Philosophy with Bob Ross, It Isn’t

In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey tries to distinguish between transactions that are private and those that are public. Private transactions have no significant effect on people who aren’t involved with the transaction. Public transactions have consequences that have a significant but indirect effect on people who aren’t a party to the transaction itself. When people realize that they’re being affected by these indirect consequences, they try to find some way to manage them, and that’s how governments form. (I’m shorthanding this a bit. Dewey takes a couple of chapters to set up this point, and that’s not entirely because of his occasional difficulties in making his point clear.)

I decided that a good way to illustrate this distinction was to, well, illustrate it. I asked my students to imagine that I was going to order a new PC from Dell (not likely any time soon), and to describe whose lives would be affected by this decision. The obvious starting place was that Dell and I would be affected, so I put marks on the board to indicate those two parties. Then we started digging. How is the computer going to get to me? Well, someone has to ship it, they said. So I drew a road connecting Dell and me, and a crude UPS truck. Who’s going to get affected by that truck? Neighbors who will be affected by smog and noise pollution, perhaps. So little exhaust clouds and houses got added near the truck. Where are the parts of the computer coming from? Well, they’re being manufactured in Asia, so I drew factories on the far side of the board, and then a boat taking the components to Dell in Texas. And so on and so on.

Now, despite the fact that my drawing was, quite frankly, terrible, I think this exercise was worthwhile. The students seemed to have fun thinking up all sorts of connections, and when we were done we had a framework to talk about how all of these ripple effects are shaped and regulated in our society. I may need to hit my sister up for some art lessons, but there’s definitely something for me to take away here in terms of how to get a point across.

206 Years Yielding

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blog has YouTube footage of two speeches in favor of a resolution that would give the District of Columbia a voting representative in the House. (A 417th representative would also be added in Utah to keep an odd number and, incidentally, partisan balance.) They’re mostly on the dry side, but watch Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton – DC’s nonvoting delegate – when someone asks her to yield her time. That outrage seems pretty real to me, and it’s outrage we all ought to feel.

Is It Spring Yet?

A couple of hours ago I felt my throat starting to get scratchy. This would be my third cold in about six weeks. There’s nothing like relentless damp weather, swinging temperatures, and a five year old to batter the ol’ immune system. It’s not doing a whole lot to brighten my mood, either, not that the news is doing anything to help.

I’ve gotten word from several of the schools I teach at that there’s an effort to encourage people to wear orange and maroon, Virginia Tech’s colors, on Friday. The maroon won’t be much of a problem, but I’m gonna have to see if I can track down some orange tomorrow.

Playing the Ostrich

I just do not have the mental energy to even look at the news to comment. But it occurs to me that at 10:30 yesterday, my students and I were discussing whether moral theory can tell us anything about the idea of self-sacrifice, or why we feel that it is a praiseworthy act when someone risks or gives up his or her life in order to preserve the lives of others. I dearly wish that these had been merely theoretical questions for the students and teachers at Virginia Tech. Some lessons do not need to be put into practice.

Good Eats in the Classroom

Are you pondering what I’m pondering?

Probably not, unless you’re pondering the best example of Alton Brown’s Good Eats series to show in a philosophy class tomorrow. But I think I need something to visualize the pragmatist idea of education being connected to life, and while we’re at it, maybe we’ll learn something about ice cream.

And hey, the show earned a Peabody Award. So there has to be some value to it, right?

If this seems like a frivolous post, my apologies. My neck is killing me – I think this storm waged an indirect attack on my spine along with the direct assault on the windows.

Take My Turnpike – Please

We’re back home after a weekend trip that involved a lot of time on the Pennsylvania Turnpike – some of it driving. And it occurred to me that Pennsylvania, like several other states, is considering leasing its toll roads to for-profit companies, and then using the proceeds to pay for major initiatives (in Pennsylvania’s case, new highway construction and mass transit funding). As I understand it, the logic is that the for-profit company would be willing to pay the lease fee because it could make a profit by increasing tolls and employing other techniques to increase use of the roads and revenue. So maybe it’s a stupid question, but – why can’t the state just do that? Is there such an internal resistance to the government maximizing its revenue that the only way it can derive the full benefit of the resources it provides is to let someone else do it? Something about the logic just isn’t clicking with me.

Problems with Plurals

When I was in high school DC Comics published a title called The Ray, about a teenaged hero who lived in Philadelphia. I bought a few issues but quickly lost interest. If I remember correctly, one of my major disappointments was that the colorist was making what should have been a bright, dazzling book too muted. But I also wasn’t crazy about the writing. The writer, some of whose books I had enjoyed in the past, was using a lot of slang and jargon in the dialogue, and my reaction as a Philadelphia teenager was that “people don’t talk like that – the guy’s trying too hard.� Well, a few years later I wound up in a Usenet conversation with the writer, who mentioned that he had lived in Philadelphia around the time he wrote the book and based the dialogue patterns on things he had heard around him.

That conversation has been rattling around for the last few days, as current media events and my own democracy research have converged on the idea of pluralism, the notion that rather than looking to form one single society that assimilates everyone who comes into it, a democracy should strive to promote and support the different small groups that have their own culture, thought processes, and ways of communicating and interacting with the world. Part of the aim is to get away from the notion that everyone needs to conform to a single dominant culture. Of course, all these pluralist groups are supposed to be able to relate to one another in a respectful fashion in order to keep the larger society flourishing. And my reaction to The Ray highlights the problem here, I think.

When you have groups that look at the world in different ways, and then express that worldview in different ways, there are going to be problems of interpretation. Those problems of interpretation can cause well-meaning groups to talk past one another, or interpret a differing viewpoint as a lack of respect. If communication and dialogue are going to be key to a democratic theory, there needs to be some kind of common framework that pluralist groups can work from, and I do not think that this can be merely a procedural consensus. There has to be a shared understanding of dialogue, democracy, respect, understanding, deliberation, and many other concepts. Not only are these required for communication attempts to be successful, they are required for communication attempts to begin. There are points of view that argue that deliberation is an elitist structure, one that puts a premium on rules of reasoning and conventions of dialogue that certain historically-advantaged groups are comfortable with and one that favors a slower approach to social change. These points of view argue that excluded groups shouldn’t be concerned about respect and deliberation – they should take action to make other people uncomfortable, to confront them with the problems and force immediate action. For a deliberative, democratic pluralism to work, a society needs to create a culture of deliberation, one that unifies the smaller cultural groups.

Now the $64,000 is how to make that happen.

Good People

One of the web comics I check out regularly is Dork Tower. John Kovalic usually has a good sense of humor about the fannish, geekish things I enjoy. His latest blog post also demonstrates that he’s one hell of a good guy. So go give the site a look-see. I’m gonna go give my family a hug.

Nano, Nano

So I finally got my 2nd-generation 8 GB black iPod Nano the other day. As is true of so many other areas of my life, I am ridiculously spoiled. I remember my first MP3 player, and how deliriously happy I was to have 32 MB of memory to carry an hour’s worth of songs with me on the bus. Now I have over 1100 tracks in a device that’s slightly smaller. And let me tell you, I’m gonna let Shuffle Play work through all of those tracks if it kills me.

In the meantime, now that I am an Apple hardware owner, I have begun to peruse sites like www.cultofmac.com in order to learn what other wonders Apple will have in store for us in the future. Then again, Fake Steve Jobs’ blog is probably more fun.

Speaking of Substance

Turns out that while I was writing yesterday’s essay about substance in the presidential campaign, John Baer was publishing a commentary in the Daily News wondering why the two candidates he considers to have the most substantial policy experience – Michael Nutter and Dwight Evans – are currently trailing in the polls. The answers he cites are the kind of personality-based rationales that show that winning an election doesn’t necessarily entail support for the winner’s policy agenda.