that can be jostled by an earthquake and then settle back into position, but bricks often collapse when the ground shakes beneath them. Bricks are easy to use, but they are not as reliable as stone. In comparison to many kinds of stone, bricks are a short-term investment.
This makes me wonder: what was the problem with the Tower of Babel? Was it the fact that the people were trying to build a tower to heaven? Or was it that they were trying to build one badly, or cheaply, or fast? Was it a problem of hubris, or a problem of materials and design? Genesis 11 does not answer that question directly. It leaves it as an open question for us.
Which is just what we should expect, if Genesis 11 conveys any truth. Think about this: how would this story have been told before the Tower of Babel was built? If the story is right, then before the Tower was built, the story would have been told in a language everyone would understand. But now that we have tried to build it (whatever that means) the story must be told in words that are confused, for people who are scattered and divided and who do not share vocabulary.
To paraphrase this: somehow, our use of bricks resulted in making it harder to connect with one another. And it's not clear how.
But somehow, it is a story that hundreds of generations have found worth repeating, even if our words fail to say with precision why that is so.
Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the way we continue to build walls of bricks. And what those bricks say about us, and what we value.
Since writing this, I started reading Christopher Alexander's book, The Timeless Way of Building, recommended to me by some friends in Sioux Falls. This line in particular stands out as serendipitous:
Seeing often requires unhasty attention, or training, or both. I can't claim to have training in architecture, but I am trained in semiotics, and I suppose some of my grandfather's years as a toolmaker and my father's career as an engineer have rubbed off on me. Whatever the cause, I care about design.
The ancient story of the Tower of Babel (found in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis) is also a story about design, and semiotics.
It's also a story worth unhasty attention. One hasty version goes roughly like this: everyone on earth shared a common language and common vocabulary. The people, moving to a new place, decided to build a tower to heaven, so they baked bricks and began to build. But they did not finish it; their language became many languages, and they spread out in many directions, divided from one another.
The Bible has a number of stories like this, short tales that seem to be making some simple and clear point. But as we ponder them unhastily - which is what theologians often do - we become more aware of how little we know. The obvious becomes the obscure, and the quotidien becomes mysterious.
A simple story becomes an invitation to slow down even more, and to consider. Selah, it says to us.
At first blush, the story of Babel appears to be a story of human hubris, and of God frustrating that hubris. It could be a simple parallel to the expulsion from Eden, or to the flooding of the earth in the story of Noah: there are limits, and if you transgress those limits, you will make your lot in life worse.
The passage in Genesis 11 talks about bricks as a substitute for stone. When I was young I often worked as a stonemason and bricklayer. That experience may be what draws me to this passage. Bricks are easy to make, and easy to cut. We can standardize them, which makes building walls much faster.
The downside of bricks is related to their upside: they're easy to break, or to cut, or to erode. They don't last as long as stone, and if they're not well-reinforced, they are not as resilient against natural disasters. Some ancient stonemasons figured out how to cut and lay stones that can be jostled by an earthquake and then settle back into position, but bricks often collapse when the ground shakes beneath them. Bricks are easy to use, but they are not as reliable as stone. In comparison to many kinds of stone, bricks are a short-term investment.
*****
This makes me wonder: what was the problem with the Tower of Babel? Was it the fact that the people were trying to build a tower to heaven? Or was it that they were trying to build one badly, or cheaply, or fast? Was it a problem of hubris, or a problem of materials and design? Genesis 11 does not answer that question directly. It leaves it as an open question for us.
Which is just what we should expect, if Genesis 11 conveys any truth. Think about this: how would this story have been told before the Tower of Babel was built? If the story is right, then before the Tower was built, the story would have been told in a language everyone would understand. But now that we have tried to build it (whatever that means) the story must be told in words that are confused, for people who are scattered and divided and who do not share vocabulary.
To paraphrase this: somehow, our use of bricks resulted in making it harder to connect with one another. And it's not clear how.
But somehow, it is a story that hundreds of generations have found worth repeating, even if our words fail to say with precision why that is so.
Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the way we continue to build walls of bricks. And what those bricks say about us, and what we value.
*****
Update:Since writing this, I started reading Christopher Alexander's book, The Timeless Way of Building, recommended to me by some friends in Sioux Falls. This line in particular stands out as serendipitous:
"But in our time the languages have broken down. Since they are no longer shared, the processes which keep them deep have broken down: and it is therefore virtually impossible for anybody, in our time, to make a building live." (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) p. 225
Contemplation, Conversation, Commentary
To paraphrase Plutarch’s famous line about education, the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. A jar that is filled by someone else only contains what is put into it; it becomes a place of storage. It is a useful tool, but it does not increase what it holds. A fire, on the other hand, gives off heat and light, and that heat and light can kindle other fires and illuminate distant obscurities.
I think education should be like this, a process that pays continual returns if it is well tended.
Of course, unchecked fire can do great harm, and education without boundaries is like a fire with no hearth or stove.
Should Education Have Boundaries? A Reflection On My Own Classrooms
But how can we put boundaries on education? One way, of course, is to limit education to memorization, tool-and-skill training, or indoctrination. But each of these amounts to filling a vessel. That is, it amounts to filling students’ minds with facts, opinions, or skills, without giving the students what they need to examine or improve what they are given, and to teach others what they have learned.
My aim as a teacher is to offer students liberal arts in such a way that they gain both practical skills and the means to improve those skills as the use and teach them. I say liberal arts because I do not wish my students to be the servants of others, but to be people who practice responsible liberty and who help others to do the same.
Of course, unchecked liberty can do great harm, and liberal education without boundaries is like a fire without a hearth. In one direction lies the restraint of being the mere vessel of others’ doctrines; in the other direction lie the perils of life beyond the bounds of ethics.
Fortunately, this is not a new problem, but a very old one. This means that there are some old and time-tested means of education that help us to find the mean between the extremes.
What I try to practice in my classes is something I see – in varying degrees – throughout the history of education. I will summarize it in three words: contemplation, conversation, and commentary.
Contemplation
By “contemplation” I mean the practice of examining what is already understood by the community of inquiry. What do we know? What are the tools we have at hand? What are the problems we wish to pursue together, and what solutions have been put forward so far? Learning these things is the first step, akin to learning the language when you move to a new country. It involves some memorization, and it involves learning the rules by which others conduct their lives and research. This is like learning the basics of a science, plus the methods used by scientists; or it is like learning the basics of poetry, plus the methods of reading and writing. Each discipline has its content and its tools, its history and its methods, its canonical texts and its rules and rituals for learning those texts. In my philosophy classes this means reading the assigned texts thoughtfully so that you come to class ready to ask good questions about them. In my language classes it means working through grammar and translation exercises, and memorization of vocabulary and inflections. In my environmental studies classes, this means learning basic taxonomy, ecology, geology, law, and policy, so you can discuss these things with others who know more than you do. In each discipline it will involve different things, but the general rule holds: if you want to join the community, you’ve got to learn these things first, just as you have to learn grammar before you can converse with others. And conversation is the next step.
Conversation
By “conversation” I mean coming together with others to think about the rules and tools we have been given. This is more than speaking with friends; this involves serious grappling with issues in the company of our contemporaries. In my philosophy classes, this means asking good questions about what you’ve read the night before class. It means exposing your ignorance and asking others to help you to correct it. It means taking others seriously as people who might see what is hidden in our blind spots. In my environmental humanities classes, this means going into the field with your classmates in order to examine the world together. In my philosophy of religion classes, this means engaging in the hard work of talking about the divine in a way that takes others seriously. Their questions might just be the questions you need; their insights might serve you well. It would be unwise to decide in advance that others have nothing to teach you; in each discipline, you’ve got to take time to do research, whether in the lab, in the field, in convivial conversation and deliberation with others. And then, when you’ve done that well, you’re ready to offer commentary on what your new insight means for us all.
Commentary
This is what I mean by “commentary,” then: the slow consideration of what consequences we might expect from what we have learned so far, and the offering of that consideration to others, so that they can contemplate and deliberate on them, and offer new commentary of their own.
Learning As A Cycle, And As A Shared Process
If you’ve done a good job with the first two steps, the third step leads you back to the first step. Good researchers who publish what they have learned contribute to the body of knowledge that others can use to kindle new fires that warm new homes and light new paths.
Another way of thinking about these three steps is that it concerns thinking about different times. The first step is the consideration of the past; the second involves taking seriously the present time and our contemporaries as fellow learners; and the third step is mindful of the future.
You might also think of this as a process of thinking at different speeds, and from different perspectives. The first step is often quite slow at first, and it requires us to learn to see as others saw, even if their way is not our own. The second step might happen quite quickly, whether in a sudden insight in the laboratory or in a fast-paced debate. The third step often requires the very slow work of painstakingly careful thinking and clear writing.
Of course, these three steps are not discrete. Often, they overlap and intermingle. We might discover in debate or in the field that we have failed to learn something important. Or our contemplative work might send us back to reexamine our research, or even to start over with new tools and insights. But on the whole, I think these three facets of learning wind up being repeated over and over in each field, and by connecting us to other people in the past, present, and the future, they offer a sort of bounded liberty to our learning.
Slow Thinking, Quick Writing, and Slow Assessment: On The Importance Of Self-Discipline
Much of what I hear and read about education has to do with metrics intended to assess the value of certain kinds of practices. I see the merit in many of those metrics. Sometimes, though, it seems that the metrics become a quick substitute for other kinds of evaluation that are harder to put into numerical or measurable form. We don't like the slow process of contemplation, or of commentary. We do like it when others put things in simple forms that we can quickly compare. There's value in that, but if we don't do our own contemplation and commentary, we abdicate a good deal of our involvement in our own learning, and we shift from being fires to vessels.
I am writing this piece fast, because I have a discipline of trying to write all my blog posts in less than fifteen minutes. (I do sometimes return to them to edit them for clarity or to add relevant information.) My aim here has been to write quickly about something I have thought about slowly. In other words, I've contemplated this for years, and today I'm writing a bit of quick commentary to contribute to our shared conversation. My quick writing is intended to be a moment of distillation of a cloud of contemplation. Too much time with my head in the clouds can obscure my vision; at some point I need those clouds to precipitate into more concrete thoughts. Writing helps me to do that.Your thoughtful replies and insights will hopefully help to kindle new fires.