Chimamanda Adichie and The Danger of a Single Story

One of the most inspiring TED Talks I've run across, and was happy to place on our Yo Ghana! website, is Chimamanda Adichie's inspiring "The Danger of a Single Story."

Adichie has been for the past few years the most prominent African writer in the U.S.  Half a Yellow Sun has already been made into a film, and Americanah is about to be.

Like her novels, "The Danger of a Single Story" is a testament to the diversity of the human experience and our need to get to know each other personally rather than through stereotypes.  She of course addresses American stereotypes of Africa.  But she also addresses her own blind spots, discovered when she visited Mexico and the home of her family's houseboy, for example.

Speaking of houseboys, one of the most powerful parts of Half a Yellow Sun comes when the white British journalist decides that Biafra's story is best told not by himself, but by a houseboy.  The first mistake we people of privilege make is to assume that our story is the only story.  The second, often made shortly after discovering that other people have their own stories, is to presume to tell it for them.

The world is blessed to have such a superb story teller to listen to and learn from in Chimamanda Adichie.

Humility and Education, Part II

A key point in my intellectual and academic development arrived many years ago, several years removed from graduate school.  I was, as they say, "burned out."  I still remember how depressed I felt in the summer of 1980 as I spent day after day on the 4th floor of PLC at the University of Oregon, reading 1,000 pages or more of books that I believed I needed to master to be a decent historian.  I had no plan opening the books, other than to learn everything in them.  I took no notes.  And of course I remember very little of their content.  I do remember how much I hated the whole thing.  But I believed that such discipline was necessary to master my subjects, my fields.  A scholar should be master of her or his subjects.

Some years later, the blessed day arrived when it occurred to me that knowledge is like an ocean.  It's so large that it might as well be infinite, and every little droplet or bit or ecosystem is connected to countless other complicated systems.  But every little piece of it is also endlessly fascinating.  The closer you look, the more you realize that. It's a pleasure to dip into it, even if--or maybe because--you constantly run up against limitations of intellect and time.

Learning undertaken with a deeper appreciation of the immensity of the subject and my own (human and personal) limitations has been much more enjoyable.  When mastery is out of the question, the mind is free to explore, secure in the knowledge that one's knowledge is always incomplete and subject to revision.  I believe that this approach also helps with my teaching, as I can sincerely assure my students that I may or may know much more about a subject than they do, but that both of us really know very little and are both in the same boat, so to speak.

Humility and Education

Our American Identities cluster had a fine meeting the other day.

 The half dozen or so people who teach the cluster's sophomore inquiry classes are trying to discern what we have in common in our teaching approaches.

One of our faculty explained that the key requirement of her class is for students to identify what they hold sacred.  She is using the term, I should hasten to add, in the secular sense.  All of us have certain beliefs or assumptions that we hold sacred, and it drives us nuts when others do not share these assumptions.  For my friend, Carrie, it's the sacredness of being there for your family, immediate and extended (that, and having the salt and pepper shakers properly aligned with each other, at home or camping, doesn't matter).  For many Libertarians, like my wild Uncle John, it's the concept of self reliance and shrinking government.

Problem is, when we bump up against people with other assumptions, we tend to keep repeating our beliefs rather than examining them and other people's more closely, let alone considering that our sacred beliefs are bound to be incomplete, that they should be, in a very real sense, contingent and open to revision, even as they guide us.

Reinhold Niebuhr years ago pointed out that devout Christians should be particularly sensitive to the limitations of the human mind, that every Christian should rest assured that some of her or his dearest beliefs and assumptions about God are bound to be wrong--we just don't know which ones.

Humility, then, is a great virtue in intellectual and religious life, alike.  But we do not seem to be predisposed to it.

Your One Wild and Precious Life

2014 was a difficult year in that it began with two friends battling cancer that proved fatal and ended with two more friends making the same struggle.

Many people have observed that Americans tend to deny death.  We live a long time, have a lot of resources at our disposal to stave off death, and many of us are pretty advanced in years before we witness the death of someone close to us.

This might have something to do with the fact that Americans often take a long time to grow up and that we are so resistant to limits.  Death is a great limiter.  No amount of money or privilege can stop it.  But we pretend otherwise for decades.

Bill and Bee Jai died way too soon.  They still had a lot to do and a great deal to offer the rest of us.  Death surprised them and broke the hearts of those who love them.

Hitting my mid-fifties depressed me for several years.  It hit me that my life was likely more than half over, and that many of the dreams that I had assumed I'd get to some day would instead die on the vine.  Losing these close friends has prompted me to realize that understanding that we don't have all the time in the world is in fact a gift.  Appearances to the contrary, our days are indeed numbered, and the number may be much lower than we assume.  Rather than moving from the distraction and boredom that so often characterizes living like life will never end to feeling sorry for ourselves because it will, in fact end, we could instead move forward, with purpose and gratitude.

As Mary Oliver puts it:

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?