Russia Out of Ukraine!!!

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Teaching a Wesleyan course online presents me with the opportunity to interact with students from scores of different countries. I am teaching The Modern and the Postmodern in Middletown, and the course is also available on the Coursera platform. Here in what students often call the “campus bubble” our political issues often seem abstract or “first world problems.” But for students in the same class but in different parts of the world, politics (and even the intellectual issues in the class) are sometimes a matter of life and death.

Recently Arianna posted the following on our class Facebook page:

Dear friends, I want to say that what we read here is very important. The last couple of weeks I do not have time for this and I apologize to the teacher, but I’ll catch up with you! In Ukraine, the revolution now. My friends and I smell smoke, because our capital (Kiev) on fire. Texts we read here, helping to become conscious, self-reliant. This contributes to empathy and transparency.
Thank you. We will win!
(Pardon my French)

There followed exchanges that linked some of the concepts in political philosophy we are studying with the quickly changing situation on the streets of Kiev. How can a revolution be successful, especially when confronted with violence? How does a new regime establish legitimacy?

Last week it seemed that Arianna and her fellow-citizens had won. Then Russia turned its attention from making authoritarianism attractive via the Olympics to real geopolitical stakes in Crimea. This morning Arianna posted this from a friend:

“This sunny sunday morning feeling when you wake up and your country is on the edge of war. You can’t sleep, eat, feel. Yesterday Russia’s parliament officially approved the use of its military in Ukraine. The south of the country (Crimea) today is basically occupied by the russian army. What? Militaries enter the territory of a sovereign country quietly and occupy it in the 21st century just like that? “Russia, the UK and the USA undertake to respect Ukraine’s borders in accordance with the principles of the 1975 CSCE Final Act, to abstain from the use or threat of force against Ukraine, to support Ukraine where an attempt is made to place pressure on it by economic coercion, and to bring any incident of aggression by a nuclear power before the UN Security Council”, – states the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances signed in 1994. The autonomy of Ukraine was guaranteed in return on it becoming a non-nuclear state. And what do we see now? It’s hard to believe that after everything that has been happening in my beloved Motherland during these 3 months, after all those people who were injured or died fighting for the freedom and democracy, Russia de facto declares a war against Ukraine. Please, wake me up, tell me it’s just a fucked up nightmare.” my friend, Inna

There are many reports now giving a context for Arianna’s and Inna’s first-hand accounts. Timothy Snyder’s account here seems particularly helpful.

I understand that it is not clear what exactly the United States and the European Union should do to stop this blatant act of aggression against Ukraine. But let’s begin by acknowledging that Putin’s regime, the same regime that (in the name of protecting national sovereignty) is supporting the Syrian dictatorship’s murderous war against its own people, has just invaded its sovereign neighbor. These are historical nightmares, at the very least, we should not ignore.

Arianna and her friends are struggling for the future of the country, while they are also trying to build more democratic political practices. How can we show our solidarity?

 

Theater and Music Theses Enliven the Campus

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Last night I had the pleasure of seeing one of the many fine student productions presented by the Theater Department at the Patricelli ’92 Theater. Claire Whitehouse ’14 adapted Matilde Mellibovsky’s Circle of Love Over Death and created A La Ronda, a play that focuses on the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Claire spent months in Argentina and was deeply impressed by the women who refused to forget “the disappeared,” and showed amazing resilience and courage in their struggle for social justice. The ensemble (Connie Des Marais ’17, Helen Handelman ’16, Grace Herman-Holland ’15, Aileen Lambert ’16, and Dominique Moore ’14) was terrific in this moving portrait of the will-to-remember and the effort to turn individual mourning into collective action. The faculty, Stage Manager (Alma Sanchez-Eppler ’14 — who recently presented her own production) and production team must be very proud. Bravo to all! The play continues through Saturday night… And stay tuned for great thesis theater through the rest of the semester.

Nathan Repasz ’14 will be giving a recital tonight at 7 pm as part of his senior thesis. Drums will be at the core of the concert. Throughout the semester there are powerful recitals by our amazingly talented students, and I only wish I could attend more of them.

This weekend performances are waiting for you! Don’t deny yourselves the pleasures they bring!! THIS IS WHY.

Congratulations and Good Luck to the Wes Athletes!

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Great news from swimming and diving coach Peter Solomon: Angela Slevin ’15 has qualified and is being invited to compete in this year’s Div. III NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships being held March 19th – 22nd in Indianapolis, IN.  Angela will be competing in the 1,650-yard (mile) Freestyle, 500-yard Freestyle, and the 200-yard Freestyle events during this 4-day competition.  We think that Angela is the first Wesleyan swimmer since 2006 to have qualified for the national championships.

On a frozen surface, the women’s hockey team has had a heck of a season so far. To close out regular play, the Cardinals tied Trinity in two straight games. This capped off one of their best regular seasons in many years.  The Cardinals qualified for the NESCAC tournament for the first time since the 2003-04 season.  The fifth seeding equals the team’s highest ever in the playoffs.

In women’s squash, Mary Foster ’14 was named to the all NESCAC squad for the fourth straight year. And Lauren Nelson ’15 was also honored with an all NESCAC nod. In men’s squash, John Steele ’14 had another superb season, and was also recognized by the conference for his exemplary play. Guy Davidson ’16 also was recognized for a fine season.

Shona Kerr was awarded Coach-of-the-Year honors for the second time in four years! What wonderful recognition from her peers!

Both men and women’s hockey teams are heading for the playoffs, and we wish them all the best. The “spring” athletes have been working hard for some time already, and I can imagine they are looking forward to the March break. As I left the gym last night (dragging myself out of the fitness center), I bumped into the chipper, upbeat women’s lacrosse team. They seemed raring to go, even if they had just finished what must have been an icy-cold practice. I straightened up and tried to look a little less bedraggled.

Good luck to those finishing their seasons, and all the best to those who are just getting underway!  Go WES!

Sigmund Freud on Boycotts, Conflict and Culture

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Sigmund Freud asked to offer a guest blog. We posted it yesterday on The HuffingtonPost.

Sigmund_Freud_Anciano

In December I enjoyed announcing to the guards at The Jewish Museum that my name was Sigmund Freud, and that I was coming for the Wish You Were Here event. I died in 1939 (and it was enough already), but Michael Roth had been invited to speak for me, as me. Roth was interviewed in my place — not just to talk about me. He’s a historian, unanalyzed I regret to say, but he did curate a large exhibition about my work that came to the museum almost 20 years ago. How he had the chutzpah to speak as me I can’t say, but the crowd seemed to really enjoy it. He probably went too far in his nasty (but accurate) characterization of Jung, but hey, it’s a Jewish Museum.

When the museum agreed to accept the exhibition about my work in the 1990s, it was a brave act. Psychoanalysis is controversial, and at that time its detractors were making nice careers for themselves. When even the plans for the exhibition were under sharp attack, The Jewish Museum stepped forward and agreed to be a venue for the show, Freud: Conflict and Culture. This was an institution that would take risks, and so I wasn’t all that surprised in December when the head curator announced that Franz Kafka would be the next speaker in the series, and that the controversial feminist philosopher Judith Butler would speak for Kafka. I was proud to be in the museum at that moment, even in the guise of Michael Roth. After all, museums are not just custodians of culture, they should be places of active engagement. Roth tells me that Judith Butler had been wrestling with Kafka for years, and that she is among our most fertile philosophical minds. She is also a supporter of the BDS movement to isolate Israel and challenge its occupation of the territories. But she wasn’t asked to talk about Israel. She would be Kafka, and at a Jewish museum they would be able to live with that tension. Good.

But no. Roth tells me that the event has been cancelled because Butler’s politics are just too controversial. Here’s what the press release says:

While her political views were not a factor in her participation, the debates about her politics have become a distraction making it impossible to present the conversation about Kafka as intended. Butler offers this comment: “I was very much looking forward to the discussion of Kafka in The Jewish Museum, and to affirm the value of Kafka’s literary work in that setting.”The March 6th program “Wish You Were Here: Franz Kafka” will not take place.

What a sad commentary on the Jewish community’s tolerance for debate these days! It’s not as if the event had to be cancelled because of the philosopher’s views on Kafka made her an inappropriate spokesperson for the writer. The fact that Butler had taken a strong stand against a particular variety of Zionism just disqualified her from talking about one of the most important writers of the last century. Now, I’m no literary critic (my tastes run toward crime fiction and the fantastic these days), but Franz Kafka would seem like just the right person to “bring back” after having spoken with me about how to understand the disguises we use to mask our conflicting impulses. But apparently, even in the New York Jewish community, culture we can debate about, but conflict over Israel we cannot abide.

Roth tells me in America today conflict is everywhere, but that people are determined to hear only from those with whom they know they will agree. Around the time he was speaking for me in New York, he wrote an angry op-ed condemning the American Studies boycott of Israeli universities, calling it “a repugnant attack on academic freedom.” Roth has known Butler since they were both young assistant professors, and he strongly disagrees with her approach to Israel and the occupation. He just doesn’t understand why this kind of disagreement should get in the way of hearing her bring Kafka back for a conversation. So now he wants to collaborate on a short essay critical of a cultural context in which a gifted philosopher won’t be able to talk about European literature because of her views on Middle East politics. You’re reading it.

Having lived most of my life in Vienna, I know a little something about conflict. It’s easier (and sometimes even necessary) to find groups with which you agree and get reinforcement for your own views. But this is a dangerous business; you can lose your ability to learn from difference and conflict — the wellsprings of real cultural development. That’s why cultural boycotts are so debilitating — whether it’s the refusal to hear from Israeli professors or the refusal to hear from an anti-Zionist philosopher. Isolating yourself from voices with whom you might disagree is also a sign (need I say it?) of your own insecurity about the views you claim to hold so dearly. Fear of your own error is often expressed as aggression against an outsider’s view.

But another op-ed? I asked Roth whether he thought people only read essays with which they knew they’d agree. Only one way to find out, he replied.

 

Review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction

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This review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History  appeared in the Washington Post this morning. I know there are many people at Wesleyan searching for ways to make a difference in the face of the environmental disasters of climate change. Kolbert is a thoughtful, engaged and determined guide.

 

Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” (2006) presented a powerful account of how climate change was disrupting lives around the planet. Whether the New Yorker columnist was visiting a utility company in Burlington, Vt., ice sheets in Greenland or floating cities in the Netherlands, she deftly blended science and personal experience to warn of the enormous harm created by human-generated climate change. The last chapter of that book, “Man in the Anthropocene,” underscored that we had entered an era in which human beings had begun to change everything about the planet’s interlocking ecosystems, and that we had put much of those systems and our own species at enormous risk.“It may seem impossible,” Kolbert concluded, “to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

(Henry Holt) – ‘The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History’ by Elizabeth Kolbert

In her new book, “The Sixth Extinction,” she provides a tour de horizon of the Anthropocene Age’s destructive maw, and it is a fascinating and frightening excursion. We humans have been bad news for most of the world’s living things, causing massive extinctions of species with which we share the planet. Unless we change our ways, she argues convincingly, we will certainly cause our own demise.

Until the 18th century, scientists didn’t have a clear idea that species could become extinct. Kolbert credits the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, writing in the wake of the great Revolution, with realizing that whole branches of the tree of life could permanently be cut off. Still, most of those who studied natural history were sure that extinctions happened only gradually over very long periods of time. This uniformitarian view would fit well with Darwin’s perspective on the slow and steady pace of evolutionary change through natural selection. Species did become extinct, but only very slowly as other competitors adapted more successfully to the environment around them.

This view of extinctions was definitively shattered by the work of Luis and Walter Alvarez, a father-son team who demonstrated that the Cretaceous period ended when an asteroid struck the Earth and radically changed the planet’s climate. In what has come to be called the K-T extinction, “every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out,” and things were no better in the water. The dinosaurs were just the most celebrated victims: “Following the K-T extinction,” Kolbert emphasizes, “it took millions of years for life to recover its former level of diversity.”

The scientific consensus was that things evolved very slowly, except in the face of radical events — like an asteroid crashing into the Earth. Today there is another asteroid hitting the planet, and it’s us. Slow “adaptation” in the Darwinian sense is meaningless if a creature very suddenly has to face conditions that “it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history.” In our age, the Anthropocene, these are the conditions human beings have been creating (very quickly) for other forms of life.

As in “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” Kolbert presents powerful cases to bring her point home. Oceans are highly stressed by climate change, for example, and acidification of the seas is driving the extraordinary ecosystems of coral reefs into extinction. Plants and animals are desperate to migrate to more hospitable climes, while others can’t survive the arrival of the newcomers. According to entomologist E.O. Wilson, whom she cites, we are now reducing biological diversity to its lowest level since the Cretaceous period.

Some of these changes have been created by our species breaking down barriers among other species as life forms tag along on our boats and planes from one part of the globe to another. Snakes in Guam, snails in Hawaii and thousands of other species brought by human beings into new environments, intentionally or not, have “succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.” As we make the world more interconnected than ever (“The New Pangaea”), the fatal vulnerabilities in thousands of species are exposed. The recent annihilation of bat populations in the Northeast, for example, has been caused by a foreign fungus that the animals had never encountered and so had no defense against. When a new fungus appears, Kolbert writes, “it’s like bringing a gun to a knife fight.”

The alterations initiated by human beings build on one another, accelerating change in ways that make it all but impossible for most species to adapt quickly enough. As the great environmentalist Rachel Carson put it, “Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.” But Kolbert is not nostalgic: “Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.”

Kolbert devotes a chapter, “The Madness Gene,” to considering the attribute of human beings that requires change in order to flourish. Unlike other species, modern humans, endowed with language, seem driven to embark on perpetual improvement projects in the course of which they alter everything around them. “With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it,” she writes. “A tiny set of genetic variations divides us from the Neanderthals, but that has made all the difference.”

Carson, a worthy model for Kolbert, wrote of “the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures.” We are deciding, Kolbert concludes, “which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed.” Our history determines the course of life on the planet. Our species changes the world, and now the most urgent question is whether we can take responsibility for what we do. “The Sixth Extinction” is a bold and at times desperate attempt to awaken us to this responsibility.

Think Summer….Think Summer

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photo[16]photo[12]

 

 

Looking out my window at snowy Andrus field, or walking Mathilde gingerly on the sidewalks around campus, it sometimes seems like we are in for an endless winter. The dominant subject for discussion on the faculty listserve is snow removal, and finding a couple of tons of salt this week was a cause for celebration in North College. Winter in New England. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

But yesterday was at times glorious, with the sunshine beginning to melt the ice and warm the heart. I didn’t need gloves or a hat when I went for my lunch at Usdan, and everyone seemed just a little cheerier. I know it’s just a tease, but still it’s fun to begin thinking of spring and SUMMER!

Yes, summer will be here before we know it, and that means (of course) we can start thinking about the Wesleyan Summer Session! Every year now there are hundreds of students on campus from June through August pursuing research, holding down jobs and taking classes. Continuing Education puts it this way:

Wesleyan University offers an intensive Summer Session in which students can complete semester-long courses in only five weeks; courses are offered in both June and July. Wesleyan Summer Session is open to students who feel they have the academic qualifications and stamina to complete an intellectually challenging course in a compressed schedule. Residential options are available for both Wesleyan undergraduates and non-Wesleyan students.

And I remind you that the classes, in poetry or biology, archaeology or government, CAN BE HELD OUTSIDE! It’s a lovely way to study and earn credit. A course listing can be found here.

People take summer classes for all sorts of reasons, but one of them may be a decision to graduate early. Wesleyan offers students the opportunity to graduate ahead of the traditional four-year schedule, which can save families quite a lot of money (and allow students to go on to other things). You can learn more about the three-year program here.

 

Professors Serving Scholarship and Social Good

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Sunday’s Nicholas Kristof’s column (NYT online) was entitled “Professors, We need You!”  He begins this way, “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates,” and then he quotes former Princeton prof Anne-Marie Slaughter: “All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public.”

I think there is a lot of truth to this line of thought, and it is worth emphasizing that most graduate programs do promote specialization at the expense of broader communication. Acquiring deep expertise in molecular biology, macroeconomics or romantic poetry is a vital endeavor, but that doesn’t have to mean that the experts lose connection with the broader public. Here at Wes, I can think of so many people on the faculty who defy the trend that Kristof is describing. I hesitate to name some individuals for fear of omitting others. But here goes.

Let’s begin with the programs developed here over the years that draw on deep expertise but accentuate cross-fertilization and translation skills. The College of Social Studies and the College of Letters have depended on faculty stretching beyond their given fields for more than 50 years. The teachers don’t do this as a tired obligation but engage in these programs with real passion. The same can be said of the College of the Environment, which explicitly connects to policy and public culture through its Think Tank. The new College of Film and the Moving Image combines deep expertise about cinema with public outreach in Middletown and popular historical scholarship in the widely celebrated work of Jeanine Basinger. Newer interdisciplinary investigation is also thriving at Wesleyan. I’m thinking of our folks working in Animal Studies or in Food Studies through, say, the Long Lane Farm. There are specialists in all these programs, but they are eager to go beyond their areas of specialization and have an effect on the world.

And I can’t help but think of Richard Grossman, an economics prof who has been churning out op-eds on monetary and banking policy with great regularity, even as he publishes important scholarly economic history books. Or I think of Gina Ulysse (who teaches anthropology, FGSS and African-American Studies), who has published ethnography and also engaged in dance, spoken-word and performance pieces. I just read some of her art criticism on the Huffington Post, and I know she is also preparing her own installation/performance. That’s not what she was told to do in graduate school.

Mary-Alice Haddad in government has combined her research on civic mobilization with teaching students how to participate in political movements in our own region. Her real expertise doesn’t put her in a cloister, to use Kristof’s word; it helps her engage vital social and political issues. Similar things might be said about anthropologist Kēhaulani Kauanui’s work with indigenous people around the world or economist Gary Yohe’s efforts to understand questions of probability and risk in regard to climate change. Both have worked with the United Nations, and both reach wide audiences with serious scholarship.

Our scientists, of course, are taking on big questions in specific research through which they can make a measurable difference. This may be in regard to epilepsy (Laura Grabel, Janice Naegele, Gloster Aaron), or muscular development and degeneration (Stephen Devoto). As a group, the science faculty has undertaken an initiative to help students from under-represented groups prepare for graduate work. This pipeline program can have a powerful effect on a number of fields and on our public culture.

Historians are no strangers to a public role. Magda Teter, for example, has explicitly used her deep archival research on Polish-Jewish relations to influence the way groups interact today. Lois Brown, professor of African American Studies and English, knows more about particular slave lives than anyone alive today. She is a specialist. But she can also be an impassioned contributor to educating Americans about slavery and abolitionism through mass audience public television programs.

Speaking of “mass,” I should definitely mention Scott Plous’ enormously successful Social Psychology class on Coursera. It wasn’t just that Scott attracted more than 200,000 people to his class, it was that at every turn he connected his teaching to action in the world. On campus and on his Social Psychology Network, Scott is a leader in “action teaching.” On campus and online, he aims to ensure that the lessons of social psychology — lessons about how we live together — are not “merely academic.”

The Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life (which houses the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship, Center for Community Partnerships and Prison Education and the Quantitative Analysis Center) can stand for countless other efforts that our faculty make to connect deep academic learning to work in the world that makes a difference.

This intellectual cross-training and the translational research that is a part of it have been hallmarks of the Wesleyan experience for decades – and reason for pride for all involved with this institution.

And for the dozens and dozens of colleagues I could have mentioned in this blog…please forgive me. But perhaps you (or your students) will send in examples through the comments…

 

Award Winning Physics Alum: Guy Geyer Marcus

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I’m very late on this, but still I wanted to give a shout out to Guy Geyer Marcus ’13, who recently won the Apker Prize, which Prof. Brian Stewart tells me “is the highest award for undergraduate research in physics.”  Wade Hsu ’10 won the prize in 2010, while working closely with Prof. Francis Starr.  Wesleyan students compete against all the big research institutions, and, to quote Prof. Stewart, “to have a second award within just a few years is a real tribute to the hard work of Guy and the support of his mentor Greg Voth — and to the learning environment Wesleyan provides.”

Here’s how Guy describes his work: “My undergraduate work… ranged from experimental fluid dynamics to topics in theoretical ion trap physics. My experimental work in fluid dynamics consisted of novel measurements of the rotational dynamics of anisotropic particles in turbulence. In particular, we introduced a new class of techniques for measuring Lagrangian statistics of rotational dynamics in turbulence. These techniques may also have exciting applications in topological fluid dynamics. On the theory side, I studied fundamental problems in quantum chaos and particle dynamics in Paul traps peripherally related to quantum computing.” Guy now has a graduate fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where he’s gone on to the easy stuff like quantum matter, topological defects and skyrmion dynamics.

marcus_guy                                                                                                                   Image courtesy of Stefan Kramel

The sciences at Wesleyan continue to produce research at the highest levels, and to involve students in that work. A belated congratulations to Guy, and to all those who helped him launch such a promising scientific career.

 

Wesleyan on Ice – Hockey Thrives

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Wesleyan’s hockey teams have been having very strong seasons. Let’s start with the women. Long a hard working and dedicated group, this year the team has had a nose for the goal and an almost uncanny ability to protect our own net. Most recently against Hamilton, Cara Jankowski ’15, Jordan Schildhaus ’15 and Jess Brennan ’17, each posted a goal and an assist to lead the Cardinals to our largest margin of victory ever over visiting Hamilton, 5-0. We swept that series, and remember that Hamilton students are all used to going to class across an icy campus!

A great reason for our success is goalie Laura Corcoran ’16. Against Hamilton in the first game of the series, she came up with 27 saves to post her third shutout of the year. Laura is one of the NESCAC leaders for both save percentage and goals-against average this season, now with .944 and 1.56 figures, respectively. She anchors a fine defense, while the offense has been putting the puck in the opponents’ nets. Coach Jodi McKenna leads a great squad.

The men’s hockey team has also excelled this year, and they had an AMAZING weekend. First, they soundly beat a solid Williams’ team, 7-3, after having jumped out to a 4-0 lead. A sophomore line was firing on all cylinders, as Alex Carlacci ’16, Jaren Taenaka ’16 and Terence Durkin ’16  accounted for the final four goals of the contest for the Cardinals. Another sophomore, Jay Matthews, ’16, has had an impressive season, already earning NESCAC Player-of-the-Week honors. Our frosh phenom Elliot Vorel ’17 also received that honor and he has been an intense offensive threat all year.

Speaking of intense frosh phenoms, the Wesleyan goalie Dawson Sprigings ’17 had a superb weekend, limiting the powerful Middlebury team yesterday to just a single goal, while our guys netted a pair. Coach Chris Potter has forged a fiery, young team, and we should wish them all luck as they head up to Maine at the end of the week.

Go winter Wes!

A High Tolerance for Ambiguity…and Uncertainty

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“A high tolerance for ambiguity” is a phrase I heard often from Wesleyan trustee Joshua Boger ‘73 during my first years here as president.  I understood the phrase to mean that much creative and constructive work gets done before clarity arrives, and people who seek clarity too quickly might actually wind up missing a good deal that really matters.  Such tolerance, I imagined, had been essential to Joshua’s success as a scientist and entrepreneur.

I was reminded of this toleration for ambiguity when I read Simon Critchley’s powerful The Stone blog this week on the New York Times site. There he writes about an old television series he watched as a kid, The Ascent of Man. In that show Dr. Jacob Bronowski led viewers on a tour of major moments in cultural evolution, from primitive times to the rise and fall of empires and the achievements of modern science. It was in many respects a triumphalist show, celebrating our ever-increasing knowledge.

Critchley, though, underscores another dimension of The Ascent of Man. In explicating Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, he writes:

Dr. Bronowski insisted that the principle of uncertainty was a misnomer because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we are always uncertain. But this is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty.

The point is that acknowledging uncertainty should be akin to acknowledging tolerance. Knowing our tendency to err should do more than make us epistemologically prudent; it should make us more open to others and less prone to impose our own views. This resistance to narrow-mindedness and dogmatism is an ethical dimension of the pursuit of knowledge.

Critchley underscores that Dr. Bronowski’s principle of tolerance is a crucial aspect of the scientific perspective. The effort to escape uncertainty can lead to a different perspective altogether – a tyrannical one.  Here’s a very moving clip on the blog from The Ascent of Man:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Umbn6ZBuE[/youtube]

 

This week I have been teaching Hegel and Rousseau, each of whom thought he had worked out essential truths. Rousseau argued that our pursuit of knowledge was usually just a pursuit of superiority and luxury, an expression of our warped vanity more than our scientific curiosity. Hegel took a very different tack, wanting to replace the love of wisdom with absolute knowing. This knowledge was of philosophy/history – Spirit, uniting ideal and real. The ambition was to overcome uncertainty in knowledge that would also offer redemption.

Reading Critchley, I recognized that I often present thinkers who can be considered dogmatic, especially when they are at their most critical about rival philosophers. I enjoy making a case for all of the writers I teach because their powerful arguments can shake up our own conventional ways of approaching issues. I’m not trying to convert students to a new dogma, but I am trying to expand their tolerance for the range of ambiguity in which they will navigate.

Openness to learning is a lifelong endeavor, and that openness is undermined when one believes one has vanquished uncertainty. Still, in my classes I love teaching authors who do claim some truth with assurance because this sharpens one’s thinking and illuminates fundamental issues – issues that may have no resolution. Tolerance is certainly an intellectual virtue; it’s just not the only one.

Simon Critchley’s reminiscence of The Ascent of Man reminds me of Joshua’s “tolerance of ambiguity” and how uncertainty and openness might go together. That’s a good lesson to live by at a university – whether one is a student, teacher…even a president.