Dream Deep

If I may, I would like to preface this great paper with an acknowledgement. This was the first things I ever read by Parker Palmer. By subterranean arrangements of agencies of which I have no knowledge, I was briefly on the mailing list of Naropa University, a wonderful place you should all click your way over to: it is in Boulder, Colorado. It was founded by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama, to provide its students with the opportunity to learn in Eastern and Western epistemologies at the same time.
I visited it three times, each time only for a few days, in 1979-1981, if memory serves. It is a major miracle that it has survived and continues to do its vital learning today. Its finances were of the cliffhanger kind when I was there.

I did not attend the wonderful conference at which this paper was presented (alas!). But I got a document of some kind which, for the first time I had ever seen, put sacred and teaching and learning in the same phrase. Since reading this paper, I have been a huge fan of Parker Palmer’s, who I would dearly love to hang out with. I hope you will have the same electrifying experience that I had with this paper, and will often surf Parkerwards thereafter.

Peace –

Haj

http://www.couragerenewal.org/resources/writings/grace

The Grace of Great Things
Reclaiming the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning
by Parker J. Palmer

We all know that what will transform education is not another theory or another book or another formula but a transformed way of being in the world. In the midst of the familiar trappings of education—competition, intellectual combat, obsession with a narrow range of facts, credentials—we seek a life illumined by spirit and infused with soul. This is not romanticism, as John Cobb (President of the Naropa Institute and host of the Spirituality in Education conference) has properly cautioned us.

I saw the other day a remarkable documentary called The Transformation of Allen School. Allen School is an inner-city school in Dayton, Ohio. It was for many years at the bottom of the list in that city by all measures. There were fifth graders who had parole officers. The dropout rate was incredible and saddening. The failure of those students in every aspect of their lives sickened the heart. And along came a new principal, a principal who—it’s relevant to note—came from the Philippines, a culture which has an inherent respect for things spiritual in a way American culture does not. And he brought the teachers together and said to them, in substance, as his very first proclamation as principal, that:

We have to start to understand that the young people we are working with have nothing of external substance or support. They have dangerous neighborhoods. They have poor places to live. They have little food to eat. They have parents who are on the ropes and barely able to pay attention to them. The externals with which American education is obsessed will not work in this situation.

But these students have one thing that no one can take away from them. They have their souls. And from this day forth in this school, we are going to lift those souls up. We are going to make those souls visible to the young people themselves and to their parents and to the community. We are going to celebrate their souls, and we are going to reground their lives in the power of their souls. And that will require this faculty recovering the power of their own souls, remembering that we, too, are soul-driven, soul-animated creatures.

And in a five-year period, that school, the Allen School in Dayton, Ohio, rose to the top of every dimension on which it had been at the bottom, through hard work, through disciplined work, but through attentiveness to the inward factors that we are here to explore. This is not romanticism. This is the real world. And this is what is desperately needed in so many sectors of American education.

As we go into these five days together, let us remember one thing about the soul. It is like a wild animal: tough, self-sufficient, resilient, but also exceedingly shy. Let us remember that if we go crashing through the woods, screaming and yelling for the soul to come out, it will evade us all day and all night. We cannot beat the bushes and yell at each other if we expect this precious inwardness to emerge. But if you are willing to go into the woods, and sit quietly at the base of a tree, that wild animal will, after a few hours, reveal itself to you. And out of the corner of your eye, you will glimpse something of the wild preciousness that this conference is looking for.

I ask guidance for myself and, as Quakers say, hold this entire conference in the light, to be here, to be present to each other in the right spirit, speaking our truth gently and simply, listening respectfully and attentively to the truth of others, grounded in our own experience and expanded by experiences that are not yet ours, compassionate toward that which we do not yet understand, not only as a kindness to others but for the sake of our growth and our students and the transformation of education. Amen.

In preparing these remarks, I’ve asked myself what are we trying to do here? We know it’s about spirituality and education, but what does that mean? For whatever it’s worth, these are the images that have come to me as I’ve tried to put a larger frame of personal meaning around this conference.

I think we are here to seek life-giving forces and sources in the midst of an enterprise which is too often death-dealing—education. It may seem harsh to call education death-dealing, but I think that we all have our experience of that.

I am always astonished and saddened by the fact that this country, which has the most widespread public education system in the world, has so many people who walk around feeling stupid because they feel that they are the losers in a competitive system of teaching and learning. It is a system that dissects life and distances us from the world because it is rooted in fear.

Everyone here has had his or her own encounter with the forces of death: racism, sexism, justice denied. In my life, one of my face-to-face encounters with the forces of death was in two prolonged experiences of clinical depression, passages through the dark woods that I made when I was in my 40s, devastating experiences when it was not clear from one day to the next whether I wished to be alive, or even was still alive—the darkness, face-to-face, immersed in it, hardly a spark of life.

It was a depression partly due to my schooling, partly due to the way I was formed in the educational systems of this country to live out of the top inch and a half of the human self, to live only with cognitive rationality and with the powers of the intellect, out of touch with anything that lay below that top inch and a half: body, intuition, feeling, emotion, relationship.

I remember one time a therapist and spiritual guide saying words that were eventually salvific for me. He said, “You seem to keep imaging your depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Why don’t you try imaging it as the hand of a friend trying to press you down to ground on which it is safe to stand?” And that image has always stayed with me of this movement from the world of abstraction, the hot-air balloon that education so falsely represents as the good life, down to the ground—in my tradition, the “ground of being”—on which it’s not only safe to stand but safe to fall, and you can get back up.

Well, at some point in that journey with depression, I was given by a friend some words from that extraordinary novel by T.H. White , The Once and Future King. This is a passage in which the young Arthur, king to be, in his depression, his dark night of the soul has sought counsel from Merlin, the magician, who was his mentor. And I want to read these wonderful words which created a spark of light for me in the midst of that death-dealing episode of my life. Speaking to the young Arthur, Merlin says:

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies. You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins. You may miss your only love. You may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it, then: To learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.

“Learning is the thing for you.” I read those words, and I began to understand that in the midst of death, there is life in learning. I could not do much in the darkness of my depression. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t connect with other people. But I could start to learn what was in there. I could grope around in the darkness and learn what and who was there. And, of course, those of you who have been on that journey know that part of what I found and learned about there was what Thomas Merton calls true self.

What Merlin knows, as he advises the young Arthur, is that education at its best—these profound human transactions called knowing, teaching, and learning—are not just about information, and they’re not just about getting jobs. They are about healing. They are about wholeness. They are about empowerment, liberation, transcendence. They are about reclaiming the vitality of life.

The question that we must wrestle with, I think, is why there is so little life-giving power in our culture when we use the words education, teaching, learning. Why are those words and the things they point to in our culture so flat, so dull, so banal compared to Merlin’s understanding?

Of course, there are many answers to that question: the industrial model of schooling that is still with us from the 19 th century, the diminishing effects of professionalism in teacher training, the way education devolved into political rhetoric and serves the purposes of power.

But the answer I want to explore is a different one. I want to propose that education is dull because we have driven the sacred out of it. Merlin, the magician, understood the sacredness at the heart of all things, and learning was a natural derivative of that. I want to explore what it might mean to reclaim the sacred at the heart of knowing, teaching, and learning; to reclaim it from this essentially depressive mode of knowing which honors only data, logic, analysis, and a systematic disconnection of self from he world, self from others.

As I launch into this inquiry, I want to remind us all that the marriage of education and the sacred has not always been a happy one. It has not always produced creative offspring. Ask Galileo. Ask a Muslim child subjected to American school prayer. Ask anyone whose family or history was touched by the Nazis’ murderous attachment of the sacred to blood, soil, and race.

There are real dangers in this enterprise when the sacred gets attached to the wrong things. There are real dangers when the sacred get institutionalized and imposed on people as one more weapon in the objectifying forces of this or any other society.

But we need to have the courage to jump into the midst of that mess. The Nazi story, the murderousness of the Third Reich, is not only about the attachment of the sacred to the wrong things by a political system of power; it’s also about German higher education refusing to get involved with those kinds of issues, distancing itself, clinging to logic and data and objectivism as a way of staying disengaged from the social reality of its time.

We can no longer afford a system of education that refuses to get engaged with the mess. We must be willing to join life where people live it. And they live it at this complicated intersection of the sacred and the secular. So with that acknowledgment of the mess on whose edge we stand, let me move ahead.

What do I mean by the sacred? I was laughing to myself in preparing this talk, remembering my first yearning for the sacred, which was only a word for me when I was young. I had merely heard it in church, and I wanted an experience of it.

In college I ran across a book by Rudolph Otto called The Idea of the Holy . Otto has a remarkable description of the sacred in which he uses phrases like numinocity and mysterium tremendum . It was my first Latin, and I was so proud of it.

What I was laughing about when I was preparing these remarks was the title of the book, The Idea of the Holy. I could only have an idea of it because I didn’t have an experience of it. And over the years, I’ve struggled to move from the level of idea to the embodied life.

I remember a night in the middle of one of those devastating depressions when I heard a voice I’ve never heard before or since. The voice simply said, “I love you, Parker.” It was not a psychological phenomenon, because my psyche was crushed; it was the numinous. It was mysterium tremendum. But it came to me in the simplest and most human way: “I love you, Parker.”

That experience has opened me to the definition of sacred that I want to explore. It is a very simple definition that says that the sacred is that which is worthy of respect. As soon as we see that, the sacred is everywhere. There is nothing, when rightly understood, that it is not worthy of respect.

I have had a rare experience of the numinous, and I treasure it. But I do not have a steady flow of that experience. And I cannot count on it to be my sustaining reminder of the sacredness of life. But I can practice respect on a minute-by-minute basis, especially towards those things that somehow arouse my anger, my ire, my jealousy, some strong ego reaction that reminds me to reach deep for respect.

How it would transform academic life if we could practice simple respect! I don’t think there are many places where people feel less respect than they do on university campuses. The university is a place that has learned to grant respect to only a few things: to the text, to the expert, to those who win in competition.

But we do not grant respect to students, to stumbling and failing. We do not grant respect to tentative and heartfelt ways of being in the world where the person can’t quite think of the right word or can’t think of any word at all. We don’t grant respect to silence and wonder. We don’t grant it to voices outside our tight little circle, let alone to the voiceless things of the world.

Why? Because in academic culture, we are afraid. It is a culture of fear. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of hearing something that would challenge and change us. The great German poet Rilke has this amazing line in which he says, There is no place at all that is not looking at you. You must change your life.” There is no place at all that is not talking to me. I must change my life.

But I don’t want to hear those voices because I am afraid of change. And so in academic culture, I am carefully buffered, carefully walled off, through systematic disrespect, from all of those things that might challenge me, break me, open me, and change me. It is a fearful culture.

One of the things we have to do is to remember the counsel at the heart of every great spiritual tradition: Be not afraid. Be not afraid. Interesting words. The words do not say you’re not supposed to have fear. I have fear. I have fear as I stand here before you. How am I doing? Do they like me? Am I delivering on all the preparation I’ve put into this talk?

I’m fearful. I have fear. But I don’t need to be here in my fear. I don’t have to speak to you from my fear. I can choose a different place in me, a place of fellow feeling, of feeling traveling, of journeying together in some mystery that I know we share. I can “be not afraid” even while I have fear.

If we could reclaim the sacred—simple respect—in education, how would it transform our knowing, teaching, and learning? I would like to suggest several answers, but I want to preface them by telling a story, not from the world of religion, not from the world of education, but from the world of science, because I think there is much for us to learn from the world of science about the very things that we care about. Science is not the enemy, not great science.

I want to tell you about a great scientist whom some of you will know. Her name was Barbara McClintock. Barbara McClintock died a few years ago in her early 90s. Her obituary was on the front page of The Hew York Times in the place usually reserved for heads of state. She was the greatest American biologist of the 20 th century and, arguably, the greatest American scientist of the 20 th century.

In her obituary, she was eulogized by one of her colleagues, a geneticist from the University of Chicago, as “a mystic who knew where the mysteries lie but who do not mystify.” I like that very much. To be mystics who know where the mysteries lie but who do not mystify—I presume that’s part of our task.

Barbara McClintock, as a young woman, became fascinated with genetic transposition. She wanted to know how genes moved, carried their messages from one place to another. In her day, there were none of the instruments and chemical procedures that my biologist son works with as he words with DNA. There were only hunches, hypotheses, clues, and the powers of human imagination—the mystical capacity to identify with the other and still respect its otherness.

Barbara McClintock exercised the mystical capacities at the heart of her work in genetic science, but the price she paid for that was to be marginalized by her profession. Her work was scoffed at. Her work was distrusted. She could not get grants. She could not get articles published. She could not get laboratory space—until she won a Nobel Prize in science, and then her dance ticket started getting filled.

Another scientist named Evelyn Fox Keller came along when McClintock was in her early 80s and said, “I would like to write your intellectual biography, your story as a scientist. Tell me,” she said, “How do you do great science?”

Barbara McClintock, who was one of the most precise empirical observers and one of the most analytic logical thinkers that we have ever had in American science, thought for a moment and said, “About the only thing I can tell you about the doing of science is that you somehow have to have a feeling for the organism.”

Then Keller asked her question again. “Tell me, how do you do great science?”

McClintock, who was at that age when all that’s left is to tell the truth, thought for a moment about these ears of corn that she had worked with all her life, because they were cheap and plentiful, and she said, “Really, all I can tell you about doing great science is that you somehow have to learn to lean into the kernel.”

At that point in the book, Evelyn Fox Keller, herself a physical chemist, writes a sentence that I regard as brilliant and luminous. She says, “Barbara McClintock, in her relation with ears of corn, practiced the highest form of love, which is the intimacy that does not annihilate difference.”

When I read that, tears came to my eyes. I thought, McClintock had a relation with ears of corn that I yearn to have with other people. And she knew it was possible to have that kind of relationship with all creatures and all forms of being. Sacredness. Simple respect. Intimacy that does not annihilate difference. A mystic who did not mystify but who knew where the mysteries lie. Here was a scientist—Nobel Prize winning, responsible for the genetic breakthroughs which we now live with, in the late 20 th century, a heroine of her own arena—who practiced the highest form of love in the doing of science itself.

Well, I think the story stands on its own, but let me just mention a few things out of it that would transform education if we could embody in our knowing, teaching, and learning, this simple sense of the sacred that Barbara McClintock brought to her work and science.

First, if we could recover a sense of the sacred in knowing, teaching, and learning, we would recover our sense of the otherness of the things of the world, the precious otherness of the things of the world.

One of the greatest sins in education is reductionism, the destruction of that precious otherness by cramming everything into categories that we find comfortable, ignoring data, ignoring writers, ignoring voices, ignoring information, ignoring simple facts that don’t fit into our shoebox, because we don’t have a respect for otherness. We have a fear of otherness that comes from having flattened the terrain and desacralized it. A people who know the sacred know otherness, and we don’t know that anymore.

When we teach about third-world cultures in ways that confine them, make them measure up to our standards of what greatness or excellence is supposed to be like, we ignore their powerful richness. These cultures have more to teach us than we have yet to understand or imagine about real values, about community, about respect, about the sacred, yet they come out, by our measures, as shabby, dirty, dusty, lacking in merit. Too many students have learned, through that reductionist model, a disrespect for the otherness of the things of the world.

We do it with great literature too. This is done not only on the right; it’s done on the left as well. We do it with great literature where the story itself may convey powerful messages about the human condition, but because its author does not measure up to current tests of rightness or credibility, the text gets dismissed. A writer named David Denby has said, “What a convenient way of making the professor and students superior to the text,” by not respecting the otherness of that voice and engaging it on its own terms. So the first thing that a people who know the sacred would know in education is the precious otherness of the things in the world.

But the second thing that such a people would know is the precious inwardness of the things of the world.

Barbara McClintock respected ears of corn in their integrity as an alien nation, as an otherness that she needed to respect if she was to do good science. But at the same time, she believed that an ear of corn had an inwardness to it, had a mind. She once said, “I learned to think like corn.” The corn thought, and you could learn to think like it. And her great science didn’t mystify that. It built on that and used her intuitive capacities to enter the mind of corn in a way that led to breakthrough scientific discoveries.

We don’t respect the inwardness of the things we study, and we therefore do not respect the inward learnings that those things have for us.

I have thought often and painfully about the education about the murderous history of the Third Reich that I got in some of the best colleges in this country. I was taught its history by good historians, some of whom were award-winning. But I was taught the history of Nazi Germany in a way—and I’ve never known how to say this—that made me feel that somehow all of that murderousness had happened to another species on another planet.

My teachers were not revisionists. They weren’t saying it didn’t happen. It happened. They taught the statistics and the facts and the theories behind the facts, but they presented them at such objective arm’s length—just the facts and only the facts—that it never connected with the inwardness of my life, because the inwardness of those events was never revealed to me. All was objectified, all was externalized, and I ended up morally and spiritually deformed as a consequence of that objectification.

There are two things that I failed to learn from the history courses that I took on Nazi Germany that I should have learned and learned painfully only in later years. One was that the very community I grew up in on the North Shore of Chicago had its own fascist anti-Semitic tendencies. I grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, and if you were a Jew who lived in that area, you didn’t live in Wilmette and you didn’t live in Evanston and you didn’t live in Kenilworth. You lived in Glencoe, because a fascism was at work which said, “We don’t want to live with you.”

I should have been taught that. My little story and the inwardness of my life should have been connected with the inward dynamics of that history in a way that would have helped me understand my own time, my own place, and my own involvement in the same evil, because without that, there was no way for me to grow morally.

And, of course, the second thing I didn’t learn which takes me even more deeply inward, is that I did not learn that there is within me, in the shadow of my own soul, a little Hitler, a force of evil, that when the difference between me and thee gets too great, I will find some way to kill you off. I won’t do it with a bullet or a gas chamber, but I’ll do it with a category, a dismissal, a word of some sort that renders you irrelevant to my universe and to my life: “Oh, you’re just a _________.” It is a dismissal that we do with such facility in academic life to render each other and each other’s truth irrelevant to who we are.

I taught not long ago for a year at Berea College in Kentucky. Some of you will know this remarkable institution devoted to the young people of Appalachia. They charge no tuition because these kids have no money. I taught a course in which I attempted to parallel the big story that I was teaching with the little stories of their lives, and not only to parallel the big story with the little story but to connect and interweave the two.

As part of that second objective, I asked my students to write autobiographical essays connected with the ideas of the big story we were considering. I wanted them to see that the big story was their story. And I wanted their little stories to correct the way the authors of this particular text had written the big story, because the whole Appalachian experience had been omitted from this text on American life.

At the end of the first session, a young man came up to me, and he said, “Dr. Palmer, in these autobiographical papers that you want us to write, is it okay to use the word ‘I’?” I said, “Of course, it is. I invite you to use that word. I don’t know how you would be able to fulfill the assignment if you didn’t. But help me understand why you needed to ask the question.” And he said, “Because I’m a _________major, and every time I use the word ‘I’ in a paper, I’m downgraded one full grade.”

This goes on all the time in education. Recovering the sacred might be one path towards recovering the inwardness without which education does not happen.

Third, by recovering the sacred, we could recover our sense of community with each other and with all of creation, the community that Thomas Merton named so wonderfully as the “hidden wholeness.” I have become increasingly convinced that this recovery of community is absolutely at the heart of good teaching.

I’m amazed by the fact that good teachers use a million different techniques. Good teaching isn’t about technique. I’ve asked students around the country to describe their good teachers to me. Some of them describe people who lecture all the time, some of them describe people who do little other than group process, others describe everything in between.

But all of them talk about people who have some sort of connective capacity, who somehow connect the students and the subject being studied and the students to each other.

One young woman told me she couldn’t possibly describe her good teachers because they were all so different from each other, but she could easily describe her bad teachers because they were all the same.

I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “With my bad teachers, their words float somewhere in front of their faces like the balloon speech in cartoons.”

I thought this was an extraordinary image, and I said, “Do you mean that somehow with bad teaching, there is a disconnect between the stuff being taught and the self who is teaching it?” And she said, “Absolutely.”

There is a distance, a coldness, a lack of community because in a secularized academy, we don’t have the connective tissue of the sacred to hold this apparent fragmentation and chaos together. Merton is right. It’s a wholeness, but it’s a hidden wholeness. It’s so easy to look on the surface of things and say there is no community here at all. But if you go deep, the way you go when you seek that which is sacred, you find the hidden wholeness. You find the community that a good teacher evokes and invites students into, that somehow weaves and reweaves life together.

Community goes far beyond our face-to-face relationship with each other as human beings. In education especially, this community connects us with what the poet Rilke called the great things of the world and with the grace of great things.

We are in community with all of it: the genes and ecosystems of biology (as Barbara McClintock knew herself to be), the symbols and reference of philosophy and theology, the archetypes of betrayal and forgiveness and loving and loss that are the stuff of literature, the artifacts and lineages of anthropology, the materials of engineering with their limits and potentials, the logic of systems and management, the shapes and colors of music and art, the novelties and patterns of history, the elusive idea of justice under the\ law. We are in community with all of these great things. Great teaching is about knowing that community and feeling that community and sensing that community and drawing your students into it.

I had a teacher at Carleton College who changed my life, but he lectured nonstop. We would raise our hands and try to get a word in edgewise, and he would say, “Wait a minute. I’ll get to that at the end of the hour.” He wouldn’t have gotten to it at the end of the week, the month, the year. Thirty years later, my hand is still up! He’s dead, unfortunately, but I’m still engaged with what he said.

I wondered what was this magic that made me feel so deeply related to the world of social thought that he was teaching, even though he, himself, was basically a shy and awkward person who didn’t know how to connect with me on the social level.

He would make a vigorous Marxist statement, a puzzled look would come over his face, and he would step over here and argue with himself from a Hegelian viewpoint. It wasn’t an act. He was really confused.

And I realized years later what the deal was. He didn’t need us to be in community! Who needs 18-year-olds from the North Shore of Chicago when you’re hanging out with Marx and Hegel and Troeltsch and other really interesting people? But he opened a door to me that had never been opened before, a world of imagination and thought that I had no idea existed, and it was an enormously gracious act. He was an amazing man who carried a community within himself, a community of people long gone.

(This is a mildly political comment, but I’m amazed at this controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton and her conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt. After all, the heart of the liberal arts is the ability to talk to dead people. People pay $25,000 a year to learn how to have conversations with the dead. It’s called being liberally educated!)

Fourth, if we recovered a sense of the sacred, we would recover the humility that makes teaching and learning possible.

Everyone in academia knows what Freeman Dyson meant when he said, about the development of the nuclear weaponry that threatened to destroy the earth, “It is almost irresistible, the arrogance that comes over us when we see what we can do with our minds.” So much arrogance that we will keep turning the crank until we destroy the earth itself. It is only with humility, the humility that comes from being in the presence of sacred things and knowing the simple quality called respect, that real knowing, teaching, and learning are possible.

A couple of years ago, Watson and Crick, the discoverers of the DNA molecule, celebrated the 40 th anniversary of that discovery. Those of you who have read the book, Double Helix , know that it’s about all of the anti-virtues of academic life: competitiveness, ego, greed, power, and money.

But when they were interviewed on the 40 th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, James Watson said, “The molecule is so beautiful. Its glory was reflected on Francis and me. I guess the rest of my life has been spent trying to prove that I was almost equal to being associated with DNA, which was a hard task.”

Then Francis Crick—of whom Watson once said, “I have never seen him in a modest mood”—replied, “We were upstaged by a molecule.”

Finally, if we recovered a sense of the sacred, we would recover our capacity for wonder and surprise, an absolutely essential quality in education. I know what happens when we get surprised in an academic context. We reach for the nearest weapon and try to kill the surprise as quickly as we can, because we are scared to death.

I will never be able to comprehend why people so devoutly believe that competition is the best way to generate new ideas, because I know from experience what happens in competition. In competition you do not reach for a new idea, because a new idea is risky. You don’t know how to use it. You don’t know where it’s going to take you. You don’t know what flank it may leave open. In competition, you reach for an old idea that you know how to wield as a weapon, and you smite the untruth as quickly as you can.

We have flattened our landscape. My image of this objectivist landscape in higher education is that it is so flat, so lacking in variety, so utterly banal that anything that pops up and takes us by surprise is instantly defined as a threat. Where did it come from? Where did it come from? It must be from underground. It must be the work of the devil.

The sacred landscape has hills and valleys, mountains and streams, forests and deserts, and is a place where surprise is our constant companion—and surprise is an intellectual virtue beyond all telling. Those are some things I think we might bring back if we pursued the themes of this conference in our lives and education.

I want to say one final word about the journey toward recovering the sacred, about getting from here to there. I do not believe that we can rightly ask or hopefully ask our institutions to manifest the qualities of the sacred that I have been talking about. I don’t think institutions are well suited to carry the sacred. I think distortion happens when the sacred gets vested in an institutional context or framework.

I think institutions have their utility. They have jobs to do. We all have important vocational decisions about whether to be inside or outside institutions and how to do that dance because we all know their power of co-optation. But I don’t believe that what we’re talking about here is going to be carried by the Roman Catholic Church or the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends or the University of Colorado at Boulder or even the Naropa Institute. I believe these are things we carry in our hearts into the world in solitude and in community.

I have been doing a small study of social movements that have transformed the landscape: the women’s movement, the black liberation movement, the gay and lesbian identity movement, the movement for freedom in Eastern Europe and in South Africa. I will not trouble you with all of the details of how movements evolve. I just want to say a word about the starting point of social movements as I understand it.

I believe that movements start when individuals who feel very isolated and very alone in the midst of an alien culture, come in touch with something life-giving in the midst of a death-dealing situation. They make one of the most basic decisions a human being can make, which I have come to call the decision to live “divided no more,” the decision to no longer act differently on the outside than one knows one’s truth to be on the inside.

I call it the Rosa Parks decision, because she is emblematic for me and for many people I know of the historic potentials of a decision that can feel very lonely and very isolated. Rosa Parks was prepared for that day on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, December 1, 1955. She was prepared in many ways. She had gone to the Highlander Folk School where Martin Luther King also learned nonviolence. She was the secretary of the NAACP in her community.

But we all know that the day—the moment—she sat down, she had no assurances that the theory would work, that the strategy would succeed, not even assurances that people who said they were her friends would be there for her in the aftermath of that action. It was a lonely decision made in isolation, but a decision emblematic of that being made by many other individuals in that place and time, for which she has risen to be the exemplar. It was a decision that changed the lay and the law of the land.

I’ve often asked myself where people find the courage to make a decision like that when they know that the power of the institution is going to come down on their heads? How do they find the courage to make a decision like that when they know it could easily lead to loss of status, loss of reputation, loss of income, loss of job, loss of friends, and, perhaps, loss of meaning?

The answer comes to me through studying the lives of the Rosa Parks and the Vaclav Havels and the Nelson Mandelas and the Dorothy Days of this world. These are people who have come to understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment, by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with what we know to be true on the inside.

And as soon as we made that decision, amazing things happen. For one thing, the enemy stops being the enemy. When Rosa Parks sat down that day, it was partly an acknowledgment that by conspiring with racism, she had helped create racism. By conspiring with death-dealing education, we help to create death-dealing education. But by deciding to live divided no more, we help change all of that.

When the police came on the bus that day, they said to Rosa Parks, “You know if you continue to sit there, we’re going to have to throw you in jail.” And her answer is historic. She said, “You may do that.” An enormously polite way of saying, “What could your jail possibly mean compared to the imprisonment I’ve had myself in for the last 43 years, which I break out of today?”

I don’t know where you are on your journey. My journey is constantly toward trying to understand what it means to live divided no more. And I think if we come out of this conference understanding that decision better in the context of education, we will have done something well worth doing.
The article is an adaptation of the keynote address delivered at the conference on Spirituality in Education, sponsored by the Naropa Institute May 30-June 3, 1997. Audiotapes of the Conference are available from Sounds True, P.O. Box 8010 , Boulder CO 80306.

You can reach us at:
Center for Courage & Renewal
321 High School Road, NE Suite D3 #375
Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2648
(206) 855-9140

http://www.couragerenewal.org/?q=resources/writings/spirit
Evoking the Spirit in Public Education
by Parker J. Palmer

When we bring forth the spirituality of teaching and learning, we help students honor life’s most meaningful questions.

I am a Christian of the Quaker persuasion whose spiritual forebears were persecuted, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs by officials of the established church in England. When Quakers fled to America in search of religious liberty, they met with similar treatment at the hands of the Puritans. On Boston Common stands a statue in memory of Mary Dyer, a middle-aged mother of six who was hanged in 1660 before a crowd of civic leaders and churchgoers bent on safeguarding “godly” ways against her seditious belief in “the inner light.”
So I am no great fan of state-sanctioned religion or of the religious arrogance that says “our truth is the only truth.” As I explore ways to evoke the spirit in public education, I want neither to violate the separation of church and state nor to encourage people who would impose their religious beliefs on others.
But I am equally passionate about not violating the deepest needs of the human soul, which education does with some regularity. As a teacher, I have seen the price we pay for a system of education so fearful of things spiritual that it fails to address the real issues of our lives—dispensing facts at the expense of meaning, information at the expense of wisdom. The price is a school system that alienates and dulls us, that graduates young people who have had no mentoring in the questions that both enliven and vex the human spirit.
I reject the imposition of any form of religion in public education, including so-called “school prayer.” But I advocate any way we can find to explore the spiritual dimension of teaching, learning, and living. By “spiritual” I do not mean the creedal formulations of any faith tradition, as much as I respect those traditions and as helpful as their insights can be. I mean the ancient and abiding human quest for connectedness with something larger and more trustworthy than our egos—with our own souls, with one another, with the worlds of history and nature, with the invisible winds of the spirit, with the mystery of being alive.
We need to shake off the narrow notion that “spiritual” questions are always about angels or ethers or must include the word God. Spiritual questions are the kind that we, and our students, ask every day of our lives as we yearn to connect with the largeness of life: “Does my life have meaning and purpose?” “Do I have gifts that the world wants and needs?’ “Whom and what can I trust?” “How can I rise above my fears?” “How do I deal with suffering, my own and that of my family and friends?” “How does one maintain hope?” “What about death?”
Inwardly, we and our students ask such questions all the time. But you would not know it to hear us talk, for we usually talk in settings where the imperatives of the fearful ego, or of the task at hand, strand us on the surface of our lives, compelling us to ask questions that are not the deepest we have: “Will that be on the test?” or “How can I get a raise?” Our real questions are asked largely in our hearts because it is too risky to ask them in front of one another.
Part of that risk is the embarrassed silence that may greet us if we ask our real questions aloud. But the greater risk is that if we ask a real question, someone will try to give us The Answer! If we are to open up the spiritual dimension of education, we must understand that spiritual questions do not have answers in the way math problems do—and that giving one another The Answer is part of what shuts us down. When people ask these deep questions, they do not want to be saved but simply to be heard: they do not want fixes or formulas but compassion and companionship on the demanding journey called life.
Spiritual questions are the kind described by the poet Rilke in response to an earnest student who had pressed him with question after urgent question:
Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart…Try to love the questions themselves…Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them—and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.[1]
Spiritual mentoring is not about dictating answers to the deep questions of life. It is about helping young people find questions that are worth asking because they are worth living, questions worth wrapping one’s life around.
When we fail to honor the deepest questions of our lives, education remains mired in technical triviality, cultural banality, and worse: It continues to be dragged down by a great sadness. I mean the sadness one feels in too many schools where teachers and students alike spend their days on things unworthy of the human heart—a grief that may mask itself as boredom, sullenness, or anger, but that is, at bottom, a cry for meaning. 

Spirituality and the Subjects We Teach

How might we evoke the spiritual dimension of public education? Behind the word evoke lies an important assumption: The spiritual is always present in public education whether we acknowledge it or not. Spiritual questions, rightly understood, are embedded in every discipline, from health to history, physics to psychology, entomology to English. Spirituality—the human quest for connectedness—is not something that needs to be “brought into” or “added onto” the curriculum. It is at the heart of every subject we teach, where it waits to be brought forth.
Why does a good historian care about the “dead” past? To show us that it is not dead at all, that we are profoundly connected to the past in ways we may not even understand. Why does a good biologist care about “mute” nature? To show us that nature has a voice that calls us to honor our connection to the natural world. Why does a good literary scholar care about “fictional” worlds? To show us that our deepest connection with reality comes not merely by mastering the facts but my engaging them with the imagination.
We can evoke the spirituality of any discipline by teaching in ways that allow the “big story” told by the discipline to intersect with the “little story” of the student’s life. Doing so not only brings up personal possibilities for connectedness but also helps students learn the discipline more deeply. Leaning does not happen when the subject is disconnected from the learner’s life.
I can illustrate this point with a story from my own education. I was taught the history of the Holocaust at some of the best public schools (and private colleges) in the country. But because I was taught the big story with no attention to the little story, I grew into adulthood feeling, on some level, that all of those horrors had happened on some other planet to some other species. My teachers—who taught only the objective facts without attention to the subjective self—distanced me from the murderous realities of the Third Reich, leaving me more ignorant, more ethically impaired, more spiritually disconnected than authentic education should.
Because my little story was not taken seriously, I failed to learn two important things. One was that the town I grew up in, on the North Shore of Chicago, practiced systematic discrimination against Jews. In those days, if you were a Jew, you did not live in Wilmette or Kenilworth or Winnetka, but in Glencoe. It was a gilded ghetto, but a ghetto nonetheless, created by the same anti-Semitism that gave rise to the larger evils of Hitler’s Germany—not on another planet but in my own place and time.
The second thing I failed to learn was more personal and more important: I have within myself a “little Hitler,” a force of darkness that will try to kill you off when the difference between you and me becomes so great that it challenges my conception of reality. I will not kill you with a gun or a gas chamber, but with a word, a category, a dismissal that renders you irrelevant to my life: “Oh, you’re just a (fill in the blank…).”
By failing to intersect the big story with the little story, my history teachers left me with facts about the Holocaust that never came to life—and with a life that went unchallenged by the reality of those horrors. Because my teachers remained objective at the expense of the spiritual, they failed to educate either my mind or my spirit. I learned neither about the Holocaust as it really was, and is, nor about myself as I really am.
When I speak about these things with fellow teachers, I occasionally hear an objection: “So you want us to stop being teachers and become therapists or priests.” No, that is not what I want: I want us to become better teachers. And part of what good teaching requires is that we stop thinking about our work in terms of the great divides: either facts or feelings, “hard-nosed” or “touchy-feely,” intellectual or spiritual, professors or priests.
We must embrace the fact that teaching and learning—to say nothing of living—take the form of paradox: They require us to think “both-and” instead of “either-or.” Teaching and learning, done well, are done not by disembodied intellects but by whole persons whose minds cannot be disconnected from feeling and spirit, from heart and soul. To teach as a whole person to the whole person is not to lose one’s professionalism as a teacher but to take it to a deeper level.
These whole-person connections are crucial not only in the “soft” subjects, such as history, but also in the “hard” subjects. I know a geology teacher who asks students to keep a journal of their daily interaction with rocks, an assignment that initially strikes students as quite odd but that eventually helps them understand how intertwined their lives are with the life of the earth. I know a math teacher who helps girls succeed by dealing empathetically with the emotional paralysis induced by the false social message that “girls are no good at math.”
The ability to think both-and instead of either-or is a skill that comes as we live our spiritual questions more knowingly and openly. The surface questions of our lives may yield either-or answers: “Shall I teach 1 st grade or 3 rd grade next year?” But to live the deep questions we must develop a taste for paradox—not least the paradox that some questions have no conventional answers and yet are the only ones worth living: “How shall I live today knowing that someday I will die?” 

The Spiritual Lives of Teachers

Spiritual questions are embedded not only in the disciplines we teach—they are embedded in our own lives. Whoever our students may be, whatever subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are. When I hear teachers ask whether they can take their spirituality into the classroom with them, I wonder what the option is: As long as we take ourselves into the classroom, we take our spirituality with us!
Our only choice is whether we will reflect on the questions we are living—and how we are living them—in a way that might make our work more fruitful. “How can I get through day?” is not as promising a question as “What truth can I witness to today?” If we do not live good questions, and live them in a way that is life-giving, our own deformations will permeate the work we do and contribute to the deformation of the students whose lives we touch.
Over the past five years, I have worked with others to create a program that offers public school teachers around the country a chance for such reflection. It is a program that is centered on a question worth living:
We become teachers for reasons of the heart.
But many of us lose heart as time goes by.
How can we take heart, alone and together,
So we can give heart to our students and our world,
Which is what good teachers do?
The Teacher Formation Program (also known as “the COURAGE TO TEACH®”), in partnership with the Fetzer Institute, is a two-year sequence of eight four-day retreats for groups of 25 K-12 teachers in locales as diverse as inner-city Baltimore, metropolitan Seattle, rural South Carolina, and central Michigan. Its purpose is simple: to give teachers an opportunity, in solitude and in community, to explore the spiritual dimension of a teacher’s life.
These retreat groups gather quarterly for two years, following the cycle of the seasons. The retreats are named after the seasons not simply to designate their timing: Each retreat, under skillful facilitation, draws on the metaphors of the season in which it occurs, inviting teachers to examine the spiritual questions that are at the heart of that season.
For example, in the fall—when nature plants seeds that may grow when spring arrives—we inquire into “the seed of true self” by asking the question, “Who am I?” Retreatants explore memories of who they were as children in order to reclaim those birthright gifts that are so often stolen from us on the perilous passage from childhood to adult life.
As they answer the “Who am I?” question, retreatants are better able to ask “Whose am I?” What is the social ecology of my life, the place where I am planted, where I am called to give and to receive? We pursue such questions not simply for our own sake but for the sake of our teaching and of the young people we serve: A teacher who works from a distorted sense of self and community is likely to be doing more harm than good.
Of course, the “seed of true self” that we find in the fall seems to wither and die in the winter. But it may only be doing what seeds in nature—wintering through until spring arrives. So in the winter season we explore questions of darkness and death, dormancy and renewal: What is it that seems to be dying or dead in us? Is it really dead, or is it simply lying dormant, waiting for its time to flower?
If we can understand what is dormant within ourselves, perhaps we can understand more deeply the dormancy within our students. Some students present themselves as dead—dead to thought, to feeling, to relationships. But a good teacher will see the true self behind that false self-presentation, see what is dormant in the lives of young people that can be brought to flower by good teaching.
Seasonal metaphors offer a way to raise deep questions about life without blinking, while honoring the sensibilities of everyone from Jews to Buddhists, from Muslims to secular humanists, from Christians to those whose spirituality has no name. When we raise such questions in the context of safe space and trustworthy relationships, the soul can speak its truth—and people can hear that truth in themselves and in one another with transforming effect.
To help that transformation along, the Teacher Formation Program practices an uncommon form of community, one in which people learn not to fix or save one another but to hold one another’s questions in a respectful and noninvasive way.
Community emerges when we are willing to share the real concerns of our lives. But in our society, you are reluctant to bring your concerns to me because you fear I am going to try to “fix” you—and I am reluctant to receive your concerns because I fear I am going to have to “fix” you! We have no middle ground between invading one another and ignoring one another, and thus we have no community. But by practicing ground rules that release us from our mutual fears, by teaching us how to live our questions with one another rather than answer them, the gift of community emerges among us—a gift of transformation.
The teachers who have participated in this program report several important outcomes. First, they feel more grounded in their own selfhood, more at home in their own lives, less likely to burn out and more likely to flourish. Second, they feel that they are better teachers, able to see their students for who they are and to respond to them in life-giving ways. Third, they feel that they are better citizens of their own workplaces, able to deal with conflict from a place of peace, to advocate for change from a place of hope.
The most important step toward evoking the spirit in public education is to bring teachers together to talk not about curriculum, technique, budget, or politics, but about the deepest questions of our teaching lives. Only if we can do this with one another—in ways that honor both the importance of our questions and the diversity with which we hold them—will we be able to do it for our students, who need our companionship on their journeys.
The teachers with whom I work are grateful to private foundations for creating settings outside the workplace where K-12 teachers can do professionally relevant inner work, as am I. But someday soon we would like to be able to express the same gratitude to a growing number of public schools for doing something they are not doing today: creating settings within the workplace where teachers may reflect on questions that are worth living.
Of course, such opportunities must be invitations, not demands. The soul cannot be coerced into inner work, and when an employer tries to do so, it is both ineffective and unethical. But freely chosen inner work, done in solitude and in community, can contribute powerfully to the well-being of teachers, of teaching, and of the students we are here to serve. By creating such settings, our schools would offer teachers, students, and the mission of education they so deeply deserve.

[1] Rilke, R.M. (1993). Letters to a young poet. (M.D. Herter Norton, Trans.) New York: W.W. Norton, p. 35 (emphasis added).
Author’s notes: Those interested in convening their own study group might also find my book The COURAGE TO TEACH®: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (Jossey-Bass, 1998) helpful. See also The COURAGE TO TEACH®: A Guide for Reflection and Renewal (Jossey-Bass, 1999) and the video Teaching from the Heart: Seasons of Renewal in a Teacher’s Life (Jossey-Bass, 1998).

Peter Coney, a distinguished University of Arizona professor, now deceased, understood what was required of a university to nurture growth and discovery. He articulated it persuasively,

“I have always felt as I pass from the turmoil of urban streets through the gates and onto the campus of an institution of higher learning, anywhere in the world, a sense of relief and comfort, solemnity and freedom. The feeling is not unlike that when one enters a national park, for this is what colleges and universities are — they are sanctuaries, preserves — of civilization. They are the only institution in the course of human endeavor whose sole purpose and mission is to know the course, content, and directions of civilization, to understand, preserve protect, and transmit these findings, and to seek further advances and new insights into the truth of ourselves and the world…[The] environment should…assure exposure to all the necessary skills and the best ideas and conceptual frameworks of the time, and provide stimulation from an active, well-read thoughtful, positive, innovative, and open faculty, all in an atmosphere of freedom and tolerance. Like libraries that have to have all the books to make sure they have the one somebody needs, we have to have the freedom at universities to tolerate and encourage all sorts of individual diversity, both in faculty and students, so that we can be sure that the best mind gets the exposure to the best cognitive resource which might enable that one-in-a-million new idea that can change the course of a discipline, or civilization.”

http://provost.web.arizona.edu/creativity.html

How to Sing the Blues (attributed to Memphis Earlene Gray with help from Uncle Plunky)

1. Most blues begin “woke up this morning.”

2. “I got a good woman” is a bad way to begin the blues, unless you stick something nasty in the next line: “I got a good woman – with the meanest dog in town.”

3. Blues are simple. After you have the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes. Sort of.

“I got a good woman
with the meanest dog in town,
He’s got teeth like Margaret Thatcher
and weighs about 500 pounds.”

4. The blues are not about limitless choice.

5. Blues cars are Chevies and Cadillacs. Other acceptable blues transportation is a Greyhound bus or a southbound train. Walkin’ plays a major part in the blues lifestyle. So does fixin’ to die.

6. Teenagers can’t sing the blues. Adults sing the blues. Blues adulthood means old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.

7. You can have the blues in New York City, but not in Brooklyn or Queens. Hard times in Vermont or North Dakota are just a depression. Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City are still the best places to have the blues.

8. The following colors do not belong in the blues: a. violet b. beige c. mauve

9. You can’t have the blues in an office or a shopping mall, as the lighting is wrong.

10. Good places for the blues: a. the highway b. jailhouse c. empty bed
Bad places: a. ashrams b. gallery openings c. the Hamptons

11. No one will believe it’s the blues if you wear a suit, unless you happen to be an old black man.

12. Do you have the right to sing the blues?
Yes, if: a. your first name is a southern state – like Georgia
b. you’re blind
c. you shot a man in Memphis
d. you can’t be satisfied

No, if: a. you once were blind, but now can see.
b. you’re deaf
c. you have a trust fund

13. Neither Julio Iglesias nor Barbra Streisand can sing the blues.

14. If you ask for water, and baby gives you gasoline, it’s the blues. Other blues beverages are: a. screw-top wine b. Irish whiskey c. muddy water
Blues beverages are NOT: a. any mixed drink b. any wine kosher for Passover c. Yoo Hoo (all flavors)

15. If it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it’s blues death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is a blues way to die. So is the electric chair, substance abuse, or being denied treatment in an emergency room. It is NOT a blues death if you die during liposuction treatment.

16. Some blues names for women: a. Sadie b. Big Mama c. Bessie

17. Some blues names for men: a. Joe b. Willie c. Little Willie d. Lightning

Persons with names like Sierra or Sequoia will not be permitted to sing the blues, no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.

18. Other Blues Names (starter kit – mix and match): a. name of physical infirmity (Blind, Cripple, Asthmatic) b. First name (see above), or name of fruit (Lemon, Lime, Kiwi) c. Last name of President (Jefferson, Johnson, Fillmore, etc.)

A present from Frank Feigert

In the early 1990s, thirty years into a successful songwriting and
performance career, Dylan released two CDs of his own arrangements and
recordings of traditional music. These recordings are, to my mind, another
version of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home (1965), rendering valuable
sources of inspiration in musical technique, poetic frameworks and human
life narratives. In the liner notes to the album World Gone Wrong, the
collection of particular interest to us here, Dylan shares with us the ways in
which the lives and themes of his musical masters have touched him. In
performing the songs composed and/or handed down by the musicians he
honors, the artist passes down stories of human struggle and deep emotion as narrated by the song lyric.5

[5 I have been using the term “lyric” to mean the words to a song in unfixed form.
For the purposes of this paper, this definition will contrast with “text,” which will refer to the transcribable performed version of a lyric. Inasmuch as variations exist from
performance to performance, once transcribed, they can be studied as personal
interpretations of the lyric.]

It is clear to ethnopoeticians and other folklorists that oral transmission of traditional narratives is far from being a detached, impersonal investment. Performance of traditional lyrics indeed requires a personal interpretation of the subject matter disclosed. Dylan (1990: liner notes) informs his listeners:

“Broke Down Engine” is a Blind Willie McTell masterpiece. It’s about
trains, mystery on the rails—the train of love, the train that carried my girl
from town—the Southern Pacific, Baltimore & Ohio, whatever—it’s about
variations of human longing—the low hum in meters and syllables. It’s
about dupes of commerce & politics colliding on tracks, not being pushed
around by ordinary standards. It’s about revivals, getting a new lease on
life, not just posing there—paint chipped and flaked, mattress bare, single
bulb swinging above the bed. It’s about Ambiguity, the fortunes of the
privileged elite, flood control—watching the red dawn not bothering to
dress.

pp. 199-200

From Catharine Mason

“The Low Hum in Syllables and Meters”:
Blues Poetics in Bob Dylan’s Verbal Art

I’m goin’ to Chicago to get my hambone oiied –

Goin’ to Chicago to get my hambone oiied –

These Kansas City women, gonna let my hambone spoil.

16 thoughts to pin on the refrigerator door

Haj Ross
English Department
University of North Texas
haj@unt.edu

1. The Universe is One, as is all knowledge of it.

2. Being part of a total Unity, every person is also One.

3. To intuit, feel, live this Union, gives peace, tranquility, and an ecstasy beyond any conceivable description.

4. This ecstasy, this possibility of being beyond oneself, is what leads us to live an academic life.

✪

5. We all are born United with this truth. As we grow up, we forget, more and more, till we get to a point where someone has to remind us.

6. A baby begins life United with the Universe, but the process of socialization triggers a continual erosion of the knowledge of being One.

7. The so-called “educational system,” through the fault of no one, contributes to, and even accelerates, this process of forgetting, the loss of the joy of being born on our Home, so green, so beautiful, so One.

8. Our job is to be aware of the antieducational reality of the current system, to know that we are under no obligation to continue going in the wrong direction, and to coimagine and give collective birth to a new system, one whose objective will be that every person, whether teacher or student, student or teacher, returns to the ecstasy of Union.

✪

9. The first step, always the most important one, is to abandon the use of force, to drop the very thought that force could ever have any place in a learning encounter.

10. When we examine the way babies and children learn spontaneously, we see how joyful a process it is. The Smaller Ones live a reality in which there are
not two verbs, but just One:

L
E
P L A Y
R
N

11. What this means is that any requirement whatsoever, anything which interferes with the fun of learning, will get in the way.

12. Each one of us is born into a unique predestined path towards an adult awareness of the Unity of the Universe. The verb educate, which comes from the prefix ex-, “out of,” added to the root duc-, “to lead, guide,” thus was built to mean “to lead or guide that which is within to the outside.” Thus to educate yourself is to listen to a small voice, deep within yourself, which is always telling you what it is that you have to learn, and what the next step is for you. It may well be that that step would not be valid for anyone else in the whole world, but for you, it’s exactly the one that you must take.

✪

13. The only thing that we ever really can teach is our being, our stance towards the world, our unique path. The younger people in the classroom with us see with faultless clarity all of our most intimate qualities, such as:

the honesty of our inner search
our humility
our joy in sharing the joy of learning
our absence of fear
in the face of the immense Mystery
of not knowing everything

14. We have to learn not to teach, with all of the asymmetries of power which are necessarily bound up in this word, to learn not to believe in all of the things which conventionally flow from the power of the teacher over the students: homework, tests, and worst of all, grades. We have to find our way back to the ecstasy of co-learning. If we know something that our co-learners do not, we can invite them to do exercises, to memorize, to do drills – but we would never make them do anything.

15. When everyone in the classroom is trying, with great humility, to listen inwards, asking themselves,

What is my next step? How can I best move towards the One?

it sometimes happens that a Superindividual being is born. You might call it a collective soul. At such times, the process of co-learning again becomes a sacred journey for all of us. A voyage into the Self.

16. This voyage was, and always is, our heritage, and that of our children. We will accept nothing less, from any system of education. Never.

Friends:

On November 19, 2007, my old and very good pal Steve Ruppenthal sent me this email:

This is an amazing and astonishing view of what could happen in our world/industry and how it would affect educational directions/environment. A bit long, but very worthwhile to watch. Some astounding, but reasonable predictions; check this out:

Please follow Steve’s suggestions. NB: the first video take a long time to load; its runtime is about 30 minutes. Give yourself that time. It was made in 2006, in Colorado, for a school district. You can learn more about the people who made it from the wikispaces url below.

http://www.lps.k12.co.us/schools/arapahoe/warriorportal/2020vision.mov

then check this out: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/video/shifthappens

http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/

Folks – check out these videos:

http://www.glumbert.com/media/shift2

http://www.plpnetwork.com/videos.html

Visit these links:

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.smeech.net

http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/

Thoughts on Cats

“Managing senior programmers is like herding cats.”
– Dave Platt

“There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.”
-Anonymous

“Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this.”
– Anonymous

“In a cat’s eye, all things belong to cats.”
– English proverb

“As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat.”
– Ellen Perry Berkeley

“Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are G-d.”

“One cat just leads to another.” – Ernest Hemingway

“Dogs come when they’re called; cats take a message and get back to you later.”
– Mary Bly

“Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.”
– Joseph Wood Krutch

“People that hate cats, will come back as mice in their next life.”
– Faith Resnick

“There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats.”
– Anonymous

“I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.”
– Hippolyte Taine

“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.”
– Albert Schweitzer

“The cat has too much spirit to have no heart.”
– Ernest Menaul

“Time spent with cats is never wasted.”
– Colette

“No heaven will not ever Heaven be;
Unless my cats are there to welcome me.”
– Anonymous

“Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.”
– Missy Dizick

“You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.”
– Colonial American proverb

“Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.”
– Joseph Wood Krutch

“Cats aren’t clean, they’re just covered with cat spit.”
– John S. Nichols

“Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will p**s on your computer.”
– Bruce Graham

“I got rid of my husband. The cat was allergic.”

A present from Alan Harris
alan harris

http://www.powells.com/review/2006_10_19

Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea
by George Lakoff

Block That Metaphor!
A Review by Steven Pinker

The field of linguistics has exported a number of big ideas to the world. They include the evolution of languages as an inspiration to Darwin for the evolution of species; the analysis of contrasting sounds as an inspiration for structuralism in literary theory and anthropology; the Whorfian hypothesis that language shapes thought; and Chomsky’s theory of deep structure and universal grammar. Even by these standards, George Lakoff’s theory of conceptual metaphor is a lollapalooza. If Lakoff is right, his theory can do everything from overturning millennia of misguided thinking in the Western intellectual tradition to putting a Democrat in the White House.

Lakoff is a distinguished linguist at Berkeley who trained with Chomsky in the 1960s, but broke with him to found first the school of generative semantics and then the school of cognitive linguistics, each of which tries in its way to explain language as a reflection of human thought processes rather than as an autonomous module of syntactic rules. Recently he has been cast as a savior of the Democratic Party in the wake of its shocking defeat in the 2004 election. He has conferred with the Democrats’ leaders and strategists and addressed their caucuses, and his book Don’t Think of an Elephant! has become a liberal talisman. Whose Freedom? is the latest installment of the linguist’s efforts as campaign consultant. It is a reply to conservatives’ repeated invocation of “freedom” to justify their agenda. It, too, is influencing prominent Democrats, to judge from its endorsements by Tom Daschle and Robert Reich.

“Unfortunately, what passes for a review of my book, Whose Freedom?, is actually a vituperative and underhanded attack….” George Lakoff

Read author George Lakoff’s response to Steven Pinker’s review here.

Lakoff’s theory begins with his analysis of metaphor in everyday language, first presented in 1980 in a brilliant little book written with Mark Johnson called Metaphors We Live By. When we say “I shot down his argument,” or “He couldn’t defend his position,” or “She attacked my theory,” we are alluding to an unstated metaphor that argument is war. Similarly, to say “Our marriage is at a crossroads,” or “We’ve come a long way together,” or “He decided to bail out of the relationship” is to assume metaphorically that love is a journey. These metaphors are never stated in so many words, but they saturate our language and spin off variations that people easily understand (such as “We need to step on the brakes”). In each case, people must grasp a deep equivalence between the abstract idea and the concrete experience. Lakoff insists, not unreasonably, that this is an important clue to our cognitive makeup.

But this isn’t the half of it. Conceptual metaphor, according to Lakoff, shows that all thought is based on unconscious physical metaphors, with beliefs determined by the metaphors in which ideas are framed. Cognitive science has also shown that thinking depends on emotion, and that a person’s rationality is bounded by limitations of attention and memory. Together these discoveries undermine, in Lakoff’s view, the Western ideal of conscious, universal, and dispassionate reason based on logic, facts, and a fit to reality. Philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge and ethics, it is a succession of metaphors: Descartes’s philosophy is based on the metaphor “knowing is seeing,” Locke’s on “the mind is a container,” Kant’s on “morality is a strict father.” And political ideologies, too, cannot be understood in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor “society is a family.” The political right likens society to a family ruled by authoritarian parenting, whereas the political left prefers a family cared for with nurturant parenting.

Political debates, according to Lakoff, are contests between metaphors. Citizens are not rational and pay no attention to facts, except as they fit into frames that are “fixed in the neural structures of their brains” by sheer repetition. In George W. Bush’s first term, for example, the president promised tax “relief,” which frames taxes as an affliction, the reliever as a hero, and anyone obstructing him as a villain. The Democrats were foolish to offer their own version of tax relief, which accepted the Republicans’ framing; it was like asking people not to think of an elephant. Instead, they should have re-framed taxes as “membership fees” necessary to maintain the services and infrastructure of the society to which they belong. Likewise, the lawyers who are said to press “frivolous lawsuits” should be reframed as “public protection attorneys,” and “activist judges” who “legislate from the bench” rebranded as “freedom judges.”

And now, in his new book, Lakoff takes on the concept of freedom, which was mentioned forty-nine times in Bush’s last inaugural address. American conservatism, he says, appeals to a notion of freedom rooted in strict-father morality — but this is a hijacking of the traditional American concept, which is based on progressive values of nurturance and empathy. The left and the right are also divided by another cognitive style: conservatives think in terms of direct causation, where a person’s actions have an immediate billiard-ball effect (people get fat because they lack self-control), while progressives think in terms of systemic causation, in which effects fall out of complex social, ecological, and economic systems (people are fat because of an economic system that allows the food industry to lobby against government regulation).

There is much to admire in Lakoff’s work in linguistics, but Whose Freedom?, and more generally his thinking about politics, is a train wreck. Though it contains messianic claims about everything from epistemology to political tactics, the book has no footnotes or references (just a generic reading list), and cites no studies from political science or economics, and barely mentions linguistics. Its use of cognitive neuroscience goes way beyond any consensus within that field, and its analysis of political ideologies is skewed by the author’s own politics and limited by his disregard of centuries of prior thinking on the subject. And Lakoff’s cartoonish depiction of progressives as saintly sophisticates and conservatives as evil morons fails on both intellectual and tactical grounds.

Let us begin with the cognitive science. As many of Lakoff’s skeptical colleagues have noted, the ubiquity of metaphor in language does not imply that all thinking is concrete. People cannot use a metaphor to reason with unless they have a deeper grasp of which aspects of the metaphor should be taken seriously and which should be ignored. When reasoning about a relationship as a kind of journey, it is fine to mull over the counterpart to a common destination, or to the bumpy stretches along the way — but someone would be seriously deranged if he wondered whether he had time to pack, or whether the next gas station has clean restrooms. Thinking cannot trade in metaphors directly. It must use a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic — progress toward a shared goal in the case of journeys and relationships, conflict in the case of argument and war — while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.

Also, most metaphors are not processed as metaphors as all. They may have been alive in the minds of the original coiners, who needed some sound to express a new concept (such as “attack” for aggressive criticism). But subsequent speakers may have kicked the ladder away and memorized the idiom by rote. That is why we hear so many dead metaphors such as “coming to a head” (which most people would avoid if they knew that it alludes to the buildup of pus in a pimple), mixed metaphors (“once you open a can of worms, they always come home to roost”), Goldwynisms (“a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”), and figurative uses of “literally,” as in Baruch Korff’s defense of Nixon during his Watergate ordeal: “The American press has literally emasculated the president.” Laboratory experiments have confirmed that people don’t think about the underlying image when understanding a familiar metaphor, only when they are faced with a new one.

Lakoff’s way with brain science is even more dubious. It is true that “the frames that define common sense are instantiated physically in the brain,” but only in the sense that every thought we think — permanent or transient, rational or irrational — is instantiated physically in the brain. The implication that frames, by being “physically fixed” in the brain, are especially insidious or hard to change, is gratuitous. Also, cognitive psychology has not shown that people absorb frames through sheer repetition. On the contrary, information is retained when it fits into a person’s greater understanding of the subject matter. Nor is the claim that people are locked into a single frame anywhere to be found in cognitive linguistics, which emphasizes that people can nimbly switch among the many framings made available by their language. When Becky shouts across a room to Liz, an onlooker can construe the event as affecting Liz, creating a message, making noise, sending a message across the room, or just Becky moving her muscles in a certain way.

The upshot is that people can evaluate their metaphors. In everyday conversation they can call attention to them, such as the deconstruction of the “time is space” metaphor in the African American snap “Your mama’s so dumb, she put a ruler on the side of the bed to see how long she slept.” And in science, practitioners scrutinize and debate whether a given metaphor (heat as fluid, atom as solar system, gene as coded message) accurately captures the causal structure of the world, and if so, in which ways.

Finally, even if the intelligence of a single person can be buffeted by framing and other bounds on rationality, this does not mean that we cannot hope for something better from the fruits of many people thinking together — that is, from the collective intelligence in institutions such as history, journalism, and science, which have been explicitly designed to overcome those limitations through open debate and the testing of hypotheses with data. All this belies Lakoff’s cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality.

It undermines his tips in the political arena as well. Lakoff tells progressives not to engage conservatives on their own terms, not to present facts or appeal to the truth, and not to pay attention to polls. Instead they should try to pound new frames and metaphors into voters’ brains. Don’t worry that this is just spin or propaganda, he writes: it is part of the “higher rationality” that cognitive science is substituting for the old-fashioned kind based on universal disembodied reason.

But Lakoff’s advice doesn’t pass the giggle test. One can imagine the howls of ridicule if a politician took Lakoff’s Orwellian advice to rebrand taxes as “membership fees.” Surely no one has to hear the metaphor “tax relief” to think of taxes as an affliction; that sentiment has been around as long as taxes have been around. (Even Canadians, who tolerate a far more expansive government, grumble about their taxes.) Also, “taxes” and “membership fees” are not just two ways of framing the same thing. If you choose not to pay a membership fee, the organization will stop providing you with its services. But if you choose not to pay taxes, men with guns will put you in jail. And even if taxes were like membership fees, aren’t lower membership fees better than higher ones, all else being equal? Why should anyone feel the need to defend the very idea of an income tax? Other than the Ayn Randian fringe, has anyone recently proposed abolishing it?

In defending his voters-are-idiots theory, Lakoff has written that people do not realize that they are really better off with higher taxes, because any savings from a federal tax cut would be offset by increases in local taxes and private services. But if that is a fact, it would have to be demonstrated to a bureaucracy-jaded populace the old-fashioned way, as an argument backed with numbers. And that is the kind of wonkish analysis that Lakoff dismisses.

Now let us consider the metaphor “a nation is a family.” Recall that in Lakoff’s account, conservatives think of a strict father and progressives think of a nurturant … well, here Lakoff runs into a wee problem. The metaphors in our language imply that the nurturing parent should be a mother, beginning with “nurture” itself, which comes from the same root as “to nurse.” Just think of the difference in meaning between “to mother a child” and “to father a child”! The value that we sanctify next to apple pie is motherhood, not parenthood, and dictionaries list “caring” as one of the senses of “maternal” but not of “parental,” to say nothing of “paternalistic,” which means something else altogether. But it would be embarrassing if progressivism seemed to endorse the stereotype that women are more suited to nurturing children than men are, even if that is, by Lakoff’s own logic, a “metaphor we live by.” So political correctness trumps linguistics, and the counterpart to the strict father is an androgynous “nurturant parent.”

Lakoff’s theory is aimed at explaining a genuine puzzle: why the various positions clustering in left-wing and right-wing ideologies are found together. If someone is in favor of laissez-faire economics, it’s a good bet the person will also favor judicial restraint, tough criminal punishment, and a strong military, and be opposed to expansive welfare programs, sexual permissiveness, and shocking art. Conversely, if someone is an environmental activist, it is likely that he or she will favor abortion rights, homosexual marriage, and soak-the-rich taxes. At first glance these positions would seem to have nothing in common. Lakoff argues that the two clusters fall out of the competing metaphors for the family, with the strict father demanding personal responsibility of his wayward children and punishing them when they misbehave, and the nurturant parent showing empathy and emphasizing interdependence.

Lakoff does not mention that others have pondered this question before him, going back at least to Hobbes, Rousseau, Burke, and Godwin. The standard contemporary analysis sees the political right as having a tragic vision in which human nature is permanently afflicted by limitations of knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and the political left as having a utopian vision in which human nature is naturally innocent, but corrupted by defective social institutions and perfectible by reformed ones. The right therefore has an affinity for market economies, because people will always be more motivated to work for themselves and their families than for something called “society,” and because no planner has the wisdom, information, and disinterest to run an economy from the top down. A tough defense and criminal justice system are needed because people will eternally be tempted to take what they want by force, so only the prospect of sure punishment makes conquest and crime unprofitable. And since we are always teetering on the brink of barbarism, social traditions in a functioning society should be respected as time-tested workarounds for the shortcomings of an unchanging human nature, as applicable today as when they developed, even if no one can explain their rationale.

The left, by contrast, is more likely to embrace George Bernard Shaw’s (and later Robert Kennedy’s) credo, “Some people see things as they are and ask ‘why?’, I dream things that never were and ask ‘why not?'” Psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, which should be scrutinized, morally judged, and constantly improved. Economies, social systems, and international relations should be consciously designed to bring about desirable outcomes.

This Enlightenment-inspired framing has a natural counterpart in Lakoff’s nation-as-family metaphor, because different parenting styles follow from the assumption that children are noble savages and the assumption that they are nasty, brutish, and short. Every thoughtful parent struggles to balance discipline and compassion, and one can imagine how a dialectic between these extremes might be the mental model behind right-left debates on welfare, crime, and sexuality. It is less clear how the metaphor would handle economics, since family members do not transact business with one another, or defense, since other than the Hatfields and McCoys most families do not wage war against other families. And it cannot be reconciled with the concept of a democracy, in which citizens consent to be governed by representatives rather than being the infantilized dependents of their parents. But at least it is conceivable that a discipline-compassion dimension could shed light on our political psychology.

In any case, this is not the conceptual analysis that Lakoff provides. His nurturant parent marks out not the indulgent pole of the continuum but the ideal balancing point, setting “fair but reasonable limits” and being “authoritative without being authoritarian.” His strict father, on the other hand, lives by Lewis Carroll’s advice: “Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes.” According to Lakoff, the ideal parent in the conservative worldview loves and cares only for those of his children “who measure up,” and believes that “affection is important, either as a reward for obedience or to prevent alienation through a show of love despite painful punishment.” Lakoff provides no evidence from linguistics or from surveys to show that this ludicrous ogre is the prototype of fatherhood in any common American conception of the family.

This put-up job is typical of Lakoff’s book. While he ostensibly offers a scholarly analysis of political thought, Lakoff cannot stop himself from drawing horns on the conservative portrait and a halo on the progressive one. Nowhere is this more egregious than in his claim that conservatives think in terms of direct rather than systemic causation. Lakoff seems unaware that conservatives have been making exactly this accusation against progressives for centuries.

Laissez-faire economics, from Adam Smith to contemporary libertarians, is explicitly motivated by the systemic benefits of the market (remember the metaphor of the “invisible hand”?). Lakoff strikingly misunderstands his enemies here, repeatedly attributing to them the belief that capitalism is a system of moral reckoning designed to reward the industrious with prosperity and to punish the indolent with poverty. In fact, the theory behind free markets is that prices are a form of information about supply and demand that can be rapidly propagated through a huge decentralized network of buyers and sellers, giving rise to a distributed intelligence that allocates resources more efficiently than any central planner could hope to do. Whatever distribution of wealth results is an unplanned by-product, and in some conceptions is not appropriate for moralization one way or another. It is emphatically not, as Lakoff supposes (in a direct-causation mentality of his own), a moral system for doling out just deserts.

Likewise, cultural conservatives, from Burke to our own day, play up the systemic benefits of cultural traditions in bestowing unspoken standards of stability and decency on our social life. The “broken windows” theory of crime reduction is an obvious contemporary example. And both kinds of conservatives gleefully point to the direct remedies for social problems favored by progressives (“war on poverty” programs, strict emission limits to fix pollution, busing to negate educational inequality) and call attention to their unanticipated systemic consequences, such as perverse incentives and self-perpetuating bureaucratic fiefdoms. Now, none of this means that the conservative positions are unassailable. But it takes considerable ignorance, indeed chutzpah, for Lakoff to boast that only a progressive such as himself can even understand the difference between systemic and direct causation.

In examining the concept of freedom itself, Lakoff again makes little use of previous analyses. Freedom comes in two flavors. Negative freedom (“freedom from”) is the right of people to act as they please without being coerced by others. It obviously must be subject to the limitation that “your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” Just as obviously, freedom sometimes must be traded off against other social goods, such as economic equality, since even in a perfectly fair and free society, some people may end up richer than others through talent, effort, or luck.

Positive freedom (“freedom to”) is the right of people to the conditions that enable them to act as they please, such as food, health, and education. The concept is far more problematic than negative freedom, because human wants are infinite, and because many of these wants can be satisfied only through the efforts of other humans. The idea that people have a right to paid vacations, central heating, and a college education would have been unthinkable throughout most of human history. (And what about air-conditioning, or orthodontics, or high-speed Internet access?) Also, my freedom to have my teeth fixed impinges on my dentist’s freedom to sit at home and read the paper. For this reason, positive freedom requires an agreed-upon floor for the worst-off in a society with a given level of affluence, and presupposes an economic arrangement that gives providers an incentive to benefit recipients without being forced to do so at gunpoint. That is why many political thinkers (most notably Isaiah Berlin) have been suspicious of the very idea.

Since freedom must be traded off against other social goods (such as economic equality and social cohesion), political systems can be lined up according to where they locate the best compromise, ranging from anarchism to libertarianism to socialism to totalitarianism. For better or worse, American political sentiments tend to veer in the libertarian direction compared with other modern democracies. The tilt goes back to the Founders, who were obsessed with limiting governmental power but not terribly mindful of what happens to those who end up in the lower social and economic strata.

This brings us to Bush’s invocation of freedom. I suspect it is futile to find a common ideology underlying the president’s coalition of Christian fundamentalists, cultural conservatives, foreign interventionists, and economic libertarians, just as it would be to find the common denominator of the two Georges — McGovern and Wallace — in the Democratic Party of the 1960s and early 1970s. And there is no small irony in casting Dubya as a rigorous philosopher and a wizard with language. Still, there are discernible themes in his rhetoric of freedom.

Bush has capitalized on the concept of freedom in two ways. He has preserved the perception that Republicans are more economically libertarian than Democrats, and he has waged war against a foreign movement with an unmistakable totalitarian ideology. This still leaves his opponents with plenty of ammunition, such as his hypocritical protectionism and expansion of government, and his delusion that liberal democracy can be easily imposed on Arab societies. But his invocation of “freedom” has a semblance of coherence, and, like it or not, it resonates with many voters.

The same cannot be said for Lakoff’s conception. “What I am calling progressive freedom,” he writes, “is simply freedom in the American tradition — the understanding of freedom that I grew up with and have always loved about my country.” Such an equation fails to acknowledge the possibility that Lakoff’s preferences and the American tradition may not be the same thing. His understanding is pure positive freedom, while acknowledging none of its problems. It consists of appending the words “freedom to” in front of every item in a Berkeley-leftist wish list: freedom to live in a country with affirmative action, “ethical businesses,” speech codes, not too many rich people, and pay in proportion to contributions to society. The list runs from the very specific — the freedom to eat “food that is pesticide free, hormone free, antibiotic free, free of genetically modified ingredients, healthy, and uncontaminated,” to the very general, namely “the freedom to live in a country and a community governed by the traditional progressive values of empathy and responsibility.”

“You give me a progressive issue,” Lakoff boasts, “and I’ll tell you how it comes down to a matter of freedom” — oblivious to the fact that he has just gutted the concept of freedom of all content. Actually, the damage is worse than that, because many of Lakoff’s “freedoms” are demands that society conform to his personal vision of the good (right down to the ingredients of food), and thus are barely distinguishable from totalitarianism. How would he implement “pay in proportion to contributions to society through work”? Will a commissar decide that an opera singer deserves higher pay than a country singer, or that a seller of pork rinds should earn less than a seller of tiramisu? And his freedom not to be harmed by “hurtful language” is merely another name for the unlimited censorship of political speech. No doubt slaveholders found the speech of abolitionists to be “hurtful.”

Probably not since The Greening of America has there been a manifesto with as much faith that the country’s problems can be solved by the purity of the moral vision of the 1960s. Whose Freedom? shows no trace of the empirical lessons of the past three decades, such as the economic and humanitarian disaster of massively planned economies, or the impending failure of social insurance programs that ignore demographic arithmetic. Lakoff is contemptuous of the idea that social policy requires thinking in terms of trade-offs. His policy on terrorism is that “we do not defend our freedoms by giving up our freedoms.” His response to pollution is to endorse the statement that “you are not morally free to pollute.” One doesn’t have to be a Republican to see this as jejune nonsense. Most of us are happy to give up our freedom to carry box cutters on airplanes, and as the progressive economist Robert Frank has put it (alluding to the costs of cleanups), “there is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house.”

What about the conservative conception of freedom? Here Snidely Whiplash pauses long enough from beating his children to explain it to us. As transmitted by Lakoff, the conservative conception includes “the freedom to hunt — regardless of whether I am hunting an endangered species.” It acknowledges the need for “a free press, because business depends on many kinds of accurate information.” Religious freedom implies “the freedom … to put the Ten Commandments in every courthouse.” Conservatives get their morality from strict obedience to their Protestant ministers, and this morality includes the belief that “pursuing self-interest is being moral,” that abortion should be illegal because a woman pregnant out of wedlock has acted immorally and should be punished by having to bear the child, and that everyone “who is poor just hasn’t had the discipline to use the free market to become prosperous,” including “people impoverished by disaster, who, if they had been disciplined enough, would be okay and who have only themselves to blame if they’re not.”

The problem is that the misrepresentations are harmful both intellectually and tactically, and will backfire with all of this book’s potential audiences. Any of Lakoff’s allies on the left who think that their opponents are the imbeciles whom he describes will have their clocks cleaned in their first debate with a Young Republican. Lakoff’s book will be red meat for his foes on the right, who can hold up his distortions as proof of liberals’ insularity and incomprehension. And the people in the center, the ones he really wants to reach, will be turned off by his relentless self-congratulation, his unconcealed condescension, and his shameless caricaturing of beliefs with which they might have a modicum of sympathy.

Worst of all, by delineating such a narrow ideological province as “progressivism,” Lakoff is ceding vast swaths of territory to the other side. If you think that recent history has taught us anything that requires amending orthodox ’60s liberalism, if you think that free markets and free trade bring any economic benefits at all (while agreeing that they have side effects that must be mitigated), if you think that democratic governance requires finding optimal tradeoffs in dilemmas such as pollution, terrorism, crime, taxes, and welfare, then you are a “conservative.” It is surprising that Lakoff is not a hero to more Republicans.

There is no shortage of things to criticize in the current administration. Corrupt, mendacious, incompetent, autocratic, reckless, hostile to science, and pathologically shortsighted, the Bush government has disenchanted even many conservatives. But it is not clear what is to be gained by analyzing these vices as the desired outcome of some coherent political philosophy, especially if it entails the implausible buffoon sketched by Lakoff. Nor does it seem profitable for the Democrats to brand themselves as the party that loves lawyers, taxes, and government regulation on principle, and that does not believe in free markets or individual discipline. Lakoff’s faith in the power of euphemism to make these positions palatable to American voters is not justified by current cognitive science or brain science. I would not advise any politician to abandon traditional reason and logic for Lakoff’s “higher rationality.”

“The latest polls have come out,” the political philosopher Jay Leno said last week, “and President Bush’s approval ratings have dropped another 3 percent. In fact, he’s so unpopular that the Democrats are going to have to work really, really hard to screw up this election.” If they take the ideas of George Lakoff seriously, they just might succeed.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Blank Slate and editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004.

Read George Lakoff’s reponse to Steven Pinker’s review, reprinted here with the kind permission of the New Republic Online.

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A response to Steven Pinker.

Defending Freedom
by George Lakoff

Reprinted with the kind permission of the New Republic Online

For a quarter of a century, Steven Pinker and I have been on opposite sides of major intellectual and scientific divide concerning the nature of language and the mind. Until this review, the divide was confined to the academic world. But, recently, the issue of the nature of mind and language has come into politics in a big way. We can no longer conduct twenty-first-century politics with a seventeenth-century understanding of the mind. The political issues in this country and the world are just too important.

Pinker, a respected professor at Harvard, has been the most articulate spokesman for the old theory. In language, it is Noam Chomsky’s claim that language consists in (as Pinker puts it) “an autonomous module of syntactic rules.” What this means is that language is just a matter of abstract symbols, having nothing to do with what the symbols mean, how they are used to communicate, how the brain processes thought and language, or any aspect of human experience — cultural or personal. I have been on the other side, providing evidence over many years that all of those considerations enter into language, and recent evidence from the cognitive and neural sciences indicates that language involves bringing all these capacities together. The old view is losing ground as we learn more.

In thinking, the old view comes originally from Rene Descartes’s seventeenth-century rationalism. A view of thought as symbolic logic was formalized by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege around the turn of the twentieth century, and a rationalist interpretation was revived by Chomsky in the 1950s. In that view, thought is a matter of (as Pinker puts it) “old-fashioned … universal disembodied reason.” Here, reason is seen as the manipulation of meaningless symbols, as in symbolic logic. The new view holds that reason is embodied in a nontrivial way. The brain gives rise to thought in the form of conceptual frames, image-schemas, prototypes, conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends. The process of thinking is not algorithmic symbol manipulation, but rather neural computation, using brain mechanisms. Jerome Feldman’s recent MIT Press book, From Molecule to Metaphor, discusses such mechanisms. Contrary to Descartes, reason uses these mechanisms, not formal logic. Reason is mostly unconscious, and as Antonio Damasio has written in Descartes’ Error, rationality requires emotion.

The old view in economics is the rational actor model, where all economic actors are assumed to be acting according to formal logic, including probabilistic logic. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work with Amos Tversky showing that real people do economic reasoning using frames, prototypes, and metaphors rather than classical logics.

These questions matter in progressive politics, because many progressives were brought up with the old seventeenth-century view of reason that implies that, if you just tell people the facts, they will reason to the right conclusion — since reason is universal. We know from recent elections that this is just false. “Old-fashioned … universal disembodied reason” also claims that everyone reasons the same way and that differences in worldview don’t matter. But anybody tuning in to contemporary talk shows will notice that not everybody reasons the same way and that worldview does matter.

There is another scientific divide that Pinker and I are opposite sides of. Pinker interprets Darwin in a way reminiscent of social Darwinists. He uses the metaphor of survival as a competition for genetic advantage. He has become one of the principal spokesmen for a form of evolutionary psychology that claims that there are genetic differences between men and women that stem from prehistoric differences in gender roles. This led him to support Lawrence Summers’ suggestion that there might be fewer women than men in the sciences because of genetic differences. Luckily, this unfortunate metaphorical interpretation of Darwin has few supporters.

This divide matters, because my cognitive analysis — in Moral Politics — of conservative and progressive ideologies in terms of a nation-as-family metaphor is inconsistent with his version of evolutionary psychology. The seriousness of present-day politics in the United States makes these issues more than a simple ivory-tower matter. If I — and other neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and cognitive linguists — are right, then Pinker is wrong, and vice versa. Pinker is, however, right for raising the issues and bringing these academic research questions into the public eye.

Unfortunately, what passes for a review of my book, Whose Freedom?, is actually a vituperative and underhanded attack. You might never guess from the review what the book is about. It is about the fact that freedom is a contested concept, a concept that people necessarily have different versions of, depending on their values. The book is an account of how conservative and progressive ideologies extend a limited common view of freedom in opposite directions to yield two opposed versions of the “same” concept. Pinker’s review is based on two rhetorical strategies:

First, he claims that I say the opposite of what I really say. He points out something ridiculous, then ridicules me for saying such a thing. Pinker uses the tactic over and over. Second, he assumes that his old-guard theory is obviously right and anything else is radical and crazy. He uses the second strategy with his politics as well as his theory of mind. Here are some examples.

Pinker represents the research on conceptual metaphor as follows: “Conceptual metaphor, according to Lakoff, shows that all thought is based on unconscious physical metaphors.” I have actually argued the opposite: Chapter twelve of Metaphors We Live By discussed the non-metaphorical grounding of conceptual systems. Chapter two of More Than Cool Reason begins with a section on “What is not metaphorical.” Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things goes through 373 pages of non-metaphorical conceptual analysis before bringing up examples of metaphorical thought. And Mark Johnson and myself, in Philosophy in the Flesh (see chapter three) survey the basic mechanisms of thought, beginning with the non-metaphorical ones — e.g., image-schemas, conceptual frames (sometimes called simply “schemas” in psychology), and various kinds of prototype structures.

Metaphorical thought is based on these extensive and absolutely crucial aspects of non-metaphorical thought. The system of metaphorical thought is extensive, as those cognitive science books show in great detail. Results from other branches of cognitive science demonstrating the reality of unconscious conceptual metaphor are listed in chapter six of Philosophy in the Flesh.

Having claimed falsely that I believe that all thought is metaphorical, Pinker then chides me by taking the position I have actually advocated: “Thinking cannot trade in metaphors directly.” This is something I have not merely stated but have argued empirically.

Pinker even gets the research in his own field of psychology wrong. “Laboratory experiments show that people don’t think about the underlying image when understanding a familiar metaphor, only when they are faced with a new one.” But experiments show exactly the opposite, as Ray Gibbs at UC Santa Cruz and Lera Boroditsky at Stanford (whose work has won her a National Science Foundation Career Award) have dramatically shown.

In addition, Pinker misunderstands the most basic result in contemporary metaphor research: Metaphor is a matter of thought, not just language. The same words can be instances of different conceptual metaphors. To take a familiar example: It’s all downhill from here can mean either (1) things will get progressively worse, based on the “Good Is Up, Bad Is Down” metaphor; or (2) things will be easier from now on, based on the metaphor in which action is understood as motion (as in things are moving right along) and easy action is understood in terms of easy (i.e., downhill) motion. The literature in the field is filled with such examples.

One of my persistent themes is that facts are crucial, and that the right system of frames is often required in order to make sense of facts. With a system of frames that is inconsistent with the facts, the frames (which are realized in the brain) will stay in place and the facts will be ignored. That is why framing to reveal truth is so important. Here is what I say in Don’t Think of an Elephant! (pages 109-110): “Facts are all-important. They are crucial. But they must be framed appropriately if they are to be an effective part of public discourse. We have to know what a fact has to do with moral principles and political principles. We have to frame those facts as effectively and honestly as we can. And honest framing of the facts will entail other frames that can be checked with other facts.”

In short, I’m a realist — both about how the mind works and how the world works. Given that the mind works by frames and metaphors, the challenge is to use frames and metaphors a mind to accurately characterize how the world works. That is what “reframing” is about — correcting frames that distorts truths and finding frames that expose them.

But Pinker claims that I say the opposite — that, rather than being a realist, I am a cognitive relativist: “All this belies Lakoff’s cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality. It undermines his tips in the political arena as well. Lakoff tells progressives not to engage conservatives on their own terms, not to present facts or appeal to the truth, and not to pay attention to polls. Instead, they should try to pound new frames and metaphors into voters’ brains. Don’t worry that this is just spin or propaganda.” Again, Pinker suggests that I’m saying the opposite of what I have really said. Here’s what I wrote about spin and propaganda (Don’t Think of an Elephant!, pages 100-101):

Spin is the manipulative use of a frame. Spin is used when something embarrassing has happened or has been said, and it’s an attempt to put an innocent frame on it — that is, to make the embarrassing occurrence sound normal or good.

Propaganda is another manipulative use of framing. Propaganda is an attempt to get the public to adopt a frame that is not true and is known not to be true, for the purpose of gaining or maintaining political control.

The reframing I am suggesting is neither spin nor propaganda. Progressives need to learn to communicate using frames that they really believe, frames that express what their moral views really are. I strongly recommend against any deceptive framing.

One of the findings of cognitive science that is most important for politics is that frames are mental structures that can be either associated with words (the surface frames) or that structure higher-level organizations of knowledge. The surface frames only stick easily when they fit into higher structures, such as the strict father / nurturant parent worldviews that I discuss in great detail in Moral Politics and elsewhere. Here’s what I (and my colleagues and the Rockridge Institute) say on page 29 of Thinking Points:

Surface frames are associated with phrases like “war on terror” that both activate and depend critically on deep frames. These are the most basic frames that constitute a moral worldview or a political philosophy. Deep frames define one’s overall “common sense.” Without deep frames there is nothing for surface frames to hang onto. Slogans do not make sense without the appropriate deep frames in place.

The same basic point is made in my other books applying cognitive science to politics. Again, Pinker claims that I say the opposite: “Cognitive psychology has not shown that people absorb frames through sheer repetition. On the contrary, information is retained when it fits into a person’s greater understanding of the subject matter.” But that is exactly what I said! The deep frames characterize the “greater understanding of the subject matter”; the surface frames can be “retained” only when they fit the deep frames.

I regularly talk about the fact that Americans typically have both strict and nurturant models in their brains. For example, here is what I say on page 70 of Whose Freedom?: “Finally and most important, just about every American has both models engrained in his or her brain.” Don’t Think of an Elephant! has a whole chapter (chapter ten) based on this phenomenon. Thinking Points also has a whole chapter on this phenomenon, called “Biconceptualism.” Here is what Pinker says: “Nor is the claim that people are locked into a single frame anywhere to be found in cognitive linguistics, which emphasizes that people can nimbly switch among the many framing made available by language.” Not everybody is all that nimble when it comes to conservative versus progressive worldviews, but many people can shift back and forth in a particular area of life — or an election — as I discuss.

In Whose Freedom?, I discuss the difference between freedom from and freedom to (page 30). Then, throughout the book, I show that both the progressive and conservative versions of freedom use both freedom from and freedom to. For example, progressives focus on freedom from want and fear, as well as from government spying on citizens and interfering with family medical decisions; they also favor freedom of access to opportunity and fulfillment in life (e.g., education and health care). Conservatives are concerned with freedom from government interference in the market (e.g., regulation) and they are concerned with freedom to use their property any way they want. In short, the old Isaiah Berlin claims about the distinction do not hold up.

Pinker acts as if I don’t discuss the distinction: “Lakoff again makes little use of previous analyses. Freedom comes in two flavors.” And then he writes as if he is informing me of freedom from and freedom to, when I have discussed both throughout the book. Even worse, he gets it wrong. He cites the old-fashioned claims that just don’t work. This becomes clear all through the book if you actually read it.

In another case, chapter seven of Whose Freedom? discusses direct versus systemic causation. On the first page of the chapter, I say, “It is surely not the case that conservatives are simpleminded and cannot think in terms of complex systems. Indeed, conservative strategists consistently outdo progressive strategists when I comes to long term overall strategic initiatives.” Pinker’s version: “It takes considerable ignorance, indeed chutzpah, to boast that only a progressive such as himself can understand the difference between systemic and direct causation.” The opposite of what I say. I’ll leave off here, though the same tactics are used throughout the review.

The results coming out of neuroscience and the cognitive sciences show that, far from there being “old-fashioned … disembodied universal reason,” people really reason using frames, prototypes, image-schemas, and metaphors — and bring emotion into the mix as an inherent part of rationality. All of these mechanisms of thought are embodied — resulting from the nature of brain structure and neural computation on the one hand, and embodied experience on the other. They lie outside of the mechanisms of formal logic, which is the basis of the contemporary version of seventeenth-century rationalism.

What is one to do in the face of this reality? In Whose Freedom?, I argue (page 257) for a “higher rationality,” a mode of thought that takes into account the understanding of the view of mind that comes from cognitive science and neuroscience — a rationality that talks about frame-based and metaphorical thought explicitly and discusses their effects, especially in politics. But this is only possible if the true nature of thought is widely understood, and that takes honest, open public discussion.

What is one to make of Pinker’s essay? Why would he repeatedly attribute to me the opposite of what I say? I can think of two explanations. One is that he is threatened and is being nasty and underhanded — trying to survive by gaining competitive advantage any way he can. The other is that he is thinking in terms of old frames that do not permit him to understand new ideas and facts that do not fit his frames. Since he can only understand what I am saying in terms of his old frames, he can only make sense of what I am saying as being nonsense — the opposite of what I actually say. That is, since the facts I cite don’t fit his frames, his frames stay and the facts are adjusted to fit them. I don’t know Pinker well enough to know which is true, or whether there is some third explanation.

A present friom Gabe Edgar