I Am Large and Multitudinous
I’ve long used this famous quote from Leaves of Grass to explain (and explain away) my rather marked inconsistencies:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)
I feel a need to justify my inconsistency because most of the people I follow and admire could be fairly grouped together based on their amazing surety. If they knowingly contradict themselves or, as I sometimes do, forget their former position and come to something new, it’s not something a lot of them (with some obvious exceptions) choose to share with the rest of us. For reasons that aren’t relevant to this particular discussion, my mental model has been one that not only equated consistency with being “right” but put changing one’s mind in the same class as intellectual weakness.
So I found myself glued to the monitor when I discovered that the Edge World Question Center’s annual question for 2008 was “What have you changed your mind about and why?” Seeing so many incredible thinkers sharing details of sometimes sweeping changes of mind was inspiring. If they’re OK with it, why shouldn’t I be? This thought, in combination with my recent experience at Northern Voice– where I had the opportunity to learn from so many peers, colleagues and intellectual idols whose passion is clear and strong without being dogmatic– has proven to be a heady and unnerving potion. Some part of me has been opened up that was formerly barely open a crack. If you know me, you might find this literally unbelievable, but I was actually hugging friends– and not just as a barely-tolerated gesture, but the real thing– and making sure I got my share of the hugging action. I hadn’t willingly hugged another person in that way, recognizing deep, Platonic kinship, for years (except for one glaring exception that happened at at Northern Voice last year)!
So here are some things I’ve changed my mind about relatively recently– some exceedingly large and some small and unremarkable:
- It’s OK to need people. I have a lot of weaknesses… refusing the benefits of friendship doesn’t have to be one of them. Even lone wolves and introverts can have friends… they probably need them. Ultimately tied to this is the realization that:
- I have something unique to offer. I’ve done a lot of teaching and given a lot of presentations. I know I have a minor talent for it. But only recently have I begin to believe that my work has lead to a powerful and unique (or very rare) combination of skills, knowledge, and obsessions.
- Tackling the big problems directly isn’t necessarily an act of hubris. What do Lawrence Lessig, Barack Obama and Barbara Ganley have in common? They’re all willing– in very different ways and approaches– to tackle the big, abstract problems. I have to reconcile my belief in transformation and innovation with the acts of the individuals that can make that happen.
- The power of individual talent and genius shouldn’t be overlooked. I believe in the power of collective intelligence, social networks and group sense-making (thus it follows that Andrew Keen and Lee Siegel are dorks). That being said, many of the things I love most– such as great works of art– are the product of immense individual effort by often less-than-admirable individuals. In our understandable rush to realize the power of the social, let’s leave more than just room for these misfit impulses to operate… let’s embrace them. Then each of us can embrace them within ourselves.
- The possibility of the Divine… and my need to make sense of that possibility even if it means uncomfortable changes follow in my life.
What have you changed your mind about?
February 25th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Chris, you always make me think. That photo illustration is a bit scary and not at all congruent with your post, but maybe that was your point?
February 25th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
This was too much to respond to in a comment, but let me praise your Whitman choice (a favorite of mine as well); my vox blog is named after a Whitman quote with very similar intention:
I celebrate myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
It is a noble challenge to contain more than we are inclined to contain, to embrace more than we are inclined to embrace. Cheers.
February 26th, 2008 at 12:17 am
If only I were that deep! Actually, I just liked that the photo title– “four armed contradiction”– resonated with my post and then it turned out to have been taken by Kris Krug, a stalwart at Northern Voice so I had to use it
February 26th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Speaking of which, you sound your barbaric yawp in many forums. I’d not seen your vox blog before. I am savoring it (though you are way too kind) and trying to tease out the enigma of your second point. Perhaps an illustration of changing one’s mind?
I love your first point. And I say it that way because I’ve been reflecting for the past few days on something Nancy White was talking about at lunch a few days ago. without going into too much detail, her point was that I would better understand someone who she knows that I admire and am constantly vexed with if I understood that person had a hard time accepting love.
For the past 18 months or so it has felt like everything I examined with any intensity came down to issues relating to scale. I suspect my next 18 months (at least) will be consumed with the problematic (sorry, I was brought up a postmodernist, where “problematic” is an acceptable noun) of love and all the things that cluster around it.
A primary part of that constellation is respect, which is a kind of love. We may not have spent much time in face-to-face conversation, but you’ve more than gained my respect in your words and deeds.
February 26th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Wow, Chris, this blows me away, particularly your struggle with possibility of the divine. It sits so uncomfortably with me, and yet your framing the intellectual space we are navigating suggests these uncomfortable multitudes beautifully.
I can’t help but think that a two days at NV and one night (no less two) at Casa Lamb/McPhee create a setting where I feel like the world is more malleable and kind, and that one can open up and make sense of it. I’m not much of a hippie, but I am thinking about what things have changed about me recently, and one of the biggest issues I have to battle with my sense of self in the face of all the work we are doing and all the emotions I constantly feel about it. I’m both lost and more alive than ever, but reining in the idea that respect and love need to be the pillar of any powerful movement makes me feel so uniquely unqualified. Strange days, these are.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:24 am
So not to get too lowbrow (I mean you just quoted Whitman and all) but to quote another great American philosopher, The Chink from “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” – Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I was just thinking how amazing you were able to find the perfect image for this post. What a succinct visual summary of emotions we hold inside – for fear it may be let out (for some of us anyway).
February 26th, 2008 at 11:34 am
rad post. thx for using the photograph.
February 26th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Man, you really went deep with this one…
I guess I’ve changed my mind about where I want to fit in society. When I was younger, I idolized the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who never bought into the game. I still admire that kind of integrity (though I better recognise now that in many cases it is more prosaic self-destruction at work). Working with you, other people who were in the loop this week, and others out in the network have me feeling more or less OK with being a (hopefully disruptive) cog in the machine.
Maybe this post should have ended with: “how have you rationalised selling out?” This comment might have worked for that too.
February 27th, 2008 at 8:45 am
I love this post, all except for the line that includes me with the likes of Obama and Lessig who really are Big Thinkers and courageous in ways I am not. I am incredibly inconsistent. Skeptical. Doubting. Negative. Scared. I want to be Nancy White when I grow up.
But really, I’m just a classroom teacher trying to keep my students foremost in my mind. That’s all. That makes me an agonizer and a rule breaker of the first order ( i.e. refusing to get a doctorate because it would interfere with my grasp of a wider world and interfere with my deep creativity and then expecting the Academy to embrace me on my own terms). And I haven’t changed my mind about any of that. I continue to worry that I am taking the easy way out by leaving formal education. I am really really really worried about that.
Thanks for pushing me to think about what’s important, and how to get over myself and my fears.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Ironically, I spend much of my time wondering if I’m taking the easy way out by staying *in* academia
February 27th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I am laughing out loud about how we each thing the other is courageous, and we feel timid or less than fully what we could be. I think we all need to love ourselves a bit better eh? Barbara, be careful what you wish for. I wake up every night with doubts. I worry that I screwed up my kids. I think I’m selfish and shy away from living up to my potential. I could continue that list for hours, including how ginormous my butt has become!
Come on, we are all WONDERFUL. (insert slightly screwy grin here)
I think this thought about getting over our fears is both useful and a bit naive, because it is through our fears we learn sometimes, eh? Maybe we need to learn how to use them. The image of Tai Chi is coming to mind…
February 27th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Ah, it’s for posts like these that I adore you. (No, really.)
And fwiw, I contain enough multitudes to border on qualifying for certain highly undesirable diagnoses. At least you’re fairly lucid in explicating your multitudes.
February 28th, 2008 at 4:30 am
Perhaps tangential, but aren’t you the guy who tried to convince me I was less an outsider than I imagined and that my voice carried much further than I thought? Hell, sometimes it’s plain nice to be wrong.
Gonna plug Strong Opinions, Weakly Held here just ’cause it fits and will probably be seen by 20 times more folks here in your comments than at my place.
Keep the faith.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
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March 1st, 2008 at 1:13 am
@ Chris, and @Barbara —
There is no easy way out when you’re doing something you’re passionate about. Caring is difficult — it means that things matter, and when things matter, they hurt.
Thanks, to the both of you, for the thinking you do, and for sharing those thoughts/ideas out loud via the blog. You help others contain multitudes as well, and that’s a Good Thing.
Cheers,
Bill
March 1st, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Barbara, in my experience acquiring a doctorate does different things to different people, and sometimes different things to the same people. At its paradoxical best, the Ph.D. opens wider horizons precisely because of its obsessive and rigorous depths. Or what are supposed to be rigorous depths. At its worst, well, that needs no description I suppose.
The experience of writing my dissertation was for me the ultimate bootstrapping transformation. I don’t think I’ve played by the a-list rules very consistently since then (if I had I’d be Michael Berube or someone like him, maybe), but there have been aspects of my scholarly life every bit as intense and eye-opening as my time in the etherblogobathycyberrealsphere from 2004-on.
April 19th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
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