a) Please consider my impression that there’s been a massive occurrence of public and political figures reopening “socially decided” issues by making statements reflecting the “politically incorrect” perspective as if those perspectives were the general consensus perspectives. While I grant that you may not have the same impression, and may wish to debate that, it would be my preference to treat this like an axiom for the duration of this debate, i.e., not to focus on whether it is or is not true that more of this stuff is back in flux. As an additional aside, I will note that for the most part these statements have been in in a “direction” that most folks would term “socially conservative”, and I find the trend disturbing and anticipate that many others of liberal or libertarian viewpoint do likewise. Again, it would be my preference not to debate any of that (the desirabilty or nondesirability of any or all of these changes per their content, etc) and instead focus on…
b) I have long been wary and unhappy with the shorthand-form social issue argument that goes like <shocked> Ack! How can you say such a thing, that’s so wrong, sexist, antigay, oppressive, insensitive to lefthanded, offensive to the differently minded! We’ve already had The Big Debate about how and why you should not give creedence to the opinion that you just voiced, don’t say what you just said, don’t advance the beliefsystem that you’re espousing. You must now be profoundly apologetic and retract it and wait and see if everyone forgives you. </shocked>. For one thing, it makes us vulnerable to perhaps adopting some perniciously oppressive beliefsystems and embracing them and making them sacrosanct just because they are less oppressive than those to which they were a more favorable alternative perspective once upon a time; for another thing, it means that entire generations soon come of age never hearing the actual original arguments played out and so, to them, the only reason ever given for not espousing some verboten social sentiment is “Ack! Bad, wrong! Apologize quick!”
But on the other hand, it’s going to be exhausting to have to re-explain, loudly and often enough to affect the public consciousness, what racism is and why it’s a bad idea to assume certain characteristics of personality and behavior are aspects of a person’s race, to favor uniformity and conformity over personal freedom of expression, to lay down once again why it is wrong and oppressive to hold a female responsible for her own rape if she acted in such a way as to indicate an active interest in getting laid, and so on and so on and so on.
Whether we wish to or not, it looks like doing so is going to be necessary ::sigh:: But moreover, in the long haul, is there a better way to make social moral progress that neither seals off various volative topics from further debate with a big “We’ve Done This One Already” banner nor condemns us to repeat the same struggles over and over as if there hadn’t been an eventually productive social debate over it with a general-consensus outcome?
Would it help if in our schools we actively taught what it was that the Nazis believed and how they conceptualized things, what the critiques were, what the outcomes of the perspectives were, and therefore why, in general, we regard what they were and stood for as “bad”? Not babytalk but really giving the kids a decent inoculation-exposure to the actual words and rhetoric associated with the “wrong sides” of social issues we’d like to consider having been put to bed?
I don’t believe it is really possible to instruct someone on the correctness of something. I base that on personal observation, reflection, and larger historical activities.
Let me give you an example. I work with a number of people (4 is a number) who lived under Communist rule. I have, when I could, had long conversations about “what it was like.” She explained to me that they did have a large introduction to alternatives… but only inasmuch as they were shown to be inferior to party orthodoxy. That is, largely, the arguments for Communism were a matter of instruction. The general effect that had, I cannot say, but I can say that it was not especially convincing to her. What is interesting, however, is that, rather than spur her mind towards formulating powerful counterarguments, it led her to reject any personal attachment to the questions whatsoever. Only now, out of Communism, in America, with a really good job, has she turned towards reflecting on the past.
What I mean to illustrate with that story is the idea that understanding is something a person comes to in the midst of a positive social atmosphere, not necessarily by rote instruction. As you suggest, “We’ve Done This Already” is not acceptable. I think, tangentially to the OP, that academia is vastly more conservative than the most stalwart Republican for all of that. The history of intellectualism is steeped with orthodox interpretations. It is a fascinating paradox.
But back to the OP. There are a couple problems. One is that our society, as such, is definitionally fluid. There is nothing any more sacred about the First Amendment than there is about the 18th, or 21st. Its rigidity only exists as long as two thirds of congress and three quarters of the states find it acceptable to keep around. Essentially, all of society is open for debate. Always. (Witness the 2nd Amendment, specifically.) This fluidity gives us the power to shape social interaction in one sense, but also removes any solid grounding for debate in another. As a relativist, I find it unsurprising, but it does belie the underlying problem I think you’re getting at.
In order to accept some kind of social-moral progress, we need a perspective which gives us, generally, a measure for progress, criteria for mistakes, and so on. But this, too, is open to debate. Is welfare inherently a problem, or are specific implimentations antithetical to its fruition? When does a tax become a prohibition? When is a prohibition acceptable? --Walk into any bar and see how many support the legalization of LSD, or cocaine (or better yet, see whether the justifications differ for different drugs; or even still whether the person even has any justification).
In your OP, you place scare quotes around a term which indicates a moral decision: “wrong sides.” If, philosophically, there is progress, then the scare quotes are unnecessary. It seems instead that the underlying problem is obvious, but intractable: there is no obvious baseline. The acceptence of such a baseline is simple orthodoxy, but orthodoxy, while culturally significant, is antithetical to progress of any sort. We cannot retain free thought while simultaneously indoctrinating people into one specific kind of thought. The likely outcome of indoctrination is apathy or talking heads.
But even this perspective gives the illusion that there really are some settled questions. With the rise of the internet, it is fair to say that the average American mope can gain access to a debate on nearly any topic, some reaching to the very heart of our way of life, like voting theories and justifications, some very approachable, others requiring a level of education outside their reach.
Any one of these could make a 7 page GD that is locked and ends up spawning a pit thread, not because you’re wrong, but because this presentation in particular is a shallow representation of underlying issues. As an example, let’s look at the rape scenario. Suppose I left my car unlocked with the keys in it in a “bad neighborhood.” I would be called an idiot by an overwhelming number of people. Suppose a woman dresses and acts provacatively around a group of soldiers, football players, convicts (I just mean: aggressive individuals, don’t read too much into my examples, please)… There would likely be outrage if anyone suggested the woman should have known better, but not so if someone said to me, “What were you thinking?” What I mean to suggest here is that the full argument, inasmuch as it is ever formulated by anyone, requires a set of grounds that are not obvious from the question at hand. In this case, specifically, one ground might be an answer to the question, “When is a person responsible, in part or in whole, for what happens to them?” The question that is settled is that theft and rape are wrong (no need for scare quotes there), but not whether someone else’s immoral act absolves others of any responsibility. What I mean is that this question is only resolved on one level, but is still completely open for debate on another level: what is responsibility? How do we decide it? Can it be shared, how, and to what extent? And so on.
When we think of moral progress, we think of the obvious resolutions that have been made. Prohibition against murder, oppression of people, and so on. What this fails to illustrate, however, is that the debate, as such, is not settled yet. Is self-defense murder, and what qualifies as self-defense if not? What specifically is oppression, what kinds of things can be oppressive, etc? For every resolved issue there are a host of issue that lie under the surface, unresolved.
To suggest “we’ve done this already” is to suggest that there are no underlying concerns, there is no possibility of a slippery slope, there is nothing more to say. But if I say something like, “The truth of a proposition is only as certain as the truth of the propositions that it depends on,” most would probably think I just stated the obvious. Yet it is usually precisely the grounds that an obviously incorrect statement rests on that are the problem. Assertion is not a productive tactic.
So long as there are unresolved issues, there can be no instruction other than memorization, assertion, et cetera. The way out? I’ve lately found it instructive to tell myself that if I cannot understand why a person has adopted a certain position, that I do not understand that position, that something was left out of the analysis. If the answer was obvious, there’d be no need for discussion. If there is discussion, then the answer is not obvious, no matter what one “feels.” Whether repeating the same arguments helps is another question entirely.
As a summary: we should definitely avoid indoctrination into whole belief-systems. I think that is the number one cause of apathy, and the number one cause of frustration in ongoing social discourse. The key is not necessarily teaching people critical thinking skills (back to the orthodoxy paradox), but probably lies along the lines of showing people why such paths are dangerous, why some paths open doors to lines of thought and consequences that are completely different from their intentions. A concise justification for any particular line of thought is logically and philosophically satisfying to the person who supports such a measure in the first place, but it is probably not as motivating as historical examples. So I think where your OP goes wrong is not that we can’t instruct people that, for example, Nazis were wrong, but that we do so less with an eye towards deontic rules and more with an eye towards, say, The Crucible.
I guess what I had in mind was not so much indoctrination but of actual engagement of people while still of school age — gee, here’s the general history and overview of our debates and policies on the subject, and their outcomes, and we’re presenting this to you so you can understand contemporary thinking, but while we’re at it, what do you think?
I think it is getting them to care in the first place. I don’t know any high school kid that wasn’t bowled over by reading 1984, if they did. I like The Crucible, too, as a great illustration of the kind of slippery slopes that have happened throughout history. There are classics, modern or otherwise, that do illustrate contemporary issues we deal with. If we make too many tests out of them, we tread a little close to leading students towards an interpretation that is satisfying rather than having them come to it on their own. But if we don’t give them a nudge to relate it to the issues we face today, we risk irrelevancy. Literature has the benefit of being able to isolate themes in a way that history classes (and the real events they discuss) cannot so easily do. Ideally, I’d like to see a melding of history and literature throughout education. The issues a generation faced could be seen by particularly representative works of a time, especially so as we come closer and closer to modern times.
I think you’re right that discussion is key. When children leave high school or college, there are no more tests. There’s discussions with those close to them, or people at work, or even some guy in a bar cursing at the television. I don’t know where to go from there, however. Some debates will be had for years to come. I do feel that there is a lot of untapped potential in our education system because it is so focused on testable results. Standardized testing doesn’t seem to be helping, from the teachers I know that have talked to me about it, but that seems to be the direction things are heading in more and more.
No, I know you didn’t mean indoctrination in a strict sense, but it is a good word for the danger we face in keeping people aware of social issues. It is hard to talk politics without also presenting what side you think is right, and so it is also hard to create a sound context for issue-debates without framing it, usually, in favor of your pet opinion. If you know where you want the debate to head, or to end, then I think it is fair to say you are trying to indoctrinate people into a mode of thought. Of course, if you’re right, one could hardly blame you.
If we want young people to reach conclusions on their own, we have to be prepared to face the possibility that some won’t come to conclusions we like. Here comes the repeated arguments. If we’re not prepared to accept that possibility, or we wish to minimize the potential, then I think “indoctrination” is a pretty fair, if possibly loaded, word.
For the record, this is something I’ve been thinking about since the last election. There were so many issues where the answer seemed “obvious” to me (and many others!) that some of us were totally puzzled by the result, and the rest were puzzled by our puzzlement! But I wondered, why so puzzled? There was plenty of talk, but what was the problem with it not having led anywhere? Why could no general consensus form? Why the polarity? And in particular it was sad to see that the youth voted in pretty much the same numbers they had before. The discourse never reached their ears. Heck, I’d have felt it a mixed blessing if they voted in record numbers for Bush.
It is a good question. I don’t want to be a thread killer with that opus up there. I’d like to see what others have thought.
You know, the sad thing that I’m seeing more and more examples of is that people simply don’t think. They don’t want to. The general population has almost no interest in why. They occassionally like to know who, what, how, where, and when, but they very rarely care about why.
Let’s take for example - and this is just one example out of thousands, but it just so happens to have been on my mind a lot for the last few days - September 11th. We all know what and how. We sure know when. We more or less know who. But in the 3 and a half years that have elapsed, I have not seen one single in depth, intelligent discussion on why. Not one! Not on tv, not on the 'net (though I admit to not looking for it*), not among friends or co-workers. Nowhere.
Sure, people have skirted the issue, but way more often than not it gets a shrug and a “they’re crazy t’rrists, what do you expect?”
Some people don’t have the balls to ask - lest they might not like the answer - but I think far more people just don’t care. It’s really sad and it sometimes makes me feel lonely within my own species.
Sorry if it sounds like I’m rambling, but I think that’s my answer to your question, AHunter3: Nobody cares.
[sub]*I’m sure someone will produce a GD link, which would be nice because I’d like to read it, but I don’t think it will negate my argument. Joe and Mary Sixpack do not read Great Debates.[/sub]
OTOH, Joe and Mary Sixpack -who-don’t-think are not spontaneously, of their own initiative, suddenly going all social-conservative activist on our ass. Sufficiently surrounded by an environment of people saying (for example) “It’s bad to say ‘nigger’”, they’ll be no more inclined to work out their own attitude and perspective on that than on anything else.
So, two things:
a) Scattered among such people are those who do think more independently, and it would seem at first glance that we do not do enough to engage them and expose them to the history of social and moral thought… so, today, exposed to sufficient quantities of Fox News and pulpit pounding theocrats priming their pumps, they are drawing socially conservative conclusions when they do their own thinking. (And only hearing “But that’s wrong, that’s politically incorrect” as counterarguments way too much of the time).
b) Perhaps Joe and Susie Sixpack are as contemplative as a row of bowling balls for a reason, not just because they’re congenitally stoopid. Perhaps it’s because they’re chronically underexposed to any situation in which their opinion is solicited and discussion ensues. Or, probably more to the point, they grew up that way and by the time they hit 20 had long since stopped trying to independently make sense of it all and ceased to care, since no one else cared what they thought anyhow.
I’m a graduate student (at a well-regarded university, if that matters) in computer science who has an interest in philosophy. I took a philosophy of science class and was talking to my professor about a possible paper topic; I was thinking of discussing Heidegger’s views on technology as it relates to my field. In the process of discouraging me from pursuing it, he told me that they shy away from Heidegger in all of the undergraduate classes, basically because his views (Heidegger’s, not my professor’s) lend themselves so readily to Nazism. This in a philosophy department, where the sole purpose of the students is to think critically.
Take-home lesson for me: I doubt the open discussion you wish for is ever going to happen.
