Implicit American Arrogance

I was thinking one day, and it really struck me how arrogant we Americans are in dealing about the rest of the world. We don't always consciously do this, but its still there nonetheless.

For example, can you imagine the public outcry there would be if any game studio anywhere created a game ever depicting the US in a negative light? We have games like Battlefield 3 and Medal of Honor where gamers play as US soldiers killing Arabs of various nationalities in their own countries and it's morally acceptable. Imagine now a game where the user plays as an Arab killing US soldiers. Even if he's doing it for the most altruistic reasons: defending his homeland, his family, his way of life, his religion, he's killing American soldiers and thus always morally repugnant. America is always morally just, and those who disagree are always morally wrong.

Maybe a better example would be a game set elsewhere, playing as a soldier fighting against the US CIA operatives in their country trying to overthrow their government. Plenty of real world examples of this exist: the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the attempts at Fidel Castro, intervention in vietnam, etc. etc. Once again it doesn't matter why you fight us, you are wrong because you fight us.

Another example of our arrogance came to mind when I was watching an episode of the West Wing (which I highly recommend). I dont remember exactly what happened, but it was something along the lines of a foreign diplomat telling US officials that since we are so fond of calling ourselves the leaders of the free world, we should go ahead and start leading (meaning intervening in whatever conflict was central to the show's plot). That phrase, "leaders of the free world" really struck a chord in me. First, it implies that anyone not under the US banner are inherently not free. Second, it explicitly states that we are the leaders and no one else. It's vague enough to makes us the leaders economically, militarily, politically, and morally of the whole world. Some of those may be true, but implying all of them by declaring ourselves to be the leaders of the free world reveals a vast arrogance. Imagine the opposite, that you're a citizen of America while, say, the Germans declare themselves the leaders of the free world. Yeah.

Media outlets are also very fond of jumping on moral outrages occurring in other countries. Perhaps the most frequent of these are punishments being administered in Muslim states for what Americans consider petty offenses. Again, there is an implicit arrogance in how the media portrays this and how the public perceives it. We would never stop to think that maybe that's how their societies have maintained social order for the past thousand years, but about how backward their societies are. How primitive. How if they would just eat McDonalds, listen to hip-hop and drive Fords the world would be a better place. I don't seek to take a moral stand on the specific issue here, I'm just noting the mindset that Americans are so quick to jump to upon hearing these types of stories.

We are also vary arrogant in how we approach relations with the rest of the world. We are so inherently sure that we know how people should live and therefore everyone should live like us. Just recently i vaguely remember Obama mentioning in a speech how it is our goal to democratize the rest of the world. As if we have a divine mandate to spread our way of life to the rest of the world and they have to accept it or step aside. As I have previously noted, there are plenty of problems with American society and in no way is it the bastion of peace, harmony, and fulfillment we believe it to be. I should note that what America wants is not for the whole world to embrace democracy. What we want is for everyone to accept a subjugated democracy, in which the people themselves don't interfere with American foreign policy self interest. Rest assured that if there was every an unfriendly democracy, we would meddle in their affairs one way or another.

I should point out that i don't hate America, or something. I just think that people should question the fundamental assumptions of their culture before they accept them. Maybe I should write an article next time about how great America is to counterbalance all this criticism I've given them lately.

The Purpose of College

I watched a college conspiracy theory movie on youtube, and I thought that I'd share my thoughts.

The crux of the movie is that by destroying the free market in college educations, the government has put tons of college graduates into enormous debt. Im not 100% sure what the crux was though; it was a while ago and I didn't watch like the last 15 minutes haha

As to what the movie itself was describing, I think that the government has been trying to make its citizens better educated and better able to compete in a global economy by subsidizing college educations to make them more affordable. This drove private loaners out of the market, and led to a lot of people going to college who might better spend their time elsewhere by learning a trade or something. More people going to college means that the value of a degree itself has greatly declined. It doesnt mean much anymore to have a college degree. The demand for college educations has risen as well, drastically increasing tuition costs.

College itself is an interesting topic. A small percentage of people actually go into careers associated with what they majored in. And the students that are supposedly "better prepared for a career" are often forced into entry level jobs, sometimes into career fields where no college level education is necessary. So why go?

I think college is important of our lives for a couple of reasons. One, it serves as a transition between adolescence and adulthood. We studied this in anthropology of religion, where coming-of-age rituals feature aspects of liminality (go wiki this). In this aspect college is very important in making youths into adults. Sociologically, you actually come to embody a different identity. I won't go to heavy into the theory here (you can look it up if you're interested), but identity is said to be rooted in vocation, geography, and social community. I think. This was last semester's material. Anyhoodles what happens in college is that all the things that you identity is rooted in change. You change living conditions/area, you are surrounded by new people, and you come to identify with the new identity of a college student. Hence people experiment with their own identities while they're in flux. Sex, drugs, alcohol, facial hair, fashion styles, and musical/food tastes are all ways in which people's identities begin to shift.

College also serves as a prime social networking opportunity. Even if your degree has nothing to do with your career, the faculty and students you connect with serve as a great resource for potential careers and other opportunities. The friends you make can last a lifetime, and a great number of people meet their future spouse there. It's also really fun to be under financial protection while coming into adulthood, which gives you a lot more freedom. I think we all owe our parents on this one.

College is really only useful academically when your career follows from your degree. In that case, business degrees, engineering degrees, law degrees, and other Ph. D.s are the most useful of the degrees since they do lead into career fields. The main reason why I avoid them however, is that such degrees make your college into a trade school, and often narrow the focus of your mind to your trade and not much else. I like to keep my horizons more broadened.

It doesnt really matter though if college doesnt help you in a career that much. In our capitalistic society the commonplace belief is that you better damn well get that degree or somebody else will, and there goes your future. It is valuable, just not in the ways that it is commonly associated with.

Why Every Moral Philosopher Ever to Philosophize Was Wrong

Many philosophers over the years have attempted to set down a definitive guide to human morals (I took intro to moral and political philosophy last semester). Aristotle espoused Greek virtue, about the higher ideals for all humans to aspire to like eudaimonia. Emmanuel Kant tried to create a moral law-formula, the categorical imperative, to define what's right and wrong in terms of of the context of human society as a whole. Utilitarians defined right and wrong in terms of the "happiness" utility of an action.

Early on in the semester we discussed moral relativism, the idea that everyone's morals are of equal truth value. It was dismissed however, for 3 reasons. If moral relativism is true, then no one society can justify criticizing another society because their morals are true too. You also cannot criticize aspects of your own society because every value held is true. There is also no such thing as societal progress or degeneration either.

The problem with these criticisms is that there's no logical fallacy committed in them that invalidates moral relativism. We just don't like the outcomes so we say that it's wrong.

I argue that as inherently artificial constructs, morality is entirely relative form person to person and thus moral relativism is true. From a truly objective standpoint, all morals are true which is to say that all morals are false too. Objectively human societies never progress or degenerate, they just change.

I think theres a strong difference between objective and subjective morality. Objectively moral relativism is true, but subjectively (because objective moral relativism is true), we are free to believe in whatever morals we want. That includes the ability to criticize others for their moral beliefs. This is totally valid although it should be conducted under the assumed knowledge that there is no objectivity to back such claims.

Because of objective moral relativism no attempt to set down a definitive set of moral principals will ever succeed. Societies and their morals are always in flux, and therefore anything set in stone will become obsolete.

Some claim that societal morals against things like murder invariably lead to a healthier society and are therefore proof of some sort of definitive objective morals. Thats false. Such morals maybe conducive to societal well-being, but that doesn't mean that they hold universal truth value. One way to truly think objectively is to remove qualifier words from your vocabulary.

Sex, Nudity, and Swearing. Get Your Attention? (a 2-for-1 night)

In light of recent events I figured a double post wednesday was ok. I was studying for my Law and Society final and was going over American obscenity and sexual laws when it struck me how weird they are. The laws themselves reflect cultural values we have about sex, so maybe it'd be a good idea to start my analysis there.

I find it strange that pornography is stigmatized within our society. Porn is depicting people having sex. Sex is such a fundamental part of being human, or even alive, that stigmatizing it is objectively as strange as stigmatizing videos of people eating. Granted there are types of pornography that involve criminal behavior that probably should be outlawed. But the vast majority isn't. One argument is that it objectifies women or debases them in some way. Again I'm sure there are types of porn based entirely upon debasing women, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority isn't. Does porn objectify or debase the men that participate? I'd also like to see some evidence of this happening. With the proliferation of the internet, porn has spread widely through society. There's your IV, show me a DV.

I think it far more likely that people simply don't like porn because of the puritan culture in which we are born, and make up arguments in order to justify it for the general public. Professor James Hunter's arguments about cultural conflict theory can be applied very well here.

Obscenity laws are also interesting. For starters I'm not sure why being naked in public is a crime. Is the human body itself so intrinsically repulsive that we must wear clothes to cover it up? It's almost as if we wear clothes as a shield to our base desires. It's almost as if theres a collective unconscious fear that if no one were to wear clothes, suddenly everyone would lose control and have mass orgies out on the streets.

One common argument is that we have obscenity laws to protect our children. No doubt that there are pedophiles out there who would take advantage of a universal lack of clothing in some way, and such behavior should be repressed for the health of the members of the society. But I feel that the argument is predominantly that being exposed to nudity, especially of the other sex, somehow ruins childhood innocence. Sex as an act may do that, in that many people see the act of sex itself as a rite of passage to adulthood, adulthood meaning being able to have children. I'd argue that being exposed to the other sex does not ruin children. I'd also like to point out that we are apparently the only species that cares about this. Have you ever heard about a chimpanzee, dolphin, squirrel, etc. ever being traumatized from youth despite being naked themselves as well as every other member of their species?

We as a culture seem so afraid of our own bodies. And I'm not sure theres a good reason why. Sex itself is so overly stigmatized. It's a natural part of life and yet we as a culture seem so afraid of it. This is probably due in some way to our puritan/victorian england cultural heritage.

Bad words are another interesting topic. I saw an episode of Campus PD in which an officer arrested someone for swearing in public on disorderly conduct. Thats how serious swearing can be in the US.

As we english speakers know, there are varying degrees of bad words. We have feces, poop, crap, shit. Heck, hell. Consummate a relationship, have sex with, fuck. Do any of these variations actually mean anything different? No, all that is different are their connotations, and their connotations are only different because we make them so as a culture. There is nothing inherently wrong with any word, they just seem that way because we make them so.

I guess I'm trying to point out that theres nothing inherently wrong with so many things that people perceive to be wrong. Many of these things are perceived wrongs only because we perceive them to be wrong. Theres nothing intrinsically wrong about them, and often times the things that we define as wrong we do so with no good reason.

On a random side note, i remember hearing once that some Inuit tribe in northern Canada had seven words or so for snow. As an American I thought this crazy. There's just snow. How can you have seven variations of it? Then it was explained to me that snow is a huge part of their culture, that they are exposed to so much of it that they do perceive 7 variations worthy of different words. It was defined in their language and culture as such. Then I thought, how many words can you name that all mean shit?

Osama Bin Laden

As you've no doubt heard, Osama Bin Laden is dead. I think its way to early on for me to give an educated opinion about anything that's happened since, however there is one thing i have to say. Right now, I'm pretty scared. With Bin Laden's death, al Qaeda has to respond in some way to prove itself as a legitimate organization. And it has to be something big. If they don't respond with violence or do with more small scale attacks, they're essentially finished. Which would be great. But I don't think it's going to turn out this way.

The death of bin laden is hugely symbolic. If al Qaeda is still functioning they have to respond in a big way. This logic, coupled with some recent things i've read has me pretty scared. You can google these to double check my sources. 1: in his Gitmo testimony, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the mastermind of 9/11, stated that in the event of Bin Laden's death, a "nuclear hell storm" would be unleashed on America. 2: In recently published documents on Wikileaks from Guantanamo Bay, Abu Farahal Libi stated that he believed al Qaeda to have a nuclear bomb or some facility or something hidden somewhere in Europe, and that it would be used in the event of Bin Laden's death. I really hope that these are empty threats, but if al Qaeda did have a major attack in the works, now is the time for them to use it. I'm thinking these next few years are going to be pretty tense.

Going along with this idea, I'm fairly certain that Bin Laden would have made advanced preparations in the event of his capture or death. Whatever people may say about him, he's not stupid. He would know that as America's most wanted man his time was limited. Over his ten years since 9/11 I'm sure he has a contingency plan in place which could include a large scale attack. At any rate I hope I'm wrong about all of this.