C-Span has been wonderful tonight. They broadcast the Libertarian Party’s Convention and now they’re showing interesting commencement speeches from around the country.
They just finished showing Margaret Edson’s and I think it’s simply a must for teachers and students alike. It meant a whole lot to me. One of the two best commencement speeches I’ve ever heard or read. Please, if you have 20 minutes, give it a watch or a read.
Whenever I cover the topic of abortion in my ethics classes, I go to great pains to stress to my students the value of a dispassionate inquiry on the subject. I discourage use of values charged, question begging language of “pro-choice” and “pro-life” and encourage more descriptive language of “pro-abortion rights” or “anti-abortion rights” as a way to stress that even though the issue of abortion is in many way a question of competing priorities of the values of choice and life in this one area, nonetheless in the larger scheme of things people on both sides of the issue do believe in rights to life and rights to choice in general. The issue of abortion is morally about abortion and politically about abortion rights, not life itself or choice itself. That said, resolving the political and legal issue of abortion for many who are morally opposed to abortion but legally supportive of rights to abortion, the conflict really does come down to a decision about what priorities must dominate in a free society—-life in all cases or life in most cases but sometimes choice in the hard cases. And so while it is less divisive and less partisan to gut our language of discussion of value loaded words wherever possible, this is just one of the ways in which the attempt to be objective by trying to find a values neutral or non-partisan language in which to speak proves limited and possibly even distortive of the complexity of the issue at hand. It is deceptive to whitewash the fact that values are conflicting.
Nonetheless, my effort in my class discussions is to try to discipline my students to clarify their understanding of the facts and of the actual value choices at hand systematically, one aspect of the issue at a time, in order to clarify where the rightness or the wrongness, the permissibility or the impermissibility, or the advisibility or the inadvisibility of abortion lie exactly. I want them to figure out as specifically as they can where they think the lines need to be drawn and to work that out both morally and, separately, politically. I also stress so much objectivity because I want my students to practice fairness towards the multiple sides of morally contestable matters and I want them to be able to hear and understand each other and the differing philosophers we read in studying the issue. And I’m extremely proud of nearly all of my students I have had these class discussions with for displaying incredible openmindedness and even temperedness with such volatile matters. I know my own thoughts on the issue have deepened from those thoughtful and probing discussions we’ve had together.
Lake of Fire is quite an admirable film for going a further step towards effective illumination of the issue of abortion by not banning the heat and volatile passions that most of us feel when confronted with various aspects of the issues related to abortion. Nietzsche stresses repeatedly and profoundly the importance of finding the truth best not through greater and greater extents of dispassionate thinking but through the ability to feel through more and more affects. Correlately, he stresses that the truth is not to be understood from the right perspective but from through the ability to multiple perspectives, from seeing through a thousand eyes and gaining a fuller picture that way. On these terms, I think Tony Kaye’s film about abortion is an enriching experience worth having. Kaye represents a number of ways of seeing, a number of ways of feeling and through uncensored documentary imagery offers the viewer the chance to see a thousand striking images and feel struck by a thousand emotions. What I appreciate is that for all the vitriol and passion of many of the participants in the film, that feeling of fairness and perspective undergirds the film under Kaye’s direction and editing and I think manages the sort of enrichening of dialogue I would aim at through detachment.
A key virtue of the film too is that among the viewpoints represented are some of the “detached,” philosophical ones usually given short schrift (if any schrift at all) in the public debate. That said, the film does have some limitations that could have easily been remedied within the seemingly endless 154 minute runtime. For one thing, the informedly philosophical discussions could be more frequent and more involved than some of the multiplications of extremist voices and I think some of the issues of broader political nature that distract from the strict ethics of the practice might not be allowed to dominate so much of the screentime. A lot of valuable, helpful, possibly crucial philosophical and legal distinctions are conspicuously absent. Most egregiously absent are non-religiously based (or unexclusively religiously based) arguments against abortion, more thorough treatments of pro-abortion rights positions that concede the humanity of the unborn such as Judith Jarvis Thomson’s very famous “unconscious violinist” argument, the constitutional controversies involved in appealing to “penumbras,” etc., etc.
That said, while ultimately incomplete, the film does an eye opening and laudable job in general of bringing home the urgency of the political context to the evaluation of the morality of abortion but to the morality of those involved in the debate. There is a strong temptation for me, as a fetishizer of detachment, to want to only address the morality of abortion in a vacuum separated from the contingent political practices associated with the debate since those are theoretically periphery to the relative rightness or wrongness of the practice in abstraction. This film brought home to me some of the arbitrariness of drawing neat lines between abortion in abstraction and abortion in concrete political contexts. As much as being able to abstract the practice or aspects of the practice from surrounding context helps to simplify the issue in theory, it also obscures the interrelated consequences of one’s ethical and political decisions given actual conditions.
I felt like everyone was treated rather fairly. I don’t know how the hardline partisans would feel, whether they would all feel like they were treated fairly or whether they would feel like their side was caricatured worse than the other. I think the visual documentation of actual abortions made a strong visual, visceral case against the practice while the detailed documentation of the extent of theocratic and vigilante tendencies of members of the anti-abortion movement made a strong case against casting one’s lot with such authoritarian scoundrels. I think also the extensive discussion of the consequences of abortions performed illegally brought to life viscerally the real dangers of “coathanger” abortions and most of the philosophers included served to make a powerful case about the moral ambiguity and open door for tolerance of choice in the law with respect to abortion.
In sum, I think both sides make visceral visual cases. It may be unique to my temperment but I found the visceral case against abortion stronger but the abstract case in favor of abortion rights far stronger. The degree to which that is a function of the relative humanity and largeness of perspective of the advocates for abortion rights compared to the authoritarian, theocratic zeal of the proponents of restriction of abortion rights is hard to gauge.
Overall, there is much to learn and many, many important things to see and feel in this film even for those of us who have already learned, seen, and felt a great deal about the topic already. Abortion is an issue that I feel epitomizes Nietzsche’s intuition about the necessity of multiplying the eyes, the angles, and affects with which one looks at something if one is to truly understand it. This film is a far cry from a final word on the issue. But it is an effective and valuable aid in multiplying one’s perspectives and one’s feelings.
My dad just sent me a link to an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education for my thoughts. After writing him, I thought I’d share some of my response to him here as well. I’m not an expert on education or educational theory but I do have 12 years of higher education schooling between time as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and 5 and a half years as a full college instructor and adjunct professor at the university level. I also have a teaching award already if that helps with my credibility at all!
First, I agree that not everyone is cut out for college. Most universities are not as small or as selective as the two which I have attended, and at which I’ve only ever taken or taught 3 classes that were so large as to be detrimental to all hopes of individual attention from professors to students. So, I have to concede that while my own experience has been that college can be focused on personal formation; at a lot of schools, there is not the personal attention and commitment to students that backs up the claim that generally, for most students, college is about personal formation and not just about career training. I personally think colleges should be, as mine have been, far more focused on personal formation than they presently are. But part of that means colleges being even less immediately economically efficient than Nemko is promoting here.
As far as I’m concerned, outside of a couple orienting theory courses: teachers should be learning to teach through apprenticeships with teachers and business people should be learning how to do business by working at businesses. Same for numerous other skill-based careers. Those people should be using college for intellectual and personal formation primarily. You can study the basic background theoretics and information needed for your particular field, but you should spend the majority of your time in the liberal arts learning those things that are “irrelevant” to your future job but crucial to your being a well rounded human being who understands culture, history, science, art, literature, philosophy, economics, a foreign language, psychology, politics, religion, etc.
I think it’s frankly insulting and short-sighted when Nemko asserts that those who are college educated would outpace those who aren’t college educated even without college since they are brighter, more talented, and “have more family connections.” The more family connections comment is just a passivity to de facto class structures that is really bothersome. The idea that just being bright or talented means you don’t need an education is really dismissive of the value of what education offers. I agree that if all you’re interested in is making money that you can do that reasonably well on your natural intelligence and other talents. I agree that the average entrepreneur can likely learn more about starting a business by hanging around businesses for four years than by attending a university. And I agree that if you’re going to wind up a cab driver or a bar tender that you don’t need a $100,000 degree to do so.
But the question is not just about how to make money but how to be a critical thinker more broadly. How to use your mind as more than simply a tool for production but as a means to itself and a measn to the broader goods of self-cultivation and critical citizenship. And in that case, I don’t think there are too many better things in life than an education. People’s minds don’t open on their own. Critical thinking, lively writing, literary appreciation, historical insight, psychological awareness, scientific sensitivity, artistic creativity, logical rigor, mathematical formality, spiritual nuance, cosmopolitan familiarity, and on and on are skills that are as important to be apprenticed in as making money or performing surgeries. I have had incredibly bright students but I’ve yet to have one whose natural talent made them a better critical thinker than I was as their teacher. I have had students who have the potential to be better thinkers than I am but without the right tutelage in how to ask the right questions, and without their getting up to speed with what’s already known, it likely won’t happen.
And that’s what this is all about. If you only use your mind in certain ways you don’t know how to think in other ways. That’s why it’s embarrassing to sometimes read scientists expose their ignorance outside of science when they start pronouncing on philosophical matters. They’re frequently infelicitous with philosophical categories because that’s not how they’ve trained their minds and it’s not where their knowledge base has been built up and so they don’t even understand what the questions are or what the complexities of the best currently available answers are.
The economic benefits of being able to think in the multiplicity of ways that a well rounded liberal education teaches are intangible. Nemko himself has allowed his thinking to be shaped nearly entirely in terms of what his own career, as a career counselor to undergraduates, involves—-cost/benefit analysis of his charges’ economic prospects related to their college and career courses. So, to him the political consequences of having more citizens who are less well rounded, less historically, philosophically, psychologically, economically, theologically, scientifically, linguistically aware don’t matter as long as those same citizens don’t waste $100,000 on a degree that “their job doesn’t require.”
Now, again, not everyone is fit for college. Not everyone is going to succeed and not everyone will learn best there. Some people will get different, comparably good benefits of personal formation through unusual routes specific to them and for those exceptional, idiosyncratic folks, I would not block the door as they exited the university. Some rare people might just be too smart for college or learn in a different way. And definitely many careers that are skill based would find better preparation in apprenticeships. And some people just cannot hack it intellectually and drag down the standards across the universities by crowding the classrooms and lowering the lowest common denominator bar to which some professors may teach.
But, what worries me is whether accepting this as a fact of life perpetuates de facto class inequalities. The norms that (1) let many more students accept their lack of fitness to even the exposure to university education, (2) turn a college degree into just a technical training, and (3) tell people not to bother with college if it won’t increase their personal earning potential, are each norms that lead to citizens who are more ignorant and less capable of informed, critical evaluation. This hardly seems like a wise thing to encourage in a democracy. They are also norms that lead to less educated parents who are in turn less equipped to rear reflective, informed children with strong habits of learning. From very early childhood, parental emphasis on education and training in thinking skills seems to be extremely influential on later mental skills from everything I’ve ever heard or read. Maybe the first kid to go to college from a given family doesn’t advance the previous generation the way the family might dream he would. But by striving to raise the family’s bar a bit in terms of overall education, maybe in the next generation the room for growth increases further as the kid still has an economically downscale parent but now one that is that little bit more trained in the ways of the mind. And of course, the case can always be made that the benefits of an education make life intrinsically richer, regardless of concerns for earning power, responsible citizenship, or effective child-rearing.
This is all very frustrating to me because our capitalist society only values what it can correlate directly to a profit. Articles like Nemko’s assume the dogma that the mind is only valuable insofar as it can be made into an immediate tool for specific wealth production. Both the long term benefits and the intrinsic benefits of minds developed for their own sakes just makes no sense on that short term cost-benefit analysis rooted in that particular value-priority scheme.
And, by the way, it is that same overly capitalistic thought process that threatens to reduce academia to a research production machine instead of primarily the home of educators. And this results in someone like me, who is most talented and successful as a teacher, feeling deeply underappreciated, barely successful, and fearful for my future prospects until I can prove myself as a publishing writer. And that just seems to me counter-productive to the academy.