Re: newyear96

Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Mon, 1 Jan 1996 11:41:10 -0800 (PST)

Thank you Mike for a year end review of all the news, at least of the
last few days. Indeed we have been edging into deeper waters, and we keep
paddling best we can.
I particularly appreciate your recapitulation and further
comments on the ideal. This was a discussion that I had a hard time
tuning in to until just the last few messages, but now that I understand
what is at stake, I agree that it may be one of the most important and
profound threads--with guiding relevance for many of the other threads we
have been weaving.
While terms like role model, values, empowerment, taking control
of one's life have been buzz words in American society for quite a while, it
seems we know very little about the process of the maturing of selves
with practical visions that reach beyond immediate perceived interests.
The best formulated accounts seem still to reside in traditional moral and
religious philosophy and education, but these are bound to very
particular cultural commitments and social organizations and are not
informed by what we have been learning in the social sciences.
Formulating these issues in precise socio-cultural psychological terms
can give us tools to understand and support the truly human impulse to
make life better while freeing us from the dominations of traditional
cultural formations which constantly reassert authority over these issues
while simultaneously shackling just those visions that will help us see
farther into a better future.
This topic tempts me to large historical excursions based on spotty
knowledge, but let me just suggest that readings into the eighteenth
century British and Scottish moral philosophy see some of this impulse
to find a natural, nontraditional, non-conventional account for the moral
sense, based on the best psychological and social thinking of the time.
It is also interesting that some of the most original thinkers in this vein,
such as Priestley and Smith were also concerned with rhetoric and
communication, and had some socially and psychologically savvy comments
on the implications of our communicative practices. What happened to this
strain of thinking, where it lived and where it was coopted and reified,
is a complicated story that I don't claim to understand.
I am also tempted to personal reflection on some of the multiple
forces that seemed to inspire me to view things other than they are. I am
a bit embarassed at the personal and potentially immodest nature of the
discussion that may follow. But it may be that shared introspection
about what caused us to hope for better, see better possibilities, and
see our own ability to make things better may not only be mutually
inspiriting, but can provide us some concrete materials for thinking
about this pootentially abstract and too high-minded topic.
As a start, let me just announce two themes that have seemed
important in my own life--the negative models and the positive models. I
remember many times in my youth from about the age of ten onwards, as I
became
aware of the painful relations in my own family and the seeming pointless
and desultory if not harmful behaviors in the lives of people
surrounding us as well as some of the limitations and harm in the schools
and other institutions around me, that I would not be like that, that I
would not treat other people that way, that I would not reproduce this or
that socail/institutional arrangement, that I would not treat others in
the ways I was treated. I went actively on a search for something better,
as well as by my college yuears for reformation of my own habitual
behaviors when I noticed the role they were taking in the reproduction of
social relations that I found had unsatisfying implications.
A few individuals I remember as giving me a sense of the
possibilities of the better, starting with just a couple of teachers who
seemed to offer more recognition of who I was than who they thought I
ought to be. That let me begin to formulate who I thought I might become
and what I miight like the world to be in a way that was neither coerced
nor based simply on negative reaction to what I had been finding. Very
important also were the distant cultural heroes who seemed to represent
the ideals of making the world better--Eleanor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger (I
still get a deeply felt rush of hope and noble ideals when I hear him
sing), the icons of science like Einstein and Planck. Although I was
looking for mentors throughout my undergraduate years, the likely
candidates weren't interested in me, though I did find a couple of
teachers who were not quite so isolated and isolating in their approach
to students--but none that I could say that did more than mitigate the
alienation. Only as I headed into my early twenties did I find mentors
that spoke to me, in both literal and figurative senses. It may be easy
to say that this was because of my own unavailability for the trust of
such relationships, but I am not at all sure about that. But this story
has gone on long enough.
Many other strands to this story, but perhaps this list is not
the place for such revery.
It strikes me now that another source of data for the rise of the
ideal in adolescence is the bildungsroman and other forms of personal
search literature.
Best for the New Year to everyone.
Chuck