Friday night I went to my local community theater’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. I attended, in part, because a current student and her parents were appearing in it, as well as several former students in very key roles. It had been a long time since I’d seen a production, so I had forgotten a lot of the plot, but it is really a show about values – values shifting over time. It opens with the rousing musical number, “Tradition,” and then slowly, throughout the show, sees the traditions they sang about so rousingly come undone.
The idea of values had special resonance at Friday’s performance, because our Volusia County Council decided this week to drop all arts funding this year – $611,758 for 32 organizations. Why? Because two organizations, Shoestring being one and the Athens Theater being the other, hosted drag events and Pride events. The person on the council who caused the funding to be withdrawn said, “I want these funds, if I’m putting my name on them, to go to healthy, family-oriented arts and culture, learning and educational experiences.”
In other words, traditions are being destroyed, and he must protect them. Tradition!
I recently posted a quote I had discovered years ago in a book titled Zen and the Art of Public School Teaching. The quote is attributed to a principal who survived the Holocaust and reads:
“I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.
“So, I am suspicious of education.
“My request is this: Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.”
After posting this quote on social media, I looked at some of the comments (usually a mistake) under the original post. Two stances took center stage. Disagreement from some commenters, because values should only come from home, or agreement, because education that does not teach any morality is itself amoral. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
It’s interesting, because I think both sides – “values should be taught at home” and “school should teach values” – seem to come from a place of conservatism. Yet they disagree with each other. And of course, the whole debate begs the question: whose values should get taught?
Many people on the more conservative end of the spectrum have been pointing to the 1947 C.S. Lewis book The Abolition of Man as an example of the need for education to teach values. The book is short, but Lewis’s argument is complex. In essence – and I am not really doing it justice – he makes the case that if you step away from traditional values, what he calls the Tao, you step into an abyss of relativism. He says that traditional values can progress, but only from within the Tao, and that trying to start from scratch and create a completely new morality does not work. He insists that Truth and Right and Wrong all exist – and that to step away from them is madness.
And of course, Relativism has its problems. I once had seventh grade students trying to argue with me that what the Nazis did was right from their perspective, so to them that made it right. And one of them said we should always respect other people’s points of view, because all points of view are valid. When I pointed out that by using the word “always,” she had created a moral rule, and in doing so made its opposite in-valid. I don’t think she didn’t knew what to say.
And, of course, it is a very short journey from “There is Truth” to “There is One Truth” to “I possess the One Truth” to “I must force the One Truth on everyone else.” Certainty can indeed become an idol. As Jonathan Haidt says in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, “to really get a mass atrocity going, you need idealism, the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end. The major atrocities of the twentieth century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack.” He goes on to say that, “The psychologist Linda Skitka finds that when people of have strong moral feelings about a controversial issue… they care much less about proceedural fairness in court cases. They want “good guys” freed by any means, and the “bad guys” convicted by any means.
So moral certainty can take us to very bad places, while moral relatavism can lead us to think there are no bad places to go, which is not true… and can lead to bad places. Both absolute certainty about morality and complete relativism can both come with a cost. What should we be teaching our children, either in our families or in schools? I found an answer that works elegantly for me via Parker J. Palmer, Robert Frost, and John Godfrey Saxe.
I feel a need to share this idea because I feel not nearly enough people have read Palmer’s book, The Courage To Teach, in or out of the teaching profession. In a chapter titled “Knowing in Community,” Palmer discusses our idea of truth. He objects to both an objectivist model, “that truth flows from the top down,” and a relativist model where there is “one truth for me and another truth for you.” He says that Truth is something that can only be known in community – that Truth, in fact, is a community.
I am not really doing Palmer’s ideas justice any better than I am doing Lewis’s, but I’ll try anyway – by moving toward the end of this particular chapter, where he says, “In rejecting the objectivist model, I have not embraced a relativism that reduces truth to whatever the community decides, for the community of truth includes a transcendant dimension of truth-knowing and truth-telling that takes us beyond relativism and absolutism alike. The clearest and most compelling name of that dimension is found in a couplet by Robert Frost: ‘We dance round in a ring and suppose,/But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
In other words, Truth exists, but no matter how hard we try to pretend (suppose) that any one of us can possess it, it is too big for any one of us to hold within our own tiny perspectives. I share this poem with my students early in the year, and they each write down what they they think it means. When we share, first in small groups, then as a whole class, it slowly dawns on most students that we are enacting the poem ourselves. The poem itself becomes the Secret we are all supposing to understand. It obviously does not mean “Truth is a Pop Tart.” That would be absurd. Some interpretations make no sense. But many of the interpretations give us knew insights about the poem that deepen our understanding.
I always pair the poem with another, longer poem by John Godfrey Saxe titled “The Six Blind Men and the Elephant.” The poem relates the tale of six blind men who have never seen an elephant, but who surround one to find out what it is like. The one touching the side declares the elephant to be like a wall. The one touching the tale says the elephant is like a rope. And so on: the leg is like a tree, the trunk like a snake, the ear like a fan, the tusk like a spear.
“And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong.
Though each was partly in the right.
And all were in the wrong!”
What Parker Palmer, along with the poets, is getting at is the idea that reality is communal, and that we experience it in community – including in the community of those who disagree with us. It is aways dangerous to stand in one place holding the elephant’s trunk and insisting that it is a snake without comparing notes with the other blind men. These days, it seems, we are willing to do violence to the other blind men to prove that we are right when in reality if we could all talk together, we might all get a bigger, more complete picture. Relativism would say that it’s okay to say an elephant is a Pop Tart if that’s what makes you happy. Absolutism says and elephant is a snake and you will never change my mind.
The community of Truth says, I must have intellectual humility before the Truth, before Reality. I must never think I have the whole truth. That, I think, is part of what the Bible means when it talks of people needing to “walk humbly.” But that is, of course, my own humble, humble, opinion.
As my thoughts about all of this wandered, I came back to C.S. Lewis. At the end of The Abolition of Man, he tries to demonstrate the validity of the Tao by collecting quotes from multiple cultures, religions, and philosophies that show the similarities of moral ideas throughout the world and across history. In an appendix titled “Illustrations of the Tao,” he quotes from Christian, Jewish, ancient Egyptian, Norse, Roman, Chinese, and Hindu texts, as well as authors such as Locke and Seneca. There is, according to Lewis, by and large, a vast agreement on what should be considered “the Good.” But they all come at the subject from different paths, from different angles.
“The Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
This is not relativism. It is not absolutism. It is humility before the truth that exists, and a willingness to entertain new ideas. As Palmer points out in The Courage To Teach, this happens in every area of human endeavor. Science is always expanding its idea of truth – even to the point of admitting it can’t possibly know everything. Religion is always expanding its truth. Read the Christian Bible and you go from “Kill your enemies” to “Love your enemies.” Are there times progress is not good? Absolutely. I am not fond of A.I.s and chatbots taking over the very human act of writing and creating art. In any field, there are reasons to conserve old ideas. But there are also sometimes reasons to discard them.
And so I come back to Fiddler on the Roof and arts funding here in the county I have called home for most of my adult life. Tevya sees three of his daughters break tradition by marrying men the village matchmaker did not choose for them. One marries a Jewish boy her own age instead of a much older man. One marries a Jewish boy who is also a revolutionary imprisoned in Siberia. One marries a non-Jewish Russian soldier. Tevya wants to pretend this third daughter is dead, but in the end he acknowledges her humanity, partly because their entire village is being driven off their land by the Russians, and he may never see her again. Anti-Semitism is a tradition too. Is this play about family values? The father appears to give up all the traditional values he had at the start of the show – yet most of us would say he has adopted better, truer values in the end. He has progressed.
Literature, art, theater, and education are not here to comfort us, at least not all the time. Is there room for completely “family friendly” art? Absolutely. But to limit art to what people find “family friendly” is to put art in binders. I think most people would agree that Fiddler on the Roof is a family friendly show – yet it is also a show that makes you think. Art is not just supposed to make us confortable. It is supposed to make us think and feel things we might not have thought before. When you find yourself disapproving of Art, instead of dismissing it, you might actually develop your thinking if you consider other perspectives.
Art can be the Secret we all gather around and wonder about.
And so can education. If you want an education that doesn’t challenge you in any way, you don’t really want an education – you want a confirmation of your current views.
We aren’t stuck between Relativism and Absolutism. We can believe in Truth and also realize we do not possess it fully. That is, perhaps, the sign of a truly educated mind.