Ethics of Engagement

May 222013
 
 May 22, 2013

DukeEngage Dublin, Summer 2008

Summer at Duke means that many students are participating in DukeEngage programs all over the world. The Kenan Institute’s DukeEngage Dublin program will begin shortly, with eight students grappling with migrant and refugee issues in an increasingly multicultural Ireland. They will be writing about their experiences and sharing on our website throughout the summer.

For now, though, I want to highlight a particular page on our website that may often get overlooked. We have a tab under Publications and Multimedia for various case studies, including several that were developed for DukeEngage training workshops on the ethics of engagement.

 DukeEngage has become a ubiquitous part of the Duke brand.  It’s certainly a remarkable endeavor institutionally, and I myself am one of countless students who mark it as a formative part of their Duke path. Because it is such a popular program, it gets a lot of hype on campus, and critique both good and bad (most recently, the Chronicle did a three part series assessing DukeEngage at the end of the year). I won’t go into too much debate, but I do think that it remains critical for students to be properly prepared, and have a sense of the ethical landscape they are navigating in any civic engagement project.

In an overview at the end of these case studies, we explain that civic engagement experiences like DukeEngage have at least three key goals: “to gain self-knowledge, to deepen students’ commitment to life-long civic engagement, and to help the communities in which they lived and worked for the summer.” As these goals interplay, complications will arise – as students learn about their new environments they may enthusiastically come up with solutions, but find they are not gaining traction applying them; the communities may have varying needs that pull students in different directions; students will have to deal with “wrong-wrong dilemmas” in which both community and individual goods are compromised, or short-term and long-term benefits do not coalesce; the whole process of making these decisions may become exasperating and turn students away from the idea of civic engagement.

The frustration of muddling through these dilemmas, however, is well worth the added thoughtfulness and attention to ethical engagement. I think it contributes to all three of the goals in substantive ways, even if it takes some time to understand how. Otherwise we are literally trotting all over the globe to “serve” or “give back” on a more superficial level, and come away reinforcing our default setting that we are inspired problem-solvers on a path to greater success for ourselves and our world.  As you’ll see from the case studies, there is not a solution at the end, or an answer key at the bottom of the page. The principles and questions to consider are instead meant to be tools for those embarking on civic engagement experiences that will involve morally serious dilemmas of the real world. Another ubiquitous Duke concept has become “knowledge in the service of society.” This is a great aim, but I think it involves more humility and tough decision-making than we might like to admit.

Human Connection

May 162013
 
 May 16, 2013

I came in Monday morning and read Melinda Gates’ commencement address to the Duke Class of 2013 (you’ll see from my last post that I’ve been rather engrossed in the inspiration of commencement this past week).  As I read along I became more and more excited. In my head, anyway, she was seamlessly connecting and reinforcing the thoughts from my last three posts! Specifically, I think the convergent theme is human connection.

Gates urges us to change the way we think about other people:

You can choose to see their humanity first – the one big thing that makes them the same as you, instead of the many things that make them different from you.

It is not just a matter of caring about people. I assume you already do that. It’s much harder to see all people, including people whose experiences are very different from yours, as three-dimensional human beings who want and need the same things you do. But if you can really believe that all 7 billion people on the planet are equal to you in spirit, then you will take action to make the world more equal for everyone.

I think this is so beautifully said, and is in a spirit similar to Katherine Boo’s captivating stories of ordinary lives. It also resonates with Durham Mayor Wense Grabarek’s remarks about desegregating the city in 1963: the community had to find its “diverse togetherness.”  And finally, choosing to see humanity first seems to me to be exactly what David Foster Wallace was imploring in his commencement address. If we see past the egoism of our own personal desires “in the great outside world of wanting and achieving,” then we may come to see that “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

Hopefully we agree on some general ideal of human connection. The various remarks may be murmuring in that corner of your subconscious that’s prone to feelings of transcendence, and collectively uplifting you.  But notice there’s a choice involved, and notice the effort of making true connections. Another line from Wallace: “It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.” Gates frames the choice as an ethical one, using Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” speech [could we not also say remaining conscious and alive?] in which he says, “Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood.” One of my favorite of her lines is that it is “a moral choice to do the hard work of deep connection.”

I wonder, if I make this moral choice, what kind of hard work might I be facing? Katherine Boo would suggest listening to the stories of those outside my usual realm of understanding; Wense Grabarek would say to put conscience on the table and face the uncomfortable truth when I see unequal respect for human dignity; David Foster Wallace would challenge me to be conscious of every interaction and deliberate in how I construct meaning in them; and Melinda Gates would encourage me to use technology wisely, not for disconnecting from but connecting to things that matter. (That’s a hard one for me, with my skepticism about technology. But it’s hard work right? Her speech motivates me to consider my relationship with technology, and how it might be more constructively optimistic.) I think there may be subtle differences amongst these thinkers in the mechanisms that give human connections moral weight, but all involve stepping away from a default and challenging yourself to live better.

So there we have it, my topics and reading recommendations from the past few posts, all tied up in one great vision for humanity. May my musings be beneficial, or at least, may the material mused upon be so instead.

This Is Water

May 112013
 
 May 11, 2013

Commencement season is upon us and with it comes the usual musings over commencement addresses.  To think how many are delivered each year is rather astounding. Some make headlines – which major figures are speaking at which university? – others are at the tiniest little K-12 schools that no one outside the county or local athletic conference has ever heard of. But every school has one, and they are a moment of significance for that particular community. They may or may not be remembered. But I think they are a valid act of acknowledgement.

They are also a useful exercise – for the writer, the audience, and potential future readers. Stop at a transition point. Think about what matters. Express in some way that resonates.

Maybe you didn’t think yours was very important, or were too sleepy or distracted to pay attention to it, but if you went back to a script there may be echoes that matter more now. Or maybe not. But we have also established that there is a tremendous body of material that constitutes the commencement address. There are no doubt countless lists. I found this archive and enjoyed perusing.  I also appreciated the introduction to the collection of speeches: “as we graduate from one year to another, one relationship to another, one experience to another – we always are learning. Though these myriad departures and arrivals of everyday existence are seldom met with ceremony, words traditionally reserved for momentous occasions may ring true and inspirational at any hour.”

“These myriad departures and arrivals of everyday existence” are exactly what are discussed in the speech that has been my inspiration in this hour: David Foster Wallace’s address to Kenyon College in 2005. What I most want to say is simply, read it. It is real and true and in touch with the unassuming day-to-day. But as he explains, that’s where life happens; that’s when we have to decide how we’re going to see the world. That’s where we have to have “awareness of what is real and essential.”  As another of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, says in her book Bird by Bird, “there Is ecstasy in paying attention.”

So in this commencement season, hopefully the celebrations in which you take part will be inspirational. Pay attention. To the inspirational day and to the day-to-day that follows. This is water. This is water.

A Matter of Conscience: Remembering Desegregation in Durham

May 092013
 
 May 9, 2013

Wense Grabarek, Mayor of Durham in 1963

I attended an event last night that made me very proud of the city of Durham. This year, 2013, marks 50 years since many significant events in the Civil Rights Movement, including the famous March on Washington in August and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. It turns out Durham made significant progress with peaceful desegregation efforts in the spring of that year, ahead of the curve and avoiding some of the terrible violence that was erupting in other cities. 

My church hosted an evening with Wense Grabarek, who was elected mayor of Durham on May 18, 1963. We watched a half hour interview with Mayor Grabarek that will air on WTVD on May 25 at 1:00pm, and which is also available on YouTube.  He had to jump right into the issue of desegregation when, on May 19, he faced a riot situation in front of the Durham County jail and courthouse. After calmly diffusing that episode, he followed up on his promise to address the community’s civil rights concerns, immediately forming a Durham Interim Committee of civic and business leaders.

With what seems to be professionalism and respect, community members had conversations with one another, considered whether change needed to be made, and if so, how to go about making changes effectively and peacefully. In the course of literally weeks, the city of Durham voluntarily desegregated restaurants, hotels, and other businesses, more than a year before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Mayor Grabarek shared his reflections that appeared in the Durham newspaper on June 5, 1963:

I believe most of you will agree with me that the days of inaction are past.  Time is here for us to reexamine our moral, social and economic consciences in the light of present day conditions and circumstances.  When we do this, we think in terms far greater than ourselves as individuals.  We think in terms of our fellow man, our immediate community, our state, our country, and our God.

One of his repeated claims about this period was that conscience brought people together. In a beautiful concluding remark, he says “our diverse togetherness gave light to our soul, and identified Durham as to who we really are.”

This insight into our local history is particularly relevant considering the simultaneous 50th anniversary of Duke’s desegregation. We should take this opportunity to think about who we really are as a community 50 years later as well – what are our matters of conscience today?

Investigative Journalism and Life Story Interviews

May 062013
 
 May 6, 2013

When I settle into a place, listening and watching, I don’t try to fool myself that the stories of individuals are themselves arguments.  I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.

I’ve just finished reading investigative journalist Katherine Boo’s first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about life in a Mumbai airport slum in a quickly expanding global India. She writes beautifully about this desperate, ignored, yet still wanting to be hopeful, undercity. Her work before this project has focused on poverty in the United States, so there are interesting parallels. One award-winning New Yorker piece is called The Marriage Cure, in which she documents the painstaking everyday lives of two women from an Oklahoma public-housing project. In both, you come to know the characters as neighbors, understand their motivations, and ride the ebb and flow of their optimism and despair.

The quotation above is from the Author’s Note to Behind the Beautiful Forevers, describing her process and intent. It reflects what I see as the strength of these stories, namely that they are just that – captivating stories. We all shape our lives around stories, mostly our own and those in our immediate web of connections. The more we extend that web to those we might otherwise overlook, the better we are able to comprehend what constitutes this life and what might make it better.

I believe our DukeImmerse students are engaged in that process when they conduct life story interviews with Bhutanese and Iraqi refugees. DukeImmerse is an intensive, semester-long research-based course of study. The causes and implications of forced migration are addressed from a variety of methodological, theoretical, disciplinary and political perspectives, all of which contribute to understanding of an incredibly complex global phenomenon. Certainly a palpable and irreplaceable perspective is that of the refugees themselves, sharing stories of their everyday lives.

The life story interviews have been translated to a larger audience through the production of the DukeImmerse: Uprooted/Rerouted Monologues. As an audience member at the performance, or a viewer of the videos online, we also are able to extend our story webs. We may then be motivated to formulate arguments and policy ideas. At the very least, though, we are more conscious of how our stories connect and overlap – the things we value and celebrate; the things we struggle with and despise; the changes we might like to see in the future; the ways in which we find meaning even in a very imperfect present.

(Kenan) Senior Stories

May 022013
 
 May 2, 2013

While browsing on Duke Today this morning I came across a series called Senior Stories, highlighting interesting projects amongst the Class of 2013.  I was proud and excited to see that three of the stories were about Kenan students. 

Alana Jackson was a spring Campus Grant winner, for her senior project on the intersection of public health and the arts. The culminating event was a performance of dance, music, and spoken word to explore the ways in which art plays a role in matters of health. Kenan was glad to help sponsor this creative endeavor that clearly brought together different modes of thinking and modes of being.

Bethany Horstmann has spent quite a bit of time with Kenan over her college career.  She spent her first days at Duke with Project Change, participated in our DukeEngage Dublin program after sophomore year, and is completing the Ethics Certificate. We are now featuring her senior thesis project on human trafficking in the latest installment of the Good Question series.

Finally, another familiar face is that of Emily McGinty. Also a Project Change alumna, and a member of Team Kenan, Emily’s biggest interest has been food-related issues.  She has done an incredible job helping to develop and advance the Duke Campus Farm.

I love the way that these seniors have put their passions to such clear purposes.  As the article says, they are leaving behind a record of scholarship and engagement.  They have also left their mark on the Kenan Institute, and we are grateful!

Do What You Love

Apr 262013
 
 April 26, 2013

Alan Evans Trio, also doing what they love

I know that I’m a much happier, lively person when I both exercise and listen to live music regularly. These identity markers are important to follow when we can. They intersected in an interesting way when I took my first swim of the season in the Central Campus pool yesterday – the lifeguard was practicing flute! Not an expected sight, it was a great entrée into conversation after I finished my swim. He has played flute and saxophone for years, and as a child wanted to be an orchestra musician. Now, he plays when he can.  Including right there in the public setting of lifeguard duty.

I was then deciding whether to go to a show in Raleigh last night, jazz/funk group Alan Evans Trio, and with the stimulation of a workout and meeting a fun new acquaintance, I was in the mood to go. For me, this was doing something that I knew I would love, despite any stigma about being alone in a social setting. And I had an absolute ball, standing contentedly solitary while enveloped in the experience of music.  

So, my somewhat obvious but enthusiastic insight from yesterday is to get over social or psychological barriers and confidently pursue the things that bring fulfillment. The positive effects of one man’s pursuit, as well as my own, have spilled over into a better disposition all day today!

Considering a Global Ethic

Apr 242013
 
 April 24, 2013

Photo courtesy of Duke Photography

Last week we had the privilege of welcoming Kenan Distinguished Lecturer Michael Ignatieff, who spoke on “The Ethics of Globalization and the Globalization of Ethics.” The concept for the annual Kenan Distinguished Lecture in Ethics is to bring a notable speaker to campus to address moral issues of broad social and cultural significance. Ignatieff, as a Canadian scholar, author, and former politician, had a breadth of experience that we knew would be valuable for this signature event. 

The trajectory of a truly global ethic, which acknowledges the contributions of all cultures, religions, and worldviews, was the structure of Ignatieff’s talk on Thursday, punctuated by specific moments of transformation that illuminated change. His article “Reimagining a Global Ethic” provides some background on the thesis. Amidst all the differences present in a global society, there must be a leveling of each person’s value and the recognition of equal moral concern for all humanity. How this has actually played out in history, and whether we’ve gotten to a point where there is this “global ethic”, is certainly complex. Part of the cleverness of the lecture was the way that the specific moments of transformation were emblematic for our collective thinking about ethics over time. It would be an interesting exercise to devise a parallel set of anecdotes to explore the globalization of ethics. But I’ll continue by sharing some of his.

We started back in 1580 with Michel de Montaigne’s essay Of Cannibals. In explaining that the globalization of ethics is tied to the history of empire, he said that Montaigne asked a critical new question of the moral imagination – he asked a cannibal what he thought of the French! In this act Montaigne considers what we can learn from another people rather than simply what they must learn from us. One of the answers was rather amusing – why do all you grown men with beards bow down to a child (the king)?  Another was more unsettling – why do some people have plenty to eat while others not enough, and why do the hungry not attack and kill those with plenty? Reversing the lens brought attention to the existence of basic inequalities, which from certain outsiders’ perspectives seemed absurd.

We then jumped to the 20th century to explore another kind of inequality and injustice, that of Nazism as a perverse racialization of the law. Ignatieff shared a fascinating segment of Duke’s history about a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin escaping Europe for the US because of the invitation of Duke Law professor Malcolm McDermott. In fighting this huge global inequality, part of what was needed was a name for what Churchill called “a crime without a name.” Lemkin provided the moral innovation of naming that crime genocide, and went on to draft the UN genocide convention. We may disagree about ethical principles in a diverse global society, but we must recognize and name what is incorrigibly wrong.

The civil rights movement was also highlighted as part of a global struggle to end unjust hierarchies. Broadly we see human rights emerge in the 20th century as a normative authority that it has not been in the past. With these and other pinpoints, Ignatieff gave us a longterm view of globalization and the evolution of moral ideas that have accompanied it. The message was overall inspiring. We still have a long way to go, but perhaps we have gotten to a place where there are no longer acceptable justifications for invidious inequalities and hierarchies amongst the human race.

I can’t help but wonder if this is too hopeful. But it helps to note the history from which we’ve come. It also helps to add Ignatieff’s final illustration, which was Aung San Suu Kyi’s work in Burma. His main point with her story was that ethics goes global by anchoring in the local.  Suu Kyi is thought of as a global human rights icon, but her priority has always been to create change in her country, and she has only been able do that by suffering on the ground. Ethical principles are not taken into a place in the abstract, but rather by how they are lived and expressed in individual lives. 

Moral Purpose Award

Apr 152013
 
 April 15, 2013

Duke and UNC undergraduates take note: there are just less than two weeks remaining to apply for the Kenan Moral Purpose Award. The award is given for the best undergraduate student essay on the role a liberal arts education plays in students’ exploration of the personal and social purposes by which to orient their future and the intellectual, emotional, and moral commitments that make for a full life. We now partner with the Parr Center for Ethics at UNC to generate one winner for each school, both of whom will receive $1000.

When the award was established in honor of the Kenan Institute’s 15th anniversary at Duke, I was a senior and decided to submit an essay.  It is with contented nostalgia that I present my entry here, as a way to both promote this year’s contest and to reflect on what has now been another chapter of my life with Kenan helping to direct my moral compass.

President Brodhead’s commencement speech to the Class of 2011 directed us to use the points of the Duke compass in order to navigate our world here at Duke and beyond.  He listed excellence, community, education, and the crutch for the other three: engagement.  We should strive for the very best; we should challenge, support, respect, and enjoy the company of such a diverse community; we should always pursue opportunities to be an intelligent contributor to the world at large.  But above all else, we should engage with one another and the community around us, in Brodhead’s words, to “enlarge each others’ understanding.”  Engagement was the task set before us, and if I am able to express development in my moral purpose then I am pleased because it means I have succeeded to some degree. 

Just as Duke has a compass, individuals have an inner compass to direct their path.  The dual process of studying ethics and growing into adulthood have taught me the importance of solidifying a moral compass by which one can be guided in all decisions.   Built into my compass are my past, my education to date, my family and community heritage, and a strong Christian faith.  These things will always be a part of me, and have actually been confirmed and appreciated in many ways by being a part of a different environment.  The beauty of a compass, though, is that it keeps you on track while also leading you into new and wonderful adventures. 

I have been able to pursue my interests and discover new ones, to develop a real passion for literature and the collection of books, to travel in the U.S. and abroad, to be a part of the Durham community through a local church and various service programs.  All of these experiences depended on the people that were a part of them, the people that enlarged my understanding.  Several examples of lessons taught to me: Innocence from the child I mentor in Durham, tolerance from the Muslim refugees I worked with in Dublin who shared so many of the same values and ideals, analytical pursuit from my religion professors who have furthered my knowledge of the Bible regardless of their own religious views…  I feel more and more strongly that it is by being open and understanding of others that we learn from them and discern how their worldview fits into our own. 

Here I must pay tribute to Peter Euben’s gateway ethics course, which put me on the path to some of my most stimulating academic and extracurricular experiences through Kenan.  One of the most powerful concepts for me, and which often shaped our discussions, was Hannah Arendt’s “moral imagination.”  Professor Euben advised us that the more points of view we could incorporate into our own, the more rich and complex the world would be.  Complex, yes.  My roommate and I are probably not going to reach a consensus on the existence of God.  But rich? Absolutely.  Our late night conversations have been monumental in learning to define and explain my beliefs.  I have had to transition from the view that Christianity must be the underlying model for character, yet at the same time I have strengthened my own faith. 

President Brodhead would be pleased to hear that more than anything, Duke has taught me to engage with the world.  Whether it is a student in my class or a character in a Faulkner novel, they become more enriching when I take the initiative to learn more about them.  Except maybe for the folks in Yoknapatawpha County and the others taking residence on my bookshelf, there is a rewarding reciprocity in the process of engagement.  I hope I have enlarged the understanding of certain individuals here at Duke, and I believe I will be able to do so even more based on what I have gained from the past four years. 

I’m glad I had Duke’s institutional compass and my own moral compass to guide me, but what an amazing journey it has been! 

Self + Other

Apr 122013
 
 April 12, 2013

An ongoing dialogue of self and other

Wednesday evening was one of the annual highlights of the spring for the Kenan Institute. In another transformation of the West Duke halls, we now have Team Kenan’s What Is Good Art? Exhibition displayed, and the opening reception welcomed it with good spirit.

The theme this year was “Self + Other” as a way to explore the ethics of identity. The artists were thinking about this concept in some form—and I’m sure in quite different forms among them—as they composed their work. I found the theme to also be fruitful as the exhibit was transmitted to an audience. Wednesday as the crowd viewed and discussed, we all approached the pieces as individual identities with our own conceptions of meaning. We engaged with the “other” of both the artist and the viewers around us. In a continuum of self and other, there were occasions when I felt like I was resonating synchronously with the artist.  Other times I felt like I travelled from self to other and back to the self as I initially viewed, then read an artist’s statement, and then stepped back for another glance. This theme helps me think about the process of engaging with any sort of art.

A new idea that has been employed with this year’s exhibition allows for deliberate engagement in a way that actually expands the exhibit. Viewers are encouraged to respond to the pieces with short messages on post-it notes, and literally leave a trail of dialogue on the wall. The exhibition booklet says that the “+” in the theme is “a way of encouraging viewers and artists to think about how ‘self’ and ‘other’ might fit together.” This element of the exhibit seems to create an additive relationship.

So, next time you are in West Duke, you have the chance to add a piece of your “self” to the exhibit. I hope you’ll do so as you think about, as Team Kenan invites, the boundaries of identity, art, and ethics.

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