I failed to evaluate my calendar and had the "reading" group last night instead of the list of things to do (or the sitting on the couch). We're finishing with the _Kitchen Table Wisdom_ book for the time being. The book is a collection of short narratives from the authors life as a doctor from a family of doctors and practicing a very compassionate psychotherapy for patients facing death due to cancer. There's a great deal about healing and recovery in the text.
Two weeks ago the story that most captured my thoughts was one about a successful woman who was facing cancer, and her sense that she deserved it due to her ruthless cruel life. Her early years were as a child in a war torn country, viciously fighting to survive, and that fight for survival she'd taken to her business life. The author, Rachel Remen, listened and encouraged the woman to tell and tell and tell all of the horrible things she'd done. In a different frame, this might have been the practice of confession. The emptying opened a way for the woman to eventually see a way to her inner self and feel hope. Remen used a phrase something like, "There are things that can never be fixed that can be healed," which captures the paradox of trauma healing. (That includes grief and loss.) Whatever happened that twists ones experience of life, there's no way to go back and repair that -- but there is hope that one can heal and recover from the trauma.
Last night, as we gathered, we brought up my concept of intellectual violence, to describe how certain communities (academia was where most of us pointed our finger), use intellectual prowess in ways that damage relationships and others. I've not articulated my understanding often: it has mainly been a practice where i have learned to STOP THAT.
One of the group helped me understand better the dynamics that make it specifically violent. There are the obvious places of violence, like the faculty member who only pays attention to a talk to ask that one devastating question, where the intellectual power is a used in a domination display. But there's another disruptive dynamic, where there isn't this obvious power-over dynamic, where one's intellectual power means one just asserts the obvious truth and plows on. That sort of confident projection is invaluable in the environment where you've got Mr Ask Devastating Question (excuse me, Dr), but i've know there's also something wrong with it, and long since learned that the behavior that was missing was listening and creating a space for new (others') insight.
My new understanding has to do with framing the behavior with the concepts of boundaries and privilege. I had always characterized the behavior as "expansive" and projecting, but my friend explained her observations in the sense of boundaries: a person behaving in this way doesn't respect the intellectual boundaries of others. That person acts and behaves as if their intellectual understanding is common to all and doesn't recognize that others may have some other way of understanding. It's not a power-over dynamic, but a dynamic of privilege. And, just as other types of privilege are often invisible to the one holding the privilege, this person, who by native gift and training is often "right," doesn't see how their statements dismiss or negate the experience and understanding of others. It's unintentional violence, just as those of us privileged by society in other ways don't intend to create the experience of violence that those without experience in the presence of the privilege dynamic.
The more i think of it this morning, the more i think the easily lampoon-able intellectual privilege of the physicist*, stands as a helpful model for me to understand the dynamics of privilege in general. The need to actively choose to include the other, to listen, to act with the expectation that others have value -- to not treat the rest of the world as lab techs....
Although i'm probably falling into a familiar trap of hubris, so i'll stop now.
We're moving on to _Plain living: a Quaker path to simplicity_, by Catherine Whitmire. It looks like it will lend itself to the same reading aloud and then sharing practice that we've developed with time.
* because while all academics are trained in the war arts of intellectual battle, physicists are notorious for the discipline's belief that any other field is just the application of the basic principles we've learned, and given five minutes we can master your field, too. And it's true, most of the time. Just look what we did to economics.
PS. Can i learn there is no "d" in "privilege"? There are too many vowels -- ivi, ege -- but there is no D. The constant need to go to the spell checker to get rid of the D reached comic proportions in this post.
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