The Hammock Papers: Constructive.

12 March 2023

Constructive.

Forbe's cites Michael Oakeshott in an article on the necessity of intellectual diversity ...

[Liberal education] is a somewhat unexpected invitation to disentangle oneself from the here and now of current happenings and engagements, to detach oneself from the urgencies of the local and the contemporary, to explore and enjoy a release from having to consider things in terms of their contingent features… [It is] an invitation to be concerned not with the employment of what is familiar but with understanding what is not yet understood.

Continuing, an offering of Heterodox Academy's solutions to The Problem ...

Constructive Disagreement occurs when people who don’t see eye-to-eye are committed to exploring an issue together, acknowledging their own fallibility and the limits of their knowledge — and open to learning something from others who see things differently than they do. Learning from our differences, and modeling how to engage despite them, is the foundation of healthy academic practice, and indeed of democratic society itself.

Colleges and universities face a number of challenges in fostering constructive disagreement:
Many students, faculty, and staff lack sufficient training in how to constructively engage across difference — especially as it relates to fundamental ideological commitments.
Constructive disagreement is a skill that must be refined through real-world engagement, but due to the aforementioned deficits within institutions today, many students lack opportunities to meaningfully and charitably engage with underrepresented perspectives.
Many professors who are concerned about this problem don’t know where or how to begin introducing missing perspectives, as they often do not have a solid foundation in them either.
Many academic contexts, from class discussions to academic research, incentivize competition in a way that can be counterproductive to learning and growth. It often seems easier to build a reputation by attacking others than by seeking opportunities for mutual growth and collaborative discovery among people who seem to be on opposing sides of an issue.
The political culture in the United States is highly polarized and increasingly toxic. In such an environment, differences of opinions are often attributed to moral or intellectual defects, with people easily branded as sellouts or traitors for engaging across the aisle.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL