What are we telling our students? (AKA, leaking gray matter)

The standard message we deliver to our doctoral students in Learning Technologies is to identify a gap in the research in an area of interest to them, and then to propose a first step study to address that research gap. Find the gap and do something about it. We are sinking in the gaps and not just gaps in the area of educational research. What other gaps might be addressed, not just in our professional academic lives but in our personal and social lives? As J. Alfred Prufrock says, “I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” As someone older than dirt, I am starting to recall the lessons of my youth … lessons so few seem to have learned. For example, there is a passage I recall from Vayikra (Leviticus) in chapter 19 that many repeat: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself … ” But there seems to be a huge gap between the people a typical person loves so dearly and so clearly (namely, members of one’s immediate family) and one’s neighbors along with those who live in neighboring or distant countries as well as those who seem different from one in terms of color, class, religion, and so many other differentiating factors that allow so many to hate so many others. Love thy neighbor … so often repeated buy so seldom realized. And what captivated my interest for years was the Book of Job … Job … a man from the land of Uz … a man challenged with many adversities who admits that G-d is great but admits that we cannot know Him as Job expresses his despair and lack of understanding for such punishment in return for having been so devoted. And then there is the answer from the Whirlwind asking Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. Indeed, that is the one book in Jewish liturgy that I embrace. The lesson I have taken away is that it is precisely the limitations of our knowledge that makes religious belief possible. The irony is that so many religious people claim to know G-d’s mind. And then the notion of origins of the universe comes to mind … namely, the big bang theory … a notion about how the universe began. And it is so in line with opening of Berasheet (the Book of Genesis) … in the beginning there was chaos and the void … things beyond our understanding … and it is also in line with Aristotle’s reasoning that there had to be a first cause because it was impossible for humans to understand an infinite regress of causes … a couple thousand years later came the big bang theory where our reasoning and understanding comes to a halt, as noted in the opening of the first book of those five books of Moses. There are limits to our understanding and our knowledge. As O. K. Bouwsma noted in an unpublished journal, it would be a remarkable coincidence if the limits of his imagination happened to coincide with the limits of reality. Or, as Wittgenstein noted in the Tractatus that it is not mysterious how things are in the world (our experience and science informs us about how things are, at least when we are willing to listen and learn) but what is mysterious is that there is anything at all … it is beyond our understanding. And yet so few people seem to admit the limits of their knowledge and understanding and have wrongheaded confidence in so many of their beliefs, as Bouwsma so often reminded us. And I stumbled into classical scepticism in my studies and Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism with one of the basic principles being that different impressions come from different sources which is a cause of withholding judgment … but so few are so often reluctant to withhold judgment … and then Edgar Allan Poe asks the raven if there is balm in Gilead … and the raven answers with the one word it can utter – nevermore. What can we change. The poet laureate says it “was never my intention to remake the world at large” and he reminds us of our duty when we see a neighbor carrying something to help him with his load. And T. S. Eliot has the Rock remind us that “The desert is not remote in southern tropics, The desert is not only around the corner, The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you, The desert is in the heart of your brother.” Hello neighbor … what gaps do you see … gaps between the have lots and those who have a lot less … gaps between love and hate … between disdain and respect … between ignoring and searching … between I and thou … so many gaps … so little time … having taken a bite of that apple,what I really want to understand is why we must imagine Sisyphus happy. I close with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 7 – “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” These remarks leaked out of aging gray matter … hush my mouth and bite my fingers.