Archive for May 2007
Freedom in Education
This past November I presented a paper in a symposium on Faith-Based Higher Education at the Association for the Study of Higher Education. My contribution to the discussion was an analysis of faith-based enrollment rates in Christian affiliated institutions with overall attendance rates as a measure of religiosity in the U.S. the point here was to show that overall attendance in these institutions and rates of church attendance run a parallel trend with a spike in enrollment and attendance in the 1950’s and 1980’s respectively. I also pointed out that the more conservative denominations and evangelical institutions in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) both report that their overall attendance and enrollment rates fair better than more mainline or liberal counterparts. I also spoke briefly about faculty practices and how one indicator of evangelicalism is that students and faculty conform to a covenant or some other statement of faith in order to be considered a member of that evangelical educational community. This inevitably raised a question of freedom. The assumption is that if a faculty member has to conform to a statement of faith, that academic freedom and the freedom of the intellect is compromised. My response was that such a notion was not true of those faculty and such an understanding of freedom as a concept was misconstrued.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is rather clear in the Redbook about academic freedom and naturally sides with the faculty on the issue. The notion itself came from the German research model of education in which the human intellect should be unfettered to pursue truth in discipline. In short, to allow the conscience of the investigator have sway in all academic matters. Combined with classroom activity in the American university, this issue raises a similar construct that faculty should be free to engage students in any manner that is appropriate to the subject matter to promote student learning. But what is also clear is that any conditions or constraints on either of these processes need to be made clear in the contract with the faculty and that the university has an obligation to meet the goals of that contract just as much as the faculty. Essentially, this means that with a faith issue, the faculty must be willing to uphold that part of their contract just as the university cannot fire that faculty member for anything it wishes and at anytime unless outlined in that contract. A contract is a set of limitations, obligations and rights. It has clearly defined limits of action in order to work in a given organization and receive remuneration for services rendered. It is a set of limits and constraints that one chooses to uphold - even those constraints that are of a religious nature. So it is clear that the person who raised this question incorrectly assumed not only the AAUP’s position, but the very nature of freedom itself in his question and statement.
Freedom as Concept
The incorrect understanding of freedom by the person who addressed me about academic freedom in my presentation is not limited to issues of faculty practice and its intimate relationship to academic freedom, but to a larger misunderstanding of the nature of freedom itself that seems to be quite prevalent elsewhere. The misunderstanding is this: freedom is the degree to which we can act and behave without constraint or condition in the matters of thought or action. Thus, my interrogator assumed that academic freedom was a right in which no action of faculty should be constrained by any ideological, philosophical, or social boundary. That is to say, “freedom” is the right to act without and boundaries and our “rights” are the conduits through which we enact our freedom in the world.
I encounter this issue as well in a course I teach in critical thinking skills. When we discuss issues such as the legalization of marijuana or smoking in public places, many of the arguments against restricting these activities focus on the right of the individual to act in freedom without boundaries. Thus, if I am in my car, I should be able to choose my actions and preventing use of cellphones is one more example of the government stripping my right to act unconstrained in the world. And this goes for many other examples as well. But if I ask them what freedom looks like without any law or constraint they find an answer difficult to be forthcoming.
Freedom, by its nature, requires constraint. We act and think in necessarily bounded conditions that our minds and the entire universe press upon us consistently. The most useful argument in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is that we do act within the bounds of time and space as a necessary condition for thought itself. We simply cannot reason or have a thought that is rational unless bounded by these conditions. This structured understanding of our psychology is then picked up in an entire structuralist school of thought in Piaget and onward in psychology and in Levi-Strauss in anthropology among others. The notion of structure is of course well known in scientific investigation since all scientific investigation works within clearly defined structures and theoretical complexities. In any means of knowing therefore, there is structure. Perhaps paradoxically then, a good structure actually gives us the freedom to think and act even as it limits how we think an act in the midst of certain constraints. So to go back to the question of what freedom looks like without law or constraint the answer is anything but freedom since freedom requires structure.
But lest we conceive of structure as such a positive vehicle, it is also true that poorly conceived structures or the use of a structure for personal power or influence can have negative effects on freedom as well. The very structure that gives one the freedom to think and act can also snap back and squeeze the conscience out persons and communities rendering them less than human. This is true of totalitarian regimes and other systems in which human thought is dictated and choice is pummeled out of that system’s inhabitants. Thus there needs to be the freedom to act and think even if we recognize that there are necessary limits of doing so. A boundary to a structure must therefore be open to critique as a condition of freedom as well. If we know these boundaries exist, a form of freedom is to call that structure into question and enter in a negotiation with those who maintain it in order to improve it to foster intellectual and social growth. This is the difference between being bounded by certain limits in which we can freely move and act, and having our actions determined by an outside force. But we very often miss or confuse the important distinction between boundedness and determinism which is why we also misunderstand the nature of freedom.
So the question is not so much about one’s free will to participate in any research pursuit or teaching practice that promotes and supports learning, but about the kind of structures in which one does so. There are, in each discipline, very standard structures of knowledge in each generation. Thomas Kuhn calls these “paradigms”. From within a structure, new structures can emerge thus forming new ways of structuring knowledge and investigation. This occurred when Einstein, working from within a Newtonian system, revealed a very different theory of the structure of the universe that is quite standard procedure today in physics. While the Newtonian system can still work on basic levels of reality as a predictor, on a particle or universal scale, it simply falls apart. But such paradigm shifts are not examples of one’s unfettered free thought, but examples of a critical apprehension of the structures that shape thought and action at a given moment in time. It also shows us that most of us are simply unaware of those structures that shape our thought and action even as we are unaware of the billions of particles of energy that course through our bodies out entire lives. Or, as Marshall McLuhan said, we cannot be sure who first discovered water, but we can be sure that it was not a fish! The point being that we always exist, think and act within a structured reality composed of numerous structures that conflict and cooperate with each other, but the nature of those structures goes unnoticed to us most of the time.
Such is the nature of freedom. Freedom in the academic sense ought to be about the freedom to engage the structures and norms of academic discipline and knowledge even as one observes, examines and theorizes about the objects of the universe in the midst of those very structures. This leaves room for the religious dimension of our activity in as much as it leaves room for the feminist, the multi-culturalist, the postmodernist, the liberal, the conservative, the socio-biologist, etc. It is not about finding ways to remove our boundaries as much as it is about discovering them and seeing why they exist in order to form new structures or reformed structures of reality from within. Such is the nature of our development as free beings in the world.
I recently drove by a Christian Missionary Alliance church where their billboard had this posted message:
“The truth is ruined when it is s t r e t c h e d.”
This got me thinking about something that has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus (which I assumed was the meaning behind the message). Is the reality in which we as a society choose to live directly correspondent to the events as they happen in the world and the basic facts of how science and religion operate in the world, or is it a menagerie - a fantasy that we try to ideate in a consistent circle of dissatisfaction? Before you browse away from that loaded question, stick with me a bit and see if you haven’t entertained some of these thoughts before…
Truth these days seems really hard to nail down because of all the mutually conflicting stores and narratives about … well … just about anything. For a really mundane example let’s look at oat bran or just about anything that you hear reported on the Today Show having to do with health or lifestyle. First we heard that oat bran would cure of from cancer. Then we hear that all of that hub bub was not true. Then we heard that it would help with cancer prevention, but only in larger quantities of whole grain. Now Cheerios uses that as a campaign for cholesterol reduction - skim milk helps of course. We hear things about what to do with our children so they are not raised to be delinquent or even worse, killers some day. We read and hear about the ten best ways to trim up for the summer, the best new diet, etc.
Deep down we have to know that all of this marketing feeding itself is a load of crap. For all of that health business here’s the best solution: get off your butt and exercise and try to have fun at the same time, spend a lot of time with your kids and have fun while using every moment to teach them how to be a good and disciplined person, eat appropriate portions of food using all of the food groups in even that revised pyramid, and burn the same amount of calories that you are eating. If you want to lose weight, burn more calories than you are eating. If we all did at least that, the Today Show would have nothing left to say other than five minutes about Iraq and the Sudan followed by 30 minutes of celebrity gossip. Well, that and the latest news from The Biggest Loser since that is perhaps the only show that really shows you what the truth really is for looking and feeling better!
So here we can argue that this example reveals that a basic truth of personal and social responsibility that includes an obligation to stay healthy and help each other is stretched in large part because we like to stay numb to anything that calls our conduct into question and to put the needs of the other above that of our own. This way of stretching truth follows a form where our narrative of reality does not correspond to the world in which we really live. It is a kind of “hyper-narrative” removed enough from what we know to be true in fact that we can maintain a comfortable level of selfishness and narrowness of our own perception in principle. It is radical individuality as a guiding principle of life that is supported by vast industries and technologies to make it so. The fact remains that as humans, we remain at the top of the food chain because we have superior intellect and the ability to work as a team and self-organize better than anything else on the planet. Yet we try to maintain a sense of reality that severs us from that basic and primal feature of our existence to replace it with a false pretense that we can actually go it alone and be happier. Try telling that to the paleolithic man who decides to fend for himself against a sabretooth tiger. Without the rest of the tribe his desire for a good dinner gets a nasty ironic flip.
So one way of stretching the truth is to develop a narrative or idealism that has very little referent to reality partially by ignoring what we do not want to experience personally even though many others do. In this way we can make the present refer to anything we want it to, even if that referent does not really exist but as a figment of our imaginations. This is the crux of Marx’s famous statement about religion being an opiate and how capitalism’s logical conclusion is to exist as a system that only sustains itself where the outcome in human living is that one group will prosper and another will suffer and be oppressed. But adding this as a corrective “reality check” to a notion like the simulacrum from Baudrillard where there is no reality anymore, only this narrative we have developed that has no referent to reality anymore. This suggests that the ones who can maintain that status at the top of the system can also maintain any narrative they wish in which those in lesser positions of power are all but forced to accept as truly correspondent to reality. This would be the reality as it plays out as if you were standing right there in the middle of an event as it happened. True the interpretations of all who experience that reality would no doubt differe even slightly, but no one would deny that they were indeed there.
For as long as religion has existed, which is as long as humans have existed, this position of power to create reality has been at the center of the duties of the medicine man, the priest, etc. While the god or gods, animus, essence, whatever is the object of worship and power, those who limit and wield that power in the world are those who have the special privilege of being the closest to it. The heart of the Reformation in the Christian tradition was the severing of the political power of the priest from the power of God in order to establish a “priesthood of believers” as Martin Luther described it. In the founding days of the United States the notion of a religion not limited to the intellect where only the learned few have the keys to the kingdom spread like wildfire. In both instances, the idea was that God is not bound to any structure that humankind can build and maintain and therefore, all have equal access to God. Great idea, that is until one group or priesthood believes that as a collective they have the most accurate version of truth that best corresponds to reality which by necessity means that no one else does. That’s when sectarian movements and cults begin. But this has been a fact of religion since it has been around as well. There will always be a group or persons who believe they have the story right. That does not mean that the story they tell does not have parts they do not fully understand - even though if pressed they will try to come up with an answer even if it defies reasonable standards of logic for it to seem like they have the whole thing understood and right.
So I have been talking about two kinds of truth: the first is a logical-deductive kind of truth where a premise and conclusion are directly correspondent. For instance, saying “It’s sunny and warm outside, therefore I will put on my raincoat” makes far less sense than saying “It’s raining outside, therefore I will put on my raincoat.” If said person with raincoat on that hot day is witnessed robbing a grocery store and the prime suspect happens to have been seen with that same rain coat on, the former explanation of rain would probably not hold up that well in court at all unless they were entering an insanity plea. We are simply driven to find a better and more logical explanation for that lack of logic. The second kind of truth is more narrative in nature in which one’s narrative description of events correspond to reality and would match other descriptions of those events. So for instance if someone were to say “I saw the suspect with the raincoat rob the store” along with a few others, that first person’s description would seem both more legitimate and more credible. But if one person stated they saw the person with the raincoat rob the store and others said they saw someone with a sweatshirt rob the store, that first person’s narrative now seems less legitimate.
The problem with both of these ways of describing truth is that they rely on individual perceptions of things and a judgment on the probability that those individual perceptions present the most accurate picture of reality possible. This makes it far easier to root out instances when truth is stretched even to the point of uncovering an outright lie. Where this is problematic is when a collective can meet the conditions of both the narrative and realtiy or a reality by drafting a narrative that maintains an order that is completely self-referential. In this case tools such as fear, escapism, a sense of hope in some ideal, or basic use of intense propaganda can go a long way to create that reality for others. This does not only happen in the case of sectarian or cult groups where the charismatic leader or leaders maintain that sense of reality, but it can happen through our news media and the infamous “black lines” of the government that blot out portions of the entire story for public consumption. While this might protect the public and others involved in the story it still distorts the entire story and therefore, distances the narrative from reality. That is to say, when portions of any narrative are left out or augmented, even with the best intentions, the story no longer offers a direct correspondence to reality and the truth is therefore stretched.
Of course, one could rightly argue that any narrative account of things will be necessity leave out details and hence be removed from that immediate intuition of reality. This was a problem for philosopher Edmund Husserl and found its way into the heart of critical theory. The goal here was to get at that immediate and intuitive experience of things unbound by the fetters that our inexact articulation of things creates. But, and here I am venturing out a bit, having an experience that you cannot speak about because it is a little “stretched” from reality seems improbable and just boring. So truth and reality must be articulated somehow and we must also understand that once we articulate it, we are loading with our own mistakes and limitations our articulation creates. This is especially the case when we articulate anything about what we believe, feel, or reason about religion. In that case we dare articulate and disclose the nature of the unseen. If that is not loaded with issues that make it really easy and highly probable to stretch the truth with every utterance even to one’s self, please tell me what is! I guess the irony of that billboard is that the truth of which it speaks, no doubt the resurrection of Jesus, could be one of the most stretched out truths we know. But that’s where faith comes in… But before I digress further…
What this does mean is that there will always be those who write reality for us - those who know more, control more, have more power over the knowledge we consume and experience. The only corrective to this numb acceptance of how those in powerful and influential position in the social ladder would rather tell the story of reality is for the consumer of reality to participate in the story itself. I guess this might be one way that blogging helps the situation by more or less democratizing information flow. But this flood of information from individuals and those representing independent collectivities that all produce conflicting stories of reality and biases may only complicate the matter even more. So if we can co-author the reality around us, the way out of blind acceptance is to verify how a narrative corresponds with reality before we accept it. And this means never accepting any narrative of things in its entirety. But it does not mean that if we cannot find that correspondence to ignore or stop trying to come to a better understanding of things. It should mean that we push harder to get to the truth by sharpening our critical lenses. Settling for anything else might just subject us to believe in a world that does not really exist…! Still wondering what I am taling about if you got this far? Watch the film Wag the Dog for a good laugh. I would say watch I “Heart” Huckabees, but that is way to dense for even me…
