Resilience, adaptation, and purpose: selected readings from the Academic Integrity Seminar*
EDITOR’S NOTE: Please see a related article about our forthcoming book: Driving Plato’s Chariot: Lessons on Student Ethical Development (Introduction).
INTRODUCTION
AIS pedagogy has been influenced by a desire to challenge what we call “adolescent social Darwinism” (a view that human beings are necessarily engaged in a no-holds-barred struggle for survival — unmediated by other goals, including compassion, kindness, social responsibility, trust, love of learning, or attraction to awe and beauty). Early in the design of our instructional materials we looked for evidence of “the better angels of human nature” in literature drawn from the most challenging settings: political prisons, Nazi death camps, the Soviet gulag, and the experience of slavery. What we found and share with students is what you see below: many of the prisoners, inmates, and victims of persecution told stories of multiple instances in which the best of humanity became evident in the worst of circumstances.
[1] Resilience and purpose in South African prisons:
From Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela
Finding alternatives to hatred
“When you’re young and strong . . . you can stay alive on your hatred. I [later] realized that they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart. They could not take those things. Those things I still had control over. And I decided not to give them away.”
Learning from ancient wisdom
“I had read some of the classic Greek plays in prison, and found them enormously elevating. What I took out of them was that character was measured by facing up to difficult situations and that a hero was a man who would not break even under the most trying circumstances.”
Mental discipline: doing small things well
“To survive in prison, one must develop ways to take satisfaction in one’s daily life. One can feel fulfilled by washing one’s clothes so that they are particularly clean, by sweeping a hallway so that it is empty of dust, by organizing one’s cell to conserve as much space as possible. The same pride one takes in more consequential tasks outside of prison one can find in doing small things inside prison.”
Discovering the foundations of a shared humanity
“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”
[2] Resilience and purpose in Nazi death camps and the Soviet Gulag
[a] From Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps.
Finding meaning by consoling new arrivals
“I thought of my arrival and my first impressions of the camp. I knew that a person coming to a camp was afraid of everything and everybody, that she was distracted and terrified. The first word was so important. I decided to be patient, to answer all questions, to calm them and give them courage. My life began to hold meaning” [emphasis added].
Maintaining a courageous spirit
“There is a power at the center of our being, at the heart of all things living. But only in man does it assume a spiritual character. And only through spirit does life continue by decision. ‘Human beings are like weeds,’ said a Soviet prisoner to his cellmates. ‘They take some killing. Now if you treated horses like this they’d be dead in a couple of days. . . .’”
A tenacious life force
“[A]lready we can grasp some part of what the survivor’s experience reveals: that whether felt as a power, or observed as a system of activities, life is existence laboring to sustain itself, repairing, defending, healing.”
[b] From Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Everything can be taken from a person but one thing
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Strength of spirit
“This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. ‘I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,’ she told me. ‘In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.’ Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, ‘This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.’ Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. ‘I often talk to this tree,’ she said to me. I was startled . . . Was she delirious? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. ‘Yes.’ What did it say to her? She answered, ‘It said to me, ‘I am here — I am here — I am life, eternal life.’”
Purpose
“There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.’”
“The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his suffering or not.”
Love
“[B]eing human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself . . .”
“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
Accomplishment, courage, and dignity
“People tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.”
[c] From Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media)
Seeing goodness in others [Gulag survivor Janusz Bardach remembered advice from his mother]
“She used a lot of wonderful sayings and this was one, “man is wolf to man.” And the other was that “the world is not without good people.” And I would never survive in the camp if there would not be good people that I met in those years. I would never survive. Because I met people that helped me, that gave me hope, that showed me that even in those conditions that there is some human spirit, that there is some humanity left” [emphasis added].
Reading and learning [the experience of Gulag survivor Lev Kopelev]
“[I was] led one night to be interrogated, I noticed a bookcase against the wall just before we came to a sharp turn of the dimly lit corridor. On the way back to my cell, with my sleepy guard walking behind me, I put on speed just before turning the corner and, without stopping, scooped up as many books as I could, hiding them under my overcoat. I could read during the day. They had not gotten around to making a peephole in the door of our cell, and by the time the guard would turn the key in the lock and slide open the bolt, I would have the book I was reading buried in straw, where the other books were hidden.”
[3] Resilience and purpose as a prisoner of war
From James Stockdale, Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior
Stockdale was introduced to Epictetus at Stanford
A voice boomed out of an office, “Can I help you?” The speaker was Philip Rhinelander, dean of Humanities and Sciences [at Stanford], who taught Philosophy 6: The Problems of Good and Evil. At first he thought I was a professor, but we soon found common ground in the navy because he’d served in World War II. Within fifteen minutes we’d agreed that I would enter his two-term course in the middle, and to make up for my lack of background, I would meet him for an hour a week for a private tutorial in the study of his campus home . . .
On my last session, he reached high in his wall of books and brought down a copy of the Enchiridion [by Epictetus]. He said, “I think you’ll be interested in this.”
Epictetus (Stockdale’s summary)
“Epictetus was born a slave in about A.D. 50 and grew up in Asia Minor speaking the Greek language of his slave mother. [He] was a very unusual man of intelligence and sensitivity, who gleaned wisdom rather than bitterness from his early firsthand exposure to extreme cruelty and firsthand observations of the abuse of power and self-indulgent debauchery.
“Epictetus drew the same sort of audience Socrates had drawn five hundred years earlier — young aristocrats destined for careers in finance, the arts, public service. The best families sent him their best sons in their middle twenties — to be told what the good life consisted of, to be disabused of the idea that they deserved to become playboys, the point made clear that their job was to serve their fellow men . . .”
“In his inimitable, frank language, Epictetus explained that his curriculum was not about ‘revenues or income, or peace or war, but about happiness and unhappiness, success and failure, slavery and freedom.’”
“‘Ready at hand’ from The Enchiridion as I ejected from that airplane was the understanding that a Stoic always kept separate files in his mind for (A) those things that are “up to him” and (B) those things that are “not up to him.” Another way of saying it is (A) those things that are “within his power” and (B) those things that are “beyond his power.”
“Bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.”
“It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw [in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp] that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, ‘Bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.’”
[4] Resilience and purpose in The Discourses of Epictetus
Deadening of the mind and spirit
“Now most of us fear the deadening of the body and would take all possible means to avoid such a calamity, yet we take no heed of the deadening of the mind and the spirit.”
What reason and affection can produce
“It follows then that whenever we find reason and affection united in an action, we confidently affirm that it is right and good.”
“Can there be a more stirring philosopher’s story than . . . the slave, Epictetus? Crippled by a cruel master, schooled by a good one, freed and then exiled, Epictetus bore out his ideas in his life. His fundamental adage — that we do not suffer because of events, but rather the thoughts we have about events — inspired the Meditations of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, spread Stoic ideas across the Roman world and, 2,000 years later, remains the essential precept of cognitive [behavioral] therapy.”
Using yourself for a worthy purpose
“Have you not received greatness of spirit? Have you not received courage? Have you not received endurance? If I am of a great spirit what concern have I in what may happen? What shall shake me or confound me or seem painful to me? Instead of using my faculty for the purpose for which I have received it, am I to mourn and lament at the events of fortune? . . .”
It is for you then, when you realize this, to look to the faculties you possess, and considering them to say, ‘Zeus, send me what trial Thou wilt; for I have endowments and resources, given me by Thee, to bring myself honour through what befalls.’ Nay, instead, you sit trembling for fear of what may happen, or lamenting, mourning, and groaning for what does happen, and then you reproach the gods . . .”
The purpose of difficulties
“Difficulties are what show men’s character. Therefore when a difficult crisis meets you, remember that you are as the raw youth with whom God the trainer is wrestling. ‘To what end?’ the hearer asks. That you may win at Olympia: and that cannot be done without sweating for it.”
Punishment or education?
“Which of us does not admire that saying of Lycurgus the Lacedaemonian? For when one of his young fellow citizens had blinded him in one eye and was handed over to Lycurgus by the people to be punished as he chose, he did not punish him but educated him and made a good man of him, and brought him before the Lacedaemonians in the theatre, and when they wondered he said, ‘This man, when you gave him me, was insolent and violent; I give him back to you a free and reasonable citizen.’”
*Footnotes for this article can be seen here.
