Celebrating Thoughtful People

I was a founding member of the Minnesota Independent Scholar's Forum and did a newsletter and calendar for them for several years. On an important anniversary, they  asked me to speak. I reviewed my own history with them and suggested some directions for the future. Some of what I suggested is out-of-date; the "Lives and Ideas Channel" never happened, though I think it is still a good idea. This paper is perhaps my most ambitious effort to do a coherent and comprehensive account of what I have been up to over the years from age 26 to 64.

June 14, 2008

Talk for the MN Independent Scholars Forum Annual Meeting

“Celebrating Thoughtful People: You Too Can Think for Yourself, Act With Insight and Care, and Maintain a Thoughtful Presence in a Crazy World”

Peter Shea

My job: to speak from a particular perspective about the social change potential of independent thinkers and scholars, first reviewing my history with that perspective, then suggesting some directions for the future --  for this organization or for allied efforts.  The perspective I want to represent is contained in the title of this talk. It needs a little explanation.

Immersion – There are enough ideas around to be immersed in them, enough ways of thinking and living too. But isn’t it odd that we can have great concentrations of ideas – the complete Shakespeare, the complete Dewey, the complete Heidegger – lying around and not one little bit of it enters us, and then someone drops a chance quote, alludes to Romeo and Juliet or continuity of experience or Dasein, and that’s the little bit we can run with, the light of our lives for awhile.

For awhile this year, I went to the St. Peter library and just took what they had on the shelves for audiobooks, whatever I thought I could stand, usually just one such find per visit, and almost every one changed my life. I don’t know why. It got in under the guards somehow, just because it was sort of chance.

I think of this as a little bit like quanta: people can only absorb new stuff in particular size packets. My hunch is that lives are one right size of packet for carrying ideas, and that people absorb ideas as they encounter lives.

I have “celebrate” in my title, and that sounds like Arbor Day or Memorial Day or the Nobel Prize, none of which much interest me today. I mean by “celebrate” something else, something like “put out there” or “make accessible.”  The title says basically that if you put lives out there, make them accessible, this will help people to think for themselves, act with insight and care, and maintain a reflective presence in a crazy world. I don’t know how true this is generally, but it seems true for me. Coming into close contact with the lives of thinkers helps me think. If I am already thinking, it helps me think better. I pick up attitudes, hopes and confidence, enthusiasm. That’s the perspective I want to share today: accessing the lives of thoughtful people matters for one’s own growth, and for the growth of the community in intelligence and responsibility.

Now for some quick history of me and this idea, over about the same 25 years that the Forum has been at work, which is roughly the same period as my experiments and adventures have covered.

I have been teaching college, all over, and I can say there isn’t as much celebration of thinkers there as I’d like – big old dead ones, yes, but not ones close enough to people to get under skin, and also there’s just a tendency to think that you can pry the idea off the person and just feed people the idea, but I don’t think that works very well, until people get used to working with ideas. So finding a way to teach has been much on mind, for a long time, and that was where some of these celebration ideas started. Let’s start there, also, beginning with the latest thing I’ve tried, the place I came here from yesterday, a carefully crafted exercise in extended celebration of thoughtful people. Let me tell you a little about it:

I am on a short break from philosophycamp, a four week residential course at Shalom Hill Farm near Windom, Minnesota. We have 15 students; the staff includes 5 instructors, 2 apprentice instructors, and a course grandmother. In addition, two resident fellows take part for one-week periods and are available to students for conversation. The principal activity of the course is a story circle held most mornings; people are asked to dig back into their memories and tell a story that connects to some important concept connected to the course theme: “Lives Worth Living: Questions of Self, Vocation, and Community.”  Topics for stories include hope, friendship, home, taking a stand, and experiences of grace. The story circles set up many subsequent informal conversations later. They prime the pump.

Beyond the learning circles, our days are structured by meal preparation, occasional field trips, and activities organized by the students themselves, or by instructors: dance classes, reading groups, writing groups, and philosophy discussions. The staff structures very little, but we are always around. All this takes place on a small farm in a very quiet prairie landscape, far from compulsions and addictions.

This course is now in its seventh offering, and the team that created it, led by U of M professor John Wallace, has drawn inspiration from many different traditions of education: the Danish folk high schools,  Reggio Emilia preschools in Italy, the Highlander Folkschool in Tennessee, and of course John Dewey. Dewey’s influence might be summed up in this way: he suggests that the teacher in the right sort of school must be familiar with the present experience of each student, the attitudes and impulses pressing forward into the future. The teacher is responsible to design experiences that move each student forward in a natural and continuous way, without big jumps, in the direction of growth and learning and wider sensibility – while somehow keeping them together as a group. We are acutely conscious that this fine idea  requires superhuman powers in the educator; one must craft a group experience that connects seamlessly to various particular experiences of each group member. Lacking the power to do that, doubting sometimes that even God could figure that puzzle out, we bring about instead a sort of blood stream: a changing nutrient bath of ideas and lives from which students are encouraged to take what they need – from instructors and staff, from fellows and visitors, and – most important – from each other. We produce activities that show people to each other in various dimensions, instill an ethos that encourages inclusion, friendliness, and experimentation, and then we step back and watch the course develop.

The idea of the course then is to just to give people access to each other’s minds and lives, in an environment that is safe and structured so that basic needs are met. People report, just after and for years after, that this summer changed and empowered their lives: helped them find meaning and direction. They got from this course what people get from good friendships, but we made it possible for several pretty good new friendships to happen at once, and to happen inter-generationally, and to happen across a wider spectrum of other diversity than natural friendships generally span.

This is about as good as classes ever get, and I am very proud of the years of work that have gone into refining the structures, learning how much to structure, producing a financial base to make the bizarre overstaffing of this thing possible, and developing a feel for what students go through when they are given freedom to explore and experiment.

Before I started this work, I had about a twenty-year fixation on a teaching idea called “philosophy for children,” originally developed to bring philosophy to elementary school children but easily transferred to other contexts. Its basic structure: the leader reads a text to a class, or shows a picture, or somehow presents an artifact, one rich in possible meanings and questions and ideas to talk about, but presentable in two minutes or so. Matt Lipman, the founder of this movement, wrote little children’s novels packed with ideas, real curriculum materials, but lots of other stuff works just as well. Anyhow, once the leader presents the artifact, he or she says the magic words, “What’s worth talking about?” and then begins collecting agenda items, things people want to talk about. These are the starting points for individual discussions, in which the leader takes the role of telephone exchange or router: making sure that people understand what is being said, and that they see how each person’s statement fits into the evolving conversation.

Again this is a celebratory practice: we make kids’ minds available to each other, produce a situation in which – I swear this happens, naturally and a lot – kids come to depend on each other’s strengths of mind to help them understand something that they want to understand. Lipman’s calls this cooperation the “community of inquiry;” it arises spontaneously whenever one gives people ownership of a conversation, and it progresses through careful coaching in listening and in knitting a conversation together – as long as leaders resist the temptation to have the last word, to play the expert game.

These are both wonderful approaches, and I am proud to be part of developing and practicing them. They give me hope for the classroom, a place in which I have had my biggest disappointments, all my life long, whether I was student or teacher. But they aren’t enough. Both are limited: philosophy for children gets at thoughts, but never at the lives with which those thoughts are in dialogue, and through which they are illustrated and made tangible. Kids become available to each other as thinkers. Philosophy camp gets at ideas and lives, again in a flexible way that puts a premium on choice, with diversity of age and experience. But it is expensive, and it is bounded in time, and it only reaches a few students each year

Here’s a second bit of history.

What I have mostly worried about is that classrooms exist in a society, and that if you get people all interested in thinking and trying out new ways of being human and then dump them into a media world, advertising world, business world, social world that is predatory and manipulative and simple-minded, all the teaching innovations begin to look like snowballs heading for hell, and that is way discouraging for a teacher.

So my other big push, in the celebration line, has been toward experiments in modifying the cultural opportunities available to people. My simplest idea was just: a calendar of readings, conferences, and lectures. I wanted everyone to have access to everything that was free and open, or cheap, to see the people who came through town. The whole events scene was needlessly and stupidly balkanized, so that even academics were missing out on major events in their disciplines, and non-academics were missing out on pretty much everything, while very interesting visitors had audiences of 15, most of whom already knew their work. This project started out on paper, as the newsletter of the original Scholar’s Forum, moved to an electronic version a few years before the internet was available to support such a thing, and ended maybe 2 years before the technology arrived to make it easy and painless. The project I think has never been picked up, now that it could be done so easily.

This was another experiment in access, but again, limited: a person can’t make much impression, on a quick visit. But I knew that individual lectures, caught by chance, had been life-changing for me, and I wanted that opportunity for everybody.

From publicity, I moved to direct event sponsorship, working partly with Brooke Portmann’s Abondia Center, which initially brought professional musicians into living rooms and very small venues for concerts and discussions. This project grew out of Brooke’s concern that Minnesota audiences were cool to contemporary music; she wanted to introduce them to performances carefully, so that they would get to know and like sounds that initially seemed very strange to them. Later, Abondia expanded its range,  sponsoring discussions of ideas, of song texts, of visual arts and architecture, always in small, intimate, hospitable settings where audiences had good opportunities to interact with speakers and with each other. Abondia did fine work. It provided metro area audiences with opportunities to interact personally with scholars and artists, and to encounter the intelligence that guided their projects, rather than simply encountering their projects as established facts. Abondia ended, after several years of active programming, primarily because no local granting agency would support this level of investment for a small audience. That is a recurring problem in making ideas and lives broadly available; the most valuable kinds of interaction are long-term, small group encounters, and those are usually expensive.  

From work with Abondia, and from my own independent experiences running conferences and lecture series, I got a sense of what these could do for an audience, and for me as an audience member, providing things to think about for a long time, structuring a year’s worth of ideas sometimes. They were lots of work, funding was uncertain, but they were enormously satisfying.

As Abondia’s work ended, I got an opportunity to continue that kind of event programming on regional cable. The Metro Cable Network, regional channel 6, sold an hour of cable time, midnight to 1 am, for about a thousand dollars a year. The station reached approximately a million people. On an impulse, I rounded up some used equipment and  a cluster of sponsors, and founded The Bat of Minerva, a philosophy interview show that soon became a “thoughtful person interview show.” The show soon found a stable format: single person, one hour interviews conducted from the behind the camera. (This saved me dressing up, getting my hair cut, finding a camera operator, locating a studio. The Bat became a very efficient operation.) The interviews explored how ideas were rooted in the lives of people who cared about ideas, how they first came to the projects and passions that eventually took over their lives. My tone was generally friendly; I tried to represent all the ignorance and interest of my viewers, and to present each guest in an affirming way, being careful to choose guests I had reason to affirm.

The Bat is still with me. It has been cablecast for about 14 years, with new episodes most weeks of the year. Basically, the Bat is a very much more efficient way to do talking heads - and reading heads - than any live performance ever could be. It gives up, so far, on interaction, which Abondia had, and gains a sustainable “platform,” which Abondia could never manage. It does a limited job well, and contributes to a climate of thought and interest in the community.

Recently, I have been exploring technology that would allow the expansion of the Bat to a full channel, multicast to colleges and universities throughout the world and perhaps, through that network, to local cable stations in need of material. This would provide a new educational possibility: a media-world, using all the hours of the year, in which learning about lives was the central priority. I love channels very much, as safe places to visit for a particular kind of treat: the sci fi channel, Sundance, PBS. One goes to such places trusting that somebody has one’s welfare in mind: they want to show good stuff. Unfortunately, most channels, commercial and non-commercial, have become predatory: someone is out to fool you, to get something out of you, to enlist or convert or overhaul you, to make you give them money somehow – at best, every 15 minutes or so. Such spaces are not safe. But television is also the most promising medium I know for producing a kind of parallel world or parallel dimension, broadly available, from which the “real” world can be critically assessed. A channel provides parity: 8775 hours of real life, 8775 hours of broadcast life – every year.

The Lives and Ideas Channel, as I have provisionally named my new enterprise, faces formidable obstacles, but, at present, on an obscure server in St. Peter, Minnesota, it actually exists, transmitting 10 whole hours of programming, over and over, to colleges and universities all over the world. It has, so far as I can tell, one regular viewer, me – but it is launched. Ask me back at your 50^th anniversary, and I’ll tell you if it worked.

At this point, my primary energy is devoted to the cable and multicast media, because of their incredible reach, and because of the great satisfaction I get from interviewing people. If the audience out there doesn’t benefit, I at least benefit, and I come away from every taping more convinced that lives inspire and educate.

One final example: over the last eight years, approximately, I have been part of the amazing adventure of lay preaching in the liberal end of the Roman Catholic Church. Over time, our tiny parish developed a support system to encourage or seduce more than 50 people to preach at Sunday mass, reflecting on the readings shared by most Christian churches on a three year lectionary cycle. The backbone of this practice was a regular Thursday morning meeting in which people responded to the scriptures and tried to understand how those scriptures might connect to the concerns of people in the parish. These discussions were wide-ranging, sometimes historical and scholarly, sometimes philosophical, but always honest. The effect of this practice was to introduce this small parish to 50 of its members, showing what their minds were like, how their experiences shaped their thinking and action. People introduced in this way could talk to each other. Because of the variety of distinctive approaches, people remembered particular sermons for years, comparing this Sunday’s approach to what happened three years ago, when this reading last came up in the cycle. We have grown a local theological and philosophical tradition, our own conversation about matters of importance to us. This also is an example of the celebration of lives and thought in a community capable of holding fast to individual contributions, a kind of collective memory.

What directions does my experience suggest, for independent scholarship in Minnesota, and for the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum?

1. A rich public space. People who think broadly need broad access to local events. The ideal that motivated the Humanities Scholars Newsletter endures. Every year I get to cover the Spark Festival for the Bat. It’s a one-week celebration of new music and multi-media work at the U of M with a rich schedule of lectures, panels, and performances, almost entirely free and open. The festival organizer, Doug Geers, has also worked hard with the Bat to ensure that the festival generates lots of interviews for regional cable. (A substantial Youtube presence is perhaps a year away.) Doug’s generosity is part of a U of M tradition: much U of M programming has always been free and open; the major carrier of that tradition right now is Ann Waltner at the Institute for Advanced Study, who produces maybe 30 events a month, with a strong invitation to the community, and strong support for regional cable dissemination of key ideas. Other Minnesota institutions are equally generous. Together they form a potential free university of amazing size and scope. With proper information tools (perhaps even a revived HSN in electronic form), and with sensible use of cable and Youtube to supplement live performance, this university could be available to every intellectually curious person in Minnesota.

Another part of this same project is that we as citizens must demand public financing of institutions that support the intellectual life of the whole community in an inclusive and cost-effective way. The grants program of the Minnesota Humanities was very small, in the total scheme of public education funding, but it leveraged maybe 5 dollars of work for every commission dollar spent, and gave many people the chance to try out programming ideas for which they had no institutional support. (I always regarded the Commission as my primary grad school, where I learned to put together public programming over twenty years of fruitful collaboration.) This program fell victim to budget cuts a few years ago; we must work to have it restored.

2. Access to lives and ideas across the generations – Philosophycamp works so well because it brings together people from 18 to 84 in a context that encourages conversation, learning by example, and reflection on practice. It is progress over a bunch of people in a community center sitting in a circle on squeaky chairs trying to talk about race or community crime, though that conversation is also hugely important. The segregation of thought is deadly. Each generation carries the hope for the others. Elderly people know that seemingly impossible problems have been solved, that it is possible to live through very desperate times. Young people give hope that the projects and ideals of their parents and grandparents will be carried forward, that the world will be in good hands. A healthy community is one in which those groups talk, and develop a shared confidence, and trade ideas and strategies and ways of living. 

For intergenerational work to succeed, the lessons of philosophycamp need to be generally applied. Seminars and conferences and the whole academic apparatus just aren’t enough to get the generations together in the right way. The course we do every summer grew out of two years of experiments with weekend retreats and one day events, involving story circles, common food preparation, and time for spontaneous informal interaction. The models for this kind of event are pretty well mapped out; the Highlander Folkschool was enormously successful at bringing people together to share experience and to plot social change, and our team’s work, applying and adapting those ideas to rural development issues in southwest Minnesota, suggests that the strategies developed there are very robust plants indeed.

Intergenerational outreach is particularly vital in the area of scholarship. Scholarly impulses show up very early in kids; there are powerful minds at work already in elementary school. But the models these kids encounter for how life can go on seldom include any accurate or appealing image of the life of the mind. There’s no scholarly counterpart to Friends; the West Wing probably came closest, in my experience. Scholarly kids, intellectually voracious kids, need encouragement and modeling from their adult counterparts. I think of my old friend Bill Phillips, a retired stockbroker with a good University of Chicago education and a lifetime of accumulated interests who has for more than a decade led a volunteer humanities seminar at St. Anthony Middle school, turning a generation of kids on to opera and Richard Feynman and Thornton Wilder and bridge as a strategy game – on to all the things that he has come to love, in a rich and varied life. His work is a model, and I would hope that an organization like the Forum could provide a framework within which such projects could be easily organized and administered.

My son is visiting today from New York. He just finished a degree in everything interesting (creative writing, religious studies, philosophy, literature) and got started really working. How is someone in his situation going to imagine going forward, if the only public models of intellectual and creative life are a few specialized spots in higher ed institutions. A culture that supports inquiry and creativity in a strong way has to contain many publicly available models of how to go on, and that requires conversation across the generations.

3. Tools for satisfying conversations across differences of ability, education, and interest. One lesson from philosophy for children is that adults and kids can have mutually satisfactory talks about ideas, non-condescending, non-slavish talks despite great differences in sophistication, if the right objects – deep and inexhaustible objects --  start the conversation and if the right disciplines – disciplines of clarification and mutual respect – are firmly in place. Some of the best philosophic conversations I have ever had took place in elementary schools with fifth grade students. This possibility is an enormous discovery. It opens the way for building a broad common base of understanding and interest among thoughtful people with very different resources. With such tools, scholarship can extend into the elementary schools, into community settings, into book groups, without the kind of “expertise aura” that so often freezes things and condemns a roomful of bright people to nodding silence while one person drones on and on – intriguing, but still strangely tiresome. There is surely a place for informed, specialist discussion, for the wonderful conversation that can only happen among people who know a lot about the same things. But scholars sentence themselves to life in a shrinking enclave, a little fort on the prairie surrounded by ever more silent native people on horseback, waiting, unless they find a satisfying way to open really fruitful dialogue across differences of sophistication. The tools for such dialogue are well developed; best practices are established. We just need to adapt them.

4. Let’s clean the “Kill your television” stickers off our bumpers. Television, despite its massive degradation, despite its role as carrier for every mental illness popular in this society, is still the greatest inspirational and educational medium ever devised. The television channel can initiate people into new areas of thought and feeling, support established workers across a broad range of disciplines, and, probably most important, maintain everybody’s peripheral vision, their sense of stuff at the margins of their own lives that is important and necessary for them. Very recent advances in editing software and in production equipment make a real broadening of access possible for the first time ever. Many people can produce watchable stuff, any group can, and they can do it without devoting their lives to the project. I think I have proved that. My show, in all its aspects, takes less than four hours a week to manage. It is a hobby level thing, but its quality, at least in good weeks, compares pretty well with comparable efforts on PBS. And the next generation of prosumer equipment will come close to erasing the difference. I am not talking about “community access cable;” that has been around for a long time, and serves an important function. I am talking about the possibility of generating channels worth of intellectually challenging programs, on very small budgets, to make a place that smart people and curious people will visit by choice when they sit down on Friday evening to chill out, a home for the curious and disaffected, the ones who respond to Sex in the City by saying, “Way too much information!” We need to claim this medium and shape it, before the predators claim it all and we are left with the real desert of pornography, violence and manipulation that critics say is already the state of the broadcast and cable media. Television isn’t dead yet, and we cannot afford to let it die.

5. The opening of options for thoughtful lives. One of the great pleasures of doing my show for the last 13 years has been cataloguing that various ways that people think in a sustained way. Let me just list some:

a.Gene McCarthy, trying at the end of his life to say just what limited things government could actually accomplish for social good.

b. Leah Fundakowski, chief writer for the Laramie project, collecting hundreds of hours of interviews to understand how people make meaning around acts of shocking violence: the murder of gay teenager Matthew Shepherd in Laramie, the Jonestown massacre, and at the same time exploring the power of theatre to help people bring closure to their involvement with horrific acts.

c. Ryan Batalden, a young farmer in Lamberton, trying to articulate his reasons for returning to farming when most of the bright people in his generation are leaving the farm, trying also to confront honestly the sacrifices and deficits that rural life imposes on young people.

d. Katrina Vandenberg, poet and memoirist, writing her way through her grief at the death of a friend in the hemophiliac AIDS epidemic, and confronting the cruelty of that tragedy: the technology that offered very sick people a chance of a normal life then suddenly killed them, in masses.

e. Connie Reinnert, running a little paper in Jackson, Minnesota, and thinking through carefully what a paper can do for the civic life of a small rural community.

f. John Davis, after a blindingly successful career in educational administration, trying to capture the attitudes and approaches that worked for him in rescuing institutions from the brink of collapse, over and over.

g. Susan Webster, art historian, tracing out the various strands of public involvement in the architectural masterpieces of Ecuador, through good careful research recovering these monuments as unifying elements in Ecuadorian cultural life.

This list is random; I could go on for hours describing what thoughtful people are up to locally. I want to insist that this list crosses all the normal boundaries. Academics are doing good work, making efficient use of the extraordinary advantages that colleges and universities provide. Independents for whom thinking and scholarship are hobbies are doing good work. Activists and practical folks who steal a few minutes between crises to think about what they are really up to are doing good work. Independent scholarship needs to connect to all of these folks, to bring all of them into the conversation. The worst outcome for any independent scholars movement would be one more balkanization in an already over-balkanized geography. We need to keep reminding each other, and, as public actors, remind the community at large, how big the tent is, how many different ways people think with power and magic and responsibility.

6. Let’s not write off the churches. To the extent that a church is in living dialogue with another historical era: Christianity with the first Century, Islam with the time of the prophet, Judaism with the early history of nomadic peoples, Buddhism with formative times in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese history – they have, built into their very foundation, an opportunity for perspective, for double vision, on our current society and its deep craziness. Churches may not always take good advantage of their advantages, but I have seen one church do so, powerfully, and I know that such community wide reflection can be a stable platform for intellectual and emotional growth.