I was actually very disappointed with what officially passed for “interfaith dialogue” at the university. I believe very strongly that one of the roles, if not the primary role, of a university education is to teach critical thinking skills and to inculcate the habit of subjecting truth-claims to skeptical scrutiny. But I observed all sorts of ostensibly university-educated people making claims which, I think, they quite frankly ought to have been embarrassed about; they were either flat-out self-contradictory or obviously wrong, or could have easily been verified to be so by a quick trip to the library.
I set out to unofficially rectify this situation by engaging in conversations with a lot of people of various religions. I learned a lot of things through these conversations, and I think many others also learned a lot from me. I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of my activities, but I think that I played a rather vital and necessary role that nobody else could have filled. As a convert to Buddhism of Chinese descent, I was very different from just about everybody else. I could say and do things that would have been very inconvenient for anyone else to do. For example, political correctness more or less prevented those coming from mainstream European Judeo-Christian backgrounds from really intellectually challenging the religious beliefs of those from minority religions. On the other hand, believers in these religions were also somewhat defensive about what they perceived as attacks on or misunderstandings of their religions. I, however, could introduce ideas from the secular and skeptical but respectful scholarship of these religions to their followers without being automatically assumed to be some sort of imperialist or “Orientalist” (which, of course, would have been quite ironic).
I think that by far the most important thing I did while I was an undergraduate was to introduce the idea of secular critical scholarship of Islam and the Qur’an to the students of Muslim background with whom I spoke. Of course, I did not single out Muslims and discussed ideas about the academic study of religion with everyone. But this was a few years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and I think that no sane person can in retrospect deny that the world would probably have been a much better place if more engineering students in universities in free societies had spent less time trying to optimize their averages and more time learning about the rest of the world and helping to spread the hard-won culture of skeptical scientific inquiry. Years from now, nobody will care if my grade point average was slightly higher; but whether skepticism of religious authority takes root in the Muslim world will have an enormous impact on the future of the world.
At the time, however, my parents continually criticised my belief that it was important to introduce skepticism and ideas about the critical scholarship of religion to the Muslim world; among other things, they asserted that it was “none of [my] business”. I was encouraged, however, by my girlfriend at the time, who came from a Muslim background herself. She also believed that what I was doing was very important, and told me that I was “very brave” to have been doing it. Of course, when you’re a young man and your girlfriend keeps telling you how brave she thinks you are for doing something, you don’t stop doing it. So once again I ignored my parents’ wishes.
My purpose in telling the story above is to demonstrate that the belief of my parents, and others like them, that the only path to success is to do what is expected of you is utterly wrong. I have had numerous opportunities to contribute to the intellectual life of the university that I would never have had if I had obeyed them and did nothing but “study”. I think I still ended up with the highest or second highest average of all the students of Chinese background in Engineering Science in my year, in spite of “wasting my time” doing all sorts of “frivolous” things of which they disapproved.
One of these things was the processing of documents written in various languages, and specifically those written in some form of Arabic script. Things were really complicated, because Unicode had not yet become the norm. Furthermore, many of the people who produced documents in Arabic script were doing so from countries which were not as technologically advanced, and thus used older software formats which were obscure and difficult to parse. My father became very upset whenever he saw me with any books on the languages used in the Muslim world, and so I had to work on my project pretty much in secret. He kept saying that my interest in those languages was a “distraction” that had “nothing to do” with my studies. Of course, if he hadn’t expressed such vocal opposition to my interests, I could have participated publicly in projects such as Unicode, which I could have then added to my résumé. This is just one of many examples of how my parents’ efforts to discourage me from spending time on things they considered irrelevant to my studies actually prevented me from doing things which would later be important to my career.
– davinci
0 Responses to “The causes of my depression, part 15: the most important thing I did in undergrad”