Leaning Ladders

John T. once told me about a friend who said
that he had spent twenty years climbing the corporate ladder
before he discovered that it was leaning against the wrong wall.

I know why that came to mind.
I was reminded, this week, that I have
climbed a couple of ladders, myself.
Mari and I attended a celebration
of the founding of the U. of Arizona
M.I.S. (computer information system)
department.  We were not there
at the founding:  it just seems like it.

Mari came to Tucson to get a degree.
I came here because Mari came here.
I was on sabbatical, as a visiting fellow
in the Philosophy Department, to learn more
about Social and Political philosophy.

I had already climbed the ladder leaning
against the door of The Castle Church in Wittenberg,
where Martin Luther had nailed his 95 theses;
not the actual door, but a figurative one.
Step by step, through the theological seminary in Berkeley,
and the parish in California, and The University of Chicago.
I stood there, certainly not on the top rung,
but high enough up so that I could see that I was not religious.

"What are you doing on that ladder?",
people at the college where I was teaching asked.
"You are in the Religion and Philosophy Department,
and you aren't even religious!"  It was so.

Wrong wall.

Well, not actually not the wrong wall,
but they owned the wall.
You should not have to be religious to teach religion,
but you ought to know quite a lot about it:  I did.
Anyway, I did not teach religion courses:  I taught ethics;
not necessarily religious ethics:  I guess that was the nub,
and the rub.

When I got back to the college with a Masters
in what Mari was studying, the college asked
if they could lean my ladder up against the MIS wall,
and tired of hearing that the view from Mount Nebo
was not what I was supposed to be seeing,
I agreed to teach Management Information Systems.

"O.K.," I thought.  "Information systems are changing the world
in more ways than we can imagine, right now.  The questions
of ethics, and value systems, are inherent in this revolution."

I said, "Yes.  Put the ladder up over there."

Most of the students did not give a diddley damn
about the great human revolutions:
from hunting and gathering to agriculture,
and from agriculture to the industrial revolution,
and from there to the information revolution.
They wanted to learn to write code, and to get a job.
Well, they were paying for the wall.

It wasn't mine.

One gets to the age where it is not safe
to climb ladders, anymore, and I am that age.
I still climb ladders, but not high enough . . . ,
no, that is not true!  At my age, one ought to keep
both feet on the ground, and not climb at all,
or both feet will be in, not on, the ground.

To return to the learned conference with which I began,
it was evident to me that I was like a fish without a bicycle
(as a man without religion was once described), although
the discipline had nothing to do with religion.
Most of the attendees, it seemed to me,
were like the students in my undergraduate classes:
mostly interested in where the better, higher paying jobs were.
It was the presenters who understood best what ideas were.

Decades past, at theological conferences, especially,
most of the attendees were scrounging for a germ of an idea
to ignite a conference paper, or maybe to breathe a little life
into the courses they were teaching.  A better job, there,
was to be associated with a more prestigious college or university.

The best times in my academic life happened
when bright and interesting people talked to each other
about things they were curious and passionate about.
"My wine glass is empty,", someone would say,
"and I cannot tell you how wrong you are with a dry throat!"

There may be no "right walls" against which to lean one's ladder,
but whatever the wall, it ought to afford a chance to argue
about things that ignite passion, and debate,
because the consequences seem important.

Most of those issues, today, are the debates of science.
And maybe politics; not politicians, but what politics ought to be.
Or maybe, as Teilhard de Chardin once described,
what happens when we look up at the horizon
and see ourselves coming toward us;
that is, what happens when humanity has nowhere to go
that is not already populated by human life.