RIGHT BACK AT YOU

There’s a column in the Toronto Sun which nails the mess Western society is in:

The social contract between the governed and the government, between authority and citizenry, has become degraded and unbalanced. Instead of asking what our duty or responsibility might be in any given situation, we demand to know what are our privileges and rights.

At its most obvious there is the usual list of standard demands. The right to marry whomever you want, the right to be ordained a priest when you don’t qualify, the right to claim welfare even if it isn’t deserved, the right to have sex with anyone and everyone, the right to die, the right to be wrong.

The list goes on: The right to swear, the right to defy righteous authority, the right to be publicly uncouth, the right to insult a cop, the right to hide behind any excuse to escape punishment, the right to never fail, never lose, never have one’s self-esteem challenged, the right to be wrong.

He forgot to mention “the right to never be confronted with an opinion differing from our own” as one of the rights we seem to insist upon, but otherwise, good show.

EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW, I LEARNED FROM SCOOBY-DOO

• Like Shaggy and Scooby, we are all perpetually trapped by fears of our own creation. These fears are so overpowering that they can blind us to the ease with which we can escape. If Shaggy and Scooby had simply quit trying to solve mysteries, they might never see another monster ever again. Of course, that just raises the question of whether they secretly longed to be scared out of their wits; perhaps, without the fear, they didn’t truly feel alive. Thus man is caught on the horns of an existential dilemma: it is possible to live without fear, but to do so makes one less than truly human.
• Beauty without purpose, as personified by Daphne, accomplishes little and eventually fades into the background, leaving one as a less-than-fully developed character.
• The world is not actually haunted by spirits, ghosts, monsters, and the like; rather, the love of money (or at least the inability to be satisfied with one’s own wealth) is the true root of all evil.
• Real estate is the only thing worth fighting for.
• Contra Ecclesiastes, not everything in the universe is cyclical: it will never again be acceptable for men to wear bright red kerchiefs around their necks. On the other hand, every man wishes he could dress like Shaggy, forever.
• A hungry man will eat the dog’s dinner. Thus, the key to keeping people controllable is to always keep them hungry and to control what and when they eat. If Shaggy had carried the Scooby Snacks, he would have had no need to associate himself with the others. Machiavelli understood this, but failed to put it in an animatable form.
• Knowledge without perspective is blind, viz. Velma without her glasses. One must have a lens of some sort with which to frame and focus reality; otherwise, the universe is merely a collection of meaningless, amorphous blobs, the contemplation of which leaves one pathetically vulnerable.
• Driving the van and pointing out the obvious is enough to justify one’s existence.
• Some people will watch anything if it has a talking dog in it.

REAL-LIFE ETHICS

Suppose you were on your cell phone and your dentist’s office rang you up. Then. when you answered, they said, “This is Dr. So-and-such’s office, would you please hold?”–is it rude to hang up immediately, or should you wait at least five nanoseconds?

Just wonderin’, that’s all.

CREATIVE DEPRIVATION

(Submitted for Friday’s BELTWAY TRAFFIC JAM, since my server was down last night.)

It’s been cool, gray, and wet here in southeastern Wisconsin the last couple days, after a period of thoroughly springlike weather last week. Indeed, nearly all of our snow is gone; all that’s left is the grotty piles of snirt (you Northerners know what that is) in the roadside ditches and the corners of the parking lots.

It’s an early spring. The harbinger of spring around these parts is not birds, but fog: Fog is a sign that the massive snow drifts are starting to melt and saturate the atmosphere. The fog arrived around the 20th of last month; within eight days, the farm fields were full of deep-black soil and the smell of regrowth was hanging in the air. The bravest among us wore shorts last week.

But not now. It’s 38 degrees as I write this on an overcast, misty Thursday morning, and it will not get much warmer than this today. In other words, it’s going to be exactly like yesterday, when I had an epiphany on the way to lunch.
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A QUESTION FOR DAVE FRIED

First of all, thanks for the response. Now, what do you think Sartre would say about the role of genetics in existentialism? If even some of our personal tendencies are genetically predetermined, doesn’t that argue that there’s some sense in which essence preceds existence?

BLOGGER, DEFEND THYSELF

I’m being accused (by Dave Fried) of throwing existentialism under the bus:

Mark blames the shirking of public responsibility on a sort of selfish existentialism. I feel that while his point is good, he’s being unfair to existentialism.

(N.b.: this is in reference to this.)

Mark quotes from Sartre: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” He might be misinterpreting this quote, however, in two different ways. First, Sartre understood that people could find value in choosing to help others, in essence stating by their behavior that all should help their fellow man. Second, Sartre disapproved of putting people in situations which necessarily limit their ability to make moral decisions.

Valid. What I’m guilty of, though, is not making myself sufficiently clear. Sartre certainly recognized that human community required some degree of collective responsibility. Dave continues:

We’ve created a society in which the amount and type of choices available to a person differ greatly from the lowest to the highest classes. It is in no way violating the principles of existentialism if people in our country choose that they would rather live in a society where, for instance, all people have access to adequate education and an opportunity to go to college.

Granted, but in the context of the original Goodman column, the burden of action is shifted away from the subject making the value judgement and onto other actors. I don’t have any problem with people who want to say that the world would be a better place if only the fiscally self-sufficient were to have children; the problem is, that’s not the world we have, and everybody knows it. (Put in terms of Christianity, it’s easy to believe that the world will be a better place when other people take care of their sins–or that the worst possible sin is one you, personally, do not commit.) Asking why I should support the education of other people’s children–as Goodman’s complainants did–is like asking why my money should support the construction of freeways in Los Angeles, since I’ve never been there.

Fried continues:

Also, consider the implications of existence preceding essence. If essence preceded existence, then you could at least make an argument that somehow, poor kids are qualitatively different to start out with than wealthy kids. Perhaps some quirk of reincarnation or predestination would sort out the souls of the yet-unborn so that the most deserving ended up in the best situations.

(Perhaps the Hindus are on to something after all!)

If existence precedes essence, on the other hand, then all children should start out as the same sort of blank slate. Anything that affects their development before they are able to make informed moral choices - health, early education, etc. - would necessarily be someone else’s responsibility. Going back to the principle of the categorical imperative, if I make a decision that my children should get top-quality education and health care, shouldn’t all children receive the same? (And yes, I’m aware you can make an opposite argument - I’m just showing that the opposite argument isn’t the only one that follows.)

Point well taken, but here’s where Fried and I part company. If children come into the world as tabulas rasas, they don’t stay that way for long–certainly not long enough to reach the age of moral action. Environmental factors are surprisingly quick to assert their influence. (I’m married to a pre-school teacher who can certainly tell you stories about that . . .) So I think that existence precedes essence for a nearly-trivial period.

True existentialism is not ultimately solipsistic, and if I implied that it was, mea maxima culpa. My real complaint was the one I alluded to earlier: that it’s easy to insist that others live life according to your personal categorical imperative, but it’s something else entirely to try to walk in their shoes. A true existentialist (such as Sartre) would never make the statements Goodman’s correspondents did. Rather, an existentialist point of view would assert that, since people are wont to give birth to children they can’t fully afford, a moral person cannot ignore their needs in arranging his or her life.

THE POLITICS OF EXISTENTIALISM

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. — Jean-Paul Sartre

How come is it, whenever the issue of collective responsibility comes up, people of every political and philosophical bent suddenly turn existentialist?

I do not frequently agree with Ellen Goodman (OK, this may in fact be the first time I’ve ever agreed with her) but after reading this column in yesterday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, I think we finally see eye to eye about something. An excerpt:

Generally, I regard personal responsibility as a national strength. It reinforces the idea that we have the power to shape and reshape our own lives as well as our bodies. But lately when my gaze rises from the scale on the bathroom floor to the scale of society, I wonder when taking personal responsibility means letting go of collective responsibility.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column asking why there wasn’t more political pressure for child care in a country full of stressed-out working families. Was it because mothers, like those in a focus group I watched, shared the P.R. mantra: “Nobody asked us to have these children.” Was it a belief that kids are private property to be groomed only by their owners?

Well, many, many readers wrote from the P.R. party. The party line was best expressed by Amanda, who wrote via AOL that: “If you decide to have a child, it is your responsibility to shoulder all the costs and responsibilities. Period. Why should I have to pay for someone else’s luxury?” She was not the only one to describe children as a luxury. One reader from Salem, Ore., compared kids to her pets: “It’s my choice to get them and I can’t expect the taxpayer to pay for their needs.”

Nobody said that parents should be their own kids’ physics teachers, police officers or pediatricians, but they basically said you shouldn’t have kids unless you already had every expense up to and through college in some mutual fund.

If you want to call Goodman’s comments more “it takes a village” idiocy, by all means, go ahead. But I think there’s a deeper issue at work here. Since it’s philosophical and I’ve got a great big piece of paper on the wall proving that I’m an entry-level philosopher, I’ll have at it.

I’m all in favor of people being generally accountable for their actions and, if you read the first paragraph of the excerpt, so is Ellen Goodman. Her commitment to personal responsibility is probably a lot squishier than mine, but it’s there nevertheless.

Children do not ask to be born into this world, nor do they ask to whom they wish to be born. If kids had some say in the matter, Bill and Melinda Gates would have half the world’s children and The Wiggles would collectively have the other half. We can all certainly understand the resentment some feel at having to support the children of the willfully indigent–those who could work, but simply don’t, preferring to collect government largesse. (Or, as one 80s song put it, to “live on the love of the common people.”) We’ve all heard horror stories about welfare parents who keep having children because it’s easier than finding a job and going to work.

But what we don’t hear (and what I couldn’t find any statistics for) is just how many of these people there really are. Does this circumstance describe 80% of all welfare recipients? 50%? 15%? 2%? Nobody seems to be keeping track. We do know that, overall, there are many fewer people receiving welfare now than there were even ten years ago–56% fewer families and 59% fewer overall recipents when 1993 and 2000 are compared, according to this site, which had the most recent stats I could find. So, while we many not have an exact number of how many people have chosen welfare parenting as a career, it seems reasonable to assume that, with that sort of overall decline in welfare recipients, whatever the number is now, it’s less than it was ten years ago.

But I digress. The point Goodman is making is three-fold: (1) many working families are struggling both financially, and in terms of their ability to be functional, (2) increasing government-funded child care would probably help them on both counts, and (3) a lot of people, parents or not, resent the bejabbers out of anybody who suggests (2).

It is my opinion, however, that it is wrong to punish a child simply because his or her parents are idiots. Or irresponsible. Or ungrateful. Or [insert undesirable personal characteristic here]. Again, they didn’t ask to be born into such circumstances, and if society expects them to rise above their humble beginnings to become better-functioning people than their parents, society had dang well better be willing to provide those kids with the things their parents cannot. This does not apply to adults, who are capable of deciding for themselves if self-improvement is worth the sacrifice it always requires, but for kids, you need to make an exception.

However, what I’m most struck by in the whole Goodman/reader exchange is the very nihilistic tone so struck by those who wrote in. There’s more than a hint of Kant’s categorical imperative in their responses. There’s also the underlying assumption that bringing a child into the world is of questionable morality, particularly if one is not of upper-middle-class means. It’s more than a little disheartening to hear children referred to as a “luxury”–they certainly are not a necessity to any individual, but it seems obvious that children are a necessity to anybody who thinks that they might grow old someday. In other words, while it’s possible to live a perfectly fulfilling life without being a parent, you certainly can’t say that the world would be better off if everyone chose to feel that way.

Like it or not, we all need children to be born into our society, if for no other purpose than to pronounce us dead and dig our graves. And, since we all need kids, we’re all collectively responsible for them, at least to some limited extent. You can’t pull the “I didn’t get the roll in the hay, so why should I pay for it?” argument. If that means you wind up subsidizing daycare for ungrateful, unambitious, irresponsible parents, so be it. I’ll grant that I don’t know that all their kids will turn out to be great, responsible members of society–are you willing to grant that you don’t know that they won’t?

(Submitted for today’s BELTWAY TRAFFIC JAM.)