| By William Irwin |

In A Fragile Life: Accepting our Vulnerability, Todd May asks whether invulnerability is desirable. Identifying Stoicism, Epicureanism, Buddhism, and Taoism as philosophies of invulnerability, May rejects what he says is their ultimate goal. His reasoning is that big things like loss, death, politics, and failure matter too much. He would not want to become invulnerable to their emotional impact.

The stoic, Epictetus.

To be clear, the invulnerability May refers to is emotional invulnerability, not physical or actual invulnerability. Even the most accomplished Stoic, for example, is still subject to the occurrence of loss, death, and failure. It is just that the perfect Stoic would no longer be emotionally vulnerable to such occurrences. Rather, such a person would notice these occurrences, account for them, but not be disturbed by them. The perfect Stoic would not lack feeling but would integrate that feeling within a properly ordered self. Granted, there are different conceptions and interpretations of Stoicism, but in general it is a philosophy that counsels self-control, detachment, and acceptance of one’s fate. Likewise, Epicureanism aims at acceptance of a life of simple pleasures taken in moderation, and Taoism aims to go with the flow, the Tao or way.

May finds much to admire and emulate in philosophies of invulnerability. Indeed, when it comes to small matters, May wishes he were more invulnerable. For example, it would be better not to be so disturbed when, due to circumstances beyond control, one runs late for an appointment. Likewise, it would be better to be less upset, or not upset at all, by one’s malfunctioning computer. In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, it would be ideal to accept the things that one cannot change—especially the small things.

For May, though, part of what makes life worth living is emotional investment. If we derive meaning from our emotional investments in people, projects, and our own lives then we must pay the price of emotional vulnerability that comes with their fragility and uncertainty. If I spend my life committed to the cause of free speech, then fittingly I would be devastated if a tyrannical government seized power and deprived the citizenry of that right. As May sees it, a reaction of stoical indifference would be inappropriate and undesirable. Such a reaction might force me to wonder if I had ever really been deeply committed to championing free speech in the first place. Likewise, if I learned that my life was about to be cut short by cancer, a reaction of stoic indifference might throw into doubt how much I ever valued my life and its projects. Perhaps all the more so, a reaction of stoic indifference to the death of one’s child might seem to suggest that one never really loved the child. No, the people and things that make life worth living deserve deep emotional investment such that one is vulnerable. A life worth living is a life of vulnerability.

To a large extent I agree with May’s conclusion. Where I disagree is with his conception of the philosophies of invulnerability and with the desirability of invulnerability as an ultimate goal. May considers philosophies of invulnerability in such a way as to overestimate their potential success. The truth is that the perfect Stoic is a fiction. Also in the realm of fiction we can find the Buddhist, Taoist, and Epicurean who have achieved invulnerability. The philosophies of invulnerability aim at a goal that they never reach. So, contra May, we need to reformulate the question. Should we pursue the trajectory that asymptotically approaches invulnerability without ever reaching it? For myself I answer yes.

If there were a single pill that I could take one time to achieve emotional invulnerability I would decline the pill. I would not want to become invulnerable immediately, once and for all, even though the invulnerability is still worth wanting. Of course, Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Epicureanism offer no such pill. Rather, what each offers is a philosophy and a training program for approaching invulnerability. The training takes time; even life-long practitioners do not often claim to have reached the desired outcome. One way to think of the training is in terms of setting an aspirational goal. For example, a runner might set an aspirational goal of running a mile in under five minutes. That goal, that aspiration, might not be realistic but it could still be worth striving towards. Likewise, I could choose to strive for emotional invulnerability. As a middle-aged man who can barely run a mile in eight minutes, a sub-five-minute mile would likely be beyond my reach. Even further beyond my reach would be complete emotional invulnerability. But, in each case, training to reach the goal could itself be transformational, and it could help me to reach desirable levels that are short of the goal. The real value of the goal is in a sense already present in the striving towards it. Even if I never get to the point of running a sub-five-minute mile, I may get to the point of running a six-and-a-half-minute mile, which may help me to lose twenty pounds, improve my cardiovascular health, and finish near the top of my age bracket in the local three-mile race. I might also be the kind of person who is better motivated by grandiose goals than by more modest goals—like those actual achievements that result. Similarly, if I aim at emotional invulnerability as an aspirational goal, I will likely never get there, but the shining example of the perfect Stoic or the perfect Buddhist may motivate me to work harder than would the more modest goal of becoming less easily disturbed by life’s everyday vicissitudes. By following the training program to become the perfect Stoic or the perfect Buddhist, I may as a result reach a state of being undisturbed by traffic jams and malfunctioning computers. I may not reach the state of being undisturbed when my long-term project of protecting free speech crumbles, but I may be able to accept it and move on. I might even be able to accept the premature death of a loved one with a degree of equanimity such that my life is not destroyed by it.

Photo courtesy of Hermann via Pixabay, creative commons license.

Like most people, I enjoy earning rewards. I would much rather make a million dollars by the sweat of my brow than by the purchase of a lottery ticket. For that matter, I would rather earn a million dollars than win ten million dollars. Along similar lines, I would rather make modest progress towards the goal of invulnerability through hard work than take a single pill to arrive there instantly. The suddenness of the pill would be part of the problem. Complete emotional invulnerability seems undesirable to some people because it is a strange and far-off reality. But as I see it, such invulnerability can become more comfortable and desirable as we inch toward it. This has to do with the usual trajectory of a life.

Photo courtesy of NBC, public domain.

In my experience, young people rarely find stoicism attractive; they do not want to be like Mr. Spock. Humans, unlike Vulcans, are motivated by emotion. Passion pushes us to pursue our dreams and to be loving friends, spouses, and family members. Indeed, vulnerability seems to be an important teacher as we learn how to love. As young people, we may wish we were less bothered by little things, but we are willing to pay the price for the benefits that emotional investment yields. There are many things for which we want “the courage to change the things I can.” But moving through life, the invulnerability of stoicism can become more attractive as more in life seems to fall into the category of “the things that I cannot change.” Ultimately, to be like Mr. Spock, who is only half Vulcan, on one’s death bed might be more attractive than “raging against the dying of the light.”

Although I would not take the pill as I have imagined it, I would be tempted to take it if its effects were temporary. It might be nice to have a box of such temporary-invulnerability pills available for the next time I am stuck in traffic or stuck with a malfunctioning computer. Of course, many people do take pills (and drinks) to calm them in response to such circumstances, but those remedies are imperfect and come with other consequences. Stoic or Buddhist training is not fool-proof; it certainly is not as reliable as our imaginary pill. Yet it does work remarkably well when one practices it consistently. The problem is that we tend to want temporary or situational invulnerability. But if we do not practice invulnerability it will not be there when we need it. The runner who does not continue training will find herself cramping up. Likewise, the would-be Stoic who allows himself to get upset when his favorite football team loses, will likely be upset the next time he gets stuck in traffic. Training for invulnerability does not require perfection but it does require consistency to be most effective.

Photo by Ian Sane, CCO license.

An invulnerability pill might be tempting, but we should be in no rush to reach the goal. It is not the destination but the slow transformation of the journey that draws us forward.

William Irwin is the Herve A. LeBlanc Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, PA, williamirwin@kings.edu. He is also a member of the editorial board for Civil American and a member of The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). He is the author of The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism without Consumerism (2015) and Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and Defense (1999), as well as of the novel, Free Dakota (2016). He has edited a number of volumes of philosophy and popular culture for Wiley-Blackwell and Open Court, such as The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) and The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (2001).

The Society of Philosophers in America (

In case it is desired, you can download a printable, Adobe PDF version of this call for proposals here.

Interested persons can either submit a proposal for a panel at one of the following conferences, or they may individually submit to SOPHIA with the intent of joining with other SOPHIA presenters on a panel to be developed. Note that individual papers can often be submitted directly to a larger conference, but some events, such as SAAP’s, specify that “multiple submissions will not be accepted and that persons participating in invited sessions may not submit to the regular program.”

All submissions should be prepared for anonymous review, and be accompanied by a second document with contact information for each presenter. Please email your submission to danieljamesbrunson@gmail.com by 11:59 PM ET for each deadline below.

1: American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 01/03/18 – 01/06/18 in Savannah, GA,

Proposal Submission Deadline is Monday, July 3rd. Individual Papers or Presentations: An Abstract of 300-500 words; Panels: An Abstract of 600-1200 words, with titles.

2: Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 03/08-03/10 in Indianapolis, IN. Proposal

Submission Deadline is Monday, August 28th. Individual Papers or Presentations: 600 word abstract; Panels: A panel abstract of 450-600 word and at least 600 word abstracts per paper. For the SAAP event, our invitation is open, yet we encourage contributions that address the conference theme, “Ethos and Creativity.” The theme comes from a philosophically significant essay about the host city, Indianapolis, written by Indianapolis poet Mari Evans (1923–2017) about race and artistic practice.

3: 4th Conference of Public Philosophy Network, 02/8/18 – 02/10/18 in Denton, TX

Proposal Submission Deadline is Monday, September 11th. Individual Papers or Presentations: An Abstract of 300-500 words; Panels: An Abstract of 600-1200 words, with titles. The 2017 conference theme is philosophizing impact: What philosophical practices improve the uptake of philosophy, both across the disciplines, and throughout society?

4: American Philosophical Association, Central Division, 02/21/18 – 02/24/18 in Chicago, IL, Proposal

Submission Deadline is Monday, September 23rd. Individual Papers or Presentations: An Abstract of 300-500 words; Panels: An Abstract of 600-1200 words, with titles.

If you are interested in proposing a paper or a panel for an event not listed here, contact Dr. Brunson at the email address above. For more information about SOPHIA, visit our About page, “like” our Facebook page, and “follow” us on Twitter.

This ninth episode of the Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show and podcast features an interview with Dr. Tommy Curry of Texas A&M University, on the need for black male studies.

Dr. Curry is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of BlackManhood, which will come out in July of 2017 with Temple University Press. Listen for our “You Tell Me!” questions and for some jokes in one of our concluding segments, called “Philosophunnies.” Reach out to us on Facebook @PhilosophyBakesBread and on Twitter @PhilosophyBB; email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com; or call and record a voicemail that we play on the show, at 859.257.1849. Philosophy Bakes Bread is a production of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). Check us out online at PhilosophyBakesBread.com and check out SOPHIA at PhilosophersInAmerica.com.

(1 hr 15 mins)

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Notes

1. Dr. Tommy Curry’s new book, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of BlackManhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, forthcoming July 2017).
2. The Society of Young Black Philosophers Facebook group.

You Tell Me!

For our future “You Tell Me!” segments, Dr. Tommy Curry proposed the following question in this episode, for which we invite your feedback: “Given the recent election of Trump, how do listeners reconcile the myth of American democratic progress with the regression in American race relations, where deportations, racial profiling, accusations of terrorism, and international bans now become synonymous with American freedom?” What do you think?

Let us know!  Twitter, Facebook, Email, or by commenting here below!

Transcript Available

You can download and read the transcript for the show in an Adobe PDF version of it.

Transcribed by Drake Boling, June 5, 2017.

For those interested, here’s how to cite this transcript or episode for academic or professional purposes (for pagination, see the printable Adobe PDF version of this transcription):

Weber, Eric Thomas, Anthony Cashio, and Tommy Curry, “Studying Black Men,” Philosophy Bakes Bread, Transcribed by Drake Boling, WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM, Lexington, KY, March 6, 2017.

[Intro music]

Announcer: This podcast is brought to you by WRFL: Radio Free Lexington. Find us online at wrfl.fm. Catch us on your FM radio while you’re in central Kentucky at 88.1 FM, all the way to the left. Thank you for listening, and please be sure to subscribe.

Dr. Weber: You’re listening to WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM. This is Dr. Eric Thomas Weber and I’m here to play for you the ninth episode of Philosophy Bakes Bread. This is a great one with Dr. Tommy Curry and it’s going to be about black male studies.

[Theme music]

Dr. Weber: Hello and welcome to Philosophy Bakes Bread, food for thought about life and leadership, a production of the Society of Philosophers in America, A.K.A. SOPHIA. I’m Dr. Eric Thomas Weber.

Dr. Cashio: And I’m Dr. Anthony Cashio. A famous phrase says philosophy bakes no bread, that it’s not practical. But we at SOPHIA and on this show, aim to correct that misperception.

Dr. Weber: Philosophy Bakes Bread airs on WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM, and is recorded and distributed as a podcast next, so if you can’t catch us live on the air, subscribe and be sure to reach out to us. You can find us online at philosophybakesbread.com. We hope you’ll reach out to us on any of the topics we raise, or on topics you want us to bring up. Plus, we have a segment called “You tell me!” Listen for it, and let us know what you think.

Dr. Cashio: You can reach us in a number of ways! We are on twitter as @PhilosophyBB, which of course stands for Philosophy Bakes Bread. While you’re there, why don’t you check out SOPHIA’s Facebook page as well at Philosophers in America.

Dr. Weber: You can of course, also email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com, and you can call us and leave a short recorded message with a question, or a comment, or maybe bountiful praise that we may be able to play on the show at 859-257-1849. That number again is 859-257-1849.

Dr. Cashio: On today’s show we are very fortunate to be joined by Dr. Tommy Curry. How are you doing today Tommy?

Dr. Curry: I’m doing great. How are you Anthony?

Dr. Cashio: I’m doing great now that you’re here. We’re going to have a fun conversation today. Tommy is here to talk to us about his work in philosophy as well as his forthcoming book which will be coming out in July of this year. It’s called The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood.

Dr. Weber: Indeed. We’re so glad you’re here, thank you so much. Dr. Curry is professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, where he researches and teaches about critical race theory in Afrikaans philosophy and anti-colonial economic thought and colonial sexuality studies, social and political philosophy and biomedical ethics. He is also executive director of Philosophy Born of Struggle, as well as the recipient of the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation’s 2016-2017 A.I. and Manet Scheppps Foundation teaching fellowship.

Dr. Cashio: Dr. Curry is a very busy man. Dr. Curry’s work spans the fields of philosophy, jurisprudence, and gender studies, in addition to Afrikaans studies. He is a prolific author, having published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and more than 15 book chapters. On top of his forthcoming book and another in development titled Another White Man’s Burden, he is also a recognized public philosopher, having appeared on Rob Redding’s radio show, Redding’s News Reviews for his segment “Talking Tough with Tommy.”

Dr. Weber: Tommy this first segment is called “Know Thyself!” and so we invite you to let us know whether you know thyself. Especially, tell us about yourself and your background and how you came to philosophy, and given that, what philosophy means to you.

Dr. Curry: I came to philosophy largely in high school. I’m a first-generation college student from Lake Charles, Louisiana, at the time was a very small town in the South that was mostly known for craw-fish. It’s a good thing to be known for. A little later it was known for steamboat casino gambling. They used to put them on the lake. During that period of time I was actually a high school debater. It was how I paid for college. I was 12, I started reading socialism. My parents used to get really worried, back then we didn’t have the internet in 1994 or 1995, to get stuff you had to go to the library and look up the numbers of different periodicals et cetera and try to buy them.

Dr. Cashio: So you were like “Mom and dad can you take me to them library so I can get a book on socialism? (laughter)

Dr. Curry:  Yes. Here’s the crazy part. It was a debate argument so I didn’t want to run Marxism because tons of people had arguments about Marxism. I started calling socialist newspapers, The Worker, The Socialist Review, they sent me tons of stuff to my house, they were sending me all this communist socialist literature.

Dr. Cashio: You’re on a list somewhere.

Dr. Curry: I am. My parents became worried.  I became more familiar with the idea of social industrial unionism, the idea of unions leading the avant-garde proletariat revolution in socialism. So I started reading that for a while, got interested in the economic theory. Then I went to debate camp and started researching critical legal studies and critical race theory. I was about 13 then that was my first debate camp. From that time I as in love with critical ideas and critical thought. I was debating, I thought, this is something I want to do. Because I was at college campuses doing this research, I saw professors, I saw college students, I was like, “Yeah, I think I could be very comfortable on college campuses.”

Dr. Cashio: You realized this at the age of 13?

Dr. Curry: I was about 14 or 15 when I decided that’s what I wanted.

Dr. Cashio: Still ahead of the curve.

Dr. Curry: It was a great experience. When you’re a debater at debate camp, you spend two weeks on a college campus. Things have changed so much, but back then you were always in the library and you had to make photocopies of what you wanted to use so you copied and make the cards. So actually back then you actually had to read everything. I was reading tons and tons of material and I fell in love with theory and critical thought. That brought me into philosophy, it was understanding how these critical arguments were being utilized to talk about things like social justice and racism and equality and economic inequality and exploitation. I didn’t come to it through a love of Plato, these were arguments I was reading in socialist propaganda. Other things like current affairs and international relations, that really became a big draw to me. I think that’s why I have such a vastly different understanding pf philosophy. For me philosophy isn’t the love of wisdom, or this academic enterprise. I think of philosophy as more of a method or a technique of synthesizing empirical data and seeing causal or explanatory theories. That’s why I think it is so necessary for philosophers to know the realities of every discipline, because I think our job is to be able to understand what are happening in terms of descriptive or empirical phenomena, and try to create causal theories that can account for all of those, it can tell people the mechanism that tells the relationship between the different phenomena. That’s a vastly different view than most philosophers have for what our task is.

Dr. Weber: That’s interesting, in prior episodes of this show we’ve noted the ways in which philosophy can be this corridor between different disciplines and why it is that a philosopher might be engaged in reading across different disciplines. I think we can see that in what you just said. It certainly sounds like a lot of work to do to make sure you understand all of the different disciplines.

Dr. Curry: Oh yeah, but I love reading. I genuinely love reading. I wake up everyday and I read either three chapters of a book or two articles. Sometimes it’s in genetics, sometimes it’s in epi-genetics, sometimes it’s in anthropology, sometimes it’s in economics, it just depends. Something, what do I not know, let’s find out about. I think that to be a really good philosopher, contrary to how our discipline works, we should be reading across fields and across disciplines. Even when we don’t understand the data analysis, I’m trying to teach myself [?], that’s my next major task. That keeps us well-informed about what’s going on and it gives us more fueled for us actually thinking about things conceptually that enriches our practical realities. That’s what stops us from being so removed from our real world context.

Dr. Curry: I wanted to ask about an earlier point, there’s a lot to talk about in regard to what you just said, but you also mentioned that your parents were really worried early on. What were they worried about?

Dr. Curry: I’m first-generation, they are high school, their 13, 14-year-old is getting all of this socialist literature mailed to the house. It came in boxes. Boxes and boxes of socialist newspaper. People were sending me all this stuff about how the communist revolution would solve racism and how the communist revolution is needed to solve the war in Iraq. This is not what you typically think that a teenager is into, much less a teenager in the south. Being from the south, you do understand there’s a stigma that southern people are less intelligent. It was just not a conversation that was happening in our school. I remember I wrote one of my papers, I think it was my junior paper for Mrs. Steven’s class on a critical race theory. She was like, “This is just…”, you know, I was talking about jurisprudence and economic bias and why racism comes before class in a junior paper. It was just a conversation that wasn’t being had at the time.

Dr. Weber: Sounds like a good paper.

Dr. Curry: I actually still have a copy of it. I look back at it now and it’s just like, I should have been a little more well-read before I jumped into that boat.

Dr. Cashio: You were a junior. Cut yourself some slack there.

Dr. Curry: It was a good idea. It was creative. That’s what those kinds of things did, it opened up a conversation.

Dr. Cashio: What did Mrs. Stevens, what did she think?

Dr. Curry: She said that she was impressed with my vocabulary.

Dr. Weber: That’s not always a compliment.

Dr. Curry: No it was. She was a great teacher. One of the reasons that I learned to write so precisely was because of Mrs. Stevens. When we are in high school, one of the first assignments, one of the first days of our English class, she made us write 300 sentences. 100 simple sentences, 100 compound sentences, and 100 compound-complex sentences. She gave us this kind of map about how you write papers. I think that literally, the trauma of writing 300 sentences in a night imprinted on me, and that’s why I write the way I write today. It was positive. She was a good teacher.

Dr. Weber: I want to follow up one more thing about something you said. You said something about how you differ from some people’s conceptions of philosophy as they think about the level of wisdom, as to where in your case you think of philosophy as a way of thinking about empirical evidence and synthesizing ideas for the sake of advocacy for progress. Is that right?

Dr. Curry: Yeah. I think that philosophy should do problem-solving. When you look at what other disciplines do, they are overwhelmingly concentrated on specific problems. If I read something in domestic violence, they are usually concerned with domestic violence on these groups of women, very rarely but sometimes these groups of men. At the same time if we look at the sexual abuse population, they are looking at the same population but only looking at sexual abuse. I think one of the things that the philosopher can do is instead of just pre-determining what you’re going to find with a theory, you have the ability to synthesize the findings in the sexual abuse literature and the findings in the domestic abuse literature to find commonality. One of the commonalities between those two literatures is previous sexual trauma and socio-economic status. Those things, while they are identified as specific causes or correlates in the respective literature, they don’t form a joint theory, there’s nothing that joins those two things together.

I think the philosopher has the ability to not only to reap that material, find that causal explanation, but also do that theoretical work, to work with theories that might explain that. If you take the sex role theory that you get from something like second-wave feminism, which would suggest that men abuse because they want to dominate women, the philosopher has the ability to track the thinking down behind that. You can go through the theories, you can go through the progressions, you can go through what the people are reading. Once you get past that, you can say “Here’s what is wrong with these assumptions. Here’s a better explanation, look how it explains reality much better. I think that’s what philosophers should be doing, we should be solving problems, be they ethical, be they social-political, bet hey clinical. I think we have contributions to make in clinical findings like domestic abuse, trauma, and previous sexual…I think all these things can matter if we jump out of our bubble which says that we literally hold up the bible of Dewey or the bible of Plato, or the bible of whoever we choose. I think it’s a limitation of our field. We have so much more exciting things to contribute if we just take up the task of educating ourselves about the world beyond the figure that we want to interpret the world through.

Dr. Weber: Very interesting. We’re going to come back to a number of the points you’ve just raised, Tommy. We’ll be talking after a short break with Dr. Curry first in a segment about race in the United States and in the modern world today, and then in the next segment about his book The Man-Not. We’ll be right back. Thanks so much for listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread.

Dr. Cashio: Welcome back to Philosophy Bakes Bread. This is Dr. Anthony Cashio and Dr. Eric Weber talking today with Dr. Tommy Curry. We were discussing black male studies, the topic of his forthcoming book with Temple University Press. This topic is unique Tommy, as it is not just about race, but about gender as well. It is about black males. As we discussed before on this show, we’ll start this segment to talk about issues of race and then we’ll focus on the next segment on gender, specifically on concerns special to black masculinity and black males.

Dr. Weber: Indeed. thank you so much for joining us, Tommy. As you know, this may be one of the obvious big picture questions. There has been talk in the past 8, 10 years, 8 years maybe, since Obama was elected, and a little bit before, that we might be in a so-called ‘post-racial’ time. So the question for you is: Are we past race, whatever that would mean? If not, how do you consider issues of race in a country that elected not once, but twice, an African American to our highest office?

Dr. Curry: When we look at race, we often have to distinguish between the symbolic gestures of progress and the material progress. This was a distinction that Derek Bell, before he died, was very insistent upon. He would suggest that when you have things like the Civil Rights movement, these are symbols of progress. Even when we learn things now, throughout disciplines, the civil Rights movement becomes the basis by which we read practically every race relation through. When we see this today even with Black Lives Matter, the reason that people protest in the streets is because it was modeled off of what they saw in the Civil Rights movement. That becomes the pinnacle focus of scholarship, of social protest, and even our conceptual lens of looking at racism in America. The problem with that, and this is what critical race theorists understood, people like Richard Delgado and Derek Bell understood was that means segregation becomes the conceptual lens by which we read something like the end of racism, or the decrease of racism. The more integrated something is, or the more access someone has to a position or office or job or social space, in our minds it’s coded as less racist. When you talk about something like Obama, it’s like, “Oh look, we de-segregated the last segregated bastion of white supremacy: the White House.”

What ends up happening with that, it’s like you put a black guy in the white house, and notice when Obama was elected, then there was a question of his race theme. White people suddenly wanted to claim his as a mixed-race president. There’s conversations like “He’s not black, he’s half-white.” When in the history of America has that ever happened? When have white people been like “That black guy is part of my race, he’s half white.” That shows you how race becomes this kind of malleable, but at the same time permanent feature of American consciousness. While you say we have got progress by putting a black guy in the white house, there is a problem with him being understood completely as a black man. There’s something about America’s racial consciousness that doesn’t allow it to fully accept that a black man could occupy that level of governance over a country. The other part about it too is that while people embrace the symbol, there is a simultaneous backlash against Obama. Many people argue that it’s this white-lash now, eight years later that got president Trump elected. You had the increase of the tea party. All of the moderates that saw themselves in Obama’s policies now shifted over to the right, became conservative. Even though he actually improved the economic and political status of more Americans, especially with him giving them affordable healthcare, these types of things suggest that racism operates at a level both cognitively, both how the perceive race and how they perceive black leadership in this country, but also materially.

How people see that they are disadvantaged next to other groups of people who they perceive as being black or other racialized minorities over them. You have a swell of poor white people who are middle class white people. You have the Occupy Wall Street movement who were literally being de-classed in a way. They saw themselves as middle class and were moving into a lower class. I talk about this in my work as a kind of ‘niggerization’ of white America. It doesn’t have the same class status that has traditionally been associated with whiteness, white privilege and white property. They saw the decrease of lower class literally racializing them as a group of people. This creates a problem in the collective consciousness in white America, which is why you have this huge sprawling of rural whites voting for someone like Trump. It means that race then becomes a central point of departure for how people relate to each other and how people conceptually understand the problem of governance. One of the things that I’m constantly talking about that I think philosophers get wrong about race is that they try to prioritize identity as it stands in for social stratification. What I mean by that is as philosophers often say something like, look at this last election for instance. The overwhelming number of white women who voted for Trump, who is by and large a misogynist and a xenophobic racist. You have this huge outpouring, but in most liberal philosophers’ minds, that was impossible because the position of gender means that you take the pro-gender stance. That you’re not as susceptible to misogyny and patriarchy as men would be because they are the dominant group in society. When you look at that empirically, white women been one of the most conservative voting blocks in the country, especially the past 50 or 60 years. Their attitudes mirror that of white men, just like in other racial groups. Their racial attitudes usually overwhelm gender difference or gender political attitudes within races.

When you look at something like Trump, a racial backlash, the analysis that you’re going to give are going to be racial stratification rather than gender divisions within the same groups. Philosophers often miss the mark. That’s why, you watch social media. You’ve seen the crisis of the discipline of philosophy. How could this happen in our America? Especially among American philosophers who largely see American democracy as not only a progressive social phenomenon, but a kind of ethos by which people try to understand and build communities. When that collapsed because there is a betrayal of the consciousness within communities, there is not really an apparatus to explain it because the way we decentralize race as an explanative phenomena or causality, in academic culture doesn’t allow us to really see that people largely align with racial interest over economic and even gender interest. It explains much more of phenomena at least socially in this country, than the other facets, which is not to say that they don’t have very serious or significant effects, but it doesn’t determine the course of history or politics the same way. That’s what happens when we look at race as in America.

We often talk about race as identity, race as skin color, race as something that we all have, versus racism, which are structures of power that are reproduced socially, economically, politically and conceptually. It leads into dehumanization or the eradication of certain racialized groups. When you look at things like that, you can actually see that Trump’s policies towards women are not gender policies, but in fact racial policies. If you think that Trump is trying to eat away women’s right to abortion because he hates women, then you have to say how traditionally white supremacist countries have looked in relationship to minorities. They have looked at them as the key, center facet of making sure that their population grows. It’s not surprising that someone is xenophobic and racist, who wants to block out immigrants and increase the white population, is against white women having abortions by and large. It fits within the general pattern that we see, especially at turn-of-the-century white idealism and white ethnological and ecological ideas. These things are reproductive ideas. This is the same way when Trump says that Mexicans are rapists, he’s not necessarily playing race politics, he’s playing gender politics.

One of the overarching ideas that people have had in the United States, especially perils, black or yellow peril, is that racialized men want to rape white women. If we change the dynamics by which we understand these concepts, then we can see very well why he resonated so much with some rural white women. They articulate their ideas of gender on racial concepts that have been historically rooted to their feared paranoia of being out-produced or overrun by racialized immigrants, racialized males typically.

Dr. Weber: I certainly remember all kinds of examples wherein white supremacists were deeply worried and pushing on the idea of our women and protecting them. I hadn’t made the connection, until you said that, to the way in which you would refer to Mexicans as rapists. Understanding how and why he got such support from the alt-right, which is this sugar-coating way of saying white supremacist. How he got such support from them, there are a number of ways. I hadn’t made that specific connection. That’s very interesting. I’m sorry, Anthony you were going to ask a question a little bit ago.

Dr. Cashio: Following this, is there any real potential for progress in the United States? Can we move beyond this or through this? How would that look going forward?

Dr. Curry: I think I’m more of the traditional, old-school race crit, so I would say no. Most afro-pessimists would agree with me in that conclusion. The reason, when scholars often say, especially black scholars and more specifically, black male scholars, say that there’s no progress on race in America, many people want to see that as a pessimist or fatalist position that is just not true. It’s not true because there’s some empirical verification that shows otherwise, it’s often not true because one cannot accept the idea. It’s absurd to accept that idea. But when you look, most people understand racism within the idea of change, but they understand change as only meaning improvement. What I’ve been really trying to tell philosophers, especially American philosophers, is that no one is arguing that there are not dynamics of racism, that it stays the same. But within the dynamics, within the fluidity of how race changes, like how Islam becomes a race, it becomes racialized. There is also a regression of race. There is the apex by which people get included in it and become more dangerous. To talk about racial progress without talking about the cyclical nature of regression, doesn’t allow us to articulate what happens in America when we’re trying to talk about race relations between other groups of people, or even how other races are racialized to demonize them. Now Islam, Muslims are now terrorists. These processes of change and dynamics and redefinition and cooptation and inclusion is what’s necessary to understand the kind of realism about the situation of race in America.

In terms of where you go from there, you literally have to change the whole structure. When you’re talking about racism you’re not talking about the thoughts of individual people. I think many people in the twenty-first century don’t understand. You’re not talking about how a person thinks about a group, that’s only implicated. You’re talking about how various structures and policies legitimize the attitudes of certain groups that then become socialized into a larger population, which is why individuals believe what they believe.

Dr. Weber: What is an example of that Tommy? I’m nodding and I appreciate the theoretical explanation you’re giving to us, but I can imagine a listener saying, “What is an example of that? What does that mean?”

Dr. Curry: An example of that would be what happened to Muslims in this country after 9/11. Islam was a religion. It is a religion. Now it becomes synonymous to terrorism because there is this event in the historical memory of America that relates the killing of Americans on American soil to Islam. What happens on the basis of that? We pass policies and declare war on Muslims. We are talking about the jihad, the terrorism, we’re talking about Isis, all of this is linked to our concept of Islam being always radical, always violent. From that stance the government takes after 9/11, different kind of policies of propaganda happen. That’s when the government starts accepting that this idea is in fact true. Once the public accepted that idea was true, notice how we now have a whole generation of people who are Americans, who grew up in an Obama era that not only called him a Muslim and anti-American, but now believes that Muslims is synonymous with anti-American terrorism.

The idea came about from a position that the leader at the time took about what happened at 9/11 and that trickled down to a reproductive concept that became cultural in the minds of individuals. Now you have American citizens two decades later that still fundamentally believe that this event was caused by this disposition of Islam. That’s what I mean. Most people would say that we need to target those individuals, without any analysis of how 9/11 plays into the collective memory, how certain policies and a declaration of war, and certain nations reproduced this phenomena, and the role that the state plays in making sure that this is still part of the national story, especially under someone like Trump, who is vehemently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant.

Dr. Weber: It’s interesting that you say that, I was just having a conversation yesterday with someone who didn’t realize that the Klan thinks of itself as thoroughly Christian. There’s a reason they are burning crosses, it’s not because they hate crosses, it’s because they think they are Christian. Nobody will jump to say that Christianity as this kind of religion. It’s the clansmen are weird. It’s interesting how by contrast, you have certain people who call themselves Muslim doing some awful things. But not every Muslim.

Dr. Curry: I always think this is funny, because a lot of the research I do is on the Klan, especially in the early twentieth century. I tell people all the time. The Klan celebrated feminism, the Klan celebrated women’s suffrage. They thought it was literally the unification of the white race against the black race. That would have more votes to subjugate black people during Jim Crow.

Dr. Weber: Wow, I’ve never heard of that.

Dr. Curry: Yeah, they actually write this in their constitutions. There were all of these local chapters, so you can look at what they were saying about women getting the right to vote in 1919, 1920. They were overwhelmingly in support of it. White people were like welcomed by the Klan all over the country during Jim Crow. It’s so funny to me that, going off of your example of how we don’t associate Christianity, it’s funny how certain ideas and concepts get so de-historicized. The whole beginning of the Klan is based on Christian doctrine, based on this divine republic idea, which is why it was supported overwhelmingly by people who weren’t part of it as maintaining the white community. Doing God’s work. When those groups incorporated ideas that we think today as being completely liberal and completely anti-racist, we just separate the two, not because they are historically separated, like women’s suffrage and the KKK or white supremacy, but because we’ve made that decision in our time period to say that these things are not fundamentally related. We just de-couple them. Most things in America had to deal with racism. American democracy is about imperialism. Women’s rights, suffrage, was about imperialism.

All of these things were the links. The idea was not that women deserve equality, it was that women can join white men to rule. One of the pushbacks against black people getting the right to vote, or specifically black men getting the right to vote, was that white women felt that they were the superior group and felt that white men should enforce that. That’s why you had all this huge push of the myth of the black rapist, the tests, the lack of civilization of black people in America. You put that in context of what happens when Obama wins office, then it doesn’t become surprising that you have this huge pushback on the idea of being governed by a black man, who also became anti-American, who became a terrorist, who became barbaric et cetera.

Dr. Cashio: He was Muslim, therefore terrorist, and he is also black, so you have…three or four adjectives.

Dr. Weber: His middle name is Hussein!

Dr. Curry: Notice the idea was that he couldn’t be born here. Because the idea in the 19th century was that black people were aliens, because republics reflected the idea of the people who they were from. This has caused geography all the way back to the 18th century. These are very old ideas.

Dr. Weber: It’s a great sign that I want to keep talking, but we do have to take a break. We’re talking to the fantastic Dr. Tommy Curry and we’re going to come right back for another segment in just a moment. Thanks so much for listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread.

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Dr. Cashio: You’re listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread. This is Dr. Anthony Cashio and Dr. Eric Weber and today we are very fortunate to be speaking with Dr. Tommy Curry about race and gender. In this segment we’re going to talk specifically about concerns that are especially important for understanding and thinking about circumstances about black men and boys, a topic that is not touched on much, if at all.

Dr. Weber: Indeed. Before we ask any particular questions, we want to read a couple paragraphs that are in the release about Dr. Curry’s book. “Tommy’s book The Man-Not is a justification for black male studies. He posits that we should conceptualize the black male as a victim oppressed by his sex. The ‘man-not’ therefore is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of black males that could challenge existing accounts of black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated through academic research across disciplines.”

Dr. Cashio: “Tommy argues that black men struggled with death and suicide as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence. Lots of evidence. The analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism, including black feminism, does not yet fully understand the role that homo-eroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the death and lives of black males. Tommy challenges how we think and perceive the conditions that actually affect all black males.” Sounds like a very ambitious book, Tommy. I have a question for you that is probably the first one that most people jump in their mind. What do you mean by ‘genred existence’?

Dr. Curry: Absolutely. Throughout history, gender was a concept that did not apply to black people, especially in the 19th century in the science of ethnology. Gender was a concept that only existed within patriarchal or civilized races. The only civilized race that possessed it was white people, or Europeans. Black people were called savages. They never developed in the minds of Europeans the necessary sex roles that would justify femininity or masculinity or what we would understand today as gender. Genre is a way, is a term introduced by Sylvia Winter, it’s something that has been described by Fanon and I would even argue Du Bois, talks about the ways in which colonialism and racism have distorted the idea of masculinity or femininity on the bodies of men and women. It’s a term that’s meant to capture the specific kind of oppression, that there’s certain bodies that we suffer under, rather than isolating those terms of oppression to what we think are causal theories of gender.

Dr. Weber: Genre, when we think about literature, genre as a topic or a way or style of doing things. Is that related in any way to the way that genre was used in the way you’re talking about it?

Dr. Curry: Winters doesn’t draw from that understanding. She thinks of genre more etymologically as referring to kind, or type of thing. She thinks that it’s necessary to talk about the kinds of oppressions these bodies or accumulations of bodies have had in colonial spaces, rather than gender, which creates a hierarchy of that. People like Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí in The Invention of Women have argued that when you talk about gender, you already presuppose a kind of history in which women have been subjugated by men and that that holds true across all cultures. In fact, that doesn’t. The ways that most white women came in contact with racialized peoples were as colonizers. They were the people brought in, following Ann Stoler’s work, they came in after the genocide. After white men killed everybody, when they wanted to set up shop, build homes, institutions, churches, expand their population, that’s when the women came in. The idea that that gender history would be the same as the gender history of a native people’s, would be completely wrong.

Dr. Weber: One of the key premises of your book, Tommy, is that there is more that is important to talk about, than issues of race when you’re talking about black men and women. There are also crucial differences that are special or unique to black males. That’s part of what is going on in your book. Can you tell us, why do we need a book that focuses on black men in particular if the problem is racism? Someone might argue. Why is this needed, and this particular this focus that you’ve got in your book?

Dr. Curry: The existence of black men and boys in the United States is largely thought of as generic. That racism affects them in ways that often lead to their death, that’s often all we understand. One of the things that we see with he deaths of people like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sean Bell, even a young boy like Tamir Rice, black men only become focused on when we’re analyzing their corpse when we’re trying to justify or analyze their deaths. We try to say that they are good people and didn’t deserve it only when we see their dead bodies in front of us. The at-large perception of black men and boys in this country is that they are dangerous, they are deviants, they are rapists, they are criminals. They are generally considered to be less intelligent than their female counterparts.

Dr. Cashio: Examples of toxic masculinity, I’ve heard it described recently.

Dr. Curry: Right, if you look at social media, black and brown men are often referred to as toxic masculines or hegemonic masculines, which means that they see power that they use violence and domination of women to construe masculinity. What I show in this book is that one, that’s a misreading of R.W.S. Connell’s theory. She does not include black or brown men or colonized men in the idea of hegemonic masculinity, because it’s a ruling class ideology. In fact, she understands the historical efforts that black men have made in the global south against colonization as a kind of radical resistance masculinity, rather than the hegemonic masculinity.

Dr. Weber: For your average listener, lots of people won’t know what you mean by hegemonic. I just want to see if we can put it in English.

Dr. Curry: Hegemonic masculinity is the idea that there is a dominant ideal masculinity which rules over a country or a republic. It’s patriarchy. It’s hegemonic not because it’s powerful, it’s hegemonic because it’s ideological.

It forms the basis and standard by which all other masculinities aspire to. It has an ideological and conscious-based control for gender and gendered norms are organized in a given society. One of the things that go along with this patriarchal epsilon is of course the emphasized femininity. The female counterpart that is supposed to protect at all costs, be that women in our country. These two ideas become the basis for the idea how R.W.S. Connell, at least initially, because she has changed her thinking, at least initially formulate the concept. But black men and brown men don’t have that kind of masculinity. They don’t come into the society as patriarchs who control economics or government. They are usually the victims of it. They are not people who outperform their female counterparts in society, in fact they are often criticized for not being able to protect or provide for the women because of their employment, because discrimination, because of incarceration, or because of the terrible problem of homicide.

What we’ve often done is used theories that were developed on Australian schoolboys in the 1980’s to articulate and describe what we take to be violent masculinity in black and brown men in the United States. Because those things have been completely different, one is talking about ruling class people, the other is talking about the impression that all people are the title phenomenon, all people suffer, they are poor or incarcerated, or they are victims of substance or drug abuse, somehow the terms become synonymous. What I think we need is more nuance when we’re talking about the suffering of black men and boys, that we can’t continue to look at them as perpetrators of violence when they suffer so overwhelmingly as victims of violence. We don’t really talk about men who are victims of domestic abuse in the United States. Most of the literature that is written on that comes from the UK, because the UK changed its views about domestic abuse in the mid-90’s. Because America is doesn’t understand that there is a symmetry of domestic abuse and inter-partner violence in the United States, men are largely ignored victims. Black men are disproportionately affected by domestic abuse at the hands of spouses and girlfriends, it is viewed to be impossible that these brutish, violent, deviant black men could actually be victims at the hands of a woman.

Dr. Cashio: In one version, the toxic masculinity, the idea that the average black male masculinity keeps them from seeing this other side as well.

Dr. Curry: Absolutely. In fact, we constantly misname it. Most people would suggest that domestic abuse in black men happens because men are trying to gain power over women. But overwhelmingly the research shows that domestic abuse in black communities are bi-directional, meaning that women hit men and men hit women, because of employment opportunities, because these are economic problems. Overwhelmingly, domestic abuse in this country happens among the poorest and the lowest socio-economic status groups in America. When you’re putting race into that, you’re finding additional issues of employment discrimination, substance abuse, recidivism, et cetera… This is what brings conflict. This is not a simple thing like all men abuse and all women are victims. Men can be victims and perpetrators and women can be victims or perpetrators. We don’t have a very good accounting theory for female perpetration and violence. It gets even more complicated when we talk about issues of rape.

Overwhelmingly, black men find themselves, especially when they are boys, having earlier sexual experiences than the general population. This means that they are at greater risk for things like statutory rape, forced or coerced rape by different groups, men and women.  But because we don’t have a very good idea of female perpetrated rape in this country, we miss the kind of vulnerability and suffering that the young boys go through. Remember the UCR, the uniform criminal code, didn’t change in the United States about rape until January 1, 2013. Before that time, the definition of rape was the forced […] of a woman. Only in 2013 when the possibility to being made to penetrate, could men be seen as victims of rape. It because of the reclassification of the day that now shows that rape in this country between men and women, where men are victims and women are victims are practically equal. Most of our accounts in theory, because before men were raped previously to 2013 it was considered sexual assault. It was literally defined in a different category. If you reclassify it, the numbers are literally like 1.28 million versus 1.26 million. The numbers are very close in terms of victimization of men and women being raped in this country. We need to do a better job focusing on this vulnerability.

Dr. Weber: Tommy we’ve only got a little bit of time left in this segment so I want to make sure I ask one question. It’s clear to me that you’re right that men can be victims and it’s amazing that if a women is raped statutorily by a male teacher, but when a woman who is a teacher statutorily rapes young men, that is not taken as nearly so troubling to people.

Dr. Cashio: People are like “Oh yeah, I wish that had been me.” You hear that.

Dr. Weber: There will be that attitude. My question with the issue of victim. Who can deny that Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin were victims and that others are, and there was this judge who was selling young black men to private prisons in Pennsylvania and caught doing so, got 29 years. There’s no doubt that there’s victimhood. On the other hand, being called the victim and thinking of oneself as a victim is also stigmatized. There’s a negative influence of associating someone with victimhood. Can you talk about that at all? Is that something maybe inescapable? IF you are a victim, well then you are a victim.

Dr. Curry: The literature that is talking about victimhood often reverberates around a notion of identity politics, that these people are perpetually victims, and their victimhood is being claimed based off of what people view as material or actual oppression. What I’m claiming with black men is a little different in the sense that in a victim versus perpetrator binary, which is often how policy and law is directed, black men never end up being seen as victims or vulnerable or impacted by violence. They are always thought of as the cause of it. When you have situations where young boys who have had early sexual experiences of statutory rape growing up, let’s say that that young boy who was raped ends up beating his girlfriend or wife, abusing her. We point to that violence, because that snapshot of violence when he is 17 or 18 with his girlfriend feeds into the theory that men abuse women. But we miss the antecedent 10 years where this same young boy at the time is struggling with issues of being raped by a women. He had no mental health, no resources for mental health, no group to talk to, had to live with this kind of violence and trauma in silence and shame. In many ways he had to absorb it by re-orienting the events, so many times when young men are raped, they end up rationalizing this as something that they wanted or something that they controlled. That trauma then builds into how this person perceives women, but we don’t talk about the violence that he saw or was a victim of, we only talk about him as a perpetrator of a crime.

What this ends up doing is that it creates a space where on top of race, the hyper-sexualization of black men and boys ends up feeding into a predetermined analysis where rape, be it domestic abuse, be it inter-partner homicide, it all fits into a theory that these people want to dominate and abuse people rather than seeing that these are products of different traumas and histories where they were the victims first. Because we don’t treat that, we don’t have a kind of compassion to these groups of people. I try to tell people all the time, when you study black men and boys, you can’t come at it with the identity lens. You have to genuinely feel compassion for what these boys are suffering. When I write about black men and boys, and I think readers of the book will see this, I humanize them first. I don’t suppose that what black men did in slavery or during Jim Crow, is actually the nature of black men in the same way that you wouldn’t say that someone who is hungry or starving who goes out and kills someone for food would naturally be a murderer.

With black males, we don’t have that distinction. We see a group that is incarcerated, we see a group who in schools are often sectored off into special education classes, we see groups of young boys who overwhelmingly based off teacher’s expectations, be they white or black, are thought to be less intelligent than their female counterparts or their white counterparts. Then we assume that in this environment that their actions or behaviors that they display are based off of their nature, rather than a coping mechanism or the effects of their marginalization and oppression. What I’m trying to do is sensitize the world with actual facts about how many men and boys actually suffer from rape and suffer from domestic abuse and fear for their lives because of the high rates of homicide in their communities, or fear of incarceration. I think that’s a very different view that we get of black males in this society. Even in theory, which tries to make them human first, and then because they are humans, suggest that it’s not just their corpse that we should focus on, but the loss of their actual lives and living, which is why I’m constantly calling for a study of black male death and dying. I’m interested in the process of what it means to lose one’s life in the course of living.

Dr. Weber: We’ve been talking with Dr. Tommy Curry and we’ve got one more segment when we come back. It’s a good sign if we wish we had more time. Thank you so much for talking with us, and thanks everybody for listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread. We’ll be right back.

Dr. Weber: Hey folks, this is Dr. Eric Thomas Weber here live in the studio. You’re listening to WRFL 88.1 FM in Lexington here. We’ve got one more segment to play for you, I know it’s about 3 o’clock, but this is not to be missed. It’s concluding thoughts and such from episode 9 of Philosophy Bakes Bread with Dr. Anthony Cashio, my co-host, and me, talking with Dr. Tommy Curry of Texas A&M University.

Dr. Cashio: Welcome back everyone to Philosophy Bakes Bread. We’ve been talking today with Dr. Tommy Curry, and now we have some final big picture questions, some light-heater thoughts, and we’ll wrap everything up in this last section, maybe with a pressing philosophical question for our listeners to contact us about. We’ll have some information about that in a second. Eric, I think you had a question.

Dr. Weber: Thank you Anthony and thank you Tommy. Yes, I do have a question for you. Any of you, if you haven’t gone to take a look, you should. You can go check out, it’s available for pre-order on places like Amazon and elsewhere, The Man-Not by Dr. Tommy Curry. We’ll have a link in the show notes about that. On the cover of the book, which you can see on booksellers or the flyer about the book from the press, there are a powerful couple of photos about alternatively, you could say, a growing boy or a young man. My sense is that you picked this photo partly because he’s a young man, or he’s really a boy but maybe treated as a man, because he’s holding up whatever you call those letters when you are being arrested. Can you tell me the story about why you picked those set of photos for the cover, and what it means?

Dr. Curry: The photo is a picture of George Stinney Junior. He was a 14 year old black boy who was executed in this country for the crime of murder with intent to rape. He is the youngest person ever executed by the electric chair to this very day. The reason that I picked him was because there was not only evidence that he did not commit the crime, but there was an insistence, that despite the implausibility of it, that he was ultimately a rapist. The reason I chose that photo, was because it was necessary for me to center the fact that a black boy, a child, was considered a rapist because he was a black male. I look at that as one of the lens that black men in this country are often read through. It’s important to understand that whereas I see potentiality and innocence in him as a boy, that most people see him as a cub, as a not yet developed beast and rapist. Not only did he get seen that way, but he lost his life in a racist American south because of it, for allegedly attacking two white women. Fourteen years old. Imagine that, right? It carries a certain kind of weight. Tamir Rice was 12. This is the condition that most black males grow up with in this country.

Dr. Weber: This isn’t some sort of mob, though like in Mississippi. This is the courts.

Dr. Curry: The courts found him guilty and sentenced him to death. That’s the weight, the racism on a black male body. Fourteen. To think that we exist in a world where our dominant perspective of gender, which is formed by western feminism, doesn’t allow for that kind of vulnerability to be articulated. The idea is that it was racism, it wasn’t racism or sexism that killed George Stinney, but the idea of the rapist is in direct relation to the patriarch who aims to protect the women of his race. He was born in that moment. It was born in the moment of black male enfranchisement after the Civil War. It was completely about patriarchy. Rebecca Latimer is saying that she was against rape so we should lynch a thousand negros. She used to other N word, but that was about patriarchy. This is not just racism. But the kinds of violence and stereotypes and the terror and horror that black men have in the imaginations of most Americans, is often dismissed and silenced within the academy. In fact, to talk about black men as being vulnerable or to be victims of violence, be it police violence or rape, or even violence by women where women are perpetrators, is to literally be excluded by most sectors of the academy. It’s so taboo. IT’s something that we not only choose not to discuss, but something that we choose to disown because black males are so over-determined by the ideas of being violent that there’s no way that we can see that violent being as being the victim.

You have got to think about this. One of the ways there have been so much buy-in from police executions of black men in this country, has been on the idea that these black men were criminals and they had to protect their lives. Even the American public is like, “Well, if this black male would have done this or that, he would still be alive. Like Trayvon Martin, if he was respectful, he would have been alive.” This is a kid! You’re following a kid and pull a gun on him and shoot him in the heart, and the idea was that well if he was just more respectful, he wouldn’t have been seen as a legitimate threat.

Dr. Cashio: Then someone his being disrespectful justifies his murder, being killed.

Dr. Curry: These are the kinds of fantasies that we create. Somehow being disrespectful equals death. Walking down the street or pulling away from a cop equals death. A 12-year old boy like Tamir Rice, holding a gun, a BB gun, equals death. Anything that black men do that is outside of the realm of what society has confined them to, can most likely lead to death. That’s something that I don’t think we really understand in our analysis of black men. What we do is we count the numbers of bodies. Even the numbers of bodies are engaged. Even under intersectional theory, often the idea is that we focus on the death of black men far too much. Black men are killed on average, are 290, to over 300 black men are victims of police homicide. Their female counterparts are between 9 and 20 in a given year. The idea is that somehow theoretically we need to focus on black males’ deaths, because focusing on all men is patriarchal.

How do black men both become the greatest victims of patriarchal violence in terms of police homicide and state violence, but then to talk about them as the greatest victims, which is an empirical question, simultaneously becomes patriarchal violence or patriarchal silence. This is why the theories in the academy must be pushed beyond their present limits and boundaries. There is an erasure that depends on the dehumanized status of black and brown men and boys that allows for them to not be centered as primary victims. Could we imagine a world about where we said we talk too much about women being victims of domestic abuse? That would cause more outrage because there is a humanity to that. We talk about them, and male victims aren’t far behind female victims empirically, looking at both groups, but we still don’t center it. When we talk about men it seems like we’re deflecting from the larger issue. The humanity attributed to what female victims of domestic violence is so pronounced on these instances. But when you talk about black men as being primary victims of police homicide, or incarceration, because they are dehumanized and we see them as less than human, and undesirable, it’s much easier to claim why we don’t need to focus on them. Their humanity is not considered first and foremost.

Dr. Cashio: This is important and heavy stuff. We’re kind of running out of time, so we want to ask you a few last questions. One of our final questions we ask all of our guests is based on the inspiration of this show, whether or not philosophy bakes bread or does not bake bread, as the saying goes. As a philosopher and as doing philosophy, and we kind of talked about this at the beginning of the show, you have a different version of philosophy than a lot of other philosophers have. Do you find it helpful? That it helps bake bread? Do you find that you’re dealing with some very heavy stuff, do you find that it helps you keep sane? I guess is the right way to ask the question.

Dr. Curry: Let me say that I don’t think that most philosophy does bake bread. Because it’s completely impractical. I’ll be very specific with the traditions. I don’t think that analytic, continental or American actually contribute in its current form to the practical problems of our society. But I think that the ideas that we learn in philosophy really could. It could make us more sensitive and aware to problems if we get rid of reading or making philosophy synonymous to our dominant ideologies, be they pragmatism, feminism, or Marxism, whatever they may be. The task of the philosopher is conceptual specificity, the idea of using concepts to articulate causal relationships of specific problems. That’s why we enjoy Marx. That’s why we enjoy pragmatism. They make certain linkages between prongs of education and social stability and how they sought to make a more robust democratic nation.

The problem is that because we are less well-read than the people at the turn of the century, and we don’t value problems in the same way. They become ideological figures and idols for us rather than guidance or examples of how to proceed through a certain method of engaging a text’s concepts and problems. In terms of sanity, it’s not philosophy that keeps me sane. Most philosophy conferences simply don’t welcome this kind of work because it’s too challenging to our already comfortable ideas. The sanity comes from, and I have had to talk to several colleges, because we have IRB study with a colleague out of California.

One of the things that happen when you hear these stories, because black men would come to my office or they would call me up and meet me at conferences and they would tell me their stories of how they were abused and raped as young boys, you carry that with you. You carry the fact that in some instances, 20, 30-year old men have only been able to tell their story of rape because I read a paper that I acknowledged that black men can be victims of it. That’s a very powerful thing. To take on, and share in somebody’s suffering because you see them as a human and you see them as a human being where someone hurt them and disappointed them. The sanity comes from, and it took me a long time, because when I first started doing this work, I was really depressed. I was really impacted, it really affected me. Some days, I’m not a big crier, but hearing these stories and reading them, I would just tear up. It’s not just the violence that happened to them, but it’s the violence that we constantly do by denying that it happens. I would go on a conference and tell people here is what is happening to these young black boys, and people were like “It’s not a big problem.” or “Black men can’t be raped, men can’t be raped, they really want sex all the time.” I’m trying to explain to them, how is this any different than what they used to say about female victims of rape? “She wanted it, she dressed this way, she asked for it…” Why does this become so easily accessible as a desire that all men want.

Why do racialized men and boys, children, get lumped into that category. How does a 6-year-old boy want to have sex? That’s the hyper-sexualization of that group. What I’ve done, I have a group on Facebook where different black male scholars talk about their research, and I wrote a book, and it’s the first book ever that is dedicated to black men as the center of a study that is utilizing their own theories. That really helped me because it gave me a way to start understanding and explaining some of these issues that I was being told at conferences constantly, but couldn’t really get a hold of a person. When someone tells you that this terrible thing happened to them, that a mother’s friend, for instance, used to pay them, they were 9 years old, their mother’s friend would pay them to perform oral sex on her. When someone tells you that, and they tell you how it’s affected their relationship, that they would never be able to see themselves marrying a woman, and always felt like they were unattractive and underperform sexually because of this incident as a child, that they have linked money to this form of approval from females, what can you say as a philosopher? Philosophy doesn’t help you there. What helps you is understanding the humanity of the person speaking, and trying to say that there is something that you can do or develop that will get other people to sympathize with that pain.

The task of doing that as philosopher when you are studying black men and boys, is that you have to fight not for the argument, but for them to be heard. It’s not about winning the argument when this happens, it’s about getting people to hear the humanity of a voice crying out as a victim of a kind of violence as denied to them. I think that that orientation, realizing that fundamentally changed how I was approaching the study of black men and boys. That’s what actually gave me some sanity. It showed me that, before I was just doing the studies, I was like here’s the evidence, here’s the evidence. It was impacting me because it was like no matter how much evidence I presented, and I’ve presented at women and gender studies conferences. I’ve presented everywhere. I was trying to find an audience of people to hear this work, to understand that intersectionality in feminism hasn’t done it’s due diligence in talking about female perpetrated against males. Those people didn’t want to engage me. Perhaps I was naïve when first coming out. In trying to center and show that black men can be heard as human beings really gave me a purpose to taking on all of the suffering and trauma of these individuals.

Dr. Weber: Thank you so much Tommy. This is some very heavy stuff. Given how heavy this is, it’s really important to remind people about the lighter side of philosophy and have a little big of levity because every now and then you do have to smile and laugh even if things are rough. This next moment is a segment we call philosophunnies. I’ve recorded, actually my son saying the word “philosophunnies,” I’m going to insert it right here.

Dr. Weber: Say ‘philosophunnies’

Sam: Philosophunnies!

(laughter)

Dr. Weber: Say ‘philosophunnies’

Sam: Philosophunnies!

(child’s laughter)

Dr. Weber: I want to invite you, if you have any funny story or joke to tell us, do you have any funny story to tell us?

Dr. Curry: Not really.

Dr. Weber: The tragic part, when you’re looking for jokes in philosophy and race is that you see some of the gross stuff that’s out there on race. The most sobering one that was really kind of tragic and not-quite so horrible compared to other jokes, I have some good ones from Paul Mooney that we’re going to tell next. This first one is an indication about some of what we’ve just heard from Dr. Curry. Here is a joke that is not funny, but sad about MLK. What would Martin Luther King be if he was white? is the question. The answer is Alive. That’s pretty awful in a sense.

Dr. Curry: That’s awful, but ironically true.

Dr. Weber: That’s an example of the most palatable of some of the first jokes, when I say palatable, I mean like I don’t feel like a terrible person repeating it because of it’s truth and it gets at the point we’ve been making. That said, we have a couple of Paul Mooney jokes that I think are pretty funny. Anthony you want to try the first one there?

Dr. Cashio: This is Paul Mooney saying this, not me.

(laughter)

Dr. Weber: Not the white guy from Alabama?

Dr. Cashio: Paul Mooney says “I have nothing to do with racism in America. It was here when I got here.”

(laughter)

Dr. Curry: That’s definitely a Paul Mooney joke.

Dr. Weber: Yes it is. Paul Mooney says “White people are very good at acting like they are not racist. They deserve an academy award for that.” I’d like to thank the academy.

Dr. Cashio: One last one again is Paul Mooney, he says, “I love Obama because he is proof all black people don’t look alike. Nobody ever told me. Good morning, Mr. President. We don’t all look alike.

Dr. Weber: We need a rim shot.

(laughter, rimshot)

Dr. Cashio: Last but not least, we want to take advantage of the fact that today we have powerful social media that allow two-way communications even for programs like radio shows. We want to invite our listeners to send us their thoughts about big questions that we raise on the show.

Dr. Weber: Indeed. Given that, Tommy, we’d love to hear from you whether you have any big-picture question to ask our listeners for our segment that we call “You Tell Me!” Have you got a question that you would propose for them?

Dr Curry : Sure. I think given the recent election of Trump, I’d be interested to know how your listeners reconcile the myth of American democratic progress with the regression in American race relations where deportations, racial profiling, accusations of terrorism and international bans now become synonymous with American security and freedom.

Dr. Weber: There you have it. If you have got any answers for us, we’re about to tell you how you can send them to us.

Dr. Cashio: Thank you everyone, for listening to this episode of Philosophy Bakes Bread: food for thought about life and leadership. Your host Dr. Anthony Cashio and Dr. Eric Weber, we’ve been very privileged today, frankly, to be joined by Dr. Tommy Curry. We hope you listeners will enjoy us again. Consider sending your thought about anything that you’ve heard today, and we’ve heard a lot that you would like to hear about in the future, or the specific question that we have raised for you.

Dr. Weber: Indeed. Once again, you can reach us in a number of ways. We’re on twitter @PhilosophyBB, which stands for Philosophy Bakes Bread. We’re also on Facebook at Philosophy Bakes Bread, and check out SOPHIA’s Facebook page while you’re there, Philosophers in America.

You can of course, email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com, and you can also call us and leave a short, recorded message with a question or a comment that we may be able to play on the show in the future. We will play it. It’s fun and we like getting your calls. You can reach us at 859-257-1849. That’s 859-257-1849. Join us next time on Philosophy Bakes Bread: food for thought about life and leadership.

[Outro music]

This fourth episode of the Philosophy Bakes Bread radio show and podcast features an interview with Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen of Arizona State University on the topic of shared values in the abortion debate.

Listen for our “You Tell Me!” questions and for some jokes in one of our concluding segments, called “Philosophunnies.” Reach out to us on Facebook @PhilosophyBakesBread and on Twitter @PhilosophyBB; email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com; or call and record a voicemail that we play on the show, at 859.257.1849. Philosophy Bakes Bread is a production of the Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). Check us out online at PhilosophyBakesBread.com and check out SOPHIA at PhilosophersInAmerica.com.

(1 hr 6 mins)

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Notes

1. Albert Camus, The Stranger (New York: Vintage Press, 1989).
2. Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2002).

You Tell Me!

For our future “You Tell Me!” segments, Dr. Manninen proposed the following questions in this episode, for which we invite your feedback: “Would people really want to live in a world where we don’t study the humanities anymore? There seems to be a lot of push to getting rid of ‘useless majors’: ‘We don’t need literature’; ‘We don’t need philosophy’; ‘We don’t need to talk about poetry anymore’; ‘We should just do practical things.’ Do you really want to live in a world where Plato is dead, where Shakespeare is dead, where we don’t think about what it means to be a human being anymore? Why  or why not?” What do you think?

Let us know!  Twitter, Facebook, Email, or by commenting here below!

Transcript

You can download and read the transcript for the show in an Adobe PDF version of it.

Transcription by Drake Boling, May 10, 2017

For those interested, here’s how to cite this transcript or episode for academic or professional purposes (for page #s, use the Adobe PDF file‘s pagination):

Weber, Eric Thomas, Anthony Cashio, and Bertha Alvarez Manninen, “Shared Values in the Abortion Debate,” Philosophy Bakes Bread, Transcribed by Drake Boling, WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM, Lexington, KY, February 7, 2017.

[Intro music]

Announcer: This podcast is brought to you by WRFL: Radio Free Lexington. Find us online at wrfl.fm. Catch us on your FM radio while you’re in central Kentucky at 88.1 FM, all the way to the left. Thank you for listening, and please be sure to subscribe.

Dr. Eric Thomas Weber: Hey folks, you’re listening to WRFL Lexington 88.1 FM, this is Dr. Eric Thomas Weber, and I’m here to join you with episode four of Philosophy Bakes Bread.

[Theme Music]

This week on Philosophy Bakes Bread, we have a special guest once again, as we have had in the past. We’ve got Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen joining us. This is, as I said, Philosophy Bakes Bread: food for thought about life and leadership. We’re going to be talking with Dr. Manninen about shared values in the abortion debate. I’m going to be joined shortly here by my colleague and co-host, colleague at another institution, Dr. Anthony Cashio, who is at UVA College at Wise. And he’s a very wise guy.

Before I jump in, I want to thank Sarah King, who kindly reached out to us and wrote, “Wow, my boyfriend and I listen to the show almost every time it airs. We love it. It’s almost as if you read our minds about our thoughts and opinions of the future to come to a T. Definitely something I’ll remember.” That was a line from Sarah King. Thank you so much for reaching out to us, Sarah. That is awesome, and that is inspiring for us.

Now as I mentioned, we have another episode of Philosophy Bakes Bread starting off in just a few moments. What we do is we pre-record interview segments and we do this over the internet, and so we had Dr. Cashio, who’s over in Virginia, Wise, Virginia. And we have Dr. Manninen, who’s over in Arizona, in Phoenix. And so, without further ado, here is episode 4 of Philosophy Bakes Bread. Again, food for thought about life and leadership.

[Starting pre-recorded interview:]

Dr. Weber:  Hello and welcome to Philosophy Bakes Bread: food for thought about life and leadership, a production of the Society of Philosophers in America, aka SOPHIA.  I’m Dr. Eric Thomas Weber.

Dr. Cashio: And I’m Dr. Anthony Cashio. A famous phrase says that Philosophy bakes no bread, that it’s not practical. But we at SOPHIA and on this show, aim to correct that misperception.

Dr. Weber: Philosophy Bakes Bread airs on WRFL, Lexington 88.1 FM and is recorded and distributed as a podcast next, so if you can’t catch us live on the air, subscribe and be sure to reach out to us. You can find us online at philosophybakesbread.com. We hope that you’ll reach out to us on any of the topics we raise, or on topics that you want us to bring up. Plus, we have a segment called “You tell me”. Listen for it, and let us know what you think.

Dr. Cashio: You can reach us in a number of ways! We are on twitter as @Philosophybb, which stands for Philosophy Bakes Bread. We’re also on Facebook at Philosophy Bakes Bread, and you can check out SOPHIA’s Facebook page while you’re there at Philosophers in America.

Dr. Weber: You can of course, also email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com, and you can call us and leave a short recorded message with a question, or a comment, or praise, that we may be able to play on the show at 859-257-1849. That number is 859-257-1849. And if you’re interested in learning more about SOPHIA, the Society of Philosophers in America, check us out online at philosophersinamerica.com.

On Philosophy Bakes Bread, we really want to hear from you, the listeners, about what you think. This is a dialogue we want to hold, we know we’re on the radio, but you can reach us in all of the ways that we’ve told you. So please do reach out to us and tell us your thoughts, comments, questions, especially your responses to the prompts that we raise for the “You Tell Me!” segment. So, Anthony, you want to remind us about what we talked about before so we can jump in today with another segment?

Dr. Cashio: Sure, Eric. On a previous episode, we had the nice conversation with Dr. John Shook trying to answer the question about whether or not it should be legally required that someone wear a motorcycle helmet when driving a motorcycle. I guess you could wear one when you weren’t driving a motorcycle, but that’s your own business.

[Laughter]

But the point is, when we were discussing this back and forth, should the government have any role when we do certain things? The issue that came up is “Where do we draw the line?” with government intervention. Should the government, for instance, be allowed to say “It’s illegal to smoke cigarettes,” “It’s illegal to drink alcohol”? We’ve tried that, didn’t quite work out. So where is the line when we’re drawing the line about government intervention in general? That’s where we were, Eric.

Dr. Weber: That was from a caller from quite a few weeks ago, and we really appreciate that. Now in addressing this issue and tackling it, there’s really basically three issues to think about. One is about the issue of drawing a line. Like, where do you draw the line? I know that’s basically the question, but within that is sort of the issue that there could be a slippery slope. Right? And a slippery slope, we’re going to talk about in just a second, I think is important to make sure we explain, because there are some slippery slopes that are things that we should worry about, and then there’s others that are kind of fallacious to bring up, that it’s a mistake to think that it’s a problem, that there would be a slippery slope. And then what principle stops the sliding down the hill, if you will, of the slippery slope problem people worry about. A line-drawing fallacy, here’s what’s at stake here: Let’s say one says “Well, we can’t say exactly where the government should and shouldn’t intervene in our lives. We can’t be very precise about drawing that line, therefore, government oughn’t to be intervening in our lives.” That’s one of the kind of claims people make. But there’s a lot of cases where you can’t draw a perfect line, about, for instance: When is a person rich?

Dr. Cashio: I would like to know that. Life goals, where do we go?

Dr. Weber: Exactly. Well, there isn’t a particular dollar amount, let’s say you earn an income each year, or amount of money you have in your bank account, that that particular dollar amount is the threshold that makes you rich or doesn’t make you rich. And that doesn’t change the fact, of course, that you have poor people and you have rich people. Those are still meaningful things and we do need to make distinctions even though some are areas are places to draw that can be grey or arbitrary, even.

Dr. Cashio: Right. My favorite version of that is “When do we say so-and-so has a beard?”  John shaves on Monday, when do we say John now has a beard? He just lets it grow, where do we draw the line between beard John and no-beard John? It’s arbitrary, it’s a false line.

Dr. Weber: And when you talk about political enfranchisement or disenfranchisement: When is someone technically an adult? Is somebody an adult at 16? Arguably some people are adults, in fact the courts even decide that a person should be treated as an adult at 16, though that person can’t vote. And 18 is somewhat arbitrary as a line, and yet there is a certain space in which we make that distinction. But when it comes to government intervention, all this talk of grey, ‘we’re not entirely sure where to draw the line’ stuff, that can still leave us worried about perhaps overextension of government intervention in people’s lives. This leads us to the slippery slope question. Basically this just means “if you let people, let government intrude in this way, then Lord, tomorrow it will be here, and then here, and we won’t have any freedom in life.” That we call the slippery slope fallacy. There is something sort of right and true about thinking about slippery slope sometimes. For instance, if you set a precedent, well that precedent is set and other people will say “well you have to treat me fairly and let me do X”, and so that is part of the real worry about slippery slopes.

Dr. Cashio: It’s not a fallacy when it’s actually true.

Dr. Weber: That’s right, basically the way to think about it is: on your slide down the hill to despair, there can be a sort of plateau, there can be this limit, a principle you have that keeps you from sliding further down the hill. For example, “if you start smoking, then you’re gonna be onto marijuana, and heroin, then pretty soon you’re gonna be selling your body.”

Dr. Cashio: I think we showed that right: “Milk is a gateway drug”, in the show, that was a slippery slope argument.

Dr. Weber: (laughing) I don’t remember that one! I like that.

Dr. Cashio: Oh yeah, it was in a court and the judge said, “By this argument, milk is a gateway drug… drug users all drank milk. It worked backwards to get the argument right.

Dr. Weber: So one can reasonably ask…what principle might we use, that third thing I wanted to talk about.

Dr. Cashio: So I’m going to reasonably ask Eric, what principle can we use to stop our slide down the slippery slope?

Dr. Weber: (laughing) Excellent question Dr. Cashio. That principle is the harm principle. When you’re thinking about limiting liberty, the argument from John Stewart Mill goes that there is a clear moment when it is reasonable for people or the government to limit the liberty of others, and that’s when they, those whose liberty we are going to limit, are hurting other people. That’s called the harm principle. Now when it comes to motorcycles, the funny thing is it seems hard to say that I’m just riding my motorcycle without my helmet, It’s none of your business, I’m not harming anybody. But we covered that in our discussion with Dr. Shook, insofar as no man is an island. If I do something riskier that raises healthcare costs for everybody, I’m harming everybody, I’m making everybody’s costs higher. So that’s the principle that we can refer to for trying to avoid sliding further down the hill.

Dr. Cashio: So it seems in the motorcycle case, the harm, then, would have to be in the economic sphere, almost completely.

Dr. Weber: That’s certainly one of them anyway. As we said last time, there’s other principles that we can draw on and refer to, but I don’t know whether or not or how helpful they are for keeping us from sliding down the hill. But caring about other people doesn’t mean we need to intrude always and use caring for people as a reason to require helmet use. But for instance caring that they not die in a situation that they’re very likely—much more likely to die in, that’s a more limiting case that every which interference. The point is that there are principles that we can look to [if] you might harm other ones. So when it comes to smoking, you brought up smoking, we do restrict other’s freedom to smoke, and that’s especially when their smoke will affect other people secondhand.

Dr. Cashio: Oh, good point, that is a great example.

Dr. Weber: Well thank you very much Dr. Cashio. I hope this helps answer some of the questions we had before because we did differ and say we’re going to have to come back to the issue of “When/ Where do we draw the line?”

Dr. Cashio: Here we’ve got the line drawing fallacy, the slippery slope fallacy, and the harm principle. We’re learning all sorts of fun things today.

Dr. Weber: And so listen folks, and consider sending us your thoughts and questions for the “You tell Me!” segment. We’ll talk about your ideas and include your comments and remarks, and we look forward to hearing from you.

On today’s show, we are tremendously fortunate to be joined by Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen, who is here to talk about bioethics and common ground in the abortion debates.

Dr. Bertha Manninen: Thank you for having me, I’m really honored and flattered to be here!

Dr. Weber: Well we’re very glad that you are here. It’s a fantastic topic, it’s one that gets people talking and thinking, and so it’s fantastic. Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen is associate professor of philosophy at the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies in Arizona State University’s new college of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. She was awarded her PHD in philosophy from Purdue University in 2006, after winning a Purdue University Foundation Dissertation Grant, as well as a university doctoral level fellowship. Dr. Manninen earned an MA in Philosophy in 2001, from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee where she was granted an advanced opportunity fellowship. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy an BA in English Literature from Florida International University in 1999. She joined the faculty at ASU’s west campus in 2006.

Born in Miami, of Cuban heritage, Dr. Manninen lists as her scholarly interests: applied ethics, biomedical ethics, normative and meta-ethics, philosophy of religion, social and political philosophy. Her work has been chronicled in such prestigious peer-reviewed professional publications as The American Journal of Bioethics, Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine, Hypatia, Journal of Social Philosophy, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, and the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Dr. Manninen has been prolific, and I realize in my notes to introduce her, I don’t have the information about the teaching award I that I know she’s received. She’s a decorated teacher at the Arizona State University, but what I do have prepared in front of me is the fact that her first book is called Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Shared Values in the Abortion Debate. And she’s also recently edited a volume titled Being Ethical, which is coming out in 2017 with Broadview Press. Bertha, this first section is called “Know Thyself”, and so we invite you to tell about yourself, about who you are, how you got into philosophy, and about what philosophical questions interest you, what drives you, what captures you in terms of your interest in philosophy? Share that with our listeners so that they could perhaps see that connection for themselves.

Dr. Manninen: OK. Thank you again, I am a child of Cuban immigrants, Cuban exiles in particular. I was born and raised in Miami Florida, in Little Havana. In particular, it’s not at all as Scarface shows it to be.

Dr. Cashio: Thankfully

Dr. Manninen: yeah, thankfully. I like to begin this way because I think my students and people in general have an idea of philosophy being a very elitist kind of discipline. I was not a good student. I didn’t do well in junior high, I didn’t do well in high school. I remember I took an advanced English course, because I was a little better in English, but I didn’t do very well in that either. Except when our teacher made us read The Stranger. And that was the only time that semester where I was really interested. The Stranger came away, and when we moved onto the next book, I kind of went back down into my shell. So I think a part of me was always—my dad says when I was little I asked questions about God, questions you couldn’t really answer. I asked my mom what was the difference between holy water and regular water, could I drink holy water? What made it holy?

Ooh, that’s a good question.

Dr. Manninen: Yeah, I got into trouble in Catholic school because of some of the questions I would ask. So I think it’s always kinda been there, but I think it’s there for most children. I see that in my daughters, already asking, my three-year old asks “Why does the moon follow us?” And my 8-year old asks questions about God as well. I think it’s there—I know that’s kind of the easy answer, it might seem self-serving because I am a teacher, the reality is that I just had really good teachers. I had a really good Philosophgy 101 professor, and I had another professor with whom I didn’t take 101 with, but I took several classes with afterwards, who’s been a mentor for 20 years, and I just had fantastic professors.

Dr. Weber: I really appreciate that you bring up a particular text, I want to make sure that folks who heard it but didn’t quite catch what that is will be able to find that. I’m French, so I have to say it this way, the author’s name is <thick French accent>“ALBERT CAMUS”<end of accent>, but Americans might say <jokingly>“Al-burt Cay-muss”<end of playfulness>. C-A-M-U-S. If you are thinking about philosophy and are enjoying this program, folks who are listening, check out The Stranger by Albert Camus. It’s fantastic, and Dr. Manninen, Bertha, is saying that that was pretty important piece in her story.

Dr. Cashio: Classic work ending, existential creation.

Dr. Manninen: When I got to college I will tell you that I absolutely fell in love with the Platonic dialogues. The very first dialogue I read in my intro to philosophy class was The Euthyphro and it’s still one of my favorites. Another one that I’d be able to chronicle my growth as a human being with was The Crito, which I also read in my 101 class. And it’s funny because I’m 18 years old and reading the Crito and in the Crito Socrates gets imprisoned for corrupting the youth and his friend Crito tries to get him to escape. And his big argument is that just because the state has committed this injustice against me, and should I commit this injustice against the state? And I remember being 18 years old and agreeing and thinking that this is complete BS! Of course you should escape! (laughter) Right? Like this is ridiculous, I can’t even understand this argument at all. And then like, almost 20 years later, after years of doing ethics and teaching students and having children, now I’m kind of like “Yeah, you know, he probably did the right thing to not escape”. So I chronicle my growth as a human being by reading the Crito, and my reaction to Socrates’ decision.

Dr. Weber: Well when you think about the influential people of the world, a bunch of them have been martyrs, you know?

Dr. Manninen: Yeah, I don’t do it because I don’t teach 101, but I have a professor here that will assign the Crito in conjunction with Martin Luther King’s Letters from a Birmingham Jail.

Dr. Cashio: That’s how I—when I teach the Crito, I assign The Apology, The Crito, and then Letter from Birmingham Jail, those together.

Dr. Weber: I want to back up and ask, you mentioned teachers were influential for you to love philosophy. What hooked you? What was it that you learned or heard from these people that really just motivated a whole career for you?

Dr. Manninen: So, as Eric knows, we recently were at the APA, and we had this discussion about how to attract first generation students.

Dr. Weber: The American Philosophical Association.

Dr. Manninen: The American Philosophical Association. In particular: How do you make philosophy attractive when it has a stereotypical low earning potential to students who quite reasonably want to get out of poverty. And the reason I bring that up is that one of the things I talked about in that paper when I gave that paper, being a first-generation college student, who also came from a poor home, while getting out of poverty was important to me of course, at the same time one thing that stuck with me is that my parents were very selfless. My dad was an actor in Cuba and he loved it, he still talks about it. But when he immigrated to Miami that wasn’t paying the bills. He did a little bit here, it wasn’t paying the bills so he quit! And so he did a variety of jobs that were there just to raise his children, as most people tend to do. For both my parents I saw that their work was… alienating, is a more philosophical term. But just they were miserable. They worked to make money to be able to live, and we never lived well, and they hated it. And I always told myself that of course I wanted to live well, but I also wanted to do a job that I thought was important, that gave my life meaning. And philosophy just did that for me. It wasn’t just… I wanted to spend my life thinking about what it means to be a good human being, and what it means to live a good human life, and to think about the things that make human life worthwhile. Like religion, like ethics, like talking to your fellow men. To the issues of justice and virtue, and I just wanted my life to be mostly about that. Philosophy gave that to me.

Dr. Weber: Thank you so much, Dr. Manninen. We’re going to come back after a short break and ask you some questions about the work that you’ve put out. But I think it’s so helpful to get a picture of who you’re hearing from, who you’re talking to. And that’s why we have this first segment called “Know Thyself”. We’ll be back in just a few minutes to talk about bioethics and shared values in the abortion debate.

Dr. Cashio: Welcome back to Philosophy Bakes Bread, this is Dr. Anthony Cashio and Dr. Eric Weber, and we’re here talking with Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen. Our topic today is bioethics and shared values in the abortion debate. We’re eager to hear from our guest! Bertha, what do you have to say about this? You wrote a book about shared values in the abortion debate. Is this a thing that can actually happen?

Dr. Weber:  Isn’t that the topic that divides people more than any other?

Dr. Manninen: I kind of want to use abortion as a stepping stone to deal with all these other divisive issues. I know that sounds a little like a lofty goal but…It is. And I think that one of the reasons that I’m “equipped” to talk about it is because I have evolved so much on this issue. And that evolution has given me perspectives where I think gives credit where credit is due on both sides of the issue. Which, I don’t think we get a lot. I do identify, if I had to put a label on me, I do identify as pro-choice. But I don’t think the pro-life side is unreasonable and I think the pro-life side brings up some very important ethical questions that need to be talked about.

Dr. Cashio: So when you say you’ve evolved, so you evolved from a pro-life stance to a more pro-choice, or what?

Dr. Manninen: When I was younger, I was pro-life because I grew up in a Hispanic Catholic household, we’re like Irish Catholics in terms of birth control and all that. But I was just pro-life because everyone else was pro-life. It wasn’t anything I gave a lot of thought to, honestly. And then when I started reading some more in college, then I started identifying more with the pro-choice perspective. But I kind of jumped from one side to the other. Like extremely. So when I was pro-choice when I was younger, it was a very, “Of course it was a woman’s right to do it because fetuses are just”…Im sure I used the tissue and blobs of cells stuff all the time, right?

Dr. Weber: You mean the argument that that’s all that is?

Dr. Manninen: Yeah, that’s all they are, they’re not even important, so why are we even having this discussion? This isn’t even an issue. So that was that. And then in grad school I became a little more nuanced because I started doing more philosophical questions about identity, for example. Which I kind of think, issues of identity are pretty heavily married to issues in bioethics, I think. So when I teach euthanasia to my classes, we don’t just do euthanasia policies. For example we begin with questions of “What does it mean to die? When do you die?”, which are identity questions. So I delve more into issues of my identity: “When does the human identity begin to exist?”, at which point I started paying more attention to pre-natal life, and when that happens. So I softened up a little bit in grad school, and you can see that in my dissertation. But really, honestly, and I like to say this because I think it illustrates how philosophy has an influence of everyday life: What really turned me on my head was having children, was being pregnant. We waited into our 30’s to have children, and it wasn’t as easy for me as it would have been for someone in their early 20’s. So it was difficult. And when we did get pregnant, and I did have my first ultrasound with my first child, who will be 8 tomorrow…

Dr. Cashio: Happy birthday!

Dr. Manninen: Happy birthday. I was enthralled, I was in love, and I think we had our first ultrasound. I couldn’t wait, it was a healthy…I probably shouldn’t say this but I’ll say it anyway. It was a healthy pregnancy, so my doctor was like “Well we don’t need to have an ultrasound until like 20 weeks because it’s healthy”. I was like, “I can’t wait until 20 weeks to see this baby”, so I might have called my doctor saying that there was a little bleeding going on, just so I could get in there to see the ultrasound.

(laughter)

I really wanted to see my baby, I had spent like a year and a half trying to have this baby, and I wanted to see this baby! She was tiny, we’re talking like 11 weeks, and I just stared at it. This entity means something to me, and I thought, well what does this say about–does this contradict the years of literature I’ve read and what I thought. And personally the

Dr. Weber: So Bertha I want to back up for a second because you have said some interesting things. Basically, it sounded as though early on you were pro-life and you might qualify your beliefs as perhaps unexamined, you didn’t think a lot about it, people around you were pro-life, and then you got exposed somehow to alternate ways of thinking, I guess in high school or college maybe. And those views are thinking of fetuses as clumps of cells and so on, didn’t think of them as persons and so forth. And then you talked about how your views were refined. At what point did you start to really hear and think about the more serious arguments people make about personhood, the claims people make about individuality at conception, or having a soul at that stage and so on. When did you hear about that and how did that factor into the development of your thought?

Dr. Manninen: I did get some of that as an undergrad, I took a bioethics course, and the professor there gave us articles from both perspectives. So I did get some of it as an undergrad.

Dr. Weber:  Your professor wasn’t just trying to convert you into some view?

Dr. Manninen: No, I have never…Although I’m sure they exist, because nothing humanity does really surprises me anymore, but in my two decades of doing philosophy, I have never met the character professor that blatantly says “I’m here to brainwash you into my liberal ways”. All my professors, when I took controversial issues made sure to give us different perspectives.

Dr. Weber:  Of course, if we’re going to brainwash you, the better way to do it is much more subtle, and to not make you realize we’re doing it right? Ooooh, (laughter)

Dr. Manninen: That’s not how the movies…in the movie the professor goes into the classroom and says “All you religious conservative people are stupid, and you…”

Dr. Weber: What was that movie?

Dr. Cashio: God is Not Dead

Dr. Manninen: That movie is so bad.

Dr. Cashio: I started teaching philosophy of religion yesterday, and I had to address that movie first day of class.

Dr. Weber: Immediately? How did you address it?

Dr. Cashio: Immediately. I just said what Bertha said. “This isn’t the how philosophy classes work, and if they did it would be bad pedagogy.

Dr. Manninen: I created a seminar on the Problem of evil, and the very first time I taught it I had a student email me saying he wants to take the class but he just saw the movie God is Not Dead, and he’s not sure if philosophy was for him. And that’s heartbreaking to see it so caricatured. But no, that’s not been my experience, neither as a philosophy student, nor as a philosophy professor.

Dr. Weber: So how do those arguments for the pro-life side you read factor into your thinking? Because as you say early on, when you were devoted to the pro-life stance, you hadn’t really been exposed to argumentation about that, it sounds like. And you heard some perhaps, from the pro-choice point of view, and perhaps that swayed you. But then you heard both sophisticated arguments in college. What did you think about those arguments?

Dr. Manninen: Honestly back then I probably didn’t think much. One thing that I like to—now that I’m older, especially where I work, my university encourages a lot of interdisciplinary work. So I like to think a lot now about how psychology influences philosophy and how people ascent to ideas or change their minds or things like that. So looking back on it, probably it didn’t make an impression back then because I didn’t want it to. There’s probably some teenage rebelling going on, I wasn’t Catholic anymore, probably looking for ways to piss off my mom, who knows. So they did not make a very big impression, but for reasons independent of the strength of the argument. They really started making more of an impression in graduate school.

Dr. Cashio: So Bertha, what kind of shared values are we talking about between the pro-life and pro-choice stances? You’ve kind of gone through both sides of the debate and back and forth as you have evolved in your thinking. What is shared? What is that common ground?

Dr. Manninen: So in my research, one of the things I’ve found, is that if you really sit down and you interview women who are pro-choice and some who have gotten abortions, who are not just pro-choice in theory, but in practice, and women who are pro-life, a lot of the things that they were saying have a lot of commonalities. One of the things that I highlighted in my book is that women on both sides take the idea of motherhood very seriously. They may differ on how to necessarily to express that idea. But the women that were pro-choice, particularly the one who got abortions, would routinely say things like “I want to be a mother, I just can’t do it right now. I would be a bad mother, I couldn’t give this child what he or she needed. It’s not that I don’t want this child, it’s just that I couldn’t provide that child with the emotional stability or financial stability or the life that the child deserves. It was always about the child. And it was about her too, but it was “I want to go to school, I want to work so that I can provide for my family later”. And pro-life women of course, said similar things. It had to do with both of them, what they thought was best for their child. Someone who is pro-life is going to say being born is what’s best for the child. And so they differ about what’s best for the child, but they are both concerned with what’s best for the child. Given that, I have a chapter where I talk about that. Like women in both of these groups care about children and care about motherhood and about how to be the best possible mothers, and that might differ to how that plays out, particularly when it comes to an unplanned pregnancy, but that is a very important shared value. Can we talk about this value as a way to humanize each other?

Dr. Cashio: Interesting.

Dr. Weber: Very good. We’ve been talking to Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen about shared values in the abortion debate, and generally the subject of bioethics and her evolution in thinking, your evolution, Bertha, in thinking over time. We’re going to come back with another segment in just a few moments and ask you some further questions about this project, and about something interesting that you said early on, that Anthony will bring up about applicability of this not just in the abortion debate but elsewhere. So thanks to everybody for listening and we’ll be right back.

[Short pause]

Dr. Weber: This is Dr. Eric Weber live in the studio and I just wanted to remind you that if you are interested in sending us any of your thoughts and comments and questions and so forth, you can reach us on twitter @PhilosophyBB, or on Facebook, if you search for Philosophy Bakes Bread, you should find us there. You can also email us at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com.

[Short pause]

Dr. Cashio: Welcome back, friends of wisdom! You’re listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread, this is Dr. Anthony Cashio and Dr. Eric Weber, and we are speaking to Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen today about bioethics and the abortion debate and finding shared and common values between both sides of the debate, if you will.

Dr. Weber: Right, and so at the end of the last segment we just started scratching the surface about one of the key points about Dr. Manninen’s book which has to do with shared values in the abortion debate. I think most people are going to sort of scratch their heads at—“Shared values?”. People so heatedly disagree about abortion, and it’s interesting that you’ve brought up some of the shared values, which have to do with mothers wanting what’s best for their kids but in very very different ways. Can you tell us more about shared values? The obvious question that comes to my mind when you’re thinking about mothers is “What about fathers? Where are all these shared values? What are all the shared values?” I know for a fact that you’ve got much more to tell us about that, but I think our listeners are going to have had their interest piqued, but they are going to want to know more now.

Dr. Manninen: Yeah, so I talk about fathers as well. I have my students to thank a lot for this book, because I wanted to write a book that would be accessible to non-philosophers as well as sufficiently academically rigorous for philosophers. I wanted to use my students in particular as “what is it that you are interested in talking about?” that perhaps sometimes philosophers might, being in the world of academia for so long, might lose touch with what the non-academics are thinking. One thing that came up repeatedly, and when I started doing research on it, came up in the research as well, is that even my pro-choice students thought that there were really bad reasons for having an abortion. Thomson, whom I love, Judith Jarvis Thomson, who is a philosopher who wrote a defense of abortion, she talks about that, but very quickly. She talks about, there is decent versus indecent abortions. But I have found that my students really wanted to talk a lot more about that. What I was wondering, and this is another shared value, what I was finding is that a lot of pro-life students were pro-life, not necessarily—you would hear things that to an untrained ear might sound kind of dead to you. “I am against abortion but I don’t think it should be illegal. But I think a mother getting an abortion because it’s just contraception is a bad idea. But I’m pro-life because I don’t think that.” Then I say like, “Do you think it should it be illegal, do you think we should have a law?” and they would say “No I don’t, I think it should be legal”. Right, OK, so that’s not pro-life, that’s pro-choice. It sounded like a mismatch of views that it might sound as if they are just being contradictory. But then I would hear the pro-choice students saying similar things in their writings: “I’m pro-choice but I don’t think you should use abortion for contraception” or whatever. I started talking more about that, like where there seems to be a common thread amongst both my pro-life and pro-choice students: Certain instances of abortion were acceptable and certain were not. I tried to divorce that, and I still do that in my classes for, “OK, Should it be legal, yes or no?” That’s one question. And then I say “OK, given that it’s legal, does that mean that there’s nothing else to talk about? Have we solved the abortion issue?” No because morality is more than just a matter of legalities, right? So the analogy I pose to my class is that I think most of us, particularly as Americans, think that free speech is a really awesome thing, that it’s a morally good thing, and on top of being a morally good thing, it is legally enshrined into our laws. But that doesn’t mean that the Westboro Baptist Church are virtuous people for saying horrible things at people’s funerals, even though they are exercising free speech. I use that to draw this distinction that we can that think a certain right to have is a good right, but think that there are bad exercises of that right. So like hate speech is a bad exercise of a good right.

Dr. Weber: But even in the law you can have subtleties. For instance, it is legal for me to go buy Sudafed, but I cant go buy 150 boxes such that I can create crystal meth. Even something being legal, what you’re going to use it for, your motivations… I think sometimes we make legality versus illegality just sort of this on and off switch, but there can be shades. Your point is that even if that’s the case, there’s still, within what’s technically legal within those parameters, ways of doing wrong.

Dr. Manninen: Right. I want to get students to the idea that there can be morally questionable exercises of a right that we otherwise think is a good right to have.

Dr. Cashio: So what would be, for our listeners, maybe an example of, as you mentioned, indecent abortions? From your research and your students, what did you come across?

Dr. Manninen: The one that students love to talk about, and when I hear “I don’t believe in abortion for contraception”, I’m like, “Well, let’s talk about what that means. What do the studies suggest about, are there really women having 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 abortions just because they don’t want to put on a condom, or they don’t want their partner to put on a condom, or whatever?” It’s true that there are some of those, nothing humanity does surprises me anymore. But it’s not the norm. Research suggests that this is not the case. Women are not just having dozens of abortions out of laziness.

Dr. Weber: And it is not easy and convenient, that’s for sure.

Dr. Manninen: Yeah, it’s not easy and it’s not convenient. We talk about that as well, when students say “I don’t like abortions out of convenience”, and I’ll put convenience up on the board, I still have some chalk, so I’ll put it up on the chalk board. What does that mean? These are terms that we love to use, use a lot. What does it mean to have an abortion out of convenience? We spend some time talking about what that means, what that doesn’t mean. In general, the examples I have in my book, and these are real examples, and I think pro-choice people are hesitant to talk about these examples, but they are there. They exist, and it doesn’t do our position any favors to act like it doesn’t exist. So here are examples of abortion that I have personally met in real life. I know someone… for lack of better term, racist. But for some reason thought that although she’s not fond of African Americans, was OK with having a sexual relationship with one. Got pregnant, and the only reason she gave for having an abortion was that she didn’t like bi-racial children. That seems to be a really piss-poor reason for having an abortion, forgive my language.

Dr. Cashio: Arguably very immoral.

Dr. Manninen: Very immoral! Another reason I found in a book once which I thought was interesting was a woman who had an abortion because the child would have been born under an incompatible zodiac sign. This is true. She was one sign and according to astrology…whatever. And another one is that…she had an abortion because the child would have had a cleft palate that was purely cosmetic. She didn’t want that.  She wanted a beautiful baby. So I have no problem saying, these are really bad reasons to have an abortion.

Dr. Weber: Yeah, there are cases still around the world, where people want boys. There’s no sign of some sort of biological unusual outcome, it’s just going to be a girl. Sometimes that’s the reason.

Dr. Manninen: I have another article, it’s not in that book but I have an article that I wrote after that book where I tackled issues of abortion disability, because that’s one that comes up a lot. And I try to tease out some nuances, because here’s an illegitimate position: There’s an article I give my students from a mother whose son had Tay-Sachs Disease. And she didn’t know he was born with Tay-Sach’s. And when the boy died, I think he died at 3 or 4, she wrote this article where she said “I absolutely loved him, and I loved my four years. Had I known, I would have aborted him.” And I make them read it because she says in the same sentence, “I loved my son, I loved those four years, I still would have done it”. I think students have a very difficult time seeing how that meshes. But I think there’s a difference between saying “I would abort a disabled child because the disease is so horrible that it would cause a life of nothing but and suffering”, versus someone that says, whom im also familiar with, “I’m going to abort this child because I don’t want to deal with…I have a disparaging attitude towards mental disability”. And it’s a different reason. One is probably more morally justifiable than the other.

Dr. Weber: What I’m hearing, is as far as the shared values in the abortion debate, you can hear various reasons why folks who are pro-life or pro-choice might say that certain presently legal actions are troubling to them. There’s reasons why, on both sides, folks can feel uncomfortable and thus can think there’s something wrong in the practice that is legal. That’s very interesting. I don’t want to let you off the hook, however.

Dr. Manninen: No, go for it.

Dr. Weber:  You said you would come back to the issue of fathers, and you’ve mentioned values that are shared among mothers in very different ways. Are there shared values that relate to fathers?

Dr. Manninen: When I was teaching at Kirkwood Community College, in Iowa City, I taught there for two years, and I had a young man come up to me and say “I need to be absent on the weeks that you’re going to talk about abortion”.

Dr. Weber: Wow.

Dr. Manninen: When I asked him why, he told me a story that he had a girlfriend that he got pregnant, and he was 19, remarkably mature 19-year-old man. He said “We had plans to get married, had plans to raise the baby, I was going to propose anyway, we just sped it up”. And then they got a diagnosis that the fetus had Down’s Syndrome. And so he said, “Alright, We’ll deal with it”, apparently his parents were very supportive, and she went and got an abortion without consulting him. It really tore him up, he said that he still had nightmares about it, it was still very painful for him. He even told her that “Look, me and my mom and my dad will raise this baby by ourselves if you don’t want it. If you don’t want it we won’t even ask you for child support, but let me have him”. And not only did she say no, she aborted him behind his back, essentially. He was clearly very affected by it. I’m an ethicist, I think that when there’s pain, that pain needs to be addressed. So that got me thinking about what do we do in these cases. There’s already been a lot written about the converse: Are men morally required to take care of a baby that they don’t want if the woman chooses not to have an abortion? There’s already been stuff written on that. There’s been a lot less written on the converse situation, what happens when the man wants the baby but the woman doesn’t, and can a man force a woman to stay pregnant? I have a chapter in my book that deals with that case with my student’s case in particular. I don’t use his real name. How do we deal morally with this situation? To that extent is how I discuss fathers in particular.

Dr. Cashio: Thank you Bertha, this seems like a very complicated, difficult, nuanced and painful topic you’ve taken up here. You had indicated earlier that you want to use your…you’re thinking about the abortion issue and the shared values in the research you’re finding there as a jumping off point to other issues. I think you mentioned euthanasia before. Are there other issues where you can see this same approach working?

Dr. Manninen: In different ways, I think the more abstract philosophical issues of like, identity, and personal identity, does have a lot of implications for things like euthanasia, for questions about dementia: “Is the person suffering from dementia the same person as the person whom you first knew?” and those are issues that permeate not just abortion and euthanasia. Also questions about cloning, people are so freaked out about cloning: “If I clone myself will there be two of me?”, well, No, right?

Dr. Cashio: We should do that at this show! That sounds like a fun…

Dr. Manninen: You are more than your genes! Do you ask identical twins if there’s one of you? Things like that. These are the metaphysical issues that permeate all of it. But one of the things that I’m more concerned with this book is that we need to start, for all these controversial issues that we’re talking about, abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, rights in the transsexual community, everything–political issues, healthcare issues. I think the reason that we are at each other’s throats is primarily because we have stopped humanizing each other. We use these terms to disparage the other–if you are in favor of universal healthcare you must be a communist, a horrible communist, bad. If you are against universal healthcare you’re this uncaring sociopath, and nothing gets done, nothing gets talked about. So this issue of looking at shared values and using that as a scaffolding to build up–I think would solve a lot of problems. Maybe not solve them really but help them at least.

Dr. Weber: It’s interesting, you brought up earlier, the fact that most people would say that one shouldn’t be necessarily punished for having an abortion, even if you don’t think it should be allowed. Our president-elect, however, has said that he favors some form of punishment, “There has to be some kind of punishment.” We shouldn’t jump into that right now, but we have one more segment, which we can come back to talk about that if you like, in the last segment. We’ve been talking to Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen, about shared values in the abortion debate and bioethics. Thank you so much for talking with us. We’ll be right back.

[Radio Station Theme music]

Announcer: Who listens to the radio anymore? We do. WRFL Lexington.

Dr. Cashio: Welcome back to Philosophy Bakes Bread! We have been talking with Bertha Alvarez Manninen, and now have some final big-picture questions as well as hopefully some light-hearted thoughts with a pressing philosophical question for our listeners, as well as info about how to get a hold of us for your comments, questions, criticism, and bountiful praise.

Dr. Weber: Well Bertha, you know, our program is called Philosophy Bakes Bread, so we want to debunk the idea that it doesn’t. But i think that you’re someone probably who has had plenty of experience around folks who deny that philosophy bakes bread–either outside of the academy, belittling philosophy. In fact, you spoke publicly about that directly to a fellow Cuban, you know what I’m talking about, so I’ll ask you to bring that up. But also within the academy, I’m sure you have experience addressing people and knowing lots of people who don’t think that philosophy bakes bread, if i’m not mistaken. I’ll let you tell me what you think about that but I guess if that’s the case, if you know people out there that doubt and deny that philosophy bakes bread, first of all, do you agree? And then secondly, if you don’t, which it sounds like you don’t, if you don’t, what do you say to these folks who don’t think philosophy bakes bread?

Dr. Manninen: Wow, so that’s a really pervasive myth. You always get the “What are you going to do with that?” I’m getting a B.A. in philosophy, “What are you going to do with that?”. There’s a meme on Facebook something like a son is telling his father “I want to major in philosophy”, and he says “Oh yeah, I hear that they’re hiring at the new philosophy factory.”

[Laughter]

Dr. Cashio: I’ve always thought we needed a handbook that we give to people: “So you’ve decided to major in philosophy. Here’s how to talk to your parents.

Dr. Manninen: It’s like a tract, one of those religious tracts. And i think the first mistake with that is assuming that because there isn’t a 1-to-1 correspondence between your degree and a job, you’re not going to find a philosopher necessarily, then that means that your degree is worthless. How many 1-to-1 correspondences are there for other degrees? How many people who major in biology find a job for biologists in the wanted ads? Same thing. So i think that’s a little unfair to philosophy. There are two ways to answer this question Does Philosophy Bake Bread? Yeah, of course, not only does it bake bread, it bakes the most bread imaginable

Dr. Weber: The most important?

Dr. Cashio: And tasty bread

Dr. Manninen: I don’t want to say the most important because I have a lot of reverence even for other fields that I don’t understand. I’m not at all good at math, but it’s awesome.

Dr. Weber: That’s a good point.

Dr. Manninen: I think we’re currently seeing the importance of studying history, and the ways that I probably didn’t see when I was younger. So I don’t want to say it bakes the most bread, but it bakes a lot of bread! And so I have two ways of answering it. Typically, at first I start out answering practically, “Well look, if you do even a little homework on this topic you’ll realize that philosophy majors end up doing quite well in the job market, they have a good earning potential that employers want people who can critically think” When we’re doing Descartes, Rene Descartes in my class, I push my students to prove to me that they’re really awake, and they’re not being deceived by an evil demon. they’re like “Why is this important?” I’m like “Here’s why this is important. If you can’t prove to me something so simple as being awake with any degree of confidence, how can you have any degree of confidence in what you believe about God, and what you believe about ethics, and how you’re going to vote, and how you’re going to raise your children. It’s not just about the evil demon, it’s about what it teaches us about how to work in the real world.

Dr. Cashio: And how to doubt well.

Dr. Manninen: How to doubt well! So that you’re not manipulated by leaders, so that you’re not manipulated into believing “fake news”, or things like that.

Dr. Weber: Speaking of leaders, you responded to Marco Rubio.

Dr. Manninen: Yeah, so when Marco Rubio was a fellow Cuban American who grew up on the same streets that I did in Miami said that we don’t need more philosophers, we need more, I think he said welders.

Dr. Cashio: Yeah, welders.

Dr. Manninen: At which point, you know, you can be both. I have had, I’ll never forget, and I’m so grateful for these experiences, I stay late at night grading, and very very often get into deep philosophical conversations with the custodial staff. And, you know, they’re thinking beings too. So this idea that you have to choose between being a welder and a philosopher, you can be both. But no, philosophy gives you a lot of practical abilities that will take you far in the job market. It’s just false to think otherwise. I don’t like stopping them because I don’t want to reduce philosophy to its practicalities. If you had known me when I was 18, 19, 20, I am a vastly better human being because I studied philosophy. I am more skeptical. I think better, I don’t just believe things, I look for evidence, almost knee-jerk reaction, I always look for evidence for everything. I’m a better writer. I’m a better person. I’m more compassionate, I want to see things from other people’s perspectives before I make up my mind. I’m a better parent. I can’t imagine not parenting in the way I do and I parent the way I do because of philosophy. And the way I treat my students has been infused by what I’ve learned in Plato, what I’ve learned in Kierkegaard. The way I raise my children has been infused by Aristotle and Kierkegaard, I love Kierkegaard. How I deal with people who oppose me politically has been infused by philosophy. It not only gives you skills, it does do that, it makes you a better human being, and…life is just so much more beautiful when you have philosophical glasses on. There’s beauty and meaning in everything, and I know it sounds cocky, but it’s really how I feel. I just see beauty everywhere now because of philosophy.

Dr. Weber: That’s a lovely metaphor, having philosophical glasses on.

Dr. Cashio: Yeah, I like that…Bertha, your work, and what we discussed in the last section I think, is a great example of how philosophy is deeply practical. We’ve got this really difficult issue and by applying the philosophical methods to thinking about it, to clarify, sometimes to maybe muddy the waters where they need to be muddied to help people humanize others and to find that meaning in their relationships with other people.

Dr. Weber: Indeed, we are so so grateful to hear about all this from you, Bertha. Now, as i have told you before, and as folks who have listened to the show before know, we don’t close without a bit of the lighter stuff. We have talked about some pretty heavy things today, in thinking about meaning in life as we just did, as well as thinking about abortion and the hot topic that divides people. Yet we can find shared values in such debates. We therefore want a little bit of levity and people to see the lighter side of philosophy, the funnier side of philosophy. So we’ve got a segment within this last section called “Philosofunnies”. We want to invite you, Bertha, to tell us a funny story about philosophy. In fact, I know you’ve got a good joke for us, would you tell us? Now, we had a little bit of discussion before this episode, because we like to tell jokes we like to try and relate them to the subject matter, but it was a pretty easy decision I think, for us to think “you know, we’re not going to do jokes about abortion”.

Dr. Cashio: I don’t even want to know if they exist.

Dr. Weber: Yeah, we decided to skip that, but we do have jokes for you about a sort of pro / con, sort of being against and for versus, oh and another one on the issue of unity despite difference. And there’s such difference on what people think about abortion. A joke about, disagreement, for instance, I think is apropos. Bertha, tell us, do you have a funny story or a joke for us?

Dr. Manninen: So, one of my most favorite passages in all of philosophy is in Kierkegaard Works of Love, where he talks about how…he makes this comparison with humans and he says “Take a lot of sheets of paper and doodle on each one of them and you just look at it that way, all the papers are different. But if you hold up each paper to the light, you will always see this common watermark.He uses that as an analogy to like, your differences are supposed to be irrelevant, are supposed to hang loosely, and you should focus on this common watermark. And we tend to do the opposite. We tend to let those doodles pretty much define how we see each other instead of the commonality. So this joke, I think, represents Kierkegaard in that sense. And it’s a religious joke too, so it’s even more relevant for Kierkegaard. Here’s the story, it says: I was walking across a bridge one day, and i saw a man standing on the edge about to jump off. And so I ran over and I said “STOP! Don’t do it!”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.

And I said “Well there’s just so much to live for!”

and he says “Well like what?

I said “Well, are you religious or an atheist?”

He goes “Religious!”

“Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?”

“I’m Christian.”

“Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?”

“Uh, Protestant.”

“Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?”

“Baptist.”

“Wow! Me too! Are you the Baptist Church of God or the Baptist Church of the Lord?”

And he said “The Baptist church of God.”

“Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?”

He said “Reformed Baptist Church of God.”

“Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation 1915?”

“Reformed Baptist Church of God 1915!” he said.

“Die heretic scum!” and pushed him off.

(laughter)

So this idea that you can have all of these similarities, and still be willing to kill each other over this one teeny, insignificant difference.

Dr. Weber: That’s the best long joke I’ve heard in a while.

Dr. Cashio: I’m going to show my ignorance. I did not realize there were so many different Baptist reformations.

Dr. Manninen: You have got to build up the commonalities in order to see the absurdity of the difference.

Dr. Weber: Anthony, you had a joke for me about pro / con?

Dr. Cashio: Yeah, we get this from John Stewart, I believe. If con is the opposite of pro, then isn’t congress the opposite of progress?

Dr. Weber: Ba-dum-Tsssss

Dr. Manninen: Oh, John Stewart… I miss him so.

Dr. Weber: And on unity despite difference here we go:  The Olympics reminds us that no matter what country you may be from, we all look dumb using an iPad as a camera.

(laughter)

Dr. Manninen: Oh that’s funny.

Dr. Cashio: Alright, and last but not least, we want take advantage of the fact that today we have powerful social media that allow two-way communications even for programs like radio shows. So we want to invite our listeners to send us their thoughts about big questions that we raise on the show.

Dr. Weber: Given that, we would love to hear your thoughts, Bertha, about what question we should ask everyone for our segment called “You Tell Me!”. Have you got a question that you propose we ask our listeners?

Dr. Manninen: Would people really want to live in a world where we don’t study the humanities anymore? There seems to be a lot of push to getting rid of useless majors, “We don’t need literature,” “We don’t need philosophy,” “We don’t need to talk about poetry anymore,” “We should just do practical things.” Do you really want to live in a world where Plato is dead, where Shakespeare is dead, where we don’t think about what it means to be a human being anymore?

Dr. Weber: Well I’m going to add to that question because it’s yes or a no question, and we may just get “yes.”

Dr. Manninen: I just can’t believe that people would answer yes.

Dr. Weber: Well, they might, and so if you’re going to answer yes you have to say why.

Dr. Cashio: And if you say no you also have to say why.

Dr. Weber: My addition to Dr. Manninen’s question is just “And if so, why?”

Dr. Cashio: We want to hear your thoughts on this. Do the humanities bake bread?

Dr. Weber: Yeah, do you really want to live in a world in which the humanities are dead? Think about it. What are some countries that have sort of killed the humanities there. When you think of North Korea, is that a place to study the humanities? Or Iran, there was a philosopher who was locked up in Iran for a long time, there was a big story about that a while back, a number of years ago. Well anyway, thank you so much, Dr. Manninen, for your question, and we’re going to tell everybody about how to get a hold of us with what you think about that question.

Dr. Cashio: Thanks everyone, for listening to Philosophy Bakes Bread: Food for thought about life and leadership. We are your hosts, Dr. Anthony Cashio and Dr. Eric Weber and we have been so lucky to have been joined by Dr. Bertha Alvarez Manninen. We hope listeners will join us again! Consider sending us your thought about anything that you’ve heard today that you would like to hear about in the future, or the specific question that we’ve raised for you.

Dr. Weber: Once again, you can reach us in a number of ways. We’re on Twitter, @Philosophybb, which stands for Philosophy Bakes Bread. We’re also on Facebook at Philosophy Bakes Bread. And check out SOPHIA’s Facebook page while you’re there, Philosophers in America. You can of course email us also, at philosophybakesbread@gmail.com.

Dr. Cashio: And you can also leave a short, recorded message with a question or a comment that we may be able to play on the show at 859-257-1849. That’s 859-257-1849. Join us again next time on Philosophy Bakes Bread: food for thought about life and leadership.

Announcer: Hey there, if you’re enjoying this podcast from WRFL Lexington, you may enjoy our live radio stream at wrfl.fm and of course via radio at 88.1 FM in the central Kentucky area. We have a wide variety of programs you are sure to enjoy. Just go to wrfl.fm/schedule and see what programs appeal most to you. Thanks again for listening to this podcast from WRFL Lexington!

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| By Shane Courtland |

One often hears the expression “You should live your life without regrets” in the same situations that one hears expressions such as “carpe diem” and “YOLO.” The basic idea is that you should live your life to the fullest. One day, if you are lucky to be living, you will be able to look back on your life. When you do so, you do not want to feel that it was wasted merely because you were too timid and afraid to embrace it. Have courage, these slogans implore – reach the fullest potential of a happy and fulfilling life.

In what follows, I want to articulate a different way to understand this expression.This understanding is inspired, in part, by a passage in Epictetus’s The Enchiridion. In passage #25, he writes:

“Is anyone preferred before you at an entertainment, or in a compliment, or in being admitted to a consultation? If these things are good, you ought to be glad that he has gotten them; and if they are evil, don’t be grieved that you have not gotten them. And remember that you cannot, without using the same means [which others do] to acquire things not in our own control, expect to be thought worthy of an equal share of them. For how can he who does not frequent the door of any [great] man, does not attend him, does not praise him, have an equal share with him who does? You are unjust, then, and insatiable, if you are unwilling to pay the price for which these things are sold, and would have them for nothing. For how much is lettuce sold? Fifty cents, for instance. If another, then, paying fifty cents, takes the lettuce, and you, not paying it, go without them, don’t imagine that he has gained any advantage over you. For as he has the lettuce, so you have the fifty cents which you did not give. So, in the present case, you have not been invited to such a person’s entertainment, because you have not paid him the price for which a supper is sold. It is sold for praise; it is sold for attendance. Give him then the value, if it is for your advantage. But if you would, at the same time, not pay the one and yet receive the other, you are insatiable, and a blockhead. Have you nothing, then, instead of the supper? Yes, indeed, you have: the not praising him, whom you don’t like to praise; the not bearing with his behavior at coming in.”

The basic idea, as far as I can tell, is that Epictetus is reminding us that everything in life has opportunity costs. In order to get something of value, one always forgoes something. The man who gets to go to the party paid for it by having to sell his praise. Epictetus then tells the reader, “But if you would, at the same time, not pay the one and yet receive the other, you are insatiable, and a blockhead.”

This is not Alix.

Let’s connect this with the expression — “You should live your life without regrets.” To do this, I will tell the reader two personal facts about my life. First, by some crazy fluke, I know the exact moment my youngest daughter, Alix, was conceived. I will spare you any other details (you’re welcome). Second, my father died young from cancer. The disease was misdiagnosed…and, by the time it was diagnosed, it was too late to save him. My Father died, roughly, two years before Alix was born. Both of these events have had a dramatic impact upon my life.

Now, imagine I have a time machine. If I go back in time, say five years, and inform my father of his incubating illness, that might give him many more years of life. In a sense, I would save my father. There is, however, a cost. The odds I would be able to conceive Alix would be so slim that it would render it, for all intents and purposes, impossible. I would never be able to match the right sperm with the right egg… Alix would be lost to me. Any child I would have in the new time line, would be a new child… a completely different individual.  Part of the cost, then, of me living in a world with my beloved Alix, is that I do so in a world devoid of my father.

We see many versions of this conundrum in contemporary science fiction. For example, we see it in movies like The Butterfly Effect (2004), The Family Man (2000) and Mr. Destiny (1990). And, if you are watching TV, this is the central premise with this season of CW’s The Flash.

The world is a complicated chain of cause and effect. If you go back and alter that chain, you do so at your peril. The chain is so connected and complicated, there is a high likelihood that any change would lead to horrible (from my POV) unintended consequences.

Let’s say the time line was altered, and I got my father but lost Alix. It is true that this time line would only be negative (as far as I know), because I know of my loss of Alix. Had I not known of Alix, my life in that alternate world might have been quite good. In fact, I might have had a completely different child. One, I would add, that I would regret losing just as much as Alix.

Here is the point. Everything in this world is interconnected through a complex web of cause and effect. Minor alterations can have large unintended consequences. If I change any of the misfortunes in my past, there is a good possibility I would lose something of value. Perhaps, it could be a friendship. Or, a family member. I could fail to meet my wife. And/or, I might not have my children. To have the good things in this life, then, I have bought them with the misfortunes of my past.

All that switching time lines would do is to allow me to trade some misfortunes with some of the good things I currently possess. “Living without regrets,” then, is simply noticing this feature of our world. There are many possible worlds (via alternate timelines). In each one, you will make mistakes, have bad luck, etc. True, these errors will lead to much sorrow and grief, but do not “regret” them. For they are the foundation upon which many of your most valuable things/relationships sit.

I miss my father terribly. There is not a moment that this pain escapes me. But, I could never exchange Alix for him (nor do I think he would want me to).

I understand that the misfortunes I have suffered have played a role (at least in a causal sense) in bringing about a life full of things and people I value. And, I understand that this would be true no matter what alternate life I had. To desire something else…To live a life of regret, then …. is to, as Epictetus notes, “[A]t the same time, not pay the one and yet receive the other, [to be] insatiable, and a blockhead.”

Dr. Shane Courtland is Program Director of the Center for Free Enterprise at West Virginia University and is SOPHIA’s Communications Officer. He is representing only his own point of view in this essay. For more information about Dr. Courtland, visit his profile page in SOPHIA’s Directory.

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