BYM Annual Carey Memorial Lecture
Friday, August 8, 2008
Frostburg, MD
“Let Us Then Try What Love Will Do”
W. Clinton Pettus
I consider it a distinct honor and a privilege to have been asked to deliver the Carey Memorial Lecture at the Baltimore Yearly Meeting Annual Session 2008. Each time I have the opportunity to engage in an activity like this, I reflect upon how fortunate I have been and how it began because my parents loved my seven siblings and me enough to stand against the tide of our time and ensure that we received a college education. A mother who had a high school diploma and a father whose formal education ended in the fourth grade are not your typical parental unit for fostering high educational aspirations in their children. Add to that, many of our relatives and neighbors opposed my older siblings going to college and many of the landowners whose farms we tended would not tolerate it as it meant fewer bodies to tend the crops. It was the latter that caused my family to move every few years from one sharecropping arrangement to another. Fortunately, my parents were not so indebted to any of the landowners that we were not free to do what they thought was in the best interest of our family. Seeing or construing the world in a way that I cannot to this day say that I totally understand, my parents provided for and inspired us to experience a world that I do not think they could have imagined, but I am so grateful that they did.
Our theme this year is “Let us then try what love will do” taken from Some Fruits of Solitude: Wise Sayings on the Conduct of Human Life by William Penn. You may expect me to begin my presentation by talking about love and the many ways that we can use it to make a difference in the world. However, you must understand that my life has not been all that typical and that if experience influences behavior I may not approach this theme in the typical manner. Therefore, I hope you will not take offense to my beginning by talking about the distinctive ways that each of us constructs and reconstructs the meaning in our lives and how those constructs influence our behavior. Then, based upon a theoretical framework about constructs, I will talk about what love is not before talking about what love is and what it can do.
Some years ago, a psychologist named George A. Kelly developed a theory of personality known as personal construct psychology1, which focused on the distinctive ways in which each individual constructs and reconstructs the meanings of her or his life. Underlying his theory is the notion that all people are scientists as opposed to giving that distinguished designation only to a particular class of people who have publicly attained the status of “scientists” by virtue of their education or experience. The idea that all people are scientists may cause many of you to think about the Quaker concept of the priesthood of all people, or direct communication with God, rather than the beliefs of some that only certain people can be priests or communicate with God.
In that regard, you may not be surprised to find the similarity in Kelly’s concept of everyone being a scientist and everyone being a priest if you knew that Kelly spent three years studying toward a bachelor’s degree at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, before graduating from Park College with a degree in physics and mathematics. The Religious Society of Friends in Kansas opened Friends University in September 1898 with an enrollment of 53 students and operated it as a Quaker institution until the 1930s when governance of the school was vested in an independent Board of Trustees. I do not know what George A. Kelly experienced at Friends University or exactly how its governance by Quakers influenced the way he saw the world. However, I can personally testify to the fact that “those Quakers” can have a significant influence on people. Consequently, I submit to you that it is easy for me to believe that his notion of every person is a scientist bears a relationship to his having been exposed to a belief system that says that every person is a priest.
Fundamental to the concept of every person being a scientist is the notion that each of us seeks to predict and control our environment. That is, each of us constructs, tests, revises, and expands personal theories of self and world that enable us to anticipate the recurring themes of our lives. If we know that people behaving in a particular way usually means that they are feeling, for example, anger, fear, sadness or happiness, we adjust our expectations and our behavior accordingly. Hence, we can see that our construct systems reflect our constant efforts to make sense of our world, just as scientists make sense of their subject-matter: we observe, we draw conclusions about patterns of cause and effect, and we behave according to those conclusions. Kelly calls the patterns or templates that we tentatively establish and try out to construe the world “constructs.”
In general, we seek to improve our constructs by altering them to provide a better fit with the world we experience. However, sometimes our personal investment in or dependence upon a construct system is so great that we will forego adopting a more precise construct. In short, constructs that represent our core values and concern our key relationships are complex, quite firmly fixed, wide-ranging, and difficult to change; whereas those that do not matter so much, or about which we do not have much experience, are simpler, narrower, and carry less personal commitment.
In the Quaker world, we often talk about our search for truth. Kelly tells us that a person's construct system represents the truth as he or she understands it in a world of personal feelings and choices. The test of our search for truth is exemplified in what we think and how we behave when we meet persons whose construct systems are different from our own. Do we confront those persons, present opposing opinions or evidence, and get frustrated if they defend their constructs instead of adapting in a direction that is consistent with our construct system? Or, do we accept “the truth” that their system has worked, more or less, for them so far, and that if it is different from ours then it is a reflection of the fact that they have had different experiences, different reactions, and see different things as important?
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Ghana where I visited the Elmina Castle or one of the “Slave Castles.” It is one of about thirty such, surviving edifices (i.e., forts, trading posts and castles) that bear witness to four centuries of the presence of European trading in commodities such as gold and ivory - and in people - on the continent of Africa. The most memorable aspect of the “castle” for me was being guided along a dimly lit tunnel to what was known as “the gate of no return.” The “gate” was erected so narrowly that only one captive could pass through at a time as each was led out, taken to a waiting ship, and subjected to inhuman treatment during and after passage to a strange, new world.
As many of the visitors to the “castle” walked through “the gate of no return” into the bright light of day, I observed that they were teary-eyed. I suppose that some wondered how one set of human beings could have been so cruel to another. Others may have wondered about the involvement of the Ghanaians in the trade as prisoners taken during inter-tribal wars are said to have been sold to the castles. When I walked out, looked around and saw so many people in tears, my first thought was that I had missed something. What did they see or experience that resulted in their feeling something that I did not feel and behaving in a way that initially surprised me? Then it occurred to me that they may have been focusing upon what happened at the castle, or upon what it must have been like to travel in the crowded, inhuman passage to the new world, or upon the conditions that the captives had to endure when they reached the new world. I, on the other hand, focused upon and took some pleasure, drew some inspiration, from the fact that I am a descendent of people who in the face of all this inhumanity found ways to survive and to propagate. My thought was if it were not for their strength of character, their extraordinary will to survive, and their adaptability, I would not be standing there among my teary-eyed colleagues. I did not feel superior or inferior to my colleagues; I did not judge them; and I could empathize with them. However, I realized that my experiences obviously differed from theirs, which in keeping with Kelly’s theory would cause me to construe things and to behave in a different way.
Perhaps my construing of that world was passed on to me by my parents as was exemplified in their seeing possibilities for a brighter future for their children even as they toiled in the tobacco fields of Virginia. Or, maybe it was the torch of hopefulness that was handed to me by my brothers and sisters, through blood and through culture, who saw light in the bleakest moments of life’s struggles. Whatever it was, the difference in my response and those of many of the other visitors to the slave castle was too striking to think that it occurred by chance.
My wife, Kathryn, was an English major at the undergraduate level so sometime we joke about the “little voice” that she and I heard on the radio during some of our travels by vehicle around the Middle Atlantic Region. I think it was the American author, storyteller, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, radio personality, and English major, Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor, who talks about “the little voice” that exists only in the heads of English majors. Picture the movie or the television program where a person may be looking into space and suddenly there is a voice that symbolizes what the person is thinking or what he is experiencing internally. My recollection is that Garrison Keillor tells us that only English majors hear those voices “inside the head” and come up with those impressive little expressions that are shared with the rest of us. So, if I were an English major, I would say to you that the voice of my ancestors came to me upon the ocean blue in Ghana and said “They held our bodies but not our spirits, and you must never let anyone capture your spirit.” Perhaps the voice that comes to a psychology major is not as articulate or beautiful as that of an English major, nevertheless, the voices that have come to me throughout life have caused me to try to live the life of a world that I want to create rather than one that will hold me back. It is a world that says faith, hope and love make us whole; that despair, gloom and hate divide us.
A less personal example of how the way we construe things influences our behavior is, for me, the struggle we sometime have in the American Friends Service Committee in reaching agreement about what strategies we should use to bring about positive change in the world. This example applies to volunteers and supporters as well as to staff members. On our best days, all of us probably see some merit in several approaches or strategies and can reason that each has its place under some set of circumstances. However, on the typical day each of us sees the strategy that has been effective for us as right or good and those of others as wrong or bad. We often confront those who have opposing opinions or approaches and get frustrated if they defend their approaches instead of adapting in the direction that is consistent with our strategy or construct system. Overcoming our differences might be significantly aided if we accepted that the systems of others have worked, more or less, for them so far, and that if their approaches are different from ours the approaches just may be a reflection of the fact that they have had different experiences, different reactions, and see different things as important. The good news is that there is high probability that as long as we continue to believe in the cause of bringing about a positive change in the world we can overcome our differences in approaches. The bad news is the high probability that we could do so much more if we did not let our different ways of construing the world get in the way of our consolidating our efforts. Rest assured that I will do my best to help us to find productive ways to deal with our differences and I invite you to join me in this sorely needed undertaking.
One of Kelly’s very interesting principles to me is the concept that a person's construct system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs. By dichotomous constructs, he means that each of us is able to discern similarities and differences of events in terms that are both personally significant and shared by relevant others. Meaning is based on contrasts where we not only construe what a thing is, but by distinguishing it from what it is not.
As an exercise, suppose you think about a partially shared construct that is common to “Quakerdom” – equality. What is equality? What is it not? Now, try integrity, simplicity, and peace; think about what each is similar to and what is different from each? Let us say for this exercise that we all agree that the opposite of equality is inequality, and that parity is the same as equality. Kelly says to us that to really understand what equality is, we must know that it is, in this case, the same as parity and that it is different from inequality. Remember that how we construe equality, according to Kelly, defines not only how we think but how we behave. Also, remember that the country that sees itself as the greatest nation that has ever existed, the country that presents itself as the symbol of freedom and justice, and the country that believes that it should spread democracy around the globe is a nation that has a rather sordid history of engaging in those things that are the opposite of equality such as discrimination, injustice, and oppression. A nation that practices inequality and injustice is not a nation of love for there cannot be love without justice.
Now, let us think about love. What is similar to love? Is it adoration, affection, fondness, friendship, devotion, or some other similarity? What is different from love? Is it hatred, extreme dislike, abhorrence, loathing, revulsion, disgust, or some other dissimilarity? What about anger, is it synonymous with hatred?
Psychologists tell us that anger is a transitory state that usually is directed at a specific stimulus or person. We can even feel anger toward someone we love. Hatred, on the other hand, is customarily aimed at a whole class of people. Anger is an emotion, whereas hatred is more of a stance, sentiment, attitude or way of thinking about others. People who hate are always sure that the cause for their stance lies in the group that they hate. Consequently, they do not have to deal with the social or religious implications of their stance. Interestingly, they may behave toward an individual member of the hated group in a fair or even kindly manner, while holding on to their attitude toward the group as a whole.
Some psychologists (e.g., Erich Fromm) say that we should make a distinction between rational hatred and character-conditioned hatred. Rational hatred arises when our natural rights are violated, or when our freedom, life or values are threatened. Character-conditioned hatred is free floating and bears no relationship to reality, although it may result from a series of bitter disappointments in life. People suffering from character-conditioned hatred often feel that they must hate someone for what they have experienced, so they create a convenient hate-object and rationalize a justification. To kill someone simply because of that person’s ethnicity, sexual orientation or a similar characteristic certainly is not rational. If you cannot relate to how preposterous character-conditioned hatred is, think about what it would be like if someone killed because of a characteristic that defines you such as height, baldheadedness, the color of your eyes, or the size of your feet.
When my family had to move from one farm to another as a result of landowners being opposed to my older brothers and sisters going off to college, one might argue that my parents had a right to hate landowners for not respecting the value that my parents held for their children getting a formal education. Since one of the things they obviously valued, education, was being threatened, we would say that they experienced rational hatred if they had developed hate toward the landowners. The fact that my parents, as far as I know, experienced no hatred would be regarded by some as a very negative thing – perhaps accusing them of being in denial. I say this because some of us believe that negativity is more realistic and that to construe life events in a positive way is somehow psychopathological.
However, some of us may look at my parents and say that the landowners held the power to control where they did not live and work but not to capture their spirits, for my parents understood that they must never let anyone capture their spirits. So, rather than investing their energy in hating, they moved on and ultimately achieved their dream that every one of their children would have the opportunity to achieve more than their parents had achieved. In the words of Bell Hooks2, in her book titled All about Love, my parents understood that taking responsibility and focusing on what they wanted to achieve did not mean that they denied reality. It meant that in the face of barriers, my parents believed that they ultimately had the capacity to shape their destinies and those of their children in ways that maximized our well-being.
Gordon Allport in his book, The Nature of Prejudice, tells us that love, which is a primary emotion, is a precondition for hatred. In fact, hatred may be seen as a defense against the frustrated desire to affiliate with others or to belong. To avoid the hurt of exclusion and rejection that we too often encounter in life, we find others to reject and exclude.
Now, let us connect all this to Kelly’s dichotomous constructs which suggest to me that to understand love, one must understand hate and vice versa. To do this, I would like for you to think about something called “love-prejudice3.” Love-prejudice refers to our tendency to over generalize the virtues of the things we love – e.g., our partner or spouse, family, nation, religion, school, ethnicity, social traditions or culture. We must love and identify with someone or something before we can learn what to hate. In short, we draw a circle around the things to which we are attached or toward which we hold affection, and everything else tends to be perceived by us as being part of an out-group. We create in-groups and out-groups when we place people in categories like introversion and extraversion, when we use abbreviations and acronyms in our professional lives, and when we use buzzwords and inside jokes. However, in the context of my presentation today, being partisan or part of an in-group, is not a major problem unless it leads to antagonism or hate toward the out-group. The point here is that our love-prejudice can lead to hate-prejudice and we can see why William Penn said: “Love is the hardest Lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.”
As I reflect on our belief that there is that of God in everyone, it follows that we should see all of humanity as the in-group, which means that there would be no out-group; that we would treat everyone like they mattered; and that we would “embrace a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fates as intimately connected to those of everyone else4…” in the universe.
One of the most perplexing problems for behavioral and social scientists is to understand why so few of us experience the loves and loyalties we need to be free of hatred and hostility. What they have found is that we are not in a position to give love if we have not received love. If we grow up in a world where we are not secure about our own worth, our own value; we have a difficult time letting our light shine. But, you and I know that the light is in everyone waiting for the spark that will ignite it. Each of us who says we love, each of us who says we believe that there is that of God in everyone has an obligation to try to ignite that light, and we know that the best way to ignite it is with love. If we are willing to take the time, exert the energy, and have the patience to scrap through the veneer of even the most estranged or alienated person, what we often find is a frightened person who did not develop love for her or himself in childhood and therefore finds it impossible to really love anyone else.
So, let us take a deeper look at love. Is it a noun, or is it a verb? Surely, many of you would say that it can be used as a noun or a verb. Also, I think that most of us would agree that William Penn used love first as a noun and then a verb when he said “Let us then try what Love [noun] will do: For if Men did once see we Love [verb] them, we should soon find they would not harm us.
It is regarding love as a verb that I would ask us to focus briefly this evening. I do this in the context of M. Scott Peck’s5 definition of love in The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, where he says that love is “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” As used here “love” is less what we say and more of what we do. It is less a feeling and more an action. It is an intention and an action over which we have some control. It is a reflection of the fact that we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. I cannot love other humans unless I love myself as I am a human.
We are a nation that is driven by this thing we call love as you have undoubtedly noticed if you watch television, go to the movies, read literature, listen to music, or are forced to listen to the conversations of others while in restaurants, on trains, and everywhere else that people can get a mobile telephone signal . But, writing television and movie scripts, songs and books about love and saying “I love you” every time we end a telephone conversation does not mean we know how to give or receive love.
Love is a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility and respect; it is not domination, alienation, estrangement or abuse. Love lifts people up; it does not devalue or degrade. Love is not what we are given, but what we give. It is accentuating the positive rather than listening to negative voices within and outside ourselves. It is living purposely; being secure in our worth and value; spreading love wherever we go; letting our light shine. It is being able to be alone rather than using others as a means to escape from solitude. It is service to others, emptying the ego so that there is space for us to recognize the needs of others and being able to fulfill those needs. It is taking loving and constructive action toward people, even those, we consciously dislike. Love is humility.
I may have left you with far more questions than I gave answers, so let me close by asking a few more. What kind of world would we have if all who say they believe in God lived as if there is indeed that of God in everyone? What is it about the way we construe the world that causes us to believe something negative about a person a thousand times faster that something positive? What is it about the way we construe the world that cause some of us to devote so much time and energy to reducing or stopping violence a thousand miles away, but will not lift the proverbial finger to stop violence across the street? What is it about the way we construe the world that would cause those of us who call ourselves peacemakers to draw a circle that includes some people and excludes others? What is it about the way we construe the world that would cause us to say to someone you should go to the front lines when we are fighting a war, but the back of the bus when you come home after putting your life on the line in the name of freedom and democracy? What is it about the way we construe the world that would give us the unmitigated gall to say to someone put your life on the line in the name of freedom and democracy, but when it comes to your sexual orientation, we will not ask and don’t you tell? What is it about the way we construe the world that would cause a child who has the perfect combination of skin color from the union of a black man and a white woman, or vice versa, to feel compelled as an adult to be identified with the ethnic group of the dark-skinned father, even though he was reared in a white household? For me the answer to all of those questions is simply that, unfortunately, we live in a world that does not understand “what love is or what it can do.”
“Let us then try what Love will do: For if Men did once see we Love them, we should soon find they would not harm us.” What can love do? Love can work miracles if we dare to unleash its true power. It is the great equalizer; the great builder of justice; and our best hope for a world of peace. However, to unleash the power of love, it behooves us to construe the events of the world and the world itself in new ways. Our challenge going forward is to try what love will do if we truly construe the world through special lens that speak to equality, integrity, simplicity and peace. And, remember these special lenses must be polished by love.
Notes:
1. Kelly, G. A. (1963). A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
2. Hooks, Bell. (2000). All about Love: New Visions. NY: HarperCollins Publisher, Inc. p 57.
3. Allport, Gordon W. (1980). The Nature of Prejudice. Philippines: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., pp. 25-27.
4. Hooks, op.cit. p 88.
5. M. Scott Peck (1978). The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, NY: Simon & Schuster, p 81.
