Author: Michael Umphrey

Remembering the songs

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey

“Yai Ya!” my grandson called, as he opened the kitchen door and walked in. This happened nearly daily or several times a day once he was old enough to walk the few blocks from his parents’ house to ours. He didn’t knock, of course. And he was partly calling his grandmother and partly just announcing he had arrived. It was partly greeting and partly invitation. He was here! Where we were! It was good.

How many generations of young Salish boys showed up at their grandparents’ homes with just those words? How long had those syllables been echoing, more or less unchanged, through the abodes of people living in this valley? This place?

Place is a tricky concept to nail down, but I tend to enjoy all the various ways people have tried. They end up talking about the central realities of human life–story, memory, kin, tradition, culture and land. My grandson traces his heritage in this place we share back, on his father’s side, into the “time immemorial” that the Salish like to talk about. I trace my own heritage back to Kansas, and then to Maryland and then to the Irish highlands on one side, and back to Utah, and then Ohio, then Massachusetts and then to the London slums on the other. Those connections, of course, are also part of my grandson’s history.

In Remembering the Songs, I found the segment on Jerome Vanderburg, a Salish man who made his home a place of music, held my attention in the most interesting ways. I knew Jerome’s name and had seen him, but I didn’t know him personally and I knew little about him. My own children grew up alongside a girl, our next door neighbor, who was a relative of his–probably either a granddaughter or a niece. So watching the film was a little like eavesdropping a bit on a neighbor here–filling in the human world around me with a bit more detail, a bit more story, making the place I live a little deeper and richer.

But how to use it in the classroom?

I would start with how recognizable as a person Jerome is to me. My own family–both my mother’s and father’s lines, are full of people who found the meaning of life in family and noncareerist passions and enjoyments, such as music. My grandfather lost his farm during the Great Depression–and I heard somewhat vague expressions of disgust at the ways of bankers and government functionaries, who, I was given to understand, cared a great deal about money but about “the little guy” not at all. But such were not the main story in life. My people didn’t dwell on it. They found another farm–not as good and without reliable water–the dry farm, they called it–and survived, finding life’s satisfactions in family events and in nature.

I don’t think the story of being displaced by the big moneyed interests of modernity is a rare story, and I don’t thing it is overly entangled in race. I think it’s a story that speaks to many of us. I also think the question of how to live in a world of large powers that displace us and to a great extend surround us invites the attention of a great many people, including young people.

This suggests the direction of my explorations, at the moment.

Losing the story

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey

I have not been doing “place-conscious” teaching to a great extent the past few years. The failure is not with the kids but with the adults, who do not see building a community and living through it as a task central to education. So, there is little in the way of conversation at the community level for kids to join.

The heart of the problem is that people have escaped community and do not want to re-create it, and certainly not in the unpromising context of a due-process bureaucracy that treats everyone–staff and clients–without care. Place-based teaching could make more sense in a private school organized around a shared purpose and a shared understanding of what practices best serve that purpose. But public schools serve mainly careerist and consumerist passions.

I’ve tried to get more clear about a kind of knowing has been handed down to me through an American culture where it was understood that the material world related to the spiritual world in such a way that any moment correctly observed could express an eternal truth–provide a visible type by which the invisible world could be apprehended.

When, as Puritans, early Americans encountered the New England coast, they did not see stones shaped by geologic forces over millions of years or waves rising and falling according to laws of physics that stretched backward and forward through infinity without change. What they did see was a stage upon which a cosmic drama of sin and redemption was enacted in every moment. They saw in all of it a provident God whose story gave time a beginning and an end, extending moment by moment in unimaginably vast patterns that both repeated and unfolded more fully.

In learning to see their own lives as stories, types within the unfolding plan, they became skilled metaphorical thinkers, adept at seeing in quite different details the same patterns, which were revelatory of the underlying truth from which existence unfolded. Their own grand errand to the wilderness could be understood through the Israelites’ journey through wilderness toward the promised land.

Every event and aspect of nature was at once itself and a remembrancer of more. History was not merely chronology but also an intelligible order in which prophets had discerned and described both past and future. History was not one damn thing after another but a way of seeing things as they really are and really will be. The smallest of stories resonated without end.

Later, such ones as Thoreau, Emerson, Melville and Hawthorne separated the Puritan’s metaphorical facility from faith in the God of the Bible, making symbols that suggested transcendence. It was still known among people in general that every time and place was somehow an instance of the universal. One could still see eternity in a grain of sand.

For a while it seemed that little had changed. But for some, a separation of metaphor and faith was not enough. It was necessary that there be no gods. It remains something of a mystery to me why, seeing a cosmos ordered by goodness, some souls turn away, preferring a cosmos that they themselves construct–the fall from an uncertain truth to a certain untruth, as Voegelin said.

But they did construct a cosmos full of emptiness and death. In “The Snow Man” Wallace Stevens said that to face the meaningless arrangements and rearrangements of patterns that make up modernity, “one must have a mind of winter.” Only then can one behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

It’s true that few of us really do have minds of winter. The covers of best sellers are graced with images of Egyptian pyramids or South American temples or Stonehenge. People keep looking beyond cold nothing.

Still, an awareness of nothing has creeped into our schools and offices. What does it matter which building in which edge city reached by which highway one goes to through morning gridlock to ride the same elevator to the same hallway to the same room filled with purplish gray fabric-covered cubicles, personalized with photocopied jokes?

In such places, the contemporary concern with “sense of place” emerged.

I think that the longing for a sense of place has grown from a longing for meaning, which is in part a longing for a way of being understood and loved, as a way of being together. Many of us no longer have a sense of living among all our grandmothers and grandfathers and all our children and grandchildren, some not yet born–and yet we are not ready to completely inhabit the cold empty sense that all we have been amounts to only the melting and shattering of vibrating bits.

The longing for a sense of place is, I think, a longing for the cosmos at the scale of home. It’s a longing for meaning and connections that prove that we are alive and that we matter. It’s a powerful longing. It leads people to crave drugs, to join gangs, to get pregnant, to prepare speeches and workshops. . .

Outside my office window, I hear thunder but it’s too dark still to see weather. I know fires are burning in the Mission Mountains, and my sons will be heading there at dawn. When it gets light, I will drive north for the first day of a new school year. I know that the empty spaces between protons and electrons that comprise my desk are a million billion times larger than the particles themselves, and I know that the solidity of the birch window sill where I lean, searching the breeze for scent of smoke, is an illusion created by force fields within which electrons and protons dance, and I know that nobody knows what the forces fields are, and that the electrons themselves are made of even smaller particles, emerging from waves of a not-nothing that are prior to energy and flooding the universe with being.

But I do not know what stories to tell at work.

I could not have imagined this

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey

Cranesbill and peonies

Cranesbill and Peonies--Umphrey's gardens

A garden is an epiphany, at least for the gardener. The orchestration of visible beauty, according to invisible processes in time, gives us the metaphors to think about the order of being. The astonishing thing is not merely how life is, but that it is capable of, indeed prone to, such beauty.

I take that to be the most important truth of many truths one can know only by experience. No philosopher confined to his study would have imagined anything so wondrous as even my little garden. The great philosophers all know this–their work is full of nature and of history, taking its bearings from the real world that they have opened themselves to knowing.

Since ancient days, one of the uses of gardens has been a refuge from worlds gone awry. I’ve used gardening this summer to reorient myself to teaching, after an unusually discouraging year. This is an unpromising time to be a teacher dedicated to passing on some understanding of the order of being discovered and explored through the great classic literature of the West.

The enemies of such as Homer, Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Shakespeare et al have always been here. In recent decades, they have been triumphant at the level of pop culture, which, regrettably, includes public education, and many young people have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the “isms” of ersatz religion before they reach high school or college, with results described memorably by philosopher Allan Bloom in his controversial best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind and summarized by James M Rhodes in Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues:

American students believe that truth is relative. They are astonished by anyone who does not accept this proposition as self-evident. Consequently, they lack intellectual seriousness and learn little. Their relativistic families are also spiritually dreary, colorless, devoid of inspiring visions of mankind’s meaning and good, intellectually moribund, bourgeois, and incapable of transmitting ethical principles effectively because their relativism has robbed them of moral authority. The students do not read great books anymore, thanks to relativism and the successful feminist assault on the Western canon. Instead, they are addicted to rock music. This music has “one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire–not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored….

Like severe drug addiction, he says, this “gutter phenomenon … ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.” The sexual frenzy of the music is part of a broader phenomenon. Sex has become “the national project.” The students have joined this enterprise. They have abolished sexual limits and modesty and now engage in multiple “relationships, ” not promiscuously, but serially. The sex is easy and it has become “no big deal.” The result is that “sexual passion no longer includes the illusion of eternity.”

Young people, and not only they, “have studied and practiced a crippled eros that can no longer take wing, and does not contain within it the longing for eternity and the divination of one’s relatedness to being.” This eroticism is sated, sterile, lame, and “is not the divine madness that Socrates praised.” Casual relationships have also fostered the habit of approaching marriage with egocentric attitudes that lack constancy. This has contributed to the runaway divorce rate that “is surely America’s most urgent social problem.” The children of divorced parents are irreparably harmed. It does not matter that armies of psychologists are hired to persuade them that their parents love them and will spend “quality time” with them. The children feel grievously wronged, come to mistrust love, and develop a slight deformity of the spirit that closes them to the serious study of philosophy and literature. In addition to all this, the students are self-centered, that is, more interested in their careers and enjoyments than in other human beings or in great spiritual or political issues. In the vast majority of cases, they arrive at their universities seeking vocational training, without the sense that they are embarking upon grand intellectual adventures that might yield answers to the question, “What is man?” Thus, a defective American eros, not only in its sexual forms but also in all its branches, has prevented our students from waxing in wisdom and grace. By and large, American students become “flat souled.”

“Flat souled” would seem a precise name of the affliction. Rhodes in main agrees with Bloom, though he thinks the situation may not always be as grim as Bloom states it. What he does agree with, though, is that youth today are taught to understand their sexuality in ways that are quite destructive to the higher learning–knowledge of the transcendent order of being. Though Rhodes is talking about undergraduates, the same dynamic is increasingly present in high school:

It [many] cases, the students’ sex has really become so easy that it is “no big deal.” In these instances, the eros has surely become sterile, devoid of Socratic divine madness, and incapable of taking wing into eternity, as Bloom contends. Also, there is usually exploitation in these kinds of relationships. Almost invariably, somebody gets hurt. Undoubtedly, there are exceptions. There must be a number of cases in which there is perfect mutual giving of self to other and a firm intention of permanence. These instances are marriage in all but name and can be expected to eventuate in the Socratic winged flights. The normal result, though, is heartbreak. Socratic teachers cannot save students from these mistakes by prying into their private lives or policing bedrooms. Neither can they prevent the errors by preaching religious morality or the lessons of Plato’s dialogues from their bully classroom pulpits; words are mere abstractions to the young until the realities of their self-inflicted injuries become manifest as pain. All the Socratic professors can do is to wait for the heartbroken students to crash-land in tears in their offices and classrooms. When this occurs, the youths do not need pinch-faced authorities in tall, pointy hats to inform them that something has gone badly wrong with their love affairs. Rather, they need advice on how to heal their wounds and fulfill their erotic natures in true love. Here, Bloom seems mistaken if he supposes that the eros of the damaged souls can never take wing. Sometimes, it is disaster that opens unhappy souls to philosophy. The teacher must be prepared to lead the students to a more philosophic eros when it is needed and wanted. In this role, the Socratic professor can help some of the sorrowing youngsters.

I have no faith in the profession of teachers–they are part of the pop culture that has become the problem, but I do wish more parents understood that what young people are being taught by pop culture is not some accidental cultural evolution. It has been planned, and the planning has not been a secret conspiracy so much as an out loud and in your face revolutionary movment that can be clearly traced in history.

The way of faith has always been too demanding for some, and intellectuals have from the beginning offered alternatives to it, all having to do with the idea that humans direct history and can make of the world what they want. These are false prophets in the sense that what they promise does not happen, but false prophets have been plentiful, offering escape from what Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquistor in The Brothers Karamazov called “the terrible freedom” brought into the world by Christianity.

Eric Voegelin is one major philosopher who traces such false prophets through history, detailing the murder of God and the establishment of ersatz religion. He focuses on the major philosophers–Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel and Heidegger–and he includes in his list of false teachings “progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism.” The way these movements have influenced pop culture has been detailed in dozens of books that are less dense and easier to grasp than most of Voegelin. They aren’t hard to find. It’s only necessary to desire.

The main thing about truth–the true order of being–is that it is hidden just enough that it’s necessary to desire it to find it. To one who desires it and is opened by love to it, it reveals itself. But it’s hidden by design from others, so that we can be free to choose what we really do desire.

Years ago, I reached the conclusion that the goal of teaching is simply to make a case for the order of being–to put before young people the record in literature of those moments, such as when Achilles learns of Patrocles’ death, when Moses knows that he will confront Pharaoh armed only with faith and that Pharoah is powerless, when Hamlet reaches the divine present and knows finally that he need only respond in that presence–“the readiness is all”–in short, all those moments when great souls break through mundane reality into the presence of transcendent being and glimpse its order.

It is not, as a student said  last year, that we are telling them how to live. It is that we are pointing them toward witnesses of how things are, so that they are more free to choose wisely.

On those few occasions when I have suggested to individual young people that there is a force in the cosmos with us that wants us to act in some ways and not in others, and sensing this is the beginning of communication with deity, the idea has not been rejected outright. So the game continues and hope remains.

What I know as a gardener is that the force before which Odysseus and Hamlet found themselves present is the same  force “that through the green fuse drives the flower.” It is the force that creates and sustains moment by moment the order of being. To be a gardener is to know that it is a force that can be known, that it reveals itself bit by bit as we ask and listen.

I am asking, and I am learning to listen.

Toward a New Story for Schooling

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey1 Comment

Saul O. Sidore Distinguished Lecture
University of New Hampshire

My topic is “Toward a New Story for Schooling,” but I’m really telling an old story: we can’t separate education from community and we can’t understand communities without understanding them as a web of stories. To improve our schools, we need to pay attention to the stories our communities tell themselves about what they face, what is worth wanting, and where to go next. A new story can suddenly change us–as individuals, communities, or nations.

In 1849 Kit Carson set off in pursuit of a band of Apaches who had captured a white woman. The anecdote, related by Carson himself, sounds like the beginning of a movie. However, Carson had to ride his sweating horse not through the West of some scriptwriter’s imagination, but through a world more like the one we experience every day. A world where we lose the trail, move too slowly, lose our nerve, take the wrong turn, arrive too late or in the wrong place. By the time Carson caught up with the Indians, the woman was dead.

In the abandoned Apache camp he found something else though. A book about a largely fictional character named “Kit Carson” who was a great Indian-slaying hero. It was a shock to him. According to historian Richard White, “Carson’s reaction to finding the book . . . was to lament his failure to live up to his fictional reputation.” The actual Kit Carson was something less than god-like. He couldn’t tuck his pants into a pair of colorful boots, swoop into the scene amid a glittering whirl of rhinestones and leather fringe to perform six-gun magic against the doomed forces of evil. Compared to pulp fiction, real life seemed a bit dismal. And so “the fictional Carson became the standard for the real Carson.”

His life began trying to imitate the story. And who can blame him? We all have within us the heroic impulse. We want lives of meaning, of purpose, of significance and so do our students. If our schools don’t allow young people to feel themselves heroically engaged in something that matters, if we don’t organize them into stories that capture their imagination, filling them with visions of how they want to be, they will fall easy prey to other storytellers, which are all around us.

It has always been that way. There are stories and images loose in the world that capture us and drive our destiny. Such stories rival geography and economics as forces that shape the history both of individuals and nations.

The trouble in schools today can best be understood as a crisis in the narrative environment.

Full Text PDF: “A New Story for Schooling”

Comparing V for Vendetta to 1984

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey1 Comment

Several students have told me that the film V for Vendetta is “just like” 1984. Since I’m always interested in resources that might make Orwell’s important warning clear to younger people, growing up as they are in a world that is so shaped by Newspeak and Doublethink–now referred to as “political correctness”–that his message is hard for them to hear, I watched the film.

It was similar, in the sense that in both stories humanity is being oppressed by a totalitarian regime. Still, it was the differences that mattered most.

For one thing, Orwell understood the political threats that would most matter in this age. He accurately identified the main source of modern totalitarianism as socialism, characterized by an ontology of materialism and an ethical philosophy of utilitarianism. This film, I thought, could have been produced by the Party in 1984. There is no God, and humanity’s fate is determined by economics; there is no moral law–the “rational” guide to ethics is to focus on the collective–doing the most good for the most people. Inevitably, “good” will be defined by the leader. We’ve been down that road several times. What is good is what is good for the Revolution. Who opposes the party opposes humanity.

So it’s quite ironic–though very politically correct at this moment early in the twenty-first century–for director James McTeigue to cater to socialist fears that the totalitarian threat comes from Christians. His film portrays a Christian fascist party at the helm of a negative utopia. Like Orwell, he uses an authentic verse memorized by British school children to evoke a distant, ominous memory from a Christian past. Orwell used lines from “Oranges and Lemons”:

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

McTeigue reaches back to the Gunpowder Plot–one of the seventeenth century religious battles between Protestants and Catholics, immortalized in a rhyme popular among British school children:

Remember, remember the fifth of November.
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

This linkage of terrorism and violence to Christianity flatters the sensibility of moderns, still believing they are achieving some sort of liberation from religion, while they continue pressing forward in a world where individual liberty erodes in a morass of political correctness, and the dominant power in Europe is a European Union intent on eroding national sovereignty through all the accouterments of a propaganda state and rationalized regulation, while churches all over Europe remain empty and quiet each Sunday.

The main danger to freedom in Europe now is the same as it was when Orwell wrote: the progressive fulfillment of socialism’s managerial fantasy, the depth and breadth of its control increasing. The main obstacle to this dream has always been the churches–think of Catholicism in Poland–which provide both a rival center of power and an incommensurable reality forever beyond the reach of the state, for those who believe. McTeigue’s vision of a state-run Christian fascism will distract many in the audience from a more credible danger.

In some ways, V for Vendetta resembles the French Revolution more than it resembles Oceania in 1984.  In Enlightenment France, a utopian naivete fed the passionate belief that if the horrible French aristocracy (and the Christian clergy) could be destroyed, that then. . .then. . .then, somehow, liberty and fraternity and equality would, um, burst forth–or something.

But. It was not to be. As Edmund Burke noted at the time, when long-established institutions are suddenly destroyed, what follows is not utopia but a mad scramble after power wildly careening into the streets–a mad scramble for which the most brutal and Machiavellian are best equipped. Terrorism did destroy the aristocracy, establishing itself as a principle of power. The Reign of Terror was enacted to the tune of noble platitudes and motivated by an unscrupulous will to power, in time, of a single man: Maximilian Robespierre.

The hero in V for Vendetta is an intellectual. We never see his face, but we hear his voice and we watch the entire nation brought to attention at his single will. It is clear that this will opposes evil. It is far less clear that this will is not evil itself. Still, isn’t there a pleasure in seeing evil overpowered? One could easily mistake this pleasure for the triumph of goodness.

This film differs from 1984 in that Orwell did not offer even any appearance of a solution to the problem of fully realized socialism. Winston Smith’s defeat is total and thorough. He loves that which has destroyed him. Though Orwell supported the desires and intentions of the do-gooders who became socialists, he could never see how those intentions, after consolidating power to do good things, could keep that centralized power from the brutal and devious thugs who would always be attracted to it. Since he didn’t see a solution, he focused on making the threat clear.

McTeigue’s story, by contrast, ends on a triumphant note, as though destroying totalitarianism were as simple a matter as shooting a bank robber in some Hollywood West. The image of triumph is not without horror, of a sort, as a mass of identically masked terrorists grin their porcelain grins–a not overly appealing nod to equality–amid explosions bringing down the architectural symbolism of Western Civ–the fireworks of emancipation, or something–with rousing music.

McTeigue’s story is self-aware enough to play with the nihilism of his avenging hero’s vision, which cannot get beyond destroying evil. The masked hero falls in love, and this brings home, painfully, the essential joylessness of the quest that has consumed his life. He cannot be deterred from his fate by the attractions of love. He knows enough to blow up a bad world, but he knows far too little of how to create a good one. The story’s grace note is that he does know, at an existential level, that it is love that he has missed. But the point of the story, still, is that he does miss it.

But he continues onward in his story, knowing that it can only end as he and his enemy fulfill their destiny in mutual self-destruction. This aspect of the movie’s vision rings true. We are indeed entangled in a titanic struggle with enemies, the end of which is our mutual death.

This dark tale will be quite ironic to one who believes Christianity’s story with its powerfully articulated vision of how a world might grow to be truly ordered by love. Without knowing that story of faith and hope and love intertwined in a workable vision of human happiness, the modern world increasingly constructs meanings centered in willfulness, pessimism and violence–V fits that pattern; it’s a bloody tale in which, as Isaiah prophesied, the wicked are destroyed, again as during the French Revolution, by the wicked.

Goodness is somewhere else doing other things, unimagined by the film.

Robert E. Lee on honesty: a companion text to Machiavelli

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey3 Comments

When my rhetoric and composition class held a Socratic dialogue on an excerpt from Machiavelli’s The Prince [Machiavellei: The Morals of the Prince], a consensus formed quite quickly that one had to do what one had to do–that is, lie.

I injected a counter argument into the conversation, suggesting that it is possible to approach public life in the spirit of Socrates, using language only to discover and communicate truth–having goals that one is willing to advocate for explicitly and honesty so that one can also adopt truth telling as one’s method.

A stronger approach would have been to be sure that students had read counter arguments by other writers before the dialogue, so that the discussion could focus on understanding and analyzing various points of view, rather than agreeing or disagreeing with what they guess is the teacher’s opinion.

So I’ve been looking for a text that could serve as one of the companion texts for Machiavelli. A letter by Robert E. Lee to his oldest son might serve. Here he argues for being frank in every situation:

You must study to be frank with the world; frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted you mean to do right. If a friend ask a favor, you should grant it, if it is reasonable; if not, tell him plainly why you cannot. You will wrong him and wrong yourself by equivocation of any kind. Never do wrong to make a friend or keep one; the man who requires you to do so is dearly purchased at a sacrifice. Deal kindly but firmly with all your classmates; you will find it the policy which wears best. Above all, do not appear to others what you are not. If you have any fault to find with any one, tell him, not others, of what you complain; there is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man’s face and another behind his back. We should live, act, and say nothing to the injury of any one. It is not only best as a matter of principle, but it is the path to peace and honor.

In regard to duty, let me, in conclusion of this hasty letter, inform you that nearly a hundred years ago there was a day of remarkable gloom and darkness—still known as ‘the dark day,’—a day when the light of the sun was slowly extinguished as if by an eclipse. The Legislature of Connecticut was in session, and its members saw the unexpected and unaccountable darkness coming on. They shared in the general awe and terror. It was supposed by many that the last day had come. Some one, in the consternation of the hour, moved an adjournment. Then there arose an old Puritan legislator, Davenport, of Stamford, and said that if the last day had come, he desired to be found at his place doing his duty, and therefore moved that candles be brought in, so that the House could proceed with its duty. There was quietness in that man’s mind, the quietness of heavenly wisdom and inflexible willingness to obey present duty. Duty, then, is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things, like the old Puritan, You cannot do more; you should never do less. Never let me and your mother wear one gray hair for any lack of duty on your part.

“Human virtue should be equal to human calamity.” That’s rhetoric worth pondering.

The truth about dragons

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey1 Comment

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. Revelation 12:9

Slaying the dragonOne thing I wish we could teach young people is the truth about dragons. It has to be taught indirectly, through metaphor, because the unseen world is–well, unseen. Some people who read this might become a little annoyed because something doesn’t want them to believe it. I think that sort of anger is the dragon’s breath, warning them away.

The primary mission of dragons is simply to keep people from the truth, particularly those truths that lead most directly and surely to joy. This is mainly because dragons are not themselves happy, having chosen to follow the theory that joy could be theirs as an entitlement rather than as what it always has been and always will be–a momentary balance requiring eternal care.

So now they wander the dark regions, trying to vindicate themselves by blocking the way of others to rather simple moments that unaccountably become forever.

I’ve acquired a taste for meeting dragons–often quite suddenly–because I’ve learned, slowly and after long, torturous detours, that, first, dragons are a sure sign of treasure–some truth that’s new to me is close at hand–and, second, dragons are mainly bluff. They have no real power–except the power of illusion and dread. It’s true that they often trick people into doing awful things, which is their only way to make anything happen. The easiest way to defeat a dragon (though not always the people who have been deceived by one) is to ignore it, and boldly to step forward as though endless joy were your right. I admit that it isn’t as simple as it sounds. It’s simpler.

The treasure, as I said, is always the truth–though I don’t mean truth in the way that scientists usually use the word. Their brand of truth is okay–very useful and very powerful–but it’s concerned with inventing props and manipulating the setting–it cannot discern the plot.

The kind of truth I mean is the truth of stories, the truth for which we live, the sum and good of our desire.

Truths of this sort have to be created–not out of nothing, but out of the stories we become, out of life itself. Is it true that you live in a happy family? Is it true that you have faithful friends? Is it true that you are kind and generous? If so, then these are truths that you have helped make more than they are truths that you have discovered. The important truths we create, mainly by using now to bind the past and the future into a pattern we choose, by making and remembering promises–some of them to ourselves, some of them to God, many of them to people we want with us sharing the special kingdom we are making of our lives.

Dragons may be found anywhere, but one predictable abode is near the hearts of young girls. The truth they are guarding has to do with what young girls want. What young women want most is to be loved by an admirable man–who sees and acts with his whole self. This is not a selfish or a petty thing, properly understood, so much as it is one of the attributes of godliness–every good kingdom is held together by love, and so being lovely is part of God’s design for our joy.

Unfortunately, the desire to be lovely makes some young girls vulnerable to insinuations that loveliness must be bought–all the fragrances, and face paints, and costly costumes. Or, it leads them to settle for attracting counterfeit forms of love–attention, lust, and all that–by dressing and speaking immodestly, as though the treasure of their truest being were some sort of joke.

So for them, that’s what it becomes.

Fortunately, the counterfeits are only that. Love is also real. This is what most torments dragons. They come here from a reality before the world where they believed that power alone was enough to create a kingdom worth having. What really enrages them is when an admirable young man enters the story who wants the young woman for more than a game–who sees in her the source of a better life, a true partner in making of the world a kingdom governed by love.

The reason that dragons are so often associated with knights is because nothing upsets them more than an admirable young man. The very existence of such men gives the lie to everything dragons have stood for, because what such young men truly want is not power or money or a high score in Modern Warfare but the admiration of a lovely woman, one who’s not too easily impressed, too soon made glad.

Unfortunately, this desire to be admired leaves young men vulnerable to all sorts of foolish ambitions. Where there is a chance to demonstrate their strength, or skill, or smarts, or daring they are likely to be found snowboarding off cliffs, sticking their heads in the mouths of alligators, or strapping themselves to rockets. Dragons enjoy such spectacles but they don’t get involved.

Dragons do get involved when an admirable young man sets out to demonstrate his worth to a lovely young woman. Trouble comes, often through the usual human weaknesses: doubt, fear, selfishness, pettiness, impatience, deception, jealousy.

Such moments, properly understood, become little or nothing.

Which is not the same as saying the tests are not real, or that they require of us less than courage, nobility, and genuine heroism. Dragons, remember, work through dread, and though dread is an illusion it is an illusion as deep as consciousness itself, and it can only be dissolved by a faith that is equally deep.

There is no avoiding it. A moment will come when wisdom requires us to move past the point of no return, push all our chips to the center of the table, put everything on the line, and risk it all. That’s our fundamental choice: dread or faith.

Dragons are dragons because they choose dread. Knights and princesses live happily ever after because they don’t.

Constructing a point of view

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey2 Comments

The experience of the young is, increasingly, that every human attachment is basically voluntary. Life is all about designing oneself according to an ever-expanding menu of choices provided by an increasingly free, prosperous, and globalizing society. A choice, they’ve been told, is nothing more or less than a preference, and nobody can tell an individual why he or she should prefer this rather than that, as long as he or she doesn’t violate the rights of another chooser. Deep down, our students don’t know whether they are or will be parents, children, creatures, citizens or friends. All they’re told is that in our wonderful, enlightened, high-tech world, such commitments are up to them.

. . .They have almost limitless freedom in choosing what to study, and hardly anything moral or intellectual is required of them. What few requirements are imposed on students are so broad and flexible as to point them in no particular direction at all. In the name of freedom and diversity, little goes on in college that gives them any guidance concerning who they are or what to choose.

Peter Lawler

The WebDriving home from the state capital the other day, the brilliant light flaming in winter-bare cottonwoods along the river where snow was just beginning to fall, part of me wanted to stop and explore, while another part was tracking promises that should be kept.

I kept driving, enjoying my glide through the mountain landscape at more than a mile a minute, feeling the grip of steel-belted radials on the exquisitely engineered curves and rises of I-90, listening to an audio recording about Alexander the Great written by first century C.E. biographer Arrian on my Subaru’s stereo.

It was great fun, hurtling through space encased in layers and layers of engineering and design. I was seeing the river from a point of view unavailable to earlier travelers. A fur trader wet to the hips trudging the river bank with forty-odd pounds of traps or a Salish hunter returning cautiously from Three Forks leading game-laden ponies could have imagined my swift and comfortable journey only as something supernatural.

Though watching the world through a window seems quite natural, it is actually the product of centuries of accumulated artifice and construction. And it was only one of the points of view available to me. I also had at my fingers instant access to information that would help me see the river as part of a vast hydrological cycle, or as a constantly changing habitat for fish, or as a potential real estate development, or as a likely site for a heap-leach gold mine.

It is such a richness available today that creates the most daunting challenge for young people, and thus for teachers. A young person has before him or her endless points of view constructed of arguments and facts, and endless choices about what points of view to inhabit supported by web sites, pamphlets, videos, reports, and songs.

Our noisy and contentious world gains meaning and coherence only as a conscious observer, paying attention to some things and not others, creates a point of view. Young people need to learn how to pay attention and how to decide decide where to look. This is nothing new.  Such help was once the main point of education, and teachers guided young people into science and history, providing a good grounding in reason and evidence, learning to see things intelligently, in ways that linked the thriving of the individual to the needs of the community and the nation–indeed, of civilization.

No more. As modernity dissolved the authority of all but the self, voices raised on behalf of the community were lost in a cacophonous crescendo of other voices competing for attention. In this world, teachers speak with little or no more authority than many others–advertisers, propagandists, rap artists, seducers, marketing reps, and thousands of others who  would enlist the young in their causes, organize them into their purposes, or sell them the accouterments of an identity.

Now we hear that being moral is just one way of life, among many. Official education competes amid the din lowering its aim, promising money and jobs.

It might help to remember God did not speak to us as thunder from the sky. He came among us as a man without credentials, speaking in a man’s voice, saying things one must have wanted to hear to hear, that were only be true for those who decided to live them before they became true. No one has to listen.

Quieter voices note that money beyond a modest amount does not bring happiness, that the economy is a fickle god that has often left its devotees stranded and alone. And other voices abide: those people in the community, especially the elderly, who have worked for years to accomplish good work. Every town has them: people who build museums, organize food pantries, develop management plans for rivers or forests, run 4-H programs, establish gardens, or operate successful businesses.

A community that is worried that its children might get lost in the modern barrage of voices–those of revolutionaries, those of addiction merchants–will want to be sure that its own voices are among those heard at school.

In my experience, through the simple act of gathering and telling the stories of ordinary members of the community, students can learn much of enduring value, including the important insight that ordinary people have survived, always, through acts of nobility and heroism, and that learning to see this and understand it is one of the important keys to happiness. They also learn what they need to learn in the official version of schooling–how to sort through information, how to select facts that are useful, and how to combine data into coherent narratives that move the work forward.

A peaceful world is not a boring world, without conflict. It is a busy world, where people somewhat heroically show up on time with their assignment done and the deadline met, looking past personal conflicts and complications so they can keep the lights on at the hospital, the shelves stocked at the supermarket, and the furnace running quietly in the nursery. Much of the work of peace is giving the ordinary its true voice, so that those who want what it tells about will know where and how to look.

By the time I made it home, Alexander had died in Babylon and snow had closed the passes behind me, but I had time to shower and review my notes before meeting my evening class.

What’s wrong with these kids? 2/24

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey

The Roman soldiers who killed a teacher two thousand years ago killed people often–mostly rebels, robbers, and thugs. The system of which they were a part, the Roman state, had taught them to take honor in their work defending the order. They knew little or nothing of the dirty, bloodied commoner, or what he stood for, or who he threatened. The teacher understood this and prayed for their forgiveness, noting “they know not what they do.”

Though Jesus was caught in an evil pattern, he wasn’t tricked into thinking that most of the people who harmed him were his enemies. They were also being harmed by the patterns he had tried to change. Those patterns are still among us. They came slowly into focus for me in a small mountain town in western Montana, but it could have been anywhere. It was simply the world.

I now see the same patterns on a much larger scale in the nation and the world and on a smaller scale within families and individuals. These patterns replicate themselves, and the more force we throw against them, the more powerful they become. They are nearly alive, taking their vital force from us, from our efforts to destroy what we see as evil.

We live in troubled times, among disorderly nations. The evening news is dominated by stories of wars that seem unstoppable. Our cities are disordered, and we hear more and more of crime, gangs, and homelessness. Our families are disordered, and we read that children are being born to single girls who are children themselves. Our personal lives are disordered, and the mental health business is booming. It seems that even nature is disordered, as storms and floods may be increasing in frequency and severity.

In all the noise, we hear passionate speakers clamor for attention, proclaiming that our schools no longer work and that our children are not getting the education they need, but there is little agreement about what sort of education they do need, and calls for better schools bog down in contention, becoming part of the troubled pattern.

Meanwhile, children go on learning what we teach, though not necessarily the things we say in classrooms. The fundamental curriculum for schools is often visible at its board meetings, in the bantering stories told by teachers in the lounge, and in the disciplinary code that is practiced (rather than the one that is written down). The level of honesty, compassion, and concern for the truth that we demonstrate in such routine, everyday affairs is more educative, for good or ill, than the ambitious, idealistic rhetoric in official curriculum guides. How do we handle our disagreements? How do we talk about each other in small groups between classes or after meetings? What standards of evidence do we maintain for tales told about our opponents?

A couple of years after I resigned as principal, the managers of that school were still struggling with the same problems I had faced. They brought in specialists to teach conflict resolution skills because of an increasing number of fights between students, not to mention a maddening level of contention among staff and parents. The conflict resolution folks taught the latest skills from their field, but judging from the agenda of acrimonious disputes at board meetings, the patterns have proven resilient.

The administrators treated student fighting as a problem separate from the rest of the school operation, to be solved with its own little program. They didn’t see it as one manifestation of a much larger pattern. The school itself was a bundle of unrelated programs with fragmented and sometimes contradictory goals. Its leaders didn’t view the myriad problems holistically, considering what teachers were teaching in the history and literature classes about character and consequence, for example, or how disagreements were handled by administrators, or what values were encoded in the discourse at board meetings.

Of course, seeing that small problems are related to much larger problems can be daunting. A few months before, the superintendent had sued the teachers’ union because of their no-confidence vote in him. Meanwhile, the staff was engaged in its annual acrimony over contract negotiations. The union had suggested a work “slow-down,” in which no teacher would come before eight or stay to help students after four, and a “sick-out,” in which large numbers of the staff would call in sick. Their strategy was based, strangely enough, on faith that the school board members they reviled cared more about the education of children than did professional educators, and that the board would back down rather than see the children lose out. They were using kids as pawns to enrich themselves. And of course, it was quite true that some board members saw teachers as commodities to be bought and used as cheaply as possible. Enemies often come to resemble each other.

And there was much, much more. Groups of parents were campaigning to remove or reprimand a number of different coaches and teachers. At every level in the life of the school, champions of morality or diversity were speaking the language of anger. Each group believed their problems were caused by an enemy, so, of course, the combatants wanted institutional uniformity that would force their enemies to accept a better way. In their different ways, each of the sides wanted codes of acceptable language. Each wanted sanctions against deviance. Each wanted submission to their orthodoxy. They wanted to force things to go the way they were sure was right.

And in the midst of it all, the staff was directed, without intentional irony, to consider the question, “How can we get our kids to stop fighting?” The more interesting question would have been “How can we become a peaceful people?”

An ecology of war

Posted onAuthorMichael Umphrey

“Ah,” said the mouse, “the world is growing narrower every day. At first it was so wide that I felt anxious. I kept running and was happy to see finally walls to the right and left of me in the distance, but these walls are speeding so fast toward each other that I am already in the last room and there in the corner stands the trap into which I’m running.”

“You need only change the direction in which you’re running,” said the cat and gobbled it up.
   Kafka

I came home from Vietnam angry, distrustful, and certain that having tasted war I had something to teach younger people about the pathways of peace. I had a lot to learn about what a poor platform anger would be from which to launch a campaign for peace. I spent the next fifteen years trying to transform a contentious little school in a contentious little town into an orderly place. It became my personal little Vietnam–a long, drawn out process of failure.

I was astonished over and over again at the resilience of the system. I left the school twice when experience made staying seem impossible; but, after hard study, I returned each time renewed and certain that, this time, I understood what needed to be done. My last bout, as principal, began when I took a job that five people had held in the previous six years, blithely certain that I knew enough to do better. It ended in a stormy board meeting at which five hundred disgruntled people came to the school gymnasium to participate in the local sport of winter politics.

Each of us contends against systems, vast in their scale and deep in their effects, that organize us into patterns that often operate outside our field of vision. Just as geese fly south in the winter without understanding the urge they feel, so we often act for reasons we cannot name. As with magnetic force or gravity, we cannot see the forces that work on us and through us, though we can see their effects. They are manifest in patterns around us, and if we do not learn to see and evade some attractions, we are organized into contests that may not serve our best purposes.

As we learn better to recognize those patterns, we are better able to see that people who are organized to oppose us by those patterns are not necessarily our enemies. It is the patterns themselves that we need to overcome. There is an ecology of war–an ecology of evil, if you will.