Love, Complexity, and Interconnection: the Heart of University Life

Earlier this week, I had coffee with my friend, Scott Pratt. Our conversation settled on questions of community, and specifically on how to cultivate and sustain academic community in this intense period of disruption, anger, and uncertainty.

Afterwards, Scott shared with me a few pages from Josiah Royce’s lectures on The Problem of Christianity in which Royce develops the idea of the “true community” rooted in love. For Royce, love animates the life of true community by aligning the “callings of individuals” with the cooperative activity of the community conscious of its own togetherness.¹ The example he uses to illustrate this sort of cooperative togetherness is a chorus or an orchestra. He speaks of the beloved community as “a community of those who are artists in some form of coöperation, and whose art constitutes, for each artist, [their] own ideally extended life. But the life of an artist depends upon [their] love for [their] art.”²

This returned me to reflections from October about how we might create the conditions within the university community for practices of imagination and understanding. Perhaps loving efforts to align individual callings with the cooperative life of the community might be a catalyzing agent.

University life has become an engine of alienation. Individual callings and academic activities are catawampus. The practices of the university are out of joint with the values that give it life.

Our efforts to respond to the current political threats to higher education are undermined by this disparity between professed values and lived-experience. They are further compromised by our inability, as a society, to imagine and inhabit the complex, interconnected reality in which we actually live. When we turn away from that interconnectedness, we shrink the university’s purpose. When we turn toward it, we re-affirm the reality that connects us. This interconnectedness shapes the callings of each that makes cooperative togetherness possible.

Interconnectedness and the Callings of Each

The callings of each are not simply determinations identified by the isolated individual in solitude and self-reflection. They arise in complex interconnected contexts. They grow from past experience and current conditions. They find voice in hope for an imagined future. Our callings emerge from the complex networks of connectedness that shape our lives.

The callings of each are already intertwined with the activity of a kind of wholeness, not yet, perhaps, the purposeful wholeness of a community aware of its togetherness, but the wholeness that conditions existence itself.

In her essay, Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina, Nancy Tuana uses the metaphor of viscous porosity “as a means to better understand the rich interactions between beings through which subjects are constituted out of relationality.” ³

Viscous porosity describes how boundaries—between bodies, systems, environments, and even ideas—are permeable. They breathe. They interact. The porosity is viscous, the movement not without resistance. This resistance too shapes what’s possible. It lends determination to the experience of each in relation to the whole.

The language of porosity is also taken up by Tiffany Lethabo King in her book, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, when she writes:

“Black porosity also collapses distinctions between bodies and plants in ways that resonate with Indigenous notions of human and nonhuman relationality” ⁴

Everything is interconnected. And if we are to become, as Royce suggests, artists of a certain kind of cooperation, we must recognize the callings of each as intimately intertwined with the togetherness of a whole—complex, unfolding, unfathomable.

To become artists of cooperation requires practice.

Practice is difficult during periods of intense disruption. Still, space must be made. This small corner of the interconnected digital world has long been such a space for me.

So, perhaps here in this practice space, we might imagine the possibility of creating and nurturing the university as a beloved community. Love is that power through which the callings of each find fulfillment in the cooperative activity of the whole. To become a true community, the whole must become attentive to its own practices of togetherness.

Disruption always creates a wake. In the slipstream, we may find spaces to practice the art of cooperation anew. And if we do, let these practices, animated by love, beat at the heart of university life reimagined. The world badly needs the wisdom that emerges in beloved communities when the callings of each resonate with the shared purpose of the whole.