Strangers

As my experience at Butler Community College demonstrates, America is a rich resource for students from many countries who come seeking to better themselves. These students find that they must contend not only with learning a complicated subjects like physics or mathematics, literature or business, but also English.

In my French class last semester, there were two students from Africa, one from Niger, the other from Cote d'ivore. A friend of theirs from the tiny island of Diego Garcia would occasionally sit in on our class.

Last week, I went to the administrative offices of Butler the other day to get a student id. The student who helped me had an indefinable foreign appearance and was timid. She was tall and black, pleasant, but not chatty. Her age was, to my eye, in the mid to late twenties and her dress was conservative. We had some difficulty understanding each others questions and answers. I therefore jumped to the conclusion  that she was also was African. I hoped she too was from a French speaking country, so I could practice my poor French. I asked her if she was a foreign exchange student, and she said no and I left it at that for the moment.But, as time went by with few words exchanged while she took my picture, I was still struck by the impression that she was not American, either by dress or action. So, throwing caution to the wind, I asked her if she spoke a foreign language. Yes, she said it was Swahili. Always, trying to make a connection, I asked in parting how to say "goodbye" in Swahili. "Kwa heri," she replied.

In my computer class, I sit next to a student from Sri Lanka, the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.He is a computer engineer, studious, but quiet.I try to engage him in conversation, but again, I find that the culture gap, inhibits the simple chatter that makes life bearable.

Our neighbor, who is now a doctor, took a year off to go to school in France. He found himself as many students do here, struggling to comprehend a strange language and a complicated subject. Fortunately, a French student befriended him and helped him with his studies.

Language is but a means of communication. Even with a common language we remain strangers. Each culture is defined by its language, music, history, and art. Language may be the means of communication, but the ideas that bring us together are the social values that we share. President Barack Obama shares the experience of almost a quarter of the population, he has one parent who is foreign born. His father was born in Kenya, his mother in Kansas.

President Obama returned to Indonesia, where he spent four years as a young boy. In Indonesia, he spoke to students at the University of Indonesia in the capital Jakarta. "Assalamu'alaikum. Salam sejahtera," Obama began, an Indonesian salutation meaning 'Peace be upon you, prosperous greetings', which drew a wave of approval. President Obama promised to increase the number of  educational opportunities for Indonesian students in the United States, and remarked that it was equally important for Americans to study abroad in order to increase cultural understanding.

Education is the key to the American experience. Education is what made Barack Obama the intelligent and articulate individual that he is. It is an amazing thought when you think about it, but it is an experience that was and is often repeated. When I think of the girl in the id office at Butler, I can't help but wonder if someday, her child may become president of the United States. Kwa heri.

Questions and Answers

My wife and kids are always telling me that I just like to ask questions and that I don't care about the answers.

Not true, I do care about the answers, it's just that the questions are so much more interesting. For instance, look at the questions to the right and see if you don't find them amusing.

Goals dammit

Do you tell the world what you are going to do, and include your family and friends in your dream? Or do you just put your nose to the grindstone and work without fanfare? Answer honestly before reading on.

Wray Herbert, in his column on Mind Matters states emphatically that talk is cheap, it is doing that matters. To bolster his opinion that talk is cheap Herbert refers to an experiment by New York University psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues who ran a number of experiments to test this notion. Here is the experiment as described by Herbert:

The psychologists recruited a group of law students and had them rate a series of statements from "definitely yes" to "definitely no"—statements like: "I intend to make the best possible use of educational opportunities in law." But some of the law students merely dropped the anonymous questionnaire into a box while others went over their answers with the experimenter. The idea was to create a laboratory version of the public pronouncement: that is, some made their intention to intensify their studies known while others kept their intentions private.

Then they took an unusual test. They were shown five photographs of a Supreme Court justice, varying in size from quite small to large, and they were asked: "How much do you feel like a jurist right now?" They had to respond by selecting one of the five photos. This well-tested procedure taps into automatic, unconscious self-evaluations: the larger the picture you pick, the more complete you feel. The idea was to see how much publicly declaring their intentions (or not) made them feel like an icon of modern jurisprudence.

In keeping with Gollwitzer's theory, those law students who had publicly announced their plan to read law journals and so forth tended to pick the larger pictures of their legal role models.

The results were clear. Although all of the law students were motivated, only those who kept their hopes private actually did the work needed to succeed. There is no substitute for hard work. Or, to use the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall, ...practice, practice, practice.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Are you a hedgehog or a fox?

Among the surviving fragments of lines of the Greek poet Archilochus (680 B.C. - 645 B.C.) is the following saying: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." These cryptic words have encouraged writers to debate the meaning behind the words, which may mean no more than that the cunning fox is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense.

One famous interpretation of Archilochus' saying is Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) in which Berlin attempts to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through a single lens of one defining idea and foxes who draw on a variety of experiences and for whom the world is not so simple. Examples of the former include Plato, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Joyce, Sartre. Examples of the foxes might include Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare,Voltaire, and Franklin, and Whitman.  Berlin's essay focuses on Leo Tolstoy arguing that he has taken on the mantle of the omniscient, observing life as both hedgehog and fox. One example will suffice to support Berlin's claim.

In a famous passage dealing with the state of Moscow in 1812 Tolstoy observes that from the heroic achievements of Russia after the burning of Moscow one might infer that its inhabitants were absorbed entirely in acts of self-sacrifice – in saving their country or in lamenting its destruction, in heroism, martyrdom, despair – but that in fact this was not so. People were preoccupied by personal interests. Those who went about their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the most useful to their country and community, while those who tried to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in history, those who performed acts of incredible self-sacrifice or heroism, and participated in great events, were the most useless.

As Tolstoy observed, Archilochus's broad classifications of foxes and hedgehog can apply to the ordinary day to day activities of individuals as well as politicians, businessmen, and thinkers. Do we focus on the task at hand or on the broader implications of our actions? There is both an immediate effect of our actions and a long term effect to what we do. Again, a simple example suffices, a cigarette may gratify a craving for nicotine, but one day lead to lung cancer.A more positive example is that today's education leads to better paying jobs in the future.

Surely, Archilochus must have thought that we all have a role to play - fox or hedgehog. Each animal is successful in its own environment. Each animal has stood the test of time. Thus, in the long term it is not better to be one or the other. The occasion determines which personality is called for. In this sense Tolstoy was right. When war presented itself, the citizens of Moscow went about their lives doing what needed to be done in defense of their capital and country. When Napoleon was defeated, then Tolstoy could observe with dispassionate reflection the many roles of the participants that lead to victory.

A paradox exists in playing the dual roles of fox and hedgehog. Sometimes the basic need to survive conflicts with the altruistic need to spread kindness and goodness throughout the world. Tolstoy himself confronted this dilemma when he chose giving away his worldly possessions over the desires of his family. Hedgehog or fox, we can not always reconcile the role we must play and must resign ourselves to the inevitable conflict.

Also read Steve Wang's article about how the internet is turning the world into a pack of foxes.