Behold the third in a series of Comments of the Day on the post about the woman who started screaming as her measure response to a speaker whose opinions she didn’t want to hear, and has ordered out of her “gayborhood.” This one is by Sarah D (the others are here, and here); the inspiration was the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”:
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Assuming that this man is preaching peacefully on a street corner, even if he is stating things this woman disagrees with, and she came up and accosted him (perhaps not fair assumptions), her screaming like this seems to me to be res ipsa loquitor on the matter.
As for how we can engage people like that, well, I think what we need to do is treat them the way I treat my four year old when she engages in such behavior. However, I do not believe the law allows me to ask a person over the age of eighteen (I refuse to call this woman an adult) to stand in a corner, be grounded, scrub baseboards, or be spanked. If my eldest, still in single digits, acted like this, I’d never have to clean my house again.
One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.” That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”.
This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even if it involves a registration process for free access to a limited number of articles per month, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here. The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University. His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia.
You may recall the incident. Jack first wrote about it here; my take came a little later, here. Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad. Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty.
Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood. So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing. Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration. The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence. (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?)
Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history. Everett was just getting warmed up. He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t. Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians).
The viral video above supposedly shows a Nigerian pastor with the handle ‘Pastor Daniel’ entering the lions’ cage at a zoo to show that nothing can happen to a man of God, just like in the Bible story. “Pastor Daniel brought his church members to show them that nothing can happen to a man of God,” a Nigerian blogger wrote on Instagram. In Kenya, a local television station shared the video and it caught the attention of a member of the Kenyan parliament, Ronald Karauri. “I volunteer to take him to the Maasai Mara [national park] please, all expenses paid. We look for the lions and he can go walk with them,” he posted on Twitter/X.
Uh, no. The BBC investigated, and the video is from Somalia, while the episode shot took place in 2021 in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The “pastor” was Mohamed Abdirahman Mohamed. He is a zookeeper and explained at the time that he raised the young lions that he is shown playing with.
Now, in 1991 a genuine emulator of the biblical Daniel, “Prophet Daniel Abodunrin,” actually did enter the lion enclosure at the University of Ibadan zoo in Nigeria. He was a real preacher, and invited his followers to watch him as he demonstrated how the power of faith can tame the savage beasts. After entering the lions’ den—it is believed a zookeeper let him in—Abodunrin chanted Bible verses while commanding communicating the big cats to be peaceful
German philosopher Immanuel Kant ( 1724 – 1804) was the all-time champ at rules-based ethics, concocting several useful formulations of what he called “the categorical imperative,”or the principle of absolute morality. All of them are, as absolutes, the starting points for hopelessly convoluted debates and “what ifs?,” but philosophy geeks love that stuff. For me, the main value of Kant’s absolutism as that they are useful for pinging ethics alarms.
Kant’s “Formula of Humanity” stated (in German, of course): “So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means,” or in the short version, “Never treat another human being as merely as means to an end.”
Abortion, for example, is an ethical controversy that Kant clarifies quickly: abortion rationalizers have long tried to duck the “Formula of Humanity” by denying that a fetus with human DNA created by humans that will grow to be a born and eventually a walking, talking, member of human society isn’t a human being at all, and thus killing it for the benefit of its mother isn’t using whatever it is as a means to an end.
You can get in the high weeds of Kant’s most famous rule here. For instance, Kant holds that it may be wrong for a person to treat himself or herself merely as a means: now there’s a metaphorical rabbit hole. But for the purposes of this post, let’s just look at two recent examples of people who probably can’t spell Kant, never mind recognize when they are defying him.
An inquirer to “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, asked this week:
“A year ago, I was told I had a form of ovarian cancer and was given two to three years to live — five years, if I’m in the top quartile of patients. I nursed my husband through metastatic lung cancer for 15 months. It was horrific; I am hoping that God takes me early. My sister, whom I love very much, is part of a fundamentalist Christian church and is one of their top “prayer warriors.” As such, she calls me nearly every day and launches into long prayers asking God to send my cancer to the “foot of the cross.” She implores me to pray with her and says that if I just believe that God will cure me, he will.I grew up Catholic and have fallen away from the church. I believe God is bigger than what we can understand as human beings. I am a data-driven health care practitioner: I believe that everybody has to die of something, and this happens to be my fate. I’ve told her as tactfully as I can that her praying for me and expecting me to pray with her for my cure is upsetting to me. It makes me feel that if there is a God, he must really hate me; otherwise, he would have cured me. (She says that he wants to use me as a “messenger” to others and that it’s the Devil, not God, who gave this disease to me.)…
“What do I say to my sister without belittling her beliefs? I’ve told her that if she wants to pray for me, I would rather she do it on her own time and not ask me to participate. But she is persistent, thinking that she’s going to “save my soul” and my body at the same time. She disputes every reason that I give her and insists that what she is doing is helpful. But it’s not helpful; it sends me into a terrible depression.”
How did censorship, airbrushing history and “it isn’t what it is” become hallmarks of progressivism? A discussion for another time…
For the nonce, consider Porsche, which airbrushed away the famous Portuguese statue of Jesus Christ that overlooks the capital of Lisbon in a promotional video celebrating 60 years of its iconic 911 model. For some reason, many people had a problem with that.
As the saying goes, “When someone tells you who they really are, believe them.” We have enough evidence to see with our own eyes and ears who Trump is and who he is not and that should not be relevant to who Joe Biden is and who he is not.
This entry, the previous one in the latest installment of the “Nation of Assholes” series and the one before that about Rudy Giuliani’s untrustworthy secret recorder have all coalesced in my mind this weekend as I have spent several days wearing myself out over planning for a pop-culture convention next week by following other conventions in other cities on social media to determine how the shows are accommodating the guests’ requirements under SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules and what that means for how I should approach any celebrity guest I wish to meet.
I get tired of holding the hands of new convention-goers who don’t understand the rules, ask for clarification and end up not following my advice. I get tired of veteran convention-goers who think they have the right to get around the rules. For entitled people who cut lines, who try to sweet-talk the guest into extra perks and who make little to no effort to ask polite, intelligent questions. They make everything harder on everyone else. Celebrities won’t want to attend these things if people don’t understand or respect boundaries. I have too many stories to recount of fans acting like inconsiderate asses and those stories are from before the pandemic.
We are already an entitled enough culture that treats celebrities like commodities, as if buying a movie ticket or following a TV program requires that anyone who appeared in the same owes us unlimited time, an autograph, a selfie, a kidney… One of the best things about the strike is that it’s finally becoming somewhat public knowledge that most actors aren’t millionaires.
We treat others like us even worse. Not only do we not put most of our fellow citizens on pedestals, but we don’t even afford them the basic respect of treating them the way we would want to be treated. As long as there’s something in it for us, I guess…
Somehow, qualities of character, such as honesty, integrity, patience, kindness, self-control (sorry, I think I wandered into the Fruits of the Spirit from the Bible) seem to have been lost very quickly. We are a mess as a culture and there’s a lot of blame to go around, not least because we have forgotten the Golden Rule.
Outspoken freshman Congresswoman Nancy Mace, (R-SC), decided to throw away her prepared remarks and riff at the beginning of her speech at fellow South Carolinian Sen. Tim Scott’s prayer breakfast last week. That was her first mistake.
“When I woke up this morning at 7, I was getting picked up at 7:45, Patrick, my fiance, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed. And I was like, ‘No, baby, we don’t got time for that this morning,'” Mace began. “I gotta get to the prayer breakfast, and I gotta be on time.”
Yes, there’s nothing better to warm up the crowd at a prayer breakfast like a pre-marital sex joke!
Seriously, how hard is it to avoid making comments about sex at a prayer breakfast? She probably embarrassed Sen. Scott thoroughly, who was metaphorically batting second behind the nookie narrative in her remarks as she praised him profusely. Scott is running for President, however futilely, and doesn’t need any silly but completely avoidable controversies. Mace also probably made Seacoast Church Pastor Greg Surratt a little uncomfortable, who had honored both her and Scott as a part of his congregation.
Twentysomething years ago, a few months after completing my PhD, I got a phone call from my mentor in Asian theatre, who, upon learning job search wasn’t going as well as I might have hoped, asked if I wanted to teach a couple sections of the university’s Eastern Civilizations course. I asked if I was really qualified to teach such a course. His response: “You know something, and you can read.”
Based largely on his recommendation, I got an interview for the position. I made no attempt to conceal my ignorance of a lot of what I’d be teaching. But the department had struggled with grad students who had lost control of their classrooms, and I’d taught full-time for ten years before entering the doctoral program; I got the job. The head of the Eastern Civ program closed the interview with “There are some books in my office you’ll want to read before you start.” I knew something, and I could read.
That’s relevant to my consideration of the recent ruling of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University, in which a tenured faculty member claimed to have been punished for arguing against certain initiatives undertaken by his department. I’m no lawyer, so there’s some legalese I’m not so sure about, and I have no interest in chasing down all the precedents cited by either the majority or the dissent to see if they really say what these judges say they say. But I know something and I can read.
More to the point, one of the texts I taught in that Eastern Civ course was Confucius’s Analects, which I had to get to know a lot better than I did previously in order to teach it to someone else. One of the central tenets of Confucian thought was his argument against having too many laws, as no one could possibly predict all the various special circumstances surrounding every dispute. Context matters; timing matters; motives matter. Confucius’s solution was to turn everything over to a wise counselor (like him) who would weigh all the relevant elements on a case by case basis. That’s not the way our justice system works, nor would it be practical, but it’s easy to see its appeal… in theory, at least.
Significantly, Confucius’s reservations about laws’ inability to anticipate all the possible combinations of circumstances are the first cousin if not the sibling of what Jack calls the “ethics incompleteness principle” which asserts that there “are always anomalies on the periphery of every normative system, no matter how sound or well articulated.”
Ethics Alarms 