Dialectic
May 14th, 2006, 08:05 PM
When I was first accepted as a student at a Zen monastery a few years ago, I admit that one of the things that initially put me off, one that made me feel a bit uncomfortable and perhaps trivialized, was my limited access to the Roshi, or teacher.
It wasn't that he was cut off; if I had something really important to discuss with him, there were channels I could go through; he still sat certain zazen/ meditation sessions with us, still cooked food on certain days, and was still kept abreast on our development. He rarely, however, interacted with us directly, taught us directly, or addressed beginner concerns.
Now as time passed, I understood more and more why this was the case: similarly to CEOs or leaders of any organization, there were limitations to his time and energy. The more time he spent with beginners and young students, the less he had for senior students, monks, and his own continuous development. So the more time he spent addressing basic needs which could have been addressed by others less knowledgeable but still qualified, the less stable and developed the organization would be. And this is a good reason why hierarchy exists: the leaders, the teachers, the ones with the most expertise, should concentrate on the biggest and most complex situations, ones which require that expertise.
Now with the rise of postmodern thinking and behavior, a curious thing has taken place: we began to appreciate leaders who did not judge someone's worth as a human being by how high they were in an organization or society, and we also respected them when they were willing to get down and dirty doing basic or mundane tasks and hanging out with the lowest in the organization. This in itself is a fine thing and should be commended.
The dark side to this, however, is that if a leader/ teacher reduces the time and energy she spends on the lowest and most mundane tasks, she may be charged with elitism, or even in extreme cases, cultism: she only deals with an "inner circle," she doesn't listen to anyone outside the organization, she doesn't value people lower in the organization, etc.
And this is no doubt something to be guarded against, particularly when it comes to cults or Neo-Conservatives.
But sometimes, a benevolent, efficient, and compassionate leader/ organization/ experts can look like a cult of neo-conservatives, because the leaders or head teachers needs to direct their attention to the most important things because her time/ energy are limited.
This is in fact the charge a lot of Christian Conservatives and Intelligent Designers bring against scientists. Anyone with a decent understanding of scientific method and reasoning, however, can see that many of their criticisms display a vast ignorance of what science actually does and stands for. This is not to say that the scientific establishment doesn't have its own problems, particularly when it comes to reducing everything in the world to materialistic components, but it's a case where a decent conversation can't even get started because one side doesn't even understand basic fundamentals of the discipline.
So, on a much smaller scale, a bit of that has happened here. The administrators and moderators and I can't be bothered to deal with people who don't understand the fundamentals. A lot of people have tried to start arguments with us when they have been vastly ignorant of our stances and the depth of our philosophy, and we can't keep going back to fundamentals because it's a huge waste of our time.
Let's take an easy-to-understand example. You have a forum of theoretical physicists. They're discussing the ambiguity of just what M-theory is and might entail, the elegance and inadequacies of current string theories, and different approaches on how they might begin to go about integrating them.
Some dude walks in and starts talking about how they're incomprehensible, totally wrong anyway, and that Thomson's blueberry model of the atom is good enough for him and negates anything they could possibly be worried about. Or hell, maybe he questions the existence of atoms to begin with.
How do you think these physicists are going to react? They are not going to reason with him. They are not going to walk him through their line of thought or the history of their noble discipline. They're going to kick his ignorant ass out of the room and never, ever let him back into their building unless he displays that he has developed the requisite knowledge to talk somewhere near their level at a later date. He might accuse them of elitism, cultism, exclusionary practices, hate, and the like, but the fact is, he just doesn't get it, and they're not going to waste their lives trying to make him get it.
I use an example of a hard science because it's easy to understand. The same applies to "softer" disciplines like philosophy, psychology, race-relations, and a deep (non-ethnocentric) understanding of religion.
My ultimate point is that "expertise" or "knowledge" or "wisdom" constitutes a sort of elitism, one which must exist if one acknowledges levels of expertise or wisdom at all. And that elitism entails operating efficiently under constraints, which means limiting access and engagements to those which really require "expert" attention (while following social norms, of course).
The conversations in which we engage here and throughout the forum require an acknowledgment of certain fundamentals; if you don't know them or constantly question them, we can't even get started. If you do, then our conversations can go anywhere in the world.
It wasn't that he was cut off; if I had something really important to discuss with him, there were channels I could go through; he still sat certain zazen/ meditation sessions with us, still cooked food on certain days, and was still kept abreast on our development. He rarely, however, interacted with us directly, taught us directly, or addressed beginner concerns.
Now as time passed, I understood more and more why this was the case: similarly to CEOs or leaders of any organization, there were limitations to his time and energy. The more time he spent with beginners and young students, the less he had for senior students, monks, and his own continuous development. So the more time he spent addressing basic needs which could have been addressed by others less knowledgeable but still qualified, the less stable and developed the organization would be. And this is a good reason why hierarchy exists: the leaders, the teachers, the ones with the most expertise, should concentrate on the biggest and most complex situations, ones which require that expertise.
Now with the rise of postmodern thinking and behavior, a curious thing has taken place: we began to appreciate leaders who did not judge someone's worth as a human being by how high they were in an organization or society, and we also respected them when they were willing to get down and dirty doing basic or mundane tasks and hanging out with the lowest in the organization. This in itself is a fine thing and should be commended.
The dark side to this, however, is that if a leader/ teacher reduces the time and energy she spends on the lowest and most mundane tasks, she may be charged with elitism, or even in extreme cases, cultism: she only deals with an "inner circle," she doesn't listen to anyone outside the organization, she doesn't value people lower in the organization, etc.
And this is no doubt something to be guarded against, particularly when it comes to cults or Neo-Conservatives.
But sometimes, a benevolent, efficient, and compassionate leader/ organization/ experts can look like a cult of neo-conservatives, because the leaders or head teachers needs to direct their attention to the most important things because her time/ energy are limited.
This is in fact the charge a lot of Christian Conservatives and Intelligent Designers bring against scientists. Anyone with a decent understanding of scientific method and reasoning, however, can see that many of their criticisms display a vast ignorance of what science actually does and stands for. This is not to say that the scientific establishment doesn't have its own problems, particularly when it comes to reducing everything in the world to materialistic components, but it's a case where a decent conversation can't even get started because one side doesn't even understand basic fundamentals of the discipline.
So, on a much smaller scale, a bit of that has happened here. The administrators and moderators and I can't be bothered to deal with people who don't understand the fundamentals. A lot of people have tried to start arguments with us when they have been vastly ignorant of our stances and the depth of our philosophy, and we can't keep going back to fundamentals because it's a huge waste of our time.
Let's take an easy-to-understand example. You have a forum of theoretical physicists. They're discussing the ambiguity of just what M-theory is and might entail, the elegance and inadequacies of current string theories, and different approaches on how they might begin to go about integrating them.
Some dude walks in and starts talking about how they're incomprehensible, totally wrong anyway, and that Thomson's blueberry model of the atom is good enough for him and negates anything they could possibly be worried about. Or hell, maybe he questions the existence of atoms to begin with.
How do you think these physicists are going to react? They are not going to reason with him. They are not going to walk him through their line of thought or the history of their noble discipline. They're going to kick his ignorant ass out of the room and never, ever let him back into their building unless he displays that he has developed the requisite knowledge to talk somewhere near their level at a later date. He might accuse them of elitism, cultism, exclusionary practices, hate, and the like, but the fact is, he just doesn't get it, and they're not going to waste their lives trying to make him get it.
I use an example of a hard science because it's easy to understand. The same applies to "softer" disciplines like philosophy, psychology, race-relations, and a deep (non-ethnocentric) understanding of religion.
My ultimate point is that "expertise" or "knowledge" or "wisdom" constitutes a sort of elitism, one which must exist if one acknowledges levels of expertise or wisdom at all. And that elitism entails operating efficiently under constraints, which means limiting access and engagements to those which really require "expert" attention (while following social norms, of course).
The conversations in which we engage here and throughout the forum require an acknowledgment of certain fundamentals; if you don't know them or constantly question them, we can't even get started. If you do, then our conversations can go anywhere in the world.