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Dan Brown’s ‘Inferno’ raises ethical questions

Dan Brown’s ‘Inferno’ raises ethical questions, reminds us to appreciate the humanities

June 14, 2013

Would you be willing to destroy half of humanity in order to save the human species from going extinct? Would it be acceptable to involuntarily sterilize people in an effort to prevent overpopulation? Those are the central questions of Dan Brown’s new novel, “Inferno.”

Brown’s novel is fun summer reading that poses troubling ethical questions. It is also a reminder of the value of the humanities. The villains in Brown’s novels are zealots. In “The Da Vinci Code” the bad guys were religious fanatics. In this novel, the villains are mad scientists. The hero is a tweedy humanities professor who loves art and poetry.

While “Inferno” isn’t great literature, it inspires appreciation for art, poetry, philosophy and history. It celebrates the skills learned in the humanities: to learn to read carefully, to think broadly and deeply and to understand the symbols and cultural artifacts that surround us.

Brown’s villains are coldly inhumane: They think population control can be justified by simple mathematics. There are too many people, so something must be done. This idea is rooted in Machiavelli, the Renaissance theorist who warned that teeming population would inevitably be purged. Terrorists are often Machiavellian in thinking that the end justifies the means. Machiavellian idealists treat human beings as things to be manipulated and quantities to be calculated rather than as persons to be valued and loved.

Study in the humanities teaches us to be wary of Machiavellian schemes. Philosophers have long warned that nothing straight can be constructed from the crooked timber of humanity. We are not wise enough or virtuous enough to engineer reality or impose final solutions.

The humanities remind us that uncritical certainty is linked to hubris. Human beings achieve moments of profound insight and sparkling beauty. But these moments do not last forever. Indeed, they are often undone by the zealots and idealists who insist that they know how to save humankind from itself.

Brown’s novel is set in Italy. It celebrates the art of the Renaissance. Great art reminds us of the power of human genius. But history warns us against taking ourselves too seriously. Before the Renaissance, the Greeks and Romans also created luminous works of genius. The cycles repeat. Saviors come and go. Civilizations rise and fall. Each generation is plagued by its own narcissism, thinking that its creative genius is unique and unprecedented.

But historical awareness should make us wary of that sort of narcissism. A sense of history should make us modest in assessing the value of our own ideals. It should also inspire skepticism toward those who propound simple technological solutions to complex human problems.

So what can we do about the population problem? A solution requires something more than science and technology. Purely technical solutions — such as forced sterilization — would work on a population of rodents or insects. But human beings are not pests to be controlled. We inhabit a world of spirit and ideas. We hope, we dream; and we create art, literature and philosophy. We also love.

Brown’s “Inferno” borrows its title from Dante Alighieri’s famous poem about hell. Dante was a romantic whose poetry was inspired by Beatrice, a beautiful woman he loved from afar. Dante recounts that his love for Beatrice kindled a flame of charity that moved him to forgive everyone, including his enemies. Love transforms us, making us ethical and inspiring work of creative genius.

The population problem is driven by sex. Machiavellian technologists may argue that sex should be subjected to mathematical control. But the humane solution is to find a way to transform sex into love — to broaden and sublimate the sex drive in ways made possible by art, literature, religion and philosophy.

People need to be educated and empowered to control their own bodies and reproductive lives. But we also need to be reminded that there is more to life than mating and reproducing.

Technology without humanity can easily become heartless. The study of the humanities cures that sort of spiritual sterility. And it reminds us to beware of zealots offering quick fixes for deeply human problems. The humanities won’t save the world. But they remind us about those works of love, genius and beauty that make humankind worth saving.

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Weighing in on the wicked waste of the West

Fiala on ethics: Weighing in on the wicked waste of the West

By Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, Friday, May. 31, 2013 | 06:15 PM

As citizens of Fresno vote on how we manage our garbage, it’s a good time to reflect on the ethics of trash. Our waste-disposal habits have changed and they will evolve further.

My grandparents burned garbage and yard waste in an incinerator. My grandfather also smoked cigars and was fond of dirty language. He would have laughed at recycling. Although filthy language is still around, smoking and burning have given way to recycling bins and smoking bans. We’ve come a long way.

The new frontier in the ethics of garbage is the issue of quantity. Americans generate more than 4 pounds of garbage per person per day — well over 1,200 pounds per person per year. That’s the highest per capita garbage production rate in the world. The World Bank recently predicted that at current rates of development, the global garbage volume will nearly double in 15 years to more than 2 billion tons of garbage per year. Is there an ethical obligation to reduce the amount of garbage we create?

Some reduction would be easy. American trash includes hundreds of billions of disposable cups and plastic bags. Those cups and bags are single-use items; we use them once and throw them away. Plastic bags have been subject to special criticism. They deteriorate into small plastic bits, polluting the oceans. The bags blow loose from garbage bins and landfills, prompting some to call them “urban tumbleweed.” Some cities have banned them. The California Senate just rejected a bill proposing a state-wide ban.

Some may think that we are entitled to produce as much garbage as we can pay for. Is there a right to make garbage? Should the affluent be proud of their profligate trash production? Imagine a rich man gazing smugly at his overflowing garbage bin, thinking that its fullness signifies a life well lived. If that image is absurd, that’s because we’re not proud of waste.

The higher path may be the one strewn with the least amount of garbage. Some books and websites tout zero-waste lifestyles. Advocates of trash-free living brag that they no longer need to take out the garbage. And they view waste production as, well, trashy. Perhaps there is something indecent or tacky about creating lots of garbage. Perhaps in the future, we’ll be ashamed to ask for a single-use cup or a plastic grocery bag. And we’ll proudly display our reusable mugs and cloth shopping bags.

Social norms regarding trash disposal have progressed. Litterbugs and trash burners are subject to fines and social disapprobation. As of yet, there is no social penalty for filling your garbage can to the brim. No one views it as rude, obnoxious or selfish to pile up mass amounts of garbage. But as the population grows and the dumps fill up, we may come to be ashamed of the sheer quantity of our refuse.

One difficulty here is that it is not clear exactly who is harmed if you generate excessive garbage or who is benefited if your bin is empty. The harms and benefits of trash production are abstract, concerning ecological and economic issues. But the ethics of garbage may involve a more personal issue of spiritual hygiene.

The old saying that cleanliness is next to godliness points toward the need to minimize waste. The goal of reducing trash may be part of a broader ascetic discipline, which wants to eliminate spiritual garbage. A trash-free lifestyle might also condemn filthy language, scummy thoughts and dirty jokes. It might also warn against wasteful extravagance.

But you can’t live without generating a bit of waste. And sometimes a dirty word is the right word. The key is balance and moderation: to produce the right amount of garbage at the right time. The ancient Greeks revered Hygeia, the goddess of sanitation and hygiene. Hygeia also represented harmony and health.

Garbage-free abstinence is extreme. A devotee of moderation may still wonder, however, whether our prodigious garbage production isn’t a sign of imbalance and dis-ease. As our trash bins bulge, are we happy, healthy and harmonious?

Perhaps saintly beings can live purely, without trash. The rest of us struggle every day to keep our language clean, our minds out of the gutter and our garbage cans from overflowing.

 

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Is college becoming mass-produced?

Fiala on ethics: Is college becoming mass-produced?

By Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, Friday, May. 17, 2013 | 05:44 PM

Soon enough, everyone will have access to the latest classes coming out of Harvard or Stanford. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, can provide students around the world with lectures delivered by leading scholars at top universities. The democratic promise of Ivy League education for everyone is enticing.

But there has been some backlash. Last week, professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State wrote an open letter opposing MOOCs. They worry that administrators “are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education.” No doubt it would be cheaper to use prefabricated mass-produced courses than to hire real professors.

Some critics worry that online education in general is the problem. Face-to-face communication is important in the Internet age. Something mysterious happens in classrooms as students and teachers think together. Face-to-face encounters give students good practice at listening, talking and thinking in community with others. And caring relationships between teachers and students develop best in a face-to-face world.

But computer technology is not all bad. Videotaped lectures, like textbooks, are useful tools for disseminating information. And serious thinking can happen in online discussion forums. Online discussions are especially useful for shy or disabled students.

The bigger problem with MOOCs is the idea that college education is another commodity to be mass-produced. MOOCs are “massive.” A recent New Yorker article reports that a humanities MOOC at Harvard has more than 30,000 “students.” A MOOC on artificial intelligence had 160,000 “students.”

The issue of scale is significant. At some point the “student” becomes an anonymous unit to be processed, a number rather than a person with a name. Mass education treats students as spectators and consumers rather than as participants in a community of inquiry.

Mass-production generally centralizes authority and standardizes its products. But education should focus on cultivating human persons and celebrating their individuality. It should not be a mechanical process of stamping out graduates.

Decades ago, social critics such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno warned that “the culture industry” would create standardization and monopoly. They worried that centralized production of films, music, literature and art would turn culture into a product to be marketed and sold.

MOOCs represent another step in the mass production of culture. Mass produced culture makes all kinds of stuff easily available. Mass quantities of consumer goods can be purchased at big box stores. We can attend mega-churches and read mass media news stories. And now the sages on stages at the big universities are coming to the masses.

Mass culture is fast and efficient. It requires little effort to fill our minds with the latest stuff. Our tastes, our behaviors, even our thoughts are standardized and homogenized, assisted by search engine algorithms, which help us find what we want from among the available products.

Mostly, we like it that way. Standardized mass culture creates regularity, predictability and comfortable conformity. We can order the same food in the same restaurant chain in any city in America. We can watch the same TV shows or read the same news, while sitting in standardized hotel rooms across the country.

Everyone discusses the same celebrity gossip, reads the same bestselling novels and watches the same blockbuster films. We are all concerned about the same scandals and crises. The more of us there are, the more alike we all become. Massive online education appears as an inevitable part of the cultural matrix.

The downside is the loss of idiosyncratic points of view, local differences and diversity of perspectives. There are no more sages hiding on mountaintops, waiting to deliver wisdom to intrepid explorers. Instead, the sage appears to everyone who can click a mouse.

MOOCs bring those mountaintop gurus down to the people. But the mass production of education carries the risk of destroying the mysterious human connection between teachers and students. The most meaningful moments in education often occur when the sage becomes a caring mentor, asking how things appear from the perspective of the student. Can a MOOC do that?

Mass education can effectively disseminate information. But no Harvard genius can replace a responsive and responsible teacher, who is present on campus and in the community and who cares about students enough to learn their names.

 

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Cosmic Silence

Fiala on ethics: Cosmic silence raises questions worth pondering

By Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, Friday, May. 03, 2013 | 05:57 PM

We have now discovered more than 100 planets orbiting distant stars. Scientists recently found three planets in the habitable zone — at the right distance from their stars to have liquid water. Thousands of other potential planets have been identified.

Astronomers estimate that there are 17 billion Earth-size planets in our galaxy. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies. Given these incredibly huge numbers, it seems likely that life could have evolved somewhere else.

So why have we not yet made contact with intelligent aliens?

This problem has been named the “Fermi paradox,” after the physicist Enrico Fermi. Given the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, and the fact that some stars and planets are older than ours, you would think that intelligent aliens would have left a trace of themselves in the cosmos. But Fermi wondered, “Where is everybody?”

Intelligent life may be incredibly rare. Single-celled organisms might live in an extraterrestrial ocean. But it’s harder to evolve brains big enough to build radios or rockets. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 100 million years. It took another 65 million years for Homo sapiens to arrive. We’ve only had rockets and radios for a hundred years or so. We are extremely lucky to have made it to this level. But it may not last long.

Mammal species exist for a million years or so. A natural disaster could wipe a species out in a cosmic instant. Industrialization is also a threat. Mammal species are currently going extinct at an increased rate due to the effects of human industrial development.

This points toward a pessimistic answer to Fermi’s question, known as “the Great Filter.” As species develop the potential for interstellar communication, they may imperil themselves by developing self-destructive technologies. This filter may explain the “Great Silence” in the universe: sapient species may not be intelligent enough to avoid the adverse affects of their own development.

The life of intelligent species in the universe may be, as Macbeth lamented, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Shakespeare reminds us that politics matters. Interstellar exploration requires centralized government, surpluses of resources, and social stability. Efficient social organization would be required to create a “Star Trek” future.

Shakespearean tragedy reminds us that human beings are not all that good at cooperative endeavor. Intelligent alien species may suffer from the same problems that we do: social violence, destabilizing inequality, political profiteering, inefficient bureaucracy and free-wheeling individualism. An alien Shakespeare may describe life on his planet as a tumultuous spectacle of egoistic ambition and hubris.

A more optimistic explanation of the Great Silence is that truly intelligent beings may want to avoid defacing the cosmos. In order to make it past the Great Filter, intelligent species may have overcome the desire to tag the universe with cosmic graffiti.

For an intelligent species to survive, it must find a way to manage its own planetary ecosystem. It would have to develop social and ethical resources that produce stability rather than violence and war. And it may want to avoid attracting the attention of more aggressive interstellar colonialists.

A species that could solve those problems may see no need for space exploration. Advanced aliens may have decided that the social and ecological costs of massive technological development are simply not worth it. Maybe they choose to live simply. Or perhaps they focus on virtual reality devices — the alien Internet — instead of interstellar exploration. They may also decide, like good cosmic campers, that it is better to leave no trace.

The deafening silence of the cosmos is a cautionary tale. Intelligent species may not last long enough to solve the problems that their own sapience creates. Maybe intelligence is inherently unstable, creating disequilibrium in a universe that is basically devoid of intelligence. Maybe the hubris of intelligence creates its own undoing.

It’s a wonder that we Homo sapiens have discovered alien planets. But we may not be wise enough to understand the ominous emptiness of the cosmic silence. Will we last long enough to fill the void with poetry, meaning and wisdom? Or like the dinosaurs, will we strut and fret for an hour on the cosmic stage and then be heard no more?

 

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Religious Freedom

Fiala on ethics: Religious freedom ideal is heart of democracy

By Andrew Fiala, Fresno Bee April 20, 2013

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The first 16 words of the First Amendment represent the heart of our democratic system, according to Charles Haynes, a senior scholar from the First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C.

Haynes gave a workshop on civic education and religious liberty at Fresno State on April 13, which happens to be Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. Haynes argued that the First Amendment represents a progressive step in world history. In other parts of the world, people kill each other over religious differences. Here, the worst that happens is that people go to court.

No system of government is perfect. But the First Amendment idea is a useful innovation. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees.

According to a poll by the Huffington Post conducted in early April, one-third of adults favor establishing Christianity as the official state religion in their own state. Thirty-two percent said they would favor a constitutional amendment making Christianity the official religion of the U.S.

In North Carolina this month, state legislators introduced a resolution stating that the Constitution does not prohibit the state of North Carolina from establishing a state religion. These legislators read the First Amendment as a narrow restriction on the federal government, which does not apply to state governments. Apparently they ignore the Fourteenth Amendment and legal precedents that extend basic rights to the states.

Thomas Jefferson may be turning in his grave. When he died, Jefferson wanted to be remembered for three of his most important projects: the Declaration of Independence, the University of Virginia and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

In the Virginia Statute, Jefferson explained that God created human beings with free minds and that He does not use coercion to force us to believe. Jefferson also noted that political and religious leaders are fallible and uninspired men. For those reasons, religious belief should not be enforced, restrained, burdened or molested.

Moreover, Jefferson held “that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself.” He adopted that idea from the philosopher John Locke, who had argued that “the truth certainly would do well enough if she were once left to shift for herself.”

Not everyone is content to leave the truth alone to fend for herself. Some continue to think that religious truth needs to be propped up and defended by political power, by hierarchical institutions and by coercive laws.

Those who think that religious belief needs legal supports may be worried that humanity is easily corrupted. Some may fear that if religious truth were not backed up by state power, irreligion would triumph. Wouldn’t people ignore religion, if the law were indifferent to religion?

But if religious beliefs can only prevail when bolstered by coercive legal institutions, this may show us something lacking in those beliefs. It would be odd to say that we need the state to enforce ideas about gravity or mathematics. Those ideas can indeed defend themselves in a free and open marketplace of ideas.

But what about religious ideas? Jefferson thought that true beliefs would prevail in an open forum. It may be that only weak or false beliefs need to be defended by political compulsion.

The authors of the First Amendment were not directly concerned with setting up a marketplace of ideas. Rather, they wanted to prevent domination by one religion over others. As James Madison wondered, “Who does not see that the same authority, which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?”

Those who want to establish a state religion ignore the ugly history of religious violence that ensues when diverse religions vie for political power. The solution is to prevent any religion from obtaining political power.

As a birthday gift to Thomas Jefferson, we might reflect on the importance of the ideal of religious liberty. We might also reflect on the connection between religious freedom and Jefferson’s beloved University of Virginia.

For truth to prevail, people need to be properly educated about the history of religious violence, about political philosophy and about the progressive import of those sixteen monumental words.