MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Social meaning of marriage

A very good essay on the social meaning of marriage.  The author identifies this as the primary concern of conservatives who oppose marriage equality, but then goes further in explaining how these very arguments actually support marriage equality.

Thus, the most important elements of marriage’s social meaning are the assumptions that married life normally involves sexual intimacy, domestic and economic cooperation, and a mutual commitment to sustaining the relationship.

It seems clear that, while the theoretical arguments for same-sex marriage often focus on legal claims, the actual conception of many same-sex couples is broader and includes this social meaning. This broader conception lies behind the emotional appeals that same-sex marriage proponents have so often made, but there is also a more theoretical case to be made as well. Many same-sex couples have the very same interest in having access to an institution that has this social meaning as opposite-sex couples have, affording them the intangible benefit of being able to signal to their community that they wish their relationship to be interpreted in the light of these generally shared assumptions. Given that, it must be unjust for the state to deny same-sex couples the right to marry when this right is made available to other couples who have precisely the same interest in having it.

 

The Liberating Embrace Of Uncertainty

A wonderful essay by Adam Frank.  He writes about how religion and science have both pursued certainty, and this is a mistake.  The embrace of uncertainty leads to the good life:

Though I am an atheist, some of the wisest people I have met are those whose spiritual lives (some explicitly religious, some not) have forced them to continually confront uncertainty. This daily act has made them patient and forgiving, generous and inclusive. Likewise, the atheists I have met who most embody the ideals of free inquiry seem to best understand the limitations of every perspective, including their own. They encounter the ever shifting ground of their lives with humor, good will and compassion.

In the end, embracing uncertainty is to embrace a quality I have written about many times before: mystery. These lives we live, surrounded by beauty and horror, profound knowledge and pitiful ignorance, are a mystery to us all. To push that truth away with false certainty, falsely derived from either religion or reason, is to miss our most perfect truth.

 

"A Call to Rewrite the Scripts in the Gender Drama"

Warren Blumenfeld writes about the North Carolina pastor, Sean Harris, who recently caused controversy for recommending that father's beat their sons if they are effeminate.  Blumenfeld points out that though many were shocked by this violent reinforcement of traditional gender roles, that the overall society daily engages in reinforcement of a very destructive, yet completely culturally conditioned and manufactured, gender binary.

Rev. Sean Harris simply serves as an extreme and fanatical example of a director in the larger coercive societal battalions bent on destroying all signs of gender transgressions in young and old alike, and in the maintenance of gender scripts. Most of us function as conscious and unconscious co-directors in this drama each time we enforce gender-role conformity in others, and each time we relegate our critical consciousness by failing to rewrite or destroy the scripts in ways that operate integrally to us.

Blumenfeld also points out the inherent contradiction in Harris' (probably very uninformed) views of gender.  Harris would seem to support an essentialist metaphysics, yet clearly  he believes gender is culturally constructed:

Paradoxically, while Rev. Harris attests to “gender distinctions” as God given, he betrays his own assertion by demanding that parents break their children early of any forms of gender transgression. Harris clearly demonstrates his role as director of this drama by inadvertently highlighting the social construction of gender roles and how we as social actors need to continually pass on the roles, the scripts, using applause or jeers, to future generations.

Language: Biology or Culture

Back in grad school I enrolled in a two week intersession class on Noam Chomsky.  I really knew nothing of Chomsky's language theories before the class.  Those first days I was very skeptical of his notions that language ability and even grammar come hard-wired in the brain.  By the end of the two-week course I was thoroughly persuaded.  Persuaded because of the logic of the arguments, and specifically one essay in which he used empirical arguments to thoroughly refute the arguments of Quine, Davidson, Dennet, and others.

Now Chomsky's dominance is under some assault.  Barbara King writes on the Cosmos and Culture blog about new work which claims a cultural influence as more prominent than a biological one.  Her second post is here.  

I'm open to being persuaded again.  I'll just need the logic of empircal argument to refute Chomsky.  

Which gets to a larger issue of importance -- how we change our minds.  By our late 20's/early 30's it seems that we settle down into a world view and that the flux and curiousity of the adolesence and grad school years transitions to something more stable.  Did you experience the same?  I feel I'm still open to radically changing my mind on various things, but I feel that it is much less likely, as I have spent time thinking about and reflecting on most of the big issues and have come to positions that are comfortable for me.  It would probably need to be something dramatic to make me shift (which is what William James said was true of our web of belief).

Mind-Body Questions Endure

I've begun reading Aristotle's De Anima, and giggled at the following, as it was the same sort of questions being asked at the turn of the millennium by philosophers like Jaegwon Kim:

[The soul] is it a' this-somewhat,' a substance, or is it a quale or a quantum, or some other . . .

Then, there was this question which was basically Descartes', Davidson's, and others:

A further problem presented by the affections of soul is this: are they all affections of the complex of body and soul, or is there any one among them peculiar to the soul by itself?  To determine this is indispensible but difficult.

I do think that there is a decent answer to these questions, from a Whiteheadian perspective, but it is funny how much these same questions persist.

Process philosophy explained

Posterior Analytics

Posterior Analytics/Topica by Aristotle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One bit of evidence that I'm a geek: I get excited that I can read Aristotle.

Back in grad school I really liked the Posterior Analytics and wanted to re-read it as part of my reading back through elements of the philosophical canon. This time I wasn't as engaged by it, presumably because it does not align as closely with my current interests as it did in grad school in the nineties. The closing pages, which discuss the limitations of scientific knowledge, are the best.

While reading, I was reminded powerfully of how different philosophical reasoning and debate is from the way most debate now occurs in our wider culture. In philosophy you must present an argument for your idea and then others look for and point out the weak points in the argument, compelling you to strengthen or abandon it.

I think one reason I get so easily annoyed with some people and their views is that there is a correct way to argue and there are things that are true and right. We may have a constitutional right to believe whatever, but we do not have a logical, rational "right" to.

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It All Turns on Affection

A masterful lecture by Wendell Berry.  He was the Jefferson lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Read these central paragraphs and ponder to good effect:

The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.

 

What Facebook Makes Us

A postmodern minister engages this idea (in conversation with Foucault, Levinas, Derrida, and Zizek).  He ends up with these questions:

What is Facebook making us? What kind of subjects are we becoming? How is Facebok creating a new subjectivity? How is Facebook shaping how we respond to the other and all the others with whom we interact and toward whom we gesture, bid, greet, and the like? What is it doing to us when, in light of the fact that there is no “real” face, the ethical interaction is no longer obligatory but merely optional? What are we becoming if/when we do not respond? What does the banal act of hitting the “Like” button do to us? What happens to our local community when we create a virtual instantiation of that community in/on Facebook as a “group” and when we use the technology to create and coordinate “events?” How is our ritualistic (liturgical?) use of Facebook in conflict with our liturgical practices in the ecclesia? This is especially pertinent and pressing when our liturgical use of Facebook isan ecclesial practice (does your church have a Facebook page, or more than one?).

My thoughts on the Trayvon Martin case

I was very disturbed from the first time I heard of this story and continue to be, the more facts that are reported.  Setting aside my visceral reaction, there is a reasoned, philosophical problem with not arresting and charging the killer.

At the root of our understanding of the role of force, and particularly deadly force, in civilized society is Lockean social contract theory.  In the state of nature we possess the right to use force, including deadly force.  When we enter into the social contract, we surrender that right to the state.  Only in situations of self-defense do we maintain that right.  As I see it, there are two major areas of problem with the Martin-Zimmerman case.

First, Mr. Zimmerman was not justified in his use of deadly force against Mr. Martin.  One maintains the right to self-defense within the social contract, but one is only justified in using the level of force necessary to respond to the force used against you.  You cannot shoot someone for yelling at youor simply throwing something at you.  You can only use deadly force when deadly force is being threatened against you.  That means even in a fist fight where all the parties are doing is beating the crap out of each other, deadly force is not justified if deadly force is not used or threatened.

To this end, there is absolutely no grounds to justify Mr. Zimmerman's using deadly force against Mr. Martin.  If Florida law actually does allow Mr. Zimmerman to use deadly force in this situation, then the law itself is unjustified and morally wrong and must be condemned.  

If Mr. Martin yelled at Mr. Zimmerman, charged at him, threw his skittles at him, kicked him, or even punched him -- none of these would justify Mr. Zimmeran using deadly force in response.  And there is no evidence as yet that Mr. Martin even acted in these ways, but even if he did, it would not justify deadly force.  Mr. Zimmerman, philosophically and ethically, should be investigated and, if the facts bear out, charged with murder.

The second issue is that Mr. Zimmerman was the aggressor.  Zimmerman disobeyed law enforcement and followed Mr. Martin.  It appears that Mr. Zimmerman then confronted Mr. Martin.  Mr. Martin's reponse, whatever it was, was in response to an escalation by Mr. Zimmerman.  If self-defense is at issue in this situation, it would be for Mr. Martin to claim.  Mr. Zimmerman was the one who escalated the situation and, it appears, was the aggressor.  It seems clear to me that he cannot, then, justify his use of deadly force because he was the one who escalated the situation to that level, not the victim.

So, even without race getting involved in the analysis of the situation, and I firmly believe that race was at issue, one should conclude, given the facts we currently have, that Mr. Zimmeran should be arrested for the unjustified homocide of Mr. Martin.