Andrew Fiala – Page 23 – Andrew Fiala, Ph.D.

February 13, 2022February 13, 2022

Love and the Golden Rule: An Ethical Valentine

Fresno Bee, February 13, 2022

Valentine’s Day is a great time to reflect on the beauty of the golden rule. This principle tells us that love is the key to morality. But love and ethics are complicated.

Morality often involves lists of do’s and don’ts. The golden rule seems to tell us how to construct such a list. It says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A negative version says, “Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.”

But ethics is not only about do’s and don’ts. Ethics also involves a transformation of the heart. It includes character and disposition, emotion and relationship.

That’s why the most inspiring version of the golden rule focuses on love. It says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This links altruism and egoism. It demands that we transform self-love into love of the other. It also suggests that ethics is not only about complying with a set of rules. Attitude and orientation also matter.

It is possible, for example, to do the right thing, but with a grudge. A person who is angry or resentful about doing good is less praiseworthy than someone who is benevolent, kind, and generous. Someone who tells the truth in order to avoid a penalty for lying is less admirable than someone who is fundamentally honest.

In reality, these things are complicated. Sometimes truth can be cold and biting. And sometimes a white lie can be kind. There is a difference between lying for malicious purposes and lying for the sake of the other person.

Love demands that we consider those complexities. The golden rule orients us toward the well-being of those we love. This goes beyond obedience to a list of commandments.

Rule-following is easier than loving. And strict compliance can betray the spirit of love. Consider fidelity and adultery. A grumpy lover whose faithfulness is stubbornly obedient is less praiseworthy than a lover who is happily faithful. The loyalty of love is not supposed to be a grim duty. There should be joy in fidelity.

Or consider the duties of parenthood. There are long lists of things that parents should do (or not do) for their children. But we wouldn’t really use the word “good” to describe a parent who obeys the rules of parenting without actually loving their children.

Some critics will say that love is too weak and mushy to be a reliable guide for ethics. Erotic love is a mercurial emotion that overwhelms rational thought. Romeo and Juliet were swept away by love. But (spoiler alert!) that story does not end well.

Ethical love is more mature than adolescent infatuation. It is supposed to be steady and enduring.

Christian texts provide us with a clue. The famous account in First Corinthians tells us that love is patient, kind, trusting, and hopeful. Love should not be proud or boastful, angry or resentful.

This account of mature and stable love can be traced back to Plato, who wrote several dialogues about love. Plato thought that love should be oriented toward higher goods. Erotic love focuses on the fleeting pleasures of the body. But platonic love is spiritual. It directs us toward enduring and essential goods.

Consider again, parental love. Loving parents do not love their children because the kids are useful or fun. A parent’s love is not about the parent’s happiness or pleasure. Rather, loving parents should want their children to thrive for their own sake.

The same is true of mature romantic love. It is not merely about pleasure and desire. Nor is it about financial partnership or some other pragmatic concern. Rather, romantic love ought to be focused on the spiritual well-being of the other person.

Of course, it is easy to misunderstand love. And we often love poorly. Poetry and literature are full of tarnished love. But the golden rule encourages us to polish up the way we love.

Love is not merely about feeding the fires of selfishness and sensuous pleasure. Rather, the beauty of love is found in the way it leads us beyond ourselves. True love is for the sake of the other. It ought to make us happy and also better and wiser.

February 6, 2022February 13, 2022

Star Trek and Racial Ethics: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

Fresno Bee, February 6, 2022

The discussion of race and racism in America continues. President Biden seeks to appoint Black female nominees to the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve. Some conservatives are outraged. Meanwhile, the NFL has been accused of racism by a former coach. And California cities are apologizing for racism against Chinese Americans, including Los Angeles, San Jose, and most recently, San Francisco.

As the history of racial politics unfolds before our eyes, it may be useful to imagine what race relations may look like in the future. For this, we might turn to science fiction. I’ve been reading a fascinating new book by Oregon State philosophy professor, José-Antonio Orosco, about social justice as imagined by “Star Trek.”

“Star Trek” was groundbreaking in its time for how it dealt with race. Orosco uses the show as a launching pad for reflection on contemporary racial issues.

The cast of the original show was decidedly diverse. The starship Enterprise was staffed by a Russian navigator, a Scottish engineer, an Asian helmsman, a Black female communications officer, and an alien, the Vulcan, Mr. Spock.

The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, made his views on diversity manifest in the motto of Spock’s Vulcan philosophy, which celebrated “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.” Roddenberry thought that an enlightened future would go beyond toleration toward the active embrace of our differences. To live long and prosper, as Mr. Spock might put it, we should value our diversity.

“Star Trek” emerged out of the tumultuous racial tensions of the 1960s. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reportedly liked the show and its portrayal of a racially inclusive future. The show even featured, in 1968, a famous interracial kiss, between Kirk and Uhura.

Orosco explains that in the 1960s, “Star Trek” imagined the future as “colorblind.” The idea was to downplay and ignore racial differences. The original series showed a future in which enlightened humans would no longer see race as important.

But Orosco argues that colorblindness contains a blind spot. In attempting not to see color, we may end up turning a blind eye to remaining racism. In trying to ignore race, we may in fact ignore racism. That may make it more difficult to eliminate racism. Racial inequities do not disappear simply because we ignore them. These things must be named, confronted and remedied.

As “Star Trek” was rebooted and updated in subsequent decades, the colorblind model gave way to a more deliberate embrace of multiculturalism. The point was not to ignore differences. Rather, “Star Trek” found ways to celebrate diversity — in its casting and in its plot-lines. Klingons and other “aliens” (including the android named Data) were brought onboard the Enterprise, welcomed and included.

It’s tempting to imagine that we’ve already arrived at this inclusive future. But we only get to the future by passing through the present. And in the present, there are still exclusions and prejudices that must be confronted.

This takes a conscious effort, including what scholars like Orosco call “anti-racist” work. As Orosco argues, to evolve in the direction imagined by “Star Trek” we must work to dismantle racism and racial prejudice. This work involves finding ways to make sure that institutions of power are inclusive. Apologies and reparations may also help.

We also need models that help us imagine a better world. Literature, film, and other arts have an important role to play in the development of the human spirit.

The hopeful vision of “Star Trek” is a tale of evolution. The utopia imagined by ”Star Trek” has a back-story. The Vulcans were originally a warlike people. But they overcame their self-destructiveness by learning to cultivate logic, nonviolence, and love of diversity. They even became vegetarians.

The humans in “Star Trek” also evolve. In the series’ imagined timeline, the 21st century was a terrible time of violence and dislocation. But we survived and learned from our mistakes. We became explorers motivated by curiosity rather than conquerors motivated by greed. We learned to value logic rather than violence. And we came to embrace the idea of infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

This is fiction, of course. The future is uncertain. But to boldly go where no one has gone before, it helps to have a vision of what the future may hold.

January 30, 2022February 1, 2022

Pacifism, Isolationism, and Just War: Ukraine, Russia, and Impending Hostilities

Fresno Bee, January 30, 2022

Should we go to war with Russia over Ukraine? A recent poll indicates that only 15% of Americans support that idea. The American public seems more sympathetic these days to isolationism and even pacifism.

Pacifists and isolationists oppose foreign wars, but for different reasons. The isolationist asks, “What’s in it for me?” The pacifist asks whether violence ever really solves anything. To the pacifist, isolationism looks cynical and callous. To the isolationist, pacifism looks naïve and utopian.

But isolationism and pacifism often converge. Consider Tucker Carlson’s opposition to a war against Russia. The Fox News firebrand is more of an isolationist than he is a pacifist. He recently said, “We’re really going to fight a war over some corrupt Eastern European country that is strategically irrelevant to us? With everything else that’s going on right now in our own country? No normal person would ever want to do anything like that.”

Carlson is also an opportunist. He may simply be trying to score political points by opposing Biden’s saber-rattling. But he gives voice to a reasonable reluctance about foreign wars. Isolationism is increasingly popular among Trumpian conservatives.

In his comments, Carlson also suggested that a war against Russia primarily serves the interests of the defense contractors who profit from war. This is the kind of argument that is often made by pacifists, who have long been critical of the military-industrial complex.

But the pacifist case against war is not only about profit and self-interest. Rather, pacifists ask whether violence and war ever really solve social and political problems. They believe that nonviolent solutions are better at producing lasting and stable peace.

Recent wars tend to support pacifist conclusions about the futility of war. American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in significant suffering for civilians and soldiers. These wars have not left the world better off.

Now, there is a moral argument in favor of war against Russia. The just-war theory teaches that war can be used as a response to aggression. This is connected to an international norm known as “the responsibility to protect” (R2P) which holds that there is a global responsibility to protect people against aggression, ethnic cleansing, genocide and war crimes.

But the Ukrainian crisis is complicated. Western powers warn against Russian aggression. Russia maintains that the West is behaving aggressively by expanding NATO into Eastern Europe. The Russians even appealed to the R2P doctrine to defend their invasion of Crimea in 2014, claiming that Russian sympathizers in Crimea were being oppressed. Critics claimed that this was a cynical employment of R2P, used by Russia as cover for its aggression.

And so it goes. Arguments about war are difficult and complex. Pacifists wonder whether there is not a better way. Isolationists will ask what’s in it for us. And just-war theorists argue about who has a responsibility to do what.

The gravity and the complexity of this issue require careful, critical thought. If American soldiers are going to be sent into harm’s way, our country ought to be engaged in deep moral reflection. The Congress ought to be debating this and voting on it, as the Founders intended when they stipulated that declarations of war ought to come from the peoples’ representatives.

Unfortunately, congressional declarations of war have given way to unilateral decisions about war made by the executive branch. At the same time, the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. and the polarization of our country make sincere debate nearly impossible.

It is not clear how to fix our political morass. But the good news is that in our country the citizens remain free to debate the morality of war. This is not true in Russia, where dissent is prohibited. Nor is it true in Ukraine, where war-resisters have been jailed.

Let’s make good use of our freedom. Our soldiers deserve that from us. We must think carefully about the morality of war before we ask our sons and daughters to kill and die on our behalf. To honor the troops, as the saying goes, means that we should listen carefully to the pacifists, the isolationists, and the just-war theorists. Now is the time for reasonable debate, before the howling of the dogs of war drowns out critical thought.

January 24, 2022January 24, 2022

Is the US a Christian Nation?

Fresno Bee, January 23, 2022

In our secular society, Christianity has become an interest group vying for influence in the marketplace of ideas. It is no longer taken for granted that this is a Christian country.

Consider a recent case before the U.S. Supreme Court, involving a Christian group that wanted to raise its flag outside city hall in Boston. The court is considering whether this would be an endorsement of Christianity by the city, or whether the flag is merely the private expression of Christian citizens.

If the Christian group wins the case, its victory will mean only that the group has the right to express its religious beliefs in a public forum. They must take turns along with advocates of LGBT rights, BLM protesters, and other groups who want to fly their flags. No one is arguing here that the state ought to reserve a privileged place for Christian symbols and beliefs.

American secularism is grounded in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The First Amendment’s “establishment clause” prevents government entities from endorsing any faith. Its “free expression clause” permits individual citizens to express their own religious (or non-religious) beliefs.

Clarity about this is important, given the shifting religious identification of American citizens and the threat of religious violence. Our system allows people with diverse religious and non-religious beliefs to peacefully coexist. And it prevents the government from oppressing religious minorities.

Some people continue to maintain that America is a Christian nation. A recent report on NPR quoted a minister at a “patriot church” in Tennessee, who said, “You know why there’s churches everywhere and not mosques? Because we’re a Christian nation.”

But the First Amendment and our shifting demography point in another direction. In a report published at the end of 2021, the Pew Research Center indicates that the Christian population has continued to decline. Only 63% of Americans identify as Christian. Non-Christian religions (Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, etc.) account for another 6% of the population. And even among the faithful, religious belief is often lukewarm. Fewer than half of Americans report that they pray daily. Only about 40% say that religion is very important in their lives.

The fastest growing group in our country is the “nones,” those who answer “none of the above” when asked about their religious affiliation. The “nones” have nearly doubled since 2007, when Pew began tracking the data. Nearly one in three Americans (29%) are “nones.” This includes some atheists (4%) and agnostics (5%). But many of the non-religious simply do not identify with traditional religious categories.

It is true that at one point in our history, Christianity was the dominant faith. But even that claim needs qualification. Many of the founders had unorthodox views. George Washington attended church infrequently. When he did go, he refused to take communion. Thomas Jefferson admired Jesus, but was skeptical of the Bible’s miracles. John Adams claimed that the Christian view of the trinity was absurd. And America is the home of alternative Christian faiths such as Mormonism, Adventism, and Christian Science.

Critics will also argue, as Frederick Douglass did, that a nation founded on slavery could hardly be called “Christian.” Douglass argued against “the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” He said, “I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton said something similar. She thought that Christianity contributed to the oppression of women. She worked with a team of feminists at the end of the 19th century to rewrite the Bible. The result was “The Woman’s Bible,” which thoroughly revised the Bible’s patriarchal and misogynistic texts.

And so it goes. We disagree about what Christianity means. A growing number of us no longer identify as Christian. And Christian groups must vie time on the flagpole along with other interest groups.

This is the reality of our secular system, operating under the First Amendment. Under our Constitution, religious liberty is valued while the government is prevented from endorsing any specific religion. In this country we are free to argue about the meaning of the Bible. We are also free to gather round the flagpole and argue about history and the role of religion in our public life.

January 14, 2022January 14, 2022

On the Importance of Looking Up

The new Netflix film “Don’t Look Up” has a lot of people talking. It is a black comedy, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence. It’s about corporate greed, bureaucratic incompetence, and the apocalypse. Its bleak conclusion gets you thinking about the dangers of power, narcissism, and willful ignorance.

The movie’s fans see it as a cautionary allegory about climate change, science denial, and clueless amateurs running the government. Some worry that its gloomy ending may encourage despair. Others hope it will be a call to action.

Reviews of the film reflect our polarization. Conservatives claim it is another example of Hollywood preaching a liberal gospel. One critic in the National Review suggested it is the worst film of 2021. He lambasted is as a “better-than-you comedy” that “reveals the nastiness of liberals.” Another critic in the Washington Examiner said it was a “lazy anti-Trump comedy.”

More subtle criticism came from New York Magazine, where a sympathetic commentator accused the film of oversimplifying the climate crisis. He said liberals “need to stop telling themselves self-flattering fairy tales.”

I suppose the point is that we are all in this together. Narcissism and stupidity cross party lines. Hollywood is part of the problem. The film seems to recognize this. It shows how the cult of celebrity corrupts everyone, even the neurotic scientist played by DiCaprio.

At any rate, this is an allegory, not a documentary. Allegories simplify reality. They tell memorable stories that get people talking. In this regard, the film succeeds. It provokes conversations about life, death, politics, and American culture.

This conversation should extend to the very idea of “looking up.” The film’s title calls to mind Plato’s famous “allegory of the cave.” In Plato story, we are prisoners chained in a cave. We are not permitted to turn around and see reality. Even when we are set free, most of us refuse to turn around. Plato suggests the masses would go so far as to kill truth-tellers and educators, who like Socrates are trying to get us to look up.

Plato’s allegory is about willful ignorance. Plato warns that most people don’t want to know the truth. We deliberately choose not to look up. We are happy with our illusions. We don’t want to confront reality. We keep our heads down, preferring slavery over enlightenment.

In the film, this idea becomes the slogan of the political party led by Streep’s character, President Orleans. The party encourages people not to look up at the comet hurtling toward earth. This is a parody of our culture’s struggle with science denial, “fake news,” and “alternative facts.” It also implies authoritarianism. “Don’t look up” also means “mind your own business” and don’t criticize the elites.

The philosophical solution to all of this is the pursuit of wisdom. We ought to look up. It won’t be easy or comfortable. We may discover things that confuse us or make us unhappy. But it is better to live in the light than in the darkness.

One of the questions raised by the film is whether you would want to know how and when you are going to die. The scientists in the film know the exact time of the apocalypse. And there is a supercomputer using big data to predict how people will die.

What would you do with this knowledge? Would knowledge of your death cause despair? Would you prefer to remain in ignorance about your death?

A modest hopeful appears toward the end of the film when DiCaprio’s character responds to knowledge of his death by changing his life. He refutes the computer’s prediction about his death, thereby reclaiming some modest dignity.

This is the kind of dignity that knowledge provides. When we look up and confront reality, we can take charge of how we live and how we die. To live in ignorance is to live as a prisoner. The truth sets us free.

Knowing the truth won’t change the indifferent reality of the cosmos. Knowing the truth won’t stop a comet or cure you of Covid. But knowledge allows us to live responsibly and, if necessary, to die with dignity. It is tempting in a crisis to bury our heads in the sand. But wisdom is only available to those who look up.