How to search for meaning without losing joy

David Gutterman: In the face of the struggle of what it is to be human, how do you persist? How do you go on? How do you live with other people? What values should guide you? What stories guide you? I'm as interested in these questions at 57 as I was at 17.

Dave (introduction):
Hi, I'm Dave Weich, and you're listening to Work-Shaped Life.

David Gutterman is a Professor of Politics, Policy, Law and Ethics at Willamette University. He’s also the Associate Director of the Center for Religion, Law & Democracy. He is, in a word, thoughtful. 

I’ve always appreciated the way his mind works. We served together on the board of Oregon Humanities. 

At meetings, twelve of us would be talking through a complicated policy or funding or personnel issue, not getting anywhere useful, when David would gently insert himself into the conversation by asking a question that totally reoriented our brains—or mine, at least—by framing the problem in an altogether different, more humane way.

Later I came to understand that this is basically what David does for a living: He’s really good at helping people think more clearly about what matters to them. Often that happens inside a classroom, but not always.

Dave:
Okay, David, tell me about your job. What do you do these days?

David Gutterman:
Well, first of all, I'm really pleased that you asked me to do this. And especially about this topic, because it's something I think about a lot, in part because I end up being able to work with people at the moment in their lives in which they're making the kinds of decisions that we've made.

So I'm a professor in the Department of Politics, Policy, Law, and Ethics at Willamette University. And I've been here for quite a while, since I started teaching at Willamette in 2000. 

I taught here for three years on a visiting position and then taught at Linfield College in a tenure track position for three years, and then came back to Willamette when they had a tenure track position in my field. So that's what I'm doing formally.

Dave:
And how conscious was that? Like your own path, you've been doing this for a long time.

David Gutterman:
Yeah.

Dave:
Is it what you set out to do?

David Gutterman:
Yes. Yes, it really is. It's kind of-

Dave:
How early were you conscious of that?

David Gutterman:
It's stunning. So if we had this conversation when I was 16, I would say to you, "I think I'm going to be a rabbi." 

And the reason why I was interested in being a rabbi was twofold. 

One, because I saw the way that religious leaders in my community were able to work with people at really tender moments in their lives, at births and deaths and marriages and coming of age rituals and a way of working in the holidays, but also working in the daily practice of being able to teach and to counsel and to be able to call on both my intellectual capacity and my emotional capacity and have them be woven together really tightly.

And I loved the way that rabbis were able to use a set of stories and engage in conversation that you had a base story from the Torah or other stories that you might be able to bring in and then be involved in a conversation, not just with the community that you're a part of, but also with other people who have worked with those stories forever. 

So I've always been interested in this question about how do you use narratives and how do you engage in storytelling as a way to help people sort out the meaning in their lives?

And I thought, "This is a path that I want to be on." 

And God got in the way, or my lack of faith in God at that moment in my life, I was like, "How could I possibly be a religious leader if my own faith was in doubt?" 

And to be clear, that was a naive understanding because I know now that how many religious leaders also struggle with faith and that faith invites doubt, many respects, and that's part of the process. But at 16, it was an obstacle that I didn't think I could get past.

So I went to college, I was a religious studies major. 

And I wasn't really interested in ... I was interested in the classes that get at meaning, at suffering and evil and at death and dying and those kinds of classes.

Dave:
All the upbeat, fun stuff.

David Gutterman:
Yeah, right. But it's like how do you, in the face of the struggle of what it is to be human, how do you persist? How do you go on? How do you live with other people? What values should guide you? What stories guide you?

And I'm as interested in these questions at 57 as I was at 17. So I started down the path of being a religious studies professor. 

I went to graduate school in a PhD program in religious studies, and I watched all these remarkable scholars who were graduate students above me, ahead of me, not be able to get jobs because religious studies faculty were like, "If you want to teach New Testament, if you want to teach the Hebrew Bible, if you want ..." And that's not what I wanted to do.

So I had a choice of whether or not I wanted to stay in that field and go through that process and teach the things that I wasn't that interested in teaching, or I wanted to go to a different field. 

And I almost went into literature, but the time in which I had offers to study literature and literary theory, the folks who I met who were doing that work were so dour. There was like a disposition of I'm wearing as black black clothing as I possibly could, right? 

The inability to smile was seen as a marker of intelligence and that suffering was a part of, was embraced as a matter of identity. 

And I was like, "I feel joy much too much to want to be in this kind of work." But it was interesting in the questions. Right?

Dave:
Right. Right.

David Gutterman:
So I shifted fields from religious studies to political theory and started in a political science department, and then went back and looked at religious social movements in the United States and pursued that. 

But all along it was, I'm much more interested in teaching than I am in writing, like if I had to balance that out. 

So I was very attracted to the idea of being in a liberal arts environment, teaching at a small school, at being able to work with a group of people, group of students who were at a real moment of transition in their lives. 

So it was kind of the things I wanted to do at 16 when I thought about being a rabbi, but it's a much more focused group of people, but I get to do many of the same things.

Dave:
Right. You brought up something which is interesting, knowing you for a little while, like you are a person, you are not a dour person.

David Gutterman:
No.

Dave:
Yeah, death, suffering. You have a fascination with very dark subject matter, difficult maybe is a better word.

David Gutterman:
Yeah, difficult.

Dave:
Because it's as dark as you make it in a way. I always think of my, we call her my great aunt, we don't know. 

She literally fled the Russian Revolution and lived with my grandmother for as long as I knew her. She lived to be like 104. She was the most joyous person I ever met in my life and probably experienced the most suffering of any person. 

I knew a few Holocaust survivor kind of, but she was among those people. And I will never forget her saying, "When I die," in her very thick Russian accent, "I want to be laid in a casket with a glass cover so I can watch all of my family and friends dancing."

David Gutterman:
Yeah. It's beautiful, right?

Dave :
It's beautiful. So you're not quite [inaudible 00:07:21], but I would put you into that category. 

And I guess I wonder, has that always been, do you think part of your nature, this sort of push and pull between that very, very dark, difficult curiosity and also a pretty good guy at a party?

David Gutterman:
Well, it's very kind of you to say. Thank you. 

I think it is. And at some level, there's a way in which studying questions of struggle is different than experiencing it. So I've been inspired by and looked to the way that people have sought to find meaning in their lives in the face of terrible suffering, right? 

In the face of struggle and how they made that in many respects that kind of choice.

So I don't want to confuse my interest in the material with my own life because I've been very fortunate. 

So when I think about what it is to be interested in these kinds of subjects, I don't think of them as dark subjects as much as I think of them as human.

And what's been particularly important to me is watching how that capacity to move from struggle towards something that's joyful, to seek joy even in the process, to accept and seek the joy rarely comes in isolation, but always comes through being in a sustained community, most commonly comes by being in a stained community. So I'm particularly, as much as I'm interested in these types of difficult subjects, I'm fundamentally interested in questions of friendship and what is it to be a friend and how does a friend help another person live their best lives and become the best part of themselves.

And I've watched other people offer that to me. 

I've seen that remarkable generosity. I've witnessed it in how other people interact with others in the world. 

And it's that approach towards friendship that I find really inspiring and what I seek to try to emulate.

Dave:
And where does your actual, not specifically your classroom curriculum, but the larger kind of package of it might be office hours, it might be anything, how does your work life and your relationship to the people in it sort of show that? 

Where do these kinds of things about friendship fit in?

David Gutterman:
That's a beautiful question and it's something I take very seriously. I think the first thing where it shows up is being really present to the students who I work with, to being really intentional and focused and present because I think for so many of us, not just since COVID, but it's a social media phenomenon, it's the world we're living in which there's a tremendous sense of isolation and separation. 

And while we are having this conversation online, it's rooted in a relationship that we have when we've been in present to one another.

So to be able to be still enough to quiet my own thoughts, to not think about what I have to do in the rest of the day or what the person I'm interacting with is connected. 

Well, they've said something, now I've got a tape in my head in which I'm going to say to them, "Oh, it's just like what happened to me." But to actually be able to follow up with them on what's going on in their lives and to ...

I learned from a dear friend of mine, Karen Wood, who was the chaplain at Willamette for many times, the most powerful words that you can offer as a teacher is simply, "Tell me more. Tell me more." So I try to really ... I'm not always good at it. We all live very busy lives.

Dave:
Sure.

David Gutterman:
But when I'm at my best, I'm able to still myself enough that I can be present to the people, the students with whom I'm interacting. And that type of attention, I think, provides the foundation of friendship. And I also work with my students on how to develop these skills in their own lives. So-

Dave:
You work with them explicitly?

David Gutterman:
Explicitly on how to do this work, right? For example, I teach an ethics and politics class, and we're about to have an exam next week. And I've moved towards having oral exams, but it's not a one-on-one oral exam. It's a group oral exam.

Dave:
How many people?

David Gutterman:
Four, usually.

Dave:
Okay.

David Gutterman:
Three or four people sit in a room with all the materials in front of them that they want to talk about, all the questions that they want to address, and they learn how to speak with one another about the big questions in life, about is violence ever morally justified and under what circumstances and according to what criteria? 

About how do we understand different notions of justice and what happens when they compete. About how we order our obligations.

And the way that the students are evaluated is less about whether or not they dominate the conversation, but whether or not they ask a question that allows one of their peers to shine. And that essays that they write the follow-up from those exams are, "What did I learn from one of my peers? And why was this so revelatory?"

So it's all kinds of ways of developing the skills in which they're learning how to listen and be present to one another. We do practice work for this, so it's not just, I've been lecturing for four weeks, now sit in a room. The whole class is geared towards the development of these skills.

Dave:
How foreign is that framework for a class compared to the other classes that they're enrolled in at Willamette? 

Is this common in any way or do you feel like this is different than they're seeing in other fields of study?

David Gutterman:
It's a good question. I think Willamette is a very intimate kind of undergraduate experience for many students, and it's geared in this direction. 

It's different than if you're going to a big state university in which just the numbers dictate that most classes are not going to look like this. So I think you are more likely to get this kind of class at a school like Willamette, at Willamette. I know that my colleagues teach in similar ways.

I will say I lean all the way into it. And I've really become much more committed then to teaching skills and the content of the class becomes the vehicle by which they're learning the skills rather than the other way around. 

And other of my colleagues do this kind of work in their own particular ways. They put their own particular spin on it. Yeah.

But we do a lot of work with students in small places. It's one of the reasons why I'm attracted to the job and grateful for the job that I have because I get to know my students. 

This semester started off with 16 students coming to my house for dinner as a way of kicking off the semester.

Dave:
How does teaching, specifically how does your interaction with the students that you teach change the way that you think about the world today?

David Gutterman:
Right. There are a number of ways that I can think about this. One is the time horizon that I think that you and I experienced when we were 20 was much longer than their time horizon. 

And in two different respects. That I think when I went to college, so I graduated in 1990, I had a broader understanding of the last 50 years of, say, US history than the students I encounter now have of the last 50 years of US history. 

So that's going backwards, just that one slice. But even more importantly, I could look forward 50 years and anticipate what the world might be like. I could look forward and I had a kind of horizon. I would've been wrong.

Dave:
Right. But you would've been reasonably confident that the fundamental expectations, you still may have been wrong, but you would've felt like, "Yeah, it's going to be something like this."

David Gutterman:
And I could project myself into it and think about how I would have a role in that world 50 years from now. 

And I think in part because of the climate crisis, in part because of the way that social media functions as everything is in crisis now all the time, that the level of what Amanda Ripley calls “the crisis entrepreneurs” in which people are profiting by the sense of heightened fear that affects us all daily, and so it makes it very difficult to think much farther ahead than what is going to happen tomorrow or the day after, or what has happened and how have people dealt with crises in the past.

So the pace with which we could work, the timeframe that we had, that is the most profound challenge that I think our students are facing right now as a difference, as a matter of sensibility. 

Coupled with a sense of isolation and separation and the way algorithms create a sense of niches in which everything seems either all right or all wrong, and unless something is all right, it is all wrong. 

So working in that place of much more, of greater nuance, and both and, and these are the challenges I think that I work with students on all the time.

Does that make sense? Is that tracking for you?

Dave:
Yeah, absolutely.

David Gutterman:
Okay.

Dave:
I think it's obviously a super broad question and it just makes you think, and listening to your answer, that on the one hand, self-selecting your students are much, much, much more likely to want to engage in the kinds of questions and dialogues that you're describing than a typical person who is not going to go to Willamette and not choose this course even if they're there.

David Gutterman:
Yes.

Dave:
That said, the people you're describing are dealing with everyone else in the world.

David Gutterman:
Right.

Dave:
So they are still ... It doesn't matter how committed they might be to dialogue and introspection in the sense of like it's all the same when they leave the classroom, that they're still the world.

David Gutterman:
It is, and it isn't, right? And here's the thing, is that one of the things that we hope for, and this is part of a different project that's related that I can talk about if you're interested, is that students get a taste of what it is to bring a half-baked idea into a room and have somebody else bring other ingredients, and all of a sudden you're cooking together, instead of having every idea that is offered to you prepackaged and pre-made.

And once you get the taste of that, you want it more. 

Then they develop the skills and the confidence that they can help change the conversations that they're involved in in the world. So part of what we get to do is to be able to say, "The hunger that you have and the pleasure that you take in being involved in the conversation with other people is legitimate and isn't something to be embarrassed about and is something that you then can create for yourself and others." 

So they get to shape the world as they go out. That's the hope.

Dave:
Right. So much of this though, hearing you say that on the one hand, totally makes sense. 

On the other hand, the baseline has moved so far since, again, 20, 30 years, whatever it might be. And yeah, I'm not old man shaking fist at cloud. This is just life. 

But I think that's part of what you're talking about with the vision forward and the vision back is that things are moving and changing so quickly.

David Gutterman:
Yep. Yeah.

Dave:
But generally speaking, a human being living 200 years ago only received so much information.

David Gutterman:
Yes.

Dave:
There were these gaps in information flow and you were living with the information that you had and may have been passed down for generations and generations. Again, right, wrong, good, bad, regardless. 

Whereas today, there's just no end to it. There's no way, there's no, I think, human capacity to actually consume and synthesize the volume of information.

And I think so part of that challenge is just what do I do in this chaos?

David Gutterman:
Yes.

Dave:
And that's the part that I've always thought, again, I don't think this is new. I just think it's far, far more extreme, maybe with every passing year, but certainly with each decade.

David Gutterman:
Well, I think what you're naming is really important, which is it's not just how much, but how fast. Right?

So if we think about sort of a capitalist framework in which everything, value is measured at the level of efficiency. In the framework that we're living in right now, so much is about speed, quickness of response, quickness of who's going to post what, right? 

And it's hard to keep up. So we can't do it. We will never be able to go as fast as the world is increasingly demand that we move. 

And the more that we do, the more machine like we become. Machines are going to work faster than humans.

Dave:
Right.

David Gutterman:
So part of, for me, what I try to do is to slow things down. I think if what we're trying to do is teach Plato, it shouldn't be measured at the standard of efficiency, right? It's the wrong metric to use. 

So I'm assigning less reading. I can do a paragraph in a class. I'm studying the Book of Job in one of my classes. We spent 90 minutes doing four paragraphs last class and reading it aloud and unpacking what's going on. 

And does that mean we're going to get to the entire text? It doesn't matter. We'll get to enough of it, but if you get to find the pleasures of moving slowly in the world. Like there's a slow food movement, I think that's fascinating, right? I love it. And there's also a slow education approach that I think I want to try to move towards.

Dave:
What are the real sort of passions or curiosity that you find students bring to your classes that you're not necessarily serving up, but they're the ones kind of pushing?

David Gutterman:
I have yet to encounter a student in the last 10 years who is satisfied with the world. And looks out at it and feels comfortable and anticipatory and hopeful. So a big question is, what do I do with all this fear? 

And what do I do with the question of, How do I, small person, figure out not just how to navigate in these conditions, but change these conditions? 

So there's both fear and powerlessness, and that is the overriding challenge that I think many people are experiencing. And it's the great challenge. That's the big challenge, right?

The smaller challenges are, or the more topical subject oriented ones are, from an ecological sense, how do I begin to live in a world in which everything that is wild is increasingly domesticated? 

We like to talk about how the wilderness begins where your cell coverage ends, and cell coverage ends in fewer and fewer places. So how do I put the phone down? How do I stop in order to be able to experience something that isn't curated for me? 

That's a question, and the conditions in which that's shrinking.

Second, well, for many students, they feel a sense of betrayal about their nation. Right?

Dave:
Not just students.

David Gutterman:
Not just students. Right? Not just students. 

But I guess the part of the difference is that for us, there is a way in which we think about what the national promise might have been. 

For many of the students right now, the only president who has really registered in their consciousness is Donald Trump. 

So it's not that a promise was broken, it's just the promise itself was corrupted from the very beginning.

Dave:
Right.

David Gutterman:
Right? So of course, we're in this place. So that's obviously the question, right?

Dave:
You are teaching how to ask a question.

David Gutterman:
Yes.

Dave:
That's the genesis of it is like, what's the right question to be asking and how do I pursue the answer?

David Gutterman:
Right. That is exactly what I'm trying to do. Right. 

Here's the thing, I think part of it is if we ask better questions and we bring that sense of inquisitive, not just to our own lives, but to the lives of other people, then we quickly begin to think about possible answers. 

And it doesn't mean that every answer is equally legitimate or every ... It's not that anything goes kind of relativism, but that we get to ask people, if this is your answer to this question, what's the foundation for your answer? 

How does it connect to these other answers that you've given to other questions? And what's at stake?

So it's not just how to ask the first question, it's how to ask the second question and the third question that allows people to reflect on their answers. 

And that we're all living into this space in which people become much less likely to believe everything that they think. 

Because if we're in the space of thinking or feeling, these can shift and beliefs tend to be much more rigid.

Dave:
Have you read the book Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz?

David Gutterman:
No, but I love Kathryn Schulz.

Dave:
Yeah.

David Gutterman:
Like her Lost & Found.

Yeah. One of my favorites. Okay.

Dave:
Agreed.

David Gutterman:
Thank you.

Dave:
Love her writing. This book is spectacular on the subject because it's actually, it's a good read too. It's Kathryn Schulz. It's a good, it's not dry.

David Gutterman:
Yeah. She's great writer.

Dave:
And historically, the wonderful takeaway for me, and I think for most people, is everybody's always wrong.

David Gutterman:
Always wrong.

Dave:
... throughout history.

David Gutterman:
Yes.

Dave:
So what makes you think in any given moment that you, just some person, or all your ideas are totally sound and will prove to be correct? That's absurd. 

And I love the book for that because it really, these are smart, decorated people from history and it's like, "Oh, look how wrong they were." And in many cases, lots of people died. There were consequences to these people's-

David Gutterman:
Yes. Yes.

Dave:
But it's just what it was. It's life. You are learning as you go, you have to ... So anyway, that's my pitch for her book. The question though that I want to, to bring this back to you-

David Gutterman:
Can I respond to that? Can I respond to that real quick?

Dave:
Yes, you can. You can.

David Gutterman:
One of the things I love about this, and it's something that we do in my classes all the time is talk about how difficult it is to change your mind. 

And we ask people to share stories about the challenges that happen to them when they change their mind about big things and small things, like the band that you loved the most when you were 16, and all of a sudden you're like, "Is this the band I love the most when I'm 17?" 

It might be you're sacrificing friendships and a matter of identity, and it might be a long, slow process, right? 

But we think that if I just make the right argument, that you're going to change your mind. I can walk into the world, say something, and it'll be transformative to people. And then once people start talking about how slow and painful the process can be for changing your mind, for acknowledging that what you once held dear, you no longer hold dear, that provides some space for people.

I totally love the ... A lot of my heart right now and a lot of my thinking is in Minneapolis. 

And watching so many people get in front, not just supporting one another, but are chanting and singing to people, "You can change your mind." 

Chanting to ICE officers. "You can stop. You can change your mind. We're here for you if you want to change your mind." 

It's kind of remarkable, it's like recognizing that that's going to be part of the process as an invitation.

Dave:
Right. You graduated college in 1990, I think you said.

David Gutterman:
Yeah.

Dave:
All these years later, how has this path shaped you? 

If you're talking to the diversion of David back then at 21 or whatever it was, what's that person seeing now? How are you different or how has it shaped you?

David Gutterman:
Yeah. I think I've gotten better as a professor the more that I've let go of my claims to expertise. 

So much of graduate school is about narrowing your scope, becoming a real expert on a particular subject, and then going out into the world and thinking, "My job is to help tell people what I know." 

And that means that I am hoping that everybody comes to meet me where I am. Right?

Dave:
Right.

David Gutterman:
And as a young professor, I did a lot of that, like, "Let me tell you about Nietzsche, let me tell you about Rousseau. Let me help you get to, so you can see the world as I see it." 

And the more comfortable I became in the classroom, the less I did that. 

The more I began to think, "Where are you? What are the challenges that you're facing?” This isn't just an intellectual exercise. This is about the whole of what people are when they come into the class. 

And how do I help you ask the question and provide satisfactory answers to “What are we doing here?"—in the classroom, in college—and focus it not just on the, What are you individually doing here, but What are we doing here?

So I probably had to go through that process in order to get to the place where I am now. 

But part of what I wish I would tell myself is to have confidence in that transformation. 

When I decided I wanted to be a professor, I didn't think I could do it in part because I had one roommate and I was not the smartest person in that double. I was struggling to understand what he was doing and we were in the same general area. 

So trying to figure out that, get to a place in which I understood that teaching wasn't about being the smartest person in the room. It was about helping other people be smarter.

Dave:
Right.

David Gutterman:
And that is such a different approach. And I figured that out at 21 when I had to sort of struggle with that identity question of like, am I capable of doing this?

Dave:
Was there another person who helped you understand that, or was that just a realization you came to you on your own?

David Gutterman:
I think it was a realization I came to on my own when I thought about the places where I had the best experiences as a student. 

It wasn't that I thought that my professors were not smart, or the people I was worth were not smart. 

It was just the style of learning that I found so much more appealing was we're sitting in a circle and we're talking to each other.

And also, I would say I understood that when you're teaching, you're not working with brains in jars. 

You're working with the wholeness of somebody, to the extent that they let you see it. And that I felt like that's what I love.

Dave:
How does what you have learned through your professional life find its way into your life with family and friends in that way?

David Gutterman:
My children have taught me a lot.

Dave:
Yeah.

David Gutterman:
They've taught me a lot about how to be a better listener. How to listen not to solve a problem, but how to listen with presence.

I'm really, really fortunate that I have friends with whom I talk about teaching and talk about being present, and so it has become a part of my life. 

I'm really fortunate that I live and work in an environment that lets me do this kind of work. 

And there's a lot of academic work that is quite different from what I get to do. It's like same planet, different worlds in which my dedication to teaching is not what's rewarded. It would be how many articles and books I put out to the world. 

Or I have to teach a fairly rigid syllabus that's not of my own design.

And most importantly, I'm fortunate to be married to Jennifer. 

My wife and I met when we were undergraduates. 

And she's a professor too, right? So she teaches biology and marine biology and ecology at Chemeketa Community College. 

So we are very different subject matters, very different types of teaching that we have to do, but we talk about teaching all the time.

So it's like to be able to ... It's very much a part of who I ... My work is very much a part of who I am. And also I think who I am is very much a part of my work. Right?

Dave:
You're lucky in that way.

David Gutterman:
I'm very lucky in that way. I'm very lucky in that way.

Dave:
Thank you.

David Gutterman:
It was really a pleasure, so thank you.

Dave (outro):
Work-Shaped Life is produced by the team at Sheepscot Creative. It’s hosted by me, Dave Weich, edited by Bailey Cain and Michael Nipper, with production support from Benna Gottfried, Rosie Struve, Amelia Lukas and Kate Sokoloff.

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I would sit home and watch Netflix all day every day. I'm not a hugely extroverted person. But I have a huge network because I'm curious and I build my network through connecting with people that I actually want to learn about. I think helping people see that your network is really, really important in helping you find your next job, the right next adventure, growing your career in the way that you want to, but it doesn't have to be like a weird, salesy thing.

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