Civic duties and the Republic

I spent most of this past Monday in the jury "lounge" of the Hall of Justice, San Diego's court complex. Quite apart from expecting the Super Friends to arrive at any moment and reflecting on the absurdity of calling any room as uncomfortable as a third-world bus station waiting room a lounge, I gained a little out of the experience.

As it turns out, I wasn't selected for a jury. But this wasn't because of my contrary nature, my argumentativeness, my training in making the weaker argument the better, my belief that the reasonableness of a doubt is both context- and subject-sensitive or even my friendship of one of the County's prosecuting attorneys. After six-and-a-half hours, Jury Services' computer had not selected my name to be sent to a courtroom and the courts' jury needs for the week had already been met.

But, in that period of several hours, after the intelligence-insulting orientation--an hour to explain what could have been read and comprehended in 5 minutes--I was thrown together with a group of people unlike those with whom I normally mix. I was between a middle-aged elementary school teacher, native to California and active in her church and a retiree who's guiding passion is the rational expansion or replacement of San Diego's Lindbergh field.

Now, fortunately or not, neither these two, nor the majority of the several hundred people in the jury lounge that day were much like the sort of people with whom I normally mix. My communities are either gay or academic for the most part. In other words, like many Americans I live in something of a self-selected ghetto. This is no different than living in an ethnic neighborhood or a homogeneous suburb or a small town. It has its advantages. At the same time, it means that I don't spend much time with people outside these self-selected community: I don't understand where they are coming from and most of them probably can't understand why I might have the opinions I do (God knows that most people I know can't figure me out).

Besides helping to guarantee the right to a jury by one's peers, civic duties and responsibilities have another advantage. Like one of the traditional justifications for public schooling, obligatory civic responsibilities force us to spend time with one another, to get some greater feeling for the larger, more inclusive public.

Now, clearly this doesn't mean that we are going to build some kind of strong community. I'm not likely to be spending time with the woman I talked to most of the time I was on jury duty. She seemed as troubled by my being Catholic as she was by the feeling she was getting that I might be gay. I'm pretty sure that if we got to know one another, we wouldn't like each other. Communities are built on closer connections and are necessarily smaller and more emotionally-charged things. But civic responsibilities might create a sense of a (loosely) united public. And such a sense of belonging to a public is necessary for the survival of anything like a republic.

A republic is, literally, a public thing, i.e., a thing that we all share and have an interest in. If we are to keep from becoming just a fractured set of irreconcilable communities, perhaps we all ought to pay more attention to our civic responsibilities.

Meth, morality and the limits of (the gay) community

The gay community--and especially the gay male community--is in the midst of a profoundly adolescent moment. Like an adolescent who has protested against his parents' rules until he is finally free of them, we find that being free of some of society's rules doesn't or shouldn't mean that we don't impose some rules on ourselves. In fact, what we are seeing in the twin crises of meth addiction and barebacking in the gay community is the necessity of rules or normativity or morality or whatever you want to call it, in any mature community.

What we are seeing--and I am going to focus on the responses and counter-responses to the widespread use and abuse (I'm not sure that there's any difference in this case) of methamphetamine among gay men--is a community that has largely been defined in terms of throwing off other conceptions of morality trying to set some rules for acceptable behavior. This, of course, sets up a tension.

The way this tension plays out is evident in the responses those who use meth--or defend its use, since these may not be identical groups--make to those members of the community who point out the ways that meth is destroying individual lives, activities like parties and dancing and the community at large. The standard response from the meth-defender is to claim that his opponent is being moralistic, is taking the same part as those who say homosexuality itself is immoral, that it's simply a matter of choosing the way in which one wants to live one's life, etc.

This is instructive, I think. I should note, for clarity, that I am no friend of meth; I've watched people I care about throw their lives away, seroconvert and slowly (and quickly) die because of its effects, and I've watched parties that I once enjoyed because of their spirit of camaraderie and love turn into aggressive hunts for aggressive meth-fueled unsafe sex. But, I am stung by the accusation that this opposition of mine is necessarily moralistic or of a kind with statements by the American Family Association or Pat Robertson about the morality of homosexuality.

I am stung because this accusation relies on a deep confusion; one between moralism imposed from outside and the adoption of a morality within a community. The gay community, of course, is largely defined in terms of its opposition to the moral pronouncements--at least some of them--of the larger society. Society as a whole has generally thought that sex belonged within marriages or at least between people of opposite sex. Gays (and lesbians) have defined a community in which this rule is profoundly rejected. This is throwing off the moralism of the larger community--and is parallel to an adolescent rejecting the beliefs of his parent.

But, the fact that the community has at its center a rejection of a particular conception of morality is not a justification for thinking that no other conception of morality should take its place within the community. Just as an adolescent who has rejected his parents' belief structure still must replace it with some other set of organizing principles around which to structure his life, the community must decide what rules we are willing or need to apply within our own community.

This process of defining and deciding on rules differs from the moralistic approach of those outside the community, because it relies on debate and discussion and the experiences of those within the community. It differs most strongly in that it is borne from a sense of concern for those within the community--Robertson doesn't care about the gay community in any sense, while my worries about the effects of barebacking and meth-addiction are motivated by just such a community concern (as well as the concern that if we cannot regulate ourselves, we open ourselves to ever more moralistic attack). In this sense it is not moralistic, even if it is moral in some sense.

Rejecting the morality of the wider community as a community is not tantamount to releasing ourselves from all moral consideration. Communities are always and everywhere defined by rules of acceptable and unacceptable behavior--even when these rules are in flux or under debate (consider debates about the value of marriage vs. differently structured relationships in our community). We all, to some degree, realize that within our community there are specific rules. For instance, we don't accept relationships between adults and children, we don't accept non-consensual relationships. In both of these cases, we are concerned about harm, precisely what drives considerations about meth and barebacking.

Rejecting traditional morality is not equivalent to an acceptance of absolutely anything goes. If, as some would say, we really must refrain from any moral considerations in the gay community, lest we be just like those who would condemn us, then there can be no gay community; instead there is just a collection of people with (some of) the same sexual proclivities.

If that is the case, then I think that a great opportunity will have been lost. For one thing the gay and lesbian community has to offer is a different set of ways of organizing a community and caring for its members.

Death, the Pope and evil

The death of John Paul II left me saddened. I am a Catholic--it was preparation for the seminary that led me to philosophy and even now there are days when I wonder whether I shouldn't have entered the monastery--so there was the loss of the head of Catholicism. I was only five years old when Karol Wojtyla was elected pope and became John Paul II, so there was the loss of a figure who, in some sense, defined my childhood and young adulthood and whatever it is that I am in right now (pre-middle-age, mid-adulthood?). He was only two years older than my grandfather and died on what would have been grandfather's 82d birthday; his death made me revisit my grandfather's death, so there was a sort of contact grief in his death. His last years were tortured; demonstrated a noble, dignified suffering, a suffering that wasn't hidden, that witnessed to the heights of human possibility even within the limits imposed by a dying body. Seeing his battle end brought out a happiness mixed with sadness.

But at the same time, I am among those that the pope, particularly in his last years, saw as the vanguard of a new, horrible evil, opposed to Christ and Christianity and the very foundations of civilization. As a gay man, I am hardly among those that the pope would have thought an ally.

Now, of course, there is a certain skewed vision of the papacy filtered through the American media and mindset. What is rarely discussed is the emphasis the pope put on the inadequacies and evils of capitalist societies--while the pope was praised here for his opposition to communism, little is ever made of his vehement condemnations of capitalism. He was an enemy of materialism in all its forms; materialism is, he thought, necessarily opposed to spirituality and humanism. Since capitalism is materialistic, it, too, is inconsistent with authentic Christianity, he thought.

In other words, there were many aspects of his social thought that would have made us natural allies, that would have made him allies with a lot of gays and lesbians, in fact. But, instead he saw us as part of a vast evil movement undermining the very society and community onto which he put so much emphasis.

There are different ways to respond to this. One could just dismiss the pope and the Catholic Church as irrelevant to the modern world. While this might be tempting for a lot of people, particularly those with a secular bent, it ignores the fact that Catholicism is the largest denomination within Christianity, that there are a lot of Catholics out there and, if nothing else, gays and lesbians need to work out a modus vivendi with them. (And, as recently happened here in San Diego, when the bishop initially forbade the funeral of a prominent nightclub owner, the Church can even be made to see the errors of its ways.) Ignoring Catholicism and its response to homosexuality is as dangerous as ignoring the continually growing tide of fundamentalisms of all flavors.

One could simply write the deceased pope as an old man out of tune with the direction of the contemporary and future world. There is also something tempting in this option. Personally, I was able to excuse a lot of the pope's disdain of gays and lesbians by thinking about other people I know of his age. If my grandfather were still alive--and assuming he didn't know about me--what would he have been like? Well, he, too, probably wouldn't have had a lot to say in favor of gay marriage or gay adoption. I'd like to think I'm wrong about this, but he grew up in a different world and, without personal and direct and positive experience of gays, he wouldn't have been swayed to our cause (whatever our cause may be). More on this very point below. However, writing the pope off as just an old man out of step with the world is itself very myopic. It simply is not the case that most of the world sees sexual liberation and the celebration of divergent sexual orientations as ideal. If anything, social liberals in the European and American mode are out of step with the rest of the world. So, while this option might be tempting, it will lot serve our interests for long.

Instead, the right tack to take seems to be to engage Catholicism (and Islam and other religious traditions). But engaging a group doesn't mean (just) protesting their gatherings or meetings or establishments. It means to enter into dialogue with them, try to understand the background for their beliefs and ideas and judgments and present ourselves in a way that is understandable to them--being understandable is not the same as being acceptable. I can understand things I can't accept, but it's hard to imagine how I could accept something I couldn't understand. Engaging also means considering in what ways another's perception of one reflects shortcomings. Now, of course, ideally the Catholic Church and the next pope would want to engage in these ways with gays and lesbians. Rome moves slowly, though. Still, this doesn't mean that gays and lesbians shouldn't engage with Catholics and other religious believers on the ground.

Liberty, Responsibility and the New AIDS Scare

I came out almost 10 years ago, when the major advertisers in gay magazines like Out and The Advocate were becoming Pfizer and other drug companies marketing miracle drugs and combination therapies and the ads of viatical settlement companies--those companies that bought dying men's life insurance policies to give them some financial stability in their last years--were slowly shrinking and almost disappearing. I knew--and know--a lot of people who were positive, but it was a time of hope. The fear that a positive HIV test meant certain and impending doom was shrinking and the possibility that those who were infected might have many fruitful and happy years ahead of them was real.

But it has seemed clear for a long time that that combination of lack of fear and that hopeful possibility was leading us to the place we thought we had left behind, the first days of the AIDS scare. Recent reports from New York point to the arrival of a new, strengthened and exceptionately virulent strand of the virus, itself immune to 39 out of 40 approved anti-retroviral drugs. Of course, it remains to be seen whether there really is such a super-virus already at our doorstep. It may just be that the one case so far found is an exception; the patient may have a peculiarly weakened immune system, allowing him to progress from infection to AIDS in a few months. But whether or not we have the super-virus already, it's on its way.

And, this time, the gay community has no one to blame but itself. In the early 80s, chronicled so well in And the Band Played On, there was a real lack of interest in the health establishment and the government--Reagan never was able to bring himself to talk about HIV or AIDS, even as Hollywood friends of his dropped from the virus. And, even though Bush with his interest in abstinence-only education and his demonization of gays and lesbians, is no ally in the fight against the virus, all of us know how it's passed and what it does to those infected. But, now far too many of us seem not to care.

Although we know the risks, we tell ourselves that they aren't real or that, since people live longer and happier lives, it doesn't much matter whether we become infected or not. Without such obvious markers as KS or the severe wasting we saw in the early days of the pandemic, we don't worry as much as we once did about getting sick. After all, getting sick isn't really being all that sick, we tell ourselves.

As a libertarian, I'm quite happy with people assessing risks and deciding to take them, as long as they are willing to accept responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions and as long as those decisions affect only themselves. If you understand the risks and bareback anyway, it might seem, then that's something extremely stupid that you have done; but something that is affecting primarily yourself. That might seem all right and good, if it weren't for the ways in which the science of infection and viruses belie this argument.

Unfortunately, when people who are being treated for infections of any type treat those infections but allow themselves to become infected by more and different kinds of the same infection, they 'teach' those infections how to beat the treatments. This is part of the reason why flu vaccines need to be changed from year to year. Viruses mutate rather quickly, and mutations that can resist the treatments being used are the ones that survive. This means new flu vaccines are always needed, since the flu virus mutates and is so easily communicable.

HIV mutates as well--its skill at mutation is one of the major hurdles to a vaccine--and new versions arise that are resistant to the treatments we currently have. Luckily, though it is much more difficult to transmit HIV than it is to transmit the flu. So, if we essentially isolate the virus by protecting ourselves and those we have sex with, we prevent the strengthened viruses from getting out and infecting others. When we don't do this, we become complicit in the creation of new versions of the virus, versions for which we don't yet have any treatments, versions that can defeat all the treatments we now have.

This is where the libertarian argument falls apart. Barebacking--whether you are infected or not--isn't just a decision that affects you or the person with who you are then having sex. By participating in an activity that can and will create new and more deadly, you are actively leading to the deaths of many more people in the future. And then, this is no longer a matter of what one does with his own body, it's a matter of what he is doing to the world, not to mention that it opens our community to all the criticisms that the moralizers from the right heap upon us.

It's far past time that members of our community took some responsibility for the predicaments we get ourselves into. I don't mean that we need to all be coupled in monogamous 1950s marriages; that's not a solution for the gay community, either. Nor do I mean that we must stigmatize casual sex. But what we do need to stigmatize or at least talk seriously about, is irresponsible sex, because it affects us all.

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.