# 165: Life Writing Changes Lives
Story behind the Passage
Yes, I discussed Susanne Koelbl’s book Behind the Veil before (“Unveiling the Paradox”) but I have to write about it again today. This is not because I want to write about Saudi Arabia in particular. I want to write about life writing and how it changes lives. This is why I opened the book again because there is a passage in there which is such a powerful testimony to how books change people’s lives. If anyone will ever tell me that books are just good for pleasure or ‘learning’ in some vague and theoretical sense, I will simply overhear it to not get angry.
The sad thing is, however, or rather the stupid thing, that in order to “prove” this, you could apply for a lot of research money and conduct a large study in order to write long papers to share your sophisticated insights about this in your academic community. In addition, of course, you would have to reflect on all this ‘critically.’ What this means is that you should think about your own thinking and doubt whether your thesis — that life writing changes lives — is actually “true,” i.e., based on evidence.
You see where I am going…?
There is such a thing called common sense. Actually, people in business studies often display this. I am not saying that I always agree but I am always impressed with a colleague of mine who, whenever I come up with a great research idea (in my view), responds with the words: “Silke, this certainly is highly relevant and probably deserves more research but nobody will ever doubt that what you are arguing is wrong, it is completely self-evident. It does not take a study to make plausible why your solution makes sense.”
So, whenever I come across a passage like the one above, I remember her words and I feel the longing to share the passage without turning it into some complicated and long research saga which is totally unnecessary to make the point I want to make. And that point is not only to show the power of literature — the real-life impact of it. It is also to relate it to the people who are responsible for making this happen. In the case above, it was Jasem’s mother who provided her son with the book. Jasem is one of the people Koelbl meets during her stay in Saudi Arabia. In other cases, hopefully in many, teachers in school or university are those who make these revelations happen by doing nothing more than making knowledge — STORIES — accessible to their students.
This, the simple act of giving a book to someone, or some other collection of stories in whichever media format, is especially relevant in countries that are, for different reasons which I am not going into today, somewhat secluded from the rest of the world. Saudi Arabia, for sure, is one of them — at least as of today. And the same situation applies to the current Covid generation of students which is sitting at home right now. I hope that many students will, even without the immediate face-to-face contact with their teachers, happen to stumble over material that will open their eyes in the way that the biography about Bertrand Russell changed Jasem’s life.
My Learnings
“The book opened up a new world for Jasem.“ This is what books can do if you allow them to do that. There is only one very simple way how they achieve that: You get access. You open them. You read. What will touch you is not a matter of any universal judgement. There will be ten people reading the same book and they will remember ten different passages that touched them in a special way. What is so outstanding about Russell is that he was not a literary scholar or writer and still won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I wish we had more people like this today. People who can think on the highest level of abstraction. People who can act with their heart in the real world. And people who can write in a way that people immediately catch the fire that they pass on to humanity.
If you have never heard about Russell, here is a pretty good short summary of his life contribution which I just found online:
“Bertrand Russell (18 May 1872–2 February 1970) could be just a brilliant mathematician who won a Nobel Prize. But he is also a philosopher who, by his writings, won the award in the category of Literature. He is the social critic who defended the rights of women and who lost work to support sexual freedom in the early twentieth century. He is the pacifist whose rejection of the First World War took him to jail. He is the activist who opposed Hitler, Stalinism, the US invasion of Vietnam, nuclear bombs and racial segregation. He is the one who made peace his struggle. It is he who — three months before his death, at the age of 97 — appealed to the Secretary General of United Nations to support a commission against the war crimes committed by the Americans in Southeast Asia. For all his contributions, Russell is defined as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. But it was mathematics, according to Russell himself, that was his chief interest and source of happiness.” Bertrand Russell, the Mathematician Who Won the Nobel Prize for Literature | OpenMind (bbvaopenmind.com)
You know what I love most about this summary? Yes, it is the very last remark — the fact that for Russell, mathematics was the “source of happiness.” It does not just say it made him happy. With a certain field of knowledge as the source of happiness, it means that there is no ending to happiness until life puts a natural ending to it. And this is pretty remarkable. I wish that all of us find this in what we do — no matter if it is in some theoretical or practical field. In any case, I am almost certain that the young Jarem was not only touched by the biography about Russell because the latter had already written about women’s rights. You have to remember that the issue of women’s rights is a special one in Saudi Arabia, which Jasem, as described in the book, became aware of quite early in his life. Still, he must have been even more moved by the fact that Russell found a spring of joy in maths. Otherwise, Jasem would not have chosen the career he chose. But the biography did even more than this.
“Russell emboldened seventeen-year-old Jasem to doubt the culture around him and to take individual responsibility.” I am noticing some skepticism and questioning in the “West” these days about the dangers of individual responsibility. It seems, the hyper individualism of “our” culture in Europe and the U.S. has come to a stage where people are realizing that this does not move anyone forward. Particularly, it does not stop people from catching a deadly disease and it does not prevent people from almost dying of solitude and social isolation.
In a culture such as Saudi Arabia, more or less the opposite rules apply. This is exactly why, for Jasem, the “encounter” with Russell triggered this alternative Enlightenment. Taking “individual responsibility” in a world that is so much about tribal relations is like teaching a nun about sadomasochist sex practices and actually convincing her to try it! (Well, I know my comparisons are a bit off track sometimes but I just wanted you to get the point….) So, learning hat individual responsibility even exists and to then actually pursue this philosophy, which is not rooted in Saudi culture and the kind of Islam that is being practiced and preached there, must have felt like a true Awakening.
“Ever since, he has been able to think for himself and see reality for what it really is.” Very often, we talk about inspiration and taking responsibility. But what does it really lead to? What happens? What do people actually DO if they experience such revelations? Yes, nowadays, they mostly talk about it on social media, so the entire world knows about it — at least their small world of “friends” and “followers.” But who really follows up on this by asking two weeks after some post or so what the sender actually did after his/her groundbreaking revelation? Usually, this is because all parties know that the answer to this question would probably be a lot shorter than the original heureka post…
What makes Jasem’s story so powerful for me is that he did take action — he really studied mathematics and statistics. You know, studying something for several years and then starting a career built on that knowledge is not a piece of cake, neither is it temporary. It does change the entire course of your life. And, again, remember how it all started: He read about Russell’s life and it “inspired him.” Of course, these are the words Koelbl as the author chose for describing this. There could be other words describing the same thing which might be more or less revealing. It des not matter at all how this incident is depicted. What I am saying is that a BOOK opened up a new world to Jasem. And it was not any book. It was a BIOGRAPHY — the life story about one of the greatest thinkers and actors in history.
Yes, people can get annoyed by my fascination with life stories. Just like Russell derived his happiness from mathematics, life stories are my source of wisdom and happiness. Especially if you live in a country or an environment where you do not have many Russells and other great and inspiring figures around because people have other priorities, books bring these role models to you. This is what media are there for since Gutenberg invented the printing press, by the way. Books allow you, the “common woman or man,” access to new worlds. And my argument remains that especially life stories play a special role for this learning for life because they do not only teach you new facts and old history, they teach you how human beings responded to these circumstances and how they used them productively.
Still, there is one thing I want to close with that is really important in order to not convey the wrong message here. It concerns the aspect of “whose biography” we are talking about. Yes, Russell was famous and most people writing biographies are famous. But I do not think that only these biographies of the rich and famous and the smart ones have the power to make such differences in the lives of others. Neither do biographies actually have to be written in the literary sense of the term. If we just learn to listen to the stories that people around us have to tell, we can gain equally remarkable insights for our own lives. As a wonderful teacher in an online seminar that I took part in just put it a few days ago:
“You, the participants, are going to be the books that we learn from.” U. M.
I could not agree more and I encourage everyone to look at the life stories around you to use them as your text books for life.
Reflection Questions
1) Did you ever read or hear about a life story that changed your life? What was it about?
2) How do you think about Jasem and his mindset in his culture?
3) How does what you read above about Russell relate to what you know about philosophy?