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.