Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life

Believing in Difference: The Ethics of Civic Literacy (1993)

1 believing in difference: the ethics of civic literacy () I can think of no more urgent moment than now for undergraduate educators to be asking ethical questions about the content and context of a liberal arts education. How can the interdisciplinary work of liberal studies, for example, bring harmony out of the dissonances of a curriculum , on the one hand, increasingly energized by the dynamic differences between races, classes, and genders, and a society, on the other, increasingly threatened by divisiveness, disengagement, and disenfranchisement? Can liberal studies help heal the wounds of our fractured national life? Or is the spirit of integration that has traditionally nourished myths of unity and consensus among interdisciplinary humanists more of a problem than a solution? Benjamin DeMott (1990) accurately surveys such ethical ground. He questions our pressing need to bring alive the differences between us at a time when “our power to see others feelingly in their separateness and distinctness” is drained by a self-enclosure that grips moral life in America today. “There’s too little realization,” he complains, “that the first step Learning in the Plural 2 toward achieving the spirit of liberty is the development of a capacity to believe in difference and to register it, to imagine one’s way deeply into the moment-to-moment feelings and attitudes of people placed differently from oneself” (13). A report entitled “Democracy’s Next Generation,” issued by the nonpartisan constitutional-liberties organization People for the American Way, concludes that among young Americans of all races between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four “self-interest often drowns out concern about our nation’s progress toward full social equality. . . . Pulling back out of [an] economic fear” fueled by the media myth that living well is synonymous with material wealth, today’s undergraduates, according to the report, “are remarkably pessimistic about our nation’s future” (Kropp 1992, B3). I detect a pessimism in some of my own students’ moral discourses that stems, I believe, from increasing self-enclosure and, in particular, from the way that civic empathy and social idealism have lost their power to inspire the current generation’s ethical commitments. In fact, many students today are frankly suspicious of idealism. Curiously, the word itself has undergone a shift in connotation and now means something slightly more akin to “fatalism ” or “fantasy.” The idealist is often viewed, then, as a sentimentalist or, worse, as a loser in a contemporary world where the future begins to look more like an inexorable grinding away of the present into itself, a world reawakened to an old nemesis of civic culture in America that the poet Langston Hughes decried as “the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” ETHICAL IDEALISM I cannot draw this discussion into the labyrinth of idealism’s many usages and meanings, since, as it has been said, the history of Western philosophy is largely a history of idealism, not to mention the parallel traditions The Ethics of Civic Literacy 3 that resonate powerfully in the philosophic and religious idealism of non-Western cultures, especially India and China. I am not as interested, however, in the philosophical character of idealism as much as with “ethical ” or “social” idealism as it is most commonly understood in today’s moral vernacular. According to this perspective, the notion of a society as a consortium of autonomous individuals is both absurd and destructive. Ethical idealism holds that persons are constituted by their networks of interaction with others, and an existence apart from those associations is, at best, a diminished existence. As such, there are ultimate, higher, suprapersonal “ideals” worth aspiring to—mutual welfare, for example, or social justice, or “enlightened” self-interest, or the empathic civility that is the ballast to jurist Learned Hand’s spirit of liberty, “the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women without bias” (Hand 1952, 190). Equally important, other-directed commitment, while serving the highest common good, is simultaneously the fulfillment of the individual. Ethical or social idealism, then, stakes the communitarian claim that individual moral freedom derives, not from psychological or natural necessity, not from filial or class arrangements, but from a covenant—whether secular or theistic—that binds the individual and the polity together into an ethical holism. In America that holism is a compact called “civil society,” a compact that innervates our civic life and gives our...