And the Greatest of These is Love: Reflections on the Closing of the Office – part 2

This week’s episode of The Office (aired on 5/9/13) left my wife and I in tears.  To appreciate why, it is necessary to understand the history of Pam and Jim – the show’s only married couple.  Jim started his sales career as a young man, presumably right out of college, at the Dunder-Mifflin paper company.  From the beginning of the show, Jim has expressed ambition to do something greater with his career and has seen his position as a paper salesman as simply a stepping stone.  At times, he has even expressed dread at the prospects of working at a mid-level paper company for the rest of his life.  When Jim started with the company, Pam was the office secretary, and was engaged to Roy (for three years!) – a warehouse worker.  Though Jim falls for Pam the first season, it takes a number of years of patient waiting and pursuit for their relationship to blossom and consummate in marriage.

Finally, this last season the opportunity Jim has been waiting for to get out of the paper business and pursue his dreams arises.  He partners with some old college friends to start a sports marketing agency called Athlead.  As the business grows, he is required to spend more and more time in Philadelphia, away from his family, which inevitably puts a strain on his marriage and builds resentment in Pam who is left to care for their two children alone.  As the stress on their marriage threatens to break it apart, Jim realizes that his marriage is more important than his career and decides to take a break from his new company to spend extended time at home to heal his marriage.  When he announces his decision to the Dunder-Mifflin owner, David Wallace, Wallace replies incredulously:  “I admire your decision.  People in my circles won’t even change their golf schedule to work on their marriage.”

Jim’s commitment is put to the test when his company asks him to go on a three month road trip to build clientele on the West Coast.  This represents the breakthrough moment the company has been looking for, and perhaps the consummation of Jim’s lifelong career dreams.  Yet anticipating the added strain his absence would place on Pam, he makes the tough call to stay home.

Jim does not want Pam to know he has done this, but she finds out by chance, overhearing a cell phone conversation.  This provokes her to view herself as an impediment to Jim’s dreams, and she is stricken by guilt.  This week she revealed her guilt to Jim, saying that she was not worth this sacrifice.  Grieved by her misunderstanding of the depth of his love for her, Jim comes up with a plan to demonstrate why she is worth it.

Throughout the nine seasons of the show, the audience becomes increasingly aware that the story within the story is that a film crew is making a documentary (for PBS!) about life in the Dunder-Mifflin office.  Knowing that this request is “against the rules,” Jim asks the producer to compile a montage of scenes that they captured between he and Pam, showing the history of their relationship.  He then surprises her with a disk which we the audience get to see.

This is the moment that brought us to tears – not only because it reminded us of how much we loved and will miss the show, but also because of how beautiful true love is.  While the other characters romance are characterized by contingency, Jim and Pam’s is the one romance characterized by fidelity.  Columnist David Brooks makes this important distinction when diagnosing the crisis marriage faces in our culture:

Marriage is in crisis because marriage, which relies on a culture of fidelity, is now asked to survive in a culture of contingency. Today, individual choice is held up as the highest value: choice of lifestyles, choice of identities, choice of cellphone rate plans. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but the culture of contingency means that the marriage bond, which is supposed to be a sacred vow till death do us part, is now more likely to be seen as an easily canceled contract.

Men are more likely to want to trade up, when a younger trophy wife comes along. Men and women are quicker to opt out of marriages, even marriages that are not fatally flawed, when their ”needs” don’t seem to be met at that moment.

How do we know that fidelity is morally superior than contingency in love relationships?  There are many ways to answer this using ethical theory.  One could certainly examine the consequences of infidelity and feel saddened and angered by the wreak of broken lives and damage children left in its wake.  But consequences alone are not enough to strengthen moral conviction.

There also exists an aesthetic dimension to morality – a kind of moral beauty that reveals to us the rightness of a lifestyle.  We see such beauty in an story of true love, a story that will inevitable involve stunning sacrifice for the sake of the beloved, a sacrifice that displays what we all know in our hearts to be true (or at least hope for it to be true) – that people are more valuable than things and accomplishments.  Visions of moral beauty evoke an emotional response and are thus confirmed by the emotions.  This is why my wife and I were moved to tears.

Whether you are an Office fan or not, please share some of your encounters with moral beauty in the world.

And the Greatest of these is Love: Reflections on the Closing of The Office – part 1

NBC’s hit sitcom The Office is wrapping up its ninth and final season.  Since its pilot six episode season in 2006, the show about a small paper company in Scranton, PA and its naively incompetent manager (played for seven seasons by Steve Carrell) has been my consistent favorite, providing countless hours of laughter –  most significantly during a dark time in my life when it was the only thing that could make me laugh.

With Steve Carrell’s departure two seasons ago, the quality of the comedy has steadily declined:  while it still has its moments of hilarity, I watch it now more out of loyalty and habit than for the comedic value.  As the writers’ creativity seems to have diminished, they have relied more and more on simple, crude sexual jokes as a source of humor rather than the thoughtful, clever character interactions that have been the hallmark of the show.  Though never a model of virtuous family fun, the show has become increasingly shocking in its portrayal of sexual deviancy, and thus sadly has gone the way of most contemporary sitcoms in which sexual immorality is trivialized by making sexual  promiscuity and marital infidelity as source of casual amusement.

The most disturbing example of this trend has been the relationship between Angela, a self-righteous, uptight hypocrite (and the one professing Christian character on the show) and her husband, known just as “the Senator” because he is a local state senator.  Angela’s co-worker and friend in the accounting department, Oscar, who is a gay Mexican-American, begins to suspect that “the Senator” is gay himself, and eventually they enter into an affair – unbeknownst to Angela, of course.  After having a child with her husband, Angela, who herself slept with another co-worker just before she was married, finds out about the affair and ends up leaving her husband to live alone with her infant son.  Occasionally, I will watch sitcoms from the 1980s on Netflix, and while even by then sexual immorality was employed for comedic effect, it was rare for it to happen among married people, and of course the topic of homosexual behavior was never even broached.

Set against the backdrop of dysfunctional marriages and romances is the relationship between Jim and Pam.  Jim and Pam’s blossoming romance was a major sub-plot of the show for a few seasons, eventually culminating in their wedding and starting of a family.  Their sincere love for each other and commitment to their new family is truly the most endearing aspect of the show.   This season has revealed some cracks in their marriage, caused by Jim’s new business venture in sports marketing, which often requires him to be away from home while Pam stays behind to sell paper and care for their two children alone.  In the midst of their conflict, there have been hints that Pam might be enticed to be unfaithful to Jim, to which my wife and I have cried “They better not do that!  I’ll never watch NBC again if they do!”

Fortunately, with a couple of episodes remaining it appears that the writers do not plan to wreck their marriage, but have them taking steps toward restoration and healing.  I plan to write a second post in which I describe what they have done and what our intuitive recognition of the beauty of this relationship says about the nature of moral law and how we learn righteousness.

Towards Uniting the Heart and Mind – part 3

This is my third post on the theme of the universal conflict between the mind (reason) and the heart (love), a conflict experienced both within individual persons, but also on a societal scale, as history ebbs and flows with cultural movements – philosophical, religious, artistic – shifting between polarizing emphases on the intellect or on the emotions. Drawing artistic inspiration from the progressive rock classic “Hemispheres” by Rush, I have been musing on the prospects of reconciling these forces by looking at the connections between truth and love. To begin reconciling the heart and mind, one must embrace metaphysics that envisions love as, to borrow from the famed theologian Francis Schaeffer, part of the warp and woof of reality; in other words, that love is inherent to the very nature of reality (“the truth of love”). I argued that only the biblical revelation of God as three Persons provides such a metaphysic.

Another essential philosophical principle to uniting heart and mind is “the love of truth.” How is it possible to love with the heart the truth that we ascertain with the mind through reason? I previously established the simple claim that love is an intrinsic quality of persons in relation. Without persons in relation, love does not exist. So loving truth implies relating to truth as unto a person, or that truth has personal qualities to it. To explore this concept, we must draw on the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge and the experience of knowing – epistemology.

The contemporary philosopher whose ideas on epistemology have impacted me the most is Dr. Esther Meek. Dr. Meek and I have developed a professional relationship recently, collaborating to an extent on how to teach a healthy, sound epistemology to young adults. She generously gave of her time this semester to do a video conference with all three of my senior Theory of Knowledge classes. In her most recent treatise on knowledge, Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology, she advances the thesis that all knowing is, to varying degrees, a transformative encounter with reality, embodied in the form of an interpersonal, covenant relationship.

This thesis is difficult to grasp as modern thinkers because it runs contrary to our unquestioned assumptions about the nature of knowledge (what Meek calls our “epistemic default”). One of these deeply held assumptions is the “fact-value dichotomy.” On one side of the dichotomy is fact: tangible, indisputable bits of external information that can be demonstrated to anyone and that every rational, educated person should receive. On the other side of the dichotomy is value: subjective, private feelings about what goals are worth pursuing in life and about how we ought to live. Knowledge is the realm of facts; values lack the authority of knowledge because they are relative to the individual, or culture to which the individual belongs, and are relegated to the diminished status of personal opinions.

Meek elaborates this dichotomy to describe how we categorize all kinds of human activities into what we count as knowledge and what we do not:

Knowledge – facts, theory, science, reason, math, the way things are (reality)

Not knowledge – value, opinion, imagination, interpretation, religion, art, morality, the way things appear

A couple of important observations here. Notice that the knowledge column contains things we tend to characterize as impersonal, i.e. independent of persons and subjective experience, while what we exclude from knowledge is personal.  Also, while we recognize that we need the things we consider knowledge to survive, what makes live meaningful and worth living are the things we have separated from knowledge.

If you have never thought about this before, I recommend that you spend the week reflecting on what people (including yourself) talk about when they are claiming to know something and on the other hand what people are hesitant to claim to know.  Consider, for example, the old adage to avoid conversations about politics and religion, at least publicly.  Why are these uncomfortable topics?  It’s not only the possibility of giving offense that is behind the warning; is it also perhaps that we do not know how to discuss such things openly and rationally because we do not regard them as matters of knowledge – to be rationally debated and evaluated – but as matters of private feeling?

One of the consequences of this view of knowledge is to extinguish our love for truth, weakening our longing to know, for how can we love truth if knowledge is impersonal?  Significantly, she links this view to the deepening sense of boredom, hopelessness, and betrayal in our society, especially among the young:

It has been ingrained in us that we should keep our emotions, our selves, out of the information [which we equate to knowledge], as you would strive to keep contaminants out of a water supply.  Small wonder that people are bored, when personal commitment and passion are “subjective” items that we must check at the door.  Small wonder that we are bored, when we presume the information is ever only dispassionately derived or held to be true.  Dispassionately gleaned information, dispassionately conveyed and dispassionately apprehended, spells boredom.  It suggests that knowledge has little to do with what is meaningful in life.

A major implication of her ‘covenant epistemology’ is that we can throw ourselves passionately and personally in the pursuit of truth because there is a Person waiting on the other side to reciprocate our efforts.  Or as I tell my students, “knowledge is not a one way street.”

There is so much to more to be said on this theme that I think it would be worthwhile for me to reflect more in the upcoming weeks what I am learning about covenant epistemology and relay this to you.  This will help me process the book and perhaps help enrich your pursuit of knowledge at the same time.

Cheating in Atlanta Schools: Extending Our Moral Outrage over Grading Deception – part 2

Superintendent Hall basking in public praise

This is a re-post of a blog I wrote when news of this scandal first broke.  See part 1 below.

In my previous post on the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, I argued that the common ways teachers manipulate students’ grades to portray a false sense of learning achievement is morally similar to teachers changing wrong answers on standardized tests, and therefore should also provoke moral outrage from the public.  Here I will develop that argument further by explaining more how these more common practices violate the same moral principles that bear on the cheating scandal.

Governor Deal’s investigative report on the matter criticizes Atlanta Public Schools for “emphasizing test results and public praise to the exclusion of integrity and ethics.”  In other words, educational leaders and teachers were more concerned about the appearance of student learning than actual student learning, and the ends of higher test scores justified the means of changing wrong answers in the minds of the violators.

I have seen this ethos at work in both public and private school settings.  While teaching at a private school I received a steady stream of complaints from parents that their children were making C’s instead of B’s, or B’s instead of A’s.  These complaints translated into trouble with the administration who criticized me for not having enough A’s and B’s.  Ironically, I left public education to teach at a private school seeking more freedom to implement academic rigor and to seek grading integrity.  Sadly, there was less freedom because the grades were even more scrutinized.  I was given a number of specific directives (like assigning an easy extra credit project that would add 10 points to the overall grade) designed to transform F’s to C’s and C’s to B’s.  The motivation for these directives was that my classroom grades created a bad image for the school – an image that students were not succeeding in science – that needed to be corrected.  Upping the grades would portray an image of success.

My response was to admit that it was true that a significant number of students were not learning that much, though those that were making A’s and B’s were achieving a lot.  I argued, with evidence to support, that low achievement in science was by not means unique to my classroom, but was a national problem especially severe in Georgia. What made me different was that I was not afraid to disclose this low level of achievement in my course grades, believing that was the only way the problem of low achievement could be corrected.  To improve the problem it had to be acknowledged openly, not covered up by grade manipulation.

Yet the cost of attempting to bring to light a real problem was gaining a negative image, among some, of being an ineffective educator.  My local leadership wanted me to change this image by changing grades (which would also enhance the image of the school) even though grade integrity would be compromised.  In Gov. Deal’s words, what was happening was a concern for “public praise [image] at the exclusion of integrity and ethics.”

The preoccupation with image (the perception of being good) versus character (actually being good) is by no means just a contemporary malady.  Yet I believe this mindset is particularly strong in an age where philosophically many have come to believe that “perception is reality”  and its corollary that “reality is what we make it.”  The postmodern worldview maintains that there is no reality independent of our perceptions.  Therefore, we cannot make objective truth claims; rather, all truth is socially constructed.  That means that it is up to human communities to determine what is accepted as true in that community:  knowing truth apart from these constructions is impossible.   Consequently, image is all we can ‘know.’

In a postmodern worldview the distinction then between image and integrity is meaningless, for the concept of integrity is based on the possibility of a real essence – a reality of being, a state of existence, that exists apart from how people perceive us.  Denying the existence of such a reality, or believing that it is there but impossible to know, negates the very notion of integrity and renders the pursuit of it impossible.  In the end this kind of metaphysics (beliefs about the nature of reality) justifies the kind unethical behaviors that put public praise before integrity and leads to grading practices that conveys an image of success without concern for real success in learning.

So far I have only diagnosed critically without offering any solutions.  I’ll follow this post soon with thoughts about the biblical basis for integrity and helpful ideas for parents and educators about how to pursue greater integrity in education.

Cheating in Atlanta Schools: Extending our Moral Outrage over Grading Deception – part 1

This is a re-post of a blog I wrote when this scandal first broke in 2011.  Earlier this month, dozens of educators implicated in the report were indicted on a litany of crimes.

This week Georgia governor Nathan Deal released an investigative report into allegations of systemic cheating on standardized tests in Atlanta Public Schools (including both elementary and middle schools).  The “cheaters” in this case, though, were not the children in the building, but the adults:  teachers and administrators who erased students’ wrong answers and penciled in the correct ones.  Altogether, 178 educators across 44 schools were indicted in the report, which described the school system’s culture as one where cheating was encouraged and whistle-blowers punished.  The scandal is all the more stinging since Superintendent Beverly Hall has received national accolades for her success in turning Atlanta’s schools around

Perhaps the most egregious instance of strategic cheating took place at Parks Middle School where the principal (hailed as a “miracle worker”) was held up by Hall as a model leader because of the dramatic increases in test scores under his tenure.  Teachers at the school describe him as being obsessed with numbers to the point of pressuring his subordinates to engage in cheating.  An Atlanta Journal-Constitution report on Parks depicts the kind of co-dependent relationship between the principle and Supt. Hall that made the school system culture so conducive to cheating:  “Hall wanted high test scores, Waller produced them, and Hall rewarded and protected him” (Judd, July 6 2011).  This protection took the form of Hall overlooking serious accusations of fraud against the principle and insisting that criticism against him would go nowhere.

The public outcry against APS has been fierce.  Parents are rightly concerned about the quality of their children’s education being compromised and the damage such practices to do children.  Gov. Deal summarizes these moral concerns in the report:  “Students are harmed, parents lose sight of the child’s true progress, and taxpayers are cheated.”

These concerns should not be limited to such scandalous instances of academic fraud, however.  It is common practice for teachers throughout all grade levels and school systems to manipulate students grades by curving test scores, “rubber stamping” assignments with A’s for just turning work in, not penalizing students for missing work, and giving bogus “extra credit” work that adds points to grades without expecting students to demonstrate achievement.

When I taught science at a metro Atlanta public school I was told  by my immediate supervisor to “curve” final exam grades by taking the square root of their raw score and multiplying it by ten (so, for instance, a score of a 36 would be raised to a 60, a 49 a 70).  There was no justification for this method except that it would cause more students to pass the course.  There were students in my class that had not passed a test all semester, but had a barely passing grade (above a 69) going into the final exam.  In my view, if they performed poorly on the final exam that revealed a serious lack of understanding of the subject and I believed they did not deserve credit for the class.  But as a consequence of this manipulative grading scheme, students who had a 71 average could make a 36 on the final exam and still pass the class (the final exam was already weighted so low as to not have a major impact on their overall grade, another way grades are manipulated to produce higher scores).  Giving students credit for a course in which they did not truly learn so troubled my conscience that I refused to change the grades.  Angry school administrators responded by demanding that the department chair secretly change my grades so that more students would pass.

In case you are wondering if my story is merely an isolated incident of manipulating grades to produce higher marks, there was a grade inflation report released in 2008 under then governor Sonny Purdue that showed enormous disparities between the passing rate of high school courses and the passing rate of corresponding standardized end-of-course tests, which are designed to measure student achievement of curriculum standards:  in most Georgia counties, students were passing the courses at a much higher rate than these exams.  This happens because teachers are often pressured by parents and administrators not to give failing grades to students even if they do not achieve.  Even C’s are discouraged in many educational circles.

This practice of manipulating classroom grades to inflate students report cards is in many ways morally equivalent to what these Atlanta school teachers are guilty of.  The motive is similar:  higher grades make the teacher and the school look good.  The consequences on the families involved are the same:  both students and parents are deceived into thinking that the children are learning more than they actually are.  And both practices waste taxpayer money.  The United States spends more taxpayer money per child than any country in the world yet our educational outcomes have been in decline for decades.

The kind of moral outcry against APS for blatant cheating on standardized tests should be echoed throughout the state (and nation) in response to policies that reward children with grades that deceive them, their parents, and society about what children are really learning.  Sadly, saying that one’s child is an all A/B student means little in this educational climate beyond that they showed up to class, were not disruptive, and did most of their homework.  Our children will typically accomplish as little as our educational system rewards them for.  Is this all we expect from our kids?

He is Risen!

I don’t have much to add to this.  Watch and hope more in the promise that because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, all sad things will become untrue and all things are being made new.  Happy Easter!

I plan to resume my “Toward Uniting the Heart and Mind” series next week.

(If you can only hear the video, just click on the “Watch on YouTube” button; I cannot see it when I play it from the blog, but that might just be me).

Towards Uniting the Heart and Mind – part 2

I am exploring the conflicting relationship between the Heart and the Mind using the song “Hemispheres” by Rush, which is the only rock song I know of devoted to this theme.  To recap, the god of Reason enabled people to transform nature into great cities, but left them feeling empty, their need for meaning being unfulfilled by their conquests.  The god of Love restored a sense of meaning, renewing their joy and liberating their souls, but left them without the means to protect and provide for themselves when nature turned hostile and winter came. Disillusioned by both gods, the people began to fight against themselves, split by conflicting allegiances to the Heart or to the Mind.  But some, weary of the conflict, seek reconciliation in a mysterious force called Cygnus:  “To the heart of Cygnus’s fearsome force/ We set our course/ Spiraled through that timeless space/ To this immortal place.”

Cygnus is presented in the song as a transcendent spirit, without physical form, who resides hidden from the gods of Olympus, yet monitors them from above.   As the plight of humanity is brought to his attention, he looks upon the unending feud between Apollo and Dionysus, who are oblivious to the havoc wreaked by their conflict on humanity, with anger.  So he manifests himself to the gods:

Then all at once the chaos ceased
A stillness fell, a sudden peace
The warriors felt my silent cry
And stayed their struggle, mystified.

As Cygnus calls to their attention the tragic consequences on earth of their raging feud, the gods respond with regret and call on him to bring peace:  “We will call you Cygnus/ the god of Balance you shall be!”  The song closes with a kind of vision for reconciliation between the Heart and the Mind:

Let the truth of love be lighted
Let the love of truth shine clear
Sensibility, armed with sense and liberty
With the heart and mind united
In a single perfect sphere.

At this point, I tell my students that simply declaring a need for unity of heart and mind is easy; actually achieving it is an entirely different matter.  We then discuss ways that the Heart and Mind, or our emotions and reason, might work in concert in our quest for knowledge.  This is a challenging discussion, as they realize the difficulties inherent in such a synthesis.  The pursuit of this harmony, I tell them, must be grounded in a view of the nature of reality (metaphysics) that coheres with such an approach to life.  This last verse of “Hemispheres” points to this.

Consider the phrase “truth of love.”  In the most basic sense, truth is simply that which corresponds to reality.  So for love to be ‘true’ in some way, love must be part of reality:  found in the fabric of the way things really are.  Yet love inherently is something that exists between persons in relationship.   Where does one get an understanding of the nature of the universe as essentially persons in relationship?

Some worldviews regard the universe as essentially impersonal.  Atheism (or secular naturalism) is an obvious example.  Pantheism (e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism) also regards reality as ultimately impersonal.  While in these religions, there might be lesser deities with personal qualities, the Supreme Being is essentially an impersonal force that does not even have a moral character, but is beyond good and evil.  These “reality as impersonal” worldviews plainly do not cohere with the concept of love actually existing.

Other worldviews regard the universe as essentially personal.  This is a defining characteristic of Theistic religions.  But among theistic religions there are two fundamentally different views of the personal nature of God:  the simple one God, one person view (Allah); and the complex one God, three persons view (the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).  If love is essentially persons in relationship, then in the simple view, love is not intrinsic to God Himself, but may only come into being with the creation of other persons, i.e. human beings.  Perhaps this is why one does not find much, if any, language of God and love in the Quran.   Indeed, only in the Bible, specifically in the New Testament, does one find plain, direct attribution of the property of Love to the Supreme Being.  This is quite consonant with the complex view of God as a plurality of persons united in a single essence.  In other words, love is intrinsic to God Himself because within the nature of God there is persons in relationship!  (see the above video for an extensive discussion of this concept).

This is not to say that the Trinity can be grasped in rationalistic terms; there is wondrous mystery in such a Being.  But one can argue that only this view of ultimate reality coheres with the belief that love really exists.  And this belief is crucial to any endeavor toward reconciling the Heart and the Mind.

I have decided to devote one more post to this theme, next time looking at the phrase “love of truth” and what kind of view of the nature of knowledge makes sense of loving truth.