Public vs. Private

As a society we have divided into Red and Blue ghettoes. Liberals and conservatives talk only to each other and look with contempt on those in the opposite camp. The complaints that each side makes about the other offer a curious parallel. Conservatives claim that liberals are too individualistic when it comes to sex. There need to be public standards of sexual behavior, conservatives think. Liberals tend to think that homosexuals should be allowed to marry, that adults should not discourage teenagers from having sex so long as they use condoms, that women can raise children just fine without fathers, that high divorce rates are nothing to worry about and that couples living together for short or long periods of time without marriage is fine and healthy. Conservatives tend to disagree with all of the above. They would usually encapsulate their views on sex as “supporting marriage” and they would describe this collection of liberal attitudes as “attacking marriage.” In short, conservatives think that sex is not a purely private matter and that society as a whole should exercise some measure of control over the sexual behavior of individuals. Hard line conservatives want standards of sexual conduct enforced with legal sanctions. Liberal individualism about sex is seen as promotion of selfishness that is destructive to a healthy social order. Conservatives see a social order breaking down with harmful effects on everyone. Leaving individuals completely “free” to pursue their own sexual happiness leads to the destruction of the familial relations which are the essential to the health of society and ultimately to the happiness of individuals themselves. The search for sexual gratification unrestricted by social sanctions of any kind paradoxically leads to individual misery.
When it comes to money conservatives think that liberals are not individualistic enough. Here the key word is not “marriage” but “socialism.” Liberals want the government to be active in solving some of society’s problems. Government should place restrictions of business to protect the environment from degradation, to protect workers from discrimination based on sex or race, to protect consumers from dangerous and defective products. They want society to support healthcare, education, and public transportation. Liberals recognize that all this costs money and see nothing wrong with taxing the rich to pay for it. When it comes to money, conservatives think, individuals should do whatever they want and the public needs to back off. Taxes should be low and rates should not be higher for the wealthy. People should pay for their own medical care and for the educational needs of their own children. If they feel their employer is discriminating against them, they should quit and find a new job. Consumers should protect themselves by researching products before they buy them. And finally, the threat that unrestricted business activity poses to the environment is wildly exaggerated.
Looking at society from the liberal point of view reverses all this as if looking into a mirror. Conservative resistance to “socialism” is a sign of selfish individualism which blinds itself to public good. Economic activity is too important to be left to unrestricted free markets. Laissez faire capitalism would naturally destroy our natural environment, reduce the middle class to poverty, and ultimately destroy itself by collecting more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Common sense demands a measure of public control of economic activity because completely “free” economic activity leads to moral disaster. On the sexual side of things, conservatives lack respect for individuals and their power to make choices unconstrained by society. The conservative sneer at “socialism” in economic matters is paralleled here by the liberal sneer at the “Puritanism” of conservatives.
The Red/Blue divide thus takes the shape of a disagreement about where to draw the line between public and private. Liberals want sexual relations to be purely private but think there should be a larger measure of public control of economic relations. Conservatives believe that society must support marriage and exert some measure of control over personal sexual behavior but that society should never interfere with “capitalistic acts between consenting adults.” Both sides see themselves as being unbending defenders of freedom where they think such freedom is appropriate and as being sensible opponents of due restraint where they think that such “freedom” is actually selfish irresponsibility.
In 1982 MacIntyre described our modern situation as a desolate one in which people could not reason with each other about what was right and what was wrong and instead could only express their anger and engage in ruthless political maneuvering to achieve their own favored ends. Now that we are in the second decade of the 21st century the modern situation looks even more like this than it did in 1982. Few, very few, liberals will actually make a serious attempt to argue that unrestricted sexual behavior will actually promote the well-being of society. Generally this is simply assumed and those who disagree are sneered at. Few, very few, conservatives will actually make a serious attempt to argue that the invisible hand of the marketplace solves all problems in the long run. Generally the mere use of the label “socialism” is considered enough of an argument.
Pity the poor moderate who seeks compromise and gets sneered at by both sides.

Teaching to students with disabilities

What has been your experience teaching to deaf and hard-of-hearing students?

A little background:

I will be teaching at RIT starting next week, and a significant part of the RIT culture is the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. 9 out of the 75 students currently signed up for my courses are in the NTID; in orientation we've already been given some preliminary tips on how to integrate these students into the class, and of course there are many other resources available at RIT.

That said, in my decade plus of teaching, I've only had one deaf student, and it was a mixed experience for me. I got used to having a translator in the classroom, and had positive interactions with the student in and out of class. However, her written work seemed limited by the grammar of ASL, and I worried that my lectures never quite made it through translation (admittedly, she should have been able to keep up through the required reading).

Do you have any positive (or negative) experiences you'd be willing to share?

Avatar and Philosophy

The idea of modern European/American people “going native” is not new. At first it was overwhelmingly viewed as a very bad thing. As far back as the 17th century the Pope worried that the missionaries he had sent to covert the Chinese were becoming Chinese instead. After James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans Americans devoured horror stories about white women being forced to go native. In the 19th century the British worried about officers and men stationed too long in India losing their British identity and this is a theme in some of Kipling’s tales. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) depicts going native in Africa as a horrifying descent into madness and evil. At some point in the 20th century the tide shifted and “going native” started to seem appealing rather than appalling. Dancing with Wolves depicts a white American shifting loyalty from American culture to the Lakota as something positive. In 2010 Avatar takes the going native theme and transports it into a beautiful science fiction setting and becomes the most popular movie of all times. Is this merely due to the stunning visual effects or did the movie make the idea of going native hypnotically appealing?

In Avatar Jake, a paraplegic ex-Marine is feeling useless and abandoned in an ugly world. The world of 2154 in which Jake lives is much like ours but darker, dirtier and nastier. Nature has been all but completely destroyed and human relationships are coarse, violent and exploitive. Medical science has the ability to heal Jake and let him walk again but society won’t pay for the operation. Jake has been left by society to fend for himself and he’s not doing very well. Jake shows no trace of anger or rebelliousness at his treatment by society. His whole attitude and demeanor is that of hopelessness. Jake is offered a chance to pay for the operation and get his legs back by taking his brother’s place in an expedition to an alien world. The organization that hires Jake has tremendous resources at its disposal and pursues its economic ends with unblinking ruthlessness. His mission is to infiltrate the alien culture and get them to sell their natural resources in exchange for modern consumer goods. But the Na’vi do not like the deal. They prefer to live simple lives in harmony with each other and with the animals and plants that make up their natural environment. They do not want to be like us. They don’t want to trade their forest homes for Ipods. Jake is stranded among the natives. They don’t like Jake but they take him in. They live in harmony with nature and with each other. Jake comes to feel that that this simple natural life is better than the world he left behind. A moment of crisis arrives and Jake finds his loyalties have firmly switched to his new people. There is a climactic battle in which the Na’vi win and a conclusion in which Jake abandons his human body and permanently becomes an alien.

The movie appeals to so many because so many feel like Jake does at the beginning of the story. He feels as though he’s been used and abandoned by a grimy, violent, uncaring society. Jake sees no reason to hope that things will get better for himself or for society as a whole. Life is hard and business is business. Nothing, not nature or the feelings of sensitive people, is going to interfere with the juggernaut of modern civilization. Mother Nature and poor little Jake are powerless. Resistance, shall we say, is futile. In the movie Jake escapes from the bleakness of modern life and finds love, harmony and right order among the Na’vi. The feel-good victory of Mother Nature depicted in the film is exposed as fantasy by the time the moviegoer gets to the parking lot to drive home. You are not on Pandora and there’s no way back. We told you that resistance was futile. Little wonder that some moviegoers felt depressed in the weeks following the movie.

Why is any of this of interest to a philosopher? Because it is evidence that many people feel something is deeply wrong with modern society and the lives it encourages us to live. Things are not in right order. If there is a deep dissatisfaction with the way things are then this is a call to philosophers to think deeply about how things should be.