#wolterstorff

I have not been faithful with my blog.  What little bit of free time I am afforded these days goes to talking with my family, eating snacks in the car on my way to and from meetings, classes, work, and home, or facebooking on the go.  So, this post guarantees to be a one or two off. Maybe a 3 off if my posting history is any better than my dieting history. 

In undergrad, I learned some pretty rudimentary things (e.g., how to form and use the subjunctive in Spanish, who Apollinaire was, why the Punic Wars occurred).  Some of those things I didn't learn very well.  I also learned some pretty deep and complex things (e.g., how to set up a solid written argument, how your epistemology shapes your teaching, the interplay between history and art).  After undergrad, my theology shifted, my views of people shifted, and my learning style shifted.  

Earning my B.A. was more than just a rite of passage, an exercise in fulfilling the first portion of the American dream.  It was a lesson to me that there was still so much more I didn't know.  Sure, I could chat with friends in Spanish, discuss the Mexican novel, and quote some lines from Don Quijote.  Maybe I could gloss the topics of the Iconoclast Controversy, Annuities, and polyandrous societies.  But more than anything, I could say with certainty, "scio me nihil scire" or "I know that I know nothing." Embedded in this Socratic Paradox is the sentiment that liberal arts education freed me from my slavery of ignorance while leading me in an insatiable quest for absolute truth.  This is not to say we don't learn pieces of truth, but we will never have all the answers this side of glory.

My Master of Education degree at Covenant further led me to gems of truth.  Making sense of knowledge and the presentation of knowledge, the work of education, was like the parable of the Arctic wolf licking the Inuit-planted bloody knife.  The more I tasted, the more I wanted.  The hope is that my fate will be less tragic than that of the wolf, for, as stated earlier, with knowledge comes freedom.  

I am finally in my PhD program.  This quest has taught me that, while I may have knowledge, understanding, and even some wisdom in some niched areas, my proverbial glasses are still foggy.  My first year, I was constantly reading the often one-sided literature required for class with a gut-reaction of distaste.  My Epistemology professor at Covenant had us read EVERYTHING with the suspicion of author-intent and worldview, but moreover the author's epistemological assumptions.  "How does the AUTHOR believe we know what we know?"  "What assumptions about truth have shaped his or her writing?"  

And so, I had the privilege of comparing required texts with things I already had in my repertoire of scholarly injunctions on truthful living.  Wolterstorff, Plantiga (some thick stuff to wade through), Sire, Jacobs, Stronks, and even the classics like Adler, Comenius, and Aristotle were all contradicting many of my readings.  As bringing their ideas to the discussion often disrupted the professor's flow, I often sat in silent disobedience - playing the game of academia - all the while knowing the discourse purported as truth was nothing more than an attempt at Postmodern inclusion of untruth.  (Side Note:  This is not to say every reading or every professor denied truth or the discussion of other ideas nor is it to say that Postmodernism is always bad nor that it always involves inclusion of untruth.  My generalities here come as the result of reader pressure for brevity, a notion I have already disregarded).

This semester/year is so far no different.  I am taking a course in Quantitative Research/Statistics, a course in World Perspectives in Teacher Education, and a Seminar on Multiculturalism.  So far readings have been far from boring, brief, or basic.  Week three of statistics has brought this 30 (we'll say 30) year old Scotsman to the verge of tears.  With my stats book in hand at a local coffee shop, I'm waiting for someone to ask if a family member has died, so I can just wail about the gross injustices of a Stats class.  If I were destined for hell, and hell were a personal place, my sentence would involve sitting in a room alone, with posters of cockroaches hanging up, doing statistics problems while chewing on cotton and listening to "Jesus Take the Wheel."  Even so, there is not much controversy with statistics.  Sure, derived scores can be played with, results can be manipulated, but calculations come out the same whether done by a transgender Asian, a white supremacist, or a deaf Democrat.  

World Perspectives in Teacher Education has thus far been enjoyable with thought-provoking and educational reads.  To be fair, I have not yet read for this week so there could be a surprise article by Oprah or an excerpt from Mein Kampf touted as gospel to throw me off.  

The Seminar in Multiculturalism has given me the most grief.  "Multiculturalism."  A word DRIPPING with Jack Knipe.  "The love of many cultures?"  "Methods of teaching many cultures?"  "How to handle different cultures?"  "How to treat different cultures in an American social, education, economic, and political context?"  You're getting warmer.  Throw in some Postmodernism, Critical Theory, and new definitions for all the words in the last question, add in a dash of history, Christian-white-male shaming, and you have the makings of five theories that are as controversial as routing credit card customer service calls to Bombay.  (To be sure, all of these comments are made in jest). 

So, I decided to go at it again - cross referencing every reading with readings that share my own epistemological assumptions (e.g., the Bible,  Justice Rights and Wrongs).  Only this time, I decided to take a page out of a friend's blog.  My friend Erin once had a blog.  She was teaching history and had so many interesting things to say in the area of pedagogy, classroom management, thoughts on education, and just funny and interesting classroom experiences in general.  Her blog was called "Watch Erin Teach."  Then she went back to school - George Mason University, interestingly enough.  And she was, herself, a student again.  So her blog took a new perspective and therefore a new title - "Watch Erin Learn."  So, I, too, decided to blog about my learning process.

This blogging theme may be short-lived, like many have been in the past.  But I want to try to use it as a way to trace my learning process.  As I stated earlier, I know that I know nothing.  I'm learning.  I'm growing.  I want to do that in the most humble manner possible.  While making assertions and arguing a point is valuable and necessary at times, it's also important to recognize that we are ALWAYS growing and changing.  Sometimes I think people fear listening to other points, changing or revising their own points, or coming full circle to a viewpoint they espoused, denied, and may now espouse again.  Isn't Hegel's Dialectic Model (i.e., thesis, antithesis, synthesis) something of value?

So my thoughts may be shoddy, they may change, I may contradict things I was thinking before.  But I hope to always point back to this post and make it clear, I am ALWAYS learning.  I want to make that clear because I just know one day I'll run for office and something like Multiculturalism will be written into law (figuratively and/or literally) and some pundit will point to this blog series and mark me as an anti-Semite, a Luddite, or a child abuser.  In our present democracy, I fear that so much of political correctness has buried the foundational concept of the "marketplace of ideas."  If you say something that doesn't meet the criteria of the "establishment" or "tolerance" you're marked as a purveyor of hate speech.

The Rawlsian vision of public reason is that we should only speak, within a democracy, in a way that is based in terms agreed upon by all sides. Its been six years since I studied Rawls (at a park in Houston. My study of philosophy is all autodidactical (not a word) in the pejorative sense) but that does not seem a gross misstatement. Rawls is concerned with finding the space of overlapping consensus and moving only once that space is found. The great difficulty with this is that there is no such space. There is no secular space nor religious space. People speak from utilitarian locations, deontological (like Rawls), behaviorist, expressionist, psychoanalytical, and that doesn't even get to religions or more basically expressed political ideologies. Because Rawls is not looking for simply language of consensus but reasons for consensus. Ahh, and here is the other great flaw. The first one I could see by my own reading (which means it is not that hard to read), but the second eluded me. Rawls looks for consensus. In democracy, Rawls sees consensuses as important, yet democracies do not function by consensus but by majority. Democracies function thanks to the ability of the minority to withstand losing elections. When McCain lost, Republicans were very pissed but they did not resort to violence; they looked to 2010. When we nation-build (for whatever reason), we see voting as vitally important, but losing is how democracies are sustained. This is what Adams taught us. This is what Napoleon could never teach us (a point that may claim a Adams as one of the most vitally important Presidents. Yes, Washington stepped down and denied the possibility of an American monarchy (thus earning the mantle Greatest President Ever), but Adams willingness to go quietly into the night, because he lost, helped to cement America in perhaps a longer lasting fashion (the worst president: Abe Lincoln, because he suspended habeas corpus, the fascist bastard. He stuck with Grant, yes, but also added a precedent to world democracies that allowed for the possibility of the State of Exception in the Weimar Constitution. Am I blaming the holocaust on Lincoln? No, but suspending habeas corpus is horrible and no one should get a free ride for it.))) While voting is heavily over rated in most political speak as the only political way to speak, it is heavily underrated in Rawls. For most people, to talk politics means to talk elections. For Rawls, it doesn't and this difference matters. To jump off of the voting issue, when James Davison Hunter criticizes neo-Anabaptists for using a definition of politics that most people don't use, I think he is being both specious and pointed. Specious because he himself criticizes a vision of politics as only voting. Pointed because political theologies are usually quite inept at communicating a political philosophy with activism and voting together in a way that people who are not bathed in Yoder or Hauerwas can understand. I think Eric Gregory makes steps in this direction, as does his colleague Cornel West, but ecclessiologically they are both much weaker than the neo-Anabaptists for reasons I am unsure of.