The Flat World and Scriptural Reasoning

In his book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman writes about the importance of culture as a factor in helping people adapt to the powerful changes taking place in the world. He asks why does one country adapt to the changes with leaders able to mobilize the bureaucracy and the public and another country gets tripped up. (p. 323). Friedman then emphasizes two aspects of culture as relevant in the flat world. One is the outward nature of the culture, i.e., how open is the culture to foreign influences and ideas? The other aspect is the inward nature of the culture, i.e., “to what degree is there trust within the society for strangers to collaborate together” (p. 324). Friedman uses the word “glocalize” to describe the process by which a society develops these outward and inward aspects of culture.

Friedman then goes on to write that many Muslim countries are struggling with the flat world:

“In a world where the single greatest advantage a culture can have is the ability to foster adaptability and adoptability, the Muslim world today is dominated by a religious clergy that literally bans ijtihad, reinterpretation of the principles of Islam in light of current circumstances” (p. 326).

The notion of reinterpretation implies that a previous interpretation has become unquestionable dogma. What does this say about the original sacred text of the Koran? Does it not imply that in and of itself the Koran is an insufficient guide for humanity so that an interpretation is necessary, an interpretation to tell us what the Koran really means? The same is true for the Bible and the Torah. Such a situation devalues the authority of the sacred text and emphasizes the authority of the interpreter. Such a power structure naturally discourages critical thinking, individual information seeking and knowledge production. Such a power structure can only survive on the fear it is able to generate in the hearts of the people who would consider to dissent and think for themselves.

Friedman then writes, “One of the greatest virtues a country or community can have is a culture of tolerance. When tolerance is the norm, everyone flourishes because tolerance breeds trust … Increase the level of trust in any group, company, or society, and only good things happen” (p. 327).

We know that a lack of tolerance and trust are attributes that Christians and Jews share with Muslims. Fear is the basis of religion. Thankfully, there is a voice of good news with the message “Fear not.”

I have a link on this blog to The Children of Abraham Institute, which I stumbled across recently. I encourage you check out this organization. Their purpose is to bring together scholars from the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faiths to build upon the common ground of each descending from Abraham through the practice of Scriptural Reasoning. The ground rules are, one, that each tradition has sacred texts, which record God’s conversation with humanity and humanity’s conversation about God. Two, the purpose of God’s conversation with humanity is for healing. I wish this organization every success and I hope to attend one of their conferences sometime in the near future.

Sense Unmaking and the struggle with authority systems

In a 1998 article Brenda Dervin wrote:

The core of Sense making's assumptions rests on the idea that knowledge made today is rarely perfectly suited to application tomorrow, and in some cases becomes tomorrow's gap. In this view, attending to the unmaking of sense is as important as attending to its making. But, there are two main conditions which make sense unmaking harder to tap. One of these is the long legacy (in the western tradition at least) of assuming that there must be factually definitive right answers to all situations and the incessant programming of our world views to this end. More difficult to handle, however, are the forces of power in society and organizations, forces that prescribe acceptable answers and make disagreeing with them, even in the face of the evidence of one's own experience, a scary and risky thing to do. Even more difficult is when the forces of power flow through an organization or system hidden and undisclosed. (Dervin, B. 1998. Sense-making theory and practice: an overview of user interests in knowledge seeking and use. Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 41)

The informant for my doctoral research related his experience of being raised to believe that the Bible is literally true and accurate in every regard, historically and scientifically. He attended a seminary affiliated with the denomination of his upbringing, but encountered there a much more liberal position on the part of the faculty. They encouraged him to view the Bible from a broader perspective that allowed for a much richer appreciation for and understanding of its essence. This was a Sense Unmaking experience for him. He gave up the knowledge that he believed to be true in order to embrace new knowledge and new truth, because he came to believe that the new knowledge was more accurate and more true than the previous knowledge. Sense ran out for him and new sense had to be made, but only because someone else challenged what he knew to be true and thus created a gap that he had to deal with. The informant could have chosen to resist or ignore this challenge. He could have chosen to transfer to another seminary at which the faculty did not challenge his belief system, but he chose to stay and realized that by letting go of his previous knowledge he was not losing something as much as he was gaining something much more.

The story took a turn for the worse, however, when the denomination decided to crack down on pastors and seminary faculty members who were deviating from the official doctrine of literal interpretation of Scripture. The informant along with many other clergy members and seminary faculty decided to leave the denomination rather than endure the persecution from the denomination. This is an example of what Dervin means by forces of power that prescribe acceptable answers and make disagreement a scary and risky thing to do.

It is also an example of one of the gaps that Angela Coco identified in her doctoral dissertation "Catholics' Mean-Making in Critical Situations". Coco articulated a Sense-Making gap she calls Effete in which people recognize the failure of their religious tradition to provide meaning for socio-biological and psychological transitions (p. 134). Coco's work addresses the issue of ordination of women in a male dominated power structure which refuses to acknowledge the gap that many Catholics are confronting.

The knowledge that women cannot be ministers is a truth that has already run out of Sense for many religious denominations, but it was often a scary and risky proposition to be the voice of deviation from the prescribed acceptable answer. The knowledge that the Bible is literally true in every respect and the knowledge that homosexuals cannot be ordained as clergy members are important issues in many religious denominations. The reactionary powers that force adherence to the prescribed answer or threaten to split the denomination or local congregation is indicative of a fundamentalist perspective that seems increasingly pervasive in today's world.

I am intrigued by the possibility that libraries as community institutions and information professionals as neutral facilitators might play a role in an effort to stimulate dialog and to give a place for the deviant perspective. Dervin writes "no matter how closed a system, somewhere, someone is making deviant observations, arriving at a sense that would be useful to the entire system if a way can be invented to admit that deviance safely into the discourse" (1998, p. 41).

Our nation is currently paying a heavy price for the lack of such a discourse, suppressed and preempted as it was by the powers of the Bush Administration, in the months leading up to the war in Iraq. The few voices that dared to deviate from the prescribed answer on weapons of mass destruction were painted as unpatriotic, un-American, and worse. Those who dared to say that the situation did not make sense were shouted down by those who refused to see the gap, who held on to their knowledge with blind faith in its truth.

It seems to me that libraries are the perfect place for public discourse on any number of issues that divide us for the ready access they provide to the resources that can prove helpful in Sense Making and Sense Unmaking.

Reflections on "Fear of Freedom" by Erich Fromm

I am going to file this under “Books that have had the biggest impact on my life”. However, the entry relates to the topic of this blog in that I believe the fear of freedom or escape from freedom is a Sense-Making activity. The following is a bit of a personal account of my Sense-Making journey along my phenomenological horizon.

My decision to apply for admission to the PhD program at the School of Library & Information Management at Emporia State University was finalized upon reading Erich Fromm’s Fear of Freedom for a second time in the fall of 2000. I had bought a copy at a used book store some twenty years earlier and reading it then was a tremendous influence in my journey away from a conservative evangelical Christian upbringing. In that first reading of Fromm I found permission and courage to question the authority of the powerful institutions and individuals that I allowed control of my life at that time. I was inspired to shed an understanding of faith as nothing more than “the compulsive quest for certainty” and a reaction against doubt to embrace an understanding of faith as an “expression of an inner relatedness to mankind and affirmation of life” (p. 66). This was a giant step for someone who all his life had been made to attend worship services three times a week, whose family life revolved around religion, and who many a night put off sleep as long as possible for fear that the end of the world was imminent.

At the time of this first reading I was in seminary preparing for a career in the ministry, which, truth be told, was not something that I really wanted to do with my life, but that is another story. Reading Fromm, however, made me resolve that my role as a clergy person would always be to communicate hope rather than fear, grace rather than judgment, and to express my own doubts and questions so that others might feel free to do the same.

By the time I had given the book a second reading I had switched career paths from local church ministry, completed a Master of Library Science degree, and was working as an administrator at Emporia State University directing the distance education program for the School of Library & Information Management. I had decided in 1992 to pursue a career in librarianship out of the realization that libraries had always provided a sanctuary for me throughout my life. Every time that my family had moved to a new community one of my first objectives was to locate the library and get a card. The library was a wonderful place where the loneliness of being the new kid and the isolation of feeling different because of religion could be overcome for a while. According to Fromm, loneliness and isolation are the two things humans fear the most and will do anything to avoid even to the point of willfully sacrificing freedom.

By the time I finished reading Fromm for the second time I had a greater appreciation for the power of libraries as something more than sanctuaries, but rather as powerful tools for the kind of freedom that Fromm was writing about. For Fromm, freedom is the solidarity with life that comes only with being at peace with ones individuality. When one is not at peace with their individuality, they suffer from loneliness and isolation, which leads to a willingness to sacrifice individuality to the authority of whoever or whatever can make the loneliness and isolation go away. Fromm writes about solidarity as a “spontaneous relationship to man and nature, a relationship that connects the individual with the world without eliminating his individuality. This kind of relationship – the foremost expressions of which are love and productive work – are rooted in the integration and strength of the total personality and are therefore subject to the very limits that exist for the growth of the self” (p. 24). Within this context, the library is not a sanctuary from loneliness and isolation for its place, but it is a tool to achieve solidarity and freedom for the information and knowledge that it makes available.

Encouraging, promoting and enabling freedom from fear is a primary goal in my life. Using information and creating knowledge to cast light on those who generate, manipulate, and benefit from fear through the abuse of power can happen in various ways such as investigative reporting, teaching, and more. I prefer the library and I seek to champion the information literacy skills and freedom of access that it offers and defends.

The postings that will be made to this blog, and my goal is to post at least once per week, will speak to the themes of freedom, individuality, solidarity, critical thinking, doubt, faith, power, authority, and more based on my experiences and observations from the various intersections of time and space that I pass through along my phenomenological horizon. Keep trekkin’.