This year brought me a new perspective on the beginning of school. Because I’d thrown my back out, I sat among the parents, rather than marching into the stadium with my colleagues, at the opening convocation. As the students walked in preceded by their professors-to-be, some of the parents commented on the size of the faculty. It is a rather impressive looking group, I thought, and I missed marching in among them. Normally I don’t much stand on ceremony, but there’s something about these rituals that I find both moving and important. Maybe because it’s my job to conduct college courses–with all the routine of class preparation, essay grading, etc.–college life itself has become for me rather commonplace, so I enjoy the opportunity to dress up and play school once in a while.
I was enjoying hearing the admiring comments about my fellow professors. When everyone in the stands stood to applaud and cheer, I was naively impressed that all of these parents would be so appreciative of the faculty; but then I also thought it made a kind of sense because these were the people who would be overseeing the education of their sons and daughters. As I suspect that everyone reading this blog has realized already, the cheering and applause were for the sons and daughters, not the professors. Perhaps the faculty was worth a comment or two, but the real spectacle was the young people whom the parents were about to leave behind. As one of the speakers reminded us (and such a reminder was no doubt helpful for those as slow-witted as I), this was a difficult day of parting.
But then parting remains an essential part of human experience. Continuing growth means also a continuing breaking away and leaving behind. A life of growth means also interaction with the complex web of actuality, an interaction that challenges the haven of more of the same. As Walter Ong emphasizes in his Interfaces of the Word (1977), the human person is an especially intensive open system, for we are capable of interacting with the cosmos not only physically and biologically, but also intellectually and spiritually. In large part under the aegis of our growing electronic technologies of communication, we are coming into a deeper sense of openness, the open-endedness of the cosmos, including ourselves, in contrast with the sense of closedness and closure that has for centuries dominated quite a lot of European consciousness–related in no small measure to print technology and the printed book’s seeming containment of knolwedge sealed off, between the covers, from the rest of actuality. It’s not that print is disappearing (prophecies to the contrary notwithstanding), but rather that our sense of it and use of it is transforming and becoming more complicated in interaction with electronic technologies of language. As Ong also points out, ours is an age much taken up with, interested in, and committed to open-system thinking. The sensibility for and interest in open systems feeds powerfully into a growing awareness of the dynamics of ecology, a complex field (or intersection of fields) of inquiry that emphasizes the interconnectedness, interaction, and open-endedness of all things.
As it happened, our (that is, Lewis & Clark College’s) speaker at this year’s opening convocation was the ecology scholar and activist Eban Goodstein, whose work centers on global warming. As Professor Goodstein put it, we stand at a unique moment in human history when our decisions could make a tremendous difference for the earth and our lives on it, certainly a tremendous and far-reaching difference for how our children and their children will live on it. In fact, Professor Goodstein’s whole talk was a deeply informed discourse on the interconnectedness of our planet. For example, he pointed out that the snow on Mount Hood supplies not only good skiing, but also much of our summer drinking water. This kind of connection is easily enough understood once it’s pointed out, but it is also the kind of connection that is far to easily to overlooked. It is also only a minor example of the vast web of connections composing the planet that we know. We ignore such connections at our peril, for now is the time that we must recover form our addiction to greenhouse-gas-producing fuels and switch over to alternative forms of energy. We have the technology and the wealth–what we need is the political will.
However, as Professor Goodstein also emphasizes, the sheer facts and predictions associated with global warming, along with all of the pragmatic arguments for putting global warming to a halt–as important as these are–are not enough either to explain or to encourage the passion that many humans feel for matters of ecological concern. In his recent book Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming (University of Vermont Press, 2007), Goodstein argues that the fundemnetal reason to stop global warming is the love that we have for the planet. In the course of the book, he articulates a fundamentally ecological (that is, open-system) spirituality attuned to the natural world, its rhythms and complexities. It should be explained that one need not believe in God to be deeply spiritual, for spirituality as I understand it has to do with how one experiences meaning, meaningfulness, and connection in one’s life. Nor need one not believe in God to have an ecological, and ecologically informed, spirituality. In fact, much of the theology that I read–for example, the wide-ranging thought of David Tracy–is informed by the human concerns of our age.
In the true spirit of the liberal arts, Professor Goodstein concluded his talk by stating that what students should be studying in college to deal with global warming includes not only chemistry and biology, but also such fields as art history, literature, religious studies, philosophy, and on and on. In our interactions with the earth and each other, we do well to make use of all that we are and have. The kind of open-system thinking that continues to develop in the liberal arts is one of the invaluable ways of preparing young people, as well as the rest of us, to interact with the world. Education and formation are never really finished; they are a way of life.