gina_schouten

Earlier this week, I received my contributor copy of The Art of Teaching Philosophy: Reflective Values and Concrete Practices, edited by Brynn Welch.[1] It’s an exciting book, and I’m proud to have gotten to contribute to it. My chapter on advising graduate students about teaching was coauthored with an excellent teacher (and researcher), a near-former grad student, Britta Clark.

I’m eager to read all the chapters. Welch often likened the book to a series “hallway chats,” or unplanned encounters in the hallway when a colleague tells you about a new teaching strategy she’s trying out. I’ve walked away from many such chats with great new ideas to adopt, and I know I’ll get a lot out of reading this.

I also know I won’t go in order. When the book arrived, I skipped straight to David O’Brien’s chapter on “Teaching with Puzzles.” O’Brien is a thoughtful, imaginative teacher and a wonderful writer, so I knew the chapter would be great. But I was inspired to start with his chapter by something else I’d been reading. I got an early look at Anthony Laden’s new book, Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do about Them. I’ll write more about it once it’s published later this year.[2] But I’m going spoil one tiny morsel by writing about it now, because it struck a chord and—along with O’Brien’s chapter—motivated me to try something new.

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Here in the U.S., my home state of Indiana has a new state-mandated DEI initiative: The law specifies that:

“Each board of trustees [of a public college] shall establish a policy that provides that a faculty member may not be granted tenure or a promotion by the institution if, based on past performance or other determination by the board of trustees, the faculty member is:

(1) unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution;

(2) unlikely to expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline; or

(3) likely, while performing teaching duties within the scope of the faculty member’s employment, to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.”[i]

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At the grocery store the other day, when my five-year-old made an impassioned plea for a certain kind of cereal, I said, “nah, that one’s too sweet for breakfast.” He responded with a stern reprimand: “Mom, you shouldn’t yuck my yum!”

I was pretty sure that admonishment didn’t apply here, but I heroically let it go.

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As I prepare my Spring semester courses, I’m wondering how people handle office hours these days.

For my entire pre-Covid teaching career, office hours were a drop-in affair. I encouraged students to make an appointment outside of office hours if they wanted to be sure they could talk to me without the chance of another student popping in. But the posted office hours could not be reserved; they were for anyone who happened to show up.

Then, during Covid, I worked with a wonderful grad student teaching assistant who encouraged me to reserve half of my office hours each week for student appointments. She told me it would make me more accessible to students.
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In the penultimate chapter of Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein argues that while the forces of polarization act on both major U.S. political parties, the Democratic party has managed to weather them whereas the Republican party has largely succumbed. That is, Republicans stand out for their growing violation of and downright hostility toward established norms. He multiplies examples to make the case at pp 228-9.

What accounts for the difference? Klein’s answer is that the forces of ideological sorting have made the Democratic party more internally diverse and the Republican party more internally homogenous: “Republicans are overwhelmingly dependent on white voters. Democrats are a coalition of liberal whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Republicans are overwhelmingly dependent on Christians. Democrats are a coalition of liberal and nonwhite Christians, Jews, Muslims, New Agers, atheists, Buddhists, and so on. On the fixed versus fluid psychological dimensions…Republicans are overwhelmingly the party of fixed voters. But…Democrats are psychologically sorted only among white voters,” while psychological orientation aligns less with party affiliation among voters of color (230-1).

The upshot is that “Democrats need to go broad in order to win over their party and…they need to reach into right-leaning territory to win power. Republicans can afford to go deep” (231). And that means that Republicans can appeal to voters through appeals to group identity, whereas Democrats must use party platform and policy goals to unify a diverse collection of interest groups.

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Part two of Why We’re Polarized connects the polarizing public, the subject of part one, to our increasingly polarizing political institutions. Klein wants to show that polarization is a feedback loop: “Institutions polarize to appeal to a more polarized public, which further polarizes the public, which forces the institutions to polarize further, and so on” (136-7). Here, I’ll be a bit more comprehensive and summative than I have so far, because it’s helpful to see how the pieces of the story fit together.

Unsurprisingly, the media is the first locus of institutional polarization that Klein discusses. Also unsurprising is his focus on the fragmentation of the industry and the rise of digital media, and on the ways in which audience analytics enable providers to discern “market demand” with growing precision. The result is a media landscape that increasingly plays to partisan divisions: “For political reporting, the principle is: ‘If it outrages, it leads.’ And outrage is deeply connected to identity—we are outraged when members of other groups threaten our group and violate our values” (149). But audience analytics don’t just reveal pre-existing market preferences. Identities are “living, malleable things” that “can be activated or left dormant, strengthened or weakened, created or left in the void” (156). If this is right, then identity-oriented media content will deepen the identities it triggers and the identities it threatens. And in deepening and threatening identity, a fragmented media armed with sophisticated audience analytics will trigger the forces of identity-protective cognition.

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[Two preliminary notes, in response to last week’s comments: First, on Klein’s definition of “polarization”: For Klein, polarization is the process whereby people’s opinions either change, or the distribution of opinions sorts, to cluster around two poles, with fewer people left in the middle. Importantly, this does not entail that either side is more extreme. So: sorting is a subcategory of polarization—both have the consequence of increasing tension between the two ends of the spectrum, “which is what polarization is meant to describe” (32); but polarization is importantly distinct from extremism. Second, on the structure of the book, which I should have emphasized. Institutions like the media are a crucial part of Klein’s explanation for polarization. This discussion plays out in the second part of the book. The first part of the book is about our polarizing political identities, which polarizing institutions interact with. On the whole, Klein wants to show that polarization is a feedback loop: “Institutions polarize to appeal to a more polarized public, which further polarizes the public, which forces the institutions to polarize further, and so on” (136-7). Today’s post finishes up a point I wanted to make about polarizing identities. Next week and the week after, Parts 3 and 4 will move on to the stuff on institutions.]

In last week’s post about Why We’re Polarized, I wrote about Ezra Klein’s case for sorting as a kind of identity convergence. Here’s a summary in his words: “Today, the parties are sharply split across racial, religious, geographic, cultural, and psychological lines. There are many, many powerful identities lurking in that list, and they are fusing together, stacking atop one another, so a conflict or threat that activates one activates all” (136). I concluded by noting that I’m particularly interested in the practical upshots of the geographic aspect of identity convergence. I live in a liberal enclave, and I’ve often wondered what kinds of moral reasons I might have to leave it. I’ve wondered how strong those reasons are relative to the self-interested reasons I have to live wherever I most prefer to live. Remember that Klein compared identity convergence to stacking magnets on top of one another, “so the pull-push force of that stack is multiplied” (47-8). I’m struck by the fact that, in his discussion of practical upshots, he doesn’t raise the possibility that we have some personal obligations to shuffle up our own magnets.
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I started reading Why We’re Polarized, by Ezra Klein, back in November. I’d also given a copy to my dad, proposing that we both read it and then talk about it over a beer. I have the good fortune to have a father who disagrees with me about many things, who is kind and curious, and who presumes good will, not only when he’s talking to his daughter but when he’s talking to most people who haven’t given him a pretty good reason to abandon that presumption. He is also so exceedingly gracious that he can be relied upon to read any book given to him as a gift. I really wanted to read this book with my dad, and I knew he’d follow through because he never doesn’t. What could go wrong? Me, of course.

A few chapters in, life got busy and other things more urgently needed reading. So, by the time I picked the book back up a few weeks ago, it had lain open and face down for long enough to have collected an impressive cover of dust. But, flipping back through the pages and revisiting my scribbles in the margins, I quickly remembered how much I’d been enjoying it. Quite apart from the interesting content, the skillfulness of it is thrilling. Klein reviews so much social science research in these chapters and weaves such a compelling argument from the threads of that research that he has no business also having written a book that’s engaging and painless to read. Yet he’s done just that.

The book makes the case that the U.S. political system is now characterized by a vicious feedback loop between polarizing political identities and polarizing political institutions. Over the coming weeks, I’ll write a few posts about things that struck me as I worked my way (back) through the book, and I’ll frame some questions it raised for me. First up is Klein’s origin story about the feedback loop, which involves the sorting of our various identities into camps aligned with newly differentiating political parties.

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In Justice, Gender, and the Family, Susan Okin wrote about a cartoon she once saw. “Three elderly, robed male justices are depicted, looking down with astonishment at their very pregnant bellies. One says to the others, without further elaboration: ‘Perhaps we’d better reconsider that decision.’” (102).

I read that book for the first time over a decade ago now, but that comic stayed with me for a long time. On the one hand, it seemed like such a clever way to make a very big and important point. On the other hand, when I tried to nail down the exact content of that point, I found myself bristling at it.
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An opinion piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom describes a new “Covid concept home” that was unveiled this summer. The home—with its four bedrooms and three-and-a-half bathrooms—is clearly intended for upper middle-class buyers, though it has not yet been priced. The “concept” emerged from a collaboration among three businesswomen in light of an online survey of nearly 7,000 U.S. adults (with household incomes of $50,000+/year). The survey’s purpose was to test “consumer sentiment in light of COVID-19 to understand the design changes consumers want in new homes and communities.”

Those survey results reveal an interesting trend in the expectations of a certain social group about work, school, and home life: “many consumers view the pandemic not as a one-off, but as a harbinger: They will need to work from home in the future.” The Covid concept home is built with this in mind.

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When and how should someone be held responsible for having transgressed a moral standard that wasn’t widely recognized—and that they themselves didn’t recognize—at the time of the transgression? We’ve had lots of occasions to think about this question over the past few years.

Judgments in particular cases clearly depend on several variables. First, of course: Is the transgression ongoing or likely to recur absent holding responsible? And, even if it isn’t ongoing or recurrent: Was the transgressor to blame for not knowing the moral standard? What harms from the past transgression persist? Can they now be eased by holding the transgressor responsible? If so, by how much? How do we balance the harm of being held responsible under these circumstances against the harm we stand to ease? Those last questions in turn depend on what kind of holding responsible we have in mind.

Until a friend sent me this column, I hadn’t thought to apply these questions to the matter of grown children “cutting off” their parents in response to transgressions that weren’t—and in several cases seemingly still aren’t—recognized by the parents as such. From the column:

“The parents in these cases are often completely bewildered by the accusations. They often remember a totally different childhood home and accuse their children of rewriting what happened. As one cutoff couple told the psychologist Joshua Coleman: ‘Emotional abuse? We gave our child everything. We read every parenting book under the sun, took her on wonderful vacations, went to all of her sporting events.’”

The parents’ indignation suggests they believe that parenting books, sports events, and wonderful vacations somehow preclude abuse. But of course, the relationship may have been emotionally abusive even if what they say is true. Still, their indignation got me thinking that two forms of holding responsible are worth keeping distinct: First is the non-consensual severing of relations. Second is the naming of the offense: the designation of the parents’ treatment as “abusive.” I’m interested in thinking more about the latter.

Quoting again from the column:

“[P]art of the problem, as Nick Haslam of the University of Melbourne has suggested, is there seems to be a generational shift in what constitutes abuse. Practices that seemed like normal parenting to one generation are conceptualized as abusive, overbearing and traumatizing to another.”

Obviously, there are important questions to ask about what merits the term “abusive.” The column doesn’t give any detailed examples to think through. But imagine some instance in which you think that both the designation “emotionally abusive” and the cutting off are perfectly legitimate forms of holding responsible. I want to know: Even in your case, if the designation meets with the parents’ sincere befuddlement, has something wrong happened to them? Some failure to preserve legibility across generations in our terms of moral condemnation? I’m not suggesting that sincere befuddlement obligates anyone not to sever ties or not to condemn. And I’m not suggesting that a grown child now cutting off her parents has an obligation to ensure that her parents fully understand the charges. But the parents’ befuddlement does make me wonder if the younger generation somehow failed collectively: Do those in the vanguard with respect to changing the meaning of morally condemnatory terms need to do more to bring others along? There may be good reason to expand the meaning of words like “abusive” or “violent.” But shouldn’t those accused of abuse and violence at least understand the meanings by which they stand accused?

I wrote this for Public Ethics, addressing one of the theses from Feminism for the 99%, which claims that “liberal feminism is bankrupt.” That thesis reduces liberal feminism to corporate feminism or lean-in feminism. Against that reduction, I suggest that: “Properly understood, liberal feminism is radically egalitarian feminism—both as feminism and as liberalism. Properly situated, the values it espouses demand structural reform to redress economic disadvantage. That’s why, as a liberal feminist, I agree with the manifesto’s criticism of lean-in feminism.”

I then consider why, if liberal feminism properly understood is radically egalitarian, so many liberal feminist seem to be more focused on the women “breaking the glass ceiling” than on the women left to “clean up the shards.” One part of the answer:

“Liberalism offers a strong evaluative grounding for demands of justice on behalf of women across the social hierarchy—and indeed for demands that that hierarchy be demolished. The social subordination to which we subject the women sweeping up the shards is unjust on grounds of the freedom and equality that liberalism celebrates. Precisely because I think liberal feminism furnishes compelling diagnoses of these injustices and illuminating prescriptions for rectification, it strikes me as important to address the hard cases that it faces. These are cases wherein apparent choice seemingly shields inequity from censure—the cases that have long been regarded…as poison for liberal feminists. Redeeming liberalism’s promise as a radical evaluative framework requires addressing the cases wherein deference to choice appears to be justice-undermining. For liberal feminists, this notably includes cases of apparently voluntary compliance with gender norms, including gender norms about caregiving.”

I conclude that “liberalism can be a tool for building the movement this catastrophic moment demands—and it’s a tool the movement should be slower to cast aside.”

That might seem a silly question, but I’m finding myself genuinely wondering. I’m going to use this post to write through my confusion, building toward a second, deeper question, which arises if we’re willing to take that first question seriously: Should single-issue anti-abortion voters prefer a course of action that leads to fewer abortions, or should they prefer a course of action that leads to more abortions but that makes the laws better reflect their convictions about the ethics of abortion? This, I’ll suggest, is the actual choice situation they face.

I’m not a single-issue anti-abortion voter myself, so I might well misstep at various points. And, because most of the single-issue anti-abortion voters I know personally are Catholic, I’m still likelier to misstep with respect to the non-Catholic moral underpinnings of abortion opposition. Still, I don’t think anything I say in setting out the considerations as I see them needs to contradict the ethical or spiritual commitments that underpin these voters’ political stance. Indeed, I am trying to reason from those ethical commitments as I understand them to the political question at hand. Let’s grant for the sake of argument that Amy Coney Barrett would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Why might a single-issue anti-abortion voter nonetheless oppose her appointment? As I see it, there are two types of reasons for opposition.

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