Education
EDUCATION DEFINED
In the general sense education is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another. Education can also be defined as the process of becoming an educated person. An educated person refers to a person that has access to optimal states of mind regardless of the situation they are in. That person is able to perceive accurately, think clearly and act effectively to achieve self-selected goals and aspirations. I leave it to readers to access the vast literature on the subject, a subject I have been involved with and in for nearly 70 years. For an excellent overview of the subject go to this link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education
AN ANCIENT PROCESS AND A MODERN QUESTION
In the sense that I have defined education above---the process has been going on for millennia, indeed, epochs and eras, ages and cycles. Go to this link for an interesting analysis of an oft'-asked question about the progress or decline in educational standards:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/nov/19/dreams-of-better-schools/
MAKING A MARK
In the last week of March and the first week of April 1999 Nato allies, mainly the USA and Great Britain, and Yugoslavia entered into a horrific war. In those first days of the war Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, was bombed and half a million Albanians in Kosovo began to flee their homeland becoming refugees and trying to avoid a process of mass killing by Serbians, a process called 'ethnic cleansing.' In these same two weeks I taught my last classes as a full-time professional teacher in a technical and further education college in Perth Western Australia and prepared to leave, to pioneer, to take a sea-change and an early retirement to Tasmania. I was 55.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, "War in Europe," 11:30-12:20 am, 11/12 December 2002.
This was one way to commemorate
or was it to celebrate the end of a
working life? Day after day, & night
after night---while I ate my evening
meal I watched the dropping bombs,
shooting in the streets, cities, towns
and villages up in Yugoslavia's hills,
target after target in that lighted
chirping box. I'd had my war, too.
My war had been without guns and
jets against confused backgrounds
of a planet & an unmistakable trend
towards the Lesser Peace:...at least
from my personal perspective as I
headed into the evening of my life in
this vast planetizing complex global
civilization, culture, society, world!!!
Consciously involved in a single historic
process, describing as best I could my
twofold date with destiny, with traces in
my memory which would last forever,
having begun to define in quite specific
detail the mark I made over those three
epochs.(1) For without a soul-satisfying
answer, a soul-satisfying mark......what
was the point of it all, what indeed??!!
(1) The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 1998. Three epochs, 2nd to 4th, 1944 to 2000.
Ron Price
12 December 2000 to 13 October 2011
CREDO AND COMMENT
Erich Fromm is a theorist who brings other theories together. He also emphasizes how your personality is embedded in class, status, education, vocation, your religious and philosophical background and so forth. Since my 5 volume autobiography and my personality is embedded to a great extent in these aspects of life, it seems relevant to make a few comments on the work, the ideas, of Erich Fromm. I read Fromm's books off and on for thirty years. -Ron Price with thanks to Michael Maccoby, "The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic," Society, July/August 1994.
The year I began my travelling-pioneering experience for the Canadian Baha'i community, 1962, Erich Fromm, American psychoanalyst and prolific writer in the field of existential psychology, stated his 'credo' in his book Beyond the Chains of Illusions. I have written some of his Credo below since it was consistent with my views back in 1962 and still is. I have commented on some of his Credo expressing views that have remained part of my beliefs during this lifelong pioneering venture spanning, as it does now, fifty years: 1962 to 2012.
"The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he has been born." Given this fact, my role as a Baha'i has been to spend my life trying to build the kind of society in which it is fit for human beings to live in. For, as Fromm says in his Credo, "society has both a furthering and an inhibiting function. Only in cooperation with others, and in the process of work, does man develop his powers, only in the context of the vast historical processes do humans create themselves. Only when society's aim will have become identical with the aims of humanity will society cease to cripple man and to further evil."
In attempting to transform society, Fromm underestimated, some critics say, the need for individuals to adapt to their society. For the Baha'i to be an effective teacher, propagator, of the New Society that he has become associated with, he needs to adapt to the larger society in which he has been born and in which he lives his life. The difficulties I had in the first decade of my pioneering experience, the 1960s and early 1970s, came, it seems to me in retrospect, from a slow adapting to my society and my own ill-health. Later, in the following decades, my effectiveness was due significantly to: (i) my more effective adapting to society and (ii) better treatment for my illness, my bipolar I disorder. This adaptive process was slow and arduous work and, for Baha'is, it takes place in the context of action toward goals using a map provided by the Founders of their religion and their religion's legitimate Successors.
"I believe that every man represents humanity. We are different as to intelligence, health and talents. Yet we are all one. We are all saints and sinners, adults and children, and no one is anybody's superior or judge. We have all been awakened with the Buddha, we have all been crucified with Christ, and we have all killed and robbed with Genghis Khan, Stalin, and Hitler. Man's task in life is precisely the paradoxical one of realizing his individuality and at the same time transcending it and arriving at the experience of universality. Only the fully developed individual self can drop the ego." Perhaps this is one way of defining the nature of 'Abdu'l-Baha and the reason for His effectiveness and efficiency. The subject is far too complex to reduce to one prose-poem. -Ron Price, Pioneeering Over Four Epochs, 9 October 2002 to 13 May 2012.
There was much truth there, Erich.(1)
I must thank you for your wonderful
and illuminating books, enriching my
life as they have, approximating the
jewelled wisdom of this lucid Faith
that I set out with in '62.....I moved
to Dundas and began to pray in the
streets on cold Canadian afternoons,
read from His sweet-scented streams
and tasted of the fruits of His tree in
those years when my father's white
hair blew in the wind for the last time.
My mother was driven to the end of her
tether & a charisma I had hardly begun
to understand became institutionalized
at the apex of a wondrous World Order.
(1) Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusions, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1962, pp.174-182.
Ron Price
9 October 2002 to 13 May 2012
AN OVERVIEW OF MY OWN EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE
For an overview of my qualifications, my curriculum vitae, my CV, my resume, my background and experience go to this link:https://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&gs_nf=1&cp=16&gs_id=9l&xhr=t&q=Ron+Price+resume&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=Ron+Price+resume&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=e045a2b0a4248e08&biw=1080&bih=537
MY WRITING IN THE LIFESPAN
Since so much of my life now, in its stage of late adulthood in the lifespan, is connected to writing, that part of my education associated with the act of writing is, in retrospect, a very important part. The following essays deals with the criticism I received for my writing from 1949 to 2011.
THOUGHTS ON THE CRITICISM OF MY WRITING: Part I
The first criticism of my writing, at least the criticism that I remember, was in 1950 when I was in grade one in the then small southern Ontario town of Burlington, a part of what is still called the Golden Horseshoe. The town is and was jammed right at the left-hand end of Lake Ontario. I’m sure I received criticism of my scribblings in the three years before that in my early childhood from my family members and playmates, perhaps as early as 1947 when I was three or four years old and colouring or printing my first words on paper. But I have no memories of that incoming criticism, no memories until, as I say, 1950. That was 60 years ago: 1950 to 2010.
Early in this new, this third, millennium, in 2004 to be precise, I began to receive written criticism of my prose and poetry on the internet. I had received criticism, mostly verbal, of my published writing from 1974 to 2004 during which time I was able to publish some 150 essays in newspapers and magazines, newsletters and in-house publications where I worked in several towns and cities in Australia. Writing had become, by the 1970s, a more central focus to my life, much more central than it had ever been, although it had always been central in one way or another at least, as I say above, since 1950. When one is a student, as I had been from 1949 to 1970 in Canada, receiving criticism of what one writes is part of the core of the educational process. Sometimes that criticism was fair and helpful; sometimes it was unkind and destructive.
Being on the receiving end of criticism in cyberspace has been, in some ways, just a continuation of the first half-century, 1950-2000, of comments by teachers and students, supervisors and the general public on what I wrote. The internet is full of lumpen bully-boys who prowl the blogosphere. There are the hysterical secularists who proliferate among that immense commentariat. There are the dogmatic Islamists and Christian fundamentalists, among others, who want to impose their absolutes on others. They try to inflict, or perhaps promote, their interpretation of the Quran or the Bible on the rest of the Muslim or Christian communities, respectively.
My experience on the internet, as I say, has just been a continuation of those decades of criticism, and of course praise, that I had already received. “Writers,” as the famous American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said so succinctly over dinner in the film entitled Last Call, “must get used to criticism.” After decades of extensive writing in many places in the public domain, I must agree with this entre deux guerres writer; criticism is part of the air that writers breath and, especially as I have come to find on the internet, writers who have lots of readers. Criticism was part of the air one breathed back in the 1950s and early 1960s as a student. One learned as fast as fear could teach us, as many of us would have put it.
Literary tyrants, people who are going to tell you where and when, why and how you have gone wrong in no uncertain terms, without mincing their words or pulling any punches, without what you might call an etiquette of expression and tact, have always come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. One must learn to deal with them in one way or another as their criticisms come your way in the daily round. There are many MOs, modus operandi, to use a term from the who-dun-its, for dealing with the harsh and not so harsh words of others. Of course, it is not only writers who have to deal with critical tongues and words in many forms. A vast literature now abounds on how to deal with this reality of life. Courses are mounted in educational and other service institutions to help us deal with this pervasive reality of everyday life in the micro and macro worlds which we all inhabit.
THOUGHTS ON THE CRITICISM OF MY WRITING: Part II
I discuss below in this nearly 5000 word essay, the reactions to criticism of two famous writers. Their reactions throw light onto my own way of dealing with this inevitable reality of existence if one is, as I am, a writer and editor, a poet and publisher, a journalist and independent scholar, a man of words, a writer of belles-lettres, a person with belletrist concerns. For many writers the term belles-lettres is used in the sense to identify literary works that do not fall easily into the major categories such as fiction, poetry or drama, but have a more aesthetic function or purpose. Much of my writing has become, in the last twenty-five years, 1985 to 2010, a hybrid that does not easily and comfortably fit into the major categories of writing.
And so it is that, after sixty years of having to deal with the phenomenon of critical feedback of my written work, I pause here to reflect on the incoming criticism of what I have written and what I now write. I pause and reflect on the experience of two other writers in the last century, writers of fame and much success at least in some quarters---if not in the popular and pervasive culture that surrounds the billions of inhabitants on this planet. Writing, whether on the internet or elsewhere, is--like identity itself—always to some extent a performance and the product of a highly mediated set of cultural, material and institutional forces. There is a complex interplay in both writing and in life itself between the material environment, culture and genetics, between fantasy, wishes and goals as well as so much else. This is not the place to pursue the origins of such literary complexity. What you might call the socio-historical and psycho-social forces behind the act of writing, though, need to be acknowledged, if not discussed in detail, when one deals with a subject like criticism.
LAURA RIDING
In 1936, right at the start of the Baha’i teaching Plan, a Plan in which I have been myself engaged in a host of ways for nearly sixty years, 1953 to 2010, the American poet Laura Riding(1901-1991) wrote to a correspondent: "I believe that misconceptions about oneself which one does not correct, but where it is possible to correct, act as a bad magic.” That bad magic has been at work on the reputation of Laura Riding for many years, for well over 70 years.
One of the criticisms levelled at Riding in her later life, or more accurately, simply a comment about Riding--and repeated recently by the renowned literary critic Dr. Helen Vendler--was that Riding "spent a great deal of time writing tenacious and extensive letters to anyone who, in her view, had misrepresented some aspect, no matter how minute, of her life or writing." Vendler, a leading American critic of poetry, found Riding "more than a little monomaniacal,” in relation to criticism of her work. Despite advanced age and failing health, Riding continued her vigorous and valiant, one might even say, fanatical attempt to halt the spread of misconceptions about herself and her writing to the very end of her life. But the "bad magic" was too powerful to be overcome. Incidentally, this view of criticism that Riding held, the view that it was “bad magic," was held by a woman who was also accused of being a witch and of exercising a literary witchcraft by some of her more zealous critics.
Why was Riding so scrupulous in her attempts to correct misconceptions of her life and writing no matter how minute? It was, partly at least, because she recognized the importance of details to the understanding of human character. "The details of human nature are never a matter of infinitesimals," she wrote in an essay published in 1974. "Every last component of the human course of things is a true fraction of the personal world, reflecting a little its general character." She, like many other writers and non-writers it should be added, never welcome criticism. Some react to the slightest criticism like a cornered wildcat and others like a barking dog.
My approach to incoming criticism is more diverse than Riding’s, not as consistently intense and defensive, not as sensitive to infinitesimals, not like that wildcat or that barking dog. Sometimes I ignore the comment; sometimes I am tenacious and write an extensive response; sometimes I write something brief and to the point. Sometimes I deal with the comment with some attempt at humour, sarcasm and wit, if I can locate these clever sorts of written repartee in my intellectual and sensory emporium.
Punitive rebuttals abound on the internet, often laced with the F, the C, or the S words, invectives from the younger generations who have grown up with these words of abuse. A much larger vocabulary of blasphemy and blame can now be found in the print and electronic media, more than in any previous generation at least in modern history. Sometimes taking umbrage at the use of these forms of vilification and vituperation in cyberspace is appropriate and sometimes it is not. I certainly agree with Riding that one’s writing should not be judged by some infinitesimals, but it is difficult when one writes extensively in the public domain not to be judged by all sorts of things of which infinitesimals are but one of the many. The only way to avoid criticism and to totally safe is not to stick one’s head above the ground of cyberspace’s highly varied terrain.
Riding, of course, did not have to deal with the world-wide-web. Her’s was a more refined and elitist, academic and journalistic, literary and scholarly world. Her’s was a world I inhabited for many a year as both a student and teacher, as a lecturer and tutor. I wrote more essays than I care now to count and I marked so many that, by the time I took an early retirement at the age of 55, I can honestly say that I suffered from what I came to call print-glut. When one has to read more than 200 pages of student work every week and do this for years, mark it for spelling and grammar errors, for content and quality, one needs an energy and enthusiasm which tends, for most teachers, to get worn-down at the edges. And this is to put the problem mildly. I found I was just about ill with mental fatigue when I faced a large pile of papers or scripts as they are variously called and which required marking. By the time I came to pull-the-plug and take a sea-change as it is called Downunder in the Antipodes my role as critic of the writing of students had lost all its oils and juices. I was ready to be farmed-out, ready to go out to pasture, where marking was to be seen no more.
FEEDBACK FROM OTHERS ON THE INTERNET
After eight years, 2004 to 2012, of receiving, keeping and filing some of the written and critical feedback sent to me by readers on the internet, I must conclude that, thusfar, the negative feedback I have received has been useful in adjusting the nature of my posts. The criticism I have received at a multitude of sites at which I post helps me to adjust my contributions to suit the administrators and moderators, the participants and interlocutors who fill the cyberspace places at these world-wide-web locations.
Most of the feedback in these seven years that has been viewed in a negative light tends to see my posts as: too long, not appropriate, raising the hackles of some readers because they were seen as irrelevant, boring, inter alia. I thought this personal statement here, this brief overview, analysis and comment, would be a useful summary of both the incoming criticism I have received in the last six years and my views on that criticism. The negative feedback was in the 10% range and 90% of my literary contributions, or posts as they are usually called in cyberspace, received various forms of appreciation.
Some people on the internet let you know, as I have already indicated above, and in no uncertain terms, what they think of your posts. Frankness, candour, invective, harsh criticism, indeed, criticism in virtually every conceivable form, can be found in the interstices of cyberspace, if one writes as much as I do at more than 6000 locations among the 260 million sites and 4.6 billion subjects, topics or items of information at last count, that are now in existence in that world of cyberspace. In the last six years I have been on the receiving end of everything imaginable that someone can say negatively about someone’s writing and someone.
This negative feedback has been, as I say, useful and I have tried to respond in ways that improve readers’ opinions of my work and, sometimes, of me. Sometimes I am successful in these efforts of explanation and of self-justification, of defence and argument, of apologetics and apology, and sometimes I am not. Such are the perils of extensive writing and human interaction; indeed, such are the perils of living unless one is a hermit and does one’s own plumbing and electrical work, never goes shopping and relies only on the products of one’s garden for food.
ISAIAH BERLIN AND IVAN TURGENEV
To draw now on a second writer and how he dealt with criticism, I introduce Sir Isaiah Berlin(1909-1997). He was a leading political philosopher and historian of ideas. In a lecture he gave in 1970 on the Russian poet Ivan Turgenev, Berlin pointed out that this famous Russian writer altered, modified and tried to please everyone in some of his works. As a result of this desire to please his critics, one of the characters in his books “suffered several transformations in successive drafts, up and down the moral scale, as this or that friend or consultant reported their impressions.” Berlin went on to say, in that same lecture, that Turgenev was inflicted by intellectual wounds as a result of the criticism of his works by others, wounds that festered in varying degrees of intensity, depending of course on the nature of the criticism, for the rest of Turgenev’s life.
Turgenev was attacked by writers and critics of many persuasions on the Left and the Right of the political spectrum in those days when these political demarcations had more clear and understandable characterizations. This Russian novelist(1818-1883) possessed, Berlin noted, a capacity for depicting “the multiplicity of interpenetrating human perspectives that shade imperceptibly into each other, nuances of character and behaviour, motives and attitudes.” Turgenev, like Riding, could never bear the wounds he received from incoming criticism of his writing in silence. He shook and shivered under the ceaseless criticisms to which he exposed himself, so Berlin informs us.
Pleasing others, of course, is important for any writer if he or she is to win a place of success among teachers, supervisors or those in the general public. This is just as true on the world-wide-web. But there is also, and without doubt for millions of internet participants, a new found freedom of expression that cyberspace provides. Part of this freedom, at least for me, is due to the advantages and pleasures of age. Now in the early evening of my life, these middle years(65 to 75) of late adulthood as some human development theorists refer to the period in the lifespan from 60 to 80, with jobs and employment positions far behind me, no one checks what I write before my offerings go into the bright lights and pixelated pages of cyberspace.
My own editing pen is kept busy, of course, and I can edit as much or as little as I desire. Editing has never been one of my favorite activities and I tend to rush this part of the writing job, at least initially. I then revise or alter, subtract or add, delete and generally edit in a multitude of ways as a result of incoming comments, both encomium and opprobrium. Sometimes I make no changes at all to my initial internet post.
After my writing gets onto the world-wide-web: it is ignored, criticized, diagnosed, interpreted, subjected to hair-splittings and logic-choppings by readers and posters, moderators and administrators who inhabit the internet sites. I am on the receiving end of invective and ignominy, negative appraisals and accusations of nefariousness. I am assailed with acrimony, berating and blame, blasphemy and bickering, castigation and censure, condemnation and contumely, denunciation and diatribe, epithet and obloquy, philippic and reproach, revilement and sarcasm, scurrility and tirade, tongue-lashing and vilification. I am given more advice than I have received at home from those I love and who love me over a lifetime of seven decades.
The criticism I received as a student and teacher in the last half of the twentieth century goes on in pithy paragraphs and sentences, phrases and single words at the several thousand internet sites where my millions of words are now published---to chose what seems to me to be an apt word for the nature and extent of my internet contributions, the places that my words occupy, in the many coloured and black-and-white pixelated pages, the public spaces in cyberspace.
I am viewed as tactless, insensitive, awfully boring and told where to get off, where to go, where to go for further writing courses to help me in my literary vocation and avocation. Sometimes I am told why I should discontinue the practice of writing entirely. I am also told what a wonderful inspiration my writing is. Compliments and acclaim, flattery and praise, abound. These words of encomium and opprobrium that I receive, as I say, are really not much different than; indeed, are much the same as, the words many other writers get when their words are found between hard and soft covers. Even the writings of Shakespeare, the Bible and other major works in the western tradition get great buckets of criticism poured on them from the generations which have come on the scene since the post-world-war-2 years, those now 65 and under, to chose a convenient timeframe for most of those who offer to me their criticisms of my literary efforts and my opinions, my responses to what others write and the inevitable and myriad contentious issues that abound in cyberspace.
Most of those, though, who have come to inhabit the parts of the WWW where I post are the Y-generation. They were born between the mid-1970s to the first years of the 2000s. These generation-Y people are in their late childhood, teens, 20s and 30s, the millennial generation, the net generation. Some say that generation-X are those born between 1974 and 1980. The fine-tuning of these generational labels can get a bit complex. The first generation who have grown-up with internet access, the years 1992 to 2012, have a wide range of personality constructs. These people are sometimes called the Z-generation and it would require a separate statement to discuss in sufficient detail their internet, their personality, typologies.
There are, though, some generalities about the generations I deal with in cyberspace, generalities, analysis and description which are useful to be aware of. These generalities may help a person deal with the individuals one comes across at internet sites as I do, but my comments on them will be brief. I could benefit, as I go along here, from the assistance of one, Rob Cowley, affectionately known in publishing circles back in the seventies and early eighties as “the Boston slasher.” His editing was regarded in some circles as constructive and deeply sensitive. If he could amputate several dozen pages, several thousand words, of my explorations on the net with minimal agony to my emotional equipment I’m sure readers would be the beneficiaries. But, alas, I think Bob is dead.
I did find an editor, a copy-proofreader and friend who does not slash and burn but leaves one's soul quite intact as he wades through my labyrinthine passages, smooths them all out and excises undesirable elements. But this editor is in the late evening of his life and, after editing several hundred pages of my writing, he has tired of the exercise and so I am left on my own. Perhaps one day I may assume the role that Cowley exercised so well in his life in Boston as The Slasher. But, in the meantime and without my editor friend, I advise readers not to hold their breath waiting for me to do what is a necessary edit. I often edit the writing of others, but it is not an exercise I enjoy after having edited student work for more than three decades and my own writing for more than five.
My writing, my posting, on the net is not one based on what some critics call fluid identities. I do not write in character or adopt different personas. The person who writes and the person who eats breakfast is one and the same. But, as many writers point out, their writing selves and their everyday selves are not the same in every sense. There is a single personality in all of my internet, all of my writing and posting. But there is also the social, the constructed, self, which sociologists sometimes call the socially constructed self. People, both on and off the internet, assume a range of identities that are reasonably consistent with each other. There are limits, though, to whatever flexibility, whatever multiple and decentered subjectivities we assume either the internet or in real life. One can shape a self on the net as one can shape it in real life, but some do more shaping than others.
THE PROCESS OF BAHÁ'Í REVIEW
and REVIEW BY OTHERS
After more than sixty years(1949-2010), then, of having my writing poured over by others; after more than forty-five years(1964-2010) of having my writing reviewed before its publication by Baha’i reviewing committees at national and local levels of Baha’i administration and its institutions and even by some individuals and groups at the Bahá'í World Centre in Haifa Israel; after trying to write in a way that would please various groups of people both within the Baha’i community and without by committees, colleagues, professors, tutors, students and teachers at a multitude of educational institutions---before my writing saw the light of day in some in-house publication or public newsletter, some magazine or journal, some newspaper or periodical, I have come to especially enjoy writing on the internet.
The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Australia Inc, the nationally elected body by the Bahá'í community in Australia does not require writers like myself to have their writing reviewed before it goes onto the internet. The Review Office of the NSA of the Baha’is of the USA has given me permission to post my works on the internet, although they have advised that review is necessary if I want to place any of my writings in book form, in a hard or soft cover, for general and public consumption. My five volume, 2600 page autobiography, has found many a place in whole or in part on the world-wide-web. That same Review Office has reviewed this work, given me permission to place it on the internet but not between the covers of a book. There is much more I could add about the process of Baha’i review, but this short comment is sufficient for this discussion of the process of dealing with criticism.
DEALING WITH CRITICISM:
AN ANSWERING THEOLOGY
Critical scholarly comments on my work as well as criticism raised in public or private discussions of less scholarly material, should not necessarily be equated with hostility. Questions and judgments, evaluations and critiques, are perfectly legitimate, indeed, necessary aspects of a person's search for an answer to an intellectual conundrum. Paul Tillich, that great Protestant theologian of the 20th century, once expressed the view that dealing with criticism, a process sometimes called apologetics, was an "answering theology.” I have always been attracted to the founder of the Baha'i Faith's exhortations in discussion to "speak with words as mild as milk," with "the utmost leniency and forbearance." This form of dialogue, its obvious etiquette of expression and the acute exercise of judgment involved, is difficult for most people when their position is under attack from people who are more articulate, better read and better at arguing both their own position and the position of those with whom they are in dialogue in some critical exchange at some thread at a site on the internet.
I am also aware that, in cases of rude or hostile attack, rebuttal with a harsher tone, that punitive rebuttal, may well be justified, although I prefer humour, irony and even gentle sarcasm rather than hostile written attack in any form. Still, it does not help an apologist to belong to those "watchmen" whom the prophet Isaiah calls "dumb dogs that cannot bark." In its essence criticism is often just another form of confrontation, an act of revealing one's true colours, of hoisting the flag, of demonstrating the essential characteristics of one's faith, of one's thought, of one's emotional and intellectual stance in life.
“Dialogue should not mean self-denial,” wrote Hans Kung, arguably the greatest of contemporary Catholic apologists. Dickensis a wonderful example of a writer with the capacity to be highly critical of people and institutions. He attacked English institutions especially with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked swallowed him so completely that he became a national institution himself.
The standard of public discussion on controversial topics should be sensitive to what is said and how; it should be sensitive to manner, mode, style, tone and volume. Tact is also essential. Not everything that we know should always be disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed is timely or suited to the ears of the hearer to paraphrase closely one of the Founder of the Baha’i Faith’s more quoted passages.
To put some of this question of tact, and this topic of personal revelations another way, we don't want all our dirty laundry out on our front lawn for all to see or our secrets blasted over the radio and TV. Perhaps a moderate confessionalism is best here, if confession is required at all. In today’s print and electronic media it seems unavoidable even if only modestly. Much of internet dialogue, though, is far, far, below standards of even a reasonable modesty or literacy as posters “f,” “c” and “s” words abounding and making their way through discussions.
Often the briefest of phraseology, a succinctness that approaches sheer nothingness, and an inarticulateness that has more in common with grunts and sighs as well as whimpers and whims is found at internet sites. So often the language betrays a knowledge of basics deriving from the visual media and little reading. The eye, as one writer put it recently in what I thought was a clever turn of phrase, is so often quicker than the mind. Well, yes and no, I hasten to add on the complex subject of the print and electronic media. Perception and understanding based on the use of the print and electronic media is yet another too complex a subject to deal with here in even the briefest of ways.
Anyway, that's all for now. It's back to the spring winds of Tasmania, about 5 kms from the Bass Straight on the Tamar River. The geography of place is so much simpler than that of the literary, intellectual, philosophical and religious geography that some readers on the internet who engage in complex and not-so-complex discussions are concerned with. Even physical geography, though, has its complexities as those who take a serious interest in the topic of climate change and the worlds of biodiversity and related sciences are fast finding out. Whom the gods would destroy they first make simple and simpler and simpler. I look forward to a dialogue with someone, anyone who is inclined to respond to what I’m sure for some is this overly long post. Here in far-off Tasmania--the last stop before Antarctica, if one wants to get there by some other route than by air or off the end of South America--your response will be gratefully received.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Australia.
Ron Price
Updated On:
13 May 2012
(5000 words-circa)
----------------------FOOTNOTES--------------------------------------
The interwar years: 1919 to 1939
2 See Elizabeth Friedman’s response to: The White Goddess! from the November 18, 1993 issue of The New York Review of Books and Helen Vendler, “Laura (Riding) Jackson,” February 3, 1994.
3 Isaiah Berlin, (1) “Romanes Lecture 1970 on Turgenev: Fathers and Sons.;” and (2) “The Gentle Genius: Turgenev’s Letters selected, translated, and edited by A.V. Knowles
Scribner’s” in The New York Review of Books, 2010.
4 For an interesting examination of this theme readers are advised to google a developing literature on the subject. One good article by Esther Milne, “Dragging Her Dirt All Over the Net: Presence, Intimacy, Materiality,” in Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol.2, No.2, December 2007.007,
5 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, U. of Chicago, 1967, Vol.1, p. 6.
6 Baha’u’llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah, Haifa, 1978, pp. 172-173.
7 The Bible, Isaiah, 56:10.
8 Quoted in Udo Schaefer’s, "Baha'i Apologetics," Baha'i Studies Review, Vol.10, 2001/2.
