Her eyebrows raise quietly. “A law degree?” The question is barely polite. “And what do you want to do with that?” I don’t remember how I answered. The response it ought to have been, though it wasn’t, is “WHATEVER I WANT.”
Sometimes I just wish that people would understand things the way I understand them, would assign the same significance to the kinds of relationships and responsibilities that I take to be the most fundamental components of communities. Hillsdale is, of course, a major exception, as evidenced by an awesome class I had this afternoon.
Today, my professor (who also happens to be the president of the College) described his wife, prefacing his remarks with, “I tell this to people all the time, and I love saying it.” He stated as a matter of fact that he depends on this woman and the huge job she does in order to hold his life together at home, because, he explained, “otherwise that whole thing would be a mess, and then what would I be good for?” He understands these Aristotelian hierarchies of communities that start with our most basic needs as “necessitous creatures” and the fact that they’re met at home. That is to say, he understands that, before he can take the time to engage in the highest activities of politics and statesmanship and friendship and so on, he must cooperate with his wife. I don’t mean cooperate in the sense of merely acquiescing to her, but in the truest sense of the word: he must align the his activities so that the two of them work together.
The assumption implicit in all of this is that there is something worth working together on. Because, let’s face it: humans are, as Dr. Arnn likes to say, “stubborn cusses.” We are powerful, and we know it. So to agree to combine efforts with another person necessarily implies a considerable degree of frustration and compromise – and that both parties have a very important end in mind, and that this end is valuable to them. They understand the thing they’re after and that they must work together in order to achieve it. They also understand what is meant by “work.” Most importantly, they understand what it means to have given their word to work together. And they understand because they used words to share ideas and communicate their dreams and intentions before they began, and then they gave these words to each other.
At this point, Dr. Arnn would cite Aristotle’s assertion that the human capacity for speech means we are moral beings. Common nouns allow us to make comparisons between things, setting standards for not only quality but behavior. The goodness and the being of the thing are connected, et cetera. But I want to loop Wendell Berry in on this discussion, too. He calls for precision in language and fidelity to words spoken, observing the contribution of clear speech and kept promises to healthy communities. Trust plays a major unspoken role in all of these discussions – one that I’m surprised never came up in our course. But the conclusion I feel inevitably led to by both the class and by Berry is that trust is a hard thing to get to anymore. I have to wonder, though, how much of that is due to the fact that we don’t understand each other when we talk, because of technical jargon, cultural barriers, or innuendo … Three hundred million people with a million English words in common, used to construct perhaps as many different languages.
If this is the case, there doesn’t seem to be a readily apparent way to fix it.
Spiritual Geography 
