My Journey In, Through and About the Humanities

Note: Now in the spring of 2025, I see this reflection, as “musing about musing.” Taking time to  “take stock” of my life.  It was written sometime in 2021

My Journey In, Through and About the Humanities

Serendipity, Erudition, Enlightenment, Transformation, Service, Intentionality and Embodiment 

Serendipity?

Life gives us the questions.  We ask questions but it is really life that presents us, no forces upon us, the questions.  Vicktor Frankl, in his holocaust book, Man’s Search for Meaning, makes a strong case for this sentiment. However,  looking back over my life, what looks like chance happenings and serendipity,  there still seems to be some consistent threads where “questions of meaning” have created the prominent fabric in my life, though at the time randomness was just as likely.   

Is there intentionality in the seemingly random moments?  Is it destiny? Is it grace?  Why have I continued to put myself in situations and life encounters to challenge my world view?  Or have I actually put myself in situations to just reinforce my predilections?

Regardless of chance or consistent thread, whatever we do, for whatever reason, life still seems to have the upper hand in forcing questions on us that require a profound response that often are moments of personal transformation.  If we are present with these moments, and have a desire to understand, we seek answers.  We respond as best we can.

The stock phrase of such musings is the “examined life” of Socrates. My goal in these retrospections is to tell my story at this stage of my life as a way to reflect on the meaning of my life,  for it surely must have meaning.  But also, to tell the story so key insights do not get lost for me or to pass on to others.   That is, so others can reassemble the same events in ways to give them new ways of looking at themselves, maybe to avoid the mistakes I have made.

Do I really have insights that warrant people listening to me?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Perhaps all that is important is that we do not shy away from telling our story.  It may have profound insights. It may not.  All we have to do is just tell our story and let others decide.  This is what I would call, living responsibly while being humble.

Through all this randomness or perhaps considered serendipity,  it is certain that I have developed a worldview.  I wear this worldview as a kind of clothing, an identity of sorts.  It is a lens through which I view the world, regardless of how this lens emerged, serendipity or not.  What is this lens?   Sometimes this worldview is conscious and sometimes it is not.

A Case Study for Serendipity

Let me start again with some sense of serendipity or randomness to illustrate the point that I have developed as a particular way of viewing the world.

I have not been a movie goer all my life.  Yes an occasional movie here and there to share with a friend or spouse;  it was not my idea of spending my leisure time.  However, since my retirement and with less demands on my time, my second wife  of three years, Margot, and  I have instituted “Friday night at the movies,” which has at times engulfed Wednesday, Tuesday etc.  At least during the pandemic.

It is a longer story why movies have not been my go-to entertainment, not the least of which is that I have not been an entertainment-popular-culture-kind-of-guy.  But also, because images when they are cast on a big screen are larger than life.  I get overwhelmed.  Probably because images, and the point of movies is to pull on our emotions.    Therefore,  because I was always overwhelmed by the experience, I became the characters and imbued significance in all the action.  I believe I am a person who always want to  control my emotional ventures.  Therefore, subjecting myself to movies took me out of my comfort zone.  I have even walked out of movies or turned them off in the middle of watching.

Here enters the contradiction.  I am now choosing to be controlled even when I decide to watch a particular movie.  Yet this movie watching  was still another example of serendipity, where questions are being forced on me, for I really do not know what will happen in the movies I watch. Intentionality and serendipity.  Control and no control.  How I respond to movies now will also give a glimpse into what I bring to the experience of movie watching, a well-developed, though certainly still evolving worldview.  

I guess the point is that now I seem more open to let somebody else  play a role, every day of the week, in defining my questions.  Why?  I am not sure.  Maybe it is at this stage of my life, I have developed a life methodology and frame or a kind of  order to tackle any questions. The choice of movies does have some intentionality, but the movie itself has its own script. 

Two movies are worth reporting on to develop my point, “Nomadland” and “A Young Promising Woman.”  Both were “Best Picture” nominees, along with the actors in the movie.  

I agreed with the Academy that each deserved recognition.  Nomadland got the best picture, along with the best actress.  The other got the award for the screenplay.  

What are the questions they posed?  What was my response and interpretation about the movie story; why it was written? What was the message?  And why the award? What did these movies tell us about the world we live in today?  Do they demand a response?  If not, why were they written? Okay, I really always come to a movie experience with a set of questions.  I am not just there to be entertained.  Why?  

Clearly neither movie was pure entertainment.  Neither had simple social messages.  Let me begin with Nomadland. Assuming most have seen the movie, I will not present the synopsis.  What I will focus on will be the way in which I saw the movie through the lens of a long journey of the humanistic traditions, both religious/spiritual  and human/secular, that is one with metaphysical views and one with materialism: These are  the clothes I wear, ones that define me today, as best as I can know myself. Do these dualisms work? 

[Insight 1: define your terms with humility.  That is, be clear what one is committed to without putting the others with different views in negative light.  This also comes from becoming aware of the concept of empathy, most recently built into ethical tradition of “care ethics.”  That is a tradition that comes from  a feminist tradition that emphasizes relationships: “put yourself in the shoes of the other person.”  I suspect this sentiment can also be traced to various religious traditions that have focused on the “golden rule.”  Kantian ethics in its the test of a “good will”: i.e. the universalizing of your actions, so that what you decide is good also applies to you, without contradicting the wholeness of what is human, the capacity for good as well as evil. This is his famous “categorical imperative.”  Which leads to  another insight to be discussed later: Do not lose the insights of our various traditions. Maybe this is where Robert Bellah comes in when he talks about “nothing is ever lost.”  I will develop this later if I have time; yet his influence is always present in my thinking and life.]

Back to Nomadland: It seems to me that the meaning of this movie for me, beyond the obvious message of lifting up the “other” to visibility and respect, and certainly a version of care ethics, where you put yourself in the shoes of another, is much more. It is also a story about  “nomads” living subsistence lives, though very meaningful,  in the crevices of modern society.  This is a touching and needed story to hear and to understand others, as well as a mirror to look at ourselves in a consumer society.   It is a worthy story told in a unique way with non-actors “playing” the parts of real people, themselves.  Oh yes, there was also the component of wonderful scenery, poignant writing, touching friendships and not the least, a sense of freedom, perhaps of the version of “nothing left to lose;” or maybe just pure wanderlust.  But what did the movie mean to me?  This is where my lens comes in.  There has to be more to a movie. 

Erudition, Enlightenment and Transformation

After watching the movie, my colleague, Soraya Chase Clow, and I had the third of our conversations about a joint presentation on our “life in the humanities.”  We had already discussed much of what had led us to our professions and how we tried to live our lives. We began focusing on Plato’s Republic.  Soraya, was informed by Hannah Arendt’s critique of Plato’s attempt to make the Republic neat and tidy, defining all aspects of life.  I was more focused on Plato’s process and the human capacity to dream big thoughts, create utopias in our mind to help us live in new ways. [Since writing this essay, The Nation magazine in a double issue of July 26 and August 2, 2021, was devoted to “This Way to Utopia, Dreams of a better world.”  An important issue in a time when dystopian thinking seemed to be the norm. Though the articles make the case that dystopian and utopian thinking were born at the same time.  On the whole the magazine comes out on the side of utopian thinking is necessary for human liberation] I was less focused on whether or not Plato got it all right, though it  did inform in my view of a responsible life in the metaphor/parable of the cave.   It was also a metaphor for much of my educational philosophy.  I took my lead from my mentor, Robert Bellah and one of his co-author’s William Sullivan.  Bellah’s book, Religion in Human Evolution and Sullivan’s, A New Agenda for Higher Education were touchstones in my thinking and  how I wanted to live my life.  

Through Sullivan’s work, I saw the metaphor of the cave as a call to responsibility and service in life.  A person leaves a life in chains, sees the light, is enlightened and transformed .  He ( I assume it was  a he) decides to return to the cave.  His enlightenment is not individual. It carries with it a desire to return home and spread the news, to help others to see that there is more to life.  It is not easy to be the “Casandra,” for he is not welcomed back by many.   The poignancy for me in the metaphor is that it is a story about taking risks and compassion as much as it is about personal transformation.  It is about leaving and returning.  

Bellah, helped me understand that utopian thinking is a serious form of play.  We humans “play.”  Through play we express our humanness at maybe its greatest depths. Play has many manifestations. I will say more about this later.  But for now, to understand utopian and visionary thinking as “play” is significant for me.  For sure it is serious play.  It has its intrinsic nature; it has a dimension of being free of evolutionary survival.  Maybe it is pure serendipity, relishing n the moment.  Yet there does come a time when we step back and ask what did that mean? If only to decide that  it meant nothing significant.  

Back to Nomadland:  The meaning for me of the movie is that it provided a critique of the cave metaphor.  In the movie the protagonist did the usual “hero’s journey,”  leaving the chains of modern life to venture out for personal meaning and transformation.  But it was more than a leaving, it was a kind of returning to a prior Eden, if you will.  What was most striking is that the community of people that were perhaps in need of redemption, from a dominant world view, were the people that provided the redemption, the nomads.  In the movie they were real people, not actors.  

Embodiment

It was the community itself that lifted everyone up.  All were transformed together.  The hero was the community.  The protagonist was transformed and enlightened by the community.  Yes, there was the moment when the protagonist went back to the modern, consumptive life of her sister to give a snarky critique of the real estate business that puts people in debt.

But the movie helped me see that the hero does not, maybe should not, be seen as an autonomous individual and more.  It is the community itself that has to rise together.  

[Insight 2: Beyond individualism. [Since writing this reflection I have been reading Robert C. Dykstra’s book that criticizes Bellah for his concept of expressive individualism as a way to not understand the importance of the individual, especially in therapy.  As best as I can get it, the individual is less important than the community.  Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic is also mentioned. But isn’t the issue one about individual ism.  That is making the individual primary. This issue came up in my work on Bellah and Niebuhr and the discussion of Moral Man and Immoral society.  I need to rethink this in light of the progressive movement as the context in which Niebuhr was writing, i.e. where social engineering was to be the answer to societal problems, essentially minimizing the non-expert in having a say in his or her own wellbeing.] This was a very important insight for me for several reasons. Humans are social animals, and it is in our nature to be connected.  But most important is the corrective this movie made to my attachment to the cave metaphor.  It also gave me pause, for in my “Ethics, Leadership and Meaning” class I essentially taught a more individualistic version of the Hero’s Journey as developed by Joseph Campbell and Karl Jung.   Yes, this movie also has a version of that, but it goes beyond as well.  Yes, the Hero’s Journey as laid out  by Campbell and Jung, does have the eventual non individual message of asking the question:  Who do I serve?  That is, beyond me, who do I serve.  So, it does have a type of  community message.  But what strikes me about Nomadland is that it is the collective working together to bring insight and transformation to each individual; the journey is collective.  I would revise the cave metaphor to be: “several of the people in chains got together to support each other and work to make it into the light.  They returned transformed to live a life as an example to others not to preach to them.”  In each of the myths that we have inherited as male and female, Psyche and Tristin, there are helpmates that guided them in their hero’s journey.  But the focus was still on the individual.]

With this insight I thought I had reached the end of my humanities journey.  My next question was how should I live in the future with this insight.  I was looking forward to having this conversation with Soraya to chat about the future, particularly now that I had retired into my Emeritus status.  How do I continue to make a contribution and live responsibly?

A week later  Margot and I watched the movie, “A Promising Young Women.”  It was clear to me that this disturbing movie forced me to realize that my journey was continuing, as it should be a never-ending quest.   I am still working on  the meaning of this movie for me.  Of course, the critics have spoken.  Yes, it is a “me too” movement film.  It seems to be part of a genre of films about female revenge but with its own unique twist that makes for a less formulaic film.  There is humor.  The is sweetness. There is cleverness. There is a window to self-serving male culture.  There is violence. There is certainly cleverness in the screen play, which won the Oscar.  All the critics seemed to be amazed at the “tone” change in the film, from lightness to darkness in a blink of the eye, when we were settled into a tone grove, just to be jolted into another emotional experience.  Why was this so notable?  Isn’t that the way life is?  I was always anxious when life seemed to be going so well and smoothly.  I was certain that just around the corner was a fall, or at least a reminder that we cannot live in the highness of life all the time.  It is humanly impossible, and life keeps throwing us a curve ball with new questions to answer.  

Promising Woman did just that to me. It took me out of my self-declared end of the line insight into a different world.  I guess the meaning of this film for me is to be reminded that life is unpredictable.  Serendipity is the norm and grace is necessary to help us stay whole in the midst of a fractured life.  Get used to it, Again! But there must be more to the meaning of this film.  What about the content of the film, the depiction of and condemnation of so many finding ways to justify violence, especially toward women?  The hero in the movie was the attorney who made a living vilifying the women who had been the victims of male violence. Perhaps over his lifetime he did more damage to women than the “boy-men” who abused a young female student, maybe “just once” in their life.  Yet, and maybe because he was the guiltiest, he sought a path of redemption, through forgiveness, but more importantly through action to bring to justice those complicit with the cover-up of the original abuse, which would also implicate him, and he would have to pay a heavy price for his actions.  

The protagonist who devised the various ways to get revenge brought justice for her friend but fell victim to her own passionate journey of revenge.  She was not without serious moral flaws.  Her entrapment lifestyle was questionable.  In a utilitarian calculus this would be so, but also from any other moral theory she was violating everything from well-developed philosophical ethics to religious ethics. Somehow as an ethicist, that is a teacher of ethical theories and evaluator of the moral life of others and myself professionally, I gave her a pass and was rooting for her.  Her violent end disturbed me and all who saw the movies.  Therefore, I applauded the end when she got the last word?  Why?

I am not sure what the screen writer was trying to convey other than some of what I have already mentioned.  Or maybe it was just a motivation to see how many emotions she could elicit from the viewer.  We were her plaything.  But what was the meaning for me?  Why was I disturbed?  Maybe it was because I saw in myself some of the compromising and complicit actions of the various characters.  Even if I was never involved in direct activities, I certainly participated in the support of patriarchy just by benefiting in my life as a male.  There was nothing conclusive and neat about the story.  We were jarred to examine ourselves and the world we live in.  There was no “happy ever after” in this movie.  This movie was juxtaposed to a movie I saw a few days later, “The Jane Austin Book Club,” where all the lives were tied-up in neat and tidy endings of self-awareness, affection and forgiveness.  I guess Jane Austin would be happy too.  Though I have never read a Jane Austin novel.  It is never too late.  My wife and I will read one together soon. I am not against “happy ever after endings,”  even the “Book Club” story included many ups and downs of the characters’ lives, which no doubt had many more ahead.

[Insight 3:  Life is not neat and tidy.  This is obvious.  This is a challenge to our desire for certainty and control.  This is also good.  Messiness is just okay.  Chaos can be creative.  Loss and death are part of life.  I lost my first wife, Madelyn, to a brain tumor.  That was not my plan.  It was not our plan.  I had cancer that I was sure that I would die first.  What a shock that life did its usual thing, forced new questions on me.  More on this later, but I felt that I had been preparing all my life to be a sensitive caregiver.  Though there was much grieving and sadness, I felt it was a blessing, a gift to be present with someone you loved as they died.  It was a gift to me figure out the meaning of the eight months of caring for her as she died.  There was nothing neat and tidy about 50 years of a relationship, from the time we were engaged in the senior year of college.  Falling in love with Margot, seven months after she died was another time of new questions being forced on me.  Blessings and challenges.]

Serendipity may be too cavalier a word to capture the essence of life for me that I try to illustrate by two movies.  Yet in my life, even with deep sadness, there always seemed to be a light that shined through, if I paid attention.  This sense of paying attention served me well in my research, especially on my recent sabbatical, where I coined my research approach/ method as “attentive serendipity.”  When a new book, event or person came into my life, I assumed it had meaning, so I followed the so-called “rabbit hole” to see what was there.  In each case it turned up fruitful and substantive insights.  

Here is what I wrote over a year ago when on my sabbatical:

A Sabbatical Year: A Religious and Spiritual Memoir (tentative title of a larger work, or maybe just another chapter in a larger work on the Future of Religious Practice, using my life as the focus of the evolution of religious practice.  Especially the serendipity of all the connections that have occurred during my sabbatical year, from thinking about romantic love and religion to happening upon the work of pastoral theologian Robert Dykstra on sex and spirituality. Therefore, an emerging approach to my project began to crystalize into what I began to call “attentive serendipity,”  forcing me to explore new avenues of ideas and ponder connections.)

A case in point is how a topic that we have been discussing in my Salon, (fancy word for a dinner and conversation group on books, articles, ideas etc.) “food.”  Since we decided this important topic, the world has provided an avalanche of data, including a new book by the New York Times food critic, Mark Bittman, Animal, Vegetable, Junk.  One of the epigraphs in the front of the book is a quote by John Muir,  “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”  Therefore, it is not a surprise that each moment, when plumbed to its depths (the key) will be related in some way to what we are trying to discern in our life.

[Insight 4:  The fractal theory that holds that each instance, person, event, etc. holds within it the whole. This comes from science.  But humanities scholars have been mining this notion in literature and thinking, both from a religious and philosophical perspective.  The implications of this are profound.  If the trite saying that we are all star dust makes sense, which I think it does, it is just another way of confirming the fractal theory and Muir’s insight.  The Big Bang is still creating new fractals.]

Okay, so serendipity is more complicated.  But in talking about it, I hope it helps to illustrate that life is not neat and tidy, yet then again it does have its coherence.  This is where I seem to end up in my journey.  

How did I get here?  And what will I do in the future?

The above concepts in the title of this essay are seemingly part and parcel of my whole journey.  So, I will just tell the story.  Certainly,  more serendipity  with emerging themes will be present.  

Early on as I gained more formal education, it is clear that erudition became important to me.  That is, becoming educated with a command of classical texts and “knowledge.”  However, it seemed to me that this erudition had to have more than an intrinsic passion. I believe I always had a sense that  gaining a special wisdom could translate into living a moral life.  Maybe, though not fully conscious early on, I assumed it would take a transformed self to be true to this desire and goal.  

Where would it lead?  In retrospect, as in the hero’s journey, it would lead to a life of “remembering” the question: who do I serve?  Therefore, service was prominent in my life.  How to embody these insights in my life was the focus.  Intentionality seemed to me to play a role.  I needed to make decisions in my life, even if the decision was to pay attention to the serendipity of my life.  This seems to me to be somewhat of a structure of my life, from serendipity through striving and seeking, back to serendipity.  But in telling the story as honestly as possible will determine if this sequence holds to be true.  I am aware that I have left out key values and struggles.  The role my faith has played is certainly in need of being addressed.  We are fundamentally spiritual beings.  We are also sexual beings.  These dimensions are part of our humanity.  Taking stock of how the two have developed in my life is also an important part of the story.  I will try to weave these influences into my story were appropriate without too much self-indulgence. 

Fundamentally this is a story about why the humanities, and a specific notion of “liberal studies” has defined my life.  I realize that there is a need to define some terms at the outset. For now, I am going to hold off on this and let the story define the way in which I understand these terms.

This is a story that leads to some confessions about how I was either not generous enough or just  too ignorant when making distinctions that judged others inappropriately.  Therefore, I think I want this to be a story about wholeness.  I have been seeking a perspective that comes from wholeness, less differentiated and more undifferentiated.  Is the concept of “oneness” the one I am seeking?  Life is one.  All are inter-connected.  Yet we live in a differentiated world of evolutionary adaptation and struggle.  Simone Weil called it gravity.  We are still bound by gravity, our incompleteness, our dark side, in Christian terms our sinful nature. 

The Journey

The Home and Family: The Early Years

I guess I need to start at the beginning.  My family was not a literary family.  We did not read books or talk about ideas.  Conversations at dinner or during the day were about doing things, whether they were tasks or activities, school-wise or athletics.  I often said that a grunt or a moan was a paragraph of communication.  There were trappings of education, the usual set of encyclopedia, magazines, Time and Life.  I even had a subscription to Boys Life.  There was a set of the Harvard Classics we owned.  I do not remember seeing any member of the family, there were six of us, my parents, four girls and two boys, reading the books.  I also do not remember reading Boys Life.  I looked at the pictures.  This seemed to me to be in contrast to some of my friends who were reading all the Hardy Boys series or the Nancy Drew mysteries.  

Yet, both of my parents were college graduates. My Mother in social work and my Father in commerce.  I suspect being married in the middle of the depression, owning a business and raising six children was not a recipe for leisure time. There were no other role models in my life to suggest that the life of the mind would be an option.  The closest thing to leisure was going to church on less busy Sundays, usually provided by my Uncle and Aunt who took all the children to church to give my parents some respite. There was a brief time when my Mother was my Sunday school teacher.  In St. Louis where we lived till I was almost nine years old, the church was founded by the grandparents on my Mother’s side.  It was an Evangelical and Reform Church, the same as the Niebuhr brothers belonged to.  Also, it was the same church in which one of my Uncle and Aunt were members when they went to Honduras to be missionaries.  My Father grew up in the Lithuanian/Polish Catholic Church in St. Louis, also founded by his parents.  Though when my parents married my Dad left the Catholic Church.  

Yes, religion and church were big in my family.  But so were sports.  My Dad helped to found, the Carodolet Sunday Morning Athletic Club.  It organized sporting activities, especially for youth. I spent most of my youth in St. Louis outdoors playing in empty lots and sidewalk games.  I do not remember reading as part of life. Television was just beginning.  We did listen to radio programs like “The Shadow” and the “Lone Ranger.”  My Uncle, who was the father of my namesake who died in the war, did baby sit and told stories about “Old Witch Johnson.”  I guess this was the closest I came to a literary event.

What I remember most about my first nine years in St. Louis was that life seemed to be a struggle for my parents.  My Dad’s business went bankrupt, and life seemed a bit chaotic, yet I had a lot of free time to roam the neighborhood. My Dad found a job in California. We sold everything and my Mom drove four of the children to California, leaving my two oldest siblings to finish their semester of high school.  In California my memories are more vivid.  Life seemed to unfold before my eyes.  We lived briefly in a beach house and then always close to the ocean in Oceanside, a town of about 15,000 people at the time of our arrival.  For most of my youth we lived in either genteel poverty or  in a very modest lower middleclass lifestyle.  There was not much literary activity in the family.  A stable household did exist, but it took both of my parents working full-time.  Bills were often not paid on time.  I entered school in Oceanside in the third grade.  My clothes were at best hand me downs that often did not fit or were tattered.  

I did not excel in school.  I was in the lowest reading group, struggling with my Dick and Jane reader.  I did excel in recess, I was a leader on the playground sport activities.  

But when I was in the fourth grade I believe I had my first literary experiences and my first organized sports activity.  I could sense that I had two sides of myself.  I tried out for Little League and was drafted early for a team when I was nine years old.  Baseball became a life-time passion that existed up through playing in College and my founding of the Albany Girls Softball League.  I am sure I learned much about life and relationships in these endeavors.  I do need to plumb the depths of this for this self-understanding, for it took many moments of self-scrutiny to continue to want to play baseball at a professional high level, only to be truncated by an arm injury as a pitcher.

Yet it seemed to me that even in the fourth grade I was wondering about the life of the mind and why books seem to be a compelling item in my life.  By then my family had accumulated many books that only seemed to remain on bookshelves.  I never saw my parents reading them.  I believe they arrived because they were part of a shipment of goods that got repossessed.  My Dad was a manager of a moving and storage company and often peoples goods were never paid for in storage.  So often my Dad brought home items from these shipments that were in storage.  

The arrival of these books sparked my first real “book” experience.  I did not read them.  I still was not a reader.  But I wanted to be, I believe.  Or at least I wanted to be seen as someone who could read.  So out of my bedroom window on the first floor of our next rented house after we moved from the beach, I set up a lending library. I fashioned library cards to have the kids in the neighborhood check out books.  All the books were beyond the reading level of the age of the playmates in the vicinity of my home.  I believe the library was short lived for one summer.  But we play-acted the importance of books.  

Fourth grade was also a time I got a mysterious illness. I could not move.  I stayed home a lot by myself as my Mother was also working full time.  I tried to keep up on homework assignments.  I created my first “term report.”  It was a fanciful booklet about how to maintain good health and eating habits.  I drew pictures of food and wrote captions and stories about the reason for the food.  I could write but I could not spell.  So, when creating the report, I wrote incomplete words as placeholders for me to go back and fill in after I looked them up in the dictionary.  Yes, I was aware about dictionaries. But I believe because of my illness I had to turn in the report unfinished, at least unfinished in my eyes.  Yet, when the teacher gave me an A+ she commented on how clever I was to create an interactive report for the reader, giving them a chance to fill in the blank spaces to complete the word.  I was off and running on my literary career.  I actually felt a bit like a fake.  I never divulged the truth about this report.  It became a moment in my life that was foundational.  I assume it was for many reasons.  One, I got away with less effort than was necessary.  Two, it was a moral dilemma that stuck with me.  I believe I still have the report.  Recently I am sorting all my family boxes of mementoes.  I will find it soon and see if my memory is correct about the report. 

Also, in sorting my possessions lately, I uncovered my 5^th grade report card.  I always quipped that I peaked in the 5^th grade.  My last quarter report card was all A’s with one B+.  My sportsmanship on the playground was given high marks.  Life was on the right  track, life of the mind, physical activity and greater awareness of being a leader and made aware about character development.  My teacher was male and my journey with him was profound.  Mr. Trainer, an appropriate name for a person molding young students.  He forced me to understand much about myself though key lessons.  Two stand out. 

On the playground I was the most gifted athlete. My teams always won.  I prided myself in choosing fellow students who were always chosen last, first.  I had confidence that I could win with any team.  Yet one day a call went against me that forced a loss.  I was indignant. I even cried.  Mr. Trainer took me aside and gave me a lecture about my behavior.  It was another moral lesson.  To this day I wonder if he made the call so that I would lose the game.  Helping me understand something about losing. 

Earlier in the year, as the “smart ass” in the class I would make wise comments. I guess to draw attention to myself, or maybe to compensate for something.  So, when Mr. Trainer asked the students to propose what they wanted to do as a whole class activity in the recess, I piped up, “Ring Around the Rosie.”  Mr. Trainer, said okay and “Harlan will sing for everyone.”  We went to the playground and I sang.  It cured my smartass activity, at least for then.   

 Mr. Trainer later became a very successful and loved  Elementary School Principal.  My high school girl friend later became the babysitter for his children.  They talked about me.  She reported, “Harlan he really loved you.”  I guess when you care for someone you are also their most staunch disciplinarian.  These were foundational moments that have stayed with me to this day.  They were real and primary.  They were not cast in postmodern deconstructions.

I would like to say more in detail about sixth grade when I was bused to a so-called  ghetto, where I learned to swear and develop friends of all ethnic groups.  But then I would also have to go into detail on my high school exploits.  I will spare you this.  I will focus on the most significant influence of my high school experience other than sports, and student government,  my first “love.”  Actually, what sparked  my intellectual opening.  Shelley was the consummate 16-year-old intellectual.  Named after poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, she was my literary mentor.  She fostered my desire for an examined life.

This will take some time to unfold.  I still have many more key moments in my journey to talk about as you will see from my list that I have outlined:

1.Path to Erudition

• My religious faith and the influence of my sister Barbara

• College life and intellectual life overtakes sports

• A year in Europe to explore the range of the humanities disciplines

• A crisis in health and decision to leave a future in political science and go on in theology

• Time a Harvard seeking erudition and gaining respect for my intellect.  Yes, I could read by then.

2.Reassessment of Gifts and Commitments

• Marriage and being uprooted to the East Coast and another year in Europe to explore the meaning of life

• Berkeley activism and a PhD, where culture, politics, religion and personal relationships meet in a grand stew of life

• Encounter with my mentor, Robert Bellah

• Children

• First jobs.

• A retreat to the simple life and youth sports

3.A Road Taken, Recovery, and  Re-Invention: The Cave, Transformation and Enlightenment

• Sojourn into the corporate life and personal relationships

• Enter more teaching, great books and shared inquiry

• Erudition is overtaken with forced humility

• Liberal Education and the Humanities become a professional endeavor

• A return to the cave and High School

4.The Future: Putting It all Together as Best Possible, Beyond the Cave

• Death and New Life, Margot

• Reflections on mistakes, Jackson Lears,  John Maynard Keynes

• Colleagues and mutual learning

• Beyond erudition, the cave and the future

• Emeritus life, responsible life, staying engaged with any insight available, not special knowledge

In order to bring this to some type of closure,  I will give a brief summary of my first intellectual mentor, Shelley.  Then I will summarize the above four major periods of my life, though not exactly chronological, this will give enough information to ask me questions that might interest the reader, especially Soraya in preparation for our presentation. 

Attentive Serendipity: Another Case

But first a revisiting of attentive serendipity, by a reading in  An Almanac of the Soul,  with an entry by Henry Miller and sections of No Man is an Island by  the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.

The May 15 entry in An Almanac of the Soul, an anthology  of daily readings, which Margot and I read, usually to start the day at breakfast, is by Henry Miller from his 1940’s The Wisdom of the Heart:

“Paradise is everywhere and every road, if one continues along it far enough, leads to it.  One can only go forward by going backward and the sideways and then up then down.  There is no progress: there is perpetual movement, displacement, which is circular, spiral, endless.  Every person has their own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept  it, no matter where it leads.  I haven’t the slightest idea what my future books will be like, even the one immediately to follow.  My charts and plans are the slenderest sort of guides: I scrap them at will, I invent, distort, deform. Lie, inflate, exaggerate, confound and confuse as the moods seizes me.  I obey only my own instincts and intuitions.  I know nothing in advance.  Often I put down things which I do not understand myself, secure in the knowledge that later they will become clear and meaningful to me.  I have faith in the man who is writing, who is myself, the writer.”

Very soon after reading this passage, which stayed with me all day, I randomly plucked off my bookshelf Thomas Merton’s, No Man Is an Island.  A number of passages in Prologue in his 1967 book,  No Man Is an Island:

“Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and member of mankind.  Every Christian is part of my own body, because we are members of Christ. What I do is also done for them and with them and by them.  What they do is done in me and by me and for me.  But each one of us remains responsible for his own share in the life of the whole body.  Charity cannot be what it is supposed to be as long as I do not see that my life represents my own allotment in the life of a whole organism to which I belong. Only when this truth is absolutely central do other doctrines fit into  their proper context.  Solitude, humility, self-denial, action and contemplation, the sacraments, the monastic life, the family, war and peace—none of these makes sense except in relation to the central reality which is God’s love living and acting in those whom He has incorporated in His Christ.  Nothing at all makes sense, unless we admit, with John Donne, that: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’”

I gained much from each passage.  I could see  wisdom in each. Each spoke of a mysterious oneness to which we are naturally bound.  Miller’s comes from his life experience, Moore’s come from his religious practice.  Both have an important role for the individual.  Miller’s is a faith in himself, Moore’s is from his from his faith that whatever we do we are part of the destiny of all others, there is no autonomous individual.  For Miller, nothing is neat and tidy, except that somehow all roads do lead to paradise.  Good news.  For Moore, a certain truth guides us through all the fragmented ways we define ourselves to what he calls elsewhere in the Prologue, “salvation.”  

However different the two men are, one a secular humanist, the other a religious humanist, there appears to be a common recognition that as humans there is a desire to have faith in something beyond which we can fully understand.  

Each of these readings entered my life somewhat randomly.  Each posed a question that needed a response.  Each spoke to the part of me that seeks wholeness and oneness and another part that recognizes that we live in fragmentation and disorder, most of the time.  I have respect for Miller’s view, but I am more informed by Moore’s vision, yet I seem to always fall short of living this life.  For my religious life, I had a sister, Barbara, who helped to reinforce Moore’s vision.  She was a role model of a humble person of faith.  She subtly gave me gifts to remind me of the religious path.  She gave me a leather-bound Bible with my name embossed on it.  She bought me the recording of Handel’s Messiah.  Her death at 70 years of age to Alzheimer’s was a significant loss, though also and inspiration on how to live.  

I think these two passages entered my life just in time to help me focus the concluding parts of this humanities memoir.  

Highschool Love and Literary Mentorship

Back to the influence of Shelley:  Two gifts she gave me symbolize her influence.  First was a small book, The Story of One Hundred Symphonic Favorites and the other, One Hundred and one Famous Poems.  When my sister was giving me religious gifts, Shelley was reinforcing cultural and literary development. My sports career and role in student government was still very much all consuming.  My relationship with Shelley was also intense, romantically and intellectually leading to self-discovery.  We wrote long and reflective letters on the meaning of life.  In retrospect they probably were sophomoric yet fostered in me something that was more than just a physical life, either on the field or in a relationship.  Shelley read novels and biographies of Nijinsky and understood much about opera and music. I was either reading an occasional sports biography or more likely the Spots page and box scores.  Being stung by a first love with the added literary component was enticing.  Life was to be understood and examined.  So much was new and no doubt confusing as a young boy of 16 or 17 in my sophomore year in high school.  I fully suspect I will come across some of these “profound” musing on the meaning of life.  This relationship became a friendship in the later years of high school, with sports and leadership roles taking over, and as she transferred to a private high school.  However, she sparked in me a lifelong curiosity about culture and knowledge.  We largely lost contact when I went away to college.  I saw her as a role model of the life of the mind.  She remained in my memory life all my life.  I give her credit for a desire to prove that I too could be erudite and complement my athletic life with a sense of being an intellectual.  

There is more: like Mr. Trainer she contributed to my moral development.  One day when we were buying items from a store the clerk failed to charge me for one item.  I decided it was a windfall and did not tell the clerk. Shelley called me on my cheating.  She made it clear that this was the actions of the person she thought I was.  I went back to the clerk and paid for the item.  

Key Benchmarks in my Humanities Journey

1. Path to Erudition

• My religious faith and the influence of my sister Barbara

• College life and intellectual life overtakes sports

• A year in Europe to explore the range of the humanities disciplines

• A crisis in health and decision to leave a future in political science and go on in theology

• Time a Harvard seeking erudition and gaining respect for my intellect.  Yes, I could read by then.

Each of these bullet points would take some time to unfold.  Instead,  I want to summarize  the journey that began in high school with Shelley that continued to blossom in college and in graduate school: a desire for erudition.   Essentially to earn my respect in the realm of an educated, well read and thoughtful intellect I needed to learn more about the basics of knowledge as we understood it.  I wanted to be seen as somebody who had mastered a field of knowledge.  I did not want to be seen as a dilettante.  There was always an anxiety about not knowing something that other educated people knew.  The coin of the realm was to know more than others.  And when lacunae in my knowledge appeared, I would often feign awareness or suggest that I was focused on a different part of the tradition, saying “that is not my field.”  In college I led discussion groups of the latest theological writings of Paul Tillich.  I put baseball on hold for a year to go abroad to Denmark to experience European education which seemed to make US colleges seem more like high school.  I expanded my music and art appreciation with opera and museum visits.  I read Kierkegaard and sat in his desk in the Royal Library.  I created a persona of erudition.  Yes there was a college girlfriend in Copenhagen with me.  But I also put that on hold when I decided to stay a second semester and she went back to the United States. This did not seem like a difficult decision, for I began to equate this relationship as lacking in honesty and integrity.  Perhaps we were using each other.  I wanted more in a relationship.  I wanted wholeness.

Returning as a first-class intellectual snob in my Junior year did not last long when I both got sick, likely with TB, and realized that my fellow students were often more well read and more thoughtful than me.  I hurt my arm and had a shortened baseball experience.  My political science major seemed to me to be reductionistic.  I floundered in my class work.  When in Europe I was on the honor roll.  In college at Whittier College in Southern California I often did not go to class or do homework.  I wanted out of a major that did not allow me to ask the big questions of life.  I eventually turned to theology, ending up at Harvard.  I now had to live up  to the reputation of Harvard’s view of erudition.  Ironically most of my successes at Harvard were in social science courses.  Harvard had a “social relations” department that was more humanistic in the image of William James.  

Yet anxiety about being a dilettante remained.  Everyone at Harvard seemed to be more prepared than I was.  I had made and exit from Whitter College after a senior year when I met my first wife, Madelyn.  We ventured together to Cambridge a month after we were married.  I now had to not only impress my professors and colleagues,  I had to live up to the image I projected to my new wife.  A path toward erudition was an anxiety road. 

1. Reassessment of Gifts and Commitments

• Marriage and being uprooted to the East Coast and another year in Europe to explore the meaning of life

• Berkeley activism and a PhD, where culture, politics, religion and personal relationships meet in a grand stew of life

• Encounter with my mentor, Robert Bellah

• Children and practical feminism

• First jobs, academia and non-profit organizing

• A retreat to the simple life and youth sports.

Erudition goals never ended they just became more realistic and less anxiety producing.  After two years in the Cambridge-Boston area, with me in full-time school and Madelyn gaining a master’s degree in Counselling and a job at Boston University, as the Assistant Director of a Women’s dorm of 500 students,  we decided to head off to study in Geneva Switzerland.  I was gaining a better sense that I was not going to be the next great public intellectual and though a life as a pastor was not my calling the teaching field of religion and social theory seemed to fit my interests and gifts.  After a year in Geneva, in an Institute studying the future of the church/religion in a residential community of 30 students from around the world ,we decided that it was time to return to California for me to pursue a doctoral program at the GTU in Berkeley.  Europe this time for me was a chance to just read and ponder my future.  I spent many hours reading in the field of the sociology of religion. Life was easy with numerous explorations of Italy, France, Germany, England and Eastern Europe.  However, with the political upheaval in the United States, largely around the Viet Nam war, there was an urgency to  be part of the struggle.  Berkeley, the mecca of student protests seemed to be the right place to land.  

But Berkeley was more than political protest. Cultural experimentation was part of the deal.  As a largely innocent and maybe puritanical in my views of lifestyle, Berkeley was a double edge.  Experimentation was a stress on relationships and had to be navigated. Feminism informed Madelyn’s new view of herself. Marxism was a badge of honor.  I founded a Socialist academic journal.  The doctoral program took seven years to complete, along with two children, a house remodel and the ending of the war in Viet Nam.  A lot to accomplish and navigate.  

My interest in the humanities as a discipline was enlarged with one of my professors, Robert Bellah.  He had recently relocated from Harvard to the Berkeley Sociology department.  He was a product of the Social Relations Department at Harvard.  He was a practicing Christian and a polymath.  He was clearly the example of erudition.  Social Science, theology, philosophy and an informed music devotee.  To say that he had an influence on me would be an understatement.  He was a force of nature.  A new biography about him will be out in November and will reveal the challenges of being a public intellectual with his various socialist political commitments and his apologetics for a religious life and practice.  He was a recipient of the National Humanities medal from President Clinton, fully establishing his credentials as a  famous and influential humanities scholar.  Life as his student was often rocky, but we eventually became colleagues and friends.  At one point he predicted that even though I was passed in my dissertation defense, the revisions that were needed would not bode well for me finishing.  

Two children were born and raised for many years before I finished my degree.  In addition, Madelyn decided to get a Physical Therapy degree at Stanford.  I was able to put into practice my feminist sympathies by taking care of two children every morning for breakfast and school and having dinner ready when she returned at night for at least a year.  I learned a lot about myself and what it means to be a parent assuming tasks that were not delineated by societies view of the role of a male or female.  

I began teaching and administrative work at the University of San Francisco once I finished my PhD.  Developing curricula for all the humanities core requirements for adult learners was excellent preparation for embracing the importance of the humanities in liberal education.  There was always an uphill battle for legitimacy of adult education programs.  I eventually left USF to run the Center for Ethics and Social Policy and become the Associate Dean at the GTU.  A long-term collaboration was established with the California Council for the Humanities (CCH)and the Director Jim Quay.  This led to the co-founding of the Center for The Common Good. My commitment to and identification of the importance of the humanities for our democratic society was being solidified with this work.  Two projects stand out.  The first was to develop a consortium of business schools to enhance the curriculum to include business ethics.  The second, funded by the CCH, was to coordinate major public events of 200 people in San Francisco with business, labor and  key non-profits and religious institutions to discuss the Catholic Bishops Pastoral Letter on the economy which was critical of capitalism. It was a time when my academic training could be put into practice around major social policy questions.  

Eventually Madelyn began work as a physical therapist at least 3/5 time which allowed me freedom to expand my work in the community.  This led to a simpler life of home focus and founding the Albany Girls Softball League.  This became a family affair, when both daughters, Amy and Megan, played in the League and Madelyn was a coach. I actually saw this League as a practicum of moral development for adults.  We had to develop rules to monitor and guide adult behavior.  The girls were okay with a recreational League to have fun, rotating through all the  positions and not being too focused on the score.  On the other hand, the parents, largely wanted to win and would harangue the umpires. Many were interested in having their child develop skills that would enhance their admission chances at Ivy League schools and get a leg up on scholarships. After over thirty years the rules instituted largely remain in tack and would eventually influence other youth sports.  My only TV appearance was with the Berkeley basketball coach and the linebacker for the 49ers, Kina Turner.  We discussed the way healthy competition should guide youth sports.  

Journalist Michael Lewis recently interviewed me for a book he was writing about his experience as a coach in the League when his daughter was playing.  Again, my humanities work in the field of applied ethics were being put to use.  

In the parlance of the Hero’s journey,  I did ask the question, “who do I serve?”  I wanted to serve the healthy development of youth.  I also had major initiatives to bring all of Berkeley together, wealthy hills residents and the often-poor ethic flatlands.  I learned first-hand about the racially divided Berkeley. We had some minor successes. 

• Enter more teaching, great books and shared inquiry

• Erudition is overtaken with forced humility

• Liberal Education and the Humanities become a professional endeavor

• A return to the cave and High School

A chance to have a salary that was not that of an academic with the hope that I would have more influence in the community landed me a job as the CEO of a small, but wealthy non-profit.  I was able to help broker international conferences that focused on the environment and peace negotiations in Central America.  These were heady endeavors, and I was compensated a corporate salary.  The rub was that the organization was not healthy, especially with so much wealth. I tried to change the culture.  It also changed me.  I developed an over blown sense of my worth which created tensions in my family. 

I left the organization with a settlement that allowed me to take stock of my life.  I had time to develop my photography and re-invent myself.  I developed a consulting business, coordinating visioning exercises for cities and counties.  I also began more part time teaching at U C Berkeley, St. Mary’s and USF.  This went on for a couple of years.  I developed a humbler sense of my worth with a realization that just being a good person and making a solid contribution to my community and to my students was a sufficient life plan. My relationship with my wife was repaired.  

During this time my forced humility was coupled with a change in my pedagogy.  I was introduced to the notion of shared inquiry in the classroom through a great books training program that was essentially behavior modification for teachers who grew up with a didactic approach to teaching, where erudition was always on display whether you had it or not.  The expert in the room was not the instructor, it was the text itself.  Students and  professor were co-investigators through asking interpretive questions of the text.  You needed to put yourself in the shoes of the author before you began your evaluation or critique about whether you agreed or not with author. Humility and empathy about a text help remove the anxiety about displaying erudition. It was a humanities game changer for me. I was being asked to do more teaching and take on more administrative roles in my part-time teaching.  I had to make a decision about my consulting work. 

An offer from Dominican University allowed me to work full-time as a professor and head of the humanities department. I embraced this opportunity with all my heart and soul in the year 2001.  With passion and some militancy, I became the major apologist for the humanities in the midst of a sea change in higher education that saw market forces taking over small liberal arts colleges.  I felt through my previous life endeavors I could articulate the essential role of the humanities.  The Humanities department  was able to sustain enough majors, both traditional age students and adult learners to be the third largest major on campus.  I served on twenty committees to ensure that the humanities were always represented.  It was always an uphill battle with the professional programs, business school and the growing commitment to science to get the resources needed for the various humanities majors.  The financial wars were always stacked against the humanities. Often money was taken from the humanities to fund other priorities on campus. 

I believe it is correct to say that I developed an antipathy toward other programs who blatantly were only interested in their departmental self-interest.  There was very little conversation about educational vision and mission and how this would cut out the soul of higher education from my perspective. A bright spot occurred in about 2012/13 when a two-year process was initiated by a small group to change the hierarchical culture of Dominican and create greater decentralization of both responsibility and authority.  Responsibility Center Management (RCM) was approved by the Board of Trustees and a new President was hired to implement the plan.  This never happened and the University reverted to competing departments for resources.  The new President was more hierarchical than the last.

[Insight 5:  A new cave metaphor:  Only after I stopped writing yesterday and had dinner did I begin to think about the approach and process of RCM.  I believe it was an early attempt on my part to live a different version of the cave metaphor.  Even though there was key leadership by me, John Stayton and the consultants, the process was taking the whole community into the process. Whatever the result, it was going to be Dominican’s version of RCM.  There were at least 6 working groups defining what RCM would be at Dominican.  Yes, there were highly defined guidelines, but most of them were to ensure flexibility and maximum input from the larger community.  Also, my approach to founding the Girls Softball League was also a broad-based leadership model.  There was a governing board and a rules committee, but again it was designed to maximize the “agency” of the whole endeavor.  I will need to ponder this insight to make sure I am not just doing revisionist historicizing.]

I came to Dominican as if I was returning from my shared inquiry enlightenment, transformed and ready to spread the good news.  I had spent a life working my way out the cave and now I was returning as a responsible bearer of how others could also see the light. The cave metaphor was useful and correct as far as it went.  Leadership was based on my insights.  But in retrospect it was also self-serving and maybe self-defeating.  As an interesting side light, I returned to my high school, to be inducted into the hall of fame for my academic work.  I used the cave metaphor there too.  I was returning, to say that I had seen the light and was happy to help educate all who would listen to my insights.  This is overstated but I am sure that is how some interpreted my remarks.  Yet given the above “insight” I can now see that I was actually attempting to live into a new version of the cave.

At least this is how I saw the world play out before I retreated due to cancer surgery and eventually the illness and death of Madelyn.

Some of my closest colleagues tried to pick up the mantle and fight the good fight for the humanities.  Innovation and creativity were present.  Yet today, the humanities at Dominican are severely challenged as a strong force at Dominican. 

1. The Future: Putting It all Together as Best Possible, Beyond the Cave

• Death and New Life, Margot

• Reflections on mistakes, Jackson Lears,  John Maynard Keynes

• Colleagues and mutual learning

• Beyond erudition, the cave and the future

• Black Lives Matter and the Pandemic

• Emeritus life, responsible life, staying engaged with any insight available, not special knowledge

If in fact the humanities were dying,  why did it happen?  What is at stake?  Who is to blame and what next?  These questions plagued me in 2015 and still plague me today.  But first a story needs to be told.

It was the year 2015,  I was just starting an unpaid leave of absence because my sabbatical proposal had been denied.  My political capital on campus was declining.  Intrigue with some key colleagues at the VP level was becoming the new culture on campus.  RCM was dead.  I needed to get away from the politics of the campus.  I was working on a book about the future of liberal education.  It was a year full of so many activities.  Madelyn and I took the occasion to travel, first Scandinavia and then most of Europe.  Then there was the trip to Colorado.  Time at the cabin increased, one special occasion was shared with one of her best friends, Margot.  Madelyn was preparing her bio for her 50^th high school reunion. It was one of the most enjoyable times at the cabin.  I also had my 50^th high school reunion.  Earlier in the year, I celebrated my 70^th birthday and in October Madelyn celebrated her 70^th with a party for about 20 of her closest friends and family.

Thanksgiving at the cabin in November was a culmination of a very special year.  Before we left the cabin Madelyn experienced a seizure.  It turned out to be a brain tumor.  After a very debilitating surgery to remove the tumor, for the next seven months my life was devoted to taking care of her and ensuring family activities for the family and friends to share with her, including the remodel of a kitchen which was her passion before she became ill.  There were trips to beaches in Ventura, Stinson and Newport.  There was a trip to Hawaii and Disneyland.  The book on liberal education was put on hold.  She died July 27^th, 2016.  

Through bereavement counselling and daily journaling, I began to re-capture a life.  Work on the book started up.  More visits with friends were cultivated.  Yet my children struggled with the death of their Mother and perhaps my commitment to find a new life for myself, which would not be exactly as they had assumed.

The book began, like RCM and the Softball League, it was not going to be my book.  I invited 6 colleagues to join with me in writing the book.  This approach could not be sustained during Madelyn’s illness.   It also could not be sustained with my colleagues; collective writing was not easy for a culture of individuals who were rewarded for individual achievement.  It was too counterculture to be sustained.  Further, I had my theories about the future of the humanities and liberal education that I wanted to put forth. I took another unpaid leave for all of 2016.  I had hoped to work on the book. My analysis about the future of liberal education was not too different from the many books that came out over the last 20 years. 

After going back to full-time teaching in the spring of 2017, I put the book on hold until the summer of 2017.  By then my publisher was not willing to give me anymore extensions.  If the book was written they just wanted first right of refusal.  My commitment to the book waned without a compelling new approach.  

Then my life began to change dramatically when I developed an intimate relationship with Margot.  I had known Margot and her first husband Chip for over forty years, since graduate school.  Margot was now divorced, and we began spending time together which led to a deep and loving relationship.  Time happened at the cabin with Margot when I was still trying to write the book. When in love and contemplating a future with this person it opened up a whole new way to be in the world.  The books seemed to take on less urgency when one’s life was new and joyous.  

That same time at the  cabin included visit by Soraya, my colleague, former student, successor as head of the humanities now a mentor to me with her own fully developed educational vision and research agenda to make sure she achieved tenure.  The book project took a back seat, when I went back teaching full-time.  

In the fall of 2018, I secured a sabbatical for a year.  My new project was less focused on the future of liberal education and more on the future of religion.  2018 included a full year of travel, family weddings, and Margot and I getting married and buying a house together in The Sea Ranch on the north coast in California. 

2019 included a brief return to teaching which lasted until the fall  of 2020.  In the summer of 2020,  I was offered a retirement plan, which I accepted to begin January 15, 2021.  Nothing was normal about 2020.  The pandemic hit and the fissures in American life became daily news.  The Presidency of Donald Trump exposed the dark side of American culture, white supremacy.  It was as fertile time to take stock of one’s own complicity in the inequality and racism in the US.  Teaching on-line with the zoom format provided the occasion to rethink my course content. It was a time of rawness.  The US capital was attacked by right wing militants and true believers in unfounded conspiracy theories.  The Black Lives Matter movement was catalyzed with the detailing of police brutality of African Americans, who were still living with the very vibrant policies that kept them as an underclass.

Personally, I was living a new life with Margot that challenged me to look at myself in  ways that were not possible in the past.  Also, my research had turned to into a way to do greater self-examination.  I began to write a memoir-like analysis about religion, politics, economics, art, and sexuality. 

Business as usual was not possible.  It was in this context that I began thinking about why the humanities, the very source of democratic self-examination was declining and no longer valued.  All the usual theories no longer seemed compelling and complete.  Then I encountered a disturbing article by Jackson Lears in the New York Review of books, “Orthodoxy of the Elites.”

It made me think about my own complicity in the decline of the humanities.  I saw myself as one of the elites who “deserved” our special status.  Consciously and unconsciously a view of meritocracy would have to assume that those who were not successful or who did not have my world view were either not deserving or wrong.  In preparation for the Graduate Liberal Studies presentation, I wrote the following:

One direction of my self-examination is to take seriously the critique in the January 14, edition of the New York Review of Books of Anne Applebaums’ book,   Twilight of Democracy.  The review by Jackson Lears, “Orthodoxy of the Elites,” has challenged me to think about how my view of education and the humanities was short sided and implicitly contributed to an approach to the humanities that was destined to fail for those who needed it the most for our Democratic society. I will attach my letter to the editor that talks about the Lears article.  

February 3, 2021  

After reading this to Margot it prompted a conversation about how some suggest that trying to make the humanities “relevant”  reduces it to some type of practical skill.  It undermines the notion that there is an intrinsic value to the humanities, not a by-product of something more fundamental.  

This is an argument that I have articulated many times.  However, in further reflection this argument can be used in an elitist fashion. Such as:

1. Those who do not understand the humanities are dull, uneducated and without a full sense of what it means to be human.  As if knowing Shakespeare is the best way to make us human.

2. I have often fallen into this elitist trap:  for example, the way in which I characterize my business colleagues, or the way I type science faculty and especially the way I think of psychology faculty as reductionistic pseudo-scientists.  

3. Therefore, I am sure my disdain for the non-educated gets communicated with my view of education and the humanities as more essential than other disciplines. 

4. This is not new in history.  Often the humanities were seen as the terrain of the so-called “cultured class.”  Being able to quote from one of the classics was a sign of culture.  Never mind if one really understood what was being said.  In this case the humanities are not intrinsic. There is something more fundamental that illustrating you class position.

So, there is a long tradition of the humanities which is essentially elitist.  No wonder the Trump supporters who do not have a college education resent people with elite educations.  One, they do not have it. Two, they  can’t afford it. Three, are looked down upon by elites like me, even if it is only subconsciously done so.  Or maybe, if I am honest, intentionally.  Of course, with good evidence. 

I am building my credentials in Lears’ “elite orthodoxy.”

Here is the Letter:

Letter to the Editor: New York Review of Books, January 14, 2021

“Orthodoxy of the Elites” by Jackson Lears

I was discomforted by Lears’ article even as I was applauding his trenchant critique of neo-liberalism and a self-serving meritocracy.  First, his treatment of the person Applebaum stooped to ad hominem attacks. Certainly, her background is a story of centrist elites, but his attacks got in the way of making his substantive points.  In contrast, the review of Applebaum’s book in the Nation by  David Klion, accomplished a critique of Applebaum without personal attacks.  Second, Lears’ erudition on so many topics got in the way of his key challenge to liberals like me:  we need to own up to our complicity in the current situation of systemic inequality and racism, which has led to an abandonment of the working class.  Which leads to my third discomfort. He is right about liberals’ selling out to neo-liberalism and a form of meritocracy. He is right we need to examine ourselves rather than blaming others.  However, I was more directly challenged to undertake  this self-examination by the reading of Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal or What Ever Happened to the Party of  the People. Frank provides all the vivid raw data with examples from the Clinton and the Obama administrations.  

In spite of the first two discomforts yet because of the third, Lears’ article is worth several deep readings.  Each paragraph suggests many years of research and thinking on Lears’ part.  It is an article that needs to be unpacked into several books.  One such reference struck a chord with me and provided a helpful framing of elite orthodoxy. He stated: “The belief that people get what they deserve is rooted in the secular individualist outlook that has legitimated inequality in the United States for centuries, ever since the Protestant ethic began turning into the spirit of capitalism.” Following this allusion there is an analogy that is worth considering.  Max Weber’s thesis was that wealth, through individual hard work (the Protestant Ethic) was an indication that individuals were  part of God’s elect. It was a sign that they were “winners” in God’s eyes, and they deserved it.  It was a material bromide to compensate for doctrines of predestination that were psychologically unacceptable.  

Analogously, the ideology of meritocracy suggests that if you rise to the top via your “talent” defined by your class, expertise and achievements in top schools (even if you got in via legacy, or a head start due to your wealth, class and access) then you deserved to be there and were one of the winners, self-defined and confirmed by fellow talented winners. No God is needed as Lears points out this value is now a deep in our individual oriented secular culture.  This is Lears at his best, drawing our attention to parts of our culture that support elite rationalizations.  

However, pondering Lears article did leave me with a big question. Why have we not been able to induce the self-examination that Lears, Frank and others call for?  When I am honest with myself, I know that their analysis is correct. What will it take to change course? Frank suggests that we need to rededicate ourselves “to the economic well-being of ordinary citizens.”  Lears, suggests that we need a “deliverance” from American exceptionalism.  We need to “grapple with the significance of our…history, including the many crimes committed in the name of American democracy.” How will this happen?  We need  leadership and a social movement to carry forth a commitment to a view of the common good, not tied to power and prestige.  More articles with good analysis and bold next steps will be helpful from  future contributors to the  NYRB. A self-examination of who NYRB serves, with “heretical” articles  will be a welcome contribution to the conversation.

Harlan Stelmach

Professor Emeritus, Humanities

Dominican University of California

I did some other reflections on the article while writing the letter:

Jackson Lear’s review of Anne Applebaum’s, Twilight of Democracy was a difficult read.  Difficult because it was less about Applebaum and more about Lears’ wide-ranging critique about all things moderate, that is, “centrists.”  I was hoping for more clarity about how to read Applebaum judiciously and a way to challenge my own experience of benefiting from American meritocracy. If one did not already have a critique of neo-liberalism  or his view of meritocracy, one would have been turned off by his crass attack on Applebaum’s personal life and an uncharitable reduction of her political views.  Rather than sticking with substantive arguments, Lears succumbed to numerous ad hominin attacks.  I hoped for more from such a distinguished scholar as Lears, and from a lead review in the NYRB.  A review in the Nation of Applebaum’s book succeeded in damning Applebaum’s neo-liberalism without a personal attack.

What is really on my mind is why have we not seen much movement to make progress on addressing the ubiquitous consensus that liberal elites captured by neo-liberalism and a narrow view of meritocracy have produced the current inequality and Trumpism.  Does Arlie Hockshield in her book, Strangers in a Strange Land about the Trump supporters have some thoughts about this?  Get the book that Bill Sullivan recommended that makes the same case. (I am trying to remember this.  I will check this out.)

Is this a version of the Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism where the desire to be seen as chosen was to show that God showered great wealth on the elect?  That is with meritocracy if you rise to the top via your “talent” defined by your class and achievements in top schools (even if you got in via legacy, or a head start due to your wealth, class and access) then you deserved to be there and were one of the winners.  

Increasingly this left out the poor, racially marginalized, and those slipping out of the middle class due to a new gilded age of centralized money and power. Winners whose wealth and power was deserved and do to their hard work and expertise, forgetting that the system was largely “rigged” systemically in their favor.  

Today I have to think how my individualist view of the metaphor of the cave reinforced my elitism.  

The Future

This reflection then leads to what next. How do I manifest these insights in my life and work today?  I am still working on defining my future endeavors, but the elements  include the following:

• Continue the self-reflection in my memoir writing, sharing this with others to prompt similar self-reflection

• Continue to write op ed articles and letters to the editor

• Engage in messy community issues like homelessness and people’s park and new zoning laws

• Continue to use the work of the salon to educate myself on key issues

• Take the time to do reading in areas I am less familiar

• Read together with Margot and learn from her

• Even read some novels taking the advice of novelist Zadie Smith in her October 24, 2019 New York Review of Books article.  “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.”

• Define conversation partners,  write and have zoom conversations:  Barry, Hugh, Traer, Soraya Chase, Laura, Julia, Max, Melba, Suresh, Henry and others

• Write a review of the biography of John Maynard Keynes, The Price of Peace, where the author documents how elites have defined reality to exclude so many people leading to inequality and how Keynesian thinking has been perverted to foster war and privilege through the manipulation of the economy, largely to help re-elect Presidents. This also illustrates where Keynes’s experience as part of the Bloomsbury culture with Virginia Wolf helped him to understand that economics was not a certainty science but a human venture that was always unfolding.

The focus is to be more public.  Follow the advice of my AAR presentation in Tucson, use Bellah and Niebuhr.  E.g. Write a review of Matteo’s biography of Bellah.  Talk about a conference on Bellah.  Get Matteo’s book on the agenda of AAR.

Conclusion

How do I understand humanities?  First and foremost it is an endeavor that tries to take the wisdom of the past and engage it with the present.  Do this in humility and passion.   The humanities that I subscribe to is always unfolding and expanding, any attempt to add certainty to life constricts it and kills it.  The ultimate positive contradiction is to “define” life as unfolding.  We enter the future with a faith in this unfolding.