Back in 1986, Randy Travis sang about a fellow who has just met an exciting woman. She has his complete attention, has him almost spellbound. He considers the possibility of spending the night with her. Then he sings, “On one hand I count the reasons I could stay with you . . . all night long . . . and on that hand I see no reason why it’s wrong.” That is one way for him to look at the situation.
But the refrain reveals the rest of the picture, as he sings, “But on the other hand there’s a golden band to remind me of someone who would not understand.” He has been tempted to forsake his marriage, and might have done so if he just looked at things from the most obvious point of view, the way he felt. He sings about a strong desire to stay, but the logic of marital love and commitment realizes that, “the reason I must go is on the other hand.”
Therein lies one of life’s crucial lessons. On one hand--every day, throughout the day--we see what we believe to be right and what feels right at the time. On the other hand there is always more to be considered, another side. On one hand we are ready to act; on the other hand it is possible that we might be wrong.
The truth is that no single way of seeing anything is ever the complete picture. There is always more. Mortimer Adler made the strange claim that the greatest contribution Greek civilization ever made to our culture is the idea of men/de, two little particles in the Greek language.
These little particles, men and de, are commonly translated into English as on one hand/on the other hand. When we think of Greek culture, sculpture, philosophy, and drama, we certainly might wonder what the man was thinking to make such an audacious claim. On the other hand. . . .
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
On the Other Hand: Sports
I’m not a sports fan. I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe I wasn’t raised right. I am an American citizen, but whether genetics or whatever, I almost completely ignore the world of sports. I have, on rare occasions, attended or listened to a sporting event. I mention two to illustrate something of the nature of the dialectic.
Do you have the dialectic down yet? Concisely, it always responds with: “On the other hand.”
When I was a young man attending Oklahoma A&M College, our greatest rival was the University of Oklahoma, led by coach Bud Wilkinson. Wilkinson won football games - more in one stretch than any major-college coach in history. His Oklahoma teams set the NCAA record by winning 47 consecutive games. When I was in college, OU was at the top of its game.
During my college career I attended only one football game. It was unforgettable. We were playing OU in the traditional homecoming game. At the time, A&M was somewhere near the bottom in college football ranking. The first play of the game was what made the game memorable.
Opening kickoff. A&M received. Bill Bredde picked the ball up on our two-yard line and ran through the entire OU team for a ninety-eight-yard touchdown. A&M against OU, first play: the stands exploded. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it. No one did that against Bud Wilkinson’s team.
We were elated, but on the other hand, our rival was still the best team in the United States. They beat us something like 49-7. Our game ended after the first play.
We might have felt a sense of hope. We might have thought we had a chance. But we had another thought coming, and we should have known it. No one human action ever tells the whole story.
____________________
The other memorable sporting event was a heavyweight world-championship boxing match between Ingmar Johansson and Floyd Patterson in June 1960. I was driving to work that night, listening to the fight on car radio.
In 1959, Johansson had defeated Patterson and taken the heavyweight championship title from him. They were fighting a rematch in 1960. I was a Patterson fan, and as I drove, I suffered, because for most of fifteen rounds, Johansson pummeled Patterson mercilessly. Patterson clearly was being slowly defeated, continually he was knocked to the canvas. Sports announcers talked about the fight being stopped and Patterson defeated by a technical knockout.
Late in the last round, the fifteenth, Floyd was down. It was unbelievable that after such a beating he could force himself back on his feet. The referee’s count came to “nine,” and to everyone’s surprise, Patterson, with great difficulty, dragged himself into an upright position, then, with a quick knockout, ended the fight. His Swedish contender took the entire ten-count. Patterson became the first world-champion, heavyweight boxer to regain his crown.
As the fight proceeded, Patterson, without question, was the loser. But, on the other hand. . . .
For the considerate thinker, there is always another hand to be considered.
[Patterson and Johansson met again. Patterson defeated the Swede in the sixth round.]
Do you have the dialectic down yet? Concisely, it always responds with: “On the other hand.”
When I was a young man attending Oklahoma A&M College, our greatest rival was the University of Oklahoma, led by coach Bud Wilkinson. Wilkinson won football games - more in one stretch than any major-college coach in history. His Oklahoma teams set the NCAA record by winning 47 consecutive games. When I was in college, OU was at the top of its game.
During my college career I attended only one football game. It was unforgettable. We were playing OU in the traditional homecoming game. At the time, A&M was somewhere near the bottom in college football ranking. The first play of the game was what made the game memorable.
Opening kickoff. A&M received. Bill Bredde picked the ball up on our two-yard line and ran through the entire OU team for a ninety-eight-yard touchdown. A&M against OU, first play: the stands exploded. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it. No one did that against Bud Wilkinson’s team.
We were elated, but on the other hand, our rival was still the best team in the United States. They beat us something like 49-7. Our game ended after the first play.
We might have felt a sense of hope. We might have thought we had a chance. But we had another thought coming, and we should have known it. No one human action ever tells the whole story.
____________________
The other memorable sporting event was a heavyweight world-championship boxing match between Ingmar Johansson and Floyd Patterson in June 1960. I was driving to work that night, listening to the fight on car radio.
In 1959, Johansson had defeated Patterson and taken the heavyweight championship title from him. They were fighting a rematch in 1960. I was a Patterson fan, and as I drove, I suffered, because for most of fifteen rounds, Johansson pummeled Patterson mercilessly. Patterson clearly was being slowly defeated, continually he was knocked to the canvas. Sports announcers talked about the fight being stopped and Patterson defeated by a technical knockout.
Late in the last round, the fifteenth, Floyd was down. It was unbelievable that after such a beating he could force himself back on his feet. The referee’s count came to “nine,” and to everyone’s surprise, Patterson, with great difficulty, dragged himself into an upright position, then, with a quick knockout, ended the fight. His Swedish contender took the entire ten-count. Patterson became the first world-champion, heavyweight boxer to regain his crown.
As the fight proceeded, Patterson, without question, was the loser. But, on the other hand. . . .
For the considerate thinker, there is always another hand to be considered.
[Patterson and Johansson met again. Patterson defeated the Swede in the sixth round.]
Monday, July 9, 2007
Home Life
Mother was different. She was a patient listener, usually. I could talk with Mother about anything, and at length, and did for over half a century. In her presence I could express myself and dream dreams that had no possibility of being realized in the real world, knowing that I was not likely to be squelched. So I felt much closer to Mother than to Daddy.
On the other hand, Mother mostly just listened. She never said much, told me little of what she thought about my words, and gave little advice and few instructions. Except on one or two subjects--birdwatching was one--she rarely revealed much of her own thought, feeling, or dreams (I often wonder what they were). She just listened to my monologues, knowing that, listening, all by itself, offers the human soul some of the best therapy possible.
So I was raised in a home that knew little dialogue, a family with three brothers who, for the most part, each went his own way, only occasionally acknowledging the existence of the others. And I doubt that we were an unusual American family. And there are other nations whose societies echo this same experience.
I don’t know how well all of this describes the homes in which Mother and Daddy themselves grew up, but I have heard enough from cousins and other family members to believe their homes were much like mine, and that the pattern could be traced back, on both sides, for at least a generation or two before that. And I fear that my own daughters might see this as a description of their own father and their own experience.
(I must say that it was quite different with their mother. She and our daughters have dialogued; they have connected, not always in the best way, but they got involved in trying to know and be known. Something of this seems to have been true of my wife’s family. Not all families are like the one I was raised in, but many are, and they tend to reproduce.)
Somehow we don’t take time for each other; we don’t listen to those nearest to us. We are family, that is, we are familiar with each other, but don’t know each other. And thus we don’t know ourselves. Without the opportunity to learn what others feel and think, we don’t understand clearly our own inner life. Without sharing with someone else our thoughts and feeling about each other, our own self-perception remains out of focus. We can know ourselves in only dialogue with others.
Without dialogue I cannot become a whole person. If in the home we don’t all share our inner lives, we remain family, but are familiar with each other only in a limited sense. Without the exchange of ideas, plans, hopes, and fears, we never live in community on this earth. Our pain, our emptiness, and our horrors are in large measure, rooted in our lack of dialogue.
It is a historical commonplace that the declaration of war is immediately preceded by the announcement that “talks have broken off.” They usually have broken down because the negotiation between diplomats is, too often, an exchange of reciprocal monologues, each trying to convince the other side, never seeking to hear and understand the other’s heritage, position, predicament, or philosophy.
However, we are stuck with each other; our radical individualism and egoism cannot eliminate all the others--people, nature, and God--that are linked with our life. Sartre claimed that “hell is other people,” but he also tells us there is NO EXIT from this world of others. We are inescapably social, made for relationship, and directly linked with the natural order. We fail to take others into account at risk of denying our humanity and destroying hope for a human and global future.
Because everything is ultimately connected and interrelated in one great ecosystem, we must acknowledge otherness, listen and respond to it, and work toward a more satisfying harmony of all its parts, including that part which is our self. Apart from dialogue, we are doomed.
On the other hand, we have available a method of thinking and living that can clear the way to a much more promising, satisfying and humane future. That method is the dialectic, and the dialectic is the heart of this ongoing discussion of “considerate thinking.”
On the other hand, Mother mostly just listened. She never said much, told me little of what she thought about my words, and gave little advice and few instructions. Except on one or two subjects--birdwatching was one--she rarely revealed much of her own thought, feeling, or dreams (I often wonder what they were). She just listened to my monologues, knowing that, listening, all by itself, offers the human soul some of the best therapy possible.
So I was raised in a home that knew little dialogue, a family with three brothers who, for the most part, each went his own way, only occasionally acknowledging the existence of the others. And I doubt that we were an unusual American family. And there are other nations whose societies echo this same experience.
I don’t know how well all of this describes the homes in which Mother and Daddy themselves grew up, but I have heard enough from cousins and other family members to believe their homes were much like mine, and that the pattern could be traced back, on both sides, for at least a generation or two before that. And I fear that my own daughters might see this as a description of their own father and their own experience.
(I must say that it was quite different with their mother. She and our daughters have dialogued; they have connected, not always in the best way, but they got involved in trying to know and be known. Something of this seems to have been true of my wife’s family. Not all families are like the one I was raised in, but many are, and they tend to reproduce.)
Somehow we don’t take time for each other; we don’t listen to those nearest to us. We are family, that is, we are familiar with each other, but don’t know each other. And thus we don’t know ourselves. Without the opportunity to learn what others feel and think, we don’t understand clearly our own inner life. Without sharing with someone else our thoughts and feeling about each other, our own self-perception remains out of focus. We can know ourselves in only dialogue with others.
Without dialogue I cannot become a whole person. If in the home we don’t all share our inner lives, we remain family, but are familiar with each other only in a limited sense. Without the exchange of ideas, plans, hopes, and fears, we never live in community on this earth. Our pain, our emptiness, and our horrors are in large measure, rooted in our lack of dialogue.
It is a historical commonplace that the declaration of war is immediately preceded by the announcement that “talks have broken off.” They usually have broken down because the negotiation between diplomats is, too often, an exchange of reciprocal monologues, each trying to convince the other side, never seeking to hear and understand the other’s heritage, position, predicament, or philosophy.
However, we are stuck with each other; our radical individualism and egoism cannot eliminate all the others--people, nature, and God--that are linked with our life. Sartre claimed that “hell is other people,” but he also tells us there is NO EXIT from this world of others. We are inescapably social, made for relationship, and directly linked with the natural order. We fail to take others into account at risk of denying our humanity and destroying hope for a human and global future.
Because everything is ultimately connected and interrelated in one great ecosystem, we must acknowledge otherness, listen and respond to it, and work toward a more satisfying harmony of all its parts, including that part which is our self. Apart from dialogue, we are doomed.
On the other hand, we have available a method of thinking and living that can clear the way to a much more promising, satisfying and humane future. That method is the dialectic, and the dialectic is the heart of this ongoing discussion of “considerate thinking.”
Friday, July 6, 2007
Thinking as Dialogue
Deep into his sermon, he would lean over the pulpit and ask, "Dear hearts tonight, are you listening?" That was a long time ago but I can still hear him addressing his congregation with that old-timey phrase of endearment.
Daddy used the rhetoric of a now bygone era, but everyone in the church knew that they were dear to him, and, we knew he wanted us to pay attention because his sermons were punctuated, repeatedly, with, "Are you listening?" After all, what is the point of preaching if nobody is listening?
And what about us? What are we trying to accomplish in our conversations with each other if no one is listening? If we are going to live with each other, we will have to listen, hear, and acknowledge each other. If I don't listen, or at least look, I may not realize it when you are hurting, and that you are about to go under, unless someone comes to the rescue. If I don't listen, I may not realize how much you care, or even that you care, about me or about whatever might be the issue at hand at any given time.
If we don't listen to each other, we each merely speak our own respective and reciprocal monologues, and--unless presented by professional entertainers--most monologues quickly become boring. We need dialogue. We need to hear each other.
Daddy's, "Dear hearts tonight," (he didn't often use this term with the Sunday morning crowd) "are you listening," was not a strictly rhetorical question; he actually wanted to see it in their eyes, their posture, and even in the expression of their faces. He wanted to know that they were engaged with him.
Yet the sermons were almost exclusively monologues. He would not have appreciated it if someone had spoken up with an answer; his question was more a device to maintain or recover attention.
On the other hand, I might be wrong, as I have been so often about Daddy. It is too late now for me to ask, but although he didn't expect spoken response he might have actually welcomed it; he might have welcomed the opportunity to engage in true dialogue about the Christian gospel.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that he very well might have welcomed it. But neither he nor the congregation of six or eight hundred people expected it because that is not part of the accepted pattern of public worship. I wonder what might happen if immediate spoken feedback became a part of the sermon?
On the other hand, if the preacher is to expect his congregation to listen, he had better have been listening to them during the week. If he doesn't know their problems, hopes, fears, dreams, doubts, excitements, moral dilemmas, existential crises, laughter and tears, his sermon may miss the people completely. They may continue to come, thinking it is somehow important that they be in church on Sunday morning, but it will not be long before they stop listening with any sense of expectation and hope. Preaching will be boring--an accurate description of altogether too many Sunday mornings.
Again, what about all the rest of us and all the talking we do? If you don't listen to me, why should I listen to you.
I think Daddy listened to his church members--actually to everyone in the community--better than he did to his three sons. Many could say the same thing about their father. Fathers often engage in a great deal more genuine dialogue on the job than they do at home.
One reason is that, like my father, there are many dads who spend precious little of their time at home, and when they do get home, they are already talked out and tired. Maybe that is the reason. I don’t know. I do know that Daddy rarely seemed to hear me, and that there was so much I wanted to say.
Before I really got started trying to make some sort of connection, Daddy would stop me with clear dogmatic instructions guaranteed to get my life moving on the right track--before he even knew what I was attempting to say. He was good at discouraging dialogue.
For the first thirty years of my life I felt that he never really heard much of anything I was trying to say. Occasionally across the next thirty-three years, we had times when we heard each other and responded to what we heard. Sometimes we argued late into the night, long after others had gone to bed, closing their doors to shut out some of our fierce and loud efforts to understand and to reconcile.
And there were times--rare times--of confession. Daddy actually listened as I confessed fears, weaknesses, disappointment, and anger. To my amazement, on two or three occasions, Daddy confessed the same to me. On those occasions I was thrilled that he treated me as a real person, as a confidant, as someone he loved and trusted.
Daddy died in 1997. The night before the funeral--at which I was to be the speaker--I stood beside his open casket looking into that face I had known for sixty-three years and cried in lonely anger for the years of opportunity lost to both of us.
So few were the hours we ever listened to each other. Precious as those times were, they never began to fill the void that I felt in my relationship to a man who, for nearly forty years, was one of the most loved and respected humans ever known in Blackwell, Oklahoma and Gainesville, Texas.
He truly was a great man. and in my confusion and anger, I could speak appreciatively of him to the hundreds who came to the funeral. But I miss him, and not just now; I always did.
Was he afraid? Was he afraid of what he might hear if he listened? Was he afraid that if he revealed much of himself I would lose some degree of respect? There were a few times late at night, after I was an adult, when he hinted at a self-image that he dared not acknowledge. He told me, once, that he wore the stern face and used the no-nonsense voice to ward off any attempt to penetrate his defenses.
Isn’t that the all-too-common human story, at least in the United States? We are afraid to let conversation move much deeper than a recitation of socially accepted speech patterns.
There is a certain reciprocity, but not much, in our exchanges about how we feel, what we think of the weather, the economy, our favorite TV show, or our ball favorite team. I suspect that sports and gossip bring us the closest to anything that resembles true dialogue. Beyond that we guard ourselves, and continue to inhabit a silent loneliness.
Daddy used the rhetoric of a now bygone era, but everyone in the church knew that they were dear to him, and, we knew he wanted us to pay attention because his sermons were punctuated, repeatedly, with, "Are you listening?" After all, what is the point of preaching if nobody is listening?
And what about us? What are we trying to accomplish in our conversations with each other if no one is listening? If we are going to live with each other, we will have to listen, hear, and acknowledge each other. If I don't listen, or at least look, I may not realize it when you are hurting, and that you are about to go under, unless someone comes to the rescue. If I don't listen, I may not realize how much you care, or even that you care, about me or about whatever might be the issue at hand at any given time.
If we don't listen to each other, we each merely speak our own respective and reciprocal monologues, and--unless presented by professional entertainers--most monologues quickly become boring. We need dialogue. We need to hear each other.
Daddy's, "Dear hearts tonight," (he didn't often use this term with the Sunday morning crowd) "are you listening," was not a strictly rhetorical question; he actually wanted to see it in their eyes, their posture, and even in the expression of their faces. He wanted to know that they were engaged with him.
Yet the sermons were almost exclusively monologues. He would not have appreciated it if someone had spoken up with an answer; his question was more a device to maintain or recover attention.
On the other hand, I might be wrong, as I have been so often about Daddy. It is too late now for me to ask, but although he didn't expect spoken response he might have actually welcomed it; he might have welcomed the opportunity to engage in true dialogue about the Christian gospel.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that he very well might have welcomed it. But neither he nor the congregation of six or eight hundred people expected it because that is not part of the accepted pattern of public worship. I wonder what might happen if immediate spoken feedback became a part of the sermon?
On the other hand, if the preacher is to expect his congregation to listen, he had better have been listening to them during the week. If he doesn't know their problems, hopes, fears, dreams, doubts, excitements, moral dilemmas, existential crises, laughter and tears, his sermon may miss the people completely. They may continue to come, thinking it is somehow important that they be in church on Sunday morning, but it will not be long before they stop listening with any sense of expectation and hope. Preaching will be boring--an accurate description of altogether too many Sunday mornings.
Again, what about all the rest of us and all the talking we do? If you don't listen to me, why should I listen to you.
I think Daddy listened to his church members--actually to everyone in the community--better than he did to his three sons. Many could say the same thing about their father. Fathers often engage in a great deal more genuine dialogue on the job than they do at home.
One reason is that, like my father, there are many dads who spend precious little of their time at home, and when they do get home, they are already talked out and tired. Maybe that is the reason. I don’t know. I do know that Daddy rarely seemed to hear me, and that there was so much I wanted to say.
Before I really got started trying to make some sort of connection, Daddy would stop me with clear dogmatic instructions guaranteed to get my life moving on the right track--before he even knew what I was attempting to say. He was good at discouraging dialogue.
For the first thirty years of my life I felt that he never really heard much of anything I was trying to say. Occasionally across the next thirty-three years, we had times when we heard each other and responded to what we heard. Sometimes we argued late into the night, long after others had gone to bed, closing their doors to shut out some of our fierce and loud efforts to understand and to reconcile.
And there were times--rare times--of confession. Daddy actually listened as I confessed fears, weaknesses, disappointment, and anger. To my amazement, on two or three occasions, Daddy confessed the same to me. On those occasions I was thrilled that he treated me as a real person, as a confidant, as someone he loved and trusted.
Daddy died in 1997. The night before the funeral--at which I was to be the speaker--I stood beside his open casket looking into that face I had known for sixty-three years and cried in lonely anger for the years of opportunity lost to both of us.
So few were the hours we ever listened to each other. Precious as those times were, they never began to fill the void that I felt in my relationship to a man who, for nearly forty years, was one of the most loved and respected humans ever known in Blackwell, Oklahoma and Gainesville, Texas.
He truly was a great man. and in my confusion and anger, I could speak appreciatively of him to the hundreds who came to the funeral. But I miss him, and not just now; I always did.
Was he afraid? Was he afraid of what he might hear if he listened? Was he afraid that if he revealed much of himself I would lose some degree of respect? There were a few times late at night, after I was an adult, when he hinted at a self-image that he dared not acknowledge. He told me, once, that he wore the stern face and used the no-nonsense voice to ward off any attempt to penetrate his defenses.
Isn’t that the all-too-common human story, at least in the United States? We are afraid to let conversation move much deeper than a recitation of socially accepted speech patterns.
There is a certain reciprocity, but not much, in our exchanges about how we feel, what we think of the weather, the economy, our favorite TV show, or our ball favorite team. I suspect that sports and gossip bring us the closest to anything that resembles true dialogue. Beyond that we guard ourselves, and continue to inhabit a silent loneliness.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Living the Tension
When my wife turned sixty, our daughters gave her a week-long, all-expense-paid trip to New England to shop for antiques. They gave her shopping cash. They also said they would pay for one other person to accompany her, so I got to go along. (I have no memory of what they gave me for my sixtieth.)
Vermont was the most impressive part of that, my first, trip through New England. My desk at home, indeed my entire office, and my pickup truck all are wildernesses
of clutter . I think I liked Vermont because it was uncluttered. I’ve never seen anything so clean, neat, and well-trimmed. Uncluttered, but not sterile like I have always perceived German communities to be.
I like the uncluttered. I like the Kansas Flint Hills, the Oklahoma Osage country, the deserts of the Southwest; I like “the wide-open spaces.” In art, I am attracted to paintings, especially watercolors, with large uncluttered areas, simple use of space.
I have no sense that I am claustrophobic, but I may be a spaceophile.
Yet I like wild, tangled regions. They offer a multifaceted richness, variety, and mystery. They call for exploration and adventure. They are filled with hidden surprises.
The uncluttered can be sterile, merely empty, a vacuum, boring. Don’t unclutter everything. Brambles and thickets are needed as much as open spaces
If creativity is located where the incongruent is comfortably embraced–as studies indicate that it is–don’t be too anxious to simplify everything. Live the tension between the mess and the well-kept.
But we must traverse the tension. Sometimes truth and life and progress and development require that we move so close to one pole that we appear to be polarized. Either pole, alone, is destructive to some degree.
Whichever we feel the need to move toward, the simple or the complex, “islands of simplicity” and times of solitude are essential. The complications of bramble, thicket, and confusing mystery will show up on their own.
Living these tensions is one way that the dialectic works itself out in the business of working out our lives. Don’t allow yourself to become overwhelmed but don’t get too comfortable.
Vermont was the most impressive part of that, my first, trip through New England. My desk at home, indeed my entire office, and my pickup truck all are wildernesses
of clutter . I think I liked Vermont because it was uncluttered. I’ve never seen anything so clean, neat, and well-trimmed. Uncluttered, but not sterile like I have always perceived German communities to be.
I like the uncluttered. I like the Kansas Flint Hills, the Oklahoma Osage country, the deserts of the Southwest; I like “the wide-open spaces.” In art, I am attracted to paintings, especially watercolors, with large uncluttered areas, simple use of space.
I have no sense that I am claustrophobic, but I may be a spaceophile.
Yet I like wild, tangled regions. They offer a multifaceted richness, variety, and mystery. They call for exploration and adventure. They are filled with hidden surprises.
The uncluttered can be sterile, merely empty, a vacuum, boring. Don’t unclutter everything. Brambles and thickets are needed as much as open spaces
If creativity is located where the incongruent is comfortably embraced–as studies indicate that it is–don’t be too anxious to simplify everything. Live the tension between the mess and the well-kept.
But we must traverse the tension. Sometimes truth and life and progress and development require that we move so close to one pole that we appear to be polarized. Either pole, alone, is destructive to some degree.
Whichever we feel the need to move toward, the simple or the complex, “islands of simplicity” and times of solitude are essential. The complications of bramble, thicket, and confusing mystery will show up on their own.
Living these tensions is one way that the dialectic works itself out in the business of working out our lives. Don’t allow yourself to become overwhelmed but don’t get too comfortable.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
