LETTER: Society cannot dictate moral judgment
I am writing in response to Andrew Sendonaris' letter in last week's issue of the Thresher ("Media violence harms society's morals"). While I agree with many of Sendonaris' comments, I disagree strongly with his view of the proper relation of the individual to society.
At the outset I must mention that I, like Sendonaris, abhor the wasteland that is much of contemporary culture.
However, I disagree with his assertion that "Societies have the responsibility to make their members believe that there is such a thing as good or bad, and that such things as stealing, killing, etc., are considered bad." A society is not a disembodied entity apart from and superior to its members.
To say that society has such a responsibility can only mean that other people not only have the right, but the responsibility to force you to believe in their standards. In fact, the right to agree with others is singularly unproblematic; it is the right to disagree that is crucial to one's rights.
If you are not free to disagree and argue your case, then any other rights are meaningless.
People have free will; Sendonaris implies that in some respect people are automatons, programmed by ideas which society must take responsibility for censoring. Sendonaris bases this on the "self-preservation" of society.
However, society does not have a self to preserve. Only individuals do. Sendonaris proposes in effect to violate the rights of dissenters so as to prevent society from collapsing into the "chaos that would ensue" when certain agreed-upon standards are flouted.
The examples of chaos which Sendonaris gives in his article, however, are horrendous because they are unreflective violations of others' rights, not simply because they are "chaotic."
By one sort of analysis, they are examples of selfishness run wild. I have heard this claim before and Sendonaris would probably agree with it. However, this confuses a concern for the self with an unthinking desire for material objects. Morality is the judgment of the choices open to you by some standard of the good.
It is choice that is essential here; if you do not have free will, your actions are amoral -- outside the province of morality. Choice between conflicting desires requires a thinking, choosing self. In this sense, then, a boy who shoots another boy for his athletic shoes has little self to examine and control his own desires.
However, you will not make him a more moral person by inculcating in him unthinking obedience to some standard, you will only make him obedient to different unexamined urges.
It is not the media that cause the violence Sendonaris decries; the media dish out their bloody grand left-and-right of violence, inhumanity and callousness because some people really like it and others accept it as entertainment. The media only present images; people choose of their own free will whether to copy them.
I agree with Sendonaris that something has gone terribly wrong, but it is due to the harmful ideas that have permeated our public school system for most of this century. American educators claim that the purpose of education is social adjustment, not academic excellence. They have expended piles of money and millenia of man-years on the first goal and feel that only a minimum basic competence is necessary for the second.
American educators esteem emotions and denigrate the intellect. They seek to ingrain self-esteem in children as if it is an inalienable right, whereas in fact it is something children must earn by taking pride in their achievements. In the name of "self-esteem," they refuse to educate children in the life of the mind, preventing children from earning the self-esteem that can come from education.
At the same time they hammer children down into the group and make life hellish for any child who prefers learning to fitting in with the group.
Their efforts to cause self-esteem to grow in children whose selves they have battered with their worthless anti-intellectual fads instead implant in children a truculent insistence on getting whatever they want because they want it, because it is their whim or because it will make the group like them.
I am not calling for a return to traditional values. I am not calling for an unquestioning obedience to established religious ideas in place of unquestioning obedience to whatever will fit in with the clique or the gang.
I do not believe that the classical canon has the magical power to make people think if they don't want to; it can only provoke them to think, and it often doesn't do even that.
What I do call for is a return to the mind, not unthinking, rigorous discipline.
Children love to learn. It is tragic that our educational system steals that love away from many children and turns their youths into unrelieved drudgery.
Mikael Thompson
Jones '97
This item appeared in the Opinion section of the September 20, 1996 issue.
Copyright © 1996 The Rice Thresher. All Rights
Reserved.
This document may be distributed
electronically, provided that it is distributed in its
entirety and includes this notice. However, it cannot be reprinted
without the express written permission of:
The Rice Thresher, Rice University, 6100 Main, Houston, TX 77005-1892, USA.
The Thresher Online Project -- ethresh@listserv.rice.edu