A draft of a sketch of an idea for a paper

No alternative

You're fine, how am I?

As I've aged, I've started to function in an almost behavioristic fashion. I mean the behaviorism of the Ryle and Malcolm and (maybe, but probably not) Wittgenstein and not that of Skinner. Obviously, I don't quite take behaviorism to be wholly true; I think I have internal states and I am even sometimes directly aware of them. Often though, my primary access to those internal states isn't through introspection at all. In particular, I find myself knowing my mood not by peering inside, but by noticing what I happen to be doing.

Many is the day I find myself singing one of my stupid songs—about dogs or cheese and crackers or potatoes or someone in the gym or something off-color—or doing one of my signature and quite bad dance moves in the middle of the kitchen or the grocery store or hallway or public restroom, or I begin to skip or gallop down the hallway at the university and I realize that I must be in a good mood. Perhaps because my default mood is a certain funk that I call The Fog, I can be surprised to discover that I'm not in it but actually happy. 

Equally surprising is that I discover this mood the same way my husband does, through my actions and behaviors, and not through some privileged access I have. The internal reflection, often as not, comes from the recognition birthed by action.

Just a minute, I'm checking my phone

We went to one of our semi-regular places this morning for our semi-regular practice of a weekend breakfast out. While I waited for my fully-regular order, I noticed the booth across the aisle. A mother sat there with her two young boys. 

One of the boys was probably around four or five and had brought a toy car to the diner with him. The other boy was young enough to be in a highchair (and the cutest onesie I’ve seen in a long time). Both boys were well-behaved, but the older one went from booth to booth looking for people to talk to and other children to play with, while his younger brother looked around for someone to make eye-contact with. 

While she waited for her food, their mother was fully engrossed with her phone, texting, reading emails, checking various social media platforms, looking at pictures. A few times the older boy called out unsuccessfully for her to notice something. She couldn't be pulled away from the phone.

When the food came, the phone went to a position by her plate, so she could keep looking at it while they ate their food. The phone remained at the center of attention, the very focal point of her time in the diner.

I’m in no position to judge her. I have no reason to believe she is a bad parent or a bad person. And, except when I babysat decades ago, I have never had to sit through a meal shared only with children. I have no kids and the world of the future is probably better off for that. 

I am also no better than she; it is a difficult thing for me to go through a meal without checking my phone. I can’t walk the dog in the morning without it. I check it immediately before sleeping and immediately before rising. I have it with me when I watch a show or a movie in the evening.

Watching her instead called to mind something I have thought about, if not personally addressed, many times before. We live in a time when the virtual too often trumps the real. We’d rather text with someone far away than talk to the person in front of us. We’d rather read about someone else’s life on Facebook than live our own. We would rather edit our experiences for Instagram than fully live them. Hell, much of the time we’d rather sext or use a hookup app than actually have  real, human-contact-involving sex.

Maybe part of the reason some among us dream of achieving immortality through uploading themselves into computers—and are satisfied that this would be a good existence—is that many of us already cannot imagine a life lived any way other than virtually. 

I love you, but I'm worried about your immortal soul

I'm not going to wade into a lengthy debate about whether laws purporting to "restore" religious liberties are really licenses to discriminate. I suspect that, in the current context, they are. No one seemed upset about catering or providing flowers for repeat trips to the altar in the past, but what do I know?

What does interest me is the discourse some religious full-bore supporters of discrimination against gays and lesbians engage in. It goes something like this: "I don't hate you. In fact I love you. And, I am concerned about your immortal soul and the souls of those you may influence. So, I think society and the law should discourage (punish) you for your life(style)." This can often trail off into talk of God's punishment. 

I suspect some of those who deal in this line do so sincerely, but it puts me in mind of another person who just wanted to see people converted—though he thought it as impossible as some modern day evangelists must see my conversion—and make sure they didn't adversely affect others. And, so, in the spirit of Christian love, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and their Lies. Because he found them incorrigible, he believed their homes and synagogues ought to be burned. And, he hoped it might lead to repentance, but failing that, at least good Christians would be saved from a malign influence. 

How different is that, at the end of the day, from those who merely want to save me from my own perfidious ways?

There's nothing more American than not vaccinating your children

We treat the anti-vaccine crowd as if they were an aberration. But they aren't outliers. They are the natural endpoint of two very strong and very American tendencies: distrust of all authorities and hierarchies; and, the belief that we are each responsible for ourselves.

There is a facet of the American ideal that sees each person as a sovereign individual, not just in charge of herself, but as intelligent, as well-informed, as wise, as good as the next person. Hobbes saw this in our English forebears, when he noted that every person is satisfied with the intelligence he has, since he is certain that he is as intelligent as everyone else. You see it in the almost universal negative reaction to being told that someone is smarter; rare is the American who will accept that this might be the case. 

Perhaps this characteristic isn't peculiar to Americans, but there is something special in the way that this distrust of authority leads to skepticism of science and the positing of individual authority here. We have no need of authorities. Each of us—every politician so quick to say he is "not a scientist," for example—is as much an expert as those with years of training, with decades of research. Climate scientists point to anthropogenic climate change and mean global warming. So what? It's snowing. And, I don't see that it's warming. So, my feelings and experience trump the data and the research. Biologists are unable to find any evidence of danger in eating GMOs—leave aside other concerns people might have. It doesn't matter. I just know there has to be something wrong with eating these  Frankenfoods. There has to be. There's no evidence whatsoever that there's any link between vaccination and autism. The only paper to support such a link has been thoroughly discredited. Its author has lost his medical license. But, though I lack any scientific training, though I cannot identify any plausible causal link, though I have no idea at all about the purported causal mechanism or the etiology of autism, I am certain that there is. And, the ample evidence that I put my own child at risk of serious illness or death—my mom told me a harrowing story of watching a child die of pertussis forty years ago—can never trump my maternal or paternal gut instinct that there just must be some connection. 

Who are the experts to claim authority over my own "knowledge" and experience? I am an American.

But, you say, not vaccinating my children also puts others' children at great risk? Well, I'm not responsible for them. They are their parents' responsibility, just as my children are mine. We are a country of individuals and families.

You don't have to be a fan of Ayn Rand or to talk about "makers" and "takers" to have imbued the idea that, in America, everyone is responsible for herself and those closest to her, but no one else. After all, the American God helps those who help themselves. You see this is debates about healthcare. You see it in discussions of the safety net and proposals that put having a life-plan before being fed. You see it in the inane way people describe themselves as have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. You see it in parents withdrawing their children from the public schools to charters and private schools, ignoring the effects on the children who are left behind. 

And, you see it in the women I watched on the news the other night trying to explain her decision not to vaccinate her children. Well, she actually refused to explain this decision, since she doesn't even owe others an explanation. Other people, she explained, are invested in their decisions and opinions, and she has her own. But, she needs to make decisions for her children. Risks to others, other children, played no part in her discussion. They don't really exist as any part of her moral calculation.

But that's not an aberration. That is quintessentially American. 

So happy, but so many shotguns

One almost constant refrain my students and I heard in Guatemala—from Guatemalans, from Americans, from workers in NGOs—was that Guatemalans are extremely happy. In spite of their sometimes crushing poverty, they are happy. In some ways, this is reminiscent of the happiest-nation-on-earth discourse about Bhutan. I'm not going to deny that I saw a lot of very happy people. I've already written about happiness and poverty and lessons we should and shouldn't take from such experiences here. 

I only want to add one small set of observations. For a country so universally-described as happy, armed guards are ubiquitous. Every morning as I would walk back from the gym to my classroom, legions of men—really boys—would fan out to their jobs as guards in businesses of every kind, from banks and jewelry stores to restaurants. Each of them is armed at least with a short-barreled shotgun. Many are also armed with sidearms. And, they accompany managers visiting stores, deliveries of canned goods to restaurants and cafés, they even guard ice cream salons in Guatemala City. 

Restaurants post signs warning that you are not allowed to smoke or bring in pets or come in armed. The assumption seems to be that many customers would otherwise be packing.

In addition to the guards and concerns about armed diners, broken-glass or razor wire or electrified fencing tops most walls and the boundaries between roofs, not only in the commercial but also in residential districts. 

What is there to be so afraid of in such a happy country? Surely, such a happy people are unlikely to engage in violent crime to change their status. Or could it be that the discourse of happiness serves the purposes of a radically unequal—and heavily influenced by those good old Chicago economists—society? They are so happy, why worry about how poor they are? We can keep them at bay with weapons.

What's the opposite of cosmopolitan?

I'm painfully aware of my foreignness in Guatemala. I mean the pain of self-consciousness and social anxiety. It's hard not to see that I'm out of place. I'm the wrong shape, and odd size, a mix of white and burn, with a noticeably non-Guatemalan beard. (I'm not sure whether the man who told me I have a nice beard, a very nice beard, at the gym was complimenting me, in awe, or taking the piss; I suspect it was the last.) I'm dressed in American clothes. I speak passable Spanish but with the wrong accent; my accent is porteño, but no one is mistaking me for an Argentine. It is barely possible that I'm not being stared at all the time, but there are more than a few side glances. And, when I greet people in the street, they are surprised. I'm not sure what they are surprised by, but something.

If I reflect though—as I did last night when I returned from not having dinner, having forgotten the book that would have been my companion—I realize I don't feel considerably more out of place here that I do at home. In the United States, my surroundings are more familiar. And, of course, I speak my native tongue. As my students remind me, I do that with an accent that most find strange. In the United States, I obviously know how to navigate, but I'm never comfortable doing so. There, too, I feel out of place, never quite right.

My philosophical commitments tell me I should be a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the cosmos. But, I can't manage feeling that. Nor do I feel the right connections to be a nationalist or a regionalist. I mean, I am an American and a Hoosier, but I'm no more comfortable around my own kind—are they my own kind—than I am among strangers.

But what do you call someone who feels himself to have no citizenship whatsoever?