Resist Orthodoxy

Roger Berkowitz
It is graduation season. My daughter graduated high school and at her Baccalaureate ceremony, one of the speakers talked about the importance of stories and storytelling. Any event becomes meaningful when and if we tell a story about it. This does not mean that “I” am in full control of my story, that the world revolves around me and my story. Rather, it means, that the stories we tell, the communities we share, the lives we live and compose together weave us into tapestries of collective worlds, they give our lives meaning and insert us into a shared world. Stories can be told and re-told, yet stories are collective. They require both a teller and an audience, and the audience will again tell and retell the story, making it a collective experience. 

For Hannah Arendt, stories are the core of public life. On one level, she cites a line for Isak Dinesen, “All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.” It is also the case that stories, Arendt tells us, help us reconcile ourselves with the world. When we tell stories, we take what is mundane, brutal, horrific, and beautiful, and we compose it into a human narrative, we make it meaningful in ways we can understand. In telling stories about the holocaust or slavery or even the stars above us, we make the world one we can love and live in, make it a human world. There may be some things that defy storytelling, that we seek to expel from the world, not to reconcile with, so the decision to tell a story or not can be a deeply political judgment about what we can and cannot humanize, and how we can or want to do so. 

At Bard College, President Leon Botstein gave the class of 2023 a piece of unsolicited advice, “resist orthodoxy.” As dangerous as giving advice can be, it is good advice. Botstein said: 

Orthodoxy, marked by a specifically American tradition of puritanism, is experiencing a renewal in our troubled times. Today’s orthodoxy is invoked to justify banning books from schools and libraries, violating academic freedom by forbidding subject matter from being taught at public universities, restricting the control by women of their lives and bodies, blocking our right to choose how we live our private lives and express intimacy with others, and rendering the natural world—our environment—which we all hold in common—vulnerable to unfettered degradation. Orthodoxy justifies condemning freedom, tolerance, difference and openness as guiding principles in our politics.

By framing the world along the lines of a simple struggle between good and evil, orthodoxy justifies intolerance, hate, and violence. The relentless onslaught of fatal shootings in our shopping malls, our schools, and places of worship is more that the expression of individual rage and anger in our society. Our shocking culture of gun violence and our collective insensitivity to the death of our neighbors are infected by the self-righteousness and self-confidence of our reigning pseudo religious political orthodoxies, by the very same ideological madness and moralizing arrogance that justifies the death penalty as lawful, as if exacting the penalty of death was a positive virtue. Orthodoxies encourage a culture of revenge and retribution, not one of forgiveness, renewal, redemption and understanding.

I therefore urge the Class of 2023 to pursue as an alternative to orthodoxy, reasoned empathy. Use the skills of inquiry and the pursuit of learning that you have cultivated in your years in college to comprehend, with some sympathy, those with whom you disagree, even with your fiercest enemies. Only by imagining the possible reasons others think differently, absorbing new ideas and information and revising your thoughts and attempting to understand those who oppose your views will the means come into view to persuade, to compromise or defeat—with civility and without violence—that which you think is wrong.