Harvest

Here I go, taking another prompt from Cafe Writing, this time option 2. I don't claim that this is particularly good stuff I'm writing, but it helped me get something out on paper. No-Prize to the first person who can identify the formal constraint I placed upon myself in this work of free verse. I could probably re-write without it and get a better poem, but if I hadn't done it in the first place I probably wouldn't have stumbled on most of the lines that I like, so there's some value there, I think.

The prompt was to write a poem about gathering together or scattering abroad, using for inspiration the following quotation by Edwin Way Teale:

"For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad."

For a moment, think of the season beneath the rustling social fabric, to the bared,
     goose-pimpled flesh of the Earth;

Man: imagine him not in his own context, but in nature’s;

Autumn not as football games and world series and leaf-blowers and costumes and candy.

Is it possible for you to imagine what lies deeper?

A moment of your

Time, a moment of your imagination. Consider:

Of all the festivals of ancient humanity, buried in our genes and memes,

Harvest is deepest.

Of course, it is only as old, really, as agriculture, but

Gathering as it does something of an even older hunter-gatherer tradition

Together with the twining roots of civilization, it is as deep and rich as the best soil,

For Harvest is where Humanity and

Nature entwine mostly closely like sometimes-lovers. Or, anyway, where they did.

It was, 100 years ago, a third of the country who farmed; 200 years ago, 90%. Today the number

Is less than 3%.

A paltry few, and harvest festivals speak to us less as we speak to Nature hardly at all, estranged lovers.

Time was, we felt the season’s celebration in our pulses, in our bones, in our loins, and in Nature's.

Of what essential of the season could we be oblivious?

Sowing with our hands and feet, legs, arms, chests, our hearts and minds, and reaping the same.

Of what, today, are we even aware of this, when we see not our farmers, when we are not our farmers,
     when we know not our farmers,

Scattering them far and wide across the landscape? Seek them

Abroad, in the far country called the past, and in that other distant land, our future.

Rural Third Places

A friend of mine recently post an article on Facebook about why "third places" are particularly important in rural communities.

For those who haven’t heard of them before, third places are where people meet and socialize outside of their homes (first places) and their work (second places). Sociologist Ray Oldenburg is credited with drawing attention to third places through his influential book, The Great Good Place.

 These are important places both for the ways they bring people together and the way that they foster a sense of community. Third places also serve to introduce newcomers to a community. The entry linked above got me to thinking about third places in communities I've lived in.

When I moved to middle-of-nowhere western Pennsylvania, I had friends who weren't afraid to become regulars at the local hole-in-the wall, a shabby-looking bar owned and run by an old biker and his wife. The main draws were $.70 drafts and cheap but tasty wings (only one variety, the kind with a spice rub). But it was also one of the finer third places I've known. I don't think this is true of all bars--most aren't Cheers. But this place, where the owner once plunked down a large handgun in front of me, I saw a patron in the process of being ejected fling a shot glass at the woman behind the bar, and there was a sign on the door disallowing spitting out the door, this seedy little place was well laid out to be an effective third place.

Why? The place was dominated by a U-shaped bar in the middle of the room, with just a few tables off to one side (plus a pool table and some ancient mechanical game involved metal discs that you'd slide from one end of a lane to another (think table-top shuffle board or curling). But the bar was the thing. Everyone sat around the bar, almost by necessity. So everyone was, more or less, looking at everyone else. It was easy to strike up conversations with complete strangers--and with the bartender too, as she was always in front of everyone. We more or less became regulars and we got to know a lot of the locals that we never would have gotten to know any other way. We taught at a boarding school--an institution of privilege--in a down-on-its-luck community, and that had led to a fairly sharp town-gown divide. Nonetheless, by making ourselves part of this third place, we bridged that divide in our own small way.

Where we live now, the third place that comes most easily to mind is our local coffee shop. Coffee shops seem like natural third places, because people often come to "hang out" there, but there's something about the atmosphere that also makes it easy to strike up conversations with other people there, even strangers. There are also special events there, such as musicians, which serve to draw people there.

Restaurants--and most bars that are set up like restaurants--do not function this way. In a restaurant, we tend to be more isolated. I'm at my table/booth, you're at yours, and we're unlikely to speak to one another. Even with people you know, you often won't speak to them, except maybe a quick hello as you or they leave. Perhaps it's because we go to restaurants for meals, which have a certain formality to them (as opposed to "grabbing coffee"); perhaps it's because of the set-up, with so many discrete tables and booths separated from one another. Whatever the reason, restaurants--nice as they are--tend not to make good third places. I'm sure there are exceptions, but that's how it seems to me.

What are some of your third places, and how do they work?

Patriotism, etc.

The 4th of July holiday in America seems rooted in ideas of "God and country," and that same soil is where I put down my own roots and started to grow. Although I gather that he hated every minute of it, my father served in the military, and so did many of the adult men that I respected most when I was growing up. I proudly wore an American flag lapel pin whenever I had a lapel, proudly raised the flag at my school for a year while a cub scout, proudly sang the Star Spangled Banner whenever it was being played, and proudly won an American Legion essay contest when I was in high school with a sincere speech that I wrote--and later read at a Memorial Day parade--praising America and the flag and patriotism.

And yet, in the meantime, my ideas about patriotism have changed radically, as I've grown beyond my roots and branched out. Really, I have a hard time calling myself patriotic anymore--and certainly most "traditional patriots" might not call me so. Allow me to explain.

History teaches us several lessons about patriotism. On the on hand, there's the standard lesson of the importance of being willing to die for one's country and what all the great patriots of the past have done. Honoring our history, our ideals, our own sense of our country's greatness. We know that story well, I think.

Our concept of patriotism derives almost entirely from a movement which really gained speed in the 19th century: the idea of nationalism. And history clearly shows us that nationalism accomplished roughly two things: the unification of countries like Germany and Italy that hadn't been unified before, and strong feelings of loyalty to the idea of one's "nation." Which, of course, made people more willing to kill and die for their countries, leading to the killing fields of WWI and perhaps even more so to WWII. You want to see flag waving? Check out Nazi Germany or fascist Italy. Most of the countries of western Europe that I've traveled in feel a deep aversion now to this kind of flag waving, because they've seen where it leads. A British friend of mine visiting America was bemused and a bit uneasy by all of our flag waving on this side of the pond. As someone--it's hard to pin down just who--once said, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag and carrying a cross."

The danger of nationalism or patriotism is not in loyalty as much as it is in blind loyalty, the too-often-advocated "my country, right or wrong." And that's one of the things that become harder and harder about patriotism, that my country--despite all the rhetoric--has been wrong quite a bit more than we would like to acknowledge. There is another lesson of history.

Don't get me wrong: we've advocated high ideals since the earlist days of the republic. We've been all about freedom and equality. Kind of. Sort of. Except that we've never wholly lived up to those ideals.  For almost half of our history, we enslaved other human beings, even after all of our European peers had ended it. The rhetoric of accepting immigrants has always thinly concealed a good deal of racism and ethnic bias. Our country and its government has, since the beginning, favored the interests of the rich. That's not something new--indeed, it has been ever thus. And let us not forget sexism, which also puts the lie to our ideals.

Yet, we might say, history shows us a trajectory of progress. Don't we do better than we used to? Fair enough, but it's essential to remember that none of these things happened inevitably. Nowhere was it written that things had to get better, and in few cases did it come from the top down. If "we the people" had not fought to make things better, it's almost certain that they wouldn't have gotten better, because our leaders have consistently been the representatives more of the status quo than of a progressive, better future. To say this another way: things haven't gotten better in our country because of blind patriotism or "my country, right or wrong" attitudes. Things have gotten better because people were willing to question the state of things and work to change them. So it has been and so is it likely to be as long as our nation endures.

And always high in our consciousness on Independence Day are the men and now women who've served our country. Is there something noble in risking one's life for our country? I would say yes. However, because these citizens are risking themselves for the rest of us, we have a duty to work to ensure that their lives are risked only in military endeavors which actually further the interests of the nation and not simply those of some minority of our citizens. Far too often, the military actions of our country have been been dishonest and/or hypocritical. The instances in which our leaders have lied to us or manipulated us have been too many for a short book, much less for my little blog. The times that our leaders have initiated military operations which put our soldiers in harm's way and killed the citizens of other nations in causes directly against our ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy have been, sadly, numerous. These, too, are the lessons of history. We have overthrown democracies in favor of dictatorships in order to further the economic interests of our elites as well as to further dubious, vague goals of "security." The military actions in the middle east following 9/11 are only the latest in a long line of American actions in which the citizens of our free democracy have been deceived about the aims and objectives of the war. My country, right or wrong? That's an easy way to brush aside such questions--and an easy way to ensure we get more of the same.

For that matter, should we look at our democracy? Our "true/false" democracy where we can choose a Democrat or choose a Republican, but don't have any other real options? And let's not forget the whole system of the electoral college rather than  a more democratic, truly popular election. If real democracy is our goal--though it probably never has been--we could be doing a lot better.

And yet, I'm raising all of these points not to argue that America is a terrible place and not to argue that we don't also have a lot to be proud of as Americans. Our people are basically good-hearted and well-meaning. Our ideals of freedom and equality are noble ones. Even the execution of them haven't been terrible. When compared with the vast majority of all governments in the history of humanity, we have it pretty damn good here. Even compared to much of our contemporary world we're doing awfully well. But let's not go too far: we're not, in every way, "the best." And we're not--when measured against our own ideals--as great as we could be. And yet, there's the thing: we can be, but only if we are not complacent, only if we are not smugly self-satisfied with our country and blindly patriotic.

And this, to me, is true patriotism. Loving your country, respecting what it stands for, and being loyal to it, but ultimately being more loyal to the ideals than to the government (any government), more loyal to what is best about the country than simply to what is. True patriotism is being willing to make our country great, not quacking on and on about how great our country is, not excusing its failures or condemning those who criticize us.

Choices, Virtues, the Mind

"Think of a reasonably consequential decision or choice you made recently. Tell yourself why you made that choice."

This is how one of the presenters at the previously-referenced faculty development day began her portion of a presentation. She went on to cite research that I'd read in another forum explaining how our decision are often, in fact, influenced by factors in our environment that we may not even be consciously aware of. As she said, "We are good at inventing stories or explanations to describe how we arrived at a certain decision, but actually have little sense of what really went on." For instance, she gave the example of performing some kind of charitable act. We may tell ourselves that we performed some act of kindness because that's the kind of person we are--someone who does good things. The research suggests, however, that we're more likely to be good to others when, for instance, we've just had something good happen to us. Or when we're in a nice environment (for instance, outside a bakery from which wonderful smells are emanating). Likewise, we may not help someone in need because we're in a bad mood, or because we're in a hurry or because we're in an ugly, smelly part of town.

I'd previously read research along these lines, so this wasn't a surprise to me. It's really just an extension of a long history of research going back at least as far as the Milgram experiment, all suggesting that our ethics and behavior are more than a little circumstantial, as opposed to be merely an extension of our "character."

At least, that is, as we commonly think of character. As the presenter noted, our ordinary conception of character seems to be certain characteristics (often thought of in terms of virtues and vices) that we "have" that we then act on. For instance, I am generous, so I give things freely to other people. I am honest, so I tell the truth. I am lazy, so I sit around eating Cheetos and putting off my work. It turns out that it's more complicated than that.

I think Aristotle, over 2300 years ago, had some handle on this, or at least helps point the way.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

In other words, these "characteristics" are simply ways that we characteristically react, ways that we respond more often than not (at least in view of the person judging us to be so). It is, though, too simplistic to say, simply because environmental factors play a role, that decision making--moral or otherwise--is merely a matter of context. Even in the original studies, there are people who go against the statistical tendencies, who behave a particular way despite their circumstances. We can't discount the effect that environment can have. As educators, for instance, we should be keenly aware of the kind of environment we are creating for our students both inside and outside the classroom. Part of what we are doing, I suspect, if we're doing things right, is creating an environment where students will build habits of excellence or virtue (along these lines, I think I need to read more about the Habits of Mind). We should also be educating our students to be more conscious of the subtle influences can alter their behavior away from what they would want their behavior to be. Of course, we adults need to cultivate the same consciousness.

Bells of Mindfulness

In Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hahn talks about literal and metaphorical "Bells of Mindfulness," and says

In my tradition, we use the temple bells to remind us to come back to the present moment. Every time we hear the bell, we stop talking, stop our thinking, and return to ourselves, breathing in and out, and smiling. Whatever we are doing, we pause for a moment and just enjoy our breathing. Sometimes we also recite this verse:

Listen, listen.
This wonderful sound brings me back to my true self.

 He goes on to discuss the idea that just about anything can serve as a "bell of mindfulness," particularly here in America where church bells are less common. I was thinking of this last weekend when I was at my college choir's reunion, because one of the many distinctive features of our campus is the set of bells in the bell tower, which not only toll out the hours and the quarter-hour increments between them, but are also pealed by students for an hour each Friday after classes have ended.

While I was there, I used my iPod to record the bells on Sunday morning as they struck the 9 o'clock hour, and after I returned home, I edited the file so that it could toll any of the hours during the work day, as well as the quarter hours. Then I scheduled my computer to play those files at the appropriate time and--voila!--bells of mindfulness.

Of course, the campus on which I live and work actually has its own bell tower with an even more impressive set of bells. However, I never seem to hear them in my office. This way, I will hear bells. It's also nice that each sound clip starts with the gentle sound of the breeze and the chirping of birds and fades out into the same. Lovely, really.

But there's more to it than that, because the bells also take me out of the present moment, somewhat, and take me to the past and to another place, to Kenyon College. It's the place I spent four nostalgia-burnished years of my life, some of my favorite to recall. It's the place where I proposed to my wife four years ago (very close, in fact, to where I stood to record the bells) and where we married three years ago (pretty close to the same site). I've returned there over and over. Lauren and I both love the place so much that she was jealous of the fact that I got to return last weekend and she couldn't. We decided that we would take a vacation to just hang out there when we have a long weekend in the fall. That's how much we love it.

More than that, it's a place that helped form "my true self," my best self. I think of it all rather like the way that Wordsworth thinks of his spot of wild country written about in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey":

                                These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: --feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: --that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

 My bells from Kenyon are not exactly what the Buddhist monk had in mind, nor are they quite what Wordsworth was getting at, but hearing them is a way of bringing into the present moment peace and joy and perhaps a sort of recollection of my best self.

Happiness: commitments, chasing dreams

Recently, I  blogged about the "pursuit" of happiness and the problematic nature of that pursuit. And now, it's graduation season.

If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front. -- David Brooks, "It's Not About You

Brooks is considering a different problem, but I think he has some interesting things to say on the same subject that I was writing about some days ago. He continues:

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

 I was struck by this formulation of what adulthood is really about and it struck a chord in me. Perhaps because of "expressive individualism" we are resistant to this, to being "tied down," yet historically speaking that has been precisely the way that humans have constructed meaning for their lives--through the webs of their interpersonal relationships, through their relations to a community, as well as through their achievements. 

All of this, however, is not necessarily and either/or prospect. The point of life is not simply to tie ourselves to commitments and, mule-like, slog them through our three score years and ten, whether we like it or not. There is an art to choosing our commitments, not to mention revising our commitments, de-committing, moving on. 

Nonetheless, I do think that if we buy into the ideas of expressive individualism too uncritically, it leads us to unhappiness. We chafe too easily at our commitments, we desire freedom and change for their own sake, rather than because our situation really needs them. We are, to go back to the way I put it in my other post, chasing happiness instead of chasing the other ends that offer significance to our lives. 

There is a balance to be struck here, and it is not the same balance for everyone. Some people really do need to march to the beat of their own drummer, chase their dreams, etc. I suspect that's been the case with most of our great artists, musicians, writers, our innovators, our movers and shakers. And it's not just them, of course: all of us need that at times, and some more than others. The important thing, I think, is that we have to spend some time thinking about these matters to find what works for us, the balance between freedom and commitment, between self and others, and whatever other poles we could define these issues around. If we don't give it serious thought, we are likely to follow too slavishly a path not of our own choosing or to be pulled from the path on which we could find happiness by the voices whispering to us of some other way of living that we dimly believe even if we shouldn't.

Happiness; or, what shall we pursue?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Has another phrase so shaped the psyche of our nation? As usual, though, the most difficult words are some of the most common: what is happiness? What does it mean to pursue it?

I recently listened to a podcast (Philosophy Bites) with a guest talking about happiness and how it's been seen at various times in history.

Historically, he noted, for medieval man happiness was a sort of accident--it might happen, but it wasn't the expected, normal state. Instead, salvation was where it was at, because life was lousy (for most people, most of the time). From the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, that changed, to the point where we were seen to have a "right" to "pursue" happiness, though the podcast's guest noted that in modern times, this "right" has become something more like a "duty" to the point where we need to be constantly questioning whether or not we're happy.




We have this idea that we should be happy, so we're constantly questioning whether or not we are and, I suspect, losing what peace we might have if we appreciated what we have.

Pascal Bruckner, the interviewee on the podcast, took something of an ancient Greek perspective on the matter. For the ancient Greeks, happiness was a judgment that could only be made at the end of a life: has one lived a good life, has one achieved excellence in the things one aimed at? In other words, it was something different from momentary contentment, momentary pleasure--a good reminder of how words change their meanings and/or have ambiguity thanks to multiple meanings.

In any case, two insights he offered that I particularly liked were these: first, the idea that "happiness is being pointed in the right direction." Second, he suggests that "happiness is a secondary goal. Other feelings and goals are more important." In other words, happiness isn't something we pursue as such. We pursue other ends--"engaging in activities which both enhance life for yourself and others and which bring you a sense of meaning"--and the fact that we're doing so, that's where happiness is. We're pointed in the right direction with regards to the meaning in our lives, the goals in our lives, the values that we hold.
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The preceding grew out of a comment made on a friend's blog, linked to where I quoted her in the final paragraph. Thanks, Sarah, for getting me to write about something I meant to write about.

Conscious decisions vs. the weight of circumstances

Maybe it's not a general phenomenon, but I have a tendency to want to think of human existence in terms of conscious decisions, of will-power, of human will. "If I work hard..." "If I stay focused on..." "If I decide to..."

I think that being a book person reinforces this, because books so often offer explanations for what decisions led to a particular outcome, explanations for why people make the decisions they do. It's the choices that are crucial. If there's a climactic battle at the end (can you tell I'm a fantasy lover?), we expect the outcome to hinge on the choices, whether of the leaders of each sides, of the lower officers, or of the common soldiers. If a freak mudslide wiped out one side, giving the other victory, or a storm sank one fleet and gave the other victory, in a novel we would feel cheated, even though exactly these sorts of non-human agents are, in the real world, the actual causes. Our satisfaction stems not from our sense of reality but from our sense of what we think reality should be.

And don't our religious traditions teach much the same thing? While Christianity, for instance, may ultimately boil down to one decision, our overall sense is that our eternal fates are decided by the sum of our actions, by the choices we make.

The thing is, it's not always so easy as that. In very many cases, we are inclined to recognize mitigating circumstances if we really look at it. We recognize, for instance, physiological changes that make a person either not responsible or less than fully responsible: dementia in the elderly, chronic pain, mental illness.

I was thinking about this in a rather different context the other day. The Monday before last, I started a new workout program. The first week was tough, but really good. I did all the workouts plus a couple other workouts. This week got off to a good start... and then Monday evening I started to feel congestion in my head and a sore throat. I hated it. I've been there before: the November before my wedding I was doing the Lean and Hard workout, starting the fifth of six weeks when I got sick. I had been seeing excellent results, but then I couldn't do it for a week and a half and it just threw me completely off (Thanksgiving and then Christmas didn't help either!). An intense workout program is hard enough when it's just you fighting against your own desire not to workout or your own desire to eat chocolate chip cookies instead of a healthy, well-balanced meal. But when circumstances make it really hard to follow through, what's a mere mortal to do?

Tuesday morning, I woke up with a vague sense of congestion and a clear sense of sore throat, but get up I did, at 5:40, to head to the gym. I did my workout, but I felt exhausted the rest of the day. When I came home, I had to nap before going back to work for an evening on duty--which brings me to another point. Tuesday was, from a weather standpoint, a lousy day: rainy and cold. It can be hard to feel good on a day like that, and I didn't. But then Wednesday and today came along: sunny and in the 50s and then 60s. Spring had sprung. And even though I got up at 5:40 on Wednesday, even though I felt more congested and my throat was more sore, I spent most of the day feeling pretty darned good. When I came home, I didn't need a nap because I felt great.

But there it is again: forces outside my control influencing me. I didn't choose for it to be a sunny day, but the fact that it was made it better, despite my sinus whatever feeling worse. And the same was true today. I went to tennis practice, I spent an hour and a half doing yoga, and I felt awfully good. Strange but true: I felt congested at the beginning of my yoga workout and I felt congested again after it was over, but during my workout, my sinuses felt pretty darned good.

Now, was my willpower involved here? Sure. I could have not gotten up Tuesday. I could have indulged in feeling bad and feeling sorry for myself yesterday and today. But I was also helped out by a bit of good weather.

Motivation and Education

Recently, a friend and colleague posted the following video on his Facebook wall, from the TED conference:


It's worth watching, but the synopsis of it is this: extrinsic motivation--sticks and carrots both--work well for straightforward tasks, but they actually hinder performance on tasks that demand "even rudimentary cognitive skills." People do far better when their motivation is intrinsic.

While posting it, my friend remarked that the talk "has excellent application to what's wrong on Wall Street and in education in regards to intrinsic/extrinsic motivation." I haven't questioned him specifically about this, but it got me to thinking about how this might apply in education.

My initial thoughts, I must admit, were not terribly positive. Schools, if you think about it, seem built almost entirely on external motivators. We force kids to be there in the first place. Once there, we have a more or less rigidly proscribed curriculum, even granting the space for electives. Within each day, we mark off how much time they will be forced/allowed to spend on any of the subject they must study. And while intrinsic motivations certainly drive some of our students, we have ever-present carrots and sticks in the form of grades and the justification that "you need this to get into [a good] college." And then as parents we offer our kids rewards and punishments based on those other rewards and punishments. We may talk about encouraging kids to "find their passion"--we may even believe in the exhortation--but even when they have we require them to study all sorts of other things and to do so on a rigid schedule. That's just what school is. For most people, it's hard to imagine school any other way.

Some years ago, I read a book by Neil Postman--one of his early works, in collaboration with Charles Weingartner--called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. In essence, TaaSA was contrasted with (another of his book titles) Teaching as a Conserving Activity, with the latter being the way that education can and does serve as an indoctrination into the dominant cultural values while the latter is a more Socratic exercise in questioning our assumptions, dragging them out into the light and, as frequently as not, beating them senseless. Postman's work seemed most suited for an English or history/social studies classroom, and the essence of it rested in allowing the class to set the course of study, with the teacher acting as the facilitator. As I recall, students would basically be allowed to decide what they would study, and the study was centered around questions: students would ask questions that were important to them (particularly questions with no certain answer or at least no easy answers) and the teacher would help facilitate the exploration of those questions--not giving them answers though perhaps some guidance--and more questions, too, pushing them to think more deeply. This would seem to fit the bill as education driven by intrinsic motivation.

Now, all that said, there are students who--despite the constraints of school, either have and maintain an essentially intrinsic motivation or, conversely, have a curriculum that is easy enough (at least relative to their abilities) as to actually respond to external motivation. Or perhaps it's just that we all respond differently to the stress of external motivation, even if the overall trend is to have a negative effect.

As I continue thinking about this, though, I can see another application of this to education: the teachers' perspective. Teachers are, in large part, motivated by intrinsic forces in the first place. We didn't go into education for the high salary, though the summer vacations may have played a role in our decision-making process. The point is that a great many teachers are self-motivated to be good teachers. And then what happens? In public education, they're boxed in by half a million stupidities imposed on them from administrators and legislators, most of which get in the way of the things that really help teaching and, at the same time, tend to demotivate. I believe that, given more freedom, most teachers would rise to the occasion, would take the time and autonomy to become better educators and offer more to their students. At least, the educators who aren't already worn down and cynical or inherently lazy.

I think in many cases this is a strength of private schools: with smaller classes and typically smaller class loads, with greater autonomy in the class room thanks to freedom from standardized tests, freedom from requirements to submit lesson plans, and, well, just plain greater autonomy in the classroom, I think that private school teachers often have great success (yes, it also helps that we can be and usually are more selective). At the school where I had my best teaching experience, when I sought a sense of what my English department chair expected us to do, his answer was simple: make our students better readers and writers. To that end, we had a few common texts at each grade level but were otherwise almost completely free. Free to choose texts, free to decide what kinds of assignments and classroom procedures to implement. And, I should add, also supported: colleagues were free with their time and ideas, funds were available for professional development. But I think the centrally important idea was that we had a very basic goal and had a lot of freedom to reach that goal as we saw fit.

Spirituality and Yoga and such

I love it when blogging gets going in a cycle of mutual inspiration. Thanks Hilary. In a recent blog written in response to a recent blog, she tackled the issue of yoga as spiritual practice and tried to pin down what that meant. Much as her blog started as a comment overflowing its little box, so did mine. So you'd be well advised to do any background reading you haven't already done (i.e. the blogs mentioned above), but also feel free to dive in without a net if you so choose.

She references an essay on the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the term "spiritual." While I'm not unsympathetic to what the writer is saying, and in fact largely agree, I think the question of the meaning of "spiritual" also depends on context. The context of the essay is almost exclusively the designation of how one defines one's religious beliefs, i.e. "spiritual but not religious" (which I've always, perhaps rather cynically and certainly a bit tongue in cheek, defined as "too lazy to go to church"). But what I'm getting at is a difference between "being spiritual" and "spiritual matters." To me, the latter refers to things other than physical. To some people, that would be a soul, perhaps "God," or "meaning." The idea seems to derive at least in some measure from the mind-body duality, which I believe to be bullshit--but rather useful bullshit in the right context. That is to say, I don't believe in a soul or a mind as distinct from the body... but as a practical matter, I think it can sometimes be useful to think of them as separate.

But I also think that this artificial distinction gets at the meaning of spiritual that Hilary was getting at with her idea of sacred space. Something or somewhere is sacred because of the meaning and significance that human minds attribute to it. Whether that place is a church or mosque, a hill where something happened or a quad at a school, it gains significance from our thinking of it as significant, as special.

In any case, I want to get back to the idea of yoga as a spiritual practice as opposed to just an exercise. I was thinking about the difference this morning while in a yoga class, and one of the things that occurred to me was that yoga is perhaps the only exercise routine we do where an integral part of it is laying down and relaxing. At the end of it, after we've stretched and worked our muscles to the shaking point, what do we do in yoga? We lay down and take the opportunity to relax. Even if we do not also take the opportunity to practice meditation as well, we nonetheless have changed our minds in a very real way. Hilary gets at this in her story of her experience discovering yoga in college. You've worked your muscles and tendons, ligaments and joints in such a way that you can really--really--relax them, and that can't help but alter your mental landscape. For myself, there are few times that I feel more clear-minded than right after a good yoga practice. Refreshed, focused, ready.

I think most exercise changes the mind, because of course I don't believe that there is a mind separate from the body. The body isn't just where the mind hangs out, it's all interconnected. And thus, what affects one (which is really one part) effects the other. We all know this, don't we? What's on our mind can make us tense or relaxed, upbeat or sluggish. And the state of our body can certainly change our mental landscape.

But I'll say again that yoga is different from other physical exercise, either because of the nature of the exercises or because of the practices that have attached to it or both. Certainly, I think the range of motion, flexibility, and work we do is an important part of it, because it offers our bodies such variety and uses the body in ways very different from the ways that daily life uses us. But so, too, is an integral part of yoga the way that yoga engages our attention and draws that attention to our breathing, to tension and relaxation, to little-used muscles, to balance. And, again, there's the relaxation at the end, which both changes our mind and opens space for using it in different ways (i.e. meditation).

Is that "spiritual"? At least in some senses of the word, I should think.

Yoga today

A friend of mine who teaches yoga blogged recently about an experience she had with her optometrist, when she invited him to her yoga class. In essence, he didn't see yoga as something that men did--or at least not straight men. Or, I presume he would say, "manly" men. And he seemed to think that it was a "hippy dippy" thing. There's a lot one could say about this reaction, but I'd like to focus on the perception of yoga today.

In the first place, I think yoga is becoming more mainstream. I don't have a hard and fast number on this, but I do know that some NFL teams and many individual NFL players practice yoga. We're talking about some of the greatest male athletes in the world, and they find something valuable in yoga. One of the hot workout regimens today is P90X. Maybe you've seen the infomercials, and if you have, you may very well have seen this guy:

He's a buddy of mine from high school, so I know the results are real. My point, though, is that P90X is a workout and nutrition system that doesn't just pride itself on weight loss but on turning the men and women who use it into physical specimens with toned, impressive physiques. And not only is yoga a part of the P90X training plan, but Tony Horton (the creator of P90X) has been quoted as saying that if he could do only one kind of exercise routine for the rest of his life, it would be yoga. Not weight training, not running or some kind of cardio, just yoga. And we're talking here about the best selling fitness videos on the market right now, so that's a kind of mainstream. (Oh, and I understand that in some of the stretching and cool-down, he incorporates yoga, though without really trumpeting the fact).

The other positive for yoga's acceptance is the penetration it has in more rural areas. My hometown, a small town in Ohio, now has yoga classes at the local community center. Here in rural Indiana, we have classes at our local library an area fitness center, and at our school (though that's just for the school community). Not that long ago, yoga was primarily an east coast and west coast phenomenon, plus urban areas. Now, it seems, yoga is all over the place.

All that said, though, I recognize that it's not just a few eye doctors who are holding out. I go to almost every meeting of our once-a-week on-campus yoga class, and it's consistently 6-8 women and me. That class meets at 6 am, so that may have something to do with the attendance. There's another yoga class on campus  at a time I can't attend, so I can't speak to its attendance. It has more people going overall, but I don't know how many men it's attracted.

And that thing that Tony Horton said about yoga? I gather he said that at least in part to resistance from some P90X enthusiasts to the yoga workout. In other words, he had to support yoga because a lot of people had some kind of negative impressions of it. I have a friend--a lady friend, I might add--who will follow me just about anywhere in the gym and do all kinds of workouts, some of which surely look goofy to any outside observer.  But there's something about yoga--she completely avoids it.

A few months ago, I blogged about teaching my first and only yoga classes, back-to-back sessions for the girls swim team. It was very positively received, but I bet it would be a hard sell if I tried to take it to my boys tennis team. Or most any other team. Maybe the point is that I would have to sell it to them, whereas the girls just took it in stride, tried everything I put in front of them, and expressed positive feelings about it afterward (but hey, maybe their coach sold it to them before they even showed up).

And what about the charge of being "hippy dippy"? I suppose anything with a "spiritual" element that isn't mainstream Christianity will probably have a decent chance of drawing that label from a certain segment of folks. That is being countered somewhat by the various fitness programs or movements that are helping to bring yoga mainstream, though that circumstance, too, causes its own issues for many yoga practitioners, because, of course, there is a spiritual component to yoga. I heard someone once say that yoga without those spiritual aspects is just pilates. I've got my own thoughts on "what yoga means to me," but I'll save those for another time.

Perhaps far more fruitful than allowing myself to continue wandering through my own view of our culture, I should just open the floor for comments. How do you see yoga? What's your first association with the word and what is your more considered opinion about it?

Making a List

When I was writing yesterday's entry or, for that matter, when I was talking to the young man in question, I also had kicking around in my head a passage from a short story that I once read on a DVD. The movie was Memento, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and the short story was called "Memento mori," written by his brother Jonathan. They had come up with the basic premise on which both the story and the film were based (if you haven't seen the film, you're missing out). Anyway, this passage stood out for me because I think it's on to something.

     Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

     "This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.

     "But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.

     "The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them. The best way to do this is with a list.
It's like a letter you write to yourself. A master plan, drafted by the guy who can see the light, made with steps simple enough for the rest of the idiots to understand. Follow steps one through one hundred. Repeat as necessary."

I would just add that this is also essentially when we do when we condition ourselves into habits that we want for ourselves--setting aside time to write, going to the gym, whatever it is.

Lacking training and qualifications: procrastination, anxiety, stress and meditation

I recently had a student come to me fairly distraught. He's stressed out, he can't sleep, he can't stop procrastinating, which makes him more stressed and sleepless in the end, all of which adds up to make him very unhappy. My heart goes out to this young man, and I wish there was more I could do for him. He's already receiving help from psychologists, psychiatrists, and pharmacists, so there's no easy referral here. In a very real sense, I'm not professionally trained or qualified to help him... except in fairly anecdotal ways, essentially "here's what's work for me (or someone I know)" or "here's what I'd try if I was in your shoes." Somehow, in the face of such difficulties, that seems insufficient.

Attacking the problems individually, I started with procrastination. Part of me thinks that there must be some very excellent book out there about procrastination, because I don't think I've known very many students--going all the way back to my own student days--who didn't struggle with procrastination. Most adults I know struggle with procrastination; so do I. I'm not sure whether that makes me well-qualified or poorly qualified to give advice, but that's how it goes. Although I have previously (not to students!) defined excessive alcohol consumption the same way, I compared procrastination to a a loan on future happiness at a high rate of interest. It's probably a bad metaphor for a high school student, since they haven't really dealt with debt yet, but whatever. The point is that as good as it may feel in the moment to avoid his homework in the moment on Friday and Saturday and Sunday morning and afternoon, it's going to feel far worse when he's stressed out Sunday night, when he can't sleep because he has to stay up late or ends up feeling overwhelmed, than it would have felt to bite the bullet and do the work earlier (and yes, I realize that procrastination doesn't always or for all people come to such a bad end--for many of us most of the time it's more of an inconvenience, but I was speaking to his experience, after all).

He acknowledged that all of this made sense, but said he "just couldn't" stop procrastinating. So we talked about strategies for minimizing distractions. I suggested that procrastination isn't a state of being, it's an action. I do understand the feeling of "can't," but at the same time, in most cases, I don't think it's as hopeless as all that. Procrastination is an action and a habit, and I suspect the key is to replace it with a different, more positive habit--which gets us back to minimizing distractions, setting a schedule for yourself to spend time working earlier rather than later, and then just doing it. Sometimes easier said than done, but there it is.

And I also recommended to him to look into meditation. He said to me that the only time he can relax is when he is asleep--a state that he can't actually reach that easily without pharmaceutical help, which has its own problems. So we talked about meditation, not because I'm an expert on meditation or can scientifically justify it (though I do know there's been some positive research around meditation), but because I think it works. Honestly, I can't really remember being as emotionally volatile as all that, but then I've been practicing meditation to a greater or lesser degree for a long, long time. We talked about focusing on the breath, about how meditation ultimately isn't, at least to start, about not thinking but about focusing on something that's basically neutral. You count your breathing, say for instance inhale on a four count and exhale on an eight count. The mind, for most people, is always focused on something, so the focus we demand of it is on repetitive numbers and the sensations of breathing.

And I told him that it very well may not work for him, but he should give it a try and then try it again and again and again. Because ultimately I guess I believe less that "meditation only works for some people" and more that "meditation works, but it takes practice to become any good at it." And let me be the first to admit that I'm no Zen master. I don't meditate for hours--or even half hours!--every day or even every week, but even without that level of doing it, I've still found it to be helpful. So, lacking professional training or qualifications, I offered him what I've seen work, because that's what I had to offer. Ultimately, I'm not sure that's much different than what the professionals do, at least in the sense that there's not one "right" way to help someone work things out for himself (which is what is ultimately needed), and so they, too, try to help the person gain some insights and to acquire some tools for managing the stresses they face. As long as I don't claim to be some kind of guru with the answers and as long as I don't recommend anything way out, I guess I'm safe enough, though whether I'm actually helping is another question. Obviously, I hope the answer is yes, but the best any of us can do is a good-faith effort.

Friendship and Justice

Recently, I was listening to The C-Realm Podcast, specifically to an interview with Gary Borjesson. And though the conversation was actually about dogs, the following came up (and, yes, it was tied into dogs too). Borjesson said:

I had this very interesting conversation with students in an introduction to philosophy class, and ... we were talking about Aristotle's understanding of friendship ... and he says at one point that if friends don't treat you justly, you can and eventually should end the friendship. And almost to a one, my students just completely dug in their heels and they really objected to Aristotle's idea that friends owe each other justice, that part of remaining friends was not only being just, but of course this is what really bothered them, was judging each other. Because of course this presumes that you're paying attention to whether you're getting what you think you deserve and that your friend's also paying attention to this. And this just didn't mesh with their notion of friendship being unconditional, so that when your friend screws up, you overlook it if you're a true friend. And only if you're small-minded, if you have the mind of an accountant, would you sort of, say, keep score and cut your friend loose because they haven't paid their share of the tip when they should or other minor infractions. And what struck me about it was that I asked them during this conversation "well, but what do you actually do? Do you remember when you're the one who's always calling your friend, and they never call back, they never invite you back? Do you remember somebody who doesn't pay their fair share?" And of course they do. On the one hand, they're keeping score all the time ... on the other hand, they're completely in denial about it. 

What struck me was not so much the idea of "keeping score" and how that affects friendship (though I supposed I do have some thoughts about that) but rather I was struck by the opposition between the ideals of judging one's friends vs. unconditional acceptance. Even if your friend's bad behavior is not directly affecting you, how do you react to it?

I'm reminded of a former student of mine who made a very difficult decision when he found that his roommate was plagiarizing wholesale the essays of others. He first confronted his roommate with the wrongdoing and tried to convince him that it was wrong and that he should not cheat. The roommate agreed, though it should be noted that there was also a threat involved: stop cheating, or I will be forced to report it. And, when he persisted in plagiarizing, that's exactly what he did. It was costly to both of them: the cheater lost the top student leadership position at the school and his roommate was harassed by many of his fellow students who lived by a "no snitches" code of ethics.

In this case, the boy in question chose his principles over his friendship (and, for that matter, over the peer pressure that he would presumably have felt not to "snitch"). He didn't do so in an absolutist way, but instead tried to convince his roommate to do the right thing first. But when push came to shove, he lived the Aristotelian view of friendship. So, what do we think of that? Did he make the right choice? Are there instances where we would be willing to choose friendship over a moral principle, and others where we would feel compelled to "do the right thing" even if it puts us at odds with our friend? Where do you draw the line?

If we accept that it is the right thing, to judge our friend and hold him or her accountable for actions that are wrong, I think there are a few different ways to approach this. On the one level, there's the idea of "doing the right thing," of course. But apart from one's own conscience, might it not be the case that you owe this to your friend for his or her own good? I know that this can walk a thin line when, on any particular issue, friends may not agree about what is right and wrong, but in a case where they basically do but one friend is failing to live up to his or her own ideals, would you then owe it to your friend to hold him or her accountable for that failure, even though it might be uncomfortable for you both? I can't say this for certain, but my sense in the case of the boys I mentioned earlier is that in the end the one cheating acknowledged his fault and the right action of his roommate; I can say with certainty that they are, at least, Facebook friends, and I don't think this would be an unlikely ending to the story, right, even if I can't say for sure?

There's another side to this. Is it not the case that the person who is committing the wrong action is, in addition to the action itself, committing a further wrong by putting his or her friend in the position of having to choose between principles and friendship? In other words, does not the friend owe the friend just action because to do otherwise would put a burden on the friend, to either have to choose a difficult right or live with choosing something that is wrong? Let's say I drive drunk and strike and kill a pedestrian. I go and ask my friend (isn't there a saying that a good friend will help you move but a true friend will help you move the bodies?) to help me cover it up. Not only have done a terrible thing by driving drunk and killing someone, but now I've also done a terrible thing to my friend, forcing him to choose between me and his own conscience. The example doesn't have to be so extreme, nor even something that is morally wrong. Say I feel that I need money for something--let's say it's not something that's vitally important, but it would really help. So I ask my friend to loan me some not-inconsequential sum of money. While it's certainly possible to imagine that one might have a friendship where something like that is fine, it's also easy to imagine that I may have put my friend in a position where he has to either loan me money--which for good reasons he may not want to do--or he may have to tell me no, which he also may not want to do. In other words, I've thrown a dilemma in his lap, and it's probably fair to say that that's not something a friend should do, at least not lightly.

Your thoughts on any of these topics are, as always, greatly appreciated.

Being respected vs. being liked

At the military school where I work, we have periodic "makes" for the cadets to be promoted in rank and/or changed in position. This can be a tough time for the boys who don't get the position they had hoped to get, because there are more boys than there are positions. Although we try to move people around to different positions, we also try to run something of a meritocracy, putting boys in positions that are not just good for them but also for the unit.

Without going into the details of it, one of the issues that came up is that some boys in the unit are well liked by their peers but not well respected. That is to say, the cadet in question may make them laugh or be "a good guy," but for one reason or another, they don't respect him. And when I look around, I see a number of guys like that.

This dichotomy came up again recently in a meeting with my fellow counselors. We had been asked to read an article about how peer pressure affected teens, causing them to take more risky behavior--and an important point here was that the pressure wasn't even of the "hey, you should do this" variety, it was the sort of pressure that exerts itself merely by the subject being watched by his or her peers. In other words, they are trying to conform to what they think will make their peers like them. In a more anecdotal bit, the article noted that "some real-world driving data suggests that teenage boys take more risks behind the wheel when one or more boys are in the car, but drive more carefully if they are with a girlfriend." In other words, it's not so much that teens automatically influence each other negatively but that the perceived expectations of what will impress one's peers has an effect.

What I see at my school is that we have competing ideas of cool, and I think what it boils down to is the difference between being liked and being respected. Some kids are desperate to be liked, to be "cool," and they tend to express that through making jokes (sometimes when they should be more serious), through putting others down, through risky behavior, etc. At the same time, our military system puts an emphasis on character and virtue, and so there exists as well a competing set of values that amount to respect, and this is based on showing good character, on doing one's job, on showing respect to others, and the like. These aren't completely separate, of course: kids may well try to have it both ways and may find a way to succeed.

In a sense, perhaps they always are. Depending on who they're around or how broadly they're thinking at any given moment, aren't most kids trying to please multiple constituencies: their friends, their teachers, their parents, their minister or priest, etc? They may weight different people differently and not even try to impress some of them at all, but I think it's fairly common. That's why, of course, parents don't see their children the same way that their peers do or they way their teachers do: because the kids are not showing everyone the same thing. It's not just kids, of course: we all show different sides of ourselves in different situations.

Given this, perhaps my dichotomy of being liked vs. being respected is too simplistic, but it still seems like a valid distinction, and I want to take it further to suggest that a mark of maturity is that we become more concerned with being respected than with being liked. The two are not mutually exclusive, but it's important to recognize that, well, sometimes they are. Putting it in the context of teaching, one might be very well liked by a class if one were to assign very little homework, give high grades, and do very little real work in class, but the teacher would not be well respected. Not all students make the distinction, I realize, but enough do. In fact, many students are pretty discerning: respect is also not conferred just for being difficult. In the case of teaching, things like fairness, accessibility and helpfulness, clarity of explanations and expectations, knowledge of content, not giving mere busy work: all of these things and more go into whether a teacher is respected. My point, though, is not to go into the particulars but just to note that a mature person in teaching or any other profession will be more concerned with being respected than with being liked.

Even as I type this, however, I know there are fields where this is not necessarily true: where being liked, being chummy with one's superiors, is actually more important than doing a good job, of striving for respect. But the fact that some institutions are broken and allow people with under-developed character into powerful positions does not change the greater importance that a mature person of character will place on respect over mere likability, and those of us who are involved in the education of children either as teachers or as parents should be working to help them move toward that more mature basis for judging themselves and their peers. The more we do so, the greater the extent to which they will form subcultures that push their members in exactly that direction. Which, of course, makes our jobs a lot easier.

Conversion, Conversation, Disagreement, Disagreeableness

Recently on Facebook, a friend of mine posted this article: "Catholic Church Issues Guide on How to Convert Witches." She is, herself, Wiccan, so it wasn't exactly a favorable notice she was giving it. To be fair, this pamphlet appears to be largely talking points and about how to have a conversation about faith with someone who believes something different from what you do--as the article notes, the booklet says "it's important to recognize that 'Wiccans are on a genuine spiritual quest,' providing 'the starting point for dialog that may lead to their conversion.'" This is genuine progress from "Burn her! She's a witch!" or even building a bridge out of her.

The comments from her friends were largely about tolerance and how the Catholic church should leave people alone, except for one mutual friend of ours who--while being respectful about it--basically said that everyone needs to accept Jesus. This got some push back initially, and though I commented there, the issues involved have continued to percolate.

We all have a right to our own beliefs and to be free from coercion. The Inquisition, burning "witches" (I put that in quotes since most of them probably weren't), a state-enforced or supported religion--all of those things are, to my mind, wrong. This pamphlet or the exchange of viewpoints such as we have in this comment thread? That's okay with me. As far as I'm concerned, S___ or the Catholic Church or whoever is welcome to tell me or P___ or anyone else that we're going to hell (or "not going to heaven") for our beliefs. I'm secure enough in my beliefs that I can handle the implied criticism of that belief system.

Fair's fair, of course, and they should be ready to get as good as they give (or perhaps get even better, if I'm right).

When it comes down to it, I can understand why the True Believers aren't, typically, laissez-faire about the whole thing. If you believe that, as the New Testament says, that the only way to get to Heaven is through belief in Jesus, then conversion of people you like and care about (or don't like, but through some ideal of universal love care about anyway) just makes sense. If I see you with a gun that I know is loaded and you believe is not loaded, and you're about to shoot yourself in the head, I should try to stop you from doing so. For such people, there's a lot at stake.

For those who either don't believe in God or gods--or those who believe that there are many paths to a happy afterlife--the stakes aren't so high. If such people are right, then all that belief in Jesus as the only path to salvation, well, it's probably not hurting you. You'll either by just as dead and decomposing and not going anywhere as the rest of us or just as likely to be on your way to Heaven for the sake of being a good person as the rest of us, so why fight about it? As long as you're not impinging upon my rights (for instance, by pushing legislation that enshrines religious doctrine as law), then you're welcome to be wrong, no skin off my back, no reason for me to convert you.

And so I have rather mixed feelings on the whole thing. Ultimately, we're all on our own path through life, we're all more or less competent to make our own decisions, and so it comes back to me championing the right for people to express their beliefs, even if I don't like their beliefs, and to argue about their beliefs, as long as they do so with relative civility (I say "relative" because I have, myself, called a colleague a fascist in the course of heated political debate--these things happen when spirits are raised). As I said in the comment thread:

it's also the case that we will all, naturally enough, judge one another. From the judgment that someone else is wrong or misguided or what have you to the judgment that someone is a real asshole or a very nice, civil person for the way that they express their disagreement, we will all naturally make those judgments.

I've lived long enough to know that good, intelligent, thoughtful people believe all sorts of things and that, much as I would like to think otherwise, I'm not infallible, so there's certainly room for disagreement without being disagreeable.