Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Is Online Social Networking Changing the Way People Relate to Each Other?

note - This post was written by our guest Malcolm Parks at the time that we initially recorded the episode which is airing this week. 

Greetings.  My name is Malcolm Parks and I'll be joining John and Ken to discuss this topic at an event at Pacific University on April 17th.  I'm a communication researcher at the University of Washington, where I've been looking into online and offline social networks and relationships for some time.

Facebook, now the world's largest online social networking site, enrolled its 200 millionth member earlier this month.  Sites like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, Twitter, and many others have become so successful that we forget they are all less than 5-6 years old.  It's far too soon to have definitive answers, but we do know social networking sites (SNS) raise some intriguing questions about the nature of social relationships and how it might be changing.  Here are a few ideas to get us thinking...

Does Facebook Change the Way People Relate to Each Other?   When researchers like me think about the social impact of communication technologies like Facebook, we try to look beyond simple things like saving time or money.  Instead we ask four questions about SNS like Facebook and MySpace: 

Too soon to know for sure, but here are some of the things we might consider.  Right off the top, let's ask what it means to be a "friend" in an online setting like Facebook.  Research shows that most people list 2-20 friends in offline settings.  But the average number of "Facebook friends" is typically 300-500.  So who are all these people?  Acquaintances?  Friends of friends?  Lapsed friends? 

Thanks to everything from personal profiles to google searches, it is possible to learn more about people before first meeting them.  Some have suggested that this might make us more critical-- more quickly sorting down to those few people who match some preset criterion.  Perhaps we harshly winnow out people who might be turn out to be more interesting if they had more of a chance.  Also, SNS make others' social connections more clearly visible to us than ever before.  What is the impact of that?  Does the old adage about judging people by the company they keep take on extra weight?  We think it might.  We also think that discovering that your friends have friends who belong to groups you don't like might have an impact on how prejudiced your are.  If nothing else, SNS and the internet generally have greatly increased contact among members of extended families (yes, that's right-- the net is pro-family!).  It also greatly increases access to social support for people dealing with diseases or difficult life changes. 

Does Facebook Change What it Means to "Know" Someone?  This is one of the more engaging questions for me-- and one that confronts us with basic philosophical questions about what we mean when we say we know another person.  Is "knowing" just having information about others?  If so, what kinds of information have the greatest knowledge value?  Or does true "knowing" unfold in a process of mutual revelation?  If so, does having all that additional information from someone's Facebook profile disrupt the process or does it just mean that we start farther along?  And what about the information itself?  Deception is a universal human behavior, but the internet makes it easier than ever to craft the image one wishes others to have.  So do we have more "information" but less real knowledge of others?  Are we beginning to assume that all online presentations are somewhat deceptive or, putting a less judgmental spin on it, playful or ironic?  These are important questions, but there are two more subtle questions that also interest me.  When so much information about us is public, what remains of the private or personal?  I'm always surprised that people don't worry more about all the personal information they put up online.  Finally, shouldn't we be worrying at least a little about the fact that Facebook and MySpace and many other SNS encourage us to describe ourselves in terms of standardized categories?  Are we commodifying ourselves?  Maybe we always have, but I'm particularly concerned when I see MySpace users present themselves in terms of product logos and symbols.  Do I really "know" you if I know what products and services you consume?  If so, what does that say about the nature of what we have become?

Good stuff to think about.  I'm looking forward to hearing what others think about these questions. 

Torture

Reflections on Torture

John Perry

Although we have not had, and don’t have scheduled in the near future, a program on torture, that’s the topic of this blog.   There are two reasons for this.  The first is a thoughtful email from one of our listeners, Gregory Slater, who is pretty disgusted with us for not having a program on torture already.  The second is that as we were discussing Lincoln today with Al Gini, we came to the question of whether Lincoln and George W. Bush should be thought to be equally culpable for their violations of the constitution in time of war.  This discussion also reminded me of an earlier program with Alan Dershowitz, who has written rather thoughtfully on the topic of torture; we did discuss the subject a bit on that program.

Lincoln suspended habeus corpus, shut down newspapers, and did various other things that were clearly unconstitutional.  I don’t know of any evidence that he authorized torture, but then I’m not a civil war scholar.  But at any rate on the issue of violating the constitution, the conclusion we seemed to reach went like this. Bush and Lincoln both performed unconstitutional acts.  If we confine ourselves to things that happened shortly after September 11, 2001, and give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt, it seems that both did so on the grounds that the nation was in grave and immanent peril.  The Bush administration, remember, in the days after September 11, also had the Anthrax episode.  One can imagine that they were sincerely frightened that the 9-ll attacks and the anthrax episodes were simply the first in a series of planned attacks by Al Queda.  Lincoln, as Al Gini pointed out, was faced early in the War with the possibility that Maryland would secede, and Washington D.C. would be surrounded, and the war would be lost.  So both administrations violated the constitution under the fear of incredible immanent danger.  In retrospect, we may think that Lincoln’s worries were more justified than Bush’s.  If so, that’s one important difference.

The other is that Lincoln was upfront about what he was doing, whereas the Bush administration was not, but tried to claim its actions were really constitutional, putting forward various lies about what it was doing, and self-serving legal analyses of the situation.  This is the difference that reminded me of Dershowitz’s position on torture.  But before getting to that, a brief digression.

One of the most depressing things about the current discussion of torture is the idea, seemingly accepted by such sober analysts as the New York Time’s  David Brooks, that a key question is the issue of balance.  That is, in assessing the Bush administration’s use of torture, we need to know whether it worked.  The is a terrible idea, for just the reasons that the comedienne Wanda Sykes pointed out at the recent dinner for correspondents.  A bank robber couldn’t very well justify robbing banks on the basis of all bills he paid with the stolen money.  Bank robbing is wrong; an individual episode can’t be justified by the good the robber does with the money he gets. 

Here is a perhaps more apt analogy.  A person has a right to a fair jury trial, where the jurors make their decision on the basis of evidence presented in the courtroom.  I’m sure many juries have felt that it would clearly be a good thing for society to have the accused put in jail, but didn’t feel they had the right to do so, on the basis of evidence presented.  The government is held to the same standards.  The issue isn’t whether, in a given case, the powers that be are certain that more good will come from imprisoning a defendant than letting him go.  You don’t’ say, ``Well, on the one hand, we don’t have the evidence to convict him, but on the other hand, we’re pretty sure that imprisoning him will do a lot of  good, so on balance it’s OK to do so.” Some things are a matter of cost-benefit analyses; some things are a matter of principles of fair play, human rights, and human dignity.

Suppose we found that in fact innocent people were more reluctant to admit guilt in the face of torture than guilty ones.  To make it simple, and graphic, suppose that we somehow discover that if fingers on one’s hands are progressively chopped off, a guilty person will, nine times out of ten, confess after two fingers have been chopped off, while and innocent person will only do so after three fingers are chopped off.  We might become convinced that this was at least as reliable as the system of presenting evidence, having a trial, and the like.  So, why not, at least for serious crimes, which are expensive to prosecute, start chopping off fingers?  Anyone who resists after two fingers is deemed innocent, and compensated generously for the loss of fingers.  The whole thing might be more reliable, and far cheaper, than the jury system.  But I think most of us would way that it would nevertheless be wrong.  It’s not a matter of balance.  This is a wrong way for a government to deal with people accused of serious crimes.

This all gets to the issue of what makes things right and wrong.  And here is where Dershowitz comes in.  Whenever one makes a claim, like I just did, that a certain procedure is wrong, because it violates human rights, human dignity, and such things, someone will come with a case where the costs of not using the procedure are so extreme, and thus possible benefits of using it are so high, that almost anyone will admit that, if those really were the facts, they would use the procedure: a so-called Doomsday Scenario.  Suppose the accused is thought to possess a nuclear weapon set to go off in the middle of San Francisco in an hour.  We have no way of stopping it except by cutting off fingers until he breaks.  Wouldn’t we do it then?  No?  Well than what if he were in a possession of a device that was going to end life on earth?  Or create a black hole in which the earth and every other part of the solar system would be sucked up, eliminating the possibility of life anywhere in the solar system forever?  Wouldn’t you start chopping off fingers in that case?

Well, we all know Kiefer Sutherland would, and I guess I would too, unless it was one of those days when I was particularly depressed about the value of life and of the solar system. 

There are two ways for one who thinks that certain things like torture, are best absolutely prohibited by laws and moral codes, and yet at the same time admits that in certain extreme circumstances particular acts of torture might be the best thing to do, because we are in a Doomsday situation --- in the limiting case, the very institutional fabric that supports the law and morality of which the absolute prohibitions are a part will be destroyed.
Dershowitz’s idea is that the exceptional should be thought through and codified ahead of time, and then the Chief of State should have to determine that those circumstances applied and sign off on them personally, admitting up front that he is suspending laws and violating rights in an extreme situation.  The other approach is simply to rely on leaders to do what Lincoln did; admit that he is breaking the law, a law of which he approves, because he thinks such an extreme case applies.  Both of these seem preferable to trying to build it into the basic moral codes as a matter of ``balance.’’ 

So, that’s my view of torture.  It’s wrong, and should be absolutely prohibited, as far as morality and  national and international law goes.  If some leader sees things as so extreme that things that should be absolutely prohibited in our legal and moral codes need to be done to preserve the very existence of the fabric of law and morality on which the prohibitions depend, then he’s on the hook to admit that is what he is doing, and say why, and take the consequences, whether meted out by a free press, the electorate, or a prosecutor in the next administration, if his judgment and reasoning are unconvincing.

There are some other points to be made about torture.  The big issue of the day is waterboarding.  It’s clearly a pretty gruesome procedure, and as I understand it the U.S. is on record, prior to the Bush administration, of deeming it to be torture, and has prosecuted enemies for using it.  The whole idea of arguing that it is really not torture is just so much clap-trap, as far as I can see.

On the other hand, we here confront that fact that language forces us to think digitally although we live in an analog world (or something like that).  There are clearly a range of treatments of prisoners that involve creating discomfort of various sorts: from putting them in unpleasant room; shouting at them; repeating questions ad nauseum; and insulting them, at one end of the scale, to pulling out fingernails, chopping off fingers, putting them in thumbscrews, and the like, at the other.  At some point a line is drawn; what falls on one side is torture, is illegal, is immoral, and so forth; what falls on the other side of the line is not.  Our legal laws and moral principles are by and large not based on the values a function takes on a continuous domain, but on words that are written into the laws and principles applying or not applying to a particular situation.  There is bound to be a murky area.  And then there are going to be areas adjacent to the murky area, and so on.  This is where lawyers and philosophers earn their living.

But waterboarding, as I understand it, doesn’t seem all that murky, although it does seem less extreme than pulling out fingernails.  Still, a full philosophical theory of torture will have to get beyond the distinction between either being or not being torture, and consider the range of methods, the range of damages caused, and many other things.

Mr. Slater thinks we should try to have Condi Rice on Philosophy Talk to talk about torture, and he is critical of the Stanford University faculties and the University of California faculties for saying nothing about the complicity of Condi Rice (Stanford Political Science) and John Yoo (Berkeley Law School) in the Bush torture program.  John Yoo seems a pretty clear case, and I think (speaking as a member of the broader UC faculty) he should be investigated by Berkeley to see if he has violated the faculty code of conduct.

I’ve known Condi Rice for quite a while, not all that well, but as a colleague working on various faculty committees, and then while she was Provost.  I don’t know how intelligent people like she and Colin Powell got involved in such a disaster as the Bush administration, and I think philosophers ought to leave it to historians to figure out what their role was.  Nothing I have seen persuades me that Condi Rice was an advocate of torture; she has expressed the view that those who criticize the Bush administration for its policy after 9-11 are not putting themselves in the shoes of the decision makers at that time.  (This makes of sense, although it doesn’t speak to the situation a bit later in the game, when one of the motivations for torture seems to have been building a case for invading Iraq.)  The remarks of hers I have seen are consistent with her having opposed torture at the time in the inner councils, and that’s what I will take as most plausible scenario, given her intelligence and character, until shown otherwise.  So although I think a number of people in the Bush administration are legally and morally culpable for self-serving dishonesty on the issue, likely including John Yoo, I haven’t signed any petitions about this with respect to Condi Rice.

Philosophical Wife Swapping

posted by Ken Taylor

I've never seen the reality TV  show Wife Swap.  And I have to admit that I find the title alone quite a bit off putting.  Just the title alone makes me think that the show  must be somewhat sexist and retrograde. So I was quite surprised and more than a little  skeptical when we at Philosophy Talk got an e-mail from a casting producer for the show requesting our help in finding parents who, as she put it,  "take on philosophical ways of thinking and reasoning when it comes to living their lives, raising their children and navigating the world around them."   At first,  I thought it must be some kind of practical joke.  And then I investigated a bit more and found that the casting producer, Danielle Gervais,  was really who she claimed to be and was really looking for philosophy-driven parents and thought that our listeners might be just the kind of people she is looking for. We had a brief debate among our philosophy talk posse about the show -- cause I have to admit I was still skeptical.   But some of members of our crew have actually watched the show.  They claim  it's often a  really fascinating study in human behavior and relationships. So they urged us to do what we could to help.  

Since my own initial skepticism was based entirely on ignorance and a bad reaction to the title of the show,   (and John's was too, I think.)  and since it would be kind of cool if someone out there who actually listens to Philosophy Talk did appear on a popular reality show and showed how philosophy can make a real difference,  I thought  "Why the hell not!" 

So if you are interested in possibly appearing on a reality show and if you do, to quote Danielle Gervais, again,    "take on philosophical ways of thinking and reasoning when it comes to living their lives, raising their children and navigating the world around them" why not give it a shot? 

Here's what they say about themselves:

   ABC's primetime series "Wife Swap" is currently casting its fifth season and looking for unique families with plenty of personality to take part in the show. Specifically, they're looking for parents who take on philosophical ways of thinking and reasoning when it comes to living their lives, raising their children and navigating the world around them. If yours is a unique family that is constantly seeking out the meaning of truth and existence and using these tools to raise your kids, the Wife Swap casting director wants to hear from you.

If you are a two-parent family with at least one child over the age of 5 living at home, and you think your family would make terrific TV, please contact Danielle Gervais at 646-747-7956 or e-mail at Casting.DanielleGervais@gmail.com

What have you got to lose?  You might be chosen and you might have fun.  If you do contact, Ms. Gervais, though,  tell her that Philosophy Talk sent you.  

Powerless . . . but Enlightened

       On Saturday, September 13, 2008, Hurricane Ike slammed into Texas.  Since I live in Ohio, my interest in this event can best be described as passing--those who live near the coast, I reflected, have to expect this sort of thing.  But then events took a surprising turn.
       On Sunday afternoon, the remnants of Ike caused a severe windstorm in my part of the world.  The wind was not of hurricane force, and unlike in Texas, it wasn't accompanied by rain.  It was nevertheless sufficient to cause trees to snap and roof shingles to fly.  At about 4:30 in the afternoon, the power went out.
       At first I assumed that it would be a few hours before power was restored, but by the next evening, my optimism had waned.  As I lay in my dark bedroom, studying the dust motes caught in the beam of my flashlight, I found myself turning to philosophy for consolation.
       For the last several years, I have been studying the philosophy of the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics.  As a result of doing this, I started putting Stoic advice to work in my own life, and before long, I realized that I had, much to my surprise, become a practicing Stoic.
       According to the Stoics, anyone wishing to have a good life would do well periodically to live without the things they value.  In particular, if we are affluent, we should "practice poverty"--we should, that is, live for a time as if we are poor.  We might, for example, eat simple meals even though gourmet food is available, and we might make a point of dressing simply even though we possess an expensive wardrobe.
       Why engage in this seemingly masochistic exercise?  Because by doing this, said the Stoics, we can dramatically increase our happiness.
       One key to a happy existence, philosophers, theologians, and psychologists agree, is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.  Unfortunately, we humans tend to take whatever we have for granted and instead make our happiness depend on the attainment of things we don't have.  The problem, of course, is that there is no guarantee that we will be able to attain these things, and even if we do attain them, we will soon find ourselves taking them for granted and will thus end up no happier than we formerly were.
       How, though, can we persuade ourselves to want what we already have?  The Stoics thought they had an answer to this question: we should periodically spend time contemplating the loss of the things we value or better still, live without them for a time.  This is doubtless good advice; the problem is that it will take effort to follow it.  Who, after all, wants to eat macaroni and cheese when lobster is available?
       A power outage, though, forces us to do what, according to the Stoics, we should have been doing of our own free will--namely, practicing poverty.  Because of the power outage, my neighbors and I found ourselves deprived of television and the Internet, light to read by, and warm showers.  The experience made me more appreciative of all these things, but as a practicing Stoic, I expected this to happen.  What I found striking is that it seemed to have the same effect on my neighbors.
       Some of them whined about their predicament, but many more seemed to take it in stride.  Indeed, this mini-crisis seemed to infuse them with life.  I encountered these newly-minted Stoics in restaurants, in the supermarket, and out taking walks in our darkened neighborhood.  After offering stories on how the outage was affecting them, they would often comment on how things could have been worse: "At least we still have water."  It brought to mind interviews of tornado survivors who, standing in front of the ruins of their home and surrounded by family members, declare that they still have everything that really matters.  (It says something about the human condition, by the way, that it takes a tornado to make us aware of what really matters.)
       After a week, our power was restored, and those who experienced the Great Power Outage of 2008 started to forget whatever lessons they learned while sitting in darkness.  It was precisely for this reason that the Stoic philosopher Seneca advocated that we supplement the hard times the world inflicts on us with “artificial” hard times that we periodically bring on ourselves, by practicing poverty.  He also thought that we should engage in"bedtime meditations": as we lie in bed waiting for sleep to come, we should think about how much we would miss our spouse, our home, our job, and the other things we value if we suddenly lost them.
        Practicing poverty and meditating in this fashion are not, to be sure, as dramatic as living through a power outage.  They are nevertheless an effective way to convince ourselves to embrace whatever life we find ourselves living.

Bill Irvine

(Author of Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy)

Inside Money: The Shadow Banking System

Hi Everyone,

Thanks again to John and Ken for having me on the show today and to the whole team (Ben, Devon, Daniel, et. al.) for their organization and professionalism.

MAJOR NOTE:  I am an Instructor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University, NOT at the GSB (Graduate School of Business) at Stanford.  Given the flow of the show, I didn't feel that it was appropriate to make the correction on the air as it would have been disruptive.  BUT, I am making it now.  :)

I'm sorry we only had part of an hour to talk about the mysteries of money.  There was obviously a lot more we all wanted to cover.  I have gotten several e-mails from folks already asking me about my opinions of the stimulus package and also three separate messages asking me to clarify my remarks about how banks can simply create money.  I wrote a long response to each, and also suggested an interesting video that was sent to me early this afternoon about the same subject.  I will reproduce my own explanation and also provide the link as well.  If you did not understand my (too brief) explanation on the radio and response to the caller, do not despair.  Following what really happens with a fractional reserve/shadow banking system is not easy until you really get into it and also suspend a bit of reality... :)

So here you go:

The best way to think about it all is this... 

The Federal Reserve controls what is known as "high powered money" or the monetary base.  This is total outstanding currency (notes and coins) and reserves (bank reserves) in the system.

However, this is NOT the money SUPPLY.  Basic money supply (currency plus deposits) is partly a function of the monetary base, but it is also a function of the checkable deposits that banks create.  Although there are many definitions of money supply depending on how liquid you want it to be, this should give you some idea. 

So, for example, when a bank receives a deposit and keeps some percent as reserves and lends out the rest, it is still accountable to its depositors at any time for the money they have deposited, even though a large percent of it has been loaned out.  So, let's say for example that $1,000,000 is deposited at Bank 1 by Person A and the bank takes some of those funds and extends a $900,000 mortgage to Person B at the same bank and keeps 10% as reserves (this percent is probably high in reality).  Person B signs a loan document agreeing to pay back $900,000 plus interest to the bank and pledging their new home as collateral.  So the bank puts $900,000 in Person B's account, Person B buys the home from Person C and then $900,000 will end up in the bank account of the home sellers (Person C) at, say, Bank 2.

So what has happened here?  Bank 1 is still on the hook for $1,000,000 of deposits to Person A even though $900,000 of the dollars have disappeared from that bank and is elsewhere in the system.  Person B is on the hook to Bank 1 for $900,000 plus interest for the mortgage they owe.  And now Bank 2 has $900,000 of deposits of which it can create $810,000 of new loans and the process goes on.

So, no HIGH POWERED money has been created by running the printing presses or by the Fed crediting banks reserve accounts.  However, money in the form of checkable deposits (i.e. banks' extending loans and funding those loans by crediting the accounts of the loan recipients) HAS been created and it is a form of leverage (i.e. debt.)  And it continues through the system as banks create loans based on deposits.  Remember that checkable deposits are part of the money supply, and it is money that people spend, so it is also money.  And the government lets the banking system do this!!!

I hope that helps.  Someone also e-mailed me (this afternoon) the link to an interesting video about money that might help all of you - I watched it quickly but it appeared to cover the fundamentals pretty well and to raise some great questions, although there is certainly a lot more to say.  See what you think:

http://www.michaeljournal.org/myth.htm

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279

Please do not hesitate to ask if you have more questions... this is not easy stuff but once you begin to grasp the fundamentals, you can ask the harder questions about how our financial system and economy operate and the direction(s) in which we could go next.

All the best,

Alex 

Philosophy Talk and the Ignorant NEH Panelist: A Rant!

posted by Ken Taylor

I don't usually rant.   I fancy myself a calm deliberate guy.   Not only do I play a dispassionate voice of reason on the radio,  I really do try to be a dispassionate voice of reason in my every day life.   I don't always succeed mind you.  But at least my heart's in the right place. 

But I've got to get something off my chest.  And what better place to do that than on a blog.  I wish I could do it anonymously, like so many do.  But I don't think that would work here.   So what's my beef?

It has to do with Philosophy Talk and the National Endowment for the Humanities.   In general,  i don't have a big problem with the NEH.  Actually,  I kind of like at least the idea of the NEH.   They've funded many worthwhile endeavors -- some of which have materially affected my own research. 

But I do have a bone to pick with them -- a bone I'd like to share with everybody who wishes Philosophy Talk well. We've applied to them five different times for various grants.  And five different times we've been turned down.  This time around, we were turned down -- rejected, refused, denied  (take your pick) -- for an America's Media Makers production grant.   The grant would have given us funds to produce a special 12 part series on the Philosophical Foundations of American Democracy.   

It would have been a fun series.   We would have done each  episode in front of a live audience at various venues around the country in Town Hall Format.  Sort of a Philosophy Talk takes Democracy on the road, kind of thing. 

The 12 episodes in the series would have covered a range of Philosophical topics designed to provide the American public with a deeper understanding of the problem and prospects of Democracy in the 21st Century.  Shows  would have been clustered around four broad themes.  

One theme was called American Political Philosophies.  Under this theme we proposed to do episodes on:  (a) Rawls, Justice, and Equal Opportunity:  (b)  Communitarianism;  (c)  Libertarianism and (d)  Neo-Conservativism & The Chicago School.   

Another theme  concerned Pluralism and its Challenges and included episodes on the struggle to rewrite the narrative of American history and contemporary challenges raised by Multiculturalism.   

A third theme would have concerned the idea of an educated and informed democratic citizenry and how to achieve it.   We intended to discuss the struggle over creation and evolution, and the role of the state in determining the content of an education more generally. The fourth theme was called something like "Our Brother's Keepers?  Individual rights and Public Responsibility."   We would have talked about a variety of things including whether money is speech, whether corporations are really persons,  what sorts of rights and responsibilities corporations have  to promote the social good.  We would also have done an episode on  religious freedom, religious conflict and  religious tolerance and the role of the state vs civil society in mediating these.  

Stuff like that.  Stuff that's at the core of trying to make democracy work in the 21st century. You could think this wouldn't make great radio.   You could also think that  even if it would make great radio, there isn't any audience for it.  You could even think that somehow the Philosophy Talk team was inadequate to the task.  

But it's hard to imagine being told that these topics were  "strange"  and "confused"  But get this.  That's just what one of the evaluators for the NEH did say.  I kid you not.  Here's a direct quote: 

The intellectual content of this proposal is strange. The philosophical foundations of American democracy are to be found in the philosophers that influenced the founding fathers as they created the Constitution. The foundations are not to be found in John Rawls and the Chicago Schoo. You could probably solve this problem by giving the project a new title, something like "philosophical ideas that influence American culture."

It is not clear what writing American history and multiculturalism have to do with philosophy--at least fundamental philosophy.

American education doesn't seem to be a philosophical question, although the founding fathers excepted an educated and informed citizenry. This seems to be a special question, rather than a foundational question.

Individual rights and public responsibility is an interesting question to which philosophers may have much to contribute, but it's not clear how this is the foundation of democracy.

It seems to me that the topics to be considered are rather traditional philosophical topics and it may be much more important to understand (even in philosophical terms) the processes that actually move and shake the country. It might be more important to deal with "the predator state" than with democracy, the public good, or education.

Let's just call this panelist, Panelist #4 -- cause that's how he/she is referred to in the materials we got back from the NEH explaining why our proposal was not fit to fund.   (Frankly, evaluator # 4 if you read this blog,  I wish you'd have courage enough to try and defend this dribble in a public forum.)  

Now I can accept rejection.  Believe me in both the businesses I am in -- radio and Academia -- one gets used to rejection and develops a thick skin pretty quickly.  If you don't, you just  go crazy.  So rejection is not the point.   I can deal with rejection.  Really!  I can!

But what I find  unfathomable is that anybody so ignorant could possibly be allowed to evaluate proposals of any kind for  the NEH.  Evaluator number 4 writes as if  philosophical thinking about the justification of the democratic political state began and ended in the 16th and 17th centuries, that nothing said or done since then adds to our understanding of the foundations of democracy, as if the founding fathers delivered to us our current democratic polity, and its complete philosophical justification, whole cloth.

I certainly wish Evaluator #4 would tell that to the hundreds or thousands of  scholars currently writing books and articles about the foundations of democracy.  He/she should tell them that it was all already said by Locke and Montesquieu. They should just stop wasting paper and killing trees. 

Just to carry on with the rant a tiny little bit more.   Again,  you might think the topics uninteresting, but to say that  "writing American history and multiculturalism"  have nothing to do with philosophy or the foundations of democracy is, well, extraordinarily ignorant again.     Not just we Americans, but peoples around the world, are faced with burning questions about whether and how there can be a shared democratic polity among people who are more or less divided and at odds with one another.   The question is one about what Philosophers like to call  "reasonable pluralism."  To be sure, the problem of developing a philosophical defense of a reasonable pluralism is indeed a problem with which our Founding Fathers, in their great but incomplete wisdom,  were hardly seized.  In their world   many, many voices were silenced, oppressed, etc.   But of course  the 20th century was massively seized with the problem of achieving a reasonable pluralism.  And no doubt the 21st century will also be.  Frankly,  it's hard for me to see what could be a more urgent topic of discussion for a radio program that purports to bring the resources of philosophy to greater public attention.

I'm  almost done with my rant. I swear. Indeed, I'm feeling calmer already. But I can't let this go without standing up for John Rawls and defending him against the claim that his work has nothing to do with the Philosophical Foundations of Democracy.

But on second thought.  I don't have to do that.  A former US President already did that.  I cite no lesser authority than former President William Jefferson Clinton, who awarded Rawls the National Humanities Medal in 1999.  I quote in full below  Clinton's citation of Rawls:

THE PRESIDENT: John Rawls is perhaps the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century. In 1971, when Hillary and I were in law school, we were among the millions moved by a remarkable books he wrote, "A Theory of Justice," that placed our rights to liberty and justice upon a strong and brilliant new foundation of reason.

Almost singlehandedly, John Rawls revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate helped the least fortunate is not only a moral society, but a logical one. Just as impressively, he has helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, Margaret Rawls will accept the medal on behalf of her husband. 

Take that evaluator #4,  whoever you are.

We don't have much hope of changing the NEH's mind. I'm sure that if we apply a sixth time,  we'll get turned down a sixth time.     Plus,  I suppose everyone -- even someone as  ignorant as evaluator #4 -- is entitled to his/her opinion.   But I don't have to be happy that someone  so manifestly out of his/her depth sits in judgment of proposals to the NEH.  Do I? 

If I thought it would do any good,  I'd urge all right-thinking Philosophy Talk fans everywhere to write to the  Senior Program Officer for the Public Programs division of the NEH to urge that the Evaluator #4 on proposal TR50035,  be barred, on grounds of sheer ignorance,  from ever evaluating an NEH proposal again. 

But I'm not that bitter or vindictive.   I'm really not.   And rejection doesn't bother me -- much.

UPDATE:  Somebody pointed out that I left out the parts where panelist 4 (and also another panelist) call our proposal "confused."   But that's worth quoting too. So here is panelist 4's overall conclusion: 

The discussion convinced me that the content was confused and not terribly important to understanding democracy. 

Another panelist,  who was initially more favorably disposed to our proposal ended up confused too (and lowered our score):

Still confused on the content -- what is the role on the philosophy in the program? Are we learning philosophical approaches? Or basic philosophical ideas? How philosophy can help us in the present?

I have to admit that the last one really gets me.  Is there supposed to be some conflict between learning philosophical approaches, basic philosophical ideas, and showing that philosophy can be applied to present social problems?   How else would one imagine that we might go about trying to present philosophy to a non-philosophical audience?   Seriously,  would it even be possible to do one of these things without doing the other two?   Imagine that we tried to teach philosophical approaches without teaching philosophical ideas.  How would that even work?   And suppose we taught approaches and ideas,  but didn't try to show how philosophy can help us in the present. Then who would care?   Or suppose we tried to illustrate that philosophy had application to present problems and situations,  but we never said what a philosophical idea is or didn't try to show how philosophers approach problems.

In short this statement is sophomoric babble that shows as much seriousness of thought as one might expect from a casual conversation in a bar over too many beers.   That it is presented as some sort of criticism of our proposal is just astounding, utterly astounding.   That such nonsense could be utter as part of the NEH's supposedly "rigorous"  evaluation process is, well, both infuriating and depressing.

Two Skeptical Arguments

Since We're repeating this show this week, I thought I'd move this post to the top. Jim was one our rare guests to actually both accept our invitation to guest blog and then to follow through. Enjoy --KT

I’ve been claiming that there are some really powerful skeptical arguments (on the show and in response to Ken's previous post).  I have also been claiming that one aspect of their force is that they do not depend on setting the standards for knowledge very high.   Here are two such arguments. 

Continue reading "Two Skeptical Arguments"

The Place of Scepticism and Sceptical Arguments

An encore post of mine on the topic of scepticism -- reissued since we are rebroadcasting that episode. --KT

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's show will be about scepticism. Our guest will be John Greco of St. Louis University. I don't really know John or his work, but I see that he has written a book called Putting Sceptics in their Place. That's sort of what I want to talk about in this warm-up to the show post.

I should start with a confession about my philosophical tastes. I tend not to find epistemology the most gripping of philosophical subjects. Roughly, epistemology has to do with the nature of knowledge. And a big part of epistemology historically has been devoted to answering the sceptic who challenges us to say whether and how we can know anything at all. Sceptical arguments, I'm sure you will see as we do the show, are pretty seductive and pretty darned hard to answer. In fact, I suspect that ultimately that sceptical arguments are not really answerable at all. At best, the sceptic can always argue the defender of knowledge to a standstill. So if the defender of knowledge is the one with the burden of proving her claims, I think she never ever succeeds in discharging that burden.

Does that mean that sceptic is right and that we really don't know anything at all?

Well, maybe. I guess that depnds what we mean by "know."

And here's precisely the thing that drives me batty about so much epistemology. So much of it is focused on analyzing and re-analyzing the concept of knowledge -- mostly in light of sceptical worries about the very possibility of knowledge. What could knowledge be such that it survives various sceptical arguments?

Continue reading "The Place of Scepticism and Sceptical Arguments"

A dialogue on Biracial Identity

posted by Ken Taylor

Tomorrow show is about biracial identity.   And I thought as a way of getting the juices flowing,  I'd write a little dialogue about some of the issues to be covered.  So here goes:

 A Black Guy (BG)  and a White Guy  (WG)  are in a bar, having drinks.  You may be tempted to think that they are John Perry and Ken Taylor -- but since I'm putting words in both people's mouths,  don't hold John responsible for any of this. 

BG:      I've been thinking a lot about biracial identities,  lately because I see that my favorite radio show,  Philosophy Talk  is about to do an episode on it.     

WG:   I wonder what they'll talk about.  I mean  thanks to Obama,  biracial is the new cool, BG.   But  I don't really see that there are  deep philosophical questions connected with the  topic of bi-racial identities raise.  Do you? 

BG:  Yeah ,  I do.   Biracial identities challenge our old understanding of race.   I think  biracial people and their struggles to constitute their identities  are beginning to push our old concepts of race to the breaking point.

WG:    This is America, dude.  Race is a reality and race isn't going anywhere anytime soon.  As a black guy, you should know that. 

BG:   Whatever do you mean by that remark?   

WG:  I mean black people experience the reality of race everyday.   White guys, like me,  tend to think of ourselves as non-racialized, as if we don't have a race.   That's a form of white privilege that you black guys don't enjoy in our racialized society.    Of course,  I'm not saying that white people are right to think of themselves as non-racialized.   It's, in fact,  part of our racial consciousness to think of ourselves as non-racialized, if that makes any sense.  

BG:  It makes lots of sense.   In America,   white is racially "unmarked."  Black is racially "marked."    if you are a member of the unmarked race, you entitle yourself to think of yourself as somehow free of race and you entitle yourself to think of  the other as the racialized other.  On other hand,  if you are part of racially marked group, you aren't so free to deny race.    And if you are one of the racially marked "others"  you are sort of confronted with your racial difference, your racial markedness at every turn.   And that gives you a distinctive form of racial consciousness.   

WG:  Er, well, something like that  -- I think.    But back to biracial people.   You said that they somehow  challenge  our old understanding of race.   But I don't see it.  Think of animal and plant species.    You can cross breed animal and plant species to produce hybrids -- sometimes stable and fertile hybrids.  But that doesn't challenge our ideas about species, does it?   In the same vein,  you  can cross breed races to produce people of biracial ancestry.   Where’s the challenge to our understanding of race in that?  I don't get it.  

BG:  But you're thinking of race as if it were analogous to biological species.   But it just isn't.   Once upon a time, people did believe that there were such things as biologically grounded racial essences.   And racial essences were supposed to distinguish people from each other in socially and morally relevant ways.  But modern biology will have none of that.

WG:  Dude,  are you really suggesting that there are no races?   Let's follow the logic of that out a little.   If there are no races, then you are not a black man, I am  not a white man, and Obama is not a man of bi-racial ancestry.  But that’s absurd isn't it?    Let me put the question to you directly.  Dude, are you now, or have you ever been,  a black man?

BG:     Of course,  I am a black man.   And you are a white man, and Barack Obama  is – well, he’s something more complicated.    Everybody thinks of him as our first black president.  But isn't he  really as much and no more a white man than he is a black man?  Why isn't he thought of as our first biracial president or even just another in a long line of white presidents?   What really makes Obama black, anyway? 

WG: Wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  You're going too fast for me.   I'm confused.    You seem to want to claim that races aren’t really real.   But you defiantly – or was it reluctantly    -- admitted  to being a black man.    What gives?  You can't have it both ways.  Either there are no races,  and you are not a black man.  Or there are races and you are a black man.  

BG:  I didn't say races aren't real.  I said they aren't biologically real.   The fact that races aren’t biologically real, doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the concept of race.  National identities aren’t biologically real, either.    But national identities can matter quite a lot in human affairs.

WG:    So you think that  race is a social reality, even if it isn't a biological reality.  I can buy that.    But then I don’t see how biracial identities push our concepts of race to the breaking point, as you claim.    Think about ethnic identities.  Does the fact of people of multiple ethnicities  push our old concepts of ethnicity to the breaking point? 

BG: Well,  I'm not sure.  But race and ethnicity are different in some ways and similar in others.    I think we need a distinction.   Let's  distinguish between race and racial identifications.  I'd like to  reserve concept of race for something that pretends to be  biologically grounded and  reserve racial identifications for something socially and culturally grounded. When I acknowledged  being a black man – and I was doing that proudly, by the way --  I wasn’t  making any claim about my biology.  I was making a claim about my social and cultural heritage. 

WG:    NOw it just sounds like racial identifications, as you are construing them,  are very much akin to ethnic identifications or national identifications.   You seem to think we've got two things going on without being very clear about them.  We've got a set of ethnicity like racial identifications and a set of would be biological racial categories.    Is there a problem with that? 

BG:    I think there is.  I think you're finally starting to get my point.     Go back to what I was saying earlier about biology and race.  Even though we now know that racial categories are biologically empty, we still have this deeply ingrained, cultural habit of identifying ourselves in racial terms.  But it turns out that our racial identifications are anchored in, well, nothing really.  Or at least they aren't anchored in the kind of thing we once thought they were.    And I think our struggle to make sense of biracial identities helps us to see that. 

WG:  I'm not sure  I'm following this.   But let me try something out to see if I catch your drift here.  Take Barack Obama, again.    What race does he belong to?   And why exactly does he belong to that race?  Is he black?  White?  Or is he something else entirely?  In the old days,   the one-drop rule told us the answer.   If you had one drop of “black blood,” then you were ipso facto black.   But that's clearly non-sensical,  especially if we're thinking of racial categories as biologically grounded.   But suppose we let culture and stuff like that be our guide.    Given Obama's quite distinctive upbringing,  you  wouldn't be wrong to think that from a social/cultural perspective he's much more of a white dude than a black dude.  

BG:  Of course,  neither blacks as a whole nor whites as a whole are cultural monoliths.   But if Obama's life story represent some strand of some typical American subculture, it's certainly not a paradigmatically black strand of the plethora of American subcultures.   I don't think anybody would deny that. 

WG:  SO what makes this guy a black dude?

BG:   He's decided that he's black and his decision counts as authentic,  I think, because he's got one black parent.   

WG:  That seems right, as far as it goes.  But it doesn't go far enough.  Ask yourself,  could Obama just decide that he is a white man, rather than a black man or a biracial man?

BG:    I think you're onto something important here.  It seems to me that   Obama’s got two, and only two socially acceptable options for his racial self-identification.    Like a rare but growing number of people who think of themselves as  a sort of multi-racial vanguard, he could  permissibly identify himself as a biracial person – full stop.   Or he could permissibly  do the more standard and  less culturally threatening thing and self-identify as black – full stop.  But we’re not yet at the point where Barack Obama is socially allowed to self-identify as white, rather than black.

WG:    What do you mean by "permissibly"  here?    He’s the goddamn  President of the United States.  He’s free to self- identify as whatever he chooses.  Remember George Bush I and his refusal to eat broccoli? 

BG:    You and I both know that Obama isn't free to self-identify as white and deny the black part of himself. First it would so radically change his political narrative that it  would be political suicide.   But politics aside, there's a much, much broader point here that gets us right to the heart of things.   Old fashioned  white people and old fahisoned black people  have a perhaps not fully conscious,  but deeply ingrained  cultural investment in  maintaining the racial status quo.  They, in effect,  try to  force biracial people into the  old comfortable and familiar  racial categories.    For some reason -- I'm not sure why -- we pigeon-hole biracial people into the socially “marked” race – in the case of black and white in America that's  the black race  --  rather than allow them into the socially unmarked race –  the white race (at least in America from its beginning until now).   

WG:   Now I finally see why you think the struggles of biracial people to constitute their identities -- racialized and non-racialized -- is a threat to our old ways of thinking.   They just don't fit.   And our attempts to make them fit distorts many things.   

BG:  That's one reason I referred to old-fashioned white people and black people.   I think maybe some younger people are beginning to see things differently.    They are willing to allow racial identifications to be as fluid and multiple as ethnic identifications. 

WG:  You're talking about the harbingers of a post-racial age.  I think I think that's a fantasy and isn't coming anytime soon.   But  this is tough stuff and my head is beginning to spin.   I think I need to listen to the upcoming episode of Philosophy Talk to get this all straightened out.  

Thoughts on the Reader

posted by Ken Taylor 

Thanks to everybody who made our  First Annual Dionysus Awards Show  such a success.  It was a lot of fun.  We got lots of  great input from our listeners.   If you haven't heard the show, be sure to check it out.  We're trying to get it picked up as pre-Oscar special by stations throughout the public radio system.  Wish us luck with that.   

Anyway,  I thought I'd follow up a bit on the discussion of one movie in particular -- The Reader.   David Thomson -- who was originally scheduled to be our guest but had to cancel at the last minute  -  had suggested to us in our preparation for the show that we  think about spending the entire hour talking about just this one film  --- I guess because he thinks that no other film from 2008 comes close the Reader in its depth and complexity.   I'm not sure I agree with that and we didn't accept the suggestion, in any case.   But I did find the movie profoundly interesting and profoundly challenging.   So I thought I'd ruminate about it a bit more in this blog entry as a follow up to our episode.  

I know that some people seem to find this film  morally reprehensible.    Manhola Dargis, writing about the Reader for the New York Times,  concludes his review with  the following:

Although the commercial imperatives that drive a movie like this one are understandable — the novel was a best seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, for starters — you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.

My reactions to this movie are completely at odds with this.   In my view,   the movie raises a number of profound moral questions and though it doesn't decisively answer those questions  -- what movie could -- it does explore -- in a way movies seldom do (though novels more often do) --  the space of possible answers to the questions it raises.  Let me explain what I mean.   Obviously  Hanna, aka,  Kate Winslett,  is the moral center of this movie. By the way, about Hanna,  Dargis says the following:

In the novel and the film — which monumentalizes every trembling lip and fluttering eyelash, turning human gestures into Kodak moments — Michael’s pain turns him not just into Hanna’s victim, but also a kind of survivor. Outrageously, Hanna is a victim too, because she took the guard job only to hide her illiteracy, as if illiteracy were an excuse for barbarism.

Dargis is surely right that both Michael and Hanna are represented as victims   -- he of her;  and she of something more diffuse and less pointed.   I suppose she is partly represented as a "victim"  of the German attempt to understand and come to grips with the past.   She is also, I suppose,  partly represented as the "victim"  of the Nazi system in which she was a participant.   But I don't think it's at all right  to say that the film  "excuses" Hanna's participation in the barbarism of the Holocaust because of her illiteracy.  The movie does nothing of the sort.  It is true that the movie doesn't take the morally "easy" way out of simply condemning Hanna's act. Certainly,   that would be the more superficially morally  satisfying thing to do -- to offer  (again) the simple, unambiguous, untroubled judgment that the Nazi's, and all who aided them,  were purely and simply evil barbarians.

Why would that be the  "easy"  way out, you ask?   Well,  my answer  goes back to a claim made a few years ago, on a show we did about evil,  by our guest, Peter Van Inwagen.  He argued, as I recall,  that the psychology of evil is incomprehensible to us, that true evil is  alien and "other."   I think something like that thought lies behind Dargis's reaction to this movie.  I say that because if you think that the Nazi's were purely and simply evil barbarians, there is nothing much  to be said or done about them except to note and condemn their barbarism. Certainly,  no "explaining" or "excusing"  is necessary.   If we are in a position to unambiguously condemn, then there's not much self-reflection called for in thinking about the Nazi's.   They were evil.  We are not.  They performed acts of unspeakable barbarism. We did not.   That was them.  This is us.   We are different. 

But I think the movie rejects this simple-minded picture and is  trying to make the point on behalf of Germans who came of age after the war  that such a proffered neat moral separation between those who lived through the war, and took part in the Nazi's atrocities and those who came of age only after the war, and therefore had no  part in those atrocities, is an illusion.   The movie makes that point in several ways.   First and foremost,  there is the somewhat opaque, but in many ways ordinary inner psyche of Hanna.  The remarkable thing about Hanna is that she is in almost every way unremarkable.  In particular,  she isn't Van Inwagen's alien other,  peculiarly capable of unspeakable acts that those her came after are incapable of.      No doubt,   Hanna is  a troubled and  wounded person, with things to hide.  But she's more than that too.   She is capable of joy and passion and a kind of love. 

You could,  I suppose,  look upon her as a sexual predator.     If Michael were a Michelle and Hanna a Hermann, we'd no doubt  see Hermann as a child molester.  Curiously,   I find that I am not quite prepared to say that Hanna  molests the young Michael -- who is, after all,   only 14, if I've got my math right -- when they begin their affair.  But it's very clear that the affair with her leaves a scar on his psyche. 

The fact that Hanna is in many ways an unremarkable person --  neither heroic, nor particularly virtuous,  but also not possessed with  an utterly alien and incomprehensible psyche of the sort that Van Inwagen suggested is the hallmark of true evil   -- is by my lights what gives the movie true moral force.  Hanna was put to a certain moral test.   She failed because she lacked whatever inner psychic resources it would have required to pass the moral test.  But I think that one of the deepest points made by the movie is that  many of who were fortunate enough not to be put the test differed from Hanna in no morally significant respect.  She and many in her generation were put to a moral test to which those in the succeeding generation were not subject.  

That doesn't mean that Hanna gets a free pass.  She is not excused. Her atrocities are not explained away -- despite what Dargis says.   I think the movie makes that point forcefully and clearly.     But at the same time, in recognizing that Hanna is just an ordinary person with an unremarkable psyche,  the movie  also raises a very deep puzzle about what exactly we are condemning when we condemn her.    Of course, we condemn her acts.  But we'd like to condemn more than her acts.   We'd like also to condemn the inner psyche that produced the acts.   That's why the judge tries to discern whether Hanna  "willingly"  joined the SS.   But if it turns out that Hanna's psyche is not so unlike our own, is not so alien and other,  what then?  How are we really to distinguish ourselves from Hanna?   

This  has to do with the problem of what  philosophers call moral luck.  Hanna was unlucky in her circumstances  -- or in the combination of her circumstances and her character.   Suppose that she had been born in Britain rather than in Germany.  In such circumstances,  the very traits that made her a willing SS guard, might have led her to willingly enlist in the British Red Cross.   And then we might have praised rather than blamed not just her acts but the inner character that led to those acts.    But the point is that it's the very same inner character in the two cases.  So on what basis do we condemn its expression through acts here, while praising its expressions through acts there?

I said earlier that the movie explores the space of possible answers to the moral questions that it raises.  I'm thinking of a couple of different things.   First, recall the scene near the end when Michael goes to New York to meet the jewish woman who wrote the book about the death march from Auschwitz.   She is stern and steadfast in her refusal to grant any absolution to Hanna.   And I do not think that the movie represents her as being somehow wrong in doing so.   Rather,  the movie takes note of and accepts that attitude as one entirely legitimate attitude among others that we might adopt.  Michael,  recall, makes no attempt to change her attitude toward Hanna.  Indeed, he seems rather  silenced in the face of such moral certainty.  Just as the court offers no answer to Hanna's biting question  "What would you have done,"  Michael has no response to the survivors refusal to offer any kind of absolution to Hanna.  

Though the movie takes note of the fact of felt moral certainty and does nothing to challenge it,  it also doesn't rest with moral certainty as the final and sole legitimate response.  Exhibit A for the movie's refusal to rest with moral certainty is the complexity of  Michael's own attitudes towards Hanna.  His welter of attitudes are as complex as could be.   I'm not sure that I can even fully describe the totality of his attitudes.    On the one hand, there is his  deeply passionate affair with her, that both opened up a certain realm of human experience to him and left him  scarred. The Hanna of his youth haunts his memory.    On the other hand, there is his subsequent encounter with her and his startling realization that she took part, willingly, it seems, in the atrocities of the past.  To the very end,  he wishes to be assured that she has "learned something from the past."  This bespeaks a kind of enduring condemnation.     But there is also more.  There is, of course,  Hanna's  refusal, driven by I am not quite sure what --  a kind of shame, I suppose --  to reveal that she is illiterate even when it might have saved her from years in prison and his silence in the face of that refusal.  He cannot even bring himself to see her to speak to her about what he knows and she knows.  And then there is the mercy he offers her years later,  through his subsequent act of recording books for her again.    Or is this a way of seeking absolution for himself?   You could see his failure to come to her aid as a kind of moral cowardice, driven by revulsion and shame, perhaps.  But if it is a kind of cowardice, it is the kind that disguises itself as "respect."    

So how, ultimately,  should we understand  the moral relationship between  Michael - who I suppose is some sort of stand in for the generation whose moral task it was to narrate the history of Nazi Germany as somehow both a chapter in its  own history  and a chapter from which it is determined to make  a decisive break  --  and Hanna -- who I suppose is a stand in,  not for the main movers and shakers of the Nazi era, but for the millions of ordinary Germans, inwardly indistinguishable from the average run of humanity, without whose cooperation the Nazi's could not have carried off their barbarism?   How are we to understand that moral relationship?  

The movie doesn't really tell us, I think,   because it doesn't really know.   It leaves us with no simple answers.  But I do think it leaves us with a profound question.   Again,  as a protective impulse, we may tell ourselves that  evil is other,  alien and distant.  But the reality is that it lives just around the corner in the souls of people little different from ourselves.   Only if we come to grips with that fact,  I think the movie is trying to say,  can we really come to grips with the past.