Reconciliation

Karen Kalteissen, Rutgers University, Fall 2005

Assignment 1

Context:

• Many of you have been raised in Christian, Jewish, or Muslim traditions or within cultures informed by monotheistic belief systems. Thurman speaks from assumptions that may seem alien to you.
• One particular challenge may arise from the fact that Americans and many others in the world have been taught to value “individualism” highly.
• The task for many of you, therefore, will be to set aside knee jerk reactions that object, “Whatyamean there is no self? No way!”
• In class, you will be helped through a “temporary believing” exercise that may help you develop an effective approach to challenging readings and ideas.
• Some of you, on the other hand, may have been raised in one of the Buddhist, the very different Hindu, or other non-monotheistic traditions or cultures. Others may have chosen to study or embrace such traditions.
• The challenge for you may be to avoid an equally knee-jerk “Hooray for our side” reaction.
• Although each of us may have slightly different stumbling blocks to avoid and new territory to explore, we share one task: to develop a project that approaches the assignment question in an open-minded way that seeks to discover ideas and perspectives we were not aware of before we began working with the article.
• We have been discussing “reconciliation” as envisioned by the South African post-apartheid commission. They saw uncovering and speaking truth as the key to reconciling victim and victimizer to stop the cycle of violence and move forward to make human life better. Throughout the term, you will discover new layers, new colors, and new richness in the concept of “reconciliation.” Start allowing it to grow now.

Assignment Question: How can what Thurman means by “selflessness” facilitate reconciliation between persons and among groups in the world?

Questions to Prime the Pump:

• What is the difference between what you thought “selflessness” meant before you studied Thurman and what explains that he means by it? Be careful not to oversimplify his complex definition.
• Thurman says the Buddha understood that “selflessness kindles the sacred fire of compassion” (53). What does this mean? What is the relationship between compassion and reconciliation?
• What kinds of “reconciliation” might be facilitated by selflessness?
• Thurman claims selflessness “does not mean that you are disconnected,” but rather that we are all “still totally interconnected.” If this is true, what difference does it make?
• What is the difference between an “ultimate self” and a “relative self”?
• In a Publishers Weekly article quoted in the Riverhead edition of Infinite Life, the reviewer wrote: “Among the riches offered here is the insight that we do not become faceless blobs as we realize our selflessness and the infinite nature of our lives but true individualists.”

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Context:

• Robert Thurman writes about the tendency of one “self” to think of itself as pitted against another self, or even more dangerously, one self believing that it must fight to survive against Them--all the rest of the selves in the world.
• Deborah Tannen is also concerned about the “I vs. I” or the “Us vs. Them” way of thinking.
• One way to look at “reconciliation” is as the art and process of getting beyond the “vs.” in human relations.
• Many important 20th and 21st century thinkers, including the post-apartheid South African commission, believe that one of the keys to reconciliation is “truth.” We must discover, reveal, and speak the whole truth – or as much of it as we can uncover—before we can hope to reconcile differences and move on.

Assignment Question: What can Thurman’s ideas suggest to us about the roots of the argument culture in Western society?

Questions to Prime the Pump:

• What truth can Thurman’s ideas about self offer us to understand and begin to reconcile the oppositional forces Tannen describes?
• What happens to the search for truth and reconciliation when knowledge (as Deborah Tannen claims) is seen as forming “warring camps”?
• What is the relationship between the “basic assumption” Tannen asks us to question and the basic Western assumptions Thurman questions?
• Tannen’s chapter includes a section on “The Cost in Human Spirit.” Could Thurman’s article have a similarly titled section? Where? In what way?
• Tannen suggests the benefits of getting beyond “dualism” by which she means the “absolute and irreconcilable principles continually at war.” Does Thurman make a similar claim? What do the two authors together suggest those benefits might be?

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Assignment 3

Context:

• The “Us. vs. Them” or “I vs. You” antagonism that we have studied in Thurman and Tannen rears perhaps its ugliest head in Beth Lofredda’s study of Matt Shepard’s murder in Laramie.
• Both Tannen and Lofredda express disappointment in their academic colleagues, both for what they do and what they fail to do. The academic establishment may illustrate, for them, Abba Eban’s famous quip about groups that never fail to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
• The core purpose of “reconciliation” as it was conceived in post-apartheid South Africa was to halt the cycle of violence and allow both victim and victimizer to get on with the business of making human life better.

Assignment Question: Can Tannen and Thurman help us understand the causes of homophobia and its violent expression? Can this understanding provide any guidelines for reconciliation between gay and homophobic Americans, “to break the cycle of violence and get on with the business of making life better”?

Questions to Prime the Pump:

• What are the roles of fear, anger, sadness, vilification, and untruth in Lofredda? In Thurman? In Tannen?
• What are the consequences of “dehumanizing” the “other,” as Lofredda suggests that Henderson, McKinney, and some CSU students did? What happens when the second “I” (in Thurman’s “I vs. I”) becomes nonhuman, invisible, nothing?
• When Lofredda looks at the response in Laramie in the first days after the attack, she identifies the widespread reaction of “outrage” among some but the relatively limited commitment to the “hard, slow work of social justice” (437). How would Tannen and Thurman explain these responses? How would you explain their roles in reconciliation?
• What is the difference between what Thurman describes as the “relative self” and what Lofredda describes as the “dehumanized” self of the Other?

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Assignment 4

Context:

• Both Matt Shepard and the women of Iran faced oppressors who sought to obliterate them; however, we meet the women as they struggle to survive in “two worlds” and Matt only after he no longer survives in any world. Most of Matt’s glbtq community, however, lives to struggle on.
• Nafisi writes of the “two photographs” as emblems of the “two worlds” the women lived in. “The second photograph belonged to the world inside the living room. But outside, underneath the window that deceptively showcased only the mountains and the tree outside our house, was the other world, where the bad witches and furies were waiting to transform us into the hooded creatures of the first” (24).
• In your last essay, you looked at the causes of prejudice and oppression, and you may find that many of them, including but not limited to religiosity (not to be confused with religion or spirituality), ignorance, and jealously guarded, insecure power, will also apply to the revolutionary regime of Iran. In this essay, you will look not at the sources of oppression in the victimizers but at the means of surviving and perhaps thriving under oppression in the victims.

Assignment Question: What can the experiences of the glbtq community in Laramie and Nafisi’s students in Tehran tell us about the resources oppressed people can use to survive and perhaps overcome their ordeals?

Questions to Prime the Pump:

• Nafisi clearly believes that art, literature, imagination, color and dreams figure in the women of Iran’s survival skills. Are those things relevant to the communities in Laramie?
• Did all of Nafisi’s students truly live in “just” two worlds?
• What complicates the “two photograph/two worlds” theory?
• What role did community play among the survivors of Laramie and the survivors of Tehran? Is the act of forming community in itself an act of reconciliation?
• What is the relationship between Sheherazade who “breaks the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement [. . . and] fashions her universe not through physical force [. . . ] but through imagination and reflection” (19) and the literature class in Tehran? Are imagination and reflection “players” in the university community in Laramie?
• What are we to make of Nafisi’s apparent endorsement of lying (17) if reconciliation is indeed predicated upon truth? And what of the versions of the “truth” that came from the journalists in Laramie?
• Are some differences “irreconcilable”? If Nafisi’s students cannot or should not seek reconciliation with the regime, then of what sort of reconciliation is Nabokov’s art meant to facilitate? Was Matt’s life irreconcilable with a homophobic community?

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Assignment 5

Context:

• Both Nafisi and O’Brien are concerned with the complexity and real difficulty of truth-telling in situations badly in need of reconciliation.
• Both Nafisi and O’Brien are convinced of the power of stories.
• O’Brien claims, “You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask” (83). Nafisi was also interested in the questions Nabokov’s “stories” – and the women’s stories – raised.
• The women of whom Nafisi writes and the characters of whom O’Brien writes are all actively engaged in a struggle to survive unspeakably difficult circumstances.

Assignment Question: What can Nafisi and O’Brien tell us about the nature of “truth telling” – its challenges, its importance, its various manifestations, and its effects?

Questions to Prime the Pump:

• We know Nafisi and “her girls” lied to survive. Are there different levels of truth? Are there lies that actually serve truth? Are there truths that are in fact lies?
• Many of O’Brien’s readers become upset when they learn The Things They Carried is a work of fiction. Nabokov also writes fiction, and Sheherazade, herself a fiction, created more fiction to stop the slaughter. What is the relationship between fiction and truth?
• A common assumption states that “the first casualty of war is truth.” Is this phrase applicable to the Iranian revolution? To the Vietnam War? Would Nafisi and O’Brien consider “truth” a “casualty” in their works? In their worlds?
• Beyond the obvious needs for reconciliation among “warring factions,” the women of Iran were in need of reconciliation within their own identities while the soldiers of Vietnam were in need of reconciliation within their minds and consciences. What kinds of truth helped them achieve these reconciliations? What failed them?
• O’Brien said a “true war story is never moral. It does not instruct nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it

[. . . I]f you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie” (69). How would Nafisi respond to this statement?

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Assignment 6

Context:

• “Reconciliation” is an important concept in the teachings of many religions. In Roman Catholicism, for example, “reconciliation” is part of its sacramental vocabulary, encompassing confession, penance and forgiveness.
• Likewise “peace,” “justice,” “truth” “tolerance,” and “love” are mentioned frequently in the scriptures and teachings of many faiths.
• Advocates of religion in general or specific religions in particular often claim that religious faith is a force for good in the world.
• Just as often, however, religion has been divisive, antagonistic, and bellicose. Some critics claim religion in general or specific religions in particular are a force for discord in the world.
• Many religious groups were vocal in their support or opposition to the Vietnam conflict of which O’Brien writes, and even more religious groups are vocal in their support or opposition to the current war in Iraq.

Assignment Question: What can Armstrong’s ideas about the reconciling potential of spirituality as well as the divisive potential of fundamentalism offer O’Brien and others embroiled or trapped in bitter conflict?

Questions to Prime the Pump:

• How does Armstrong distinguish among religiosity, religion, faith and spirituality?
• What characterizes “fundamentalism,” “revealed religion,” “spirituality” and “mysticism” according to Armstrong?
• Is there anything “spiritual” about O’Brien’s search for truth in retelling the Vietnam experience? Can you find any hints of (Armstrong’s kind of) “mysticism” in O’Brien or your other author?
• Is there anything analogous to (Armstrong’s understanding of) “revealed truth” or “fundamentalism” that causes conflict in O’Brien or in your other author?
• Can thinking of your authors – and the topic of reconciliation – in these terms lead you to an inkling of an “action horizon” as we have discussed it in class?

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