Better Liked and Better Liking

Well, another semester has been put to rest, a particularly busy one no less, and now it is time to document some of the many thoughts and experiences that went into it while taking a hiatus from these mailings. I have perhaps learned more in teaching this semester than in any other, or, if not that, then I have certainly gained a different perspective of life as a result. We live in an exciting age in which today’s young people are more aware and more concerned about their world than they have been in at least several decades, and that spirit of youthfulness, life, and excitement is contagious.

On a personal note, I am pleased to report that this semester completes my coursework for my master’s degree, and I have only my comprehensive examination (my “comps” as the two-part, three-hour test is called), and my degree papers left to polish (in lieu of the typical thesis). I do not know what the future will entail, or even if I will be teaching in the fall. There is a strong possibility that if I am teaching (it is not certain at this point that there will be any open positions), it will be philosophy instead of English, which would in many ways be a welcome reprieve for me, as I have long been more interested in ideas than eloquence, and as rewarding as teaching writing actually is, it can become exceedingly taxing to try to teach and grade the structure and form of something to the relative exclusion of its underlying essence. Certainly English professors grade partly based on content and philosophy instructors partly on structure and coherence, but the emphasis as a writing instructor is obviously different than that of someone whose teaching focuses on ideas. The counter side to teaching writing, however, is that since we are dealing with structure and form, any topic goes, and you get a great deal of diversity (if only you could savor the content for its own sake without having to fling around the colored ink). Philosophy tends to treat a very wide array of topics as well, but the boundaries are a little more narrow, as what makes philosophy philosophy is its particular way of viewing the world, namely through a more “rational” lens. Unfortunately, that lens can sometimes lose focus of the sublime: lose focus of our fundamental humanity, our spiritual selves, our higher natures.

I have, in fact, just finished grading finals, and the two open-ended essay questions prompted students to introspect about their progress in writing over the course of the semester, and, now that they are exiting the course, to revisit the question, “What is creative nonfiction?” Creative nonfiction sounded like such an oxymoron when entering the semester, but like everything, the students’ understanding of creative nonfiction became much more nuanced and less reductionist, the responses as varied as the genre itself. Many realized that creative nonfiction is not really so much a formal academic discipline as it is a way of looking at the world, assigning different values to reality than many people typically associate with college or collegiate English in general. Put differently, creative nonfiction is as much a celebration of life as it is an academic discipline, a probing of the question, “What does it mean to be human, experiencing life in all its myriad forms?” The reason, of course, is because it leaves plenty of room for subjective truth, which, at the end of the day, is what gives our lives their greatest meaning: it is precisely our humanness or lack thereof that defines us, our everyday interactions with our fellows and the “word of mouth” communications that brighten our day and inform us, in part, of the world.

Several students wrote about their discoveries this semester, very much in keeping with the Rogerian argument glossed in Communication, Rogerian Style. One student, for example, writes: “After careful consideration, I realize I can stop using my writing to point fingers and just let my writing paint a picture for the viewer to look at with his or her discretion.” As can be surmised, this student was skilled at crafting arguments and had done a great deal of it. Quite a few other students, in their own ways, also spoke about the difference this approach to writing made even in the way they viewed their world now on this end of the semester. While creative nonfiction certainly can be used for confrontation, it typically does not adopt the defensive stance seen in a lot of argumentative writing. There seems to be a moral lesson in that realization as well, and I hope to spend the balance of this newsletter fleshing it out in more detail.

The word “Christianity” means many things to many people. At its most basic, Christianity refers to a movement, a group of persons all in one way or another defined by Jesus Christ, namely informed (whether directly or indirectly) through the written accounts in the New Testament. Those persons who, in their various understandings, adopt the name Christian, automatically identify themselves with a particular group, which by default forms a distinction between them and other groups. It is certainly possible that a Christian could be a member of another group as well, though as a rule, a Buddhist is someone who aligns himself or herself within that particular historic tradition, a Hindi is someone who aligns himself or herself with another movement, and so on with only marginal crossover. Which group we identify with is defined at least in part (if indeed we are a part of any religious group), by our geographic locale. American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910), perhaps best known for his classic 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experiences (available as a free, online e-text from the University of Virginia Library), captures this idea when he writes of “living options.” Specifically, he spells out this idea in his short address The Will To Believe delivered to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities in 1897:

The idea, of course, is that in order to align ourselves with a particular group of people, we have to take seriously those ideas the group collectively represents. And, the fact of the matter is, ideas that are perfectly valid to one culture often carry little validity to another. That is not to say, of course, that one cannot respect another culture’s ways of looking at the world, but (for example) as much as I admire and respect Confucius and his teachings, what I know of life in China is exclusively communicated to me through various media outlets including the Internet, and I strongly suspect that to go there and live would result in a much different experience than admiring Confucian ideals from a distance (not to mention, of course, that Confucius represents “old China” and not the world power of today pulsing with youthful energy). The fact is, I am an American who reads Confucius from the standpoint of an American—I can’t realistically do otherwise. Confucius may be a poor example in terms of subscribing to beliefs—his ideas place little demands on me to adopt or abandon any particular creed—but it does suggest that even as I admire his thoughts, they still remain somewhat “other” to me. How much more so if I was asked to seriously entertain the possibility of converting to Aztec ritualism or if someone earnestly inquired about the depth of my faith in Zeus and the gods of Mount Olympus. Even if I respect aspects of those beliefs, they certainly are not going to be viable options for me. Depending on how we view that fact, it can either complicate ideas of epistemology (“what is truth?”) or it can enrich it. And of course depending on how it strikes us also depends to large degree on the underlying assumptions against which we compare or frame the question.

However we come to affiliate ourselves with a particular belief system, accepting its claims as true, that essentially creates a sense of “us” and defines that “us” against “them”—those persons who are not a part of our group. An essential aspect of any group is that it always has both an inside and an outside: it could not be properly called a “group” if it did not. What is not so obvious to many people is that the inside “us” and outside “them” does not have to represent division.

Let’s think for a moment of two other categories of people with which we are all familiar, namely male and female. Now certainly in the history of our race, the “us” and “them” that is created by this division has served to alienate and distance, as it still does even today in certain pockets of the world. One or both sides view the other with fear, distrust, suspicion, even scorn. Some of us can probably relate. If we have personally been in a negative relationship with the opposite sex, we often carry around wounds that have yet to heal. It is easy for us to feel cynical and to make alienating observations about the opposite sex. Nevertheless, most of us have also seen examples of so-called “perfect couples”: persons who seem ideal complements to each other, perfectly paired. In this case, the “us” and “them” becomes a new “we” in which both parties are mutually complemented. Their differences, rather than dividing them, instead serve to mutually define them. Certainly in most instances neither the man nor the woman has any plans any time soon to give up his or her sexual psysiology. With such couples there are no apologies made for his being a man or her being a woman, or, if there are apologies, it is only to the degree that the parties acknowledge how their own particular predisposition as male or female can at times unfavorably interfere with the harmony they seek in the relationship. (“I’m sorry for being such a witch; forgive me when I act like a jerk.”) If he was not a man in the fullest, truest sense, and she was not a woman in the fullest, truest sense, “they” could not properly be deemed the perfect couple. No, the very thing that defines the relationship in the first place and makes it so winsome is that the so-called “them”—the mutual and self-defining difference—is celebrated, serving at once to clarify each individual’s identify while also helping to define—to complement, enhance, accentuate—the other.

In the religious world, too often we see intolerance in the name of religious fervor. It is considered a virtue by some religious persons to draw the boundary lines between “us” and “them”; such a Christian, to cite the group to whom most of us have had the greatest exposure, reads “Come out and be separate” as meaning “Don’t associate with them.” There can also be the sense, however literally true, that we have the answer, and rather than being charitable in seeing that you, who are on the outside, also come to partake of this answer, instead we throw you the proposition, and if you reject it, so much the worse for you. The fact is, if you do not accept our answer, we will reject you, even if we never admit it to ourselves.

Beliefs, particularly true ones, may well be extremely important, but why are they so? Ultimately it is because they have direct consequences on the quality of the lives of persons, so we are back to the idea of the worth and value of people over ideas, even if the ideas are indispensable in helping us arrive at this ultimate valuing of persons. When a belief begins to take on a greater importance than persons on this larger scale, we no longer have something vibrant and healthy but the beginnings of totalitarianism and inhumanity. It is precisely grandiose ideas considered bigger than any single individual that people have lived for, and, more to the point, that people have died for, often needlessly. Beliefs, when they are not tempered with love and mutual respect, when they are not genuinely and from the heart held in the best interest of our fellow humans, our fellow brothers and sisters with whom we share this beautiful blue planet, have a tendency to manifest in counterproductive and even potentially lethal ways. Beliefs and ideas can at times threaten to take on lives of their own, placing “iron bands of terror” on people, as Hannah Arendt would say of fascism, an initially innocuous-seeming ideology that soon took on a lifeforce of its own and ran feral, creating some of the worst atrocities the world has ever seen. Religious beliefs are not immune from this same tendency when they lose their mooring to love. They may not result in mass genocide, but they certainly are not doing much to enrich our lives here or anywhere else.

These examples are obviously extreme. Nevertheless, it would be much more profitable to look at the example of the well-paired man and woman for inspiration. They love each other, and it is their love that causes them to celebrate, even revel in, their respective difference. Likewise, it is entirely possible to make no apologies for being “us” while recognizing “them” as insightful, interesting, worthy of consideration and respect. It is possible to recognize, and not feel threatened by the fact, that there are lots of other “us”es in the world as well, and rather than “us” and “them” creating insuperable barriers, rather “us” and “them” can help to mutually define and enrich us all, if we will but let it. This way of looking at the matter moves the relationship from that of man and woman in competition into the realm of man and woman in cooperation toward mutual, shared goals, that of this person of faith and that person without working in partnership toward the betterment and enrichment of both. This approach views the world as it does because it ultimately cares about persons more than it cares about beliefs.

The late Rev. William Sloan brings out a parallel example to our man and woman in his interview with Terry Gross on NPR. Terry Gross asks him what his thoughts are on interfaith marriages, say, between a Jewish spouse and a Christian one. Sloan responds by suggesting that there are two ways in which such marriages could positively flourish without religious friction. The first would be if faith meant little to either spouse. As they are only nominally involved in their respective religions, there should be little conflict between the two of them. The other way, and indeed the best way that their marriage could take off, would be if they were both deeply devoted to their respective faith, concerned to live out its ideals as fully as they humanly could. In this case, not only would the man complement the woman and the woman the man in the most beautiful sense, but the one would be better and more authentically Jewish and the other better and more authentically Christian, both enriched not by competing but by cooperating and pooling together the best parts, the overlapping parts, of each of their faiths.

The area where this particular vision of mutual cooperation between faiths is likely to receive its stoutest criticism concerns epistemological claims—truth claims. Does not this kind of interfaith cooperation let down the mandate of a single truth? Isn’t there a sense where it waters down the truth? That is certainly one way to look at the differences. But there are a few things to consider before we immediately conclude that we are doing a disservice to truth if we link arms with another rather than taking a stand. The first is that people come to God, ultimately, because they are drawn to God, and that is something that we can never effect in another person. We can certainly share with another how our own lives have been spiritually enriched, we can pray for them, we can encourage them as best as we know how. But persuasion, and its closely related cousin conversion, are “inside jobs.” The change that transforms always takes place in a person’s heart, and there is no human alive who can change the heart of another human who is unwilling to have his or her heart changed.

The second point to consider is really an extension of the first. People are ultimately going to believe what they are going to believe. If we consider our own affiliations for a moment, we are not likely to change faiths—certainly not at the drop of a hat—and neither is anyone else, at least until allowed the freedom to see the truth clearly for what it is on their own time table. Faced with that fact, we can either alienate ourselves from others, or we can cooperate with them, extolling the virtuous elements that we all agree are worthwhile. Remember what the student cited above learned in his studies this semester about the art of persuasion: “After careful consideration, I realize I can stop using my writing to point fingers and just let my writing paint a picture for the viewer to look at with his or her discretion.” Telling the truth is unquestionably a worthy virtue, but truth without accompanying love is misguided, missing the deeper truth of truth-telling.

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

I would echo the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. in suggesting that “I have a dream.” I have a dream of a world in which we can not only recognize and accept one another’s differences without trying to change the other person, but in which those differences can be savored and enjoyed as part of the amazing richness and diversity of this species called humankind. We can and should tell the truth, but with a difference, that difference being that we do so with love, genuinely concerned with the well-being of others. If we can begin to recognize that “us” and “them” does not have to mean that a wall is erected between us but rather that we are given an amazing opportunity to stretch out a hand and fellowship with another, our mutual differences complementing rather than confronting, the world will be a far better place for everyone involved. Like the student who discovered that he did not have to point fingers any longer in his writing, but could simply paint a picture, content to let the other person admire or reject as will. As his essay continues, it is clear that he has discovered a paradox in this approach of loosening his grip; namely, he has learned that allowing the other person the dignity of freedom actually maximizes the very persuasion he had hoped to effect before with his pointed fingers. He had tried to coerce and cajole, and when he relaxed and simply tried to communicate, as one human being to a fellow human being, he found that he was happier, better liked and “better liking,” and ultimately more persuasive by allowing persuasion to become a secondary goal.

Subscribe to Le Penseur Réfléchit, the Mr. Renaissance bi-weekly newsletter.