The Desire of Discipline
This speech was given in 1974.
As I considered how to introduce this year’s workshop theme— “A Wise Steward”—the parable of the unjust steward kept plucking at my attention. In making peace with this parable, I had to view our theme at its primal level. The unjust steward is apparently commended for discounting obligations owed to his master in order to gain favor with potential employers; in fact, his master says he has acted “wisely” (Luke 16:8). If this steward is our model, however, a wise steward may be little more than a crafty self-seeker. Even as I disdain this definition, however, I am taught by it. My commitment to higher education need not preclude my learning an occasional Primary lesson.
The steward, having chosen a foolish path, yet walked it finally with foresight and a determination to survive that exacted something akin to admiration from his defrauded employer. One need not envision the steward being rehired by his former master, however, and I am sure this parable is not an early aggrandizement of the loser—a common attitude in current writing. In sum, the servant’s action reflects only modest positive content. But this parable contains no illusions, and as such is much less disquieting than a possible counterpart: a person who chooses an exalted road yet walks it foolishly. At the most basic level, wisdom may be a lonely, individual business, akin to self-preservation. We ignore this reality at our physical and intellectual peril. In a profound sense, every number above one is a fraction.
If we raise our concept of wisdom from an isolated survival level, we may well pause at the practical good sense of the Proverbs. Here, in the so-called hokmah of ancient Israel, we have the distilled experience of a people, a balance sheet of consequences presented to us in casual yet forceful candor. No treatise on alcoholism is more insightful than the concluding seven verses of chapter 23. And the opening lines of this same section—with their cold-eyed advice to those who overestimate their ability to resist temptation—are as convincing as they are chilling.
The wisdom of the Proverbs makes group action possible, from a primitive hunting party to a modern parliament. Here, wisdom is less personal preservation than it is social accommodation. If we have individual salvations to work out as BYU faculty members—intellectual as well as spiritual—we are also part of departments, colleges, and committees. In acknowledgement of this shared interest, let us shift our focus from wisdom to stewardship. Stewards must be about business other than their own. A sty warden—an earlier form of this word—tended everything from accounts to pigs. Cooperative action always requires service, subordination, and self-control. In this regard, I am struck by the emphasis of the Proverbs. Little space is given to why. Instead, the burden is on how: how to avoid needless difficulties with adversaries, how to learn from others’ mistakes, how to get cooperation from those below or above us. In crisp aphorism and extended analogy, the Proverbs implicitly recognize what repeated experience teaches us. Specifically, the Proverbs’ explicit graphic detail almost exudes a determination to capitalize upon cooperation and avoid needless contention within a holy people. Consider, for example, that having once seen the picture in our mind’s eye, we can never forget: “He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears” (Prov. 26:17).
A neglected but almost unique strength at BYU—among the major universities of the world—is our potential ability to capitalize on a commitment extending beyond personal ambition or loyalty to a scholarly discipline. I hope I never forget the cue that the president of the Kellogg Foundation gave me when that organization was considering our application for a major grant to help Native Americans. At the risk—which he admitted—of raising our expectations, he called me to ask how we had dared to schedule a series of projects that depended upon close, even subservient, cooperation between several departments and colleges. Mentioning his own background in educational administration, he expressed frank disbelief in our ability to pull it off. I explained, as persuasively as I could, what our shared theological base did for us. As I did so, however, I found my own vision concerning what could happen in a fully integrated scholarly endeavor suddenly enlarging. Why should we be content with an aggregation of effort, the best one might hope for elsewhere, when we might achieve synthesis?
Without spurning what telestial and terrestrial attitudes have to teach us, perhaps we can lift our sights once more. The most arresting discussion of wise service I know occurs in the sixth chapter of the Wisdom of Solomon: “[Wisdom] goeth about seeking such as are worthy of her, showeth herself favorably unto them in the ways, and meeteth them in every thought. For the very true beginning of her is the desire of discipline; and the care of discipline is love; and love is the keeping of her laws; and the giving heed unto her laws is the assurance of incorruption; and incorruption maketh us near unto God; therefore the desire of wisdom bringeth to a kingdom” (Wisdom of Solomon 6:16–20, KJV1).
If the rather brisk sorties by which we move from contemplating wisdom to exaltation involve more than we are trying to handle in this workshop, the assertion that the true beginning of wisdom is “the desire of discipline” provides culmination for our consideration of wise stewardship. Even if we catch only the faintest suggestion of discipline in the unjust steward’s action, it is still there. In the moral bookkeeping of Proverbs, self-discipline takes on increasing importance. But only those who resonate to the Prophet Joseph’s declaration that the people must govern themselves are prepared to appreciate wisdom as the desire for discipline.
As an academic administrator, I often need to remind myself that the desire for discipline cannot be vicarious. We can commend that desire to others with fatal ease—and I risk such a misstep in talking about it today. Yet my role requires me to ask the following questions: Do we want to give the term faculty dignity and significance? Do we want to be genuine scholars—not instead of or because of or eventually or partially—unmistakably and now? The suggestion that “we become what we want to become” contains a copybook simplicity. But action does have its genesis in attitude. Consider, for example, how Alma emphasizes attitude in his discourse on acquiring gospel knowledge. According to Alma, we do not generate faith unless we want to believe (Alma 32). The desire required for generating faith is not restricted to theology. At BYU, for instance, we do not become scholars simply because the administration expects it of us.
The desire for discipline turns self-preservation into self-expression, social accommodation into shared and supported growth. How often that which we feel most deeply is most appropriately shared! The facade we casually call “personality” may be as distinguishing as a fingerprint—but about as thin. For example, consider the contrast between conformity, which is usually exacted, with obedience, which must be given. Surely any discipline imposed from without is as intellectually stultifying as its effects are temporary. Discipline imposed from within, however, reflects the unremitting goad of our finest hopes and expectations. The truly wise steward recognizes all people choose the cause that commands their allegiance—in conscious selection as well as in the disorderly realm of personal longing—from which intent and action ineluctably follow. BYU faculty members have chosen that cause and have a singular opportunity to realize educational aims beyond usual conception. Our only real challenge must be our own highest aspirations.
“What will you have?” asked Emerson. “Pay for it, and take it.”2 The down payment on every achievement is desire, and discipline mints the capital with which we can meet recurring installments. I can come to such a conclusion in serenity but not in comfort, for comfort connotes indulgence, and indulgence generates contempt. Wise stewards neither expect nor extend indulgence; rather, they want to be what they ought to be. If what I have said today unites us in that conviction, then we may all set our faces toward Zion—whose purity of heart is surely supported by a disciplined mind.
