Let me point you to a post on MyDD on the idea of pluralism and how it intersects with American politics right now; I had an interesting back and forth within the comment thread on defining pluralism and what demands it makes from a cultural standpoint – a theme that might be familiar to you if you’ve been reading this blog, but the conversation is worth a look.
In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey tries to distinguish between transactions that are private and those that are public. Private transactions have no significant effect on people who aren’t involved with the transaction. Public transactions have consequences that have a significant but indirect effect on people who aren’t a party to the transaction itself. When people realize that they’re being affected by these indirect consequences, they try to find some way to manage them, and that’s how governments form. (I’m shorthanding this a bit. Dewey takes a couple of chapters to set up this point, and that’s not entirely because of his occasional difficulties in making his point clear.)
I decided that a good way to illustrate this distinction was to, well, illustrate it. I asked my students to imagine that I was going to order a new PC from Dell (not likely any time soon), and to describe whose lives would be affected by this decision. The obvious starting place was that Dell and I would be affected, so I put marks on the board to indicate those two parties. Then we started digging. How is the computer going to get to me? Well, someone has to ship it, they said. So I drew a road connecting Dell and me, and a crude UPS truck. Who’s going to get affected by that truck? Neighbors who will be affected by smog and noise pollution, perhaps. So little exhaust clouds and houses got added near the truck. Where are the parts of the computer coming from? Well, they’re being manufactured in Asia, so I drew factories on the far side of the board, and then a boat taking the components to Dell in Texas. And so on and so on.
Now, despite the fact that my drawing was, quite frankly, terrible, I think this exercise was worthwhile. The students seemed to have fun thinking up all sorts of connections, and when we were done we had a framework to talk about how all of these ripple effects are shaped and regulated in our society. I may need to hit my sister up for some art lessons, but there’s definitely something for me to take away here in terms of how to get a point across.
When I was in high school DC Comics published a title called The Ray, about a teenaged hero who lived in Philadelphia. I bought a few issues but quickly lost interest. If I remember correctly, one of my major disappointments was that the colorist was making what should have been a bright, dazzling book too muted. But I also wasn’t crazy about the writing. The writer, some of whose books I had enjoyed in the past, was using a lot of slang and jargon in the dialogue, and my reaction as a Philadelphia teenager was that “people don’t talk like that – the guy’s trying too hard.� Well, a few years later I wound up in a Usenet conversation with the writer, who mentioned that he had lived in Philadelphia around the time he wrote the book and based the dialogue patterns on things he had heard around him.
That conversation has been rattling around for the last few days, as current media events and my own democracy research have converged on the idea of pluralism, the notion that rather than looking to form one single society that assimilates everyone who comes into it, a democracy should strive to promote and support the different small groups that have their own culture, thought processes, and ways of communicating and interacting with the world. Part of the aim is to get away from the notion that everyone needs to conform to a single dominant culture. Of course, all these pluralist groups are supposed to be able to relate to one another in a respectful fashion in order to keep the larger society flourishing. And my reaction to The Ray highlights the problem here, I think.
When you have groups that look at the world in different ways, and then express that worldview in different ways, there are going to be problems of interpretation. Those problems of interpretation can cause well-meaning groups to talk past one another, or interpret a differing viewpoint as a lack of respect. If communication and dialogue are going to be key to a democratic theory, there needs to be some kind of common framework that pluralist groups can work from, and I do not think that this can be merely a procedural consensus. There has to be a shared understanding of dialogue, democracy, respect, understanding, deliberation, and many other concepts. Not only are these required for communication attempts to be successful, they are required for communication attempts to begin. There are points of view that argue that deliberation is an elitist structure, one that puts a premium on rules of reasoning and conventions of dialogue that certain historically-advantaged groups are comfortable with and one that favors a slower approach to social change. These points of view argue that excluded groups shouldn’t be concerned about respect and deliberation – they should take action to make other people uncomfortable, to confront them with the problems and force immediate action. For a deliberative, democratic pluralism to work, a society needs to create a culture of deliberation, one that unifies the smaller cultural groups.
Now the $64,000 is how to make that happen.
I’m just going to throw up a link to an article in yesterday’s USA Today discussing Lost’s use of philosophical figures as namesakes for many of its characters. I’m quoted a couple of times in the article, but the real interesting discussion is probably in the comments thread. (There goes the online edition beating the print version again.)
Jill Porter in the Philadelphia Daily News had a column last Friday saying that John Edwards should end his presidential campaign because of the recurrence of Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer. Most of her points seem pretty weak to me, and Porter seems to know it. She quotes a breast cancer survivor who says that the decision should be up to Elizabeth and John, and she says she’s sure that this is what Elizabeth wants. (Press coverage since Friday has only confirmed that impression.) So what Porter seems to be saying is that Elizabeth is wrong to want to continue the campaign, and that John should override her wishes and make the “right� decision for her. I can imagine a dozen other contexts where that paradigm would provoke outrage.
I don’t think Porter’s attempt at gender reversal really works, either. If Hillary Clinton were in this situation with Bill, I think that everyone on the planet would know that Bill would want the campaign to continue. Hell, he’d probably campaign from his hospital bed if he could. Would some people criticize her for it? Yes, but those people would likely criticize Hillary Clinton for the color of her socks. If she dropped out, they’d snicker that it just proved she wasn’t tough enough to handle the campaign, or to try and win without Bill around.
There is one point that Porter makes that gives me some pause, though. John and Elizabeth have two young children. They did not ask to go through this campaign. They did not ask for the stress that it causes. They did not ask for the extra burdens it will place on their parents. They did not ask to live in a world where their family pain would become political fodder. There is a point in asking whether this is fair to them. But truthfully, you could say the same of any candidate with young kids. I remember watching the 60 Minutes segment on Barack Obama and his family and looking at his two small daughters, and wondering what on Earth they might be in for during this campaign – and especially if he wins. Since I’m an Obama supporter, a small part of me felt selfish for wanting to take these kids’ daddy away for an all-consuming job for the next ten years or so. With the uncertainty that comes with Elizabeth’s cancer recurrence, I can imagine that such concerns multiply a hundredfold. It probably would be better for the Edwards kids, all things considered, if John wasn’t running for president and Elizabeth wasn’t working so hard on the campaign.
But here’s the reason why I went over to Neil Sinhababu’s site last night. Since he’s the most prominent Edwards-supporting philosophical utilitarian I know of, I couldn’t help but think of him as I pondered this question. (He had no commentary up at the time, but he’s since posted a link to this post.) John Edwards is running under a belief that if he becomes president, it will improve the lives of thousands, probably millions of children from where they would be if he were not president. I have no reason to doubt his belief is sincere, and I see no reason why John Edwards shouldn’t think he has a chance to accomplish that good. If he believes that the lives of millions of people will be better if he’s president, and the lives of his own children will be worse off (but still good), then it certainly seems like the ethical thing to do would be to help all of those other kids.
As a parent myself, there’s a part of that argument that goes against every fiber of my being. I feel like I have a special obligation to my daughter, that I have to put her well-being above the well-being of not just other individuals, but entire groups if need be. But in part, that’s because I don’t feel like there are other people to pick up the slack for what my wife and I (and our families and friends) don’t provide. That lack of trust, that lack of feeling like we’re all in this together, is precisely the problem that’s tearing up our society. Porter even points out the problem:
Few individuals have the opportunity he does: to quit work and be there for his family.
Many spouses in John’s situation would be desperate to do so, but need to continue working to earn a paycheck and perhaps retain health benefits.
John and Elizabeth Edwards may have an enormous opportunity to change that dynamic. If they’re right, I certainly can’t fault them for making that effort. In fact, I applaud them.
I went to Neil Sinhababu’s site to research something for a longer, more serious piece I wanted to write. And I will still write that piece. Tomorrow. Because what I found on Neil’s site was a link to a webcomic called Lump of Clay, which did a long series of strips attempting to use the ontological argument to prove the existence of a perfect girlfriend.
(If you don’t know the ontological argument, here’s the very condensed version: if you can imagine a perfect x, then there must be an x in the world. Because a perfect x would have to be an x that exists. Why? Because existing is better than not existing. So an x that didn’t exist would have something wrong with it, and couldn’t be perfect. This argument is usually used to try to prove the existence of God. It is much more entertaining when used to prove the existence of a perfect girlfriend.)
The forum at the Library went pretty well today, I believe. When the conversation between Kloppenberg, Kuklick, and Westbook expanded to include the audience, there was definitely an intellectual energy that I found welcome. It brought me back to the excitement I felt when I first started studying pragmatism, and felt like I had found philosophical work that had some of the resources I was looking for. So I feel fortunate to have had a chance to help out with the event. It also left me thinking that there’s a useful purpose to this site, in getting some of these ideas out into the electronic conversation. Since I finished the dissertation, I think I’ve been taking the pragmatist background of the site more for granted and occasionally bringing it up in reference to particular issues. So I’m going to try to balance those posts out with the occasional re-visit to some of the important themes and texts in the pragmatist democratic tradition. We’ll see how that goes.
The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium is hosting a public forum on American Pragmatism and American Politics this Saturday at the Free Library on Logan Circle. The event is at 1:00 PM in the Montgomery Auditorium. I’m actually pretty excited about it, because three of the people other than John Dewey who are most responsible for my interest in pragmatism are going to be there: Robert Westbrook (who wrote John Dewey and American Democracy), Bruce Kuklick (who assigned me the aforementioned book in an intellectual history seminar in 1999) and James Kloppenberg (whose Uncertain Victory was one of the first comprehensive overviews of pragmatism and American social politics I read in my research). So if you’re in the area, come on down and philosophize.
Following up somewhat on yesterday’s post, here’s an article from today’s Inquirer about brain research in Germany, where scientists are conducting research to see if they can use brain scans to determine a person’s intention to perform a mathematical operation.
In one study, participants were told to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers a few seconds before the numbers were flashed on a screen. In the interim, a computer captured images of their brain waves to predict the subject’s decision – with one pattern suggesting addition, and another subtraction.
What’s not fully clear from this article – and I’m going to see if I can track down more details – is whether or not the patterns were noticeable before the subjects consciously made their decision. It sounds like they did, but I’m not 100 percent sure. If so, it would seem to be an indication that what feels to us in our inner thoughts like we’re “making a decision” is just our phenomenal consciousness getting something of a status report about what our entire organism has already set out to do.
In turn, there’s a potentially important semantic discussion about whether the brain pattern in question is an explanation for the decision, or if it is the decision. (Although even in the latter case, one would presume that there is an explanation for the particular brain pattern in the relationship between the nervous sytem and the environment. That is, I presume all this until the neuroscience experts show up to take me to school.)
I’ve been giving some thought to explanations lately. As a teacher and as the parent of a five-year-old, I spend a lot of time explaining things, and I’ve been wondering a bit about what makes a good explanation. I’m talking here about explaining why things happen the way they do – explaining what the heck Descartes means in contemporary English is a whole other ball of wax. And it strikes me that if we’re trying to give a full explanation of why Event A occurs, what we’re trying to do is identify a set of conditions X, Y and Z. And if the explanation is a full one, then whenever you have conditions X, Y, and Z, you are assured that you also have Event A. (I’m fudging the distinction between what philosophers call necessary and sufficient conditions here. I’ll try and get back to that.) If you can have conditions X, Y and Z but not have Event A, then there’s something that’s missing from your explanation. (For example, if I say “The explanation for that water boiling is that it reached 212 degrees Fahrenheit,” and then we go into high altitude and discover that 212-degree water doesn’t boil, we have to add somethign to our explanation about atmospheric pressure and sea level.) Now, maybe there’s a condition W that we hadn’t identified, and maybe there’s a pure random element such that you can’t ever give a full explanation. But in terms of defining a good explanation, it seems like this is what we’re going for.
And something that has struck me a number of times over the years is that if we think that there’s an explanation for things, then we’re essentially saying that there’s a mechanism driving events, that specific conditions dictate certain outcomes. Now, maybe we human beings won’t ever discover the explanations and the mechanisms. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. So if the world is explainable, doesn’t that suggest that the world is what is, and that it can’t be changed? That whatever efforts we might make to change or not change the world are, in fact, already part of the mechanism? (“I’m sorry my paper is late, Dr. Thomer. A pterodactyl took a wrong turn millions of years ago, so I overslept.”)
Not that a world that can’t be explained is a whole lot more reassuring. I mean, the reason we want explanations is so that we can feel like we have some control over our lives – if I do X, I will get Y. To the extent that the world is random, I can’t have any control over it.
When I think about things like this, I get the sense that I’m sticking myself into a binary, either-or box, and like a good pragmatist I should try and find the shade of gray somewhere in between. But I’ll be damned if I have a clear idea of what that shade is, sometimes.