Peripheral Visions

self-respect by finding someone else to put down.
    In the Philippines, children learn early on to avoid competing, so that success or failure is often attributed to luck and the child who claims credit for success is remorselessly teased. When American educators arrived in the Philippines, they found this reluctance to stand out and excel frustrating. American clergy have sometimes complained that Filipinos lack the kind of internalized conscience they were used to, responding to public shame rather than true contrition. Individual behavior is experienced as an expression less of the self than of the group. Yet if the conscience really is an internalization of external authority, as Freudians argue, this may be liberating to know.
    Even in a society that uses competition to select and strengthen a few members of the group for success, there are situations in which the smart ones, the successes, limit their risks in the face of future challenges, for once they have gotten away from school and become established at a high level, the risks of learning may seem hardly worth it. Given a choice, as we are later in life, most people choose not to learn and therefore not to change except in superficial ways. Deborah Tannen points out that in American culture men are notoriously unwilling even to stop on the road to ask for directions, but this is only one of many settings in which obtaining information or guidance is blocked because of the acknowledgment of weakness involved. Only a few people become, out of their experience, addicted to the process of learning, to its intrinsic rewards.
    When we went to the Philippines, Barkev and his colleagues went as professors of management, brought by the Ford Foundation. They started trying to learn a little Pilipino—phrases and greetings. One day one of them walked into a room where there were six young Filipina secretaries and complained loudly, “No breasts, no breasts!”—a tiny mispronunciation of “no keys.” The room was filled with cascading female laughter, and the story was retold for months. That was the end of their effort to learn the language, for the professors were prohibited by their status from making fools of themselves. Wealth and power are obstacles to learning. People who don’t wear shoes learn the languages of people who do, not vice versa. Given a choice, few will choose the reversal of status that is involved in being ignorant and being a learner, unless there is a significant gain of intimacy or respect in the new learning. When I first became a dean, I admired the campus skating rink and started talking about learning to skate, but helpful faculty friends argued that as dean I could not afford to let colleagues see me in the inevitable comic falls.
    The Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila were a mixed group of Filipinos and Americans who had been there for many years, for when the United States took over the Philippines from Spain the Vatican moved to disassociate Philippine Catholicism from the Spanish tradition and Spanish Jesuits were replaced by members of the New York Province of the Society of Jesus. By the time I was there, a new Philippine Province of the Society had been created, and many American Jesuits who had worked there all their lives had been transferred officially to the new province governed by Filipino priests they had trained. Thus, the Ateneo de Manila, which like every educational institution was a place where the self is battered and buffeted and reshaped, became a doubly conflicted force field of ways of constructing the self. The Jesuit tradition, shaped by the Counter-Reformation, is based on a training system that deconstructs the self and reconstructs it on new lines. The spiritual and emotional technologies that are today called therapies find their roots in the spiritual disciplines and practices of earlier eras. Typically for a Jesuit, childhood faith is lost and a new, self-conscious faith, both more individual and more individualistic, forged. The Society of Jesus has produced many of the great soldiers of faith and many of the great apostates, including Fidel Castro. Jesuits who survive that formation are tough.
    The American Jesuits in Manila, still in 1966 holding almost all the positions of authority in the university, had a certain massive quality of assurance, striding across the campus in their tropical white soutanes. Many had come as young priests twenty or thirty years before; told when they came that they