The Personal and the Political: PART I

 

Note: The following is the first in a series of posts in which I explore the dynamics of liberty in the classroom. These posts represent a thought process that continues to evolve as an exercise in writing as thinking. 

Liberté by Eugéne Delacoix

I live in a cultural milieu in which the intersection of the personal and political are espoused to have reached an inflection point. What does that mean to me and my classroom?

I can only start with what I think I know: 

I can say with some degree of confidence that the United States has a history of intertwining the personal and the political. There is the famous revolution in which political difference led to fratricide. And the infamous Civil War in which political difference…well, you get it. And since the New Deal saved American government from the extreme clutches of Fascism and Communism, American foreign and domestic policy has been marked by personal and political commitments to spreading and defending liberty of all kinds, including those that are antithetical to its own espoused values.

I'm beginning to wonder if what appears to be a dangerous intensity in political tribalism has, in fact, been more of a baseline frequency in the exercise of American political freedom. Maybe what we see today is just a new style of the dynamic between the personal and the community. 

In thinking about this, I defined two phrases to help me in my internal dialogue: "political liberties" and "personal liberties." I don't espouse to be an expert. These phrases exist in other forms elsewhere and have been used by much smarter people than I to form more grand conclusions and motivate more grand actions. But to help me make sense of this acute condition of political unease, I've temporarily appropriated them as tools for my own work. 

In the United States, I think people have always been passionate when and where their external “political liberties” intersect with internal “personal liberties” in a way that challenges their assumptions and expectations.

Liberty Bell

When I use the term “political liberty” I generally mean those natural rights I experience as an American enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I am referring to the public space in which individuals are free to move, work, live basically as they choose so long as they don’t interfere with another’s rights to do the same. I recognize this is a vague definition and there is much disagreement about the shape and scope of this form of liberty, but understanding this term as a public, community formed and informed arena of behavior should be sufficient for my task. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be another example of attempting to codify “political liberty.” 

“Personal liberty”, however, suggests to me the psychological and spiritual latitude necessary for a public domain to authentically, functionally and intrinsically value and practice political liberty. I think of this kind of internal liberty as the cognitive space in which the psyche is free to explore, evaluate and create understanding in its own unique manner, free from threat. Here, the individual mixes sense perception, epistemological approach, and genetic code to assess and act into the reality it thinks it observes.

I used to assume that people believed something and then acted out that belief in the world which reinforced their belief and built a cyclical feedback loop that reinforced ideas. For example, I might believe that the federal government is trying to take my guns away, so I perform all the appropriate actions that correspond: I join the NRA, I vote conservative, I engage in conversations with other like minded people about the ammo shortage, the misrepresentations of bump stocks by the liberal media, etc. All of these behaviors then would reinforce my beliefs that the federal government is trying to take away my gun rights. 

After some reflection, however, I'm beginning to wonder if I had it wrong. I wasn't thinking about it right or completely or differently.

Now I'm wondering the extent to which the way I derive and revisit my belief interacts more subtley with the action. In other words, I'm wondering about the relationship between the internal exercise of what I'm calling "personal liberty" to the external exercise of what I'm calling "public liberty." How does the cognitive space I live in affect the public space I live in?

I'm venturing into territory outside my purview, but I'm committed to considering this.

Certainly, philosophers and psychologists better describe the tensions inherit in the dynamics of perception and reality, but give this layman some slack. Much in life remains a thought experiment in the journey toward understanding. 

Thought by Simona Vergani

For people to feel and express the intensity of division and discord we see in many aspects of life today suggests that tension is the result of perceived threats to “personal liberty.” Most of these threats seem to come from the “political” aspect of life. Gender, policing, equity, tax policy, gun rights, education, crime or any other number of issues often present challenges to my daily schema and create internal unease, especially since I am a captive of habitual thinking.  These challenges can even be experienced as psychologically or spiritually violent depending on how tightly I clutch my worldview to maintain the “way its always been” inside my psyche. And it makes me wonder how much I have underestimated the extent to which the external tension I see is a result of the internal tension I don’t see.

Putting these dynamics into words has reminded me that political unrest is as much about personal unrest as anything. Anxiety about mortgage payments, reproductive care or the ammunition shortage catlyzes the cycle of internal fueling external reinforcing internal and so on. 

Watching the manifestations of these internal tensions in the public domain of a free, democratic society, reminds me then that the personal is “political,” as the post-modern maxim asserts, which gives me a starting position for analyzing this dynamic as it pertains to classrooms. 

I wonder: 

Do the students in my classroom feel free? How do the rules and obligations I place on them in the classroom affect their agency in the world? Do the ideas I present and the methods I choose to present them encourage students to open their minds or to close them? How does the act of "correcting" student work for years shape the way they talk about people of a different race, gender, persuasion, etc.? How has it shaped the way I think about different student learning styles and styles of demonstrating learning? How can I be both a safe person to share ideas with and a person that smashes ideas?