One door closes, another opens...
After 31 years at Evergreen (and four years at UC Riverside) I have left university teaching to consult fulltime. I HAVE NOT RETIRED!!! I'm now consulting fulltime and planning to stay active for a long time.
Among the many kind words that have been expressed upon leaving teaching, being conferred the status of Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Evergreen is most meaningful. The proclamation from the Board of Trustees touched me deeply:
They left out my work in Vancouver/Clark County, my service as Special Assistant to the President, Daniel J. Evans, my work creating the college's Office of Institution Reserach and service on two Presidential search committees. It was a full 31 years and I have a lot of people colleagues, staff and students for 31 incredibly interesting years.
After 31 years at Evergreen (and four years at UC Riverside) I have left university teaching to consult fulltime. I HAVE NOT RETIRED!!! I'm now consulting fulltime and planning to stay active for a long time.
Among the many kind words that have been expressed upon leaving teaching, being conferred the status of Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Evergreen is most meaningful. The proclamation from the Board of Trustees touched me deeply:
In recognition of exceptional service to The Evergreen State College as a Member of the Faculty; of his teaching in public administration, quantitative methods, and sociology of organizations, among other other disciplines; of his extensive teaching in both Olympia and Tacoma campuses; of his service as director of the MPA program, acting director of the Washington State Institute on Public Policy and other major college governance work;
In appreciation of his contributions to excellent faculty seminars; of his abilty to teach complex ideas in ways students can grasp; of his care and respect for all of his students; of his commitment to initiating difficult dialogues, particularly about race; of his ability to make seminars comfortable in uconfortable times; for his willingness to make "new mistakes;"
The Board of Trustees does hereby confer the title of Emeritus Membber of the Facullty upon Lowell (Duke) Kuehn... done this 14th day of June, 2007.
They left out my work in Vancouver/Clark County, my service as Special Assistant to the President, Daniel J. Evans, my work creating the college's Office of Institution Reserach and service on two Presidential search committees. It was a full 31 years and I have a lot of people colleagues, staff and students for 31 incredibly interesting years.
I shied away, quite unlike me, from public ceremony. I wanted to leave doing what I think I did best, talking about the events of our lives in understandable words, trying to draw some lessons learned.
The rest is pretty long, but it is a summary of 35 years in the classroom. I'm interested in your comments.
Last All-Program Lecture, April 24, 2007
When I looked at the syllabus before the quarter began I realized that my good colleague Dr. Bacho had given me a gift. Really. He scheduled me to give the all-program lecture in Lyceum twice. This is truly my favorite thing to do. The Lyceum lecture is fun and challenging. Fun, because everyone in the program is gathered together and there is an opportunity for all of us to share what we’re learning. Challenging, because the lecture, to be useful, needs to integrate the various parts of the program.
A few weeks ago I used the lecture to talk about how to manage your Spring Fair projects. Today’s lecture comes at a good time, your projects are well along the way, we are almost done with this quarter and almost done with the year. As you know, I am leaving teaching after 35 years, 31 of them at Evergreen; given that this is the last time I will speak, formally, to the program as a whole, maybe this is a good time to try to summarize, to bring some of the pieces together.
In thinking about this lecture and my years at Evergreen, I decided that I did not want to give some sort of valedictory, trying to sum up what it’s all about. I’ve given a couple of those graduation speeches over the years and, quite frankly, they haven’t been very good. I’m not a great public speaker, I am, I think, a pretty good teacher. So I decided that in my last address to the collected body of the Tacoma Program I would avoid giving a speech and the one thing I’ve always wanted to do, to teach.
For me teaching has always been about bringing you something you could use. So my remarks tonight are directed at sharing some things that may assist you as you try to put into practice this program’s motto: enter to learn, depart to serve. What I have to say today, however, is very much influenced by the appalling events of the last couple of weeks.
You know I love words, I like to honor their true meaning and in looking up the meaning of “appalling” I find its describes right on what’s happened recently. To cast a pall over our lives, as though we are covered by a cloud over our heads.
These have not been good times for America recently. For the last several weeks we have watched the meltdown of a civilization in Iraq that is hundreds of centuries older than our own. Whatever your political position on this war, no one can take comfort from the appalling toll of lost life that comes from the ceaseless violence Iraqis are capable of inflicting on each other as part of sectarian strife. No one can take satisfaction in watching the blood-letting knowing that, in some way, we are responsible.
I hate to even mention it, for fear of providing notoriety to someone I believe deserves no attention. The comments and behavior of Don Imus are too appalling to disregard. I never thought he was funny or entertaining, depending upon sarcasm for humor, which is a low form of a very sophisticated form of humor, satire. Imus got what he deserved. In choosing absolutely the wrong, unfunny thing to say about exactly the wrong target set himself up to lose his job… not because he is a bigot, which he is… not because he said something inappropriate (I believe free speech should be protected as long as speakers accept the consequences of their words)… but because he didn’t do his job: he wasn’t funny and he wasn’t entertaining. His idiot comments, dismissed in a self serving apology as something bad said by a good man, only revealed an evil mind that, uncensored, spews out hateful comments. Certainly appalling.
Then, of course, a week ago yesterday the horror at Virginia Tech, something that touches all of us personally, because we share that sense of the college as a haven. And we mourn deeply because we know college is a place where personal dreams take root. In a moment, at a place where one would expect peace and anticipate growth, all those dreams end. I must admit, I feel sorrow for Mr Cho, too, because he believed he lived alone in horrible so dreadful that it drove him to wreak violence. How his family must hurt, along with all the rest of the families whose sons and daughters’ lives were shortened that day.
I hope it does not detract from the sorrow we feel for these victims to note that as many and often more Iraqis die every day - along with significant numbers of American military, none who have their lives and dreams profiled and mourned to the degree the students in Blacksburg have been.
Through all these appalling moments I have been disappointed at the superficial and shallow commentary offered by television. What the shooting at VT turned out to be was a grand opportunity for the networks to fill morning and evening news with feature stories largely devoid of content and meaning. This was just one big 20-20 episode aimed at boosting Katie’s disappointing ratings or Meredith and Matt’s marketshare.
I’m hardly being original in beating up that convenient strawman, television, but I guess I’ve run out of patience. Once again, an opportunity to learn something about ourselves and the psychology that drives up is lost in high tech graphics that document every minute of that appalling day.
I must admit that some of what I am saying borders on the curmudgeonly comments of a guy getting older by the day. I’m trying to avoid the kind of thinking that leads to letters to the editor ranting about everything from Nintendo to traffic roundabouts. I must admit, however, that I’m running out of patience for some of these things.
In an effort to stave off cynicism, I’m going to use this lecture as a way to make sense of these appalling events and keep our minds focused on what we can be, as opposed to an exploration of our limitations and failures. I need to keep my mind on those qualities that make us human and humane.
Oddly enough it is at those moments of greatest inhumanity that we rediscover who we are. I daresay more acts of human generosity and kindness occurred at Virginia Tech than acts of violence. That’s how it works: at 911 or in the aftermath of Katrina, we are suddenly able to set aside our divisions aside to discover how alike we are. When our communities are truly threatened, we strengthen our communities.
So what does this all mean? Does it mean anything at all? That’s the task I set for myself in front of you today. What can be learned from these appalling episodes that in any way informs those of us who sit here learning so that someday we may serve.
If I take a dark view of things, which I tend to do, I can add up these appalling events to conclude that whatever the social bond is, it isn’t holding very well right now. I would prefer, however, not to conclude the worst. Instead I think there is value in considering some basic rules of thumb I follow to get through these puzzling and disturbing events.
My first rule of thumb holds that nothing is as simple as it seems, nor is it as complex as it appears. Most problems, in life or in social events, can not be made as simple as talk show television and news pundits want us to believe. The more you look carefully at something, the more you realize how many different angles and perspectives are involved. Indeed, isn’t it is the mark of an educated person to realize the multiple dimensions to any given phenomenon?
Quite frankly I “knew” more as a freshman in college 40-plus years ago than I do today. I came to college full of strongly held opinions and beliefs. But from that point forward I’ve discovered how much I don’t know and the danger of oversimplifying things. To take away the complexity is to rob life of its richness.
The world is not simply divided into people or things that are good or bad or right or wrong. As Dr. Hardiman reminds us, this is a world of “ands” and “withs” not “either” and “ors.” The age old philosophical debate as to the inherent goodness or badness of humankind is simply fallacious: humans, all of us, have the capacity to do good and evil. We and our society are a mixture of bad and good. Approaching life as though it is one or the other is to miss the complexity of our very human personalities.
If I warn against simplifying reality, I also caution against assuming that things are so infinitely complex that they can never be understood. One of the good things western society has brought this world is a logical way of thinking and a scientific method for understanding the world. Problems do have solutions and the inherent complexity in the real world can be reasonably sorted and arranged to make sense of our lives.
There is an interesting political point to be made here. I’m making a stereotypical comparison, but when it comes to policy debates it seems like Republicans always try to make things look simpler than they are, while Democrats come up with complicated answers. Think of the debates between Bush and Kerry. Think about it… see what I mean?
I’m not suggesting that bringing order to chaos is easy, but it is possible and much of what we teach here in Tacoma is to apply the analytic tools that allow us to describe, predict and even interact effectively with the world around us.
If I’ve learned that things are never as simple or complex as they seem, I’ve also found that it’s wise to avoid the error of attributing anything to a single cause. That’s an oversimplification that is sure to get you into trouble. I have never agreed with many things that Freud said, but his comment that all behavior is over-determined is true. Our actions are driven by many motives and noble and less noble ones can operate side by side.
Media coverage of Virginia Tech reached new lows in terms of simplistic, single cause analysis. It may be a comfort to think that something awful is easily explained or that one thing is the cause of all this sorrow, but the world is not put together that way. We have to do the difficult work of finding and sorting through the causes and the ways they interact. It is exacting and exhausting, but there’s no way around the effort required to make sense of the world we live in.
Another conception we need to get out of the way of clear thinking comes from a misunderstanding of what Darwin taught us. He never suggested that the outcome of evolution was perfection - that each species, as it evolves, becomes better. To the contrary, Darwin discovered that evolution represents adaptation to specific ecological conditions. Surviving species were those best adapted to the conditions they live under, not the best species.
And so it holds for societies, cultures and we as a species. We have survived, thusfar, because we have possessed the traits that allow us to adapt. We are not smarter or better, we are just adapted. Mesopotamians 5000 years ago, Chinese and Egyptians 4000 years ago, Greeks 3,000 years ago, Romans 2,000 years ago were just as smart as we. We have more data, more facts, we are more knowledgeable, but not any smarter.
And certainly, we are in no way morally superior. Horrible, immoral acts dot all of human history and the 20th century presents plenty of barbaric examples, be it Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot to earn the last few generations’ infamous place in history. Smart does not necessarily equal good, a lesson I learned in graduate school.
I was in a very tough and competitive program. It prided itself on weeding 80 per cent of its students out and the 20 per cent that survived were arrogant in their pride. One day I was struck with an important insight: most of those who had not survived were just as smart and in many instances more creative than those who had. There is no correlation between academic achievement and personal morality. Education makes us smarter, not better. To become a better person requires a very different journey than that which scholarship presents.
The deeper I reach into this analysis the closer I come to a question to a that has obsessed me since I sat where you do, as an undergraduate, 39 years ago. That question, put to a Sociology 101 class by Professor Bill Klausner, who became a mentor and friend, haunts me today, like a tune you just can’t get out of your mind. In that Soc class at the University of Redlands, Klausner asked us to consider what was the force that held us together socially? What was the social bond, the glue or magnetism, that sustained families and friendships, corporations, communities or states? Of course, he followed with the corollary question: what causes them to fly apart? What are the conditions that loosen the bond that holds us together.
That question has fascinated me ever since and through my teaching, research, scholarship and experience I have continually come back to it. What makes one marriage fail and the next one last? By the way, the news is not good, at least in the US. Failure rates for marriage are at a historic high… we just don’t seem able to make these things work.
Actually, I figured out the answer to Dr. Klausner’s question. The single essential ingredient that holds us together is trust. It is our recognition of our mutual dependence on one another, that we need and can depend on each other that hold families and states together. It’s like that silly team-building game where you’re blind-folded and then fall back to discover your comrades will always catch you. A trite example, perhaps, but a powerful lesson.
We live together because we trust each other to look out for each other, at some minimal level. I could not drive home today if I could not trust that the other drivers will obey traffic laws. Modern society would collapse within minutes if the trust that we have for each other disappeared.
If I really think about Iraq, Imus and Virginia Tech I realize that those events sting so deeply because they tear at that social fabric of trust. That the lessons to be learned by the lies in Iraq, the misanthropy of Imus and the violence of VT is that we can’t and shouldn’t trust each other. Such things loosen the social bond that draws out of us the things that create the wonders of cultures and societies.
It’s easy to forget the basic “socialness” in all of us that provides real satisfaction in our lives. I was reminded of it the other day in a small but very powerful example, once again, sitting on a United Airlines flight to Chicago. I am a frequent flyer with United. We’re easily identified because United seats us in the rows just aft of the first class bulkhead back through the exit rows. The added legroom is a perquisite of being loyal to United. You’ll recognize us, too, because we have the weary look that comes of spending hours in at 35,000 feet in a tube. We all have our creature comforts: the Ipod, noise-cancelling headphones, cellphones at the ready, reading material and conveniently placed items of food and drink to sustain us in this age of deregulated, Chapter-11 airline amentities.
We all sat there, lost in our thoughts, waiting to push back, prepared to watch Happy Feet for the fourth time this month, when the captain came on with an announcement. He said, “we’re a special flight today. We’re carrying a kidney for transplant on board. In fact, if you listen in on Channel 9, our call sign won’t be United 200; it will be Lifeguard United 200.”
There was a palpable flow of energy through the cabin with the captain’s announcement, every one sat up a little straighter, the looks on people’s faces took on a sense of purpose, we were excited… we were on a mission. This was Lifeguard United flight 200 after all! You could actually feel the plane lift before we started the roll down the runway.
Once again, I learned an important lesson about us as humans. We just want to be part of something and we feel a special joy that comes from doing things together. For years I’ve done an exercise with clients: I’ll go around the table and ask everyone to tell me when there was a moment in their lives when they were part of a group where they, together, accomplished more than they ever could have alone.
Know what’s interesting about that exercise? Everyone has a story they can tell. And 90 percent of those stories come from high school or the military. Someone was part of a championship team or a school play or a church group that traveled somewhere to do a good work. It’s amazing and kind of sad, we all have these experiences and most of us never have them as adults. It’s a sad commentary about where we live and how we work.
If I have learned one thing from all this that I live by as a guiding principle, it to never do anything to dilute trust. Once lost it permanently damages the social bond, be it between parent and child, husband and wife, colleagues and co-worker and neighbors in a community. The bond is too precious and fragile to waste. Once lost it is almost impossible to regain. Slowly but surely that which holds us together is diluted to the point we are all alone and truly vulnerable.
The single human act that does the most to kill trust is lying. I used to use a book by Cicela Bok called Lying, an incredible detailed and scholarly analysis of all the ways we lie and how each, even the simplest, destroys trust. Even the simple, so-called, white-lies to a question like, “what do you think of this tie,” alter the integrity of a relationship and ultimately, really insult the friend whose feelings you are trying to save.
By the way, I am not speaking from a position of moral superiority. I am a humble sinner who has seen my way. I’ve told lies and I’m sorry for what I have done that harmed precious relationships.
The fact of the matter is that lies always serve the liar even when they are meant to protect others’ feelings. Now Bok may draw an unrealistic line in the sand, but her point is well taken. The degree to which we accept lying as the normal currency of relationships we need to ask whether those untrustworthy relations have any value.
Honesty is a huge burden. It comes at a cost to be honest and it takes considerable forbearance to listen to honesty. But we must accept the consequences of honesty if we are to maintain authentic, trust-based relationships. Otherwise we end up living a lie, don’t we?
It’s astounding at the high tolerance American’s have to being lied to by their presidents. Whether it be Bush’s lies about our intervention in the middle east or Clinton’s lies about dalliances with a White House intern, we not only accept it, polls show that we pretty much expect it. Interestingly, Americans can live with big lies… it’s the little one that do presidents in. Notice that Nixon was not driven from office because of his machinations in foreign policy, including some big time deceptions about Viet-Nam and Cambodia. He had to leave because we could not tolerate him covering up a break-in at his political rival’s office. Clinton’s deceptions about NAFTA didn’t do him in, but his wayward zipper almost did.
The on-going maintenance of trust is the most important thing any of us can do in any relationship. And that point leads me to the issue that brought me to Tacoma and postponed my retirement from teaching for another 8 years. If there is a deception I can’t abide it is the gap between the promise of the Constitution and the treatment of citizens of color in America.
A few months ago I proclaimed from this lectern that I love the Constitution, and I do. I recognize that its authors may have been inspired by greedy and self-serving motives, but the document has a life of its own and the ideals it describes are consistent with a just and fair society for all of us. At every turn, in the long run, the Constitution has led us to made policy decisions to protect all our rights and to assure justice for everyone. It’s taken awhile sometimes, but in the end, our Constitution has protected us and stood in the way of those who would rob us of our commonly held rights.
For those of you who take my Monday class, I guess you could say that the Constitution is the ultimate mission statement.
But the condition of race relations remains the most troublesome problem in the United States and one that threatens our ability to live up to the Constitution and unless we do something, very soon, I fear our society will be torn apart as the bonds of American trust evaporate.
My concerns about race relations I must say, sadly, came later in my life. I grew up in a racist society and, even though my parents were fair-minded persons, I was surrounded by things that guaranteed I grew up a racist. Once I realized this, and detested looking at myself in the mirror, I began to work (and continue to do so everyday) to cancel out whatever racist conceptions I might have.
I grew up in Anaheim, California, right in the heart of Orange County. There were three blacks in my high school graduating class of 500. What was interesting about that is that to the north and south, in Fullerton and Santa Ana, the high schools were probably split in even thirds between blacks, Latino and white students. I must admit, with some embarrassment, I was so naïve that I never questioned why there were so few blacks in Anaheim. I naively, admittedly stupidly, simply assumed they didn’t want to live in Anaheim. I didn’t think much of the place, so it was reasonable that they didn’t either.
I learned differently later and in an interesting manner. Again on an airplane. This was over 20 years ago. I was taking my son Matt on a promised trip to Washington DC for his 10th birthday. We were taking the red-eye through St. Louis. That night, somewhere over Nebraska, I was still awake. Matt slept besides me. The flight attendant, a young black man, was coming down the aisle, checking, as they do, that everyone was alright.
I didn’t realize the man in front of me was also awake. As the FA approached the passenger sitting in front of me said to him, “got any watermelon on boy?” To his credit the black man gave him a look but continued on.
I had an epiphany. I realized to be black in America is, like that flight attendant, to be reminded of every day and often in a most unpleasant manner. Rarely am I made aware of the fact that I am a white male and that I can call upon all the privileges that come with that status. And if I am, it’s because I am welcomed in someway, given a slight advantage even though I’m a stranger.
A few years later, after I started teaching here, I was up in 211 just talking with students before seminar began. It was near the holidays and one of my favorite students was sharing the story of her son’s homecoming from Ann Arbor, Michigan where he was a student at the University of Michigan. He had told her that he had almost missed his connecting flight through Chicago in O’Hare. He was telling her how he had had to run through the terminal to get to the gate on time. “Oh no,” she told him, “son, never run.” It took me a second to grasp the meaning of what she was saying and then I realized that I never, as a parent, had to warn my children not to run in public for fear that someone would think they were doing something illegal.
Another one of my students, a beautiful woman, a dancer, told me she was walking with her 5 year-old daughter across a field that separated her apartment building from a local mom and pop grocery store. They passed a young white girl, maybe 10, who as they passed, hissed at her and her daughter, “Nigger!”
I just couldn’t believe these things, or didn’t want to. But I know, sorrowfully, they are true. And I know these events are common and often even worse. I do not like living in a society where those things happen; where any one of us is treated as less than another. This is the sin of our society and I will not stop speaking out against it.
It’s interesting that, even here, we have a hard time talking about race. But I believe we must until we remove all the misconceptions and lies that separate us. We need to talk about this as uncomfortable as it may make us, be it for embarrassment or shame or anger… we need to talk it through.
I have faith that there is a solution and that we will solve the conundrum of race relations by trusting each other. I wish I had a specific solution to offer, but I don’t. All I can do is pass the gauntlet on to you with not just hope, but a belief that the answer lies among you.
That is what attracted me to Tacoma. There is something happening here that is not happening anywhere else. We are learning to live together, work together, to respect and even rely upon our differences. Maxine Mimms recently told me that there may be nowhere in the US where you see the diversity we have here.
A few weeks ago I told you about Willi Unsoeld. I thought he was nuts, really. He was a hero and when I finally met him I couldn’t take seriously his belief that Evergreen could be the model for world peace. What seemed pretty goofy 31 years ago is maybe not so unbelievable after all.
This is, in the final accounting, about leadership. Everyone knows this program’s motto, “enter to learn; depart to serve.” I, personally, modify that statement… I want us to depart to serve and to lead. As you know, I have a different take on leadership. As with many things Hollywood has misled us, leadership is not a rare trait reserved only for a few politicians, military leaders and sports stars… and a saint or two.
Leadership is a much more common quality, possessed by all of us. When we see the need to help others get through a tough situation, you answer the call and offer that assistance. You may not want to, but you realize it must be done. Whenever there is a hard time, there are leaders who step forward to help us through.
That’s why the greatest leaders are not found on the top of pedestals or astride statues of horses. The true leaders of this world are parents and teachers who help children do things they don’t think they can do. Getting a five year old to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool… that’s real leadership.
So, at the end, I urge you to step forward; answer the call to leadership. Help others do what they think they cannot do. I knows this comes at a cost, but I believe - it is a cost worth bearing.
I hope that I have given you the skills and confidence to step forward and lead. To show people we can have a better country, one whose communities look like what we have created here.
I have been blessed to be here. I never leave an event here with Kathleen that I don’tr turn to her and say, “what we would have missed.” It has been a honor to have you as students and an even bigger honor to be part of such a great team of colleagues. These are remarkable teachers and many a time I’ve sat in awe and watched them do what they can do.
I have few regrets. I wanted to teach a course with Barbara Laners called, 21 Questions to Survive the 20th Century. I don’t think we could ever get the list down to 21. And I always wanted to teach a course on race relations in America. Maybe someday.
It has been a great privilege to be part of this community and, while I am leaving teaching, I will never leave here. In trying to explain my feelings at this moment I recalled something I read in a book about baseball. It was a sort of early tell-all about the real life of major league players, written by Jim Bouton, an ex-Yankee and Seattle Pilot, of all things. In summarizing his life in his life in baseball he said, “All the time I thought I was holding the ball; then I realized the ball was holding on to me.”
I could say the same thing. All the time I thought I was holding on to you, only to discover that you were holding on to me.
A few weeks ago I used the lecture to talk about how to manage your Spring Fair projects. Today’s lecture comes at a good time, your projects are well along the way, we are almost done with this quarter and almost done with the year. As you know, I am leaving teaching after 35 years, 31 of them at Evergreen; given that this is the last time I will speak, formally, to the program as a whole, maybe this is a good time to try to summarize, to bring some of the pieces together.
In thinking about this lecture and my years at Evergreen, I decided that I did not want to give some sort of valedictory, trying to sum up what it’s all about. I’ve given a couple of those graduation speeches over the years and, quite frankly, they haven’t been very good. I’m not a great public speaker, I am, I think, a pretty good teacher. So I decided that in my last address to the collected body of the Tacoma Program I would avoid giving a speech and the one thing I’ve always wanted to do, to teach.
For me teaching has always been about bringing you something you could use. So my remarks tonight are directed at sharing some things that may assist you as you try to put into practice this program’s motto: enter to learn, depart to serve. What I have to say today, however, is very much influenced by the appalling events of the last couple of weeks.
You know I love words, I like to honor their true meaning and in looking up the meaning of “appalling” I find its describes right on what’s happened recently. To cast a pall over our lives, as though we are covered by a cloud over our heads.
These have not been good times for America recently. For the last several weeks we have watched the meltdown of a civilization in Iraq that is hundreds of centuries older than our own. Whatever your political position on this war, no one can take comfort from the appalling toll of lost life that comes from the ceaseless violence Iraqis are capable of inflicting on each other as part of sectarian strife. No one can take satisfaction in watching the blood-letting knowing that, in some way, we are responsible.
I hate to even mention it, for fear of providing notoriety to someone I believe deserves no attention. The comments and behavior of Don Imus are too appalling to disregard. I never thought he was funny or entertaining, depending upon sarcasm for humor, which is a low form of a very sophisticated form of humor, satire. Imus got what he deserved. In choosing absolutely the wrong, unfunny thing to say about exactly the wrong target set himself up to lose his job… not because he is a bigot, which he is… not because he said something inappropriate (I believe free speech should be protected as long as speakers accept the consequences of their words)… but because he didn’t do his job: he wasn’t funny and he wasn’t entertaining. His idiot comments, dismissed in a self serving apology as something bad said by a good man, only revealed an evil mind that, uncensored, spews out hateful comments. Certainly appalling.
Then, of course, a week ago yesterday the horror at Virginia Tech, something that touches all of us personally, because we share that sense of the college as a haven. And we mourn deeply because we know college is a place where personal dreams take root. In a moment, at a place where one would expect peace and anticipate growth, all those dreams end. I must admit, I feel sorrow for Mr Cho, too, because he believed he lived alone in horrible so dreadful that it drove him to wreak violence. How his family must hurt, along with all the rest of the families whose sons and daughters’ lives were shortened that day.
I hope it does not detract from the sorrow we feel for these victims to note that as many and often more Iraqis die every day - along with significant numbers of American military, none who have their lives and dreams profiled and mourned to the degree the students in Blacksburg have been.
Through all these appalling moments I have been disappointed at the superficial and shallow commentary offered by television. What the shooting at VT turned out to be was a grand opportunity for the networks to fill morning and evening news with feature stories largely devoid of content and meaning. This was just one big 20-20 episode aimed at boosting Katie’s disappointing ratings or Meredith and Matt’s marketshare.
I’m hardly being original in beating up that convenient strawman, television, but I guess I’ve run out of patience. Once again, an opportunity to learn something about ourselves and the psychology that drives up is lost in high tech graphics that document every minute of that appalling day.
I must admit that some of what I am saying borders on the curmudgeonly comments of a guy getting older by the day. I’m trying to avoid the kind of thinking that leads to letters to the editor ranting about everything from Nintendo to traffic roundabouts. I must admit, however, that I’m running out of patience for some of these things.
In an effort to stave off cynicism, I’m going to use this lecture as a way to make sense of these appalling events and keep our minds focused on what we can be, as opposed to an exploration of our limitations and failures. I need to keep my mind on those qualities that make us human and humane.
Oddly enough it is at those moments of greatest inhumanity that we rediscover who we are. I daresay more acts of human generosity and kindness occurred at Virginia Tech than acts of violence. That’s how it works: at 911 or in the aftermath of Katrina, we are suddenly able to set aside our divisions aside to discover how alike we are. When our communities are truly threatened, we strengthen our communities.
So what does this all mean? Does it mean anything at all? That’s the task I set for myself in front of you today. What can be learned from these appalling episodes that in any way informs those of us who sit here learning so that someday we may serve.
If I take a dark view of things, which I tend to do, I can add up these appalling events to conclude that whatever the social bond is, it isn’t holding very well right now. I would prefer, however, not to conclude the worst. Instead I think there is value in considering some basic rules of thumb I follow to get through these puzzling and disturbing events.
My first rule of thumb holds that nothing is as simple as it seems, nor is it as complex as it appears. Most problems, in life or in social events, can not be made as simple as talk show television and news pundits want us to believe. The more you look carefully at something, the more you realize how many different angles and perspectives are involved. Indeed, isn’t it is the mark of an educated person to realize the multiple dimensions to any given phenomenon?
Quite frankly I “knew” more as a freshman in college 40-plus years ago than I do today. I came to college full of strongly held opinions and beliefs. But from that point forward I’ve discovered how much I don’t know and the danger of oversimplifying things. To take away the complexity is to rob life of its richness.
The world is not simply divided into people or things that are good or bad or right or wrong. As Dr. Hardiman reminds us, this is a world of “ands” and “withs” not “either” and “ors.” The age old philosophical debate as to the inherent goodness or badness of humankind is simply fallacious: humans, all of us, have the capacity to do good and evil. We and our society are a mixture of bad and good. Approaching life as though it is one or the other is to miss the complexity of our very human personalities.
If I warn against simplifying reality, I also caution against assuming that things are so infinitely complex that they can never be understood. One of the good things western society has brought this world is a logical way of thinking and a scientific method for understanding the world. Problems do have solutions and the inherent complexity in the real world can be reasonably sorted and arranged to make sense of our lives.
There is an interesting political point to be made here. I’m making a stereotypical comparison, but when it comes to policy debates it seems like Republicans always try to make things look simpler than they are, while Democrats come up with complicated answers. Think of the debates between Bush and Kerry. Think about it… see what I mean?
I’m not suggesting that bringing order to chaos is easy, but it is possible and much of what we teach here in Tacoma is to apply the analytic tools that allow us to describe, predict and even interact effectively with the world around us.
If I’ve learned that things are never as simple or complex as they seem, I’ve also found that it’s wise to avoid the error of attributing anything to a single cause. That’s an oversimplification that is sure to get you into trouble. I have never agreed with many things that Freud said, but his comment that all behavior is over-determined is true. Our actions are driven by many motives and noble and less noble ones can operate side by side.
Media coverage of Virginia Tech reached new lows in terms of simplistic, single cause analysis. It may be a comfort to think that something awful is easily explained or that one thing is the cause of all this sorrow, but the world is not put together that way. We have to do the difficult work of finding and sorting through the causes and the ways they interact. It is exacting and exhausting, but there’s no way around the effort required to make sense of the world we live in.
Another conception we need to get out of the way of clear thinking comes from a misunderstanding of what Darwin taught us. He never suggested that the outcome of evolution was perfection - that each species, as it evolves, becomes better. To the contrary, Darwin discovered that evolution represents adaptation to specific ecological conditions. Surviving species were those best adapted to the conditions they live under, not the best species.
And so it holds for societies, cultures and we as a species. We have survived, thusfar, because we have possessed the traits that allow us to adapt. We are not smarter or better, we are just adapted. Mesopotamians 5000 years ago, Chinese and Egyptians 4000 years ago, Greeks 3,000 years ago, Romans 2,000 years ago were just as smart as we. We have more data, more facts, we are more knowledgeable, but not any smarter.
And certainly, we are in no way morally superior. Horrible, immoral acts dot all of human history and the 20th century presents plenty of barbaric examples, be it Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot to earn the last few generations’ infamous place in history. Smart does not necessarily equal good, a lesson I learned in graduate school.
I was in a very tough and competitive program. It prided itself on weeding 80 per cent of its students out and the 20 per cent that survived were arrogant in their pride. One day I was struck with an important insight: most of those who had not survived were just as smart and in many instances more creative than those who had. There is no correlation between academic achievement and personal morality. Education makes us smarter, not better. To become a better person requires a very different journey than that which scholarship presents.
The deeper I reach into this analysis the closer I come to a question to a that has obsessed me since I sat where you do, as an undergraduate, 39 years ago. That question, put to a Sociology 101 class by Professor Bill Klausner, who became a mentor and friend, haunts me today, like a tune you just can’t get out of your mind. In that Soc class at the University of Redlands, Klausner asked us to consider what was the force that held us together socially? What was the social bond, the glue or magnetism, that sustained families and friendships, corporations, communities or states? Of course, he followed with the corollary question: what causes them to fly apart? What are the conditions that loosen the bond that holds us together.
That question has fascinated me ever since and through my teaching, research, scholarship and experience I have continually come back to it. What makes one marriage fail and the next one last? By the way, the news is not good, at least in the US. Failure rates for marriage are at a historic high… we just don’t seem able to make these things work.
Actually, I figured out the answer to Dr. Klausner’s question. The single essential ingredient that holds us together is trust. It is our recognition of our mutual dependence on one another, that we need and can depend on each other that hold families and states together. It’s like that silly team-building game where you’re blind-folded and then fall back to discover your comrades will always catch you. A trite example, perhaps, but a powerful lesson.
We live together because we trust each other to look out for each other, at some minimal level. I could not drive home today if I could not trust that the other drivers will obey traffic laws. Modern society would collapse within minutes if the trust that we have for each other disappeared.
If I really think about Iraq, Imus and Virginia Tech I realize that those events sting so deeply because they tear at that social fabric of trust. That the lessons to be learned by the lies in Iraq, the misanthropy of Imus and the violence of VT is that we can’t and shouldn’t trust each other. Such things loosen the social bond that draws out of us the things that create the wonders of cultures and societies.
It’s easy to forget the basic “socialness” in all of us that provides real satisfaction in our lives. I was reminded of it the other day in a small but very powerful example, once again, sitting on a United Airlines flight to Chicago. I am a frequent flyer with United. We’re easily identified because United seats us in the rows just aft of the first class bulkhead back through the exit rows. The added legroom is a perquisite of being loyal to United. You’ll recognize us, too, because we have the weary look that comes of spending hours in at 35,000 feet in a tube. We all have our creature comforts: the Ipod, noise-cancelling headphones, cellphones at the ready, reading material and conveniently placed items of food and drink to sustain us in this age of deregulated, Chapter-11 airline amentities.
We all sat there, lost in our thoughts, waiting to push back, prepared to watch Happy Feet for the fourth time this month, when the captain came on with an announcement. He said, “we’re a special flight today. We’re carrying a kidney for transplant on board. In fact, if you listen in on Channel 9, our call sign won’t be United 200; it will be Lifeguard United 200.”
There was a palpable flow of energy through the cabin with the captain’s announcement, every one sat up a little straighter, the looks on people’s faces took on a sense of purpose, we were excited… we were on a mission. This was Lifeguard United flight 200 after all! You could actually feel the plane lift before we started the roll down the runway.
Once again, I learned an important lesson about us as humans. We just want to be part of something and we feel a special joy that comes from doing things together. For years I’ve done an exercise with clients: I’ll go around the table and ask everyone to tell me when there was a moment in their lives when they were part of a group where they, together, accomplished more than they ever could have alone.
Know what’s interesting about that exercise? Everyone has a story they can tell. And 90 percent of those stories come from high school or the military. Someone was part of a championship team or a school play or a church group that traveled somewhere to do a good work. It’s amazing and kind of sad, we all have these experiences and most of us never have them as adults. It’s a sad commentary about where we live and how we work.
If I have learned one thing from all this that I live by as a guiding principle, it to never do anything to dilute trust. Once lost it permanently damages the social bond, be it between parent and child, husband and wife, colleagues and co-worker and neighbors in a community. The bond is too precious and fragile to waste. Once lost it is almost impossible to regain. Slowly but surely that which holds us together is diluted to the point we are all alone and truly vulnerable.
The single human act that does the most to kill trust is lying. I used to use a book by Cicela Bok called Lying, an incredible detailed and scholarly analysis of all the ways we lie and how each, even the simplest, destroys trust. Even the simple, so-called, white-lies to a question like, “what do you think of this tie,” alter the integrity of a relationship and ultimately, really insult the friend whose feelings you are trying to save.
By the way, I am not speaking from a position of moral superiority. I am a humble sinner who has seen my way. I’ve told lies and I’m sorry for what I have done that harmed precious relationships.
The fact of the matter is that lies always serve the liar even when they are meant to protect others’ feelings. Now Bok may draw an unrealistic line in the sand, but her point is well taken. The degree to which we accept lying as the normal currency of relationships we need to ask whether those untrustworthy relations have any value.
Honesty is a huge burden. It comes at a cost to be honest and it takes considerable forbearance to listen to honesty. But we must accept the consequences of honesty if we are to maintain authentic, trust-based relationships. Otherwise we end up living a lie, don’t we?
It’s astounding at the high tolerance American’s have to being lied to by their presidents. Whether it be Bush’s lies about our intervention in the middle east or Clinton’s lies about dalliances with a White House intern, we not only accept it, polls show that we pretty much expect it. Interestingly, Americans can live with big lies… it’s the little one that do presidents in. Notice that Nixon was not driven from office because of his machinations in foreign policy, including some big time deceptions about Viet-Nam and Cambodia. He had to leave because we could not tolerate him covering up a break-in at his political rival’s office. Clinton’s deceptions about NAFTA didn’t do him in, but his wayward zipper almost did.
The on-going maintenance of trust is the most important thing any of us can do in any relationship. And that point leads me to the issue that brought me to Tacoma and postponed my retirement from teaching for another 8 years. If there is a deception I can’t abide it is the gap between the promise of the Constitution and the treatment of citizens of color in America.
A few months ago I proclaimed from this lectern that I love the Constitution, and I do. I recognize that its authors may have been inspired by greedy and self-serving motives, but the document has a life of its own and the ideals it describes are consistent with a just and fair society for all of us. At every turn, in the long run, the Constitution has led us to made policy decisions to protect all our rights and to assure justice for everyone. It’s taken awhile sometimes, but in the end, our Constitution has protected us and stood in the way of those who would rob us of our commonly held rights.
For those of you who take my Monday class, I guess you could say that the Constitution is the ultimate mission statement.
But the condition of race relations remains the most troublesome problem in the United States and one that threatens our ability to live up to the Constitution and unless we do something, very soon, I fear our society will be torn apart as the bonds of American trust evaporate.
My concerns about race relations I must say, sadly, came later in my life. I grew up in a racist society and, even though my parents were fair-minded persons, I was surrounded by things that guaranteed I grew up a racist. Once I realized this, and detested looking at myself in the mirror, I began to work (and continue to do so everyday) to cancel out whatever racist conceptions I might have.
I grew up in Anaheim, California, right in the heart of Orange County. There were three blacks in my high school graduating class of 500. What was interesting about that is that to the north and south, in Fullerton and Santa Ana, the high schools were probably split in even thirds between blacks, Latino and white students. I must admit, with some embarrassment, I was so naïve that I never questioned why there were so few blacks in Anaheim. I naively, admittedly stupidly, simply assumed they didn’t want to live in Anaheim. I didn’t think much of the place, so it was reasonable that they didn’t either.
I learned differently later and in an interesting manner. Again on an airplane. This was over 20 years ago. I was taking my son Matt on a promised trip to Washington DC for his 10th birthday. We were taking the red-eye through St. Louis. That night, somewhere over Nebraska, I was still awake. Matt slept besides me. The flight attendant, a young black man, was coming down the aisle, checking, as they do, that everyone was alright.
I didn’t realize the man in front of me was also awake. As the FA approached the passenger sitting in front of me said to him, “got any watermelon on boy?” To his credit the black man gave him a look but continued on.
I had an epiphany. I realized to be black in America is, like that flight attendant, to be reminded of every day and often in a most unpleasant manner. Rarely am I made aware of the fact that I am a white male and that I can call upon all the privileges that come with that status. And if I am, it’s because I am welcomed in someway, given a slight advantage even though I’m a stranger.
A few years later, after I started teaching here, I was up in 211 just talking with students before seminar began. It was near the holidays and one of my favorite students was sharing the story of her son’s homecoming from Ann Arbor, Michigan where he was a student at the University of Michigan. He had told her that he had almost missed his connecting flight through Chicago in O’Hare. He was telling her how he had had to run through the terminal to get to the gate on time. “Oh no,” she told him, “son, never run.” It took me a second to grasp the meaning of what she was saying and then I realized that I never, as a parent, had to warn my children not to run in public for fear that someone would think they were doing something illegal.
Another one of my students, a beautiful woman, a dancer, told me she was walking with her 5 year-old daughter across a field that separated her apartment building from a local mom and pop grocery store. They passed a young white girl, maybe 10, who as they passed, hissed at her and her daughter, “Nigger!”
I just couldn’t believe these things, or didn’t want to. But I know, sorrowfully, they are true. And I know these events are common and often even worse. I do not like living in a society where those things happen; where any one of us is treated as less than another. This is the sin of our society and I will not stop speaking out against it.
It’s interesting that, even here, we have a hard time talking about race. But I believe we must until we remove all the misconceptions and lies that separate us. We need to talk about this as uncomfortable as it may make us, be it for embarrassment or shame or anger… we need to talk it through.
I have faith that there is a solution and that we will solve the conundrum of race relations by trusting each other. I wish I had a specific solution to offer, but I don’t. All I can do is pass the gauntlet on to you with not just hope, but a belief that the answer lies among you.
That is what attracted me to Tacoma. There is something happening here that is not happening anywhere else. We are learning to live together, work together, to respect and even rely upon our differences. Maxine Mimms recently told me that there may be nowhere in the US where you see the diversity we have here.
A few weeks ago I told you about Willi Unsoeld. I thought he was nuts, really. He was a hero and when I finally met him I couldn’t take seriously his belief that Evergreen could be the model for world peace. What seemed pretty goofy 31 years ago is maybe not so unbelievable after all.
This is, in the final accounting, about leadership. Everyone knows this program’s motto, “enter to learn; depart to serve.” I, personally, modify that statement… I want us to depart to serve and to lead. As you know, I have a different take on leadership. As with many things Hollywood has misled us, leadership is not a rare trait reserved only for a few politicians, military leaders and sports stars… and a saint or two.
Leadership is a much more common quality, possessed by all of us. When we see the need to help others get through a tough situation, you answer the call and offer that assistance. You may not want to, but you realize it must be done. Whenever there is a hard time, there are leaders who step forward to help us through.
That’s why the greatest leaders are not found on the top of pedestals or astride statues of horses. The true leaders of this world are parents and teachers who help children do things they don’t think they can do. Getting a five year old to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool… that’s real leadership.
So, at the end, I urge you to step forward; answer the call to leadership. Help others do what they think they cannot do. I knows this comes at a cost, but I believe - it is a cost worth bearing.
I hope that I have given you the skills and confidence to step forward and lead. To show people we can have a better country, one whose communities look like what we have created here.
I have been blessed to be here. I never leave an event here with Kathleen that I don’tr turn to her and say, “what we would have missed.” It has been a honor to have you as students and an even bigger honor to be part of such a great team of colleagues. These are remarkable teachers and many a time I’ve sat in awe and watched them do what they can do.
I have few regrets. I wanted to teach a course with Barbara Laners called, 21 Questions to Survive the 20th Century. I don’t think we could ever get the list down to 21. And I always wanted to teach a course on race relations in America. Maybe someday.
It has been a great privilege to be part of this community and, while I am leaving teaching, I will never leave here. In trying to explain my feelings at this moment I recalled something I read in a book about baseball. It was a sort of early tell-all about the real life of major league players, written by Jim Bouton, an ex-Yankee and Seattle Pilot, of all things. In summarizing his life in his life in baseball he said, “All the time I thought I was holding the ball; then I realized the ball was holding on to me.”
I could say the same thing. All the time I thought I was holding on to you, only to discover that you were holding on to me.
posted by Duke at 7:48 AM
