Gregory E. Ganssle

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Greg Ganssle is a philosopher with the Rivendell Institute and a lecturer in the philosophy department at Yale University. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Syracuse University and an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Rhode Island. Published works include Thinking About God: First Steps in Philosophy (2004), God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature (2001), and God and Time: 4 Views (2001). He has published academic papers on God's relation to Time, Free Will, and St. Augustine. Greg has served on the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ for twenty-six years.

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The following lecture was presented at the graduate student seminar of Faculty Commons' National Faculty Leadership Conference, The Heart of the University, June 27, 2008.

Our present inquiry does not aim, as our others do, at study; for the purpose of our examination is not to know what virtue is, but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would be of no benefit to us.
(Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103b 28-30)

Each age has its own occupational hazards. Each age encourages certain vices and devalues certain virtues. Because we are immersed in our age, these hazards are often invisible to us. We simply cannot see the effects of certain cultural norms on our characters. Think for a minute about the fact that we call the age in which we live the information age and not the age of truth or the age of wisdom. What are the risks of living and working in the age of information? The age of information requires certain skills of anyone who aims to be successful. The practice of these skills habituates a person into patterns of being, doing and thinking that ultimately shape what kind of person she becomes. These skills are very different than those that would be required for truth or for wisdom. For example, information is a commodity that is to be assimilated, managed and mastered. Truth, in contrast, requires that we submit to it, that we meditate on it, that we order our lives around it.

It is also the case that each profession has its own particular occupational hazards. Unless we recognize and anticipate the hazards of our occupation, we may find that we have come to embody a set of skills and virtues that make us into people we do not want to be. 

The academy is a guild. We are being apprenticed and we are training others into the life of Scholarship. What counts as being a scholar is what is modeled by your faculty and your peers. The apprenticeship does not end with the completion of your Ph.D. You are constantly learning within the community of scholars. The concern I am addressing tonight is not with the content that I am learning but with the habits of mind and of life that I breathe in without thinking much about them.

Specifically, I want to address practicing the good life in the face of two occupational hazards common throughout the American Academy. These hazards are easily found outside the university as well, but they have special purchase on those of us in this particular guild. For each of these hazards, I will discuss a particular antidote. I hope to show how the practice of certain disciplines can help us cultivate the kind of mental and moral habits that will counter the development of these hazards.

Cynicism

The first Hazard on which I want to comment is the Hazard of Cynicism. Throughout culture and in the academy, there is a widespread posture of cynicism. There are many reasons why this posture is so common. Popular journalism and the proliferation of Post Freudian pop-psychology make us more likely to adopt the cynic’s posture. The cynic’s posture is a posture of double suspicion. First there is a suspicion of motives. We tend to assume that other people act for motives about which they are not entirely open. People do what they do for private and self-serving reasons that are kept hidden. It is the common suspicion that if a person’s motives can be revealed, his projects can be discredited. There is also a suspicion of value. The cynic is slow to admit that some course of action or research project has value on its own terms. Rather we tend to exert our energy to undermine whatever value is being recommended.

Another reason that cynicism is widespread is that it is the path of least resistance. It is much easier and much safer to take a shot at something else than it is to offer oneself as a target. It is more dangerous to try to articulate, support and defend a positive position. The critic’s seat is a safe seat.

Another reason for the proliferation of cynicism in the University is that we are being trained to become professional critics. Becoming a critic of ideas and movements carries the occupational hazard of cynicism. We take text after text and argument after argument and subject them to a rapid digest and criticize regiment. We sit in our seminars and shoot down the entire life project of a scholar such as Aquinas or Hume in under an hour and then move on the next week to repeat the offense against another thinker. We attempt to see through their concerns and analyses and thus we can remain unbothered by their conviction and untouched by their prescriptions. We learn to explain away the very ideas that should challenge us. Lewis has a caution for us, in this regard:

[Y]ou cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see. [1]

Cynicism, then, is corrosive to my eyesight. It makes it difficult for me to see the true, the good and the beautiful when it is right in front of me. It makes it hard to see even the plausible and the promising and the O.K. looking. It makes me quick to dismiss and slow to listen. It allows me to react to other voices without hearing them.

Psalm 1, vs 1 tells us: “How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, Nor stand in the path of sinners, Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!” The seat in your seminar room is the seat of scoffers. We are being trained to sit in that seat and take up that role. To become “like a tree firmly planted by streams of water” (Ps 1:3) we must get out of the seat of scoffers. We must learn how to engage in our discipline without occupying the seat of scoffers.

An Antidote: The Discipline of Affirmation

I want to propose one practice that can help counter the development of a cynical mind. This is the practice of the Discipline of Affirmation. The discipline of affirmation is simple to grasp but not easy to practice. I can summarize it in a sentence. Affirm before you criticize. Make it a habit to search for what is good and true and beautiful about a position or idea before you look for what is false or bad or repugnant in it. Decide to say what is good before you say what is bad. Talk about what contribution is made by an idea or movement or thinker before you talk about your criticisms. I think it is especially important to speak what you see to affirm. It is part of the discipline of affirmation that we speak our affirmations out loud. It is not enough simply to think about them. We need to make our affirmations public.

The cynic’s posture can become so comfortable that we forget that it is a particular posture. It becomes second nature. It is rather like the recliner in my living room. Once I get in it and get settled, it is hard to be motivated to get up. I need a pretty good reason to exert the effort. Practicing affirmation helps me not to get too settled in the cynic’s seat. The default habits of mind and speech that look to debunk or to see through are broken up by other habits; habits that point in other directions. By practicing affirmation, I can train my eyes to see the good, the true and the beautiful.

Imagine you are teaching or taking part in a seminar where the members practice the discipline of affirmation. Picture how the tone of the discussion would be different if each week you launched the analysis of a text or a scholar with the question, In what ways in particular do you think the author has demonstrated good insight or analysis? Beginning with thoughtful affirmation sets the environment of a discussion in a way that can be quite dramatic. As a participant in the seminar or as a leader, you can open up new ways of thinking by the practice of affirmation.

The practice of the discipline of affirmation is an expression of that rare virtue, humility. Humility is not servitude. It is not a refusal to admit that you have insight and that you have something to offer. To be humble requires that you admit that you do have things to bring to the discussion. It also requires that you realize that there is much to learn from your peers, much to learn from your students, much to learn from the people you disagree with most, and much to learn from past generations. Humility, like cynicism, is a posture. It is a posture fundamentally oriented towards Reality. It dawned on me one day that I cannot hope to be right more than half the time. After all, I am surrounded by some of the smartest and most well informed people in the world. How can I think that I am going to be right more than half the time? The discipline of affirmation helps me walk in humility.

Humility is a submission to Reality also in the sense that it is truth seeking. Reality is what it is. What is true, is true. We order our thinking around what we discover about the world, about human nature, about God. Human beings are to be seekers of truth and as such to be submitted to Reality. We are all trying to figure out what is true. The discipline of affirmation reminds me of this fact. The primary focus of my inquiry into another person’s project ought to be its promise of leading us into a better understanding of Reality.

Discontentment

The second hazard of the age and of the guild I wish to address is discontentment. Discontentment is seen widely in contemporary western society. I believe there are several trends that make ours a culture that is marked by discontentment. First of all, the saturation of our society in the entertainment media makes our culture fertile ground for discontentment. How many advertisements does an average American, for example, see by the time she is twenty five years old? Suppose there are twenty commercials in an hour of TV programming. Suppose also that she watches about five hours of TV per week—a figure that is well below the national average. She sees 100 commercials a week, 5,000 a year and about 100,000 by the time she is 25. My estimates are actually very low here, and these figures do not consider other forms of advertisement. Every commercial has exactly the same message: Do not be content with who you are or what you have. You are inadequate the way you are. You need....

For the academy in particular, I think discontentment is also bred by what you might call the economic ambiguities of the life of a scholar. The primary currency of the academic guild is prestige. There is not a lot of money in being a scholar. You are paid mostly in prestige. Prestige, however, is a volatile currency. It is subject to wild fluctuations in the market and there are few objective measures of the level of your prestige. Prestige has no stable or reliable purchasing power. There is no gold standard.

If I measure myself by my prestige, I will soon become deeply discontent. It is easy to weigh my worth by comparison with other scholars and teachers or by some vague standard that I set for myself. This tendency can result in bitterness or jealousy towards others or it can result in discouragement with myself or both. I find that I tend to measure myself in my weakest points against others at their strongest points. In this way, I enter a thought-game of competition that pits me against others and therefore isolates me. Such a competition cannot be won.

In addition, there is the nagging fear that the work does not matter very much. The amount of work it takes to publish an academic paper that might be read by a few friends and a few others is enormous. My brother, who works in computers, writes monthly columns for a computer magazine and a sailing magazine. Years ago, he told me that it took him about three hours to write a column. He would get paid about $750 for each one. I tried to explain how academic publishing worked: how we write a paper over several weeks or more and then read it to a couple of conferences and incorporate criticisms. Then we may send it out to some friends for further comments. After that we send it off to a journal and six months later it comes back with still more comments. Finally we get the finishing touches together and we wait. A year later, the proofs come back and we must check those carefully ourselves. Then in six months the article comes out and we get paid with three free copies of the journal in which it appears. He could not believe anyone would continue to write for those journals. Seeing the process through his eyes a bit raises the nagging question: Is it really worth it? It is no surprise that Discontentment is an occupational hazard.

An Antidote: The Discipline of Thanksgiving

The key to fighting discontentment is contentment. Cultivating contentment is difficult. One discipline that I have found helpful in this regard is the Discipline of Thanks-giving. It began to occur to me that thanksgiving is a discipline when I realized that thanksgiving is not an emotion. Thanks is something I can give even if I do not feel especially grateful. It is the practice of giving thanks that most often precedes the response of feeling thankful.

How can one practice the discipline of thanksgiving? It is a lot like those old Arthur Murray Dance Studios at which you learned to dance by following the footprints that were marked on the floor. It is incredibly awkward and we must begin with very basic steps. So here are my basic steps for cultivating contentment through the discipline of thanksgiving. I begin with whatever comes to my mind. I choose to express thanks for whatever particular thing I am thinking about. So I will say out loud, “Thanks for the chance to go to campus today.” Then I turn to the next thing that comes to mind and I express thanks for that. “I am grateful that I don’t often have to wear a tie.” I keep this up until my mind begins to turn to those aspects of my life and situation for which I am deeply grateful. It is a privilege to be associated with Yale University. I am amazed that I get to be a philosopher and that I got to go to graduate school. I know lots of smart people who did not have the opportunity. The fact that I get to be married to Jeanie and to have David and Nick and Lizzy as my kids is astonishing to me. These elements of my life are occasions for deep and persisting gratitude.

The challenge of discontentment for me is often a challenge of cloudy vision. I don’t often know what I want. Particular and local frustrations seem large while those deep benefits seem small. The practice of Thanksgiving helps clear my vision. It helps me recognize (or re-cognize—that is—to think again about) those ingredients that in fact make my life rich. It helps me put those items that feed discontentment into perspective. It brings a deep sense of contentment. I take my first awkward steps when I decide to give thanks for whatever comes into my head.

The discipline of thanksgiving also has connections with Humility. The practice of thanksgiving helps us to realize that many of the most important things in our lives are not the results of our own efforts at all. They are gifts that we have received. This fact is part of the Reality to which we must submit. The connection with Humility makes it clear that the discipline of thanksgiving fits most easily into a theistic world-view.  As a theist, I know that all of these things, my life and family and my opportunities are gifts from God. It is not hard for me to give thanks to him for them. Although you do not have to be a theist to be grateful or to practice giving thanks, the practice makes the most sense if the most fundamental Reality is a Person who made you and cares for you. Thanksgiving, then, is a person to person exchange. It is not just an exercise in wishful or positive thinking.

Cynicism and Discontentment are two of the vices that are rampant in the academy. The practice of the discipline of Affirmation and the discipline of Thanksgiving can serve as antidotes and as paths to help us become the sorts of people who can inhabit the university with the heart of Christ.

Some Questions on which to Reflect:

Endnotes

[1]  C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (New York: MacMillan, 1947), p. 50.

Copyright

Copyright  © 2008 Faculty Commons and Gregory E. Ganssle.