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Questions: Catalyst for the Hero’s Journey
C. Uhl & M. Dijulio
The unexamined life is not worth living. –Socrates
Heroes, both today and back through time, have a renegade streak. They are not
satisfied with the status-quo. So it is that the heroic impulse often manifests in the form
of questions that challenge societal norms. Questions like: Why do we kill each other?
Why do we hoard? Why do we rush thorough our days? Why are we afraid to speak
what is really true for us? Why do we knowingly participate in economic arrangements
that we know are immoral? Why do we, with full knowledge, persist in creating climate
chaos? Such questions don’t make for polite conversation, but in their absence, we live
as cowards.
Questions and the Hero’s Journey: A Story
In the 1980s there was a young woman who worked as a clerk in a Dublin
supermarket. At that time, the apartheid regime—the discrimination of the black majority
by the white minority both politically and economically—was strong in South Africa.
The young Irish woman had read about this situation and had also heard the plea by black
South Africans to boycott fruit from their country. She became curious and began to ask
questions. This led to the discovery that that her store was selling this “racist” fruit
which meant that as a store cashier, she was literally the one who was selling the fruit.
She could have just shrugged and let it go, but she was deeply upset. On a small,
everyday scale this was her Call to leave the Known—i.e., to stand up and say “no” to
apartheid, even if this meant losing her job. So, the next day when customers brought
their groceries to her, she rang everything up except the fruit from South Africa. Not
surprisingly, the shoppers complained to the store manager and soon the young woman
was fired. But, the story doesn’t end there! Soon, every other clerk in that grocery store
was also refusing to sell the South African fruit. And the trend spread to other
supermarkets in Dublin, where more clerks came out to support the young woman by
refusing to ring up the “racist” fruit. And what was the result of all this? Well, the
possibility of imminent, large-scale supermarket shutdowns and extensive media
coverage caused many supermarkets to discontinue the sale of the South African fruit and
the young woman was given her job backi (paraphrased from DEC version 2 ch 8).
It should noted that there was nothing particularly extraordinary about this
woman. She had only a high school diploma, no political experience as an activist, and a
very ordinary job. What she did have was the sensitivity to recognize a situation that
struck her as wrong and the courage to move beyond playing it safe, even risking the loss
of her job. It was her willingness to question the status quo and her courage that were
her gift to her community.
The power of questions as a transformational tool goes far back into history. The
great Greek thinker and teacher, Socrates, taught by asking questions. He didn’t give
lectures or write books. Instead, he employed questions to cajole his student’s to explore
their thinking so that they might uncover the roots of their beliefs and values, and the
assumptions and ramifications therein. This approach revealed the ways in which his
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student’s thinking was dogmatic and limited. But fomenting such probing inquiry was a
potential threat to the status quo and eventually, Socrates was accused of corrupting the
minds of young men and sentenced to death (Phillips, 2001). Today, as well as in Greek
times, it requires a measure of heroism to doggedly ask questions, especially those that
challenge the status quo.
Social Conditioning Today Around Questions
We are all born with curiosity. Indeed, researchers report that pre-schoolers ask
dozens of questions per hour. Adults often ignore children’s questions or deflect them
with responses like “Why do you ask so many questions? In cases like this, the message
the child receives is that it’s not OK to be curious and question-filled. But many studies
now make it clear that when we snuff out curiosity, we snuff out learning, in so far as
curiosity is an important driver in the acquisition of knowledge. And there’s more, there
is also a strong link between curiosity and feelings of wellbeing. This is not so surprising
in so far as people who are curious orient their lives toward discovery and growth.
Compared to less curious people, they are predisposed to engage in, rather than avoid,
novel activities. Indeed, “curious people tend to be more self-aware.... They don’t shy
away from the tough life questions like: Who am I? Where do I want to go in life? And
why? Instead of sleepwalking through life or doing what’s expected, they are wondering
how to get the most out of their days and the most of themselves” (Lang, p. 36).
In the context of the Hero’s Journey, I find it helpful to think in terms of safe questions—
those that are familiar and predictable, and unsafe questions—those that shake us up,
even turning our world upside down. My schooling was full of safe questions that had
only one right answer. Teachers and test makers knew the right answers and it was my
job to learn them.
This changed for me when, in my early twenties, I accepted a teaching job at a
school for delinquent boys near Richmond Virginia. I had never taught before, and, as
part of my preparation, a friend suggested that I read the book, Teaching as a Subversive
Activity. Still today, I recall the intrigue and excitement I felt when I read: “Once you
have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—
you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want
or need to know” (p. 23). The authors went on to observe that: “The most important
intellectual ability humans have yet developed—the art and science of asking questions—
is not taught in school!” (Postman and Weingartner, 1969, p. 23). How true this was for me! I had
been conditioned to believe that learning was only about answering questions, not asking
them. Suddenly, a way opened; I would center my teaching on open-ended questions—
i.e., questions that didn’t have a known answer in the moment of the asking—questions
that were big and important and that presented a problem that was worthy of attention.
The book’s authors even provided a sampling of such questions:
 What do you worry about most? What are the causes of your worries?
 What, if anything, seems worth dying for? How did you come to believe this?
 What is progress? What is change? What are the most obvious causes of
change? What conditions are necessary for change to occur? What are
the most important changes that have occurred in the past 50 years? What
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kinds of changes are going on right now? Which are important? If you
wanted to stop one of the changes, how would you go about it?
 What does it mean to be free? Is freedom an illusion? What does it mean to be
prisoners to our own thinking? Are our beliefs passed down through
generations? Through authorities? Why?
 What are the conditions necessary for life to survive on Earth? What are the
greatest threats to all forms of life on Earth?
These are the kinds of questions that stop me in my tracks. I can’t simply push “play”
and access a routine or “scripted” response to them. Indeed, such questions have a heroic
quality in so far as they invite me, you, all of us into the unknown. In my experience, if I
commit to sitting with such questions, I might discover things about myself that I never
knew.
It is striking to me that in our culture we are often discouraged from asking such
yeasty questions with admonitions like “That’s not a question you can answer” or “You
will just get depressed if you are always dwelling on such questions.” Implicit in these
retorts is the notion that questions without quick and ready answers are to be avoided.
We are seldom told that the very best questions, the ones with the power to
transform us, don’t have answers, at least not right away. Rilke captured this when he
wrote in Letter to a Young Poet:
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward
all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions
themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a
very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot
be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the
point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you
will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day
into the answer.
Living a question, as Rilke describes, requires that we submit to the discomfort of “not
knowing,” which means that we step into the “unknown”; and this takes great courage,
especially in a culture like ours that conditions us to seek the comfort of the “known.”
When we submit to our conditioning, settling for superficial “answers” to life’s big
questions, we forfeit the option of setting our own life course. Sure, we may take a
vacation to the Bahamas or travel to Spain, but we will likely go seeking ease and
comfort, not answers to our life’s most ferocious questions.
Are Answers Overrated?
Imagine that I set a glass of water before you and ask you to tell me what it is.
You look at it, smell it, feel it, taste it and then triumphantly pronounce, correctly, that it
is water in the glass. I frown and say, “You have told me the correct name for what’s in
the glass, but this doesn’t tell me what ‘it’ is. What is this stuff you are calling ‘water’”?
You respond, “Ok, it’s an atom of oxygen combined with two atoms of hydrogen.” But I
wave you off saying that hydrogen and oxygen are just words, nothing more. You might
go on like this—using words, symbols, labels—endeavoring to answer my question but
as Zajonc (p. 118--confirm) points out: Far from helping us connect with reality,
answers actually make us less attentive to it. An answer consolidates a perspective; as
soon as you have an answer, there is no further need to really pay attention to ‘what
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is’.... Answers are never complete… They always point to something else… Alone, they
dull you to life... They do not move your forward, but stop you; they do not illuminate the
world’s unity… They do not help you to learn, but flatter you with having learned. Admit
ignorance and you open to encounter.”
Notice how Zakjonc’s last sentence, “Admit ignorance and you open to
encounter,” goes counter to our conditioning! After all, we are often told to project
confidence even when in doubt! Professing our ignorance, we are warned, is tantamount
to revealing weakness and this we must never do. Better to pretend. But is it? Really?
Susan Sontag has said, “Answers deplete the world.” I invite you to test her
assessment right now by actually pouring yourself a glass of water and asking, with the
innocence of a child, “What is this?” This will require that you drop your conditioning, if
only for a short time, and settle into “don’t-know” mind. Are you too busy to do this?
Think you already know the answer? Imagine you can simply access the answer on
Google?
GOOGLE: Help or Hindrance?
As a culture we are obsessed with answers. After all, answers give us relief. A
question arises and we feel a tinge of discomfort. We want relief, but how might we find
it? Google of course! Just go on the Internet, plug a few words into your search engine,
and presto, Google delivers the answer. And if a pithy answer can’t be quickly located
on the Internet, we often conclude that further inquiry into the question isn’t worth the
bother. In this vein, Andrea Batista Schlesinger writes: Young people are substituting
search engines for an inquiry process. They plug in their terms and press Enter, print the
first three articles that come up, rinse, and repeat. This automated search cycle is not
inquiry. They do not think carefully about the question they are asking; they do not
refine that question based on preliminary exploration; they do not consider the credibility
of the sources they encounter; they do not synthesize what they read... If they only learn
to retrieve, and not to interpret, when and where will they think new thoughts? (p. 5).
Schlesinger has a point, but it’s not just “young people.” It’s all of us. We seem to want
to live on the cheap when it comes to questions, anxious to settle for quick answers,
unwilling to engage in a process of full inquiry.
The Power of Why
Though our curiosity may have been dampened, it still lies dormant within us as
part of our birthright. It can be awakened. So, when I encounter students who are
dubious about the power and magic of questions to lead to insight, I invite them to
fearlessly ask the question, “why?” over and over again, just as young children so often
do. The practice (inspired by Jensen, 2004) is straightforward: When someone expresses
an opinion, simply ask: “Why do you think that?” Then, when they reply, respond with
“And why is that?” and so on, always with the intent of helping the speaker journey
deeper and deeper into her own thinking. For example, imagine that you are talking to
your friend, Judith, about the notion of “progress.” She has just declared that “As a
society, we in America are making progress!” Curious, you ask Judith:
“Why do you think we are making progress?”
She responds, “We are developing new technologies every day.”
Still curious, you respond, “Why are new technologies a sign of progress?”
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She responds, “Because new technologies make life easier.”
“Why is an easy life a mark of progress?” you ask.
She replies, “An easy life means more free time.”
“And Why is more free time an indicator of progress?”
“Free time means freedom to do whatever we want.”
“And Why is the freedom to do whatever we want a mark of progress?”
“I dunno, it just is,” replies Judith (paraphrased from TAILM, p. 66).
Granted, to persist in this way might be seen as rude in our culture like ours that
discourages such behavior, but is it really rude? Might it be that through your persistent
Whys you could help Judith discover the layers of beliefs—i.e., assumptions—
underlying her initial statement about progress. Indeed, with your help, Judith might
realize that she—along with almost all of us—has mindlessly absorbed her society’s
definition of progress, in effect, forfeiting the right to consider for herself what is meant
by progress. This is not to say that such questioning is easy. It is often deeply unsettling
because by questioning our own assumptions and beliefs, we are almost always
questioning the assumptions of our culture, and this can lead to stigmatization. As
Jensen posits, our culture is quick to censor those who call into question its sacred icons:
“Question Christianity, damned heathen. Question capitalism, pinko liberal. Question
democracy, ungrateful wretch. Question science, just plain stupid” (Jensen, 2000, A Language
Older than Words, pg. 40).
Wrap Up
Nothing shapes our lives so much as the questions we ask, refuse to
ask, or never dream of asking. Our minds, bodies, feelings, and
relationships are literally informed by our questions.
-p. 56, Sam Keen, In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred
The Hero’s Journey is seeded by questions. The hero-in-waiting slowly comes to
realize that she has unwittingly inherited a boatload of beliefs that shape and limit her
perception of the world, of herself, of education, of her country, of life’s meaning and
purpose, and more. With time, she might also discover that her very reluctance to ask
hard, probing questions is also, in some measure, a product of her conditioning. As
nascent heroes, ourselves, the challenge is to realize that it is only by fearlessly
questioning what our society holds as true, that we can break the trance of our social
conditioning, thereby ensuring that our Hero’s Journey is not stillborn within us.
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Katrina Shields, In the Tiger’s Mouth (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 1994), 12.