Hey Brooks decided to respond to my post too!

What Life Asks of Us

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

This approach is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness. But there is another, older way of living, and it was discussed in a neglected book that came out last summer called “On Thinking Institutionally” by the political scientist Hugh Heclo.

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.

In 2005, Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Heclo cites his speech as an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect ... . If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game ... did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

I thought it worth devoting a column to institutional thinking because I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most. Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.

Second, institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.

Patriotism, First Principles, and a UChicago Education

Hey duck- sorry its been so long sense I last posted. I have a long piece on Gaza, that I just never managed to get updated quickly enough. If the cease fires holds for a few days I'll try to wrap that up soon.

In the mean time, I'm carrying a conversation I've been having with many of you over the past few weeks onto the blog, that for a miracle of a change has nothing to do with irregular warfare, the Middle East, South Asia or any of my other typical soup boxes.

As many of you know I'm applying to a number of government jobs for next year. as part of the application they almost all ask some variation of "why do you want this job". And here's where I run into trouble. This SHOULD be totally straight forward, right? A second grader knows the answer here... "Because i want to serve my country though X department". And I'm a perfectly good MUNer, i should be able to write something compelling. But (much to the vexation of all you poor suffering souls who have had to listen to me work on these) that doesn't seem to be happening. Patriotism just seems to be this fundamentally problematic concept for me.

Some of this is undoubtedly from my liberal construction of patriotism:

If conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past, liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past. Consider Obama's original answer about the flag pin: "I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said last fall. "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism." Will make this country great? It wasn't great in the past? It's not great as it is?

The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law. American history is a chronicle of the distance between those ideals and reality. And American patriotism is the struggle to narrow the gap. Thus, patriotism isn't about honoring and replicating the past; it's about surpassing it.

Because I see a gap, rather then a concrete culture, theres more room for my native cynicism to creep into my world view. But i just dont think that is the entire sum of the problem.

But I have good news.

I've found someone to blame.

Better yet, I've found someone interesting to blame.

No, not the very evil Bush administration, that's just not sporting, and its not in the spirit of these days of change.

I blame the University of Chicago education that I've loved so much, including my time in MUN.

There are two reasons that I'm choosing to lay the blame at the foot of our gargoyle decked ivory towers. The first (and frankly rather uninteresting one) is that the U of C make us all perfectionist that think about things too hard. yaddad yadda yaddad... academics can't deal with the real world, ect ect. Believe me, I'm not dismissive of the problem that this creates (ask me about my family some time), but this is water thats been gone over many many times, so I'll save us the air space.

The second, and more pertinent, piece of the puzzle has to do very specifically with the U of C education, enshrined in the General Education Core Curriculum. While I'm not disputing that there are other acceptable Core sequences, my own selection of PIR, Philosophical Perspectives and Western Civ (ok Italian, but its the same narrative arc) can certainly be classed as a good model for the education the U of C advertises. Covering a massive chunk of the western cannon in philosophy, political science and pre-modern European history, these are the classes that are intended to form the bedrock of our education, that provide "opportunities for critical inquiry and the discovery of knowledge [by] studying original texts and of formulating original problems based on the study of those texts."

But in the University's quest to train us to evaluate a range of primary texts, there is also a silent privileging of a specific type of argumentation. We are trained to dissect the logic of philosophers, either by breaking down the argument of a specific thinker, or by putting different descriptions of the ways in which things work into dialogue with one another. And in this we receive a world class education. But where the University misses the boat is that all of this is all done at the level of second order arguments, rather than by examining the validity of First Principles.

First Principles are those awkward fundamental assumptions that underpin all this arguments, including claim about what we should be aiming for, what we should care about, and sometimes, what human nature is. Statements like "human life has value", "pain is bad", and "justice is important" are certainly things we grapple with in Core classes, but when it comes time to write a paper we argue not that "Nietzsche is wrong because he doesnt place a high enough premium on human life" but instead that "Nietzsche's arguments are fundamentally flawed, because his assumptions about humanity's capacity for empathy are contradicted by his understanding of family relations". Please note that my argument isn't that First Principle argument are in any way more important then Second Order analysis (I think both are critical). Its that there is a massive privileging of one over the other.

This same problem also exists in MUN. Never, in four years of staffing and competing have I heard anyone I respect make arguments about First Principles. In fact, I'm usually among the first to start mocking the "human rights kids" (add the derogatory drawl to that intonation please) who occasionally try. Instead, good delegates debate how to construct policy given pre-established ends, and how to spin our positions to garner support.

The problem is that all of this has not only made me somewhat clumsy at articulating these underlying principles though lack of practice, it has made me fundamentally uncomfortable using them in anything I see as being "intellectually serious" discourse. And so "America is a good thing" goes from being something that I can articulate and grapple with in a rational way, to being a scary blob of emotions, something indelicate to talk about. I have to be argued into a corner to admit it, and then feel compelled to redefine a poke at it until I'm blue in the face.



So how about it kids? Do you think that our education is slanted the way I do? Is it a problem that it is? and how about this country of our (hey it inauguration day, it seems fitting)? or is Auntie el-Belle just crazy?

UPDATE:
Or I could have just waited for today's speech, and had the answer handed to me:

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honour them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

How to find your favorite think tank. Seriously, I'm still not over how FP went from being the home of uselessness to the source of all that is good in the universe.