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Medical Students /Paediatric notes
The Violence of Our Knowledge: Toward a
Spirituality of Higher Education
Parker J. Palmer
The Michael Keenan Memorial Lecture, Berea College, Kentucky
The Seventh Lecture 1993
____________
update:
Received this interesting email on 15 May 2019
"Parker Palmer gave this talk at St.
Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan in
Fall 1993.
The Michael Keenan Memorial Lecture is in honour of Dr. Michael Keenan, first
Dean of St. Thomas More College.
This location is indicated on Courage and Renewal website: http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/interviews/ that
links to your site.
Thank you for hosting this outstanding talk of Parker Palmer on your website...
It is a talk many still remember more than 25 years later, along with the
workshop he gave on campus to 80 faculty. I was president of STM at the time,
and the one who negotiated Parker's coming to STM. Glorious and inspiring 3
days.
John Thompson
Professor Emeritus, Sociology
St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan"
_______________
Thank you Prof John Thompson for adding context to this lecture.
Palmer as usual never fails to amaze me with the depth of his wisdom and
understanding about the spirituality of education. In this lecture, he correctly
pointed his finger on the three weak points of contemporary epistemology:
objectivism, analytic and experimentalism. As he put it, “everyway of knowing
becomes a way of living”. For him, true higher learning involves a “healthy
dance of between the objective and the subjective, between the analytic and the
integrative, between the experimental and what (he) will call the subjective.”
The spirituality of learning or a “transformed understanding of knowing” comes
from 4 components:
(1) learning is personal
“In contrast to modern objectivism, the wisdom traditions say truth is personal,
not propositional. The modem academy is very hung up on the notion that truth is
to be found in our propositions about things. But the spiritual traditions drive
our understanding of knowing to a deeper level where it is said, "Truth is
personal and, yes, we need propositions to share our person hood with each
other, but unless it is incarnate, unless it is embodied, unless we are
attempting to 'walk the talk' or 'talk the walk', it cannot be truth."”
(2) learning is communal
“It means that our movement toward truth is a corporate movement in which we
must wrestle with each other, we must have conflict with each other, we must
reach consensus with each other - and then we must break that consensus because
some new observation has been made or some more powerful interpretation has been
offered. Truth emerges between us and among us and through us as we wrestle
together with the great and small questions of life.”
(3) learning is reciprocal
“There is something powerful about the spiritual understanding that we are not
only seeking truth, but truth is seeking us…At the heart of all great knowing is
a sense that the "object" of knowledge isn't an object at all. It has some kind
of personal quality to it that speaks to the knower, that reaches for the
knower; great knowing is always involved in that mutuality, that reciprocal
dance between the knower and the knowing.”
(4) learning is transformational
“I will be changed by truth, and there is no way to evade that. It will be a
daily struggle with what I know, to live my life more fully and more deeply.
Knowing, teaching and learning will transform me if my knowing, teaching and
learning are guided by the images and norms that I have just been trying to
articulate.”
Updated: 18 May 2019
Notes
Text of Lecture from
www.21learn.org/arch/articles/palmer_spirituality.html
I spend a lot of time looking for little stories that will help me tell a big
story. I have a very big story that I want to explore with you tonight, and I
have found a little story that I hope will help us along. It is a true story
from North American history, from the world of the first Americans, the Native
Americans, as they encountered what we now call "higher education." It's a story
that, if we could fully understand it, would help us understand ourselves in
higher education a good deal better. Let me tell you this story, and let the
rest of my remarks this evening be an elaboration on it.
The story comes from the year 1744. That was the year when the white
commissioners of the territory known as Virginia had negotiated a treaty with
the Indians of the Six Nations. As part of that treaty, these Indians were
invited to send their young men to the College of William and Mary, one of the
first institutions of higher learning established in the Colony. The elders of
the tribes took this treaty home, spent an evening considering the offer of
these white commissioners to educate their young men, and on the next day, June
17, 1744, answered the white commissioners with the following words:
"we know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in your colleges,
and that the maintenance of our young men while with you would be very expensive
to you. We are convinced that you mean to do us good by your proposal, and we
thank you heartily. But you, who are wise, must know that different nations have
different conceptions of things, and you will therefore not take it amiss if our
ideas of education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some
experience of it. Several of our young people were brought up at the colleges of
the Northern Provinces. They were instructed in all your sciences, but when they
came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the
woods, neither fit for hunters nor counselors, they were totally good for
nothing. We are, however, not the less obliged by your kind offer, though we
decline accepting it. But to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of
Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take care of their
education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them."
Now that story has a voice of humor, a voice of quiet wisdom, a voice of deep
insight. It also has within it an enormous amount of pain. It is the pain of the
tribal elders who, "unlettered" as they were, still knew something deep in their
bones that we don't quite yet know today. What they knew I would put in the
following phrase: they knew that every way of knowing becomes a way of living.
Let me put it in language that they would not have used or understood, and power
to them: every epistemology becomes an ethic.
What they knew, deep in their bones, is that they were engaged in a battle, and
it was not simply a battle over land, over territory, over natural resources and
mineral rights. It was a more fundamental battle about whose way of knowing
would prevail as formative and shaping of the lives of human beings. Let me put
it from a slightly different angle. These elders knew that every mode of
education, no matter what its name, is a mode of soul-making. They knew that all
forms of teaching and learning are forms of spiritual formation, or deformation.
And they were deeply troubled by the kind of deformation that they knew this
form of knowing, teaching and learning - the one represented by William and Mary
College - would bring upon their heads and the heads of their young.
(There arc many subtexts in this story, and I hope to tease some of them out as
the evening goes on. You will have noted that the story not only is about a
history in which a way of knowing represented by Native Americans is losing the
war. It is also about the education of "boys" and the making of "men." It was a
time in history when "girls" and "women" were simply not on the agenda of higher
education, and therefore the story is about another kind of warfare that has
gone on in our world as well. I will come back to those themes later.)
I want to reflect for a while on the mode of knowing that won out in this
battle. What was the mode of knowing represented by William and Mary? What
ethical formation, and deformation, has it created in our lives? As the title of
my remarks suggests, I want to make a link between our knowledge and our
violence. I want to talk about the violence of our knowledge because I believe
that the kind of knowing that has been practiced in our institutions of higher
learning has lent itself to subtle and pervasive forms of violence to our
personal and social lives. As backdrop, let me give a quick definition of what I
mean by "violence."
It is important to recognize that to do violence to each other we need not drop
a bomb or hit someone with a stick. We do violence in much more subtle ways. My
operating definition of violence is that violence always involves violating the
integrity of the other. We do violence whenever we violate the integrity or the
nature of the other, whether the other is the earth, or another human being, or
another culture. I want to suggest that in our institutions of higher education
we are deeply devoted to a mode of knowing that often issues in violence, thus
understood.
What is that mode of knowing? I want to describe it with three words. I will say
a brief bit about each of the three words, then I want to offer some examples of
how this mode of knowing becomes a way of living. The three words are
"objective," "analytic," and "experimental' - three word, without which I think
the western academy would be virtually speechless.
Objective means that you cannot know anything truly and well unless know it at
arm's length, at distance, at great remove. If there is not a great chasm
between the knower and the known, we believe that the knowledge is somehow
tainted, distorted, unreliable, untrustworthy. We believe that until you have
taken that person (if you are a sociologist or a psychologist), or that literary
text (if you are in the field of literature), or that historical episode or
natural phenomenon (if you arc a historian or a scientist), and held it at arm's
length from yourself, you cannot possibly be doing scholarship, you cannot
possibly be generating valid knowledge.
Let me turn this around. There is in our dominant mode of knowing a profound
fear of subjectivity and a profound fear of relatedness, a fear of entering into
relationship with that which we know. This is a very complicated subject,
because this objectivism which I am criticizing arose historically at a time
when radical subjectivism had gotten us into terrible trouble, and I don't want
to ignore or override or forget that fact. Historians tell us that over the
course of history, something like 6,000,000 women have been burned as witches
because someone's subjectivity said, 'You are evil.' I have no desire to throw
out the baby with the bath water. I have no desire to lose the fruits of an
objectivism that has attempted to give us independent norms for what is true and
untrue, apart from the whims and opinions of people who hold religious or
secular power. I honor that impulse and that need, but I think that we are a
time in history when we have to understand that unfettered objectivism is
equally as cruel as unfettered subjectivism.
My country fought a 'famous" war not long ago, the Gulf War, in which tens of
thousands of non-combatants were murdered - and it was an acceptable war to a
large majority of the American public because we were able to fight it at
distance and detachment and remove. Apparently the modern ethic regarding
warfare is that if it can be air war - one conducted at arm's length through the
miracle of electronics and engineering - then it is an ethical war. After the
Gulf War, our president said we had 'kicked the Vietnam syndrome, which was a
subjective war, fought face to face, which tore us apart as a people because we
were so troubled by the evidence of subjectivity. But we are at ease in a world
of objectivity where whatever we do to the other is done across a great chasm.
Now you see, as I talk, I am already crossing the line from epistemology to
ethics. I am already offering an example of how a way of knowing that arose for
important and valuable reasons has become a form of of ill in its own right. But
more important to me than the fact that objectivism creates cruelty is that it
does not accurately portray how real knowing happens. This objectivist mythology
about knowing at arm's length, knowledge that William and Mary wanted to
introduce to the poor, ignorant Native Americans, is in fact a distortion of how
science itself is done. It turns out that great knowing is not simply done
objectively; it is done paradoxically in a dance between the subjective and the
objective, a balance between intimacy and distance. That is how great knowing
happens in all disciplines. This mythology of objectivism is more about control
over the world, or over each other, more a mythology of power than a real
epistemology that reflects how real knowing proceeds.
Let me tell a quick story about the dance of great knowing, the paradoxical
integration of the subjective and the objective at the heart of human knowledge.
It involves an American geneticist, a great scientist named Barbara McClintock.
Some of you may know that name, if not, I urge you to get acquainted with her
life. Barbara McClintock died about a year ago at age 92. Her obituary was on
the front page of the New York Times, an honor usually reserved for heads of
state. She was arguably the greatest American scientist, and almost certainly
the greatest American biologist, of the 20th century. Her work as a young women
brought her into a fascination with the phenomenon of genetic transmission, and
she pursued hypotheses and used methodologies that were so contrary to the
objectivist view of science that she had great difficulty getting support for
her work, getting grants, getting lab space, and getting colleagues. Then, in
her early 80's, she won a Nobel Prize for science, at which point her dance
ticket starting getting filled!
Another scientist, Evelyn Fox Keller, intrigued with the amazing story of
McClintock's life and with the courage with which she had pursued her insights,
went to McClintock and said "I want to write your intellectual biography. Tell
me, how do you do this great science?" Barbara McClintock thought for a moment
and said, "Well, all I can really tell you is that to do science of this sort,
you have to somehow have a feeling for the organism." Keller asked again, "Tell
me, how do you do this great science? And Barbara McClintock, thinking about the
ears of corn that she had worked with all her life because they were cheap and
plentiful, said "All I call say is that to do science of this sort,you have to
know how to learn from the kernel."
In order to describe her science, McClintock used profoundly relational and
connected metaphors, not distant and detached images. Is she saying that logic
and data have no place in scientific inquiry? Of course not. You don't win a
Nobel Prize if you believe that. What she is saying is caught up in one sentence
from her biographer, a sentence that I find deeply revealing about human
knowing. Evelyn Fox Keller says, in her relation to ears of corn, Barbara
McClintock practiced the highest form of love: intimacy that does not annihilate
difference." When I read that I thought, "Oh, my goodness, Barbara McClintock
had a relation to ears of corn that I yearn to have with another human being!"
The Native Americans in my opening story would have loved Barbara McClintock.
But higher education has not understood the Barbara McClintocks of this world,
and so it practices an objectivism that becomes ethically deforming.
The second dimension is "analytic." Analytic means that, once you have made an
object out of something to be studied, you are free to chop it up in pieces to
see what makes it tick. The analytic act is possible only when you have
objectified something, only when you have held it off at a distance and made it
into a thing. I was trained as a sociologist, and I really believed that the
average American family had 2.8 people in it - until I became a community
organizer and started to have to put a different face on what a family was like.
I remember that, as a young child, I was terribly attracted to watches or clocks
that were not immediately attached to an owner, and I would take them down in
the basement and disassemble them, fascinated literally with what made them
tick. Only in later years did I realize that I was never able to get one of
those things back together
This memory became a metaphor for me of what my education had done to my mind,
to my heart, to my soul: it created a great facility with the analytic act of
taking things apart, and very little capacity for the creative or integrative
act of putting things back together. That is the second dimension of this
knowledge that the Native Americans knew they were in a life and death struggle
with, a knowledge that lends itself to the violence of dissecting everything so
that the center cannot hold.
Thirdly, this knowledge is experimental. Once you have made an object out of
something, and chopped it up into pieces to see what makes it tick, you then can
move those pieces around to see if you can create something more consistent with
your design of what the world ought to be. I am not taking a cheap crack at
science. I honor great science in its original and authentic form - though I
have little truck with the textbook version of science which wants to say that
science is all logic and data. So I'm not talking here about laboratory
experimentation which clearly has its place. I am talking instead about, let us
say, our relation as a western society to third world cultures. I am talking
about the kind of "experimenting" done in third world societies all around the
globe. In my country at least, we have very frequently looked overseas and said,
"What might it be like if we removed a little bit of your political system and
put some of ours in? We think we could make your polity more pleasing to our
eyes. What it might look like if we removed a dimension of your economy and put
in a little of ours? What might it look like if we removed some elements of your
religious understanding and replaced them with some of ours?" We have
experimented on a global scale, experimented with all kinds of things beyond the
legitimacy of the laboratory.
Objective, analytic and experimental: this is the kind of knowing that the
Native Americans were struggling with as they encountered this phenomenon called
'William and Mary, or western higher education. Now, are those merely
philosophical abstractions which might interest a few academics but that never
come home to roost in daily life? I think not, and before I move to the more
constructive part of my remarks, I want to share a couple of real-life stories
about how this mode of knowing can control and lead to the deformation of our
ethical lives.
Every year, the Carnegie Commission does a survey of recent college graduates in
the United States, and every year they come up with the same litany of findings.
It goes something like this: when you ask recent graduates, "What do you think
about the shape of the global society? - their answers are profoundly negative
and pessimistic. They say the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and they
can quote chapter and verse on environmental pollution, nuclear
proliferation,the collapse of governments, the dissolution of local economies.
Ninety percent of these college graduates will tell you that the world has a
very dim future, very low chances of global survival. But when you ask the next
question, "What, then, do you think about your own personal futures?", the same
90 percent who say the world is going to hell in a hand basket will get a
collective grin on their faces and say, "No problem! Have a nice day!"
What's going on when these graduates, our best and brightest, will say that the
world has no chance of survival, but will also say that they are going to a good
school, are getting good grades, are going to get a decent job and have a decent
life? Well, lots of things are going on, but one thing is that they have been so
thoroughly schooled in an objectivist view of the world that they don't even
know that their dismal facts and figures are about the very planet that they
walk upon day in and day out. How could they, when the information has been
presented to them at such great remove? Theirs is a trained schizophrenia, a
trained division between personal reality and the reality of the larger global
society.
Let me give you an example from my own life which remains immensely painful for
me, but is sadly true. I was taught in some of the best colleges in my country
about the Third Reich, about the murder of 6,000,000 Jews, and God knows how
many homosexuals and gypsies and others who didn't fit the mold. But I was
taught about those horrors in a way that left me feeling that all of that had
happened on another planet, to another species. It had happened, I knew that for
a fact, but it was presented to me at such objective distance, so disconnected
from the facts of my own life, that at a feeling level I ended up with a sense
of "another planet and another species." I look back and realize that never in
my history courses were we presented with the art created by the inmates of
concentration camps, never were we presented with the poetry written by them,
never were we shown photographs of the bodies stacked like logs at Buchenwald
and Auschwitz. Why? Because in the academic formation I got, those kinds of data
would have been dangerously subjective; we were given only the objective concept
and statistics which left us at arm's length from these events.
I never learned that the town I grew up in on the North Shore of Chicago had its
own fascist tendencies. Nobody in those history courses ever challenged me to
ask, "Why do no Jews live in your home town?" Even worse, I was never challenged
to understand that I had inside myself a little Hitler - that is, a force of
shadow and darkness which,when the difference between you and me becomes too
great, leads me to want to kill you - not with a bullet or a gas chamber, but
with some word or image of dismissal: "Oh, you're only this, or you're only
that." I was never asked to interject and introspect in that manner. Why do
those American college graduates make such a radical and insane division between
the facts about their world and their own personal lives? Because that is how
objectivism teaches us to think about everything. It teaches us to think at
arm's length, it teaches us to imagine realities 'out there" that have nothing
to do with realities in here.
A second story: there is an amazing motion picture produced by public television
in the United States called "The Day After Trinity." It is a film about the
first detonation of an atomic weapon at Almagordo in New Mexico. "Trinity" was
the ironic code-name for that explosion, and "The Day After Trinity" is a
documentary in which the nuclear physicists and the mathematicians and the
chemists come together 45 years later to reflect on what they had wrought. As a
Quaker, I was prepared to judge those war makers, but part of the power of the
documentary is that one walks away deeply touched by their humanity, by their
moral anguish, by their capacity to wrestle with the meaning of their own
actions and of their own lives. There is no one there that you can hate.
But that makes the chilling moments in that film all the more chilling. And one
of the most chilling moments is when a mathematician comes on the screen and
says, "The day before we pushed the button on that nuclear I weapon, we had done
calculations to indicate there was a small but real real possibility that when
we set it off there would be an instant incineration of the entire envelope of
oxygen surrounding the earth, thus snuffing out life on earth." Then he says,
"Still, we went ahead and pushed the button." I have thought about that moment a
lot over the years since I saw that film, because it is not an isolated moment
in the history of science or the history of politics. And I have wondered, "How
do you interpret that moment?" I am sure there are many interpretations. But the
one I offer you is this: we are so deeply imbued with the idea that truth lies
in "experimentation" that we are willing to experiment with the entire planet as
a laboratory in order to fulfill our concept of truth. It is chilling to think
that our concept of truth could lead to self-destruction, and yet I think we
have ample evidence, and it is not just from this kind of high drama I am
portraying, that our concept of truth does exactly that.
We talk about ourselves being "in possession' of great knowledge. I would like
to turn that around and suggest that we "are possessed" by our knowledge in a
way not unlike the way the ancients talked about demon possession. We are driven
to unethical acts by an epistemology that has fundamentally deformed our
relation to each other and our relation to the world.
I want to turn a corner toward the constructive part of my thesis, having, I
hope, illustrated the violence of our knowledge as clearly as I know how. What
is important about today, what is hopeful about our times for me, is that the
way of knowing called objectivism, that single minded emphasis on objectivity,
analysis and experimentation, is now being challenged from many quarters. We are
being called into a more paradoxical wholeness of knowing by many voices. There
is a new community of scholars in a variety of Fields now who understand that
genuine knowing comes out of a healthy dance between the objective and the
subjective, between the analytic and the integrative, between the experimental
and what I would call the receptive. It is remarkable to talk with scientists
today in many fields (and I see this, for example, among biologists whom I talk
to all across the States), who say that a very different science comes from
approaching the world with a kind of appreciative receptivity than when you
approach the world as raw material to be dealt with at your will. When you
understand an organic reality and take an appreciative, receptive approach to
it, you do a subtly but significantly different kind of science than when you
approach the world as a machine to be taken apart like those watches that I
could never get back together.
So I am not trying to split these paradoxes apart; I am trying to put them back
together. I am suggesting that those of us who are interested in bringing these
paradoxes back into harmony will find support today in some very major and
significant intellectual movements. We find support, for example, in the
feminist philosophers who are re-visioning the nature of science. I think some
of the most important literature of our time is being written by feminist
scholars who are retelling the story of what science is all about, telling it
from the inside as scientists. They are not inventing a new science but are
telling the truth about how science is done - and it turns out to be a deeply
human enterprise, a deeply human truth.
What fascinates me is that we find many, many young people not interested in
learning science as it is traditionally taught. But in these new models of
science, which want to integrate the subjective with the objective, which want
to present a more connective mode of doing science, we find a terrific interest
among young people. I have a hunch about why that is. I have a hunch that young
people today feel profoundly disconnected and alienated from community in its
many forms - from human community, to community with nature, to community with
things of the spirit. If we present science or thinking to them as one more way
of getting alienated and disconnected, why would they want to learn? Who would
want it if you already lived in a world of disconnection and alienation and
someone cynics along and says, 'learn to do science or sociology or literary
criticism or history because it will disconnect you even further." But when we
represent human thinking for what I believe it is, which is not a disconnected
mechanism but a community-building capacity, then it turns out students want to
learn because students want to conic back into community with that which they
have lost.
Why does a passionate historian think about the dead past? To make it deader?
No, to bring it back to life so that we can understand our connectedness with
it. Why does a biologist think about the minute world of nature? To make it more
minute? No, to give it a voice so we can hear what nature is trying to say to
us. Why does a literary scholar reflect on the world of imagination? To separate
it from the world of "reality?" No, to help us understand that the world of
facts cannot be adequately understood alone but by acts of imagination. Great
thinking in all fields at its deepest and best is a connective activity, a
community-building activity, and not an activity which is meant to distance and
alienate us. When young people start to understand that, then they start having
a real reason to learn how to think because they are hungry for community, they
are hungry to get reconnected.
So the feminist philosophers of science are one source of a profound
intellectual revolution in our time, bringing us toward a more paradoxical and
relational model of doing science. There is another place where what I am
talking about has actually been institutionalized in colleges and universities.
It is in ecological science, where a new generation of students are learning
that they are not apart from nature, they are a part of nature, they are in a
conversation with nature that makes claims on their own lives. I have two sons
who are biologists, and both of them, in graduate programs centered on ecology,
have a real ethic about their intellectual work and about what it implies for
their daily lives. This revolution is also happening in subatomic physics where
the separation between the knower and the known has really been discarded. To
hear physicists say things like, "it is no longer possible to make a statement
about nature that is not also a statement about myself," is to hear the myth of
objectivism crack and crumble.
But what I want to say in the context of this college, and of the tradition in
which this college stands, is that there is at least one more place to look, for
the kind of transformation of knowing that I am reflecting on tonight. It is
happening not only in quantum physics, not only in ecological study, not only in
feminist scholarship about the nature of science. It is also at the heart of our
major spiritual traditions. I think we have especially rich legacies to draw on
that are rich and transformative - images of what human knowing is all about.
Think for a moment about that little formula that I offered at the outset, that
every way of knowing becomes a way of living, that every epistemology becomes an
ethic. Our religious traditions have primarily been presented to us as an ethic,
at least in modern times - a set of values to live by, a way to conduct our
lives. What we have forgotten, perhaps, is that behind this ethic lies a way of
knowing, and without that way of knowing the ethic is hardly sustainable. My own
tradition in Christianity, and I have given this a lot of thought over the years
as to what might be the major elements of the Christian understanding of how we
know, of coming to know what we call truth. I have found four words that I want
to end with in the hope that they will be suggestive to some of you who are
attempting to live at the intersection between faith and intellect, to live at
the fruitful place where the lilt of the spirit and the life of the mind
co-exist and connect.
What might be the major marks of a spiritual understanding of knowing that could
save us from the violence of our knowledge, and help move us closer to what
might have been possible if those Native Americans and those folks from William
and Mary could have sat down and had a good long talk with each other? Here are
four words that emerge from the heart of my own tradition (and others, as well)
that might move us toward a transformed understanding of knowing.
The first word is personal. I don't know of any spiritual tradition in which the
first thing to say isn't something like, "Truth is personal." It seems to me
that all of the great spiritual traditions are asserting in a vigorous and
fundamental way that person hood and truth have something elemental to do with
each other. In contrast to modern objectivism, the wisdom traditions say truth
is personal, not propositional. The modem academy is very hung up on the notion
that truth is to be found in our propositions about things. But the spiritual
traditions drive our understanding of knowing to a deeper level where it is
said, "Truth is personal and, yes, we need propositions to share our person hood
with each other, but unless it is incarnate, unless it is embodied, unless we
are attempting to 'walk the talk' or 'talk the walk', it cannot be truth." I do
not mean to say that we must live up to all the truths we know. That is not
possible in human life. But I do think we are called to speak honestly,
experientially, and existentially about our struggle to embody the truth as we
know it.
As a teacher, a lot of this boils down to some very practical stuff. I find as a
teacher that when I no longer stay on the abstract level of propositions, but
talk with my students about the human struggle to live what I know, then
something new opens up in the educational process that is deep and powerful and
connected between them and me. I am deeply challenged by the statement that is
at the heart of Christian faith (and I speak now to those of you who understand
yourself as Christian). When Jesus is asked, "What is the truth?", he replies,
"I am the truth." He makes a statement that is radically personal. I read that
statement through Quaker sensibilities which say that this incarnation of truth
is not limited to one person at one point in space and time, but is a constant
possibility in every human heart. That is how I understand the person hood of
truth in my own tradition. But in the simple proposition, "I am the truth", I
find a deep challenge to the academic notion that truth is abstract, truth is at
arm's length, truth is propositional, truth is out there.
The second word that comes to me from my own tradition poses a paradox to the
first one - and that is the word communal. Truth is personal, but truth is also
communal. What that means to me is that it is not enough to say, "One truth for
you, another truth for me, and never mind the difference." It means that our
movement toward truth is a corporate movement in which we must wrestle with each
other, we must have conflict with each other, we must reach consensus with each
other - and then we must break that consensus because some new observation has
been made or some more powerful interpretation has been offered. Truth emerges
between us and among us and through us as we wrestle together with the great and
small questions of life. So right at the heart of my spiritual tradition is
statement not only that truth is personal, but a statement that you are person
only in community. You cannot sink into narcissism or solipsism or some kind of
private version of truth. That would be to deny the very nature of person hood
itself, which is essentially communal.
The third quality truth has in my spiritual tradition is mutuality of
reciprocity. The academy has an amazing slogan that it uses all the time, at
least in my country. In the catalog of every college or university, their is the
statement that "this institution is deeply dedicated to the pursuit of truth."
There is an astonishing conceit buried in that image of "the pursuit of truth."
If you think about it for a minute, the notion is that truth is an evasive
rabbit scampering across the field and hiding under the hedge, and trying with
all its might to evade us, but we, with our deep dedication to finding and
consuming the truth, are out there with our hounds and horns, and horses,
tracking truth down at risk of life and limb, until we catch it all and kill it
and eat it. It is an amazing image if you think about it!
But the spiritual traditions know something quite different. It is not truth
that is evasive - we are. Spiritual tradition knows that truth is the 'hound of
heaven' trying to track us down, while we use all our efforts to evade truth's
voice, truth's hand, truth's claim upon our lives. There is something powerful
about the spiritual understanding that we are not only seeking truth, but truth
is seeking us. I think this is something that is known in every field of study.
Have you ever had the experience of reading a great novel and suddenly asking
yourself, "How does this great writer, who lived a hundred years ago, know me so
well?" That is an experience of being tracked down by truth. I have talked with
scientists who feel that the fundamental movement in the doing of their science
is more than simply them chasing nature, but nature chasing them. Einstein used
to talk about spending most of his life "listening to the universe speak." At
the heart of all great knowing is a sense that the "object" of knowledge isn't
an object at all. It has some kind of personal quality to it that speaks to the
knower, that reaches for the knower; great knowing is always involved in that
mutuality, that reciprocal dance between the knower and the knowing.
Finally, the fourth word is transformational. Truth is personal, truth is
communal, truth is mutual or reciprocal, and so truth is inevitably
transformational. I will be changed by truth, and there is no way to evade that.
It will be a daily struggle with what I know, to live my life more fully and
more deeply. Knowing, teaching and learning will transform me if my knowing,
teaching and learning are guided by the images and norms that I have just been
trying to articulate. That brings me full circle, I think. I can now say why it
is that objectivism holds such sway in the academy, why it is that knowing,
teaching and learning at arm's length are so popular and so tenacious. The
reason is that objectivism allows us always to be the changers and never the
changed. It gives us the illusion that we can reach into any domain we wish and
manipulate it without every allowing that domain to speak back to us in a
compelling way.
But I think that what is happening now, the reason for the intellectual
revolutions I have been naming, is that we have a growing sense that our myths
of control are only that - myths. We begin now to understand that the world,
whether it be the world of nature, or the third world of disempowered people, or
whatever world you want to name that we have been attempting to manipulate and
control, will in fact speak back to us, does in fact speak back to us, is in
fact making a claim upon our lives. We are not only the changers,but we are
inevitably the changed. Our intellectual revolutions in feminism, in physics,
ecology, literature, and across the board, are slowly catching us up with the
fact that whether we like it or not, we are involved in a transforming live
encounter with the world through our scholarship and through our knowledge.
There is a way of doing education that will honor afresh and significantly the
wisdom of those Native American elders who, back in 1744, understood, I think,
everything I have been trying to say tonight. Let us continue to try to
understand what they are trying to say to you and to me.
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