WILLING TO SUSPEND A QUESTIONING DISPOSITION

If I were to get my “druthers,” the nation would, in its civics classes, adopt the liberated federalist construct to guide the choices of content.  It would be a content filled with stories and issues that would have students engage in questions over how collectives, as opposed to individuals, make a difference in the formulation and implementation of public policy.  It would have students make valuations of public actions that affect the common welfare of the nation, as opposed to public policy that affects the private interests of individuals and/or factions.  It would certainly have students be offended by claims of ideologues who unquestionably accept versions of the truth, be it based on political, economic, and/or religious belief systems.  No; liberated federalism would strive to have students be of a critical disposition; more questioning than accepting, more dubious than accommodating – not in a disrespectful way, but in a loving or, at least, respectful way.  Given this, I believe Daniel C. Dennett[1] asks a very interesting and important question.

Let me share with you how he asks it:

I put it this way.  Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves.  I’ll call them the Gold Army and Silver Army:  same numbers, same training, same weaponry.  They’re all armored and armed as well as we can do.  The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it’s as simple as that.  The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists.  They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.

Which army do you want on the front lines?  It’s very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means.  What you’re saying is that we’ll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours.  It’s extremely hypocritical.

Wow!  I must say, when you put it that way, I take pause.  How critical do I want the next generation to be?  The concern entailed in Dennett’s question puts the basic premise of liberated federalism into a very uncomfortable light.

Of course, when Dennett mentions economists, he could as easily have said scientist or philosopher or political theorist or thinking citizen.  It could be anyone who is open to new information, to divergent arguments, to unorthodoxy.  It surely is not someone who buys into a view of final truth.  It is not someone who cannot distinguish between faith and knowledge where faith is that position between knowledge and ignorance.

I have a faith.  It is that we can encourage students to be skeptical yet motivated by a love for the common good so that he or she can be called on to sacrifice for the betterment of the commonwealth and be sufficiently obedient when the demands and the reality of a troubling time call for it.

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[1] Dennett, D. C.  (2013).  The normal well-tempered mind.  In John Brockman (Ed.) Thinking: The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 1-17).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.  Citation on pp. 16-17.

A NEED FOR A MORAL TIME

As the years go by, the twentieth century is beginning to recede in our collective memories.  Yet the turns we collectively made during that century are still making their effects quite clearly felt every day.  None are more daunting than the attacks cast upon our moral traditions.  From the effects that the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche had to the rise of atheistic, totalitarian regimes to secularization of our political discourse, we no longer hold the Judeo-Christian tradition with the reverence we once ascribed to it.  I am not passing judgement here over any of these effects, events, or transitions, but I want to point out the gravity of this turn.  I would claim that for most of us, when it comes to moral questions, we don’t go first to religious sources to determine what we consider moral and what we consider immoral.  Yes, some of us do, but the majority of us take on a more practical view than a biblical one.  When one asks, for example, should I pay my employees a living wage or should I fluff off a legitimate demand of an employer or should I support public policy that insures health care for all our fellow citizens, these are questions that I see most people respond to from a self-interest point of view.  While for most, God might not be dead, His attributed admonishments about responsibilities concerning the fate of others have become just so much background noise.

I have in this blog argued that we, through most of our national history, transformed from a more theistic foundation – a Puritanical foundation – to a secular perspective.  The transformation was slow, but completed in the years after World War II.  It was in those years that the natural rights construct became our prevalent view of government and politics.  Here, the language of liberty took dominance.  With that bias, the focus became one promoting the notion that everyone was free to determine what beliefs and values one was to hold.  Historically, there was a bit of irony involved.  When one considers what all the twentieth century had already offered up, one would think that certain moral commitments should have taken hold.  Let’s get a sense of this situation; Jonathan Glover[1] writes:

The problems have come from events, the twentieth-century history of large-scale cruelty and killing is only too familiar; the mutual slaughter of the First World War, the terror-famine of the Ukraine, the Gulag, Auschwitz, Dresden, the Burma Railway, the Hiroshima, Vietnam, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Cambodia, Rwanda, the collapse of Yugoslavia.  These names will conjure up others.  Because of this history, it is (or should be) hard for thinking about ethics to carry on just as before.[2]

Has our rejection of religious based morality, to the degree it has happened, been a reaction to this history of misery and destruction?

I don’t have any great insight.  My only observation is that our civics curriculum that has adopted a natural rights perspective to guide its content and led to an abandonment of any systemic moral education cannot be anymore ill advised.  We cannot go back to the Puritanical days; we are too materialistic, too diverse.  But we can study moral questions.  Unlike Nietzsche, I don’t look at our Judeo-Christian tradition as a sign of weakness or a lack of will; I see it as the height of practicality.  I also see it as very much in sync with the basic moral claims of all the major religious traditions.  I saw an interesting film recently.  Focus is a film that illustrates how con artists work.  The basic technique to steal your money is to divert your attention.  There is a series of scenes in which a small army of pick- pockets and other con men and women make hay during Super Bowl week at the site of the big game.  What I took away was that you cannot beat them by thinking all you need to do is be conscious of where your valuables are.  You need to avoid such places or attend but put an empty wallet in your back pocket – perhaps with a note inside saying, “not here.”  Similarly, morality is a way to avoid the great problems in life, especially in one’s dealings with others.  Moral behavior in our social interactions tempers the motivations of others to do us harm.  One might have something someone else wants to take, but if you treat people right, at least you are providing some discouragement toward others taking advantage of you.  More positively, you can very well encourage conditions of coordination and cooperation.  It can lead to our federating ourselves with others.

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[1] Glover, J.  (1999).  Humanity:  A moral history of the twentieth century.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

[2] Ibid., p. 2.