Intellectual maturity, however, is not just a product of reading and contemplation. It is the endresult of an examined, engaged and well-lived life. All the education and experience in the world cannot change the character of a person if that person chooses to behave in an inmature way, or to shun those principles that make someone serious, retrospective and wise. Consequently, as we strive to be intellectually mature we engage in bringing a sense of order to our lives, learning respect for others and gaining an ability to think before we speak.
If knowledge accummulation was all that it took then most old scholars, writers and activists would be mature intellectuals, but they are not. Some people I respect as scholars and writers do not measure up simply because they are more concern about what some literary scholars call "performance"or about their politics then they are about imparting wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge encapsulated within temperance, a bit of long suffering, and an eye toward contributing something that lasts beyond the season. That is why there are so few truly mature intellectuals in our academy and our public life.
But there are some, and they have an influence beyond what they might imagine. Not all of them get everything right, and in today's critical world we can find much fault in their work and thoughts. Being intellectually mature doesn't mean that you are perfect or that you stay up with all the cultural changes, only that what you say is based on solid principles that neither vacillate or are given to enhancing a personal reputation. Some may seem rigid but in fact are not because they understand that they don't know everything, but they are firm because they realize that without firm opinions and recognizeable positions debate and intelletual negotiation is impossible.
Intellectual maturity is also not bond by particular cultural parameters. It is easy to see the mature intellectual as some kind of Einstein or Neibhur--notice the absence of women here--but there are others who do not fit the image but are so in their particular ways. What makes them mature intellectuals is that after a life of accummulating knowledge and engaging actively in their fields, and after a sizeable body of work, they then retreat to reappear only when they have something important to say or write.
Intellectual maturity is also not the domain of the academy or journalism or even the sciences. We tend to get many of them from those disciplines but that is only because we recognize them more easily. The first mature intellectual I met was na old fellow that lived next door to our home. In the afternoons he would gather the barrio kids and tell them stories about the Mexican Revolution, la Llorona, about science and anything that a barrio kid would be interested in. I'm sure that he got some things wrong, at least in the details, but he taught those of us who paid careful attention that there was knowledge to accummulate and worlds to explore.
He was a sober man who read much, said a lot less than he had to, and listened, even to us rowdy kids. Another non-academician, non-elite was Sister Zacharias, a sunday school teacher in a small church that I attended. It was hard to sit through a lesson of hers--she mostly taught adults but I would sneak in occasionally--and not be moved by her spiritual insights, her scriptural knowledge and by the conviction that we could trust every word that came from her mouth. As someone who reads much about religion and doctrine I know that she did not get everything right, but she motivated us to search the divine and to trust.
Trust is a fundamental characteristic of a mature intellectual. You trust them to say only those things they really believe are true, and only after they have been tested it through intense study and action.
After many years of engaging in the intellectual pursuit I realize that intellectual maturity may come with age and experience--though there are young mature intellectuals--but it does not come as a logical sequence. The world itself does not prepare or train us to be intellectually mature. And true intellectual maturity is not found within a moment or a season but is something that lasts for the person's remaining years.
When I think about it that way I realize how far I am from achieving that state of mind. So, for the moment I simply write about it while I admire those who are--from a distance, lest they discover my intellectual inmaturity.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Intellectual Maturity
I have been swamped since I came back to Utah and have written little. Add a bit of spousal illness and it has been hard to think of anything to write. I don't think I have that much to say today but felt the need to continue to communicate. There are so many things I want to say and so I want to be careful not to sound like the street corner preacher who emphasizes the obvious and garbles the details. After all, this blog is partly about communicating and writing, and another part about making sense.
What has been on my mind in recent weeks is change, and the ability to deal with it whether it comes at the dawning of our intellectual lives or at the sunset. Change is not new but it seems to come faster and in more varied ways today with technology. Everyone has a say and there are many good ideas and presumptions out there as well as many others that dressed themselves as such. For a person that wants to keep in touch with what goes on around him/her the overload can easily destroy a line of thought. And when you get old that can be rather inhibiting and destabilizing. It also makes it hard to be a mature intellectual.
Maturity requires profound thinking and the ability to focus on specific thoughts and actions. It is difficult to do so today. I now understand why Thoreau took "time out" to live by himself and why Emily Dickens stayed in her room most of her life. I love the woods but would never live there alone and while I love my home the four walls eventually become smaller and suffocating. Yet, finding my space and my time are more important today than ever.
I was better at it when I was simply a freelance writer and got up to write and went to sleep after writing. Only in those moments when I went out to make a few bucks did I interrupt that part of my thoughtful life.
Becoming a professor changed all of that because I did not believe in "carving my space" at a time that I was mentoring students, giving interviews to the media, or conducting research for my books. I became a public person while being a deeply private one. As much as I enjoy gatherings with friends and engaging in intellectual discussions, I still often find myself alone in a crowd because that is where I feel the most confident.
I believe that as we mature intellecutally we need to get a bit more introspective and to be more profound in our analysis and our work. Accummulating knowledge is important but it is not the same as digesting it. We can go on expanding side ways and even upward but much of that will "tip over" if we don't ground ourselves more deeply in the soil of knowledge and wisdom.
Rather than sharpening our intellectual tools to continue to compete with newer scholars who graduate with an abundance of theories and technological skills, we need to better assess what we know and find ways to articulate it in more meaningful ways. Our competitive years are over and it is time to create a secure place for our work. This is important even if by stepping away from the hustle and bustle of academia, we are perceived as a bit oudated and are accused of "not getting it" or of "not staying current". I think there is something to the criticism but I also believe that much of it has to do with the competitive nature of the intellectual pursuit.
No one that keeps trying to stay "current" ever writes work that will stand the test of time because every discipline and genre requires time to master, and in the quasi-interdisciplinary academic or intellectual world in which we live, we end up mastering nothing because we cannot focus on anything for too long. In a period of time when information, data and analyses continue to pour into our heads, it is hard to truly known anything but the most superficial. So we expand sideways but set down very little intellectual roots. That may be okay and even natural for young scholars, writers and intellectuals. Accummulation while young is important for maturity in our latter years but it can evenutally be detrimental to the thought process. I don't mean we should stop learning or acquiring news skills, only that we shift our focus to making better and more profound sense of what we know and have learned already.
Having challenging jobs and developing difficult research questions is of great value while young, but there is a time to consolidate, evaluate and then share. While we are suppose to do that for all of our work, there is something about time and experience that can provide us with important insights.
Recently, I was reminded of a friend I had at a university. He was a living library of his community's history and had been an important actor within that past. But by the time I met him, he sat on the steps outside of his office and smoke hundreds of cigarrettes sharing with anyone who listened stories of his past. I encouraged him to write and to try to make sense of all that he learned and experienced, but he could not get away from longing "to be active". Eventually his importance faded and the university cast him out like it did its shreded documents. They may have done that anyway but he would have at least taken with him something more than a black lung.
I also met another fellow who kept accummulating books, documents and all the material culture he could. But he never wrote, rarely shared what he was learning with anyone, and he was so difficult to associate with that he left almost no legacy, no new way of thinking, and no body of work that could be poured over to learn something more than the obvious in our field.
It is also important for young scholars and intellectuals to know that being smarter, better trained and more passionate does not yet make them truly great scholars or intellectuals. That takes time and it takes going through all the phases necessary to get to a point in which things that come out of your mouth or your computer have been weighed, tested, and refined over time. Of course, being old and having done something for many years guarantees little except social security and medicare.
At this stage of my life I see my work as only beginning to scratch the surface in terms of depth and profoundness. Part of the reason is that I have spent too much time learning a profession to which I came late, and trying to overcome a sense of inferiority for not having gone to a more prestigious school and not having the type of mentors considered masters in their fields. So, sometimes l've belabored my intellectual work, and given that I prize all the opportunities I get, I tend to "stay" too long and thus slow my maturing. The fact that I feel twenty years younger than I am, I sometimes trick myself. But then I feel the aches and pains of the physical self and those of the intellectual one and I am reminded that I must move on.
For this reason, I will be droppping much of what I do now at the end of this academic year and dedicate myself to seeking deeper knowledge and learning to be more profound in my intellect. This means I will eventually drop this blog, stop presenting in some conferences and doing lectures for pay that often come my way. I don't plan to get "old" too soon, and there is, in my view, still a long and exciting road yet to travel, but I do hope to mature intellectually and otherwise before I start looking twenty years older than I am. I may never get there but at least my carcass on the road to intellectual wisdom might get me some sympathy.
What has been on my mind in recent weeks is change, and the ability to deal with it whether it comes at the dawning of our intellectual lives or at the sunset. Change is not new but it seems to come faster and in more varied ways today with technology. Everyone has a say and there are many good ideas and presumptions out there as well as many others that dressed themselves as such. For a person that wants to keep in touch with what goes on around him/her the overload can easily destroy a line of thought. And when you get old that can be rather inhibiting and destabilizing. It also makes it hard to be a mature intellectual.
Maturity requires profound thinking and the ability to focus on specific thoughts and actions. It is difficult to do so today. I now understand why Thoreau took "time out" to live by himself and why Emily Dickens stayed in her room most of her life. I love the woods but would never live there alone and while I love my home the four walls eventually become smaller and suffocating. Yet, finding my space and my time are more important today than ever.
I was better at it when I was simply a freelance writer and got up to write and went to sleep after writing. Only in those moments when I went out to make a few bucks did I interrupt that part of my thoughtful life.
Becoming a professor changed all of that because I did not believe in "carving my space" at a time that I was mentoring students, giving interviews to the media, or conducting research for my books. I became a public person while being a deeply private one. As much as I enjoy gatherings with friends and engaging in intellectual discussions, I still often find myself alone in a crowd because that is where I feel the most confident.
I believe that as we mature intellecutally we need to get a bit more introspective and to be more profound in our analysis and our work. Accummulating knowledge is important but it is not the same as digesting it. We can go on expanding side ways and even upward but much of that will "tip over" if we don't ground ourselves more deeply in the soil of knowledge and wisdom.
Rather than sharpening our intellectual tools to continue to compete with newer scholars who graduate with an abundance of theories and technological skills, we need to better assess what we know and find ways to articulate it in more meaningful ways. Our competitive years are over and it is time to create a secure place for our work. This is important even if by stepping away from the hustle and bustle of academia, we are perceived as a bit oudated and are accused of "not getting it" or of "not staying current". I think there is something to the criticism but I also believe that much of it has to do with the competitive nature of the intellectual pursuit.
No one that keeps trying to stay "current" ever writes work that will stand the test of time because every discipline and genre requires time to master, and in the quasi-interdisciplinary academic or intellectual world in which we live, we end up mastering nothing because we cannot focus on anything for too long. In a period of time when information, data and analyses continue to pour into our heads, it is hard to truly known anything but the most superficial. So we expand sideways but set down very little intellectual roots. That may be okay and even natural for young scholars, writers and intellectuals. Accummulation while young is important for maturity in our latter years but it can evenutally be detrimental to the thought process. I don't mean we should stop learning or acquiring news skills, only that we shift our focus to making better and more profound sense of what we know and have learned already.
Having challenging jobs and developing difficult research questions is of great value while young, but there is a time to consolidate, evaluate and then share. While we are suppose to do that for all of our work, there is something about time and experience that can provide us with important insights.
Recently, I was reminded of a friend I had at a university. He was a living library of his community's history and had been an important actor within that past. But by the time I met him, he sat on the steps outside of his office and smoke hundreds of cigarrettes sharing with anyone who listened stories of his past. I encouraged him to write and to try to make sense of all that he learned and experienced, but he could not get away from longing "to be active". Eventually his importance faded and the university cast him out like it did its shreded documents. They may have done that anyway but he would have at least taken with him something more than a black lung.
I also met another fellow who kept accummulating books, documents and all the material culture he could. But he never wrote, rarely shared what he was learning with anyone, and he was so difficult to associate with that he left almost no legacy, no new way of thinking, and no body of work that could be poured over to learn something more than the obvious in our field.
It is also important for young scholars and intellectuals to know that being smarter, better trained and more passionate does not yet make them truly great scholars or intellectuals. That takes time and it takes going through all the phases necessary to get to a point in which things that come out of your mouth or your computer have been weighed, tested, and refined over time. Of course, being old and having done something for many years guarantees little except social security and medicare.
At this stage of my life I see my work as only beginning to scratch the surface in terms of depth and profoundness. Part of the reason is that I have spent too much time learning a profession to which I came late, and trying to overcome a sense of inferiority for not having gone to a more prestigious school and not having the type of mentors considered masters in their fields. So, sometimes l've belabored my intellectual work, and given that I prize all the opportunities I get, I tend to "stay" too long and thus slow my maturing. The fact that I feel twenty years younger than I am, I sometimes trick myself. But then I feel the aches and pains of the physical self and those of the intellectual one and I am reminded that I must move on.
For this reason, I will be droppping much of what I do now at the end of this academic year and dedicate myself to seeking deeper knowledge and learning to be more profound in my intellect. This means I will eventually drop this blog, stop presenting in some conferences and doing lectures for pay that often come my way. I don't plan to get "old" too soon, and there is, in my view, still a long and exciting road yet to travel, but I do hope to mature intellectually and otherwise before I start looking twenty years older than I am. I may never get there but at least my carcass on the road to intellectual wisdom might get me some sympathy.
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