HileThoughts

In March, Daniel Everett spoke about endangered languages at a Long Now seminar (audio, summary). In 1977 Everett, then a Christian missionary, went to work with the Pirahã tribe in the center of the Amazon.  A tribe that

numbers only 360, spread in small groups over 300 miles. An exceptionally cheerful people, they live with a focus on immediacy, empiricism, and physical rigor that has shaped their unique language (Brand, 2009)

What I found most astonishing was that they have no creation stories or myths. While this would seem to be fertile ground for a missionary it actually had the opposite effect. The ultimate empiricists, the Pirahã  believe only what they can see, what their elders have seen, or what others have told them that they have seen. When unable to provide evidence for his god the Pirahã lost interest in discussing it further. Moreover, in that failed effort Everett lost his faith as well. During his presentation he tells a rather charming story about this experience which he evidently expands in his book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.

I had always thought that all peoples had creation stories, that all peoples had created one or more gods. It is most refreshing to know that is evidently not the case.

I just read Kate Lovelady’s (the Leader of the St. Louis Ethical Society) blog post discussing one of her new year’s resolutions to make sure her wishes to be an organ donor were recognized.

I checked the back of my license and saw that would not have helped - I would have to sign as well as two witnesses - that seems more dificult than it should be. While my family knows my wishes I decided to take Kate’s advise and visited this national site which has links to information from each of the various states.

Going to the Missouri link, I worked for a while and finally figured out how to register on the state’s web site. The usability of the site clearly has never been tested by watching real people try to walk through the process. They have managed to create a site that is well deigned to frustrate rather than help users. The ability to get to the pages is hidden, the text confusing, and trying to fill out the forms when you are able to get to them is counterintuitive. But, if you are persistent, you can in fact use it to register to make your wishes known.

So I did it - so can you. Find out how to register in your state and make your wishes known so that when you loose your life you can pass parts of it along to others in need.

Prior to our opening retreat we have all taken the DISC assessment ( an "assessment" not a "test") that describes our leadership behaviors. According to the presenter, like the Myers-Briggs it is based on Jungian theory, though the presentation does not stress this nor do I see an obvious connection.

Four dimensions are described and we are asked to self select the one that we feel most closely reflects how we are at work. For my part I select the "detail oriented and completion focused" C type as slightly more important to me than the D type with its "get it done attitude." Meeting with others who also find affinity with this dimension is a lot like talking to myself. What my C group members describe doing is exactly what I to do as a matter of course.

When we get our actual results I find that I am must know myself pretty well. I was indeed highest in C followed, lower by a single point, by D. Termed creative by the DISC report it reflects my interest in the specific details of getting things to work and the desire to actually get things to work and to make decisions.

As a psychologist, trained in assessment, I find the results of assessments I take about myself fascinating. Do I see myself in the results? Do I see others in the assessment? Can I see how a particular individual might score and why they and I have the relationship that we do? In this case I can answer yes to all of these question.

But more interesting to me are the questions from the group. I have taught for the last 10 years at the American Ethical Union’s Lay Leadership Summer School. There we have traditionally taught and used the Myers-Briggs. So, as I listen to and participate in the DISC portion of our weekend it is with both ears - as a LSL participant and as a faculty doing similar work for the AEU. The questions and comments from the groups are remarkably similar.

I am both this way AND that way, it depends on the situation.

Is my score related to American or world cultures?

These were hard questions to answer.

How can this be valid?

There is more to me than this.

The presenter fields the questions carefully, stressing the ideas that this is "only one data point," that we each have a unique personality, and that we cannot be fully described by the pattern of four scales. 

For me, the idea of assessment seems so natural. That those few questions on the assessment, hard as they were to answer, do seem to accurately describe things about the way I think and work. Yet it is clear that my response is idiosyncratic. Others are clearly concerned reading more, or less, into the assessment then is there.

When I last used the Myers-Briggs in Summer School I worked hard at minimizing the stress the assessment caused our students by presenting it as a useful heuristic. That helped some. But no more than the comments of our DISC presenter. The questions and concerns remain the same. Perhaps that is just the way it is going to be.