Posted on Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Education as a Public Resource for Addressing American Political Polarization

Civil American, Volume 5, Article 1 (June 23, 2020).

| By Preston Stovall |

Part 1: Speaking to the Middle

I

Paginated PDF version.

An educated populace is crucial for a well-functioning democracy, and in the U.S. the use of pamphlets, periodicals, opinion pieces, and public letters, stretching back before the revolution, testifies to the importance that Americans place on an educated public. The use of these devices has helped keep American citizens apprised of the problems we face, and in the early Republic especially it was an important method of consensus-building.

Benjamin Rush.

This interest found kindred expression in a general concern with education in the United States and the colonies, one that many of the founders shared: Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in the creation of what would become the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Rush founded both Dickinson college and what would become Franklin and Marshall College (‘Franklin’ named after Benjamin), and Thomas Jefferson worked to establish a system of schools in Virginia, from the local level up to the University of Virginia, with the aim of selecting the brightest pupils for further instruction at each stage.

These projects were animated by a sense of education as something like a public resource for the American people. As a public resource education offers individual citizens not only a path to gainful employment but also the possibility of improving our lives by developing the habits of thought and conscience that accrue through a period of prolonged engagement with the thoughts and deeds of those who came before us. And by creating such citizens American education offers, for the public, successive cohorts able to sustain the intelligent collective reflection over the shape of American society that attends our participation in this experiment in self-government.

Thinking of education as a resource for the American people highlights the importance of the principles and institutions that shape its management. For just as the principles governing (e.g.) Fish, Wildlife, and Park services for U.S. citizens are enforced by various institutional mechanisms, and these geared toward the end (in part) of allowing us to enjoy the public goods that come with resource use in wilderness areas, so are the institutions of education meant to be run by principles that enable American citizens to enjoy the personal and social benefits that come with education. And just as access to wilderness areas redounds on the health of American society and its citizens, so does access to education. This analogy suggests that if education is a resource for the American people then educators—as stewards of the use of that resource—have a duty to mind the institutional norms and mechanisms that enable the public to enjoy its benefits, just as employees of FWP have a duty to mind resource management in wilderness areas.

Thomas Jefferson.

Despite its close ties to the founding of the Republic, in practice higher education, as with political representation, would remain for generations the province of the elite, however. When Jefferson speaks of the “best geniuses” that will be “raked from the rubbish annually” by the school system he proposed for Virginia (Ford 2010, 61), his candidate geniuses were white men from families wealthy enough to pay for higher education.

It is a testament to the animating ideals of the American system of government that we have gradually overcome some of the barriers obstructing the universal enjoyment of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If the development of American society is to proceed on the basis of a more thorough realization of the principles of individual liberty and collective self-government that animate our country, and if education in the United States offers both the individual benefit of personal betterment and the public good of intelligent control over the shape of our union, then it will be important that American educational institutions foster the mutual understanding that precedes collective action. For we cannot effectively work together on a common project if we do not understand what our partners want and are trying to accomplish.

II

Unfortunately, we live in a time of increasing political polarization in the United States, and this makes it harder for people to understand one another across political divides (see section III for the details). This polarization has grown sharply in the last twenty-five years. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016 more than 50% of those identifying either as Democrat or Republican held not only an unfavorable but a very unfavorable view of the other party (Pew Research Center 2016b). By contrast, in 2014 43% of Republicans and 38% of Democrats had a very unfavorable view of the other party, and in 1994 these percentages were just 17% and 16%, respectively (Pew Research Center 2014). This growing divide is reflected in different views about what our top priorities should be (Jones 2019). There is also a rising sense that public discourse on political issues has become too divisive (Pew Research Center 2019).

This situation makes it difficult for people of different political views to talk to one another without the conversation devolving into acrimony. That in turn makes it difficult to share and improve on the ideas we have about what we are facing and what to do about it. It would thus seem that U.S. educators, qua stewards of the public resource that is education, bear a duty to intervene in this situation in ways that foster the collective understanding and self-government that I am suggesting education offers the American people.

III

There are reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of such intervention. Research going back over three decades suggests that Americans share more political commitments than they realize, and that it is the vocal minorities in the wings that are driving the sense of a division. Summarizing a recent study and the associated background literature, Stevens (2019) writes (emphasis in the original):

Democrats and Republicans significantly overestimate how many people on the ‘other side’ hold extreme views. Typically, their estimates are roughly double the actual numbers for a given issue.
Greater partisanship is associated with holding more exaggerated views of one’s political opponents.
The Perception Gap is strongest on both “Wings” (America’s more politically partisan groups).
Consumption of most forms of media, including talk radio, newspapers, social media, and local news, is associated with a wider Perception Gap.
Education seems to increase, rather than mitigate, the Perception Gap (just as increased education has found to track with increased ideological prejudice). College education results in an especially distorted view of Republicans among liberals in particular.
The wider people’s Perception Gap, the more likely they are to attribute negative personal qualities (like ‘hateful’ or ‘brainwashed’) to their political opponents.

It is distressing that both college education and consumption of most forms of media today appear correlated with a greater perception gap, and this research reinforces the suspicion that we are facing a period of increasingly difficult collective action on account of a failure to understand one another. But the model mocked up here also suggests we are facing an opportunity as well. For if we share more in common than we realize, while it tends to be the vocal extremist minorities in the wings who dominate public conversation, then once we have a better understanding of where most people are located it may be that collective understanding (if not agreement) will be easier to reach than it appears right now.

My proposal in this essay is that educators make an effort to speak to the middle on politically-charged issues, and toward that end I gather together some social-scientific data and offer an interpretive gloss about how to proceed. My focus will lie on the situation on college campuses, as I believe that university educators have a particular duty to model the norms of thoughtful conversation that are needed for the development of mutual understanding. Higher education in the U.S. today has seen its own trends of increased political polarization, however, and so it will be important for the academician to address the problem as it appears within the academy as well. But if we educators can build up a bulwark of sensible people in the middle of the debate on university campuses, we might hope to more effectively intervene in the situation with the public at large.

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Posted on Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Du Boisian Double Consciousness and the Appropriation of Black Male Bodies in Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Civil American, Volume 4, Article 1 (April 16, 2019).

| By Darrius Hills and Seth Vannatta |

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him not true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. ~ W. E. B. Du Bois ^[1]

The lust—the libidinal desire—for the Black male’s body that serves as the motivation behind his condemnation and death is not altogether new. ~ Tommy J. Curry ^[2]

W. E. B. Du Bois

Black male bodies are bodies under siege. In the current historical moment, one polemical, ethical issue is the deadly interplay between the surveillance of black bodies and a burgeoning militarized police state. There are several sources of this extended surveillance and scrutiny of black male bodies in American race relations. Studies in higher education and the psychology of race have illustrated how black boys are mischaracterized as older in appearance and more aggressive in demeanor than their white counterparts.^[3] There is also substantive research on the impact that implicit racial bias has on black men and boys in terms of health and well-being, imbalances in the criminal justice system, and overarching social stigma in everyday life.^[4] This mode of surveillance and sanctioning, as we illustrate, also extends into the practices of sexual victimization of black boys and men, an understudied but prominent feature of the life experiences of black male bodies in past and contemporary American culture. Assaults against black male personhood and embodiment reveal the extent to which the American context has distinguished its racial hierarchy through the ostracizing of blackness-as-non-white. Such a social habitus featuring this racialized “twoness” reveals how black people and black bodies are problem people and problem bodies—imposing upon blacks America’s anxiety about “racial others.” To this end, we are concerned with a philosophical exploration of the experience and configuration of black bodies in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) in light of the insights from W.E.B. Du Bois and in light of gender theories on the historical and contemporary constructions of black male sexuality and identity.

Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness provides one component of the theoretical lens we use to analyze Peele’s film. We investigate double consciousness, black male embodiment, and racial appropriation through an examination of the film’s symbolism relating to each as they influence the central character, Chris Washington. Du Bois outlined the former concept in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), while the themes of racial appropriation, exploitation, and surveillance of black male bodies were inaugurated in the slave trade and continue in contemporary cultural and economic practices.

Tommy Curry’s recent text, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017) will assist our efforts to extend the film’s thematic focus on black male embodiment, sexual victimization, and racial appropriation. As Du Bois notes, African Americans are coerced to see themselves through the multiple and contradictory projections of whites. Black bodies are valued “only in terms of how white gazes value” them.^[5] Black bodies, especially black male bodies, are denied complexity and humanity. Black men are, Curry remarks, “man-nots.” Black men are only bodies, problematic bodies to be tamed and controlled. Given the racializing, sexualizing, and criminalizing of black male bodies within the white racial imagination, Curry notes that black men exist only as negations—codified and mapped “in an anti-Black world” and “denied maleness in relation to white masculinity.”^[6] ^[7] In Get Out, the black male as only body enables the continuation and safeguarding of white interests and futurity. Curry has framed this reality of black male life in terms of a practice of anti-black misandry—anti-black male sentiment—that is rooted paradoxically in both the fear and desire of black male flesh.

Curry captures the dual quality of fear of and desire for black male flesh in the notion of phallicism. Phallicism, notes Curry, invites, and further legitimizes societal suspicion and scorn, both in academic theory and in social institutions toward black men. Curry writes:

Phallicism refers to the condition by which males of a subordinated racialized or ethnicized group are simultaneously imagined to be a sexual threat and predatory, and libidinally constituted as sexually desirous by the fantasies or fetishes of the dominant racial group.^[8]

Drawing upon the historical constructions of black manhood from slavery to Jim Crow and into the present, Curry presents phallicism as a frame for anti-black male sentiment and the resulting architecture of race and place imposed upon black male bodies. In a societal context in which all “male genitalia is conceptualized as a weapon wielded against women,” views of black men as problematic only bodies with a genetic and primordially-based proclivity for sexual violence are proffered as evidentiary support for the sanctioning, controlling, and killing of black men.^[9] Here, black men are always already the rapists, the brutes, the savages, etc.; however, in this schema, black men also represent sexual desire. Because there is long historical precedent of black men (and women) being “hypersexualized as objects of desire, possession, and want,” another feature of black male experience that is under-examined involves the reality of sexual victimization of black men and boys.^[10] In the great zeal to imagine black men as the always-already-hyper-rapist, the sexual vulnerability of black men as subordinate men trapped in a racial and sexual hierarchy that denies their personhood and agency goes unchecked.

Phallicism, then, as an accepted perspectival apprehension of and desire for black male embodiment, legitimates the use of coercion and control of the black male body as an only-body within the larger racial ecology of white male and female supremacy. Chris’s ordeal in Get Out creatively highlights that phallicism as a frame for misandry is a function of the collective white American psyche on black male bodies. Given the scope of Curry’s insights on this point, we argue, first, that Chris’s experience of double consciousness in the film discloses the white lust for the black male body concealed by the thin banalities of white liberal progressivism. Second, we show that Get Out illustrates Curry’s conclusion that Black men are treated as only problematic bodies in need of administrative control. Last, we demonstrate that Get Out highlights a yawning gap between the reality of white women as proxy patriarchs, culpable in advancing white supremacy, and the mythical view of them as both pure and passive non-participants.

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Posted on Monday, November 19, 2018

Cheese and Ethics

Civil American, Volume 3, Article 5 (November 19, 2018).

| By Raymond D. Boisvert |

One of my nieces helps publicize Maine cheesemakers. She invited my wife and me to an actual “cheesery.” Yes, it’s a cheesy name but one that says it all. Why bother with fancy, disguised labels like “creamery” or “dairy farm” when what you do is make cheese. The setting is lovely: The Belgrade Lakes region. The address is Pond Road and, sure enough, the land rolls down to a body of water. Strangely enough, its official name is Messalonskee Lake, not pond but, as we know, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

The cheesery is small, homey, artisanal. Milk comes from the farm’s own 60 or so goats. There are also sheep. Where there are sheep and goats, this is what a city dweller notices, there’s also a certain aroma, and bugs. Plenty of bugs. Bugs are central to the philosophical lesson to come, but that’s for later. A great number of the bugs are visible, hovering around the animals (and the human visitors). Others are invisible, in the soil, in the guts of the animals and the humans. Some bugs, though, come in neat packets and are carefully stocked. These have actually been sought after and, yes, paid good money for, by the cheesemaker.

The sought-after bugs are mostly bacteria. They have Latin names. Some of them are immediately recognizable, Penicillium roqueforti, or Penicillium camembertii. Other names are just enigmas, for example Brevibacterium linens. While the name may be enigmatic, its presence is not. Anyone who has smelled foot odor has noticed its impact. So has anyone who has savored cheeses like Munster, Pont L’Évêque, Port-du-salut, or Limburger.

Bugs are annoying. We try to avoid them. Bacteria are annoying and disease-causing. We try to avoid them as well. In other words, for quite a while now, we have been “Pasteurians.” We have succeeded, in the tradition taught us by the great Louis Pasteur, in eliminating unwanted, disease-causing bacteria from our foodstuffs and ourselves. The background scenario was fairly straightforward: bacteria = bad = must get rid of them. But now we are confronted with cheese makers who spend good money to acquire and then use bacteria. What is going on?

Louis Pasteur.

Well, several things about which a history of ideas can enlighten us. The general topics have familiar and very old labels: the one and the many, the pure and the impure. These labels can be matched with a historical one: the ancients and the moderns.

Interestingly enough, the ancients, it turns out, tended to embrace multiplicity and mixture. We often don’t notice because we read their texts through the interpretive lenses of later thought. Philosophers, influenced by Modernity, will tend to talk about the “good,” for example as if it were a singular thing.

Aristotle.

This can be a source of problems when life is a complicated adventure. The ancients like Plato and Aristotle did pretty well. One of the famous maxims inscribed at the temple at Delphi read “Nothing in Excess.” In line with this saying, philosophers recognized the need for some balance among multiple elements as defining the “good.” Plato thought in terms of an optimal society, one in which “good” was to be defined by the proper arrangement of the multiple and differentiated humans who made it up. Aristotle invented a word, “eudaimonia,” to indicate “happiness,” or human “flourishing.” A flourishing life involved multiple elements: proper organization of dispositions, good habits, friends, some luck as regards things like health and a stable society, all accompanied by a general reasonableness and attention to what is learned from experience. Eudaimonia was always a complex affair.

Epicurus.

Then, came a shift. After Aristotle, Epicurus defined “pleasure” as the content of happiness and thus goodness. As a philosopher, he asked a complicating question: what is pleasure? It turned out to mean “ataraxia,” non-disturbedness. A life lived in equilibrium, with minimal disturbances, would be the most pleasant life. The Stoics, often contrasted with the Epicureans, had a similar ideal, “apatheia,” absence of powerful emotional upheavals.

These post-Aristotelian moves marked a major change: an inward turn. Things to be avoided, e.g. disturbances, emotional upheavals, upsets to a life lived in equilibrium–all of these arose from what was outside us. The less we involved ourselves, the less we made ourselves vulnerable, the greater were the chances of achieving a pleasurable, minimally disturbed life. The older ethics assumed that a good/happy life was not possible unless there were people on whom we could depend. The newer one followed the trajectory sung by Whitney Houston: “And so I learned to depend on me.”

Mass grave at the Nazi Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Religion added another ingredient. This arrived via the teachings of a Persian sage called Mani. The internal/external distinction became a sharp good/evil split. Manichaeism described a world in which good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter were irreconcilable. Each could be easily identified. Matter was evil, spirit was good. Within this context it made perfect sense for large numbers of men, aspiring to a good life, to withdraw from the world and become cloistered monks. Also encouraged was a tendency as old as humanity: identifying scapegoats. Women labelled as witches felt this wrath, as did heretics. Later writers traced political problems to “parasites,” either the idle rich (Lenin lambasted them), or poor folks (Ayn Rand lambasted them). The Nazis treated their enemies as parasites and germs, agents in need of eradication.

Newspaper headlines about the notorious E. coli do not help, especially when they fail to mention that most strains are harmless and even beneficial. Eliminating them would be disastrous for our health. Better to work with them. This is where cheese making offers an object lesson. Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus casei – don’t eliminate them. Welcome them, cooperate with them. The results: healthy, tasty cheeses.

Pasteurizing plant, from the McCord Museum.

The post-Aristotelian dispensation in ethics led readily to a fetish with eliminative purification. Cheese making returns us to a more complex, i.e. more concretely accurate, setting. It’s not one that is anti-Pasteurian. Its more accurate label is “post-Pasteurian.” The philosophical framework that accompanied the “eradicate to purify” move, the post-Aristotelian inward turn, was doubly problematic. (1) A good life was to be achieved by insulating ourselves from the vagaries of existence. (2) The dispensation encouraged a combat mode. It fostered, in other words, not just withdrawal, but attempts at purification through eradication of what was considered, unilaterally and unequivocally, evil.

Cheesemaking offers another model: streptococcus, lactobacillus, penicillium, we can work together. We could, of course, go the radical antibiotic route. But it is better to reject the Manichean, purificatory move. Instead of defaulting to a position which is hostile, start with one that is hospitable. Viruses? Not eliminate, but integrate. (We call this vaccination.) Bacteria? Avoid blanket condemnations. Admit a good/bad mix, and the responsibility for sorting things out that comes with it. Then, welcome, integrate, harmonize what will give rise to fruitful culminations. In other words, make cheese. Mary Douglas an anthropologist with an interest in food wrote an important book about the drive to purification. The book was called Purity and Danger. The ethics lesson offered by cheesemakers would suggest, as a life guideline, a different title: Purity is Danger.

Dr. Raymond D. Boisvert recently retired after 35 years of teaching at Siena College, near Albany New York. His early research was on American Pragmatism. This culminated in Dewey’s Metaphysics (1988) and John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time (1998). More recently he has concentrated on philosophy and food, publishing I Eat, Therefore I Think (2014) and Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (2016, with Lisa Heldke).

Posted on Friday, September 7, 2018

Clutter

One-sheet for SOPHIA Conversations

Click on the image here for a printable, Adobe PDF of our One-Sheet on “Clutter.”

SOPHIA has created our journal, Civil American, and our radio show and podcast, Philosophy Bakes Bread, in part to offer content for conversations among our local chapters. The Chairman of SOPHIA’s Board of Trustees John Lachs published his short essay, “Clutter,” in the 2017 edition of Civil American not very long after his wife passed away. The objects in our lives can seem mundane, but they can also bear great emotional weight for us. The leaders of the Lexington SOPHIA Chapter selected his essay as the focus of one of our “One-Sheet” documents, which will serve as the topic and guiding document for an upcoming chapter meeting. You can click on the thumbnail image of the one-sheet on the right hand side or you can open it by clicking here for a printable version of the “One Sheet” document on “Clutter.”

SOPHIA is grateful both to Dr. Lachs for his essay a well as to the leaders of the Lexington SOPHIA Chapter for drafting the questions that groups can use to jump easily into fun philosophical conversation. Thanks to Caroline A. Buchanan, Derek Daskalakes, Erik Jarvis, James William Lincoln, and Eric Thomas Weber. If any groups choose to make use of this one-sheet also, we encourage them to let us know how the conversation went as well as what thoughts their group has for possible improvement of this one-sheet or for future pieces.

John Lachs facilitating a SOPHIA symposium in Oxford, MS.

John Lachs of Vanderbilt University

This piece includes the full content of Lachs’s short essay, thanks to Civil American Editor Shane Courtland. The author, John Lachs, is Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

Posted on Monday, April 30, 2018

The Moral Duty of Solidarity

Civil American, Volume 3, Article 4 (April 30, 2018).

| By Avery Kolers |

I. What is Solidarity?

Suppose you are a white bus rider in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. You look up from your newspaper to see Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. She is expelled from the bus. What should you do?

On the one hand, you have paid your fare for a public service and are entitled to receive it. Justice supports your claim to remain on the bus until you reach your destination. A “Good Samaritan” might take an interest, but if you are on your way to work and need the job to pay the bills, you might look at your shoes and mind your own business. It’s not as though standing up for Mrs. Parks will enable her to keep her seat, it will only cause the bus to be late and might just get you ejected, as well – or worse.

Anyway, how sure can you be that she is telling the truth when she says she is tired and just wants to rest her legs? Perhaps the people accusing her of being ornery – people who are in your social stratum, people you know and like and trust – are right. So what should you do?

I submit that there is a single right answer to this question, and that, at least from our vantage point today, it is obvious to all decent people: you must not stand for this. You should insist that Mrs. Parks be allowed to keep her seat, and if she is ejected from the bus you should walk off alongside her. If her community then boycotts the bus company, you should boycott too.

Admittedly, it might be exceedingly difficult to make yourself do this.

Fast-forward to today. You reside in a neighborhood in which there is a monument to some minor Confederate figure. Local African American activists demand that the statue be removed, perhaps replaced by a statue of Rosa Parks. You might wonder whether it matters all that much; he was after all a minor figure and was rehabilitated into a philanthropist of sorts after the war. And the statue is quite lovely. Your neighbors, whom you know and like, view the statue as a landmark in a neighborhood that, though mostly white, is completely lacking in “Southern sympathizers.” They just like their statue.

It is not completely clear to you why the activists have descended on your neighborhood. This is hardly the most important issue in the world. Most people don’t even realize who the guy in the statue was. Why make such a big deal of it?

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