First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage

I feel that it is a good rule of thumb for me to take a couple of days to think about my post when I am going to write about gay marriage. Not so much because the subject warrants deep consideration, although it does, I have been known to dash off posts on other topics that also warrant deep consideration. In this case the enforced days of mulling give me not only time to collect my thoughts, but also time to mellow out.

I need such time, because I am angry about the nature of the discussion of gay marriage in our nation! While appeals to emotion, also called pathos, may be an effective argumentative strategy, I don't believe that they are the most ethical method of discourse (an interesting post from a friend I met through dancing on this subject, if you are interested). Furthermore, when discussing something as polarizing as gay marriage, I feel the vitriol that passion can bring out only impedes parties from coming to such common understandings as can be found. In fact, I have already begged off of posting about gay marriage once, on the grounds that I didn't wish to embitter my readers. I actually did post about Proposition 8 elsewhere, and my initial thoughts on the subject and what I actually wrote a day later were quite different in tone. That said, on to the post about gay marriage.

What I wish to address specifically is the religious objections to legalizing gay marriage. Or, even more specifically, how I can think of absolutely no reasonable grounds for a religious objection to legalizing same sex marriages... yes, I am staying calm. This is mostly directed at Christians, both because I hear the most objections from them and because I am most familiar with the content of their objections. If you have objections from a different religious tradition that do not conform to these generalizations I would be most interested in hearing them.

I really do not care what your religious stance on the righteousness of gay marriage happens to be, that is between you, your conscience, your deity, and your religious leaders, or some subset thereof. I don't want to try to argue whether homosexuality is a sin with you, I do not need to! Unless your religion is different than the vast majority of religions, it probably teaches that following another religion is less righteous, in some sense. I think this can even be said to be true of the Quakers and Baha'is, despite both being paragons of tolerance. As such, I think it is likely that you support immoral things being legal, because most Americans appreciate the freedom of religion, even though it allows those immoral "others" to indulge in their less righteous beliefs.

One might argue that it is a harmful lifestyle, both to those who practice it, although as freedom loving Americans this argument does not hold much weight, and to their children, a more compelling argument. While there have been many emotional counterarguments to this point, again, I do not need to refute you. Presumably you believe that being raised without a personal relationship with a loving Savior is also harmful, or a firm indoctrination into the Church's dogmas if one happens to be Catholic, or whatever the analogous benefit is to whatever religious tradition you prefer. Yet we do not try to legislate that Hindi couples, or Jewish couples, or Muslim couples, and so on, not marry and raise children.

You might object that marriage is a sacred religious rite and it cannot be performed on homosexual couples due to its very nature, whatever the laws in place may be. Here I will have to both agree and disagree with you. Yes, marriage is a sacred religious rite, and yes it is reasonable for you to believe that it cannot be performed for same sex couples, although I disagree with that. But no, that is not all that it is. Marriage is also a purely legal and entirely separate secular condition, which must be kept entirely separate if we are to maintain the separation of church and state that is one of the great institutions of our nation. And it is this second, secular form of marriage that I, and most advocates for same sex marriage, am calling for same sex couples to have equal access to.

Ah, and here you think you might find some traction for your slipping arguments against some sex marriage, but won't advocates for same sex marriage take permission to engage in secular marriage and use it to try to legally force churches to marry them in religious ceremonies? Sadly, I think that some will, and I do not think that to do so is right, by the same freedom of religion that I supported above. However, just because someone might take a warranted right and attempt to do something unwarranted with it does not justify withholding the warranted right. And, let me be perfectly clear here, I believe that churches should not be forced to marry gay couples, but I also believe that they should not be forced to accommodate inter-racial marriages, despite the fact that I feel their refusal to do so is morally disgusting, and I feel the same way about a refusal to acknowledge same sex marriages.

Furthermore, the right to refuse service for religious reasons should be restricted to religious institutions, in my opinion. A business has no more right to refuse a gay couple service for their identity than it would to deny a person service for their racial, or political, or gender etc. identity. And, since I cannot think of any more common objections to same sex marriages, I shall end the discussion there for now.

However, on a related note, apparently Lowe's is pulling an ad from a show because objections have been raised to the show focusing on Muslims in the United States. This is yet another example of the market not being guided inherently by a conscience, or anything else with moral relevance, but rather by what people want, or, more accurately, what will affect the bottom line. In response to this villainy some feel the need to legislate morality, forcing Lowe's to put run the ad using some form of anti-discrimination legislation. Again, while I agree with anti-discrimination laws, I do not believe their proper use is to force businesses to run ads on specific shows. However, despite the fact that some people will use said laws in a manner with which I do not agree, I am not advocating that we get rid of said laws altogether. But, if you happen to do business with Lowe's, I would advocate that you consider shopping elsewhere until they repudiate their cowardly and, ultimately, bigoted action and reinstate the ad!

The Good Samaritan: Love the One You're With

Let me first disclaim that I have reservations about the song I use in the title. If you cannot be with the one you love, settling for the one you are with seems to do her (him) a disservice. On the other hand, if you are with someone, I should hope that they are the one that you love. Anyway, moving on.

You might note that this post is about neither Kant nor philosophy inspired by music videos. Since no one commented to affirm my choice for the next two posts, I felt fairly free to change them. I will get to those two posts, eventually, of course. Instead I wanted to take a moment to write a post related to one by my sister on Love, specifically the part about the story of the Good Samaritan, because posting my thoughts as a response to someone else's feels more personal, or relational, than simply broadcasting my own ramblings.

Her post seemed very relevant to what was on my mind, as my walk home was occupied with thoughts about the insufficiency of liberal "rights based" ethics, and universal ethics in general. To explain, what I mean by a universal ethic is a system of deciding what is good to do wherein all moral agents, which you can usually just think of as people but some try to sneak animals into the mix, are given the same consideration. The liberal tradition is certainly universal, as anyone familiar with the little phrase, "[w]e hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal," will recognize. While we may all be, in some sense, created equal, and we may want society to endow us with uniform rights, any personal system of determining good actions which treats everyone as equals turns out to be fairly monstrous.

One quick example, suppose you want to buy your parents a gift for their birthday, because you are a better human being than I am. While you COULD spend your money on a gift, you could also spend it to feed a starving child in Africa, and if we are going to consider all people equally, it seems than preventing someone from starving is more important than purchasing a birthday gift. Thus, in a universal ethic, birthday gifts have to wait until all hunger, curable disease, and similar conditions are taken care of, unless your birthday gift happens to actually be Malaria medicine. Similarly, how could you justify conceiving a brand new baby when there are so many perfectly serviceable babies already languishing in orphanages waiting for adoption? While the world might seem like it would be better if we all subscribed to a universal ethic, I think we would actually end up with a world that was less humane, where the value of genuine care and human relationship was so deformed as to be a caricature of its intended appearance.

This is the problem addressed by relational ethics, sometimes called ethics of caring. Under systems of this form, one is allowed, even encouraged, to give special consideration to the people one encounters most immediately. The Jewish law expert's desire not to love absolutely everyone is a perfectly human response, which by no means makes it the one God would like us to have, but it does make it the one we have with which to work. Notice, however, that Jesus didn't say that the Samaritan was just cruising the desert roads looking for someone to assist. Since the Samaritan left the beaten man with an innkeeper, it seems reasonable to assume he was traveling in pursuit of his own business. However, when confronted with the immediacy of the beaten man, the Samaritan responded with an ethic of care, and cared for the man's injuries.

I am not arguing that we externalize suffering, by buying our fiancée an engagement ring with a blood diamond for example. Simply because we have a higher ethical duty to our loved ones does not excuse sociopathy towards strangers that we encounter, and when we make a choice that effects someone, we encounter them, if in a highly attenuated manner. The immediacy of our personal relationships will grant them higher ethical salience, but this does not entirely negate our ethical duty to the rest of the world.

Furthermore, when we directly encounter suffering, as in the case of the Samaritan and the robbed traveler, then our relationship is quite immediate, rather than attenuated. So I am not arguing against the validity of the parable of the Good Samaritan, just attempting to frame it within a context of immediate caring, rather than universal duty.

One argument against the humanity of current urban living conditions is that the abundance of stimuli overwhelms our ability to process it all. This leads to a dulling of the immediacy of encountered events, as we filter them through more relevance criterion to deal with the sheer weight of information. A dulling of immediacy quite naturally dulls the prospect of encountering a stranger as a fellow human being, which forms the basis of an ethic of caring. Simply put, if one steps over the beaten traveler on the sidewalk, without even noticing that they are there, one never has the opportunity to meet them and relate to them as a caring human being.

In conclusion, someone is born every day, but you really ought to make special effort to remember your parents' birthdays.

Science Fairs

Now, I may not be the best qualified to discuss a science fair, never having participated in one, but I recently read a New York Times article on the decline of the science fair, and I wanted to respond. The whole article is a quite worthwhile read, but the line that irritated me into action was, "many science teachers say the problem is not a lack of celebration, but the Obama administration’s own education policy, which holds schools accountable for math and reading scores at the expense of the kind of creative, independent exploration that science fair projects require." It seems that viewing math and reading as somehow in opposition to creative, independent exploration is yet another example of why our education system is declining.

Setting aside, for now, the belief that reading and math are both inherently sources for creative, independent exploration, let me first argue that reading and math are cornerstones of science. While I may not have participated in any science fairs, toward the end of elementary school I did design and conduct my own experiment, with assistance from my parents of course. One convenient facet of moving so much as a child is that, if I can remember where something happened, I get a fairly accurate idea of when it occurred.

My experiment involved seeding multiple little, plastic flowerpots with grass seed, then covering them with plastic 5 gallon buckets for different durations throughout the day. My hypothesis was that, since sunlight is necessary for photosynthesis, grass that was covered during less of the day would do better. More interestingly, I wanted to see how significant a small decrease in the length of the day would be and what would happen to the grass living in almost total darkness.

While I don't recall exactly what results I obtained, I do recall there being interesting differences between the pots. In order to describe these differences I used not only qualitative standards, such as the color of the grass, but also the quantitative standard of how high it grew. Any time you use a quantitative standard, there is a good chance your experiment can benefit from mathematical understanding. Most fundamentally perhaps, one can plot the data points then approximate a function to describe the relationship between sunlight and grass height. Then, if one knows math, one can translate one's knowledge about functions into further educated guesses about the behavior of grass. Also, if one is curious about the results that others have already obtained on the subject, the ability to read critically is probably going to be a crucial one to have.

That said, I happen to believe that reading and math are both fertile sources for personal creativity. Some of my most prized remnants of my grade school education are poems that I wrote, either for official assignments or personal gratification, I was a sad little emo-kid (see how I pretend that has changed...). To consider the ability to write as independent from the ability to read seems silly enough that I believe I do not need to address it, please correct me if I am mistaken. Another piece of paper that I treasure contains my verification that the power rule of differentiation works for arbitrary polynomials. This was not part of a homework assignment, but I knew the power rule and the limit definition of the derivative, and I was curious why it worked. If that isn't independent exploration, then what is?

I guess that my main point is that, not only are math and reading essential parts of scientific exploration, but personal exploration is an integral part of any education, math and reading included. Furthermore, we absolutely NEED educators at every level emphasizing this message to students. Otherwise we populate our college calculus classes with students concerned only with what is true and what the answer is, rather than why things are true and how to obtain answers for themselves. This trend is not only deleterious to our education system, but also to our society, as it seems destined to produce citizens who would rather be given the "answers" than wrestle, often futilely, with the important questions.

Poker Face and the Problem of Other Minds

A week ago, the estimable Mr. Karplus of Sounds Like Japan fame posted a rather addicting "mashup" of the top 25 pop songs of 2009. In a successful attempt to procrastinate reading some math, I embarked to watch the music videos for each of these songs. Through this process I came to two realizations; firstly, as addicting as some pop music is, some is either musically or substantially (ie relating to its content) unpalatable; secondly, there are some interesting concepts to be explored.

Music tends to evocative, rather than expository, communication, by which I mean songs tend to communicate by inspiring the listener, rather than rationally detailing their message as a philosophical or mathematical argument would. Due to this, I will be giving myself license to interpret the song as it relates to me, instead of claiming to explain something inherent to the music. If you appreciate music qua music, that is, the musicality of music, you should check out Sounds Like Japan, Tim knows his stuff!

As you might imagine from the title, I am going to begin by examining Lady Gaga's song "Poker Face." Let me make clear from the beginning that I do NOT wholeheartedly endorse the message of this song! That said, what is the essential message of this song?

I find that choruses are a good place to begin the search for the overall purpose of a song. Because it is repeated throughout the song, the message in the chorus ties the various parts of the song together. In "Poker Face," the chorus is as follows:

"Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read-a my poker face
(she’s got to love nobody)"

My interpretation is that this song is narrated by a woman who avoids emotional investment in her romantic relationship because her partner cannot discern her true detachment behind her "poker face." However, I do not think that this is a very satisfied woman.

The line of the song that I find most objectionable is, "And baby when it's love if its not rough it isn't fun." My main problem with this message is that it normalizes force in the context of a romantic relationship, something I find abhorrent. While, rationally, I recognize that each couple defines their manner of interrelation within the context of their personal relationship, our society has such deep issues with domestic and relationship violence that it hardly seems necessary to glorify it in song.

The reason that I mention that line is that I find it indicative of the self-destructive behavior the unhappy narrator is displaying. Further supporting this interpretation is the previous line, "Russian Roulette is not the same without a gun." If that doesn't seem self destructive, I don't know what would. The question then becomes why is the narrator, despite the freedom implied by, "she has got to love nobody," so despondent?

My interpretation is that the depression results from being unloved, despite being in a romantic relationship. The chorus makes clear that she considers some essential part of herself unknown to her partner. In such a situation, one must doubt whether he really loves her, because she believes that he doesn't really know her, because he cannot read her poker face, that is, know her most private reflections.

This leads us to the problem of other minds. While each of us has uniquely privileged access to our own minds, we can neither access the mind of another on such an effortlessly deep level, nor easily share our own inner workings. Thus, one of the greatest wonders and joys of living is the continual sharing of ourself with others and being trusted by others who attempt to share themselves with us.

One of my favorite YA authors, John Green, coined the term, "imagining each other complexly," to describe this process. Imagining is an appropriate term, given that our impression of someone else is forever trapped within our own mind, but the joy and hope of the phrase comes from the word complexly. We seek to know our partner not as they exist-for-us, by which I mean as we want them to be, but as they exist-for-them-self, to borrow a distinction from my man Emmanuel Kant. To quote John Green in this video, where he is quoting Ze Frank, "we want to feel what it's like to be other people, and let other people feel what it's like to be us." While this was said specifically in relation to why YouTube users make videos, I think it applies to why we write blogs, write music, risk ourselves in the hope of love, and why we walk out into society each day in spite of the often alienating nature of the world in which we live.

To finish with "Poker Face," while the narrator "has got to love nobody," she also has got nobody to love, nor is she loved in return, at least not in a complex notion of the word. While the song starts out in an ominous tone, by the end the chorus sounds distinctly like a lament. I believe the narrator would welcome exchanging the risks of basing a relationship on emotional deception for the true risks involved in an emotionally vulnerable relationship based in open honesty.

Let me conclude by noting that this is a good example of the value that philosophical reflection has to the "layperson." Personally I think "Poker Face" is a wonderful and catchy song, but consumption of its message without critical reflection seems, in some sense, dangerous. With reflection one can both enjoy a driving, compelling, mournful song and attempt to come to grips with some of the problems that seem essential to being a human.