The Ethics of Information

by Dominick Dodgson

Currently, there are tens of thousands of human rights violations taking place throughout the world. At the same time, there are over 1.5 million non-profit organizations registered in the United States alone, most raising money for a good cause. I don’t need to know about all of them or their individual missions and concerns. Nor do I need to be involved with the vast majority of them. In fact, if I’m honest, I just don’t really care about most of them.

As finite humans, there is a limit to just how much we are able to care. And because of that, I question many of my friends’ ethical mandates to constantly “be informed.” We can cherry pick the issues we choose to engage until we appear to have a well-rounded portfolio of activist concerns, but we can never be fully informed on every issue that confronts peace and well-being. We can only ever “be informed” about the narrowest of slivers or the cause du jour.

But woe to us, if we are not! I voiced this concern once, wondering why someone’s moral standing was dependant on how much news media they ingested, and my concern was met with rabid rebuttals. “How can we,” they asked, “if we aren’t aware of the world’s atrocities, be sure to avoid them in our own community?” We can’t be sure. But history has shown that awareness of horrors is no vaccine to prevent their recurrence.

So I voice the concern again. I question the mandate to consume news as an ethical duty; the need to know all of the bad things happening around the world. And I certainly question the name-calling and shaming that implicitly happens when we assume that being informed equals a higher level of ethical living, something I have experienced with my more “progressive” and “liberal” friends.

In full disclosure, this conversation is personal for me. My wife doesn’t watch the news. She makes it a point NOT to be on the Internet to find out what’s happening in the world. She doesn’t even have a Facebook account for crying out loud. “What!?” you might be saying, “No Facebook? No Jon Stewart or Colbert? But what about the children?! Surely we must do something to protect the children!” But in spite of all her lack of information, my wife is one of the most caring and ethical people I know. She is concerned about our community and we strive to be actively involved in making it a better place. Somehow she missed the memo that said it was her duty to know what’s happening in the world. And yet, she seems to be doing quite alright, morally speaking.

So, with that in mind, here are my more concrete concerns with an overemphasis on being informed:

1. The very word “Informed,” like most words, is a slippery term wherein a person’s definition typically says more about the person than the term. How much information does a person need to consume before they pass the threshold from “uninformed” to “informed”? Do you know about the anti-gay agenda in Uganda? Okay, here’s your “informed” certificate. Oh wait, you don’t know about the religious violence in the Central African Republic? I’m going to need that certificate back. And who is in charge of those certificates anyway? What makes them the “informed” authority?

Based on the amount of information we now have access to I would hazard a guess to say almost every 5th grader in America is more “informed” about current events in the world than almost every person born before the invention of the printing press. And somehow I don’t think that means every 5th grader in America is less prone to unethical behavior than every person born before the invention of the printing press.

Which leads me to point number two:

2. An overemphasis on being informed can lead to equating the ethical life with simply knowing what is happening, which seems dangerous. Because of the rise of “Causes” on Facebook and the ability to flaunt our enlightened opinions online, it seems many people genuinely think that the greatest test of our ethic is measured by (a) how “disgusted” we are at people who do bad things and (b) how dramatically we can talk about our disgust publicly. The more we know about bad things going on in the world, the more we can verbally condemn them, ergo, the more ethical we must be. Sounds like flawed calculus to me.

Finally:

3. Knowing about more injustices than we can possibly do anything about is depressing. It seems cruel to keep shoving more information about problems in our world into heads that can only care so much. We already know more about the world’s ills than we could possibly integrate into our immediate lives, so to keep heaping it on just seems to increase our anxiety and fear; it inspires a feeling of helplessness. Dr. Mark Warr, a sociologist from the University of Texas, says it this way: “People are bombarded with information about crime from the media, which makes them believe the world is a much more dangerous place than it really is. This creates a climate of fear that can negatively affect the way we live, the way we go to work, the times we shop and the precautions we take for our families and children.”

So, if the way to a more ethical culture is found only through the crucible of fear, then by all means, keep the articles and graphic images flowing. But I’m inclined to think a better society comes through love, not fear, what with Paul’s “perfect love casts out fear” and all.

Now, in order to pre-empt those among us who like to swing pendulums from black to white, I am not advocating anti-intellectualism or non-engagement of the issues we face. I am not advocating an ignorant love of feel-good clichés and puppies. I’m not suggesting we bury our heads in the sand. I am simply calling for nuance.

If you feel the need to keep up with all the problems in our world in order to be a part of the solution, I commend your effort. But I ask you not to claim that only such a posture is morally high ground. Perhaps not all of us feel that need. Perhaps there are other ways to be part of the solution and we need to make room for those ways. 

Dominick Dodgson is a professor of philosophy & ethics who consumes pop-culture and pretends it's "research." You can follow him on Twitter @dedodgson and read more posts at www.dominickdodgson.com. 

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to support what we do, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.

Image Credits:
Image #1 via Will Lion 
Image #2 via Jeff Maurone 
Image #3 via Sharon Pruitt 
  

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The Disparate Worlds of Warring Minds: The Epistemology of a Government Shutdown

by Ben Howard

My first thoughts last Monday, the first day of our government shutdown, were about the show The Newsroom. Mainly, I was wondering how many people were looking up the scene on YouTube, in which Will McAvoy calls the Tea Party the “American Taliban.” It felt incredibly apt for a day that seemed, from my perspective, like a small guerrilla group storming the Capital building and taking the entire US government hostage. Scenes and rhetoric which I had once believed only to exist in the purview of one-dimensional Sorkin villains were now being uttered by actual, live human beings. My twitter feed exploded… mainly with tweets from me.

As is my typical response to governmental ineptitude, I attempted to channel my own inner-Colbert. What’s the good of a manufactured crisis if you can’t get your internet friends to laugh? None, I tell you. None at all.

As the avalanche of mockery poured forth from my keystrokes, I began to wonder at the ease with which I was able to treat the Tea Party, and those associated with it, as an abstraction. As a construct, rather than actual people. And I’ll be damned if humanizing your villains doesn’t always make for too much introspection.

So I made an attempt to try to understand the rhetorical gymnastics that could cause this particular maneuver to seem like a good idea. However, as I reflected on the political beliefs that had led to this point, beliefs shared by acquaintances and some in my own family, I began to wonder if the divide was something deeper than mere ideology. In fact, I’m now convinced that our current political crisis is not born of ideological differences, but epistemological ones. It’s not a difference in the “what” of belief as much as it is a difference in the “why” and the “how.”

Of course, this is not to say that ideological differences do not exist. It is all too easy to point to a plethora of ready examples, from policy regarding deficit spending to gun control to the role of government in healthcare. But the disconnect is deeper. These aren’t simple disagreements by warring factions who share the same underlying assumptions; they are disagreements over the assumptions themselves; they are disagreements about the nature of belief.

The beliefs of Republicans, or at the very least the Tea Partiers who currently hold the reins of the Republicans in the House, are largely based on the fear of unmanageable cultural shifts and a resulting mistrust of those they see as representatives of this shift, those not part of their tribe. This fear leads them to cling to the social mores of a so-called golden age, willful naiveté in the face of complexity, and to look to the recent past for a template of stability. All of which are formed in a crucible of fear.

This can be seen most obviously in the debates over the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and over gun control legislation. The anger and vitriol which the Right exhibits in these disputes is not about preserving freedom (despite their language); it is about the fear that their way of life is under attack. Even when proposed legislation may have little practical effect, or even bring about changes ostensibly in line with their beliefs, they are afraid that “the country they know is slipping away.” This leads to the indignation we see in these numerous debates. What happens when you’re afraid and no one seems to be paying attention? You start yelling and waving your arms.

Additionally, this fear gives rise to an insular epistemology which serves as a rallying cry in a battle between the “righteous us” and the “despotic them.” And in such a posture, outside authorities cannot be trusted, for they are the “THEY” which is so feared. This distrust of outside authorities who represent the cultural shifts at work in our society is responsible for the persecution complex, the continued paranoia, and the conspiracy theories which run rampant in the Tea Party’s ideology.

A recurring theme in recent years has been the inability of Republicans to accept as fact, information which clashes with their fixed preconceptions. Multiple reports have surfaced that, in the face of dour poll results before the 2012 election, Mitt Romney, his campaign staff, and many of his supporters flatly refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the numbers, insisting that they were the product of the liberal media. Similarly, there are those who continue to hold to the “Birther” narrative, long after Barack Obama released his birth certificate for scrutiny, or those who argue that the ACA is destroying the country, even when the evidence runs contrary to such claims. When fear and mistrust run rampant, even facts must bend to the underlying convictions.

The epistemological gulf that stands between the parties in Washington is one that has been opening for years now in the Christian theological landscape. The Tea Party’s fundamental way of viewing the world and posture of fear is predated (and arguably, grows out of) Evangelical Christianity’s response to the shift of cultural fault-lines. Its literal apocalyptic interpretations, strict fundamentalism, and a similar mistrust of centralized authority (i.e. a strain of anti-intellectualism that rejects Biblical criticism), prefigure the Tea Party’s strands of visceral reaction against science and post-modernity. This goes a long way in explaining why the Tea Party movement resonates so strongly within Evangelical spheres.

While it is clear from the rhetoric involved that I (and probably most of you) do not share the ideology or the epistemology of either Tea Party Republicans or the Evangelical Christians who helped give rise to them, it must also be said that our own progressive epistemology holds no intrinsic claim to absolute truth either. It may very well be wrong. In the same way that I believe the Tea Partiers’ epistemology to be wrong, they believe mine to be equally fallacious, and the truth is, we may very well both be correct.

If the Right Wing Conservative epistemology is built on fear, the Left Wing Liberal’s (mine) is based on a mythos of progress. While certainly a sunnier disposition, it’s not necessarily a correct one.

The intellectual framework on which our belief in progress is founded establishes an unwavering trust that truth is something quantifiable and firmly established by facts, a fetishization of education to the degree that arguments garbed in highly intellectual jargon seem intuitively true, and the certainty of a brighter future as cultural shifts continue to move in what we consider a positive direction. These all flow out of the unrelenting belief in the mythos of inexorable progress.

The reason it’s so easy to believe that “our side” is objectively right stems from our participation in a country that has, by and large, already adopted this standard of measure, and where such presuppositions are accepted as a societal and cultural norm. While the statistical majority of the population may not believe this to be true, the “majority of ideas” has won the day on this front. Whether it be media, science, or our present-day renderings of our historical perspective, all had their tutelage in the halls of academia where knowledge for knowledge’s sake holds absolute sway.

All of this has worked in concert to foster an intellectual hubris on the part of liberal thinkers (i.e. me) that has crystallized an accepted ideology as objectively true. All the proof one needs for this is simply to read my twitter feed, or that of any other self-proclaimed progressive, and consider their constant belittling and self-aggrandized mockery of those they believe to be less intelligent, and less worthy of a hearing.

This belief in progress and the intellectual hubris that it engenders work to exacerbate the fear and mistrust prevalent among Evangelicals and Conservatives. It serves as little more than a confirmation that their darkest fears are being realized, and that they were right to distrust in the first place. Because they look to the memorable past, any movement away from that is suspect, indeed frightening. Because we look to the certain future, and are pushing to bend the arc of history toward it, we are confirming their worst fears that culture is changing, in flux around them.  Meanwhile, we ridicule their words and dismiss their beliefs. How chilling must it be to express your fears (whether legitimate or not), and be met with mockery and derision?

If this were only a division of ideology, reconciliation would be found through the means of debate, through facts and theories. We would win one another to our cause. But this isn’t a schism of ideology; its roots lie deeper – they are more entrenched, and less examined. In an epistemological divide, reconciliation can never have winning as its goal. The gap between the disparate worlds of warring minds can only be bridged through the authenticity and vulnerability of legitimate relationship. We must encounter the other, and though we find she is not the same as us, we must deign to see her as similar. We must humanize those we so often demonize.

This means that we must come into conversation sans agenda, sans ideology, and with the humility that the deepest assumptions underlying our own beliefs may ultimately be wrong. This is not a call to relinquish the most formative tenets of our faith (whether that faith be political or religious), but it does require us to come, unarmed, to the table of truce. And while a truce is no end-game, it is at the very least, a step forward (oops, that’s the language of progress), a step back from the brink, to use a more Republican friendly metaphor. And it is this, the ability to be able to speak the language of the other, not just to have dialogue, but to have dialogue and be understood, that is the mark of maturity, and honestly, the only path to reconciliation.

But like I said, it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong about everything. Maybe the way of reconciliation is to hold the government hostage, to argue about whose fault it is, to call Republicans names, and to play to our basest instincts. Cause you know, anything’s possible. 

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
 
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The Legality of Fear: Zimmerman, Race and Clint Eastwood

by John Carter

Twenty years ago this fall, I began my studies at Duke University School of Law. Amid the required first-year classes on Civil Procedure, Contracts, Criminal Law, and Legal Research and Writing was a seemingly typical class on Torts, taught by a young professor named Jerome Culp. Torts is the area of law which encompasses many of the reasons people sue one another—assault, battery, negligence, defamation, medical malpractice—but more broadly it can be described as the area of law which governs how we are to treat one another.

Professor Culp, a scholar in the field known as Critical Legal Studies, was not content to teach the basic rules of the field—in fact, he considered that beneath us and expected us to learn these on our own time, outside of class. Instead, he believed the proper use of our time together was to foster in us an awareness of the role that power, race, and gender play in legal norms, and the degree to which “the law” becomes both the means of execution and the camouflage that conceals these deeper issues.

To make the point, Culp discussed the tort of assault. As a matter of cold law, an assault occurs when a person experiences a threat of physical harm by another person, whether or not any physical contact actually occurs. The person must actually believe she or he is in danger, and this subjective belief must be “objectively reasonable” in the eyes of a judge or jury.

But what is “objectively reasonable”? And what assumptions are hidden in this legalese? Professor Culp told the story of walking down a Chicago street in the early 1970s; he was, at the time, a large, imposing black male with a full Afro. As he rounded a corner, he apparently caught an elderly white woman by surprise and she shuddered in fear upon seeing him. Setting aside our anachronistic political-correctness and enlightened sense of propriety, was her fear objectively reasonable? Would a jury at the time have thought so?

That is, of course, precisely the issue at the heart of the Trayvon Martin murder case. Though the nature of the case is different—the charges against George Zimmerman are criminal, not civil—the reasonableness of Zimmerman’s actions hinge on the reasonableness of Zimmerman’s fear, or stated more evenly, who was reasonably entitled to be afraid of whom, and how does the law judge actions when each may be reasonably afraid of the other?

During that class, the professor had us come together several times to watch movies that examined the role of the law in society. I don’t remember all the movies we watched, but I remember one clearly—Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. In that movie, a prostitute is beaten severely, and the local sheriff, played by Gene Hackman, is inclined to be lenient in his punishment of the crime, so the other prostitutes pool their resources to hire a gunslinger to exact vengeance. A young man called “the Kid” has romantic ideas of the Old West and recruits Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman to join him as hired avengers, but the Kid soon realizes he is in over his head.

And intriguingly, Unforgiven provides not just a lens through which to view the Martin case, but a prism which, as we turn it, radically changes how we see the individuals and their underlying motivations. 

Is Zimmerman the Clint Eastwood gunslinger, hired to provide protection when traditional law enforcement could not be counted on? Is he the cowboy who beat up the prostitute, unfairly let off lightly by the sheriff in the interest of civic expediency? Or is he the Kid, motivated by false images of machismo to engage in violence that spirals beyond his control? 

And is Martin the analog of the prostitute, the silent presence (or, in Martin’s case, the absence) whose victimization sets the entire course of events into action? Or is he the abusing cowboy whose initiating violence triggers his own helpless demise? And could these all be true at the same time?

The ways that we call on narrative to explain and understand our lives and our society will often predetermine our judgment as to who was right or wrong, and the law is less a ruler we use to judge conduct than a mirror which reflects back to us who we truly are, and who we expect ourselves to be. So we must ask, who is the law protecting, and who is it placing in jeopardy, forcing them to protect themselves? Quite simply, the verdict will tell us whose fear we most identify with—in a way, we will be identifying ourselves.

John Carter is a lawyer and Baptist minister living in Nashville, TN. You can follow him on Twitter @roguebaptist. 

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Why I Shaved My Beard: Thoughts on Fear, Chaos and Community

Fear the beard.

by Ben Howard

I shaved my beard yesterday.

That may not mean a lot to you, but it means something to me. The only time I shave, or get a haircut for that matter, is when I'm in need of some kind of emotional catharsis. And lately, I've needed that kind of emotional release.

Let me explain. I'm terrified.

I'm terrified by this endeavor and how it's become such a huge part of my life.

I'm terrified by how much it has grown. I track my page views daily (which I realize is crazy narcissistic, but it's part of being a blogger), and I honestly can't believe how much the place has grown.

I'm terrified by how I feel things have matured, both in terms of other talented writers joining me and the way I can see my own writing improving.

But what I'm really terrified of are none of those things. I'm terrified of failing. The better I feel about this endeavor, the more I realize that it would hurt if it all turned south and went down in flames. Or even worse, if it just wasted away, starving until nothing was left but the shell it left behind.

But I am scared that in an attempt to stave off failure, I'll change, and that I won't like who I become. I want to bring you beauty, and humor, and spur your mind and your imagination about what it means to be live in this world, and what it means to seek after a better one.

But I also want you to like me. I want you to read my posts. I want you to say nice things about me. Sometimes these desires work together, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes I worry about which one is winning.

Ugh, feelings.

Life is messy. I know it's messy, but I don't want it to be. Sometimes I pretend it's not. Sometimes I let it all show. That's why community is so useful. It's a place to let it all show.

I assume this chaotic tug-of-war is present in everyone. We battle our own emotions, desires, needs, and fears on a daily basis. Too often we seek easy answers about ourselves and others. We attempt to clarify our emotions and motivations in an attempt to explain ourselves. We attempt to uncover the motivations of others by dissecting their actions.

We assign grand narrative arcs to ourselves and those around us that look very tidy and clean and believable, but which ultimately bear little relation to the jagged, chaotic tumble of everyday life. We rarely know the whole story, even when it comes to our own interior struggles.

This is where I find the importance of community. We let people in and we let them know us, and in the process of letting them discover who we are, we attempt to know ourselves a little better. 

It's scary to be that vulnerable. I'm nervous right now that you'll read this and see me as self-absorbed, or needy, and to be honest, that is who I am. I'm a chaotic mix of diverging emotions most of the time. I rarely make sense even to myself.

Through that vulnerability and through this growth within our communities, experiencing pain and joy alongside others, we learn about them and about ourselves. The discoveries we make aren't always pretty, sometimes they're quite disappointing, but they allow us to grow and develop.

These communities allow us to overcome fear and failure, insecurities and chaos, and live into a better version of ourselves and a better version of our world. Sometimes they help us to know that we just need catharsis, that we just need a release.

That's what I needed.
 
And that's why I shaved my beard.

Peace,
Ben

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Marriage and Chick-Fil-A

by Ben Howard

The following thoughts are still in progress.

Last week in an interview with Baptist Press Chick-Fil-A COO Dan Cathy confirmed that the company, based in the Southern Baptist roots of S. Truett Cathy, is “supportive of the family – the biblical definition of the family unit.” This set off a firestorm of reports from major media outlets construing the statement as an attack on gay marriage.

Chick-Fil-A tried to respond by saying they have no policy regarding gay marriage and that "going forward, our intent is to leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena," and that its tradition is, "to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect – regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender."

Here's the rub. Neither side is spinning the truth. Dan Cathy was not making a statement opposing gay marriage, but also, he was. The problem, the real problem at the root of the gay marriage debate, the one that makes people on both sides feel slighted, abused, and insulted, has to do with the great unasked and unanswered question of the debate. What is marriage?

Is it a symbol? A sacrament? A contract? A societal construct? Does it mean anything at all?

I think at its core, at its richest, its all of these things. It's a creation of society to help us get along. It's a contract that means one stands beside the other through anything. It's a sacrament that helps us share, just a little bit, in the divine community of God's self. And it's a symbol, a symbol of love and devotion, and a symbol that creation is good, and that world should go on being good.

This is bigger than a rights issue. Marriage at its fullest is a grace and it's not something we can demand, its simply a gift we are given. It isn't something government's can hand down or make laws about or rule on or permit or prevent people from doing. Laws are flawed and staid and cannot encapsulate what “marriage” is even if they use the word.

On the other hand, while I feel marriage is a religious issue, I also believe the conservative understanding of marriage is weak. In a social and religious context where it has become increasingly difficult to explain the importance of symbols and ritual, the refuge of choice has been the literalization and legalization of the Bible. As a result, a once rich full view of marriage has been reduced to a cultural expectation and a legalization of sex.

The more I consider the issue, the more I belief that the conservative response to gay marriage is one of fear more than one of hate. With such a thin view of marriage it becomes increasingly difficult to articulate the value of such a commitment and in lieu of deconstructing this view in order to build a healthier richer understanding, the response has been to go on the defensive and to define marriage as its borders.

Eventually, this conversation will end with the government allowing same-sex marriage. It's a matter of time. This is the way history works. I hope that both sides can learn to talk to each other and understand each other, and hopefully this conversation will not be for nothing. I hope that out of this conversation we get a more vibrant, deeper view of marriage and the commitment it entails. Then again, that is not how history works.

Peace,

Ben

You can follow me on Twitter @BenHoward87 or leave a comment if you would like to contact me.