Thank you and welcome, 54 inductees, current members of NHS, parents, faculty, family, friends.

It’s an honor to have been asked to share some words of wisdom with you—especially so, given that I know your first choice, Mr. Kay, was unavailable to do so.

So: upon accepting this late assignment, I rushed to Mr. Sturgeon to ask what this speech should attempt.

His answer was simple: “Talk about character, service, and leadership—talk about honor.” I have to admit I found the answer slightly boring. But thankfully, Mr. Sturgeon added two more words that hit me in my sweet spot: “Inspire them.”

A Metaphor from the Dead

I happen to have fallen in love with the word “inspire” a good 30 years ago, when I was fresh out of high school and falling in love with the beauty of the English language to such a geeky degree that I spent my spare time playing with etymology—the study of word roots. I used to lie on my apartment floor with this very book—the Webster’s Universal Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language—for hours at a time, and surf through its pages looking not for definitions, but for the ancient, original meanings of words we use today.

The etymology of the word “inspire” has been one of my favorites for all my adult life. The literal definition—“fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something good or creative”—that’s so cliché by now that, here again, we find it boring. But as one of my very closest friends, the great German philosopher and Dead White Male Friedrich Nietzsche observed in the late 1800s, “all words in use today are dead metaphors.” All the words we use today, in other words, have a poetic meaning at their roots that has rubbed off over the centuries to the point that we don’t hear it.

So hear this one:

“inspire”: ORIGIN: from Latin in- ‘into’ + spirare ‘breathe.’ Originally used of a divine or supernatural being.

Do you hear that? Admit it: at its dead metaphoric root, the cliché word “inspire” has  more epic swag than all of us in this room combined: God breathing life into Adam? An act of “inspiring.” The muse of epic poetry breathing the Iliad into Homer? Another act of “inspiring.” Oh, the swag, it overwhelms.

At the same time, though, this piece of swag makes my job here harder. Because it means that this here ceremony, folks, is at heart religious, and that my job is to somehow try to express nothing less than “the divine.” It means that your teacher has suddenly received the role, for the space of this gathering, of something closer to that of priest.

So the flip tone, the swaggy slang, I must inform you, stops here. One of you asked me to be a rapper up here, and I am not sorry to say that you will be disappointed.

Because honor is no laughing matter.

We can laugh back in the mundane world. I’ll rap for you in the cafeteria.

But here, now, let us try to understand this ritual—yes, I said “ritual”—for what it is.

Out of the roughly one thousand young adults in our society, its elders—and again, yes, I said “elders”—have invited a tiny, select minority of our young—the 54 of you standing on this stage—to honor you with a rite of passage. It is a passing, from our generation to yours, of a torch we call, metaphorically, “honor.”

And this means, at bottom, that we have identified you as having the most promise to lead our society when we no longer can.

It is a solemn thing, the rite of passage, stretching back surely thousands of years and hundreds of generations in human history. In this ceremony, we are entrusting you, among all your peers, with a new role: to be our replacements in the future, and to lead our society well. We are passing to you the responsibility, when you replace us, to keep our society strong and wholesome, decent and admirable.

We don’t do solemn well in these times—so I’m going to ask you to take this moment to concentrate yourselves in order to, just this once, attempt to do solemnity well. I’m asking you to open yourself to whatever “divine breath” might inspire you for the remainder of this ceremony, as we discuss your passage to adulthood, and to a life of honor.

Let’s begin with that lamentably dead, cliché word itself. Let’s begin with the word “honor.”

An Uncomfortable Question

We observed you closely and chose you carefully, because you have shown uncommon honor. We are confident that you deserve this ceremony, and we congratulate you for it. I personally know many of you standing on this stage, and have observed you in action in our years here together, and I have greatly admired you. I am sure I speak for many of your elders in this room when I say that it gives great hope for the future.

It’s that future that we will now focus on—your future. Let’s be honest here: the odds are strong that many of you will graduate from SAS to enter some of the most privileged and ivied halls of power on earth today.

The question that intrigues me, but also concerns me, and that should concern you as well, is this: how will you handle the opportunities that your privilege will offer you as you grow into adulthood? Will you be able to continue handling them with honor?

I hate to say it, but unfortunately, the odds are very strong that for some of you—perhaps even most of you—the answer may be uncomfortable. Why? A Wall Street Journal article last year entitled 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You says it well: “If you really want to cause social mayhem,” the author tells his imaginary audience of graduates,

it helps to have an Ivy League degree. You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can change the world. They are right, but remember that “changing the world” also can include things like skirting financial regulations and selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it…

“Don’t use your prodigious talents to mess things up,” the author concludes. “Too many smart people are doing that already.”[1]

It is an uncomfortable observation, but honorable people don’t avoid discomfort. It’s uncomfortable because the author clearly implies that many former high school honor students, surely NHS inductees like you, somehow lost their honor along the way, and used their talents “to mess things up.” If it happened to so many corrupt elites today, logic dictates that it can happen to you future elites tomorrow.

On Cultural Cancer

You’re probably thinking at this point, “Not me. I won’t become a dishonorable adult.” We all want to believe that. But the sad thing, it seems to me, is that these “smart people” probably didn’t go into college thinking, “I’m going to use my talents to evade taxes, to defraud people who trust me, to abuse the environment, to promote cancer and obesity.” A few sociopathic outliers notwithstanding, I don’t think human nature works that way.

So if it’s not human nature that leads power to corrupt, the problem must lie in a society’s culture, in its values. It seems obvious to me that we live in an age suffering from a set of values that is itself a form of cancer—of cultural cancer. And that set of values, in bumper sticker form, that has “inspired” so many talented people to sell their honor today, teaches this wisdom: “he who dies with the most toys wins.” (That actually was a bumper sticker in my youth—I’m sure many parents in the audience remember it. Your generation’s Facebook “bumper sticker”—YOLO (and for you parents out there, that stands for “You Only Live Once”—preaches a similar gospel of self-indulgence.)

According to this philosophy, if “messing things up” helps me make more money to buy more toys and live the high life more than everybody else, so be it—I’m in. I’m successful. I’m a winner.

Notice that what’s missing in this toy-rich “winner” are the very qualities of Honor we’re here today to celebrate: the spirit of Service not to the self, but to the greater good; the Character to choose that greater good over tempting self-indulgence; and the Leadership to walk away from that temptation. These are the very honors we’re publicly adorning you with today.

Yet clearly these YOLO values rule the lives of many people in the modern world, and it’s no wonder why: statistically, if you’re 15 years old right now, you’ve seen 300,000 30-second TV commercials in your life.[2] That’s 2,500 hours of “buy toys, buy toys, buy toys” you’ve wracked up so far. You’ve spent more hours in front of the advertisement delivery system—the TV—than you’ve spent in school at this point. It has breathed commercials into your lungs through your eyes and ears mercilessly, relentlessly, and through that “breathing,” it may have “inspired” some of you to equate success with shiny stuff.

More depressingly, unless you’re lucky enough not to fit the U.S. statistics, while you spend 28 hours a week watching TV, you spend less than four minutes a week in meaningful—key word, meaningful—conversation with your parents.

28 hours of ad bombardment a week versus 4 minutes of meaning per week with your parents. Clearly, parents, teachers, and spiritual leaders have about the same chance of extinguishing the flames of desire coming from the boob-tube that they would of putting out the sun with a fire extinguisher.

So your time is coming: from these honors to those opportunities to cash in on them for a life of shiny things bought at the price of “messing things up” and making the world worse, you’re going to face choices. Will you be able to keep your honor intact?

A Cautionary Life

Let me tell you a true story to illustrate this point. It’s the story of Dr. Richard Teo, who is a 40-year-old millionaire and cosmetic surgeon in Singapore—or was. Because Dr. Teo’s 40^th year was his last. Last year, he died of lung cancer.

In a speech to a class of dental school students—you can see it on YouTube, and I urge you to—Dr. Teo shared the story of his success.[3] His description of his teen years should sound familiar to many of you. “Since my youth,” Dr. Teo said,

I’ve been a typical product of today’s society…. I was told by the media… and the people around me that happiness is about success—and that success is about being wealthy. I’m a typical product of what the media portrays. So I led my life according to this motto.

Back in those days, [Dr. Teo continues,] I was highly competitive, whether in sports, studies, leadership. I wanted it all. I’ve been there, done that.

But at the end of the day, it’s still about money.

Dr. Teo was from a working-class family. His hard work in high school earned him a scholarship to NUS, where he entered its elite ophthalmology program. He got a research grant that led to two patents—one for equipment for eye surgery, another for an eye laser. He showed great promise in helping the blind to see.

But there was a problem: while his friends who went into private practice were, as he put it, “making tons of money,” he was only earning a moderate income. He obviously wasn’t poor, and yet, since he’d been taught “it was all about money,” that moderate income wasn’t enough.

Dr. Teo speaks of the moment when he discovered, as he puts it, that “people who are not happy to pay $20 to see a General Practitioner have no qualms paying ten thousand dollars for a liposuction, 15 thousand dollars for a breast augmentation.”

And this is the moment of truth for that that promising high school Honor Student and elite university student; this is the moment when he faced the question I’m asking you to contemplate: “Will he be able to continue handling the opportunities he has earned with honor?”

Dr. Teo shares the reasoning that led to his choice:

It’s a no brainer isn’t? Why do I want to be a GP? I’ll become an aesthetic physician. So instead of healing the sick and ill, I decided that I’d become a glorified beautician.

Long story short, Dr. Teo decision to abandon the blind for a life of enlarging breasts and reducing thighs made him millions in his first year of private practice. He was pictured in magazines with celebrities and tax-dodging Facebook founders. He bought toys—he was especially proud of his shiny Ferrari—and he built a mansion. A decade after enjoying these toys, when dying from Stage 4 cancer at age 40, he discovered that they “brought [him] no joy,” that he “could not hug his Ferrari to sleep.”

Dr. Teo spent his final months trying to atone for his sense of shame—of dishonor—by returning to what we’re here to celebrate: a life of Service. He returned to helping the sick instead of profiting from the vain, making the rounds comforting people who, like himself, were suffering from terminal cancer.

Let’s leave him there, thankful that he found meaning in his life, though only very late. I know this is depressing stuff, but hey: five minutes of depression now, if it “inspires” any of you to withstand the temptations to sell out that are surely coming your way, may save you from years or decades of depression later, if and when you realize that you did sell out.

(Sell out what again, Mr. Burell? Character. Service. Leadership.)

So—Yeah. Blech. Yuck. Horrible. I feel it too. Not inspiring at all. I apologize—but again: Honor is no laughing matter. We’re not here to party.

In any case, let’s transition from this “dying depressed with the most toys” sewer of a story to conclude it in the comic vein. Let’s conclude it with George Carlin’s take on this YOLO brand of “wisdom”: “Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions,” bother Carlin preaches,

is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.[4]

What I am Not Saying

At this point I want to make sure you’re not hearing me saying, “Do not become wealthy.” As a product of the working class who paid all his expenses for over a dozen years in college—tuition, rent, car payments, insurance payments, gas, food, utilities, on and on—by working low-skill, low-pay jobs, and for whom the experience of emptying the spare change jar on the floor in order to count enough coins to buy a bagel sandwich for breakfast was not uncommon at all, I can tell you with all certainty: there is no dignity in poverty. Worrying about how to keep a roof over your head next month is not a lifestyle I recommend to you. By all means, prosper: take care of your material needs for yourself, and for your family.

Nor do I want you to think I’m condemning bankers, businesspeople, doctors, or any of the other well-paid professionals as a class. At its best, banking is itself service, providing the capital to the talented entrepreneurs who can innovate, start businesses, improve life, and provide jobs for people who need them. Doctors, at their best, ease suffering. On and on.

So use your talents, by all means, and provide comfort for yourself and your family. Just “don’t mess things up” by choosing more comfort at the price of your honor.

Confucius—and those of you know this white Chinese guy talking to you right now would not finish his speech without a nod to the divine Confucius at some point—says it very sensibly and, to me, rightly:

Wealth is something everyone wants—but if you have to gain it in dishonorable ways, it’s better to be a street-sweeper.[5]

Wealth and honor are not mutually exclusive terms, then—okay? You can have both, if you make the right, but very difficult, choices, and don’t sell your honor for, you know—shiny body-tape and shiny sandwiches.

Monstrous, but True

I’m going to close with an anecdote that might help you understand why I chose this theme:

One year here at SAS, a student—let’s call him or her “Alex,” a nice gender-free name to protect his or her identity—asked me to write a college recommendation letter. I only knew Alex for a brief semester, but Alex impressed me, demonstrated drive and grit, belonged to service clubs, was in NHS, the whole nine yards. So I agreed—and if I agree to write you a recommendation letter, my own spirit of Service kicks in: I polish the hell out of that letter to make it sound as if composed in heaven. I do it because you’ve made me trust that you will do good in the world.

Alex came by a few months later to tell me the good news: acceptance at the “reach” college. “Do you know what you plan to study?” I asked. Alex smiled and answered, “I know exactly what I want to study: Corporate law. I want to get through college as quickly as possible in order to make big bucks protecting them from consumers they’ve hurt.” “Yeah, right,” I said: “Seriously: what are your plans?” And Alex laughed and said, “I am serious. Those are my plans.”

Though not aimed at me, that remark hit me like a kick to the stomach. I felt dirty for several days after hearing it—and again, not because Alex chose what can be an honorable profession, but because Alex found hurting others for money a laughing matter. I felt a bit sick at the idea of my life-work—endless hours of service to the students in our community—promoting the success of individuals like Alex.

Try to imagine how that would make a teacher feel.

Honorable—and Equally True

Now let me wrap up with a more uplifting story—and for those of you impatient for me to reach the end, also the final one. It happened in class just this Wednesday: I was introducing a lesson in which students had to read three ancient Chinese texts about terra cotta warrior-guy Qin Shihuangdi. The three texts contradicted each other on several important points, required sharp skills in analysis, literacy, and reasoning—the same wonderful skills that made me at one point consider going into law myself. When I asked how many students in the class had any interest in becoming lawyers, hoping to “inspire” any who said yes by this challenge, not a single hand went up. Interesting. On impulse, I had to ask, “Just out of curiosity—around the room real quick: what are you leaning toward devoting your life to in college?”

The answers? A good seven or eight said “engineering”—“Good!”, I said. “Create things that solve problems. Make things. With all the problems crowding the horizon, we need all the engineers we can get.” I also heard “architecture, computer animation, nursing, art, dance, veterinary medicine, international relations, environmental science.”

Not a single YOLO, “he who dies with the most toys wins” answer in the room. That crisis of faith in my profession largely evaporated in that moment.

What I especially liked about their answers, moreover, was that they all shared a passion for some skill, some practice, some intrinsic challenge that they seemed to enjoy tackling. They shared an enthusiasm.

And like “inspire,” the word “enthusiasm” brings us back to this wonderful Unabridged Dictionary—because it, too, has a beautiful metaphor buried way down in its own etymological roots. En—“Into” + theos, Greek for “god”—so, “to have a god inside.” These kids seemed to have found their “god inside”—and having that, they surely wouldn’t feel the need to devote their lives to taping sandwiches on the outside.

We Close

To close: as I said at the beginning of this overly-long speech, it’s essentially a first draft finished at 4.30 this morning. I apologize for that length, but by George, you need to assign the homework earlier. I also apologize for the absence of crowd-pleasing humor and harmless subject matter—but to have chosen that would have made me feel dishonorable.

I congratulate you again for the honor you have received today, and repeat the sincere report that many of you on this stage have enriched my life by making my very wonderful job more wonderful still with your presence. And I hope you carry that honor with you to the grave, at the end of a life that is prosperous, yes, but more importantly, is also one of Service, of Character, of true Leadership—of Honor.

I’m no god, so obviously I cannot inspire you. But that god inside of you, that enthusiasm for self-fulfilling work? I trust with all my heart that, if you honor that, and pursue what you love, you—and all of us in this room—will love what you become. Even if you don’t cure cancer, you will not be spreading it.

So Congratulations, NHS inductees of 2013. I thank you for your time in this solemn occasion, and invite all the elders in this space to congratulate you for your accomplishments along with me.

Works Cited

Confucius, Analects: With Selections from the Traditional Commentaries. Trans. Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett. 2003. Analect 7.12 (adapted), p. 68.

Corless, Roger. The vision of Buddhism: the space under the tree (1990), p. 20
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Carlin

Herr, Norman, Ph.D. “Television and Health: Statistics on American Teens, Television, and Parental Contact”. Web. N.d. http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html

Teo, Richard, M.D. “Thoughts of Life, Wealth, Success & Happiness”. Jan. 19, 2012. Video. http://youtu.be/umLkfADe17s

Wheelan, Charles. “10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You.” Wall Street Journal. April 30, 2012. Web. http://on.wsj.com/IeVcNY

I have a dream that meetings planning semester 2 start on the conceptual and inquiry level, not the factual and knowledge level. (In other words, that they follow UbD as we’re expected to do.)

It could make for beautiful meetings if everybody came to a meeting with a response to an agenda item such as,  “What’s the most interesting, challenging, provocative, real essential question you can come up with for the Age of Imperialism*?”

I’d love to hear people offer their answers–especially if their angle is more exciting than mine. Off the top of my head, I would answer for this one, for example,

“The West on Trial: To What Extent Can Imperialism Be Described as International Criminal Behavior on the Part of the West?”

Notice what this does: It doesn’t teach “an answer.” It doesn’t prescribe which facts students must learn. But it does require students to inquire and research evidence and make arguments with facts–and it provokes them out of any complacency that it’s a settled question that “the West is the Best” (that’s “an exemplary American education with an international perspective” in spades!). And since there’s no one “correct” answer, only historically supported arguments of greater or lesser force, it opens doors to real seminars with real debates.

Contrast this with listing a chronological series of Textbook Chapter Headings and making multiple choice questions unrelated to any clearly identifiable essential question. I would not enjoy that meeting, and I would not enjoy having to teach with that forced end–the common assessment–in mind.

My understanding of UbD–and I’m fairly certain it’s in the ballpark–is that this is how units should be planned. Knowledge only comes after standards and understandings and essential questions have been identified. Knowledge is meaningless if put first, and meaning is skipped over in the name of traditional “memorize this for the test” coverage.

I know I’m probably professionally too frank for many of you to handle. But I hope you’ll try to look past that and honor this attempt to understand why Understanding by Design and meaning-focused unit planning does not receive the attention it’s arguably expected to receive. “Conceptual, not factual”–we were urged to prioritize it at the beginning of the year, and again at a faculty meeting this week. Yet we’re making MCQs and canned timed essay prompts straight out of 1970. Why?

If anybody wants to have these types of meaning-focused discussions for S2 unit planning, I’m absolutely willing to spring for beer at the local Hawker Center. This is why I love teaching. And this is why I’m so frustrated that I do come off as occasionally abrasive as I do. I just don’t understand why we keep putting ladders against the wrong wall, and work so hard to climb them in our meetings. I can’t understand why we never talk about meaning.

*or WW I or WW II or the Cold War or Post-Colonialism or the War on Terror or the Rise of China

So Students 2.0 — with help from “Arthus” and a nudge from Lindsea — is indeed back up, but with a twist: it has a new address: students2oh.net.(Originally it was .org.)

Apologies to all for that lapse. Better late than never. And it’s nice to revisit that stretch of the path.

The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death. So if I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death.
– the Zhuangzi, Ch. 6, transl. Burton Watson*

On Beauty, Tragedy, and Inspired Irresponsibility

Zhuangzi, Daoism’s second sage, dreams he’s a butterfly. Or is the butterfly dreaming it’s Zhuangzi? Zhuangzi isn’t sure.

One of the beauties of teaching Chinese history, for me, is that I make my living doing something I passionately love to do. Not only would I do this job for free — I would even pay to do it.**

But this beauty has a tragic side too: the demands of the teaching profession allows precious little extra time to write regularly about the daily riches of the mind flowing through the hours in the classroom. My beloved John Keats, that sublime, gorgeous, tragic English Romantic poet who died so young — only 24! – expresses this tragedy well in his sonnet, “When I Have Fears” [emphasis added]:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

That “teeming brain” is the real pay of teaching Chinese history and thought. That “fear” of “ceas[ing] to be” before being able to write out the thoughts flowing from the daily work is the tragedy.

So, stack of papers to mark and lesson-planning template currently demanding my time? For the moment, be damned. Because I have just fallen in love with the mind of a man named Chad Hansen, after reading the first five pages of his ground-breaking 1992 study, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought.

A Masterpiece of Thanksgiving: A Daoism Scholar’s “Acknowledgments” Section

The kicker? Those five pages are merely his “Acknowledgments” section — that conventional section of the author’s “thank yous” acknowledging all the people (“I’d like to thank my wife for her patience while I researched and wrote this book”) , places (“and Stanford University for the year off to allow me to write”), and experiences (“and my students over the years for their feedback and insights”) that deserve a moment of gratitude and civilized recognition.

Many readers skip the “Acknowledgments” section without reading in order to get on with reading the actual book. Those that skip Hansen’s pay a high price for their unstill impatience. Because Hansen expresses his thanks like a fellow lover of the life of the mind.

A. Thanking Thinkers

He thanks A.C. Graham, for instance, with this loving line:

The entire field of Chinese thought could not have advanced to the point of being philosophically interesting without his magnificent lifelong contribution. Without any hesitation, I rank his publication of Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science as a far more important event in understanding Chinese thought than the unearthing of the Mawang-dui tombs (vii).

Hansen wins me with the fearless choice of the word “magnificent” to describe the world of the mind, and even more with that last claim about the importance of Graham’s book. It speaks volumes of Hansen’s own lucky fortune to know the love of the life of the mind — of reading only “the best that has been thought and said in the world”, as Matthew Arnold so wonderfully put it — that he can so confidently rank the views unfolded in Graham’s book over the most exciting archaeological discovery from the 2100-year-old Han Dynasty tombs at Mawang-dui (to see how exciting, go here, here and here).

On the following page, Hansen becomes more beautiful — yes, beautiful — still. After thanking Graham and two other 20th century scholars for being “the three giants of Anglo-American sinology” and “links in the chain of creative transmission” of ancient Chinese thought, Hansen wins me with his fourth choice — a scholar not so close to us in time:

[T]he presence of the passion and commitment to preserving dao is a debt we all owe to Confucianism–and its first great innovative transmitter, Confucius.

Lovely. “I’d like to thank three white guys who wrote recent books, and one Chinese guy named Confucius who died 24 centuries ago for his book.” This is the life of the mind: living or dead, ancient or modern, as long as the ideas are fine and there to be shared about “the finest things that have been thought and said” on a subject, space and time don’t matter. Confucius is not a hero or a superhuman giant; he’s a fellow conversationalist with the rest of us. Hansen’s acknowledgment of Confucius’ contribution to this fine conversation is itself fine (and “fine!” is what I wrote next to it in the margin):

Without [Confucius'] transmission, there would be no possibility of this odyssey of the mind. It gives the resources for traversing the greatest conceptual, linguistic, and space-time distance possible in the actual world (vii). [emphasis added]

Hansen mentions that he’s in his 30th — 30th! — year of studying, teaching, and thinking about ancient Chinese thought. I’m only in my 5th, a novice compared to him, with less than five years of concentrated study and only maybe 20 or 30 of its key texts under my belt. So reading Hansen’s “Acknowledgments” gives a special pleasure to me when it lists so many of the writers I have managed to explore — the 19th century Scottish missionary James Legge, who was first to translate the Confucian and Daoist classics into English while in Hong Kong after the Opium Wars; stellar 20th century “transmitters” into English like Wing-sit Chan, Burton Watson, William Theodore de Bary, Joseph Needham, and Bernard Karlgren; Tu Wei-Ming and P.J. Ivanhoe; the exquisite Roger Ames, Henry Rosemont, and Robert Eno. I’ve enjoyed these men in my own timeless conversations with their writings, my own scribblings in their margins (extending them, challenging them, qualifying them, and sometimes merely drawing a smiley-face, a “quotable,” a “!”, a “wtf?!”, a “wow,” a “fine!“). I don’t know Hansen, but we know the same people and their ideas. I look forward to meeting Hansen and hearing his ideas, finally. God knows I’ve come across his name dozens of times in my readings so far.

More love for Hansen when he writes about my own cherished Herbert Fingarette, whose slim Confucius: The Secular as Sacred stopped time for me on so many of its gem-like pages: Fingarette’s radical re-interpretation of Confucius upset the traditional scholarly understanding and, like any radical in the company of mainstream thinkers, received much unkind criticism. Apparently Hansen was among those critics, wrote something unkind, and came to understand Fingarette’s brilliance only later. So how kind of Hansen to state in his “Acknowledgment,”

[I was similarly delighted by] Fingarette’s picture of Confucius, to which my review was too unkind. I have always appreciated his ground-breaking vision of the depth of Confucius’ reliance on [ritual] convention (ix). [emphasis added]

 

B. Thanking Parents, with a Twist

If you’re still with me in this unexpectedly long love letter, your reward is here, as I close with Hansen’s final acknowledgments, which are among the most unusual and delightful acts of literary gratitude I have ever encountered.

Hansen gives the standard thanks to his university employers, his professors as a student, his wife for her patience and for “making space for [his] bizarre work habits and curious interest in wildly different ways of thinking” (x), and for her feedback as he wrote (as a life-long nocturne typing this mental love letter at a 24-hour open-air Singapore “Hawker Center” at 3 a.m., while my wife sleeps at home — a normal “bizarre work habit” of my own — I hear Hansen on this one loud and clear. Marriage to a mental traveler is no normal marriage, nor is it an easy one). But when he gets to the equally standard thanks to his parents, he adds the following endearing and non-standard twist:

Lest I forget what we must all learn from Confucians, let me also thank my parents. They provide the basis on which we all build. In my case they gave me both the habit of early rising and hard work and a love of learning (x). [emphasis added]

“What we must all learn from Confucians” indeed. They take “Honor thy father and thy mother” into dimensions of depth and beauty unknown to our Commandment-following biblical tradition. To see Hansen acknowledge this influence of Confucius — and the urgency that Westerners learn it suggests his view that they haven’t — adds still more to the pleasure of getting to know this man in his first pages. Ditto that “love of learning”: the key word, as for this entire letter, is “love.”

C. Thanking the Dao

All nice and good — beautiful, even. But the next paragraph’s turn from a Confucian to a “Daoist acknowledgment“? Just wow:

If personal history and transmission of culture is a cause [of the ideas I present in this book], then so is evolution. My thanks to the primates, large mammals, the plant kingdom, and the unfathomable natural forces on which they rest. The electromagnetic field coursing through my computer no doubt flows from the Big Bang. (Mysticism is an easy matter [in] these days of black holes and singularity) (x).

Just look at that.

D. Thanking . . . wtf?!

And now get ready for this:

No serious skeptic can cite natural causes and ignore supernatural ones. A specific footnote of thanks to Dan Hoffman for originating the theory that I am a reincarnation of Zhuangzi. Apparently Zhuangzi decided that the distortion and misunderstanding of his doctrine had gone on long enough and needed a missionary. What better than to use the barbarian [English-American] system? He chose rebirth in the Rocky plateaus of the High Uintah mountains of Utah where one can grow to outward maturity acquiring a minimal cultural endowment . . . . where [the] nearest neighbors were three miles away.

From there, Hansen writes, his Zhuangzi-possessed self was whisked to Hong Kong,

where I saw more people in fifteen minutes than I had seen in my whole life. There I quickly learned there was more gospel to learn than to teach (xi).

And oh, my young and still so often literal-minded students, if you are reading this, please see that Hansen is, in the best Zhuangzi-fashion imaginable, pulling your leg with this reincarnation stuff — and showing you, maybe for the first time (or second, since hopefully your reading of the Analects showed you the same thing), that scholars are far from the dusty, boring old squares our anti-intellectual American culture likes to stereotype them as being!.

E. (wtf?!, part 2) Thanking Mormonism

I’ll leave the final acknowledgment to Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism (and unwitting agent of Zhuangzi’s master plan, according to Hansen!), and his Mormon influence on Hansen “despite [Hansen's] professed atheism” (xi) for you to enjoy if you buy the book.

Me? I only hope I don’t “cease to be” before moving as slowly, lovingly, and joyously through the rest of Hansen’s book as I have through these mere first five pages. Thanks to Zhuangzi, I “love my death as much as my life,” and will happily pass when my Yang flows south and my Qi flows back into the “Big Lump” of life. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting a few more years to enjoy these conversations with other strangers speaking on pages, letting me speak back on them, and in that way becoming “friends of the mind.”

—–

*Complete Zhuangzi online here.

** Two years ago, when I first “fell in,” I literally offered $1,000 to the other teacher of Chinese history at my school to let me take her sections, so I could have all the sections and take the subject places that only a lover knows. But, bad luck, she said no. At the end of that year, that bad luck became good: a whim of course scheduling complications gave all the History of China classes to me anyway. The rest is pure, loving history.

Cross-posted from my China blog, Writing China.

Who needs CNN? (Click image for larger view)

I broke my own rule by sending the following to students in an email, rather than posting to the web:

[Student] and I had a talk about economics journalism, and how CNN and even Reuters and McClatchy are second-rate (for CNN, third-rate) compared to professional economists who blog their views regularly. Since you guys seem interested in figuring this stuff out, but don’t seem to have figured out that the hardest-hitting and most in-depth (and readable) analysis is in the top-tier economists’ blogs, I offer the following starter-pack. It’s multipartisan, from right to left (especially Economists Club).

You’re smart enough to figure out Google Reader and RSS feed subscriptions with a simple Google search (use those terms), so I’ll just share a few economics blogs that go way deeper than the mainstream media.

Subscribe to them, read them regularly, and you’ll feel your brain swell beyond the pop journalism dimensions:

Here’s a Google Reader Bundle of the Econ blogs I read. Click the image  to go to the RSS feed for all of them (and feel free to drop recommendations in comments) Update: As a perceptive reader points out, Matt Taibbi is not an economist — though he’s a valuable (and hilarious) investigative journalist specializing in the Wall St./Politics nexus — so I removed him from the bundle:

Click the image for the Bundle page, subscribe there.

Crazy, beautiful backstory: Several eons ago, I wrote a “Must-Reads Before Dying” post that the inimitable Stephen Downes challenged for its omission of Confucius. I met his challenge with a cheeky “Confucius? Really? Too stuffy for students” type response:

And Stephen, notice the sentence before this update? Of course there are omissions…. The Dao De Jing? A deep book, but too ponderous and opaque next to the joyous alternative of Zhuangzi. The Analects? Sure, though far from a literary masterpiece.

Fast forward to, oh, the last three years teaching the entire history of China six times over (it’s a semester course, so I get to watch that epic story twice a year). With each turn to the “100 Schools of Thought” of Classical China, during its very un-classical and downright barbarous Warring States Period, I’ve had the pleasure of re-visiting Master Kong’s Analects and, with each re-visit — and re-read, and reading of new translations (my god, the Ames and Rosemont philosophical translation is rich), and re-annotation — and I’ve had the pleasure of esteeming and enjoying him more and more. (Prof. Robert Eno of Indiana University has an excellent, free “teaching translation” here.)

So, Mr. Downes: a mega mea culpa. You were so very right — and your philosophical background, which you recently pointed to in a Stephen’s Web post defending the value of a philosophy major, showed that value in your challenge to that “Must-Reads” post. Do I still love Zhuangzi and Laozi and the Daoists? Absolutely. But Confucius has grown on me with each new read until now, he — and Mencius and Xunzi — are even more “must-read before dying.” The bloody Chinese hit the jackpot in terms of ancient wisdom. Crazy cool.

So anyway, yeah: not much calling to write about technology in education any more (obviously, as the silence shows). But to use it to write alongside, with, to, and for students? And anybody else interested in what the world’s oldest living civilization may have to offer the young upstarts like our own? Oh, yes.

Anyway, that’s how this blog started, years ago. It was for my students. I began because I was making my freshmen in Korea blog about history and literature, and pulled the old “practice what you preach” thing by blogging alongside them.

Now, though, it’s China and the West in the ultimate civilizational stand-off. Drop by and join the conversation if you’re interested (and here’s the class blog, chocablock with readings to catch you up if you want an education in Chinese history that has nothing to do with textbooks and everything to do with provocative reads and questions).

Consider that an invitation. Here’s the card:

Mao swimming the Yangtze at 72, in 1966

I asked for voice in the “Was Mao Really a Monster?” editorial assignment, and boy did I get it in this student’s opening:

The cool waves splashed against his chest, his glimmering green teeth glistened in the beautiful sun, his body moved majestically in the cool waters. This is not the image of a great brute, but of an excellent ruler. After seeing Mao’s adorable face, there is no way you can classify him as a monster.

I’m not making fun of the writer, by the way–the kid’s bright, and the sentences above, though obviously written in what David Sedaris might call a “kicky” (and academically heretical) mood, are pretty elegant for teen prose. (A webcam reflection he did this week made me recommend, in all sincerity, that he consider aiming to become the next-generation Pee Wee Herman.) And since he couldn’t resist going for the laugh–and succeeding in giving it to me, out loud, just now–I pass it on for your enjoyment.

(More on Mao’s historic swim below:)

And speaking of Pee Wee, here’s a blast from his amazing 1980s wonderland. It’s one of few children’s shows I watched religiously as an adult: