The president of Amherst College, Tony Marx, sent a letter to the alumni opening up the question of how to best educate students for our times. I have always felt that education needs to address not only the intellectual development, but also the moral and philosophical development of the students. This is easy to say but for a long time how to go about this eluded me. Also I came to appreciate that our development toward pluralism, the appreciation of different points of views, had come upon its own limit, because it made it seemingly impossible to address the moral and philosophical development of students. After all we didn’t want to impose our “subjective values” on students.
It has become clear to me in my own experience that however positive that acceptance of different views are, we have to be able to make distinctions, define high and low, better and worst, in a way that takes the best of pluralism – which is the willingness to let go of our attachment to seeing truth in a specific way – and then not shy away from making distinctions, from implicating ourselves morally and implicating others. After the dangers of moral absolutism are due to creating a morality based on preference or bias rather than freedom from ideologies and our deepest recognition of reality. The other extreme has been moral relativism which makes it impossible to claim any kind of moral standard. This is an extreme and irrational view, and of course rarely do we take it to the extreme because inherently we know there is right and wrong, but it can hinder us from going forward. Some will claim morality is a cultural construct and I would agree with that, however it is a construct that can reflect an inner drive toward goodness accurately or not. In the same way that art is a cultural construct that can reflect inner qualities.
I did a performance for a group of students and faculty at Amherst. After my performance, I made a few key points which I’ve listed below. We had a very lively question and answer period and the discussion that followed was fascinating. The professors and the president, with their very authentic questions and responses afterwards, helped to bring the students into this context (It’s a lot for college age kids to unselfconsciously engage with these issues.) I was struck by how going into these questions is breaking convention and how important this is. Summary of four points we discussed:
We went into four points as a way to connect with the question of purpose in an authentic way beyond personal ideology, dogma or intellectual ideas about it.
We all have preconceived notions, conscious or unconscious, about the purpose of life that generally have not been examined and yet greatly influence our relationship to it. Some example may be: to do good, to serve God, to make the world a better place, to fulfill our destiny, Love, survival, procreation, life as a classroom, self-gratification, materialism, etc. Ideas and values are being passed on to us by our family, our peers, previous generations, and our culture but we rarely take the time or opportunity to question or examine them.
The question of purpose is the most important question for anyone to go into as it informs every life decision we will make (whether we know it or not). And the deeper our connection to purpose, the more impact we will have because more possibilities open up and greater creativity is released. I gave some concrete examples of how going into this question deepens our perspective which in turn informs our responses in all the important aspects of our life.
To go beyond a narrow or dogmatic view of purpose we have to expand our perspective beyond our immediate individual life circumstance and our current cultural time in history, recognizing that our definition of purpose isn’t static but has been evolving over time. In that deep time view we become aware of the fact that the Universe is perpetually evolving and that we, too, are part of that process. This process of evolution has an exterior visible dimension which is matter, and an interior invisible dimension which is consciousness and culture. Becoming conscious that we are part of this process is an extraordinary and thrilling moment in history. Before becoming conscious beings, we still served a purpose in the Universe but without being aware of it, in the same way that a cell serves a function in the body without being aware of the larger picture. But as we become more and more conscious to this big evolutionary picture and our place in it, everything changes and we realize that we are literally the eyes, mind and awareness of the universe.
This is the thrilling new frontier.