It's just a preference

In conversations in both the real and the cyber worlds, one often comes across people who, while looking for love or a reasonable (and temporary) facsimile thereof, make clear members of which ethnic groups they are uninterested in. My experience in this area is mostly limited to the gay world, where it's not uncommon to read or be told that someone isn't interested in blacks or Asians or Latinos or whatever.

This declaration is almost always followed by the caveat, 'It's just a preference.' Now, it's not just ethnic groups that are picked out in this way, people often also indicate that they aren't interested in overweight or feminine men, etc. While there are surely problems with this, too, I'm thinking mostly about the racial and ethnic categories for now.

What's interesting, I think, about these declarations is that the idea that it is just a preference is supposed somehow to insulate the preferer from any kind of criticism. I think the thought goes something like this: I'm not attracted to black men or Asian men or half-Albanian, half-Aborigine men, but no one can criticize me for feeling or being attracted in that way because it's a preference of mine and I am in no way morally responsible for my preferences. They are just preferences that I am somehow stuck with.

But it's just false that I have absolutely no control over or responsibility for my preferences. Take one wholly non-erotic example: I used to find the taste of yerba mate utterly disgusting; it turns out that the taste of holly leaves is not immediately appealing to the North American palate. But I wanted to be able to drink it, so I trained myself to enjoy it. I cultivated a taste for it. Although I didn't enjoy drinking it, I wanted to enjoy drinking it, so I practiced until I could.

The same can be said of various other tastes and preferences that I have cultivated and inculcated in my life. To some degree one chooses his preferences and decides how much work he is willing to put into gaining them. And, sometimes I have decided that I am unwilling to put in the necessary effort in order to have a preference that I would like to have. So, I would really like to be the sort of person who enjoys poetry, but although I want to enjoy Rilke, I am not willing to put in the effort that would make me a happy poetry-reader--except for epic poetry, which I am able to enjoy.

So, what I am offering is the following observation. If someone doesn't find himself attracted to, for instance, Asian men, this is not just a fact that he discovers about himself, as if his preferences were handed to him and he himself had no part in them. If he isn't attracted to Asian men, this means both that he has a certain preference and he is not willing to explore what work it might take to overcome that preference. So he both isn't attracted to members of a certain group and he has made a decision not to become a person who is attracted to members of that group.

For what it's worth, I don't think that anything like this is the case in sexual orientation, but that's because I think it's wrong to think of being homosexual or heterosexual as a preference. I don't merely prefer men; that isn't a matter of taste, it's something that is a deeper part of my erotic being. I am not saying, however, that there is necessarily something morally objectionable in not being attracted to members of some particular ethnic groups. I'm not sure whether there is something wrong with this or not. I do know that there is something morally problematic in not thinking that members of certain ethnic groups could be one's friends, but whether this carries over into erotic cases, I don't know.

I do know that there is something a little sad in not being able to imagine that there would be a sexually attractive black man or Hispanic man or Asian man or white man. Just as there is something more than a little sad in fetishizing members of an ethnic group, so that one is only attracted to white men or black men or whatever. But this is sad because it points to a lack of imagination and a diminution of the beauty in the world for that person.

Of course, not every Asian man, for instance, is attractive to me, but this no more means that Asian men as such are unattractive than the fact that most white men are unattractive to me means that I don't like white men. But, whatever my preferences, they are my preferences and inasmuch as they are mine, I am responsible for them. So responsible that saying that they are just preferences doesn't make me immune to criticism.

There may be no disputing matters of taste, but there is criticizing them.

Relativistic worries

This week it was time for the first exam in my intersession ethics class. Exams are good as a lecturer, because an exam day is a day that I don't have to teach. I do really enjoy teaching, but at the same time I become extremely nervous right before teaching. The whole experience is a lot like stagefright--or anyway the sort of stagefright I experienced when I was younger and in college or community theater productions. Most days, I get such a serious nervous cough before I teach that I am on the edge of being sick. No matter how long I do it, I still get the same feeling; but I am also exhilarated when a lecture or a discussion is going well, the students are interested, intrigued and maybe a little entertained.

But on exam days, while the students write their answers, I usually take the classtime to read some philosophical book that doesn't directly apply either to the class or to my normal academic interests. So, they were answering questions about moral skepticism and Immanuel Kant and I was thinking about relativism. In fact, I was thinking about relativism and the danger that classes like mine might lead my students to reject ethical thinking altogether.

The way I have always taught ethics has been in two parts. For a while we talk about various traditional ethical theories. I provide the arguments in their favor, the sorts of ethical answers they provide, the problems and counterintuitive results. Then we move on to the next. After we talk about the theories, we talk about various ethical and social issues; I provide or elicit the various positions that people do or might have on the issues discussed. We talk about the arguments for the views and the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments. What we rarely arrive at is anything like a consensus; and I (almost) never tell them what I think the right answers are on any of the issues, concentrating instead on evaluating arguments, justifications and rationalizations.

Not surprisingly, my worry is that my students might come away from the class thinking that, since there are arguments on either side and these arguments all have strengths and weaknesses, there just are no answers. In other words, I'm worried that I might be turning out a group of moral relativists. That, since we don't arrive at any answers, they might just believe that there's nothing more to morality than what they unreflectively believe in any case; ethical thinking doesn't provide them with answers anyway. But, at the same time, I don't think I'm in any position to provide them with answers.

I know what I think about abortion, I know what I think about same-sex marriage, I know what I think about drug use, I'm pretty sure that I am well-justified in my beliefs about these matters. But I don't have anything like certainty about my beliefs. And a philosophy lecturer teaching an introductory ethics class isn't probably the right person to teach someone how to be moral. Aristotle was undoubtedly wrong about a lot of things, but he was probably right in thinking that moral beliefs and practices are habituated through the way in which one is raised and not learned in the way one learns physics. If I wanted to teach them to be ethical, I would take Alasdair MacIntyre's advice and have them read(Jane Austen) novels.

But then I worry that if I'm not giving them answers but I am showing them difficulties with moral arguments I'm not doing much more than destabilizing them in their moral beliefs. So, what good could I possibly be doing? If teaching ethics the way I do has any positive effect, it must be in teaching them that, if they are going to hold others to their ethical standards, they must be able to defend those very beliefs. And, since other people have different beliefs, they need to be able to do a better job than their epistemic competitors do. Otherwise, they have to admit that they have no very good reason for holding the beliefs they do hold dear. That isn't to say that they must give up their morality if they are unable to defend it, but just that they ought to respect those views they can't refute or outargue.

And, maybe this isn't such a bad goal for an ethics class, these days. After all, one way of thinking about the war that we are currently engaged in, is as a war of ideas. But, all too often, the ideas are presented merely as conclusions without support or any need of it. So, if I get a few students to think that they ought to be able to defend their views--even if their defense is never conclusive--maybe I am doing a service to the world.

Inside voices

There's probably something a little strange in blogging about the loss of privacy in contemporary society--after all blogging is often little more than sharing what would otherwise be private thoughts and private facts about one's life in a very public form. In blogging though, the blogger has the ability to edit his thoughts and to decide just what should be shared and the reader makes a choice to read (or not read) the blog. A blog is a loss of privacy, but a negotiated loss of privacy.

That's not what happens now on the bus or in the grocery store when the person in the next seat or comparing prices of different canned vegetables is talking on the phone telling her interlocutor and everyone within 20 feet what her doctor had to say about her bowels or her cousin's recent run-in with the law.

It's also not what was happening two nights ago when I went out with my partner and my mother, who's visiting for Christmas. From the time we started eating our appetizers through the meat and the dessert, a group of high-school friends somewhere near my mother's age, regaled each other, us, the entire restaurant staff and all the patrons with tales of how well and badly their marriages were going, which of their children don't respect them, and in just which ways Mary Magdalene is superb--I will be much happier when people get over the badly mixed mish-mash of ancient Gnosticism and long-lived conspiracy theories so tragically publicized in The DaVinci Code and so well lampooned in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum more than a decade ago.

I guess my problem is that where I was raised, most people had two different sorts of voices: one public and one private. The public one is the one that you use when you are teaching, preaching, otherwise declaiming or warning little old ladies that a Mack truck is fast approaching. The private one is the one that you use when you are talking to friends, on the phone where someone might hear you or discussing matters better kept to a small group of friends.

Whether it's the current ability to have phone conversations no matter where you happen to be or the way that people share every intimate detail of their lives on daytime television, it seems that much of society has lost the ability to be discreet. And yet, for some reason, when someone is talking about what they caught their husband doing and talking about it so loudly that I can hear it 10 feet away, they still become offended when I stare and give them a sympathetic look.

Neither gods nor monsters

Sitting in my apartment on a sunny, warm winter's day in San Diego, trying to recover from a night of dancing after my bartending shift and lazily leafing through the January GQ, I read an article about Justin Volpe the NYPD officer convicted of sodomizing Abner Louima in a precinct bathroom in August 1997. The article is a well-written and sympathetic piece by Robert Draper, focusing on the events and stresses leading up to the attack and the effects the subsequent conviction and 30-year sentence has had on Volpe and his family. I say it is sympathetic, but of course it is in no way exculpatory, nor is it meant to be. Instead it attempts to live up to a promise to show Volpe as a human being rather than a mere monster.

Of course, it is easier to see Volpe as a monster, just as it is easier to see the soldiers in Abu Ghraib (and, it seems, a few Marines at Guantanamo and at least a few SEALS in Iraq) as monsters or a few bad apples--as the current Administration characterized them--or to see the two boys who so brutally murdered Matthew Shepard merely as drug-crazed maniacs--as 20/20 has stipulated they were in the absence of any corroborating evidence. Seeing the perpetrators of these acts as monsters or bad apples or under the influence of such strong drugs that their reason and humanity had altogether left them is easy, because it is so reassuring.

If the soldier humiliating a detainee is a monster or a bad apple, that means she isn't like me. Because after all, I am a human being. I wouldn't or couldn't do anything like that, because I have a good moral foundation and I am a robust and hearty apple, resisting the rot spreading through the barrel. And as frightening as it is to face monsters, because of what they might do to me, it is far more frightening to be brought face to face with human beings who perpetrate truly horrendous acts. These are more frightening less because of what they might do to me, than because of what they show me about what I might do to others.

It's easy to demonize others and, like most easy things, doing so is laziness. In seeing others as monsters, we remove ourselves from their midst, just as we remove them from our human community. This lets us avoid the questions that considering what they have done as human beings raise. Questions like: What could lead someone to do that? How could someone who seemed otherwise moral do something like that? How could somebody who was always a good apple so quickly become a bad apple? How far below the surface are the parts of me that could do those same things?

These are important questions for our own moral and ethical health. As Arendt put it, evil is banal. It is commonplace and perpetrated by commonplace, ordinary people, not by--at least not always by--moral monsters. This is precisely the point of, for instance, Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors where he documents the lives and psychologies of the physicians who worked in Nazi death camps. For example, he explains how Mengele was able to act as an uncle to Gypsy children, to gain their affection and apparently return it, to bring them gifts and yet on the next day to order them killed. It is tempting in cases like this to say that the affection was just more evidence of this monster's evil. But, as Lifton makes apparent in this and other cases, there is no more reason to think that the evil was defining of his character that there was that the affection was.

As these sort of cases, the results of the Milgram experiments and others which followed--which demonstrated that otherwise moral people will, with very little impetus, torture their fellow humans for nothing more than the carrying out of a purported psychological experiment--and cases like that of Volpe and Abu Ghraib show, we have not just angels of our better nature to call upon but also devils lurking not far below the surface.

So, while those who commit atrocities are not monsters, we also have to remember that we are not moral gods, that put into strenuous situations we, too, are likely to engage in actions that would make us almost unknown to ourselves. Perhaps this is the lesson of the traditional idea of the fall of man--or one of them, since I spend too much time thinking about this particular topic: that though we have the capacity for great and moral behavior, we also have the capacity for the most horrendous of acts. And this applies not just to a few bad apples among us, but all of us. If anything this knowledge can help us to avoid those situations--those near occasions of sin--that would lead us to such acts. This self-awareness might just help us to stop ourselves when we see that we are falling closer to the acts of those we so easily call 'monsters'.

On meritocracy

This week, President Bush awarded three Presidential Medals of Freedom--the highest award that a United States civilian citizen can be awarded--to L Paul Bremer, Jr, the former administrator in Iraq, retired General Tommy Franks and former CIA-director George Tenet. It has always been a central plank in the philosophy of the GOP that people ought to be rewarded for their efforts and merits--indeed that the ideal society is a meritocracy. This has been the traditional Republican argument against Affirmative Action, for example.

But, then, as a casual observer, I have to ask myself what these three men were rewarded for. American citizens have been assailed on all sides with reports of just how bad the intelligence situation has been for years. So Tenet's award must not be for the job well done at the CIA, unless it's just for having had the job. But a Medal of Freedom is a far cry from a pocket watch.

The early days of the Iraqi invasion seem to have been a series of missteps, misestimations and outright mistakes. For this, Franks is being rewarded? Of course, he did campaign for Bush's reelection, but a Medal of Freedom isn't supposed to be a political gong--our minimal system of awards is not supposed to mirror the British Honours system.

Of the three, only Bremer seems to have done an admirable job. Whatever one's view of the invasion and following occupation, once in power, Bremer brought a modicum of order to a country over which he did not have total control using a military he was not in command of. He probably made the most of a bad situation.

Awards like these, not unlike former Administration officials retiring from public life to lucrative careers in industries they used to regulate (or de-regulate) make one wonder whether there are any members of the Grand Old Party who actually still believe that one should be rewarded for effort, or whether this is just a slogan to be thrown out when public welfare is cast aside in favor of the market.

Judging books

I'm a firm believer in enjoying all sorts of pleasures: I'll gorge myself quite contentedly on a farm-style breakfast or the king-sized version of a Kit Kat but I can also appreciate a fine dry-aged steak served medium rare with a mash of baby leeks on the side. I like foreign language films (except ones in French: the sound of the language grates for me) and I love to watch Desperate Housewives. Some pleasures are coarser than others and some pleasures might take more acclimatization to appreciate than others, but pleasures are pleasures. Having said that, though, I realize that even if a novel by Danielle Steele deals with some of the same themes (betrayal, love, family ties, the effects of world-events on individuals) as one by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Mann, they aren't equivalent in artistic merit. And, the fact that they deal with the same matters, or both give pleasure or both are equally useful as doorstops doesn't make them the same thing.

All I'm saying is that as silly as it is to judge a book by its cover (although I do resist buying any book with a movie-tie-in cover) it's just as silly to judge a book by what uses it can be put to: giving pleasure, telling its readers something about broader themes, holding a door open. And, if it's wrong to judge a book that way, it's much, much worse to judge a person that way. But these seem to be the two standards by which we usually judge people. I have no doubt that this is worse in the gay microcosm where I spend most of my time, but microcosms, too, reflect something about the macrocosms of which they are part.

Item, the first. I'm a fairly muscular man, hardly a body-builder, but it would be fair to say that I work out religiously, in at least one of the original senses of 'religio'--conscientiousness or scrupulosity. And I realize there's probably a deep and troubling psychological explanation for this as well; I'm self-aware enough to realize I have neuroses, but not enough to want to remove them, having explored them to their depths. Spending time developing my body is an organizing activity of my life, though not the only, nor even the primary, one. So, when I get involved in a conversation about politics or philosophy or my favorite movies or authors with mere acquaintances, they often tell me that they are surprised that I would have thought about the things I have or that I have the opinions I do. After all since I am big, I must be dumb or simply uninterested in any matters of intellectual import. In other words, if I care about the exterior of the building, I must not have bothered to furnish it.

This, of course, is the familiar phenomenon of judging a book by its cover. Since it is so familiar, it's less interesting. And, while it's annoying, it's not as troublesome to me as the second--and, I think, allied phenomenon--judging a book by the uses to which it can be put.

Item, the second. As often as I have to tell people that there are plenty of muscular men or attractive women and men who are, may the Heavens forefend, nonetheless intelligent, thoughtful and interesting people, I am forced to tell them that there are plenty of bartenders, physical laborers, desk-clerks, drivers, waitstaff, baristas, etc., who have exactly the same properties.

You see, I have more than one job, and in the opinions of some people I meet, they are greatly divergent jobs. On the one hand, I'm an adjunct philosophy instructor--someday, Oh someday, I'll finish my dissertation and be a real live professor, the Blue Fairy willing--and on the other, I tend bar. I also do some freelance writing once in a while, but it's the teaching and the bartending that keep me eating, and I do like to eat. Often, when someone sitting at my bar hears that I teach, too, they try to suppress their surprise and then tell me how interesting that is. Sometimes they will just come out and tell me that they assumed I was just a bartender. Sometimes, before they've learned what my other job is, they will ask me if I really want to bartend for the rest of my life and whether I've ever thought about getting an education. Or sometimes they will ask me whether, since I teach, I teach physical education. Once I had someone ask me if what I taught was philosophy of sport; I replied curtly that my area of interest was actually philosophy of mind. And, often, when the conversation has gone on for a bit, as it sometimes does on quiet nights, they'll tell me that I'm pretty smart for a bartender. And right there is the very center of the problem.

It's the 'smart for a bartender' or 'just a bartender' that sticks in my craw. This is meant as a compliment, of course, and I accept it as such, even if I'm not so good at taking praise. But it's not a compliment full-stop. Instead, it's a comparative compliment. I'm not just being told that I've been judged to be of at least passable intelligence; I'm being told that, unlike other bartenders, I have actual thoughts. But that's just an instance of being told that, in general, my interlocutor judges people not just by their appearances but also by the uses to which they are put occupationally. Since a person is a bartender, they must only be so intelligent--perhaps smart enough to remember lots and lots of drinks and their prices and make change correctly most of the time, but not smart enough to worry or think about foreign policy trends, the meaning of life or whether religious belief, quite apart from being true, is ultimately an estimable organizing principle for a human life. If they are making these sort of job-based assumptions about bartenders, then it's only fair to assume that they make these assumptions about gardeners and desk-clerks and bus- and truckdrivers and the list goes on and on.

And, that's just silly. There are, of course, jobs, occupations and avocations that assume a certain high level of intelligence. If you are an astrophysicist, you are probable pretty damned intelligent. If you understand the intricacies of contract law or thoracic surgery, you aren't an intellectual slouch. But this sort of assumption only works at the upper end, it doesn't and cannot work at the 'lower' end. The fact that someone is engaged in menial or service work or whatever other sort of labor we tend not to admire or value very highly doesn't show anything about that person's intellectual gifts, anymore than their attractiveness or physical prowess does. As my grandfather--a very smart and intellectually curious man if just a heating and cooling technician and salesman--used to say, 'It all pays the same.' Of course, it doesn't all pay the same, but the point remains: there is nothing undignified in working in most any job if it keeps you and those you care about living.

After all, Socrates was just a potter who made copies of religious statues, Spinoza was just a lens-grinder, Kafka was just a clerk in an insurance office, Jefferson was just an unsuccessful farmer and, if you're so-inclined, Jesus was just a carpenter and Muhammad was just a merchant in the employ of his first wife. For the most part, jobs are just jobs, and the majority of people work to live; their lives are not defined or fairly-evaluated in terms of what puts bread on their tables. And, if you are unable to see that fact, you will never grasp that their can be anything of value in any human being per se. So, the next time you tell me that I'm smart for a bartender or, when I make a mistake in making your drink that 'at least I'm pretty', you'll understand the momentary grimace before I smile, laugh and say 'Thank you'.

An SUV in every garage until death

Living in California makes it clear to me just how much we need to rethink the necessary connection between individuality/independence and personal automobile ownership. On the one hand, this state is full of people making up for personality and other personal shortcomings--not all, but most, of them explicable in Freudian terms--with Hummers and Envoys and Armadas that don't nearly fit in freeway lanes, let alone city streets--why does anyone need to drive an entire navy? And why do so many men (and women) who never approach a farm need such big payload capacity?

In addition, San Diego with its beautiful weather is full of retirees. While I have the greatest respect for older people, especially those who have worked hard throughout their lives and quite often have sacrificed for their communities and the nation as a whole--so much respect that I resist the urge to tell them to get out of my way or hurry them along in the grocery store , a feat requiring great restraint as those who know me could attest--American culture has screwed up in leading them to believe that independence is equivalent to the continued driving of personal automobiles. Our highways are overcrowded and our parking lots are too small, leading people who cannot maneuver their too-large SUVS or their oversized but totally safe Lincolns, Cadillacs and other throwback monstrosities into parking places and instead "parking" them in the fire lanes in front of the grocery store, blocking foot and car traffic and making emergency vehicle access impossible if needed.

But asking people to give up driving, even when they have reached a point when it is no longer safe to do so--like the woman I watched getting into her car as I ate breakfast at a local diner this week--is tantamount to asking them to give up freedom. She was severely hunched over, in such obvious pain as it took her 15 minutes to get into her car after she had finished eating her meal, could not see in either her rear-view or side-view mirrors, was smoking and drinking coffee as she drove and pulled out into traffic without any possible knowledge of whether a car was coming or not. Surely she was not the safest of all possible drivers or even anywhere in the top 75%. But at the same time, having a car and driving one are so much a part of American life and what it means for most of us to be complete and whole, that to take away her car would be a near-literal imprisonment in her home, not unlike a psychical castration--back to Freud. But the answer can't be letting everyone drive forever--if the problem is in the American mind, then the solution has to be there, too. And not on the streets or the parking lots of America. (And, of course, the solution would involve a lot of Hummer drivers and, even, Hyundai drivers like me, hoofing it or getting on public transport a lot more and, instead of complaining about how slow and dirty buses and trams are, getting more of them.)

So, when I'm yelling at an elderly couple parking their Town Car in front of the local market--like I was today--remember that it's not just because I'm angry, wrathful and nasty, but also because I care.