About Me
Thank you for visiting my website. If you would like to find out more about me in the form of a traditional résumé, just click on any photo of me. But the following descriptions might tell you more than the résumé. Including the fact that they are so long-winded.
My college friend, Garth Dickey, loved to talk about philosophy. He had this way of repeatedly interrupting our conversations with the following one-sentence quote from Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:
"Does man think because he has found that thinking pays?"
Every time Garth quoted it, it bugged me. I was not what you would have called a hippie. But at the same time, I was not into doing things because they paid. Being paid was the reason that mercenaries fought for the enemy, and why so many corporations were willing to shortchange the public interest. Being paid was not something I aspired to. In addition, since I was a psychology major who believed that the mind and brain and thinking made humans great, the possibility that thinking could be nothing more than a cheap payoff scheme bummed me out.
Fast forward 40 years. The question still bugs me. In comparison to my college years, I spend just as much time engaging in thinking. It is still a big deal. But Garth was right, and there is one type of thinking that always makes me feel like a sellout.
Here is a first example involving genres of music. You have undoubtedly heard someone talk about country music or rap or heavy metal or opera and say: "I know that a lot of people are into it, but it doesn't do anything for me and I am not going to listen to it." Okay. That's pretty straightforward. And it sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to think. But I cannot adopt it without feeling like a scumbag. When it comes to some particular type of music, I want to hear what lovers of that music hear. The genre doesn't matter. Death metal, mafioso rap, 16th century opera, new age ambient - take your pick. What matters isn't the type of music. What matters is the fact that people get drawn to a type of experience that I can't appreciate. I have no way of connecting with it and including it as something of value.
If my reaction is, "I want nothing to do with it because it doesn't do anything for me," I feel like I have made a heartless decision: "no payoff, no involvement by moi."
The heartless part is related to disregard, and the thought that it would be just fine for me to go through life regardless and not hold anything in regard if I chose not to. Since I have spent almost 90% of my life as either a student or teacher, I have thought about this question a lot in the context of education. Go back to school. Get an education. Give yourself choices and make more of yourself (or more accurately, more for yourself) than just a maintenance worker (unclogging drains, fixing broken parts) or a custodial worker (cleaning, mopping, and emptying trash). In the United States, high school graduates earn about twice the yearly income of adults who never go beyond 8th grade; college graduates earn about 50% more than high school graduates; and PhD's earn about 50% more than college grads. In short: education pays.
But there is a very bizarre split going on here. Cleaning and emptying trash belong in the category of "caretaking." They exemplify being-of-service. Being-of-service is an admirable human endeavor. Why would we transform learning into an escape from admirable human endeavors? Isn't learning supposed to promote that stuff?
As suspicious as I am about dichotomies, I keep coming back to one in this case. It is based on the difference between inclusivity and exclusivity. Both of these words come from the Latin verb claudere, to shut. Inclusivity shuts in. Exclusivity shuts out. Each approach has its consequences.
For exclusivity, the main consequence is some payoff. You get privileges. You can be selective. You are allowed to proceed regardless. Being exclusive is like driving your car into a one-way tunnel, deciding that you want to change direction, and simply backing out. Even though the whole point of the tunnel is to prevent you from doing so.
Appreciating the fullness of experience is the same to me as driving through a one-way tunnel. Being inclusive takes away your option of backing out. It forces you to drive out the other end, no matter how far the tunnel extends. Seeing experience through - finding out where it leads and how all of the pieces fit - is the main consequence of inclusivity.
There is also one experience in which inclusivity and exclusivity feel particularly at odds to me, and that is the experience of kindness. "Kindness" can mean a quality of my heart (considerate, generous, caring, accommodating, cooperative, forgiving, merciful) or it can mean a quality of my mind (kind-ness, i.e., the ability to understand the kind of thing that something is, the ability to understand its nature and potential). Unless I give myself over to something, surrender to it, allow myself to get swept up in its dynamic, I cannot know what kind of thing it is. When I find myself avoiding that kind of involvement, I feel like my thinking is into being turned into something un-kind. Exclusivity feels like it is stripping the kind-ness out.
I assume that everything I experience comes equipped with a certain dynamic, a certain "umph," a certain "gist." Everything comes complete with a "that's-the-way-it-is." Here is an example involving the color blue. When I see something that is blue in color, it never feels to me like a neutral, unemotional physical event. It never feels like the presence of a visual stimulus initiating a response in the photoreceptor cells of my retina, followed by the triggering of a G-protein-coupled receptor and initiation of a signaling cascade that carries information from my retina to my cerebral cortex by way of my lateral geniculate nucleus. Blue is never that. I could never grab the response in my retina and feel like I had my hands on blue. Blue is not up for grabs in that way. Blue is woven into people's experience in a gzillion different ways. For me, part of blue is lying on my back and gazing up at a cloudless sun-filled summer sky. I have no idea how far away it is. I have no idea where it starts and where it stops. I have no idea about its size. But it is right there and I get swept up. Not literally, of course. But in the sense of getting lost in my experience. This blue sky experience is how inclusivity feels to me. It feels like forgetting about what's at hand (or handy) as well as whatever might be up for grabs. People say, "Oh, that is very interesting!" As if they have done the world a favor by taking hold of one of its parts and designating that part as a matter of interest. Interesting doesn't work that way. When it comes to interesting, I am not the point and the interest I bring is not the point. The things out there around me are the point. Their proximity to me is irrelevant. If I go around pointing out how interesting things are to me, it feels like I am detracting from their value.
Which brings me to the experience that I always seem to have particular trouble with - the experience of choice. For me, choosing feels like a guaranteed way of cheating experience and detracting from its value.
In its simplest definition, choice involves the act of selecting from two or more possibilities. Some people say that all we ever do 24/7 is make choices. We always have choices. We cannot help but make them. Even not choosing is itself a choice. (You've heard people say that, right?) For me, this type of thinking doesn't work because it is predicated on the principle of exclusivity. Let's suppose there is possibility A and possibility B. And let's suppose that I choose possibility A. And let's say that I go on to formulate my life according to that possibility. But what I want to know is, where did A and B come from? What gave rise to A and B in the first place? The German philosopher Martin Heidegger was obviously not the first to write about choices and the world. But what he wrote captures my experience to a T. And what he wrote was this: if I am dead set on imagining my life as a set of choices, then I better first figure out how the world that provided me with those choices in the first place. I cannot formulate my life according to my choices unless I can somehow figure out how the world itself got formulated, since any option I choose must originate in the world. And of course, figuring out how the world got formulated is something that nobody can do. Or to say it another way: the world that I am brought into at birth is already carefully configured. I am also carefully configured before I arrive in it. So while I can think about my life as a series of choices, I am also faking myself out with this approach because all of my choices are taking place in a context I can't figure out.
Choosing this and not that feels exclusionary to me, like I am providing myself with a bogus privilege. I cannot make myself better off by making a choice, since no matter what choice I decide to make, I will always need a place to be better off in, and that place is the world at large whose formulation I cannot understand. So when I am experiencing the world at large in my everyday life, I have no way of knowing what part of my experience might be dispensable or appropriate for disregard. In order for my experience to feel consistent with my lack of knowledge, I feel like I am obligated to treat every aspect of my experience as indispensable and non-expendable. In other words, nothing can be excluded, and the idea of payoff takes a back seat to accommodation of the world at large as I encounter it in whatever context. And in contrast to the way that many people incorrectly summarize the position of Darwin: there is no survival of the fittest, survival of those who chose best, got selected for special privileges, and received maximal payoff. There is only survival of the fitting - survival of those who best accommodated the world at large, everything included, and nothing approached with disregard.
FOR THE RECORD: I also love prime time TV, blockbuster movies, and shopping malls. My favorites are listed here.
