2 comments
7 Nov 2004 @ 09:36 by ov : Commencement
Dianne I would like to thank you for finding and posting this article. I notice that it was posted over two months ago, but for some reason I only discovered it last week. I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about it, and I've noticed that it reflects a lot of the proactive and positive inquiries that have been happening lately in some of the logs around NCN. Most of these comments will be excerpts, and perhaps later I will add some more thoughts of my own.
The first article of three is about a commencement speech that she gave to graduating students at the University of Utah, where she was also being awarded with an honary doctorate in humanities.
"Before the speech, I had had the great pleasure of meeting with a group of graduating seniors. What I heard were mature voices, steady minds, speaking from a generation that had witnessed the beginning of two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, while students at the university. They were not interested in ideas or language that polarized people: Christianity vs. Islam; republicans vs. democrats; Mormons vs. non-Mormons; wilderness vs. development. They talked about alternatives, solutions, how to speak a language that opens hearts rather than closes them. These students were acutely aware of complexities and hesitant to take sides before considering all the evidence."
Terry's speech reflected those values expressed above. She listed some criteria such as in the open space of democracy:
- there is room for dissent.
- there is room for differences.
- the health of the environment is seen as the wealth of our communities. We remember that our character has been shaped by the diversity of America's landscapes and it is precisely that character that will protect it. Cooperation is valued more than competition; prosperity becomes the caretaker of poverty. The humanities are not peripheral, but the very art of what it means to be human.
- is a landscape that encourages diversity and discourages conformity.
- can also be messy and chaotic. It requires patience and persistence.
- every vote counts and every vote is counted.
- beauty is not optional, but essential to our survival as a species. And technology is not rendered at the expense of life, but developed out of a reverence for life.
"Reverence for life" was a point that was worthy of repeating.
Her speech continued with a call to think, and to question tyranny, and finished up with following excerpts.
"Our insistence on democracy is based on our resistance to complacency. To be engaged. To participate. We may be wrong. We will make mistakes. But we can engage in spirited conversation, cherishing the vitality of the struggle. Democracy is built upon the right to be insecure. We are vulnerable. And we are vulnerable together. Question. Stand. Speak. Act. Make us uncomfortable. Make us think. Make us feel. Keep us free."
The response was very interesting, the humanity students cheered, and the business studends booed and gave catcalls. Terry said she was witnessing the ideological split that reflected the rest of the nation. The university officials were not that happy with her speech. Senator Bennett expressed his strong dissent to her speech, and in a letter to her explained his position and then asked her "what she would be willing to die for." She thought about it for a few weeks and turned the question around and asked him "what would he be willing to live for."
Terry explains the positive side of this question further in her second article, which I've summarized in the next comment. I have a few ov comments though, and they concern the problems of polarization. As soon as the "with us or against us" proposition is accepted, both sides are loser strategies that endorse conflict and opposition, and set the determining priority as death rather than life.
Any moral appeal implies that the opposing side is immoral, which falls on deaf ears because both sides think they are moraly superior to the other. Even more dangerous however is that this framing avoids and hides the amoral alternative which does not even recognize the legitimacy of morality. Reason, ideology, economics, pragmatics are all amoral conditions. Morality becomes reduced to a rhetorical tool, and the opposing side is seen as using sophistry. Is it any wonder that fundamentalists fear intelligence. And is it any wonder that intelligence is abused and needs to be evaluated within a moral context. This is not an impossible task, nor is it simple.
Humanitarian and economic are not by definition dichotomous, but the differt responses between the humanities faculities and the business faculties in attendance at the commencement ceremony show that this is a key element of our current polarization.
Another issue which seldom gets discussed is whether the moral foundation is based on exclusion or inclusion. This is the "lifeboat game" on a global scale, and it underlies all discussions on this issue, but it would be taboo to even mention it, and as a result both sides are talking to deaf ears.
Life and death, moral and immoral, inclusive and exclusive, and all of these need to be seen as polarizing extremes.
23 Aug 2004 @ 01:20, by D