Philosophical notes…
On God, Bob Dylan, and the Holocaust
I’m teaching a class on religious ethics at the moment. I couldn’t bring myself to cover the usual set of topics about sex and gender, abortion, euthanasia, and the various “real” life questions in between. There are a number of ethics classes that deal with these kinds of topics across the university curriculum. What concerned me, chiefly, in a religious ethics class, was the question of theodicy, i.e. “Is God ethical?” How can anyone even consider religious ethics after the Holocaust? In what sense is belief in a good, loving, all powerful God possible after the twentieth century? So, the course covers 10 different ways of thinking about this question from theologians, atheists, philosophers and the like. It begins with the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible, and continues on to Augustine, Kant, Luther, Kierkegaard, Arendt, Levinas, Bonhoefer, and Zizek, among others. I don’t teach to answer the question definitively (although a number of compelling approaches to the question are offered), but more to respond to a common complaint I hear concerning the presumed unwillingness of religious people to face the question, openly and honestly. As Ron Rosenbaum wrote in an interesting article for the Chronicle on Bob Dylan’s reference to Hitler in Tarantula:
In those eight words—“hitler did not change history. hitler WAS history”—it seems to me, Dylan is not saying Hitler’s evil genius was unique, exceptional. He’s saying Hitler represents—embodies—a distillation of all the horrors routinely perpetrated by human civilization… “Our God problem,” I said, was the abject failure of post-Holocaust Jewish theodicy: The attempt to maintain a belief in a God who had given Hitler free rein to murder. For Jewish scholars and theologians, it seemed to me, post-Holocaust theodicy should be the first, if not only, subject of their study.
It seems to me Rosenbaum is right. What’s troubling is how difficult it is to speak adequately about these things, which is the real reason Ron writes. He gave a lecture which fostered a response that haunted him, troubled him to the degree to which he had to respond. He writes, I suppose, what all who ask these questions must write in the end: “I apologize.”
I believe my feelings were as legitimate as his feeling of faithfulness, my anger as legitimate as his desire to continue a lifetime of belief and consolation. But who knows what losses he endured and how he had continued to love God?…
…Hitler is dead, and I had nonetheless hurt the feelings of an undoubtedly good man to make a point about Hitler, God, and Bob Dylan. That wasn’t my purpose, nor is my purpose here to take pride in my newly awakened empathy for my questioner. It’s to register an honest evolution of feeling from an anger that was not sufficiently separated from a desire to hurt those religious figures who assumed some special authority if not holiness, and whom I felt had failed me and their followers. In a place for truth-telling—the academy—I feel remorse for my zeal to make the truth hurt.
And though he and I still may well differ, for that I apologize to him.
Ron Rosenbaum, “The Naked Truth,” The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/IuAvMw
The Thingy-ness of Books
“Seriously, much is to be gained by ebooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness, a little bit of humanity. Do you know what John Updike used to do the first thing he would get a copy of one of his new books with Alfred A Knopf? He would smell it. Then he’d run his hands over the ragged paper, and the pungent ink, and the daggled edges of the pages. All those years all those books he never got tired of it. Now, I am all for the iPad, but trust me, smelling it will get you nowhere.” –Chip Kidd: Designing Books is No Laughing Matter. Ok, it is. On TED: http://bit.ly/HiUyyB
Charles Taylor Interview
Charles Taylor interview on his new book, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience: “The original model of secularism was one in which a very dominant religious group had to fight with other kinds of tendencies. That was the situation in France in the 19th century but it doesn’t at all describe modern-day Canada or the UK. The kind of secularism [advanced in the book] answers the question, ‘How do we live together?’” - http://bit.ly/AAAs5I
The cost of homelessness
The cost of homelessness: “We learned that you could either sustain people in homelessness for $35,000 to $150,000 a year, or you could literally end their homelessness for $13,000 to $25,000 a year,” he said. - http://bit.ly/ySAORx
The Atheist Fatwa
“De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality. ‘To say something along the lines of “I’m an atheist; I think religions are not all bad” has become a dramatically peculiar thing to say and if you do say it on the internet you will get savage messages calling you a fascist, an idiot or a fool. This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?’” - “The God Wars,” The New Statesman http://bit.ly/xUQMw4
Voluminous
“Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their ethereality and become experiences, turning points in an insufficiently clarified existence, and thereby acquire the almost mystical (but also fallible) intimacy of memory…The library, like the book, is under assault by the new technologies, which propose to collect and to deliver texts differently, more efficiently, outside of space and in a rush of time…what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.”
- Leon Wieseltier, “Voluminous,” The New Republic: http://bit.ly/Anv1yD
Taking Care in Teaching
“One [misconception], said Mahzarin R. Banaji, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is what she called a ‘myth’ about different learning styles, in which it is thought that some students learn best visually, others by hearing, and still others kinesthetically.’There’s no evidence, zero, that teaching methods should be matched up with different learning styles,” Ms. Banaji said. “It’s intuitively appealing, but not scientifically supported.’”
I picked out this quote from the Chronicle article, “Harvard Conference Seeks to Jolt University Teaching,” because it’s always bothered me how pervasive this myth is today. We often hear things like, “Oh, I’m a visual learner. I can’t understand lectures on quantum mechanics.” Turns out it’s tough to prove.
And it makes sense too. I mean, as kids, we live or die by our ability to listen to our parents. Mothers don’t typically spend a lot of time trying to teach their kids kinesthetically, or draw a visual diagram when crossing the street. They just say, “Grab my hand!” or “Look both ways!”
Of course this example includes seeing, hearing and doing, and some kids may get more out of each, but we all have the ability to listen when it really matters to us. This is why I think the more they test the connection between teaching to these individual styles and actual learning results, the more they find it doesn’t amount to much.
I’d suggest that a more basic way to consider teaching and learning outcomes is to explore practical ways to promote “care.” The point I take from the example above is that we tend to learn the things that we care about from people who demonstrate that they care about us. A simple pedagogical principle is summed up in polite ways we say good-bye, “take care.”
The philosophical tradition that I tend to spend the most time in finds its roots in the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had a lot to say about what it means to exist, or to be-there [Dasein]. He was particularly interested in how our being is directed towards particular things in the world. How do things matter to us? Not just why things matter, but how do they come to be important for us? Heidegger thought that this was a key question to understanding the world we live in. A key category he developed in this regard was Sorge, the German word for care. A prominent example Heidegger gives is a carpenter’s hammer. If we want to know what it is, we might think to investigate its material properties, it’s composition as metal or wood. But Heidegger argues that this doesn’t tell us what it is for us. To understand how it matters for us, you need to ask how it fits into the carpenter’s set of concerns, as a device used to build things, as an artistic tool, as a way of bringing order in his or her world.
Much more could be said here, but the point is that understanding why you care about something is crucial to what you study. Understanding how you end up caring about something is crucial to thinking about good teaching and learning.
A modest suggestion from my own limited experience about what’s gone wrong with university education follows from this. The problem is not that lectures are not visual or kinesthetic enough. Rather, this is just a symptom of a deeper problem, which is that the basic context which fosters our learning as human beings has been broken. That is:
- We’re often lectured about subjects that seem irrelevant to our lives
- By lecturers who seem distant and rather disinterested.
Interestingly, these two points relate directly to most people I talk to about their best learning experiences.
Firstly, people often comment that the subject areas that they eventually end up majoring in at university are the things that were either compellingly interesting to them or that they could see were crucial to their future success, i.e. they cared a lot about them. This also explains why some people who were told early in life that they weren’t university material, end up being some of the most knowledgeable experts because they just got to working and learned what they needed to know on the way. They found that they could easily read about what they cared about.
Secondly, when most people think back on their intellectual development, there are often great teachers that figure highly. With all the talk on improving education these days, the surveys keep showing the same result: teachers matter. This is not to say that there is any one method or magic bullet for good teaching. Rather, there are habits or virtues such as willingness, persistence and believing in students that matter most to learning. People often cite the teacher who took the time to encourage them or just had a way of explaining the subject that most interested them. Sometimes its a teacher early on in middle school or even kindergarten who believed in them when no one else did.
In any case, I have to admit, I do spend time making my lectures as visual and interactive as I can because I still think seeing, hearing and dialoguing on a subject helps embodied human beings with eyes and ears learn. But, more and more, I’m coming to think that my main focus is to keep working to convey in my courses that:
- What students are being asked to learn is relevant and very important to their future success (yes, the study of philosophy is still really important in the world today); and,
- As their lecturer, I do actually care about their learning and future, and will keep trying week after week to help them learn (even though I, like them, have my own research deadlines to meet).