Trying to understand everything

by Richard L. Weaver II

Perhaps I was too easily influenced, however, my parents, teachers, and ministers always impressed me as I was growing up with how much they knew. They just seemed to have all the answers, and because of that they not only had my attention and respect, but my admiration as well. When I read books, too, I couldn’t believe the expertise of authors. When I was young — much of the way through high school and college, too — I placed authors on a pedestal. I didn’t just think highly of them, I revered, even worshiped them.

It was only four years after completing graduate school that I was asked if I was interested in writing a textbook, and both my co-author and publishing company had to convince me that I was now in a position to approach such a task. It was hard for me to believe that I had acquired that level of expertise because, for me, it meant taking my place at the same noble and lofty height at which I had placed the many authors I had read — and so recently, too, it seemed to me.

To illustrate how common the experience is — placing parents, teachers, ministers, and especially authors on a knowledge pedestal — a student came down to the front of the lecture hall after one of my lectures and asked me, “Do you know everything there is to know about speech communication?” The question shocked me at first because of the surprise factor. It seemed to have come from nowhere. But it shocked me, too, because in my mind I had resolved that issue, and many times when I have worked through ideas, I think others have come to similar conclusions. How was it possible he could think that of me? No way!

Now, thinking of this situation in retrospect, it revealed the naivete of the student, but, more importantly, how being in the position of director and lecturer of the course and the author of the textbooks could cause a student to think I knew everything.

I treated the student’s question and the questioner with the utmost care. First, I wanted to treat him with the respect and dignity he deserved, of course, but I wanted to make sure I left him with the feeling that I was, indeed, open to any future questions he chose to ask. Second, I wanted to instruct him, too, without belittling, deprecating, or trivializing his question. Thus, I began slowly.

You know, we are tiny complex human beings living in a huge and complex world. And, if you think about it, we will never be able to understand everything. That applies to all levels and all areas of life. It took me a long time to grasp this, but as an author of a textbook, I realized that there will always be things just outside of my comprehension. Also, because there is so much background, such a wealth of history, and so many factors to be considered, we all have a difficult time — no matter how long and hard we study — learning everything there is to know, no matter how much we refine and narrow the subject. New experiences, inventions, experiments, and opinions continually arise, too, that must be considered. Despite everything there is to know, all we can do, in the end, is offer the very minuscule, limited, and biased picture we have as a result of raising our periscope from where we are located, turning it slowly around to view everything we can, and then trying to compose some sort of representation of what’s out there from our perspective — because that’s all we have.

Some of what exists in my own discipline, I will never know. Some of it I will view and try to work out. And even what is known, or what I find out, I will have to interpret and put into a context for myself. Unfortunately, what I have had to do is accept the fact there is and always will be stuff out there that I won’t have time to examine much less understand, and I just have to let it go at that.

One way to understand all of this is to view the entire world in which we live as an enormous jigsaw puzzle with trillions of pieces. We may only have access to just one corner or just a few pieces. The more we search and investigate, of course, more pieces of the puzzle become known to us. But, from the pieces we are dealt and the pieces we discover, we must make assumptions. For the most part, we don’t even know what the whole puzzle looks like, and it is likely that when the veil gets taken away and we see that the puzzle is, indeed, massive, we might even discover that the pieces we were scrutinizing were actually something else entirely or, when the parts at our disposal are put together, we end up looking at an entirely different picture than the one we had imagined.

The student who asked me, “Do you know everything there is to know about speech communication?”actually humbled me somewhat. If students truly believed that I either knew everything (or thought I did), this places an imposing burden on me for representing the information in the best manner possible, offering contrary evidence and information where appropriate, and making certain that I never presented it in a patronizing or arrogant manner. It meant labeling my own insights and opinions, when uncorroborated with supporting evidence, for what they are, and putting facts, statistics, and other data into their proper and appropriate context. That constitutes an awesome burden.

What students do when they assume you know everything there is to know is entrust you with the responsibility of presenting everything in the most accurate, forthright, truthful, genuine, and responsible manner that you can. To be the least bit deceitful or deceptive would be to jeopardize the trust relationship between teacher and student. To add irrelevant opinions such as political, moral, or tangential commentary (unrelated to the subject at hand) would be totally inappropriate and out-of-line.

You see what the problem was when I was first asked if I wanted to write a textbook? The problem was that I didn’t know or understand everything, and I felt that was a necessary prerequisite for approaching such a task. I had to be convinced that what I knew — and would then acquire through research and investigation — was, indeed, sufficient. And, I might add, even after asking the questions, wondering to myself, talking to other people, and completing the research and investigation, I was still unsure that the textbook I had completed satisfied the criteria I had set for authors. The popularity of my first textbook proved otherwise, and convinced me that not only does life not always make sense but that I could let my doubts go, recognize for sure that I would never know everything, and go on to write several more.*


(*To satisfy the curiosity of some readers, it should be known that I went on to write well over thirty college textbooks (including editions), and the ninth edition of Communicating Effectively (written through six editions with Saundra Hybels) was published in 2009.)

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At The Times of India, in an essay, “O-Zone: Must You Understand Everything?,” Vinita Dawra Nangia has offered a delightful perspective on trying to understand everything. She ends her essay saying: “Very often as we move on in life, mysteries and open ended situations we left behind, start falling into place. And invariably we realize as the coins start finding their slots that everything had a reason and a time.... And much as we may have imagined, didn’t need us unraveling or understanding it...Somebody, somewhere understood it all...”

Richard Bernstein writes this review of Roger Shattuck’s book, Forbidden Knowledge at The New York Times website. I have not read Shattuck’s book, but I love the review, especially this paragraph by Bernstein: “Indeed, there is a paradox appreciated by the author in the fact that he had to acquire enormous amounts of knowledge himself in order to address the question of when knowledge becomes too much. Mr. Shattuck's overall purpose is cautionary. Writing at a time when most of humankind is swept up in a Promethean quest for knowledge and liberation, he wants to put in a word for restraint, for boundaries.” Bernstein ends his review saying: “''Forbidden Knowledge'' is the effort of a first-rate thinker to combine personal experience with literature, philosophy and the history of science to produce a moral whole, a creed to live by. The edifice trembles here and there, but it is nonetheless a fine structure, full of dark passages and richly furnished rooms. It will take some time and effort to visit them all, but it will be time and effort well spent.” The book seems to be a quest by Shattuck not to know everything but to make sense of everything he knows.

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Copyright April, 2009 - And Then Some Publishing L.L.C.