Philosophy & Star Trek

SOPHIA Roanoke is happening again, this time with a Philosophy & Star Trek series:

I’m late to get the fliers printed, and I’m too worn out from this week and blissed out from my massage to really do much other than send texts. I miss Kinko’s.

Seminar: The Prime Directive and Consequence

If you see a society suffering and you have the means to help it, do you have a moral obligation to intervene?

This is the intersection of Utility and the Prime Directive, and it gets to the heart of the idea of eudaimonia, the ancient Greek notion of happiness. Eudaimonia is the underpinning for all Aristotelian ethics, but what does it mean to flourish? What moral mandates do we have to interve when someone is not flourishing? When a system is failing? When a society is acting in ways that we percieve as impeding the florishing of its citizens?

What is the Prime Directive, and what is its relationship --if any -- to eudaimonia? To ethics?  To Utility?

Beyond individual self-interest

Notes from "Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage" 

"Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest." 

"What do we owe those with whom we inhabit the earth? And what do we owe the earth, as well, while we’re at it? And why do we owe people or other living creatures that concern? Why do we owe them regard for life or a commitment to a nonviolent relationship? Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another." 

"what would it mean to live in a world of radical equality? My argument is that then we cannot kill one another, we cannot do violence to one another, we cannot abandon each other’s lives."  (emphasis added)

"If I think of myself not just as this bounded individual but as fundamentally related to others, then I locate this self in those relations. In that case, the self I am trying to defend is not just me but all those relations that define and sustain me, and those relations can, and should be, extended indefinitely beyond local units like family and community."

"we don’t need a new rational justification for nonviolence. We actually need to pose the question of violence and nonviolence within a different framework, where the question is not “What ought I to do?” but “Who am I in relation to others, and how do I understand that relationship?”"

"We have to be able to identify institutional modes of violence, including prisons and the carceral state, that are too often taken for granted and not recognized as violent. It’s a question of bringing out in clear terms those institutions and sets of policies that regularly make these kinds of distinctions between valuable and non-valuable lives." [e.a]

The common thread.

"Every single vector of the jackpot was weaponized by the same disruptor: human nature. Now, it might have manifested itself as selfishness, or venality, or simple stupidity, but at the bottom, it all amounted to the same trait: our persistent, self-destructive resistance to acting for a collective good."

Hutchens

Interview with Dr. Hutchens
research manuscript: “‘Flipping’ the Tenure Debate and the Continuing Need to Protect Academic Freedom,” Counterpoint, Vol. 517; Colleges at the Crossroads: Taking Sides on Contested Issues (2018) p 67-78. 

Summary: 
Hutchens looks at tenure for one of its most important incidental benefits: academic freedom. He shows how tenure is a twentieth century invention to help secure the ideal of a life of the mind in  universities, long held to be  dedicated spaces to think and reflect as opposed to places to produce specific, tangible goods or services. But tenure as we know it is being diluted—by a diminishment of tenured positions through the ever-expanding percentage of contingent faculty—and simultaneously eroded— by laws that seek to constrain the landscape that tenure encompasses. These threats to tenure imperil academic freedom, the ability to say and think and research as one will without regard to those who hold the purse strings. “Currently, uncertainty encompasses the available mechanisms to protect professors’ academic freedom,” (p. 70) and “failing to support academic freedom i higher education undercuts the kind of intellectual and scientific advancements that have made American higher education a model looked to by the rest of the world.” (P. 72). The answer, he suggests, is by extending those protections of academic freedom—explicitly and without regard to tenure—to all employees of the university, thereby rendering the so-called “tenure debate” toothless while also re-elevating the university campus to its ideal, and some might claim rightful, place as a place to think and to reflect.

During the interview, I asked Dr. Hutchens what led him to tie the two threads of academic freedom and tenure together in the particular way that he did. He told me of his origins as a history student, and then a law student and how he initially thought that he would focus on the K-12 education and the law, but then found himself fascinated by higher education. He was intrigued by the, admittedly medieval in many ways, notion of an entire system dedicated to the life of the mind, while at the same time seeing the many legal and cultural efforts to dismantle it. He said he feels we might well be at a “windmill and Don Quixote moment” culturally, given the recent political efforts to dismantle what is arguably a crown jewel in many of the states that are striving hardest to constrain tenure and the university itself.

He talked about how the foundations of the academy are precarious and eroding, and how they have been since the 70s but that recent efforts are nothing short of astonishing, seeming to be the epitome of cutting one’s nose off to spite one’s face. We spoke of union efforts on campuses, a coalition between collective bargaining and traditional law, and he said that recently the AAUP and AFT are joining together to enter the conversation on unionizing and other protection efforts. 

I asked him what the role of SACS and other regional accreditation agencies is in light of universities  removing standard majors such as history or philosophy, or closing whole departments such as English. He said that though the agencies were originally regional, they aren’t any longer, and a university can now shop around until it finds an agency that will provide credentials, and the credentials are only meaningful for student aid. He can see a bleak time when these less rigorous agencies will hold a place of preferential status, wherein a governor might decide that only certain agencies are relevant for accreditation credentials, and that could lead to a dismantling of the contemporary university. 

What then? I wondered. Ideological conformity is threatening decades of university building, and where does that leave us—academics, specifically, but American culture more generally—if even only some of these efforts succeed? He agreed that there would be long term and far reaching consequences to whatever we think of as American culture. 

Reflections:

Despite the grim and gloomy nature of the topic, I found Dr. Hutchens upbeat and engaged. He truly loves the idea of university and loves the universities themselves, embattled though they are. We discussed the professorate and the role and possible responsibility of the university in being forthcoming about how many positions are available for faculty, which is merely a small fraction of the graduates produced each year.  I mentioned the meager stipend often afforded to teaching assistants, and noted how I had opted to take on dogsitting instead, earning nearly as much as a TA position at University of Kentucky, while somehow also failing to make what seemed to be expected and appropriate steps for my off-transcript resume. I confessed that while I wasn’t approaching my doctoral studies as a path to a career, it was good that I wasn’t, because by not doing these materially bad and laborious off-transcript steps, I was gravely diminishing my chances of employment anywhere. Are we all to become public philosophers? I asked. I told him of reading Kim Tolley’s collection Professors in the Gig Economy, (2018) and how it cemented my view that while I love universities, I think I don’t have any place there and am much better off hosting philosophy talks at the local public library while wearing my regalia, once I’ve earned them. And in many ways, doing so would feel as though it were a return to the more ideal, albeit quasi-medieval, role of the university itself, the life of the mind made manifest.

Neither of us expected to talk as long as we did, going on for over an hour. I asked him to send me something short and digestible if he had anything like that handy, and he mentioned a column he recently wrote. I look forward to talking with him again, and feel there are many rich threads left to explore at the intersections of higher education, the law, and the culture of the mind.

The Age of Spiritual Machines

Ray Kurzweil loves intelligent machines. He has a vision beyond just intelligence, though, one of partnership that will take us to a new era of human gentleness, an era hallmarked by a positive and supportive integration with machines that are not only intelligent, but spiritual. 

In Kurzweil's vision, "life in the new millennium no longer seems daunting. Instead, Kurzweil’s twenty-

first century promises to be age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live." 

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicts that machine memory and computational ability will surpass that of human in 2020, ushering in an era hallmarked by "relationships with automated personalities," wherein humans will interact with machines as their "teachers, companions, and lovers." By 2030, he tells us, "information will be fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways; computers, for their part, will have read all the world's literature. The distinction between [humans] and computers will have become sufficiently blurred that when the machines claim to be conscious, we will believe them."

Bill Joy, of Sun Microsystems, met Kurzweil at a conference in 1999 and Ray shared a pre-publication partial reprint of Age. Bill was so affected by the conversations with Ray and others at the conference that he described it as a subject "haunts me to this day." He ended up writing a longform article (the .pdf is 18 pages), published in Wired, about a much less idyllic future than the one Kurzweil envisions, a future that is essentially already upon us, one that––due  to the self-replicating nature of early 21st century technological innovations of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR)––have the capacity to end human life on the planet. 

Joy's conclusion is curious: “The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” It would be a head-scratcher on its own, given that Joy spends much of the article discussing his path from literate three-year-old to modern day guru of machine design, a path that is hallmarked at every turn by curiousity and the desire to answer questions and to seek solutions to problems. It is wholly unsurprising that Joy found Star Trek (the original series) to be inspiring: he came from a modest background was insatiably curious, and had a problem-solving mind; Joy spent a lot of time at the library and watching network television: this is exactly the audience for whom Rodenberry wrote his humanitarian tales. 

What makes Joy's conclusion even more baffling is that it is essentially Theodore Kaczynski's underlying argument in "Industrial Society and Its Future," the so-called manifesto printed by The Washington Post in 1995. Kaczynski believed that this particular knowledge and research was dangerous to the future of the human race, and he wrote many letters to those few academics and researchers who were propelling the science into new frontiers, pleading with them to stop.

Joy knew of Kaczynski, invokes him early on in his essay, and claims "I am no apologist for Kaczynski." One assumes that Joy is attempting to separate the man's violence from his ideas, here, and bully on Joy for that. But one wonders exactly what level of social and academic control is envisioned by someone who spent his whole life researching, exploring, and creating, all with only the goal of solving problems.

Yes, research is dangerous, and no, we don't know what we're doing ("that's why they call it research," as Einstein pointed out).  I don't agree with Kurzweil et al as to the utopian vision of intelligent machines, let alone this blissed-out harmonious interwoven reality granted to humans by blending with spiritual machines. I'm a Quaker; I like my machines few and far between, my reliance on them as light as possible, and (unlike the rest of my life)for them to be simple, long-lasting, and easily repaired. 

I also agree it would be the saddest state of human affairs to begin "limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge." If we cannot dream of the stars, what is the point?

Even robots dream of electric sheep. 

Better than we know

We are better than we know, if we can be made to see it, [then] for the rest of our lives, we'll be unwilling to settle for less. 

- Kurt Hahn

Seminar: Survival

"They would choose freedom, no matter how fleeting.  . . .  Survival is insufficient."

 

Resistance is NOT futile

When I watched this clip, I cheered out loud (much to the chagrin of my friends and fellow students in the common room that evening). We see the solidarity of self-determination from within the collective, compassion for an outsider, and defiance of authority (in the form of the chillingly assimilated Picard, who has difficulty with the pronoun I). Also, the choice of "Hugh" is excellent. We are Hugh becomes heard as We are you.

Seminar topic: even if resistance comes to nothing immediately, is it futile? Is resistance its own valuable act? What solidarity do we owe to those who are disadvantaged/oppressed even (especially) if we are not? 

There are FOUR lights

In this episode, Picard admits that in the end, torture prevailed. He would have been willing to say anything, but, even worse, he had come to see five lights, despite knowing the truth that there were only four. Oppression warps reality and our own ability to perceive the truth. It is the presence of the rescue team that allows him to issue the iconic line. 

 

What is being offered to Picard is particularly appealing to me: a life of comfort, with time to pursue philosophy. This offer -- and the ability to withhold it-- is what corrupts the lizard brain to comply with the oppressor. 

While survival may, in fact, be insufficient, it must also be safeguarded at all costs. What does this mean for the creation of a just society?

Your First Duty is to the Truth

Picard pretty much owns Wesley on lying, and gets harsh when Wesley defends himself through a technicality.

Is it ever okay to lie?

Why does Picard take such a hard stance on lying, even lies by omission?

What harm is done when we lie?

Hope

"If we want to truly endure, we can't just focus on what it takes to merely survive. We have to focus on what it takes to truly live. And that doesn't just come from the head; it comes from the heart. So the non-essentials, as you call them, the writers, the artists,  the dreamers--they are essential, because in our darkest hours, they give us the most essential ingredient to the survival of our species: Hope. And in the end, it is hope, and only hope, that will save us."

----Jillian, Salvation, S1:E4

Kobyashi Maru

The Kobyashi Maru is an exercise in Starfleet’s training program, designed as a no-win situation that tests ethical decision-making and leadership. During the exercise, a cadet encounters a civilian ship in distress. To save the civilians, the cadet needs to enter the Neutral Zone, violating a treaty. If the cadet honors the treaty, the civilians will be left stranded and at the mercy of the hostile Klingons.  If the treaty is broken, the Klingon armies will likely attack and board the ship being commanded by the cadet. 

What would you do faced with the original Kobyashi Maru?

What do you think of Kirk’s “success” through cheating?

What sorts of ethical decisions are in play as the Kobyashi Maru opens? How do ethical decisions who went before us influence, limit, and shape the (perceived) possibilities of our decisions and leadership today?

Do you believe in the existence of no-win situations? (Kirk didn’t.)

When faced with a no-win situation, what is the most ethical place from which to proceed? What role does self-interest play in a no-win situation? Is it the only thing that one has any power over at that point?

It matters quite a bit how we go about making decisions when it seems as though there are no good options. Kirk famously said “I don’t like to lose” when faced with the Kobyashi Maru (and then cheated to change the rules so that he could “win”). No one likes to lose, and that’s why this exercise exists, especially at the point that a cadet is being considered for leadership. The point of the no-win situation presented (which Kirk cheats his way out of) is to see what kind of character a cadet has. Clearly Kirk’s character is one that finds personal victory important enough to cheat. 

This, as you might imagine, bothers me, not just because cheating is wrong (so so so wrong!!!) but because real life isn’t about winning, it’s often about losing with integrity, or at least as much integrity as you can salvage. 

Academia is broken

Academia is having a normal one.

There's an important paper waiting to be written about the precarity of the professorship. This is a disgrace, and a continuation of decades of precarity in education. We can do better.

 “The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA seeks applications for an Assistant Adjunct Professor on a without salary basis. Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.” 

University assets continue to post historic gains. "UC assets grow by $38 billion in 2021 to $168 billion, with endowment returning 33.7 percent and pension up 30.5 percent"  

And tuition continues to outpace inflation at a blistering pace "How Much is the tuition for 4 years at UCLA? For the students who were admitted in Fall 2021, the estimated tuition for 4 years is $52,966 for California residents and $176,376 for out-of state students."

Meanwhile, in sports:

"The new contract will pay Kelly an average of $4.7 million annually, a source told ESPN. Including incentives, Kelly could make $23 million ($5.75 million per year) over the course of the contract, sources told ESPN's Chris Low. His salary in 2021 was $5.6 million. UCLA has posted a 18-25 record in Kelly's four years." Jan 15, 2022

The Social Gospel and Education

     The New York Times article "Do Other Countries Teach Better?" opens with a paragraph that sets out its framework: the US labor force is at a disadvantage for global competition in the "new global economy." The headline sets the stage for this salient leap of illogic, proclaiming, in the form of an investigative question, that "other countries teach better."

     I cry foul from the starting whistle. One cannot simply take a ranking of a basic performance metric to evaluate the global success of a population, and the editors' greatest sleight of hand here is in presenting "millions of laid off workers" as the result of a faulty national education program, generally, and of bad teaching, specifically. Essentially the equation we are shown in the headline and first paragraph is that a lack of robust employment in the United States is the teachers' fault. Put this way, it seems like a silly sentence. Nonetheless, we all do love a graph, and the editors make great use of the OECD rankings.

     "The United States is losing ground in worker training to countries in Europe and Asia whose schools are not just superior to ours but getting steadily better." It's important to note that this article comes in 2013, a few years after the great 2008 financial crisis, an economic implosion that was borne by the workers, but not by the businesses that had created a financial house of cards. But let's leave these considerations aside for a moment and discuss the comparison at hand. Do "other countries teach better?"

     The editors rightly highlight two key differences between Finland and the United States: first that education is seen as a social investment, and second -- most importantly to the editors and likewise to this scholar -- that teachers have a place of high esteem in Finnish society, reflected by rigorous training and excellent relative compensation growth within the profession. The United States takes an extreme opposite approach, and the results are clear. But what makes this approach possible in Finland and impossible in the United States?

     The answer lies in the editors' analysis of school funding in Canada, where differences in neighborhood economic levels are evened out by state coffers, again an approach exactly opposite of our country. "Americans tend to see such inequalities as the natural order of things." This, along with a national sentiment of devaluing education generally, is at the heart of the situation on the table. And American disparagement of education is itself predicated on the belief of "inequalities as the natural order of things." Only in America do you hear the adage "those who can't do, teach," and one hears it quite often, a sentiment more in line with Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution,” which devalued intellectual pursuits and demonized academics. In Finland, Canada, and most everywhere in the world, even in the countries who performed at lower ranks on the OECD chart, it is assumed that if we want people to be able to do, we must at some point teach, and this gets to the heart of the editors' analysis. 

     Anywhere else in the developed world, a situation where "40 percent of ... public school students [are] in districts of 'concentrated student poverty'" would constitute a national crisis to be addressed with utmost urgency. In the United States, we take such a situation as a given, a reflection of "the natural order of things." What cultural conditions exist to make disparity "the natural order?" 

     This mindset reveals an underlying cultural belief in economic success as ultimate proof of moral superiority, an outgrowth of Frederick Jackson Turner's "rugged individualism" mythos turned into a cult of social darwinism, the so-called Social Gospel of the 1920s. The blueprint of the social gospel continues to drive political decisions in all areas of American society, but especially in the realm of education. "If you deserved an education," the social gospel seems to tell us, "you could afford one." Economic success is proof in this country of deservingness, whereas in other developed countries it is treated as luck, literally referred to as fortune, and comes with a sense of social obligation. The form and weight of this obligation varies from one culture to the next, but the presence of some form of duty of care for those less fortunate is undeniable in all the OECD countries on the list. China dominates the list because they have made sweeping social and political changes to value education, reversing inequality in education since the death of Mao. "Shanghai has taken several approaches to repairing the disparity between strong schools and weak ones, as measured by infrastructure and educational quality." The United States, by contrast, instituted the No Child Left Behind policy, which in effect punishes weaker schools by diminishing their funding and teacher salaries through gatekeeping federal money. 

     "If things remain as they are, countries that lag behind us will one day overtake us," the editors conclude. Their litmus for success is not, interestingly enough, on our rankings at mathematics within the OECD nations. Instead, it is American economic prowess that the editors say is in peril, that which is so worthy of preservation that we should bend the political will to achieve it. One wonders if this reflects an internalization of the American social gospel or if the authors are attempting to spur a national commitment to education by, as this reader suspects, speaking a language that will finally matter. 

     I return to my opening point. Do "other countries teach better?" is not exactly a fair question given the cultural differences on display. How the United States manages to rank as well as it does given the hostile social climate towards education is the real mystery. Perhaps America has no business being in the OECD list given the educational condition of the country. Instead, the results reveal a bit of a miracle, a story of overwhelming creative talent of educators combined with a foundation of capacity in students. The results show that America is squandering her greatest resource, her people, in a relentless adherence to the value of individual economic achievement. We must change our definition of success as a society and make a radical about-face of political will. The editors show that the commodification of education creates a risk to our global standing. We are not lacking teachers with the ability to "teach better." We are lacking leaders who value education enough for all citizens, and thereby the country, to succeed.

Nagata

The Universe never tells us if we did right or wrong. It’s more important to try to help people than to know that you did. More important that someone else’s life gets better than for you to feel good about yourself. You never know the effect you might have on someone, not really. Maybe one core thing you said haunts them forever. Maybe one moment of kindness gives them comfort or courage. Maybe you said the one thing they needed to hear. It doesn’t matter if you ever know. You just have to try. 

—-Naomi Nagata, The Expanse

2022 Wishes

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value. Rather, it is one of the things which give value to survival." C. S. Lewis

"Survival is insufficient." Star Trek Voyager, ep. 122

May your 2022 be filled with things which give value to survival.

Habermas, the UAE thing, and the utility of culture jamming.

Habermas' refusal is spot on. Awards are perfect times for "refusal to participate" protests. But we ought not take refusal as a hard and fast rule. Buy Nothing Day is a piece of culture jamming that works by refusal. Culture jamming also weaponizes participation, as in applying for grants or conference presentations or publication in journals that would likely work to different aims of their governing bodies.

When Habermas refused the UAE prize, he increased awareness of the human rights issues far beyond the scope of what the prize money would have been able to do. The Utilitarian approves. Using -- and refusing -- awards to affect the conversation around issues is important, and one ideally suited to Utilitarian analysis. In the case of grants by libertarian groups, many scholars opt not to apply, seeking not to align themselves with groups who seem to favor market forces and capital over improving the common welfare. But I argue this is short-sighted. Scholars ought seek these awards out with vigor, putting the funding to its best possible use. Refusal to be considered for these funds won't stop the Koch brothers or other neoliberal groups from administering the funds. We, as ethicists, should seek to be considered for two main reasons.

The first is that the funds are going to be awarded. If candidates limit themselves only to those of one viewpoint, that viewpoint is amplified, taking up more of the stage than is reflective of its place in the discourse.

Secondly, we ought to be mindful of how we dismiss the concerns of those with whom we disagree. By finding the starting point of what we both value -- despite differences in how we express or achieve that value -- we keep our own analysis relevant and more substantial. The conversation overall is richer.

Utilitarian scholars in particular have an obligation to seek out and pursue funding opportunities, conference participation, and journal publication which they might initially reject as less than like-minded. If the governors reject our scholarship, let them do it openly, looking at the best we have to offer, that which comes from a place of utility's mandate to value us all equally and to seek the best outcomes for everyone, even those with whom we disagree.

We are all made better for it.

Afterglow

 The last presentation is over and we mill out the doors into the twilight. The cement stairs reflect heat up through the soles of our shoes as we descend toward the street. The Uber back to the hotel is silent, our briefcases askew on our laps, conference program sticking out at an edge and I don't care.

Back at the hotel I wave as I get out of the elevator. You nod, a weary lift-and-release as you lean against the glass back of the elevator car, the plants of the lobby visible behind you like supporters on a coat of arms. The doors seem tired as the close you in.

I fumble with the key card three times before I realize I'm putting it into the door backwards, right it and lay the briefcase on the luggage stand, kick my Keds off leaving one, then the other before the door swings home behind me. The cargo pants and socks come off in one motion and the blouse follows, dropped to the floor like a trail of breadcrumbs heading to the bathroom where I start the tap for a hot bath.

I check my phone for the first time since breakfast: well wishes from Back Home friends, a question about a housesitting gig that happens next week, a random text from a forgotten flame; messages from a foreign land in a language I used to know but don't remember. I'm so full of ideas and conversations that words have lost their meaning. The phone battery light glows red and I drop it on the charging stand as I pick up epsom salt and test the water temperature, then climb in, letting the water coax the muscles of my back to uncringe. 

 

Only music makes sense now.

What an excellent day.

Lunch Lacuna

The presentation was a smashing success. You struggled not to crack an expression when I sent you a private message of "BINGO!" when a participant said "more of a comment than a Question" and followed it with "onto-relational." (What can I say? I know our audience.)

The post-panel discussion was rich with "let's do it again, only next time we can. . . ." possibilities. We love what we do and we're good at it. I stopped by the bathroom (down the hall and to the left) to swap out my skirt and flats for cargos and Keds, and now we're sitting at one of the many round tables, feet parked in chairs, sipping hot tea. The chicken Caesar salad was remarkably good, though I don't remember eating it.

A satisfied quiet is all around, punctuated with random bursts of conversation as we process, individually but together, all that we have discussed since breakfast. We're saturated, and the conversational blurts are release valves. This is creativity, and the sparks find other sparks. Energy thrums a low-key current throughout the room.

The next panel is on Thoreau and Self-reliance and we're all wondering just how sassy I'm about to be, but that's an hour from now. You point to ethicists' D&D pickup game forming over in the corner; they've just shouted a request for a thief-mage-cleric-thing or possibly a bard (they have plenty of fighters, but more are always welcome, they add raucously). It looks like great fun, but I shake my head, too spent from the presentation to say "no, thanks," and I realize I'm tired. The drop is coming -- I can feel it at the edges -- but for now it's just a contentment, a moment of stillness between swimming in Deep Thought. A feeling of being home.