I’ll let the new contributors introduce themselves, but here is a list of them in alphabetical order:

• Daniel Den Boer
• Matt Gerrelts
• Kenny Gradert
• Jacob Kroeze
• Steve Mangold
• Tom Swiftbird
• Joel Veldkamp

I had to put the question to myself: in what ways does Dordt College form the desires of its students? Surprisingly (to me), the first thing that I thought of was my Resident Life training.

I’m a Resident Assistant this year in one of Dordt’s residence halls, and one of the interesting distinctions that are presented to Resident Assistants as part of their training are the three primary areas for RA activity: reporting violations of the code of conduct, forming relationships with residents, and planning/conducting wing/campus “programming.” The interesting portion of that trio, for my purposes, was “programming.” The ambiguities of the word itself point in the direction I want to go. Does programming have to do with planning and running programs for students to participate in—wing events, bible studies, all-campus activities—or with literally programming students such that they unconsciously behave in certain ways? Both, I think. The first kind of programming is intended to accomplish the second kind.

The most important element of Resident Life programming occurs during W(eek)O(f)W(elcome). At least three unconscious sets of habits are instilled by the activities that Freshmen are led through during WOW week. (1. They are presented with a dramatic presentation known as “The Show,” which essentially provides a rationale for following the Dordt code of conduct; (2. They are exposed to what are supposed to be models for relating to other students in the persons of their “WOW leaders” (a guy and girl chosen to lead each small “WOW group” of freshmen); (3. They are programmed to conduct their social lives, preferably, in certain public areas like the campus center, the recreation center, and the food commons.

As far as I can see, Resident Life Services in its comprehensive, detailed, and on-going attempts to program Dordt students has (if in other terms) best understood that education is formation above and beyond information. It is perhaps too bad that they are the only group consciously engaged in the formation of students’ desires (–Smith would argue that other sections of the college, such as classes, also engage in formation, but often unconsciously with deleterious effects because the telos embodied in these sections of the campus are quite possibly identical to those of un- or anti-Christian colleges), but that is another issue for another post.

The inevitable result of identifying Resident Life “programming” as a pedagogy of desire is that one has to put this question to it: what telos is embodied in the practices it seeks to establish among students?

Chiefly, the telos seems to be a vision of communal life in which the rules are obeyed because they are recognized to be in one’s best interests and in which highly visible inter-genderal socializing occurs regularly. Quite appropriately then, one of the buzzwords of Residence Life rhetoric is “community.” I recognize and admire the self-consciousness of their pedagogy of desire. It puts things in perspective and adds a new degree of coherence even to disagreements I have with their vision of community or the programming by which they preach to student hearts. On those disagreements more, perhaps, some other time. In the meantime: kudos to Res Life for understanding that students are desiring animals, and I hope that other sections of the college follow their example to become pedagogues of desire.

1. Site-design still does matter, as do blogrolls. And this is because there are still newcomers to the blogosphere, and for these newbies nothing is more attractive than a good site-design and nothing is more helpful than a blogroll. My Google Reader was populated initially from the blogrolls of bloggers I admired—and it is still the case that when I discover a new blog I don’t just view its RSS but I actually visit the site where design continues to deeply affect my first impression.

2. RSS readers have the further implication that it is now more difficult for new bloggers to develop a commenting community. When returning readers always and only encounter your posts via their RSS reader, they don’t have the opportunity to view any discussions that might have begun below the post. Like millinerd I cherish my comments, but I don’t have much hope for a vigorous commenting culture to develop spontaneously on this blog. It seems to me that the best hopes for new bloggers in search of a commenting community are as follows: (1. Either get linked to and discussed by other blogs that have already developed a commenting community (as witness my most commented post—a phenomenon entirely due to the kind link-love of Ben Myers), or (2. Get friends to blog with you, and agree to comment on each other’s blog (–still working on this one; but my friend Daniel Den Boer has begun to blog and I look forward to the relationship between our blogs becoming the nucleus of a blogging community eventually).

It was strange feeling our way toward an appropriate method in which to use our ten minutes. We decided to silently pray over the psalm (Psalm 1) for about five minutes and then to share our thoughts with each other, and then to spend some time in short, intermittent prayer over what we had read and thought and heard and wondered.

We were awkward, and probably both a little uncomfortable, but both of us took something away from the time—each of us had a central impression, and we were both encouraged in our practice to notice that Psalm 1 itself is actually recommending the kind of discipline we were starting. How appropriate! My take-away was a sense that the opposite of fruitful implantation by the stream of God’s law was disintegration—the chaff that blows away in the second half of the Psalm—and that the only way to avoid disintegration was to hold onto the unity of the calling of God. Failing to relate everything that I do to that central calling will result in my drying up, chaff-like, and blowing away. My brother’s take-away was an image: a tree that had withered except for a single green leaf. He was struck by the idea that even if our lives do seem to be disintegrating, and we do seem to be failing to relate everything to our central vocation in Christ, we can rest in the assurance of vegetable prosperity, we always have a green leaf, we will always bear fruit in our season.

I was a bit upset with myself at first for seeking this “take-away”—it seemed facile when I first reconsidered it. But I think now that it would only be facile if I meant by it that my meditating should wrap up at the end of the ten minutes and issue in a thesis statement. It shouldn’t. If it does I probably haven’t quieted my heart. But it probably should leave me with the memory of something, something that I can rest in and turn around in my mental hands like a gem with interesting facets, whenever I have quiet moments without work at hand. Otherwise it’s quite possible that my ten minute morning meditations will become a compartment unto themselves, a place where “spirituality” occurs and then I leave the Spirit safely packed away on a shelf until I want to take him down again. As if that would work. Instead, I want the rhythm of these two times to be part of the day, in fact the poles around which the day rotates. I want to look forward to these time and to remember them, allowing my thoughts and actions to radiate out and toward them rather than to be separate and untouched by them.

Our rule is simple: 2 ten minute periods of prayer a day. The first one will occur as soon as we can fit it in before 10:00 AM, and we will all use this first period to pray a chosen psalm. Everyone will pray and meditate on the same psalm as everyone else each day, progressing slowly through the whole psalter. Then, at 7:00 every evening, we will seek out whichever other members of the brotherhood happen to be around us at the time, and spend ten minutes in communal prayer. Every Monday, at 10:00, we will meet to talk about what we have discovered and to encourage each other in our continuing spiritual discipline. It’s simple, but it’s a regularity and rhythm, in a tight community, that God may use as a conduit to pour out rich blessing.

I first encountered Meditations in a film called The Corn Is Green. Katherine Hepburn plays an altruistic school-mistress who moves to the Welsh country-side to educate miner’s children. She discovers one young miner who turns out to be brilliant. In a remarkably short time she brings him from rustic bare-literacy to a state of preparation sufficient to win a scholarship to Oxford. My favorite portion of the movie, as my younger self intently watched it, was a montage of his progress in education. The montage involved scenes of him writing essays, reciting mathematics, learning to pronounce French, and translating Latin.

The Latin he translates is from the first book of the Meditations. Consequently the distinctive and unmistakable style of Aurelius’s opening words are imprinted on my memory:

From my grandfater Verus: the lessons of noble character and even tempter.

From my father’s reputations and my memory of him: modesty and manliness.

From my mother: piety and bountifulness, to keep myself not only from doing evil but even from dwelling on evil thoughts, simplicity too in diet and to be far removed from the ways of the rich.

From my mother’s grandfather: not to have attended public schools but enjoyed good teachers at home, and to have learned the lesson that on things like these it is a duty to spend liberally…

The general structure of the Meditations, as we have it, consists in 12 “books” (chapter-length) divided into numerous “chapters” (sentence-length to paragraph-length).

The first book comprises a list of gifts from people and the gods. Gifts, but chiefly of the immaterial and life-changing kind. This portion of the Meditations can be read in two ways: as a vote of thanks for the beneficent influences in Aurelius’s life, and as a portrait of his own character, habits, and history. In this dual reading lies, I believe, the central insight of the list. Marcus is acutely aware that his moral vision is historical in origin and communal in composition.

What do I mean by that?

Far too often, in our dislocated and fragmentary modern way, when we sit down to do some moral reasoning—to decide if some action is right or wrong, or to evaluate our own characters—the only way we know how to begin is to attempt to found our moral reasoning on some set of first principles and then to justify our behavior in light of them. We can then alter our collective memory to believe that these principles were the real engines behind our actions. An example, right or wrong, is the moral reasoning that occurred with respect to the American war in Iraq. Visceral reaction to a dimly perceived (and ultimately disproven) threat to national security was later justified as the liberation of a people from an oppressive regime. Whatever you think of it, that kind of reasoning is often perceived to be necessary in order to hold together the resolve of a plural nation. We invoke an independent principle to justify a collective action that different members of the collective performed for separate reasons. (Perhaps oil, perhaps insecurity, perhaps loyalty, perhaps peer pressure.) We feel the need to hide the complexity and eclectic morality of our collective deed by covering it in a principle that nobody actually thought of at the time of action.

Not so Aurelius. The honesty of his self-analysis begins in this first book of the Meditations. He recognizes that what some have chosen to see as the features of his character that make him the exemplary stoic have come from a wide variety of sources. Marcus doesn’t view himself as some -ism driven moral agent. Stoicism is not the looming dynamo behind his habits and character. Instead, a long and disparate catalogue of influences just begins to unfold the sources of his moral vision. Fathers, mothers, teachers, friends, colleagues, and predecessors all contribute their piece or pieces to his character. His clarity in recognizing this, and in identifying the pieces, sets up the feat of moral reasoning we’re about to witness in the rest of the book.

This honesty leads to possibly the most attractive portion of the entire volume, occurring at the end of this first book:

From the gods: to have had good grandparents, good parents, a good sister, good masters, good intimates, kinsfolk, friends, almost everything…

This sums of the lesson of the first book. Marcus doesn’t thank the gods for introducing him to the systematic body of teachings known as Stoicism—he thanks them for the community they’ve placed him in. He is thanking them, ultimately, for a moral vision because he has just demonstrated that his moral vision derives from the community in which the gods have placed him.

Again, as I stated in the introduction to this series, although we may not agree with the detail of Marcus’s moral vision, the way he goes about reasoning from it is exemplary. He begins by demonstrating the practice of moral self-location: examining the history and composition of one’s own community, whatever form it takes.

In most circles, canons of literature (and canons of art and music) have suffered the moral equivalent of a heart-attack. They have been stopped in their tracks by the accusation of cultural imperialism. About time, too.

Of course, when I say that “canons” are dead, I mean it in the grand, old sense. In a broader sense, just about everyone has their own canon these days. There are theorists here and there who argue that every age has always had its own canons—even before we “lost” the classical tradition. People valued different elements of that tradition depending on their historical and cultural perspective. But this point misses the point that before the loss of the classical tradition different people were valuing different elements of the same books.

I dare you to name even a single book that you think most college-educated people have in common these days.

We tend to develop intersubjectivity with local readers—local according to geography, academic emphasis, political proclivity, religious conviction, or social position. We don’t mingle incognito among other educated people outside of our locality as easily as when the foundation of every education was “the classics.” One name for this condition is “the splintering of Western civilization.”

Enough apocalyptic.

Frankly, our condition arises from a worthy revolution. Even a superficial examination of the history of “the Classics” reveals that none of them attained or maintained that position according to some objective standard of excellence. Invariably, a canon is the symptom of some class, racial, religious, or otherwise ideological hegemony; its overthrown, the symptom of unshackling.

All of which brings us to the question, what should we do? Hide in our localities, growing apart and inevitably hostile, tiny cultural nation-states pursuing a universal policy of isolationism?

One solution—which I reject—in horror at the lack of cultural intersubjectivity, attempts to reintroduce a widespread knowledge of “the Classics” (according to the justification that they explain to us who we are and how we got here). But that, obviously, is little more than a denial of the cure that canon-subversion has effected for our ideological blindness. Getting to know who we are in this way is indistinguishable from getting to know who are not, and consequently amassing the most appalling set of pathologies regarding the low, the different, and the unexpected. I offer, instead, that we are confronted (and, indeed, undergoing) a radical revaluation of the meaning and function of culture itself. I know that the following suggestion will set off alarm bells for a number of reasons in many heads, but here goes anyway: I would compare the developing cultural consciousness (at least as far I am aware of it) to the daily life of a fellow who’s just kicked a nervous eating habit. For this man food, which used to be inappropriately constitutive of his peace and identity, resumes its proper place and by diminishing in quantity rises in his consciousness. Similarly we, having kicked the oppressive habit of mainting cultural canons, are forced to find new things to constitute our peace and identity (and the stage for our friendships), while at the same we are freed to appreciate literature in its uniqueness.

Still, it’s hard to kick a nervous eating habit, to stage a friendship in a world without canons. It’s a downside of freedom, but we struggle on.

The reflections the film prompted in me were chiefly eschatological. That is to say, they had to do with the ending of things in both a temporal and teleological sense. The film explores the ends (temporally) of an old man’s marriage, a boy’s relationship to his father, a faded hero’s dream, and a pack of dogs’ loyalties. But it also explores the ends (teleologically) of marriage itself and dreaming itself.

In the opening montage of the youth and married life of Carl Fredricksen, we are given a portrait of happiness that shows the inter-twining of dreaming and community in a successful marriage. Appropriately, the happiness of Carl and (his wife) Ellie is shown as a product of their friendship and partnership. But the friendship and partnership  itself is (at least consciously) a by-product of their dream—the dream of transplanting an old club-house to a south-american paradise. They fail to achieve their dream in Ellie’s life-time. Ellie proves to have been aware of the true source of their happiness—their adventure, as she calls it—but Carl still feels that their relationship, the central thing in his life, is tied to the dream they shared. So he sets out for South America by tying hundreds of balloons to the top of his house and floating away. Much later in the movie, when he feels that he has accomplished their dream—at the expense of the dreams and possibly even lives of some new friends—Carl opens a little book Ellie wrote about their dream. He discovers, instead of the childhood memories of a south-american paradise, a collage of pictures from their marriage, together with a note thanking for him for the adventure and encouraging him to have a new one.

This is one of the best dealings with death that I have seen in a children’s movie. First time in years no one has been told that the person will “live on” whenever they remember them.

At any rate, Carl realizes from the revelation of Ellie’s last comment that the point of their adventuring and their dreams had been their community. He further realizes that to abandon the new community he has joined to pursue an old dream no longer attached to a community would be a kind of defeat. Which brings up the darker side of the film.

Another character in the film has a dream—the old popular explorer, Charles Muntz. Muntz was the original movie-inspiration for Carl and Ellie’s south-american dreams. But when Carl does actually end up in South America he discovers the older man there too. And he has been changed, twisted by the years. Endlessly pursuing a colorful bird that no one at home would believe really existed, Muntz has placed his entire worth in a dream that has overtones of psychological vengeance and has definitely become an obsession. Muntz is an example of dreaming without community—that is to say, dreaming detached and absolutized from the fabric of life as a whole. He is the rugged individualist in extremity. Even his crew and minions are not people, not a community—they’re a bunch of dogs he’s fitted with collars to make them talk.

I have heard Pixar accused of being a “communist” film company. Presumably this has to do with the themes of repentance and hope that run through many of their movies, and the very un-american emphasis on communal visions and on subjecting one’s own private interests to the interests of the group. If that’s communism, bring it on.