Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
One. AA’s all-or-nothing approach made J.G. feel like a defeated misfit. In part, AA was alienating for J.G. because he had no faith in God when AA emphasizes surrendering to a Higher Power.
Two. One-way fallacy. AA told J.G. he had no other treatment options: “Either embrace AA or die.” It's AA or nothing.
J.G. eventually left AA and found effective treatment elsewhere.
Three. AA’s claims of success are less than other studies’ findings. Some claims for AA are as high as 75%.
However, Harvard’s Lance Dodes arrives at a success rate of 5-8%.
According to The Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches, AA is ranked 38 out of 48 methods.
Four. AA can't handle all the mental problems. Alcoholics suffer high rates of mental health problems. AA is not equipped to address these.
Five. AA truisms and wisdom have become culture’s sacred cow. You’re not allowed to criticize AA without being branded an insensitive lout who is “killing people” by discouraging them from joining AA.
This is an emotional, not a rational or critical thinking approach to disagreement.
Six. Rock-Bottom Theory is dangerous. The AA dogma that you must “hit rock bottom” before you really seek recovery is a dangerous message, according to many addiction treatment professionals. It would be like telling a 250-pound man to gain even more weight, soaring to 650 pounds, before he “got serious” about losing weight. By that time, he might be dead.
Seven. AA is criticized for it’s “one size fits all” approach, what is also called the Procrustean method.
Eight. AA offers either/or fallacy or false binary equations: Either you are an alcoholic or you are not. However, many addiction specialists claim that alcohol addiction exists on a spectrum.
Nine. AA can be a dangerous place for some. A lot of medical professionals force their patients to use AA at the exclusion of other treatments. Some AA environments are dangerous and abusive, especially toward women, according to a report in Pro Publica.
Ten. Finnish approach may be more effective and is based on science. Finland is effectively using United States neuroscientist John David Sinclair medical approach, which focuses on blocking dopamine during alcohol ingestion with the use of an opioid antagonist naltrexone.
Blocking dopamine in the brain through drugs is considered by many a scientifically proven treatment. In contrast, AA uses a non-scientific approach: You must undergo a spiritual makeover, come clean, be honest, makes amends with others, and experience a spiritual rebirth to stay away from addictive behavior. This belief is a sacred cow, but it’s not science.
In critical thinking, we must have credible evidence to support our claims. Is AA using credible evidence to support its claim that AA is the only way to treat addiction?
Counterarguments:
We all know family and friends who’d be dead if it weren’t for AA. They must be doing something right.
There is something to be said about changing one’s spiritual orientation, rather than using drugs, to free oneself from addictive behavior.
AA has a track record of providing a support group for people who can’t deal with their addiction on their own.
AA addresses the whole person, not just a habit, as we read in Ed Kressy's essay.
Rather than micromanaging this or that addiction with medication, AA attempts to change default settings of the soul and show how these default settings trigger addictive behavior.
For example, comedian Marc Maron has been off drugs and alcohol for close to 20 years with the help of AA recovery program. He says on his WTF podcast that recovery has taught him that growing up in a toxic family environment he built a default setting so that when he is in a healthy non-toxic work, friendship, or love relationship his default setting is to make that healthy environment toxic.
Why? Because, Marc Maron has learned, toxicity is his home.
For an another example, we can look to journalist Ana Marie Cox, who suffers from bipolar disorder and is a recovering alcoholic and prescription drug addict. AA recovery taught Ana Marie Cox that while she conquered drugs and alcohol, her default setting is to hate herself. As she said on her podcast With Friends Like These while talking to depressive NPR personality John Moe, her default setting is reach for the bottle of self-hatred.
For Ana Marie Cox, self-hatred is the one addiction she hasn't conquered. She said her default setting is "to reach for the bottle of self-hatred," a habit she's still trying to overcome.
What if we become dependent on the medication that is supposed to help us overcome our addiction?
Sample Thesis Statement That Supports Different Approaches Over AA:
While AA does a good job of addressing the holistic concerns to root out addictive behavior from addictive personalities, it should not be used as the Recovery of First Choice for all addicts since some people have specific needs that are more effectively treated with alternative methods.
Sample Thesis That Favors Medication Over AA In Some Cases
While I feel badly for the Marc Marons and Ana Marie Coxes of the world who need AA to help them overcome their toxic, self-destructive behavior, we must acknowledge that for some with a specific chemical problem and no toxic personality afflictions the Finnish medical intervention program is probably the most effective treatment.
Sample Thesis That Defends AA:
While there are addiction treatments that can help change people's chemistry to free them from their addiction, AA is the best method available because it changes the total person, not just a person's chemistry, and it is this complete transformation that makes for a better long-term way to fight what will be a lifetime of addictive behaviors.
Sample Thesis That Defends AA:
We are better off relying on AA's method of attacking the dysfunctional personality that creates addictive behavior than become dependent on medications that simply become a new addiction.
Sample Outline for Addiction Essay
Paragraph 1: Summarize the major points of the essay "The Irrationality of AA."
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that agrees or disagrees with the above essay.
Paragraphs 3-6: Your supporting paragraphs
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal
Paragraph 8: Conclusion
Writing Option for Anti-Vaxxers:
Support or refute the argument that there is no valid defense of the Anti-Vaxxer position. You can consult the following:
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
Composition and Critical Thinking professor Mike Manderlin was in Prospect College’s faculty bathroom stall. Sucking greedily on a sugarless lemon-honey-flavored throat lozenge, his pants coiled around his ankles, reading his wife’s text: “You might want to check out this YMCA workshop for compulsive overeating,” with a link for registration. When he sensed the presence of Mary Beauregard, one of his students, standing just outside the stall’s locked door. How did he know it was her? Was it her familiar breathing, rasping and emphysemic from her chain smoking? Was it her familiar smell of mothballs and cloying talcum powder wafting from her green nicotine-stained skin? Actually, the tipoff was her signature neon pink luggage cart with her matching tote bag and backpack, which he could see beneath the partitioned stall.
“Mary, I know it’s you. You need to leave. Now.”
“Professor Manderlin, I need to talk to you about my grade.”
“What you’re doing is illegal. I could have campus police arrest you. Now I suggest you leave at once.”
“No, not until you explain why I got a C.”
“We can talk about your grade in my office,” he said. “This is not the place.”
“You didn’t even read my essay about my party catering service, did you.”
“Actually, I did read it. You can make one hundred smoked salmon canapés in a half hour. Very impressive. Did you not read my comments?”
“You said you liked my story of becoming one of the industry’s leading catering services, but that my essay was ‘larded’ with grammar errors. Why do you have to use the word ‘larded’? It’s such a demeaning word, and it hurts my self-esteem.”
“We can talk about this later.”
“I don’t think so.”
Mary’s track record was well known. A forty-year-old student. She had been attending the college for more than a decade and had filed so many grievances against the school that she was known as “Scary Mary.” But Mike never imagined she would break into the faculty bathroom and corner an instructor while he was doing his business.
“Mary, you need to leave the men’s room this very instant, before this goes on your record.”
“Not until you give me more feedback.”
She was now gripping the top of the stall’s partition so he could see her thick, stubby fingers. Stacking her tote bag and backpack on top of her luggage cart to make a precarious stepping stool. She had elevated her 250-pound body so that her head was peeking over the stall. Her tight curly jaundiced hair was wet with sweat. She glowered at her instructor behind her black cat eye glasses and blinked her eyes repeatedly. While crinkling her pointy nose.
“You need to help me,” she said, barely able to catch her breath. “I can’t afford to flunk this class again.”
“Get out of here, Mary, before I have you arrested.”
“No. Not until you explain my grade.”
“You want me to explain your grade? Okay. Your fifth-grade-level incoherent chicken scratch is so bad I stay up at night wondering if the college’s mission to educate the masses is a fool’s errand. Your writing is so conspicuously absent of basic critical thinking skills that it makes me want to ram an icepick through my forehead. There. Is that enough explanation for you?”
“You’re a terrible person unworthy of a calling as noble as higher education. I can see you’re incapable of helping me. I’ll leave now.”
“Good idea. And, Mary, I need you to drop my class immediately. If you don’t, I’ll report this incident to campus police and have a restraining order issued against you. Am I clear?”
“I will gladly drop your class. But you should know you have no empathy for your marginal, at-risk students such as myself. I’m going to do some research on Rate My Professor and find someone with more compassion and understanding as I work on completing my education.”
Satisfied with the way she put her professor in his place. She attempted to descend from her makeshift ladder, but she lost her balance and all 250 pounds of her crashed to the ground. Writhing on the tile floor, she shouted that she feared she might have broken several bones and may require a stretcher.
Out of the stall now, Mike looked down at Mary and told her she was going to be fine, but that may need to ice her injuries to reduce possible inflammation.
“Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Help me up.”
“I’m not touching you, Mary. And besides, I’m late for class.”
After his encounter with Mary Beauregard. Mike rushed to his 6 p.m. Critical Thinking class. His students, many of them commuting from a long day at work, were starving at the dinner hour. Because he had a lot of empathy where hunger was concerned, he was lax about the campus-wide no-eating-in-class rules. Sitting at the desks, students were feasting on giant burritos that looked like fluffy pillows. Mike happily imagined sleeping with his head on such a soft burrito, waking up periodically, taking a bite out of his chipotle-infused cushion, resuming sleep, and starting the whole process all over again.
Other students were eating platters of chicken katsu over heaps of white rice drowning in thick brown curry gravy. The spicy curry was so alluring Mike had to muster all his strength not to hover over their plates and scoop mounds of curry into his ravenous mouth.
Some students were gobbling protein bars and washing them down with ice-cold mocha coffee beverages. Topped with white clouds of whipped cream, chocolate chips, rainbow sprinkles, and maraschino cherries.
One resourceful student brought a jar of peanut butter to class and spooned giant gobs of peanut butter on bananas and apple slices.
Another student was eating an oversized hot pastrami sandwich with melted Swiss cheese, mustard, and pickles.
The only thing that stopped Mike from stealing his students’ food with his bare hands and devouring it in front of their terrified faces was the fear that a student would video his piggish spectacle and post the disgusting display on YouTube.
The classroom was so redolent of spices, smoked meats, and vinegar that Mike felt a sharp tingling sensation in his nostrils, and his mouth watered. He look down to make sure there was no drool on his Dacron sport shirt.
In spite of the apples, carrots, and smoked almonds he had wolfed down during his office hour. He was so dizzy with hunger that it was all he could do to not cancel class, run across the street to the Middle Eastern restaurant, and inhale several skewers of chicken kabob dipped in their signature smoked paprika hummus.
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paul Bloom's Claim That Empathy Has Deficits
One. Empathy is a poor moral guide because it's biased and often looks-based.
Two. Empathy blinds us from utilitarian approaches to policy in favor of feelings approaches.
Three. Empathy is inferior to compassion. The latter desires to help others in the absence of feelings or empathy.
Four. Excessive empathy or "hyper empathy" can be bullying and controlling over others.
Five. Excessive empathy can lead to excessive self-denial and self-abnegation.
Six. Empathy can be selfish, indulgent, unpleasant, and inappropriate when the person is reacting to someone who is suffering (drowning example).
Seven. Empathy leads to emotional burnout.
Eight. Empathy is a liability for doctors who need calm, not empathy, to make their patients feel better.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
One. In the context of Caleb Crain's "The Case Against Democracy" and Ilya Somin's "Democracy vs. Epistocracy" support, defend, or complicate the argument that an uninformed public lacking adequate critical thinking skills cannot support a democracy as we tend to idealize democracies but rather, at best, maintains a democracy so flawed many would argue that it cannot be called a democracy at all, but rather some grotesque sub-version of a democracy.
Paragraph 1: Summarize the problem of an uninformed populace, also known as "hobbits," and misinformed public, known as "hooligans." Or you might define the terms "hobbits," "hooligans," and "Vulcans," and give examples.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 Your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis
Paragraph 1: Explain the alleged deficits resulting from social media use. Or you could summarize Tristan Harris' comparison of social media to religious cults.
Paragraph 2: Write a thesis that agrees or disagrees with the claim that "social media mode" maladapts you to meaningful, fulfilling tasks. Social media is "Cap'n Crunch," a form of binge eating that never leaves you satisfied.
Paragraphs 3-6 would be your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal:
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, restatement of your thesis in a more emotionally powerful form to achieve pathos.
Four. In the context of Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "The Case for Reparations," defend, refute, or complicate that America is morally obligated to exact qualified African-Americans reparations for America's crime of an ongoing kleptocracy, which includes slavery, Jim Crow, and their ongoing legacy today.
Paragraph 1: Summarize the debate on both sides.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 would be your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion.
Five. Develop an analytical thesis that shows how Jordan Peeles' movie Get Out builds on Ta-Nehisi Coates' notion of American kleptocracy.
Six. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that recycling is a liberal white middle class religion that speaks more to Kool-Aid-drinking tribalism than it does improving the Earth. Consult John Tierney's "The Reign of Recycling," Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism is a Religion," and Stephen Asma's "Green Guilt."
Seven. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that radical changes in the job market over the next 20 years due to robots and high-tech will compel country's to provide their citizens with a Universal Basic Income. Consult the following:
Paragraph 1: What is UBI and why is it so relevant right now?
Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Is UBI viable? Is it realistic? Is it an appropriate response to 47% of jobs being lost in the next 10-20 years?
Paragraphs 3-6 will be your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal
Paragraph 8: Conclusion
Arguments Against Universal Basic Income (UBI)
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is.
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable.
Modify for students who don't wish to see the documentary:
Option "X":
Develop a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that climate deniers are using logical fallacies and fake science to support their claim that "we don't really know if humans are causing climate change."
Paragraph 1: What is the scientific claim of climate change?
Paragraph 2: Do you agree that logical fallacies and manipulations are being used to deny climate change?
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting arguments.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Eight. Develop a thesis that in the context of the documentary Merchants of Doubt addresses the question: Should we have faith that "reason and faith can defeat propaganda and falsehoods." Or is such a message optimistic bias rooted in delusion?
Nine: Develop an analytical thesis that in the context of Merchants of Doubt explains the fallacies behind spin and how these fallacies can be constructed to effectively cause doubt and confusion over the legitimate claims of science.
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that radical changes in the job market over the next 20 years due to robots and high-tech will compel country's to provide their citizens with a Universal Basic Income.
Three. UBI would eliminate need for minimum wage. Lower minimum wage would encourage more hiring.
Four. Because UBI doesn't give more money for children, UBI doesn't reward one lifestyle over another.
Five. Citizens would have more time and resources to train and get educated for more career options presuming they used their time and money wisely.
Six. Most stay-at-home parents are women who have not been justly paid for their domestic work over the centuries. UBI would help remedy that injustice.
Seven. UBI gives citizens an escape valve from an abusive job or relationship. Having guaranteed money makes it easier to bail when you have to. "This is jacked up, man. I've got to bail."
Eight. 13K a year isn't so much that you would be content to retire in your house. Most people would want at the very least to supplement their meager income with part-time or full-time work. More enterprising citizens would use their free time and money for education and job re-training.
Nine. UBI would eliminate welfare abuses and welfare fraud because UBI spells the death of welfare as we know it.
Ten. Providing for the citizens with UBI would lessen the risk of the kind of discontent that leads to nationalist nativism, a racist political movement that makes one ethnic tribe hate on immigrants as scapegoats for the country's woes.
Eleven. Addressing the counterargument that not having to work would make us lazy depressed slobs, some would argue that technology is forcing us to change and adapt. Just as coal workers are inevitably going to become extinct in the next century, we must adapt to a new employment landscape. We must either adapt or die. We must not be chained to our "Calvinism hangover," the deeply American notion that work is salvation and unemployment is a sign of sin and depravity.
Twelve. The rich know they have to share their wealth because the throng with torches and pitch forks will be knocking on their doors. In other words, UBI is much needed pacifier, a form of social control that augments the safety of the rich.
Thirteen. The open debate about UBI--the biggest debate--is the philosophical question about the nature of work. Some say UBI will kill work and that without work people will descend into depression and pathology. Others say we will adapt to this new economic landscape. One argument in favor of UBI is that even if we don't know the answer to this question definitively, we HAVE NO CHOICE but to adapt to a world where close to 50% of jobs will be lost.
Fourteen. Technology will change the human animal on a chemical level and we will be able to adapt to the new work environment as evidenced by Elon Musk's exploration into his new neural lace company. Such technologies will make us smarter and more adaptive as human beings.
Fifteen. Even if we concede that not working will turn us into lazy bums, that is the lesser evil of the economic injustice social chaos resulting from not having UBI.
Arguments Against Universal Basic Income (UBI)
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society. Dependence, in other words, leads to laziness.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society. The dependent will drag down the producers.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. Once you take a government handout, you become vulnerable to the government's control over every part of your life. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is. Why stick to your family, when you don't rely on them?
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable. Our identity and sense of wellbeing is tied to having a job.
Six. There is no increment for children. Why not? Because you're not encouraged to have children to get more. Some find this a form of lifestyle control. Others like it.
Seven. The estimated 13K a year isn't enough though some say that still puts people in the top 12% of all global earners.
Eight. Unless all countries had equal UBI, the more desirable UBI countries would be a magnet for people of other countries who'd swarm into "healthy UBI" countries to bilk their system.
Nine. UBI is giving 15% of average national income. This would require tax revenue of 15% of national income. That is too much tax, some say, for such a small income.
Washington Post article that argues UBI won't make America great again.
Challenging the American Work Ethic
There is a notion in America, from the beginning of its European history, that being a hard worker means being noble, virtuous, and successful.
The contrary is also assumed: If you're poor and unemployed, your life is evidence that you are a member of the damned. You are morally depraved and bankrupt.
This notion comes from a form of Protestantism called Calvinism. John Calvin said evidence of being a member of God's elect was being a hard worker. German philosopher Max Weber said this became the "Protestant Work Ethic," the fuel of American capitalism.
Perhaps the American Work Ethic is Based on Unexamined Opinions
Inherited opinions: These are opinions that are imprinted on us during our childhood. Robert Atwan writes they come from “family, culture, traditions, customs, regions, social institutions, or religion.”
Involuntary opinions: These are the opinions that result from direct indoctrination and inculcation (learning through repetition). If we grow up in a family that teaches us that eating pork is evil, then we won’t eat at other people’s homes that serve that porcine dish.
Considered opinions. Atwan writes, “These are opinions we have formed as a result of firsthand experience, reading, discussion and debate, or independent thinking and reasoning. These opinions are formed from direct knowledge and often from exposure and considering other opinions.”
Some questions to consider about the work ethic for your UBI paper:
Should we really have a work ethic for menial, repetitive jobs that reduce us to human routers?
Don't jobs prevent us from spending time on our real interests and passions?
Have we been brainwashed by the Protestant Work Ethic so that we are contented "rabbit workers" for our employers?
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paul Bloom's Claim That Empathy Has Deficits
One. Empathy is a poor moral guide because it's biased and often looks-based.
Two. Empathy blinds us from utilitarian approaches to policy in favor of feelings approaches.
Three. Empathy is inferior to compassion. The latter desires to help others in the absence of feelings or empathy.
Four. Excessive empathy or "hyper empathy" can be bullying and controlling over others.
Five. Excessive empathy can lead to excessive self-denial and self-abnegation.
Six. Empathy can be selfish, indulgent, unpleasant, and inappropriate when the person is reacting to someone who is suffering (drowning example).
Seven. Empathy leads to emotional burnout.
Eight. Empathy is a liability for doctors who need calm, not empathy, to make their patients feel better.
Two. He accuses PB of wanting us to feel others' pain less: Straw Man Fallacy.
Three. He accuses PB of saying one thing and doing another: Semantic and Splitting Hairs Fallacy.
Four. He accuses PB of wanting to be "more significant than he is." False Motivation Fallacy.
Five. Complexity Fallacy. If the argument isn't simple enough, accuse the writer of being unclear and dishonest.
Six. "Fudging and circumlocution": Wordy Refutation Fallacy: Hide behind big words to sound convincing.
Seven. "He provokes audience and makes a bold statement" and then he is "hedging and qualifying": Stipulation Fallacy. Essayists use stipulations all the time. They are part of sophisticated analysis, not trickery.
Eight. "fundamental human belief": Tradition and Emotional Fallacy.
Nine. We need more, not less, empathy: More Is Better Fallacy.
Ten. "No one said a doctor needs to feel depressed": Red Herring Fallacy.
Eleven. "He sets himself up as a tough-minded truth teller." False Representation Fallacy.
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
McMahon Grammar Lesson: Comma Rules (based in part by Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers)
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
Comma Rule 6: Use commas to set off interrupters or interjections between sentences.
Keith Manderlin, a close friend of mine, went on the buttermilk fried chicken diet and lost 45 pounds.
I looked down at my thumb, a flat grape in the aftermath of me hitting it with a hammer, and realized I had better have my wife drive me to the emergency room.
Green tea, which is believed to be rich in anti-oxidants, varies in quality depending on your supplier.
I sat down and wrote a song on the piano, a lugubrious homage to my angst-ridden adolescent years, which became my all-time selling hit single.
Peanut butter, known to contain significant amounts of rat and cockroach parts, continues to be a brisk seller in spite of its reputation for containing impurities.
When Zombies Became a Worldwide Pestilence, Circa 2012
I’ve been teaching college composition and critical thinking for thirty years. If I had to pick a year that defined a radical change in my students I’d have to point to 2012. That was the year things started to go downhill. It was the year when smartphone users in the United States topped 100 million. It was the year a growing number of Americans and people worldwide began to see the smartphone as a necessity more important than having a toothbrush or wearing underwear. The smartphone became an external organ an external amygdala with Wi-Fi.
More than a human appendage, the smartphone became an opium-drip machine that you carried around with you 24/7. You could enjoy validation and dopamine all day long, until your brain dulled and short-circuited rendering you a mindless zombie falling down a rabbit hole of anxiety and depression.
Depression made people turn to their little opium gadgets with even greater intensity as if the very source of their mental disease might save them and put them into states of euphoria the gadget had once provided them.
I talk about the smartphone-induced zombie state with my students all the time. I talk about how this zombie state will make them “bottom feeders” in the new economy. Their time and energy wasted on their opium machine will make them lose their competitive edge to those who have the strength of mind to keep their smartphones in their proper place.
Having a competitive edge has never been more urgent in this age of merciless economic stratification where everything is tiered including our educational caste system. I remind the class that 8000 students walk through the Humanities Building every week and of those students only 3% will pass our college’s Critical Thinking courses which puts my students in the 97 percentile. A staggering 90% of the remedial students won’t even make it to freshman composition.
It’s bad enough to struggle at the bottom of the educational ladder with the odds set against you. But it’s far worse to voluntarily keep a smartphone attached to you constantly because now you’re aiding and abetting in your own demise by allowing this insidious contraption to turn you into a dysfunctional zombie.
I tell my students that this zombie state was prophesied in the 1999 film The Matrix in which we see we have a choice to take the Red Pill of knowledge or the Blue Pill of ignorance. Most people in the film’s future dystopia choose ignorance. The Blue Pill prophecy was fulfilled I tell my students in 2012 when everyone in the world believed erroneously they not only did they need a smartphone; they needed to constantly address the smartphone’s voracious appetites.
All of my students have horror stories of friends and family members whose lives have been ruined by smartphone addiction. They’ve traded ambition and caring for being numbed and depressed by their little dopamine device. They talk of older brothers and sisters unemployed college dropouts who malnourished and corpse-like languish in dank, dimly-lit basements where they are shackled to their smartphones day and night.
My students speak of their own battles with social media-induced anxiety and depression. Listening to my vitriolic rants against social media many of them have deleted their Facebook accounts. They all feel better for it. I’ve had students announce to the class that they deleted their Facebook account and it was followed by applause as if they were announcing their many days of sobriety at an A.A. meeting.
I confess to my students that while I rarely use my five-year-old smartphone a dinosaur by today’s standards I have wasted tens of thousands of hours mindlessly relaxing in front of the Internet since the late 1990s when I was deluded like millions of others into believing surfing the Net gave me infinite possibilities and a giddy sense of omnipotence. But thousands of hours wasted on skimming news articles, consuming entertainment, and conducting product research was time I could have spent practicing writing and playing piano. Rather than honing those skills I’ve remained a dilettante.
I too am in need of an intervention I confess to my students. I too am a casualty of the false utopian promises of technology. Looking at twenty years and tens of thousands of hours wasted wallowing in the malaise of the Internet's mind-numbing seductions I must now redeem myself before it's too late.
I make an announcement to my class. I am going to write a book about critical thinking as the antidote to the zombie state, which became a worldwide pestilence in 2012. The process must be reversed. The Red Pill must replace the Blue Pill. I will call my book Critical Thinking for the Zombie Apocalypse.
This sound like futility.
This sounds like a fool’s errand.
This sounds like the desperate play of a washed-up nonentity straining for relevance.
But my quest to save the students in my critical thinking class is like religion when you think about it. Religion tells you the world is a place of darkness and that to surrender to the world results in death—you navigate the Earth like a mindless zombie unaware that you slog across the planet in darkness.
I can shrug my shoulders and say the hell with it. Why fight the current? Why fight this tsunami of social media and smartphone addiction that is eviscerating our brains? Because complete surrender is nihilism the belief that nothing matters.
I cannot be a Priest of Despair and Hedonism.
I cannot tell my twin daughters now in the first grade that life is a meaningless joke.
If George Carlin is right that when you’re born you’re given a free front-row ticket to the freak show then you should know why it’s a freak show. And you should learn to tell the difference between a freak show and a non-freak show.
Knowing the difference means a lot to me.
But George Carlin was only half right.
The world is a freak show to be sure but only part of the world is. A freak show by definition means something deformed, grotesque, askew, out of whack. But these conditions are degraded versions of something better.
An informed opinion is a rare thing and it is a good thing to have.
An uninformed opinion one that is held out of habit and reflex more than anything else is a degraded version of the informed opinion. Mobs of people with uniformed opinions wreak hell and havoc on the world.
Eight. Develop a thesis that in the context of the documentary Merchants of Doubt addresses the question: Should we have faith that "reason and faith can defeat propaganda and falsehoods." Or is such a message optimistic bias rooted in delusion?
Nine: Develop an analytical thesis that in the context of Merchants of Doubt explains the fallacies behind spin and how these fallacies can be constructed to effectively cause doubt and confusion over the legitimate claims of science.
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Find fragments and comma splices in the following:
I’ve been teaching college composition and critical thinking for thirty years. If I had to pick a year that defined a radical change in my students, I’d have to point to 2012, that was the year things started to go downhill, it was the year when smartphone users in the United States topped 100 million. It was the year a growing number of Americans, and people worldwide, began to see the smartphone as a necessity. More important than having a toothbrush or wearing underwear. The smartphone became an external organ, a kidney with Wi-Fi.
More than a human appendage, the smartphone became an opium-drip machine that you carried around with you 24/7. You could enjoy validation and dopamine all day long. Until the mindless zombie state took over and depression set in.
Depression made people turn to their little opium gadgets with even greater intensity. As if the very source of their mental disease might save them and put them into states of euphoria the gadget had once provided them.
I talk about the smartphone-induced zombie state with my students all the time, I talk about how this zombie state will make them “bottom feeders” in the new economy. Their time and energy wasted on their opium machine will make them lose their competitive edge to those who have the strength of mind to keep their smartphones in their proper place.
I tell my students that this zombie state was prophesied in the 1999 film The Matrix. In which we see we have a choice to take the red pill of knowledge or the blue pill of ignorance. Most people in the film’s future dystopia choose ignorance. The blue pill prophecy was fulfilled, I tell my students, in 2012 when everyone in the world believed, erroneously, they not only did they need a smartphone; they needed to constantly address the smartphone’s voracious appetites.
All of my students have horror stories of friends and family members whose lives have been ruined by smartphone addiction. They’ve traded ambition and caring for being numbed and depressed by their little dopamine device. They talk of older brothers and sisters, unemployed college dropouts, who, malnourished and corpse-like, languish in dank, dimly-lit basements where they are shackled to their smartphones all day and night.
My students speak of their own battles with social media-induced depression. Many of them have deleted their Facebook accounts, they all feel better for it. I’ve had students announce to the class that they deleted their Facebook account and it was followed by applause as if they were announcing their many days of sobriety at an A.A. meeting.
I confess to my students that while I rarely use my five-year-old smartphone, a dinosaur by today’s standards, I have wasted much time relaxing in front of the Internet since the late 1990s when I was deluded, like millions of others, into believing surfing the Net gave me infinite possibilities and a giddy sense of omnipotence. But thousands of hours wasted on entertainment and consumer research was time I could have spent practicing writing and playing piano. Rather than honing those skills, I’ve remained a dilettante.
I, too, am in need of an intervention, I confess to my students. I, too, am a casualty of the false utopian promises of technology. Looking at twenty years and tens of thousands of hours wasted wallowing in the malaise of the Internet's languid seductions, I must now redeem myself. Before it's too late.
Essay #4 Options Due May 16
Writing Assignment Option #1
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
Study Questions
One. What is the role of Dionysian ecstasy in the story?
The "clamor of bells," dancing, and celebration is about being grateful, but to surrender to one's praise of happiness one must forget about the dark side, the tiger's claw beneath the velvet carpet.
To be happy requires compartmentalization, having your happy "pocket" and keeping your sad "pocket" hidden.
American slave owners committed heinous acts against their slaves before coming home to pray with their families, read bedtime stories to their children, and smile piously to Jesus before sleeping with a saint-like grin, only to wake up in the morning and start their acts of abomination all over again.
These slave owners are compartmentalizing. Their left hand commits evil and their right hand, unaware of what the left hand is doing, prays with piety to its white Jesus.
We cannot be happy in heaven if were conscious of those suffering in hell.
How do we enjoy our juicy medium-rare steak when we know that the cow whose butchered cuts we're savoring trembled with terror, cried out, and let out explosive diarrhea before being cut into hundreds of pieces?
How do we enjoy an expensive dinner at a fancy restaurant when we know every 5 seconds a baby somewhere in the world dies of starvation?
How do we enjoy our recently purchased clothes when we know they were made from child slaves?
Speaking of slaves, the American economy boomed when slavery in the south was at its peak. The cotton industry fed the American economic machine, causing white Americans to shout with joy, "Cotton is king!" All the while, every sort of abomination was committed against the slaves. How could the white people be so happy when they knew another group of people was suffering with such unspeakable torment?
The short answer: compartmentalization.
And this leads us to one of the story's major themes: Compartmentalization is a moral abomination.
The collective joy in the opening paragraph is the joy resulting from a collective delusion, a shared psychosis. To partake in such a psychosis destroys the moral order.
Two. What kind of society is Omelas?
We know they are not simple. They are smart.
They do not own slaves.
They are not ruled by a monarchy.
They were happy yet intelligent.
However, they had succumbed to the "banality of evil," the notion that evil exists in our every day lives without drama or spectacle. Rather, evil exists insidiously and we become numb and inured (accustomed) to it.
We pen up livestock, torture and abuse millions of pigs, cows, and chickens, and gnash our teeth into these slaughtered meats while laughing and slapping our thighs in chicken wing bars.
This society exhibits other moral failures with its "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em" philosophy. They are conformists. Everyone tows the line and does their share. Conformity to an evil order makes us evil. But we haven't seen the evil in the story yet.
We also know that they have kept their desires (concupiscence) in check. They are neither peasants nor technophiles always wanting the newest smartphone. They are in the middle. They want comfort and luxury, but not in excess.
Omelas is a society that has mastered compartmentalization to the point that they have eradicated guilt.
They take a dreamy drug called drooz that gives them "dreamy languor." We are assured that it is not habit forming.
Three. What is the allegory of the boy locked up in a cellar?
Or the service industry serving the expensive appetites of the booming tech industry in San Francisco as explored in "Dinner, Disrupted" by Daniel Duane.
I am reminded of girls in India who are forced by their families to be surrogate mothers for a few thousand dollars.
I am reminded of the babies sold in the surrogacy industry who are later victims of human trafficking.
The people of Omelas have made peace with the suffering boy as a bargain for their happiness. They have sold their souls to the devil, so to speak. They live in a dystopia, a sort of hell on earth.
The children initially disgusted by seeing the suffering child begin to accept its suffering. They see the child as subhuman and incapable of achieving happiness anyway. This reminds me of academics who speak of "the underclass," so well articulated in Bell Hooks' essay.
A "good" white person (living in accordance with the laws of the land regardless of how racist) during times of slavery would not want to live in a nice house, attend a nice school, attend beautiful cultural events, and enjoy the progress of technology if all these things were built on the blood, sweat, and tears of slavery.
Morality cannot exist with compartmentalization. To have morality is to be spiritual and to be spiritual begins with seeing the human race as a unified whole.
We are only as good as we treat the least fortunate and most exploited among us.
Writing Option #2
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paragraph 1 is your introduction, a summary of Bloom's points.
Paragraph 2 is your agreement or disagreement with Bloom, your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Option #3
Support, refute, or complicate Malcolm Gladwell's claim that expensive universities are immoral to serve gourmet food to their students because the cost excludes financially challenged students from attending these universities.
Support, refute, or complicate the claim that the disease model of addiction can be harmful to some addicts who would benefit more from a habit or conditioning model of addiction.
While many parents are well intentioned and fearful of vaccines as they are mired in a sea of overwhelming alarmist information, their decision to deny their children vaccines is misguided, at best, and morally repugnant, more likely, when we consider their refusal to acknowledge real science and empirical evidence, their reliance on logical fallacies and quack pseudo-science, their narcissistic conspiracy mentality, and, most of all, their decision to exact a potentially fatal pestilence upon our children.
Sample Outline
Paragraph 1: In your introduction explain the justifications used for the anti-vaxxer movement.
Paragraph 2: Refute or defend those justifications in your thesis.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal section.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis.
Group Activity
Get into groups of 4 or 5 and ask the following 3 questions:
One. Do you have an emotional response to parents who don't vaccinate their children?
Two. Are parents who don't vaccinate their children getting a "bad rap"? Explain.
Three. How could you incorporate these two questions into an introduction for your essay?
Writing Option #6
Support, refute, or complicate Tom James' claim that the promises of legal pot have not been fulfilled by incompetence, corruption, and confusion.
Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple.
Explanation
The privileged position themselves to sacrifice a group to perpetuate the privileged group's power. The privileged, like the leaders in Le Guin's short story, rationalize their exploitation of the sacrificed group by making utilitarian pronouncements such as "sacrificing a few for the greater good."
The poor are used as a resource in our society. They pay for municipal violations, they pay higher fees for cars, house, interest payments. There is an entire industry based on exploiting the poor. For example, there are check cashing agencies in poor neighborhoods that take a huge percentage out of the check before handing over the cash.
Small children work in sweat shops all over the world. They don't have a childhood. They don't see their parents. They are slaves. However, they are in demand because they allow American consumers to buy clothes for cheap. Thus these small children are sacrificed for our consumer pleasures.
The same can be said with agriculture. People work in substandard working conditions so we, the consumer, can buy affordable produce.
The same can be said of the restaurant industry. People are exploited so we, the hungry diner, can "eat out on the cheap."
Perhaps the worst sacrifice is made in the industrial prison complex where poor people of color are the primary source of income for this industry.
Theme of Denial
We are all upset by injustice, but we can inure ourselves to cruelty and injustice through denial or willed ignorance.
We rationalize:
"Someone's gotta clean those toilets."
"Someone's gotta pick cheap produce so I can feed my family."
"I'm sad that cows cry before they get slaughtered, but dang that double cheeseburger with goat cheese, bacon, onion rings and sopping with tangy chipotle mayonnaise is delicious."
"I know my peanut butter has cockroach pieces and rat hair in it, but what are you going to do?"
Study Questions
One. What is the role of Dionysian ecstasy in the story?
The "clamor of bells," dancing, and celebration is about being grateful, but to surrender to one's praise of happiness one must forget about the dark side, the tiger's claw beneath the velvet carpet.
To be happy requires compartmentalization, having your happy "pocket" and keeping your sad "pocket" hidden.
American slave owners committed heinous acts against their slaves before coming home to pray with their families, read bedtime stories to their children, and smile piously to Jesus before sleeping with a saint-like grin, only to wake up in the morning and start their acts of abomination all over again.
These slave owners are compartmentalizing. Their left hand commits evil and their right hand, unaware of what the left hand is doing, prays with piety to its white Jesus.
We cannot be happy in heaven if were conscious of those suffering in hell.
How do we enjoy our juicy medium-rare steak when we know that the cow whose butchered cuts we're savoring trembled with terror, cried out, and let out explosive diarrhea before being cut into hundreds of pieces?
How do we enjoy an expensive dinner at a fancy restaurant when we know every 5 seconds a baby somewhere in the world dies of starvation?
How do we enjoy our recently purchased clothes when we know they were made from child slaves?
Speaking of slaves, the American economy boomed when slavery in the south was at its peak. The cotton industry fed the American economic machine, causing white Americans to shout with joy, "Cotton is king!" All the while, every sort of abomination was committed against the slaves. How could the white people be so happy when they knew another group of people was suffering with such unspeakable torment?
The short answer: compartmentalization.
And this leads us to one of the story's major themes: Compartmentalization is a moral abomination.
The collective joy in the opening paragraph is the joy resulting from a collective delusion, a shared psychosis. To partake in such a psychosis destroys the moral order.
Two. What kind of society is Omelas?
We know they are not simple. They are smart.
They do not own slaves.
They are not ruled by a monarchy.
They were happy yet intelligent.
However, they had succumbed to the "banality of evil," the notion that evil exists in our every day lives without drama or spectacle. Rather, evil exists insidiously and we become numb and inured (accustomed) to it.
We pen up livestock, torture and abuse millions of pigs, cows, and chickens, and gnash our teeth into these slaughtered meats while laughing and slapping our thighs in chicken wing bars.
This society exhibits other moral failures with its "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em" philosophy. They are conformists. Everyone tows the line and does their share. Conformity to an evil order makes us evil. But we haven't seen the evil in the story yet.
We also know that they have kept their desires (concupiscence) in check. They are neither peasants nor technophiles always wanting the newest smartphone. They are in the middle. They want comfort and luxury, but not in excess.
Omelas is a society that has mastered compartmentalization to the point that they have eradicated guilt.
They take a dreamy drug called drooz that gives them "dreamy languor." We are assured that it is not habit forming.
Three. What is the allegory of the boy locked up in a cellar?
Or the service industry serving the expensive appetites of the booming tech industry in San Francisco as explored in "Dinner, Disrupted" by Daniel Duane.
I am reminded of girls in India who are forced by their families to be surrogate mothers for a few thousand dollars.
I am reminded of the babies sold in the surrogacy industry who are later victims of human trafficking.
The people of Omelas have made peace with the suffering boy as a bargain for their happiness. They have sold their souls to the devil, so to speak. They live in a dystopia, a sort of hell on earth.
The children initially disgusted by seeing the suffering child begin to accept its suffering. They see the child as subhuman and incapable of achieving happiness anyway. This reminds me of academics who speak of "the underclass," so well articulated in Bell Hooks' essay.
A "good" white person (living in accordance with the laws of the land regardless of how racist) during times of slavery would not want to live in a nice house, attend a nice school, attend beautiful cultural events, and enjoy the progress of technology if all these things were built on the blood, sweat, and tears of slavery.
Morality cannot exist with compartmentalization. To have morality is to be spiritual and to be spiritual begins with seeing the human race as a unified whole.
We are only as good as we treat the least fortunate and most exploited among us.
The story is about how evil flourishes in false utopias where people are encouraged to feel good about themselves.
To use the above John Oliver video in a comparison with the Ursula Le Guin short story, you might consider the following parallels of moral shortcomings:
denial
compartmentalization
desensitization to cruelty
confusing majority rule with moral order
confusing status quo with moral order
preferring self-interest and pleasure over moral duty to others as a Faustian Bargain (deal with the devil)
McMahon Grammar Lesson: Comma Rules (based in part by Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers)
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
One. In the context of Caleb Crain's "The Case Against Democracy" and Ilya Somin's "Democracy vs. Epistocracy" support, defend, or complicate the argument that an uninformed public lacking adequate critical thinking skills cannot support a democracy as we tend to idealize democracies but rather, at best, maintains a democracy so flawed many would argue that it cannot be called a democracy at all, but rather some grotesque sub-version of a democracy.
Four. In the context of Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "The Case for Reparations," defend, refute, or complicate that America is morally obligated to exact qualified African-Americans reparations for America's crime of an ongoing kleptocracy, which includes slavery, Jim Crow, and their ongoing legacy today.
Five. Develop an analytical thesis that shows how Jordan Peeles' movie Get Out builds on Ta-Nehisi Coates' notion of American kleptocracy.
Six. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that recycling is a liberal white middle class religion that speaks more to Kool-Aid-drinking tribalism than it does improving the Earth. Consult John Tierney's "The Reign of Recycling," Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism is a Religion," and Stephen Asma's "Green Guilt."
Seven. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that radical changes in the job market over the next 20 years due to robots and high-tech will compel country's to provide their citizens with a Universal Basic Income. Consult the following:
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is.
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable.
Eight. Develop a thesis that in the context of the documentary Merchants of Doubt addresses the question: Should we have faith that "reason and faith can defeat propaganda and falsehoods." Or is such a message optimistic bias rooted in delusion?
Nine: Develop an analytical thesis that in the context of Merchants of Doubt explains the fallacies behind spin and how these fallacies can be constructed to effectively cause doubt and confusion over the legitimate claims of science.
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that recycling is a liberal white middle class religion that speaks more to Kool-Aid-drinking tribalism than it does improving the Earth. Consult John Tierney's "The Reign of Recycling," Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism is a Religion," and Stephen Asma's "Green Guilt."
Identifying Claims and Analyzing Arguments from Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky’s From Inquiry to Academic Writing, Third Edition
We’ve learned in this class that we can call a thesis a claim, an assertion that must be supported with evidence and refuting counterarguments.
There are 3 different types of claims: fact, value, and policy.
Claims of Fact
According to Greene and Lidinsky, “Claims of fact are assertions (or arguments) that seek to define or classify something or establish that a problem or condition has existed, exists, or will exist.
For example, Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow argues that Jim Crow practices that notoriously oppressed people of color still exist in an insidious form, especially in the manner in which we incarcerate black and brown men.
In The Culture Code Rapaille argues that different cultures have unconscious codes and that a brand’s codes must not be disconnected with the culture that brand needs to appeal to. This is the problem or struggle that all companies have: being “on code” with their product. The crisis that is argued is the disconnection between people’s unconscious codes and the contrary codes that a brand may represent.
Many economists, such as Paul Krugman, argue that there is major problem facing America, a shrinking middle class, that is destroying democracy and human freedom as this country knows it. Krugman and others will point to a growing disparity between the haves and have-nots, a growing class of temporary workers that surpasses all other categories of workers (warehouse jobs for online companies, for example), and de-investment in the American labor force as jobs are outsourced in a world of global competition.
All three examples above are claims of fact. As Greene and Lidinsky write, “This is an assertion that a condition exists. A careful reader must examine the basis for this kind of claim: Are we truly facing a crisis?”
We further read, “Our point is that most claims of fact are debatable and challenge us to provide evidence to verify our arguments. They may be based on factual information, but they are not necessarily true. Most claims of fact present interpretations of evidence derived from inferences.”
A Claim of Fact That Seeks to Define Or Classify
Greene and Lidinsky point out that autism is a controversial topic because experts cannot agree on a definition. The behaviors attributed to autism “actually resist simple definition.”
There is also disagreement on a definition of obesity. For example, some argue that the current BMI standards are not accurate.
Another example that is difficult to define or classify is the notion of genius.
In all the cases above, the claim of fact is to assert a definition that must be supported with evidence and refutations of counterarguments.
Claim of Fact Can Support an Argumentative Thesis
If you're making the case for recycling, for example, your argument will have more power if you make a claim of fact about the state of the landfill problem as you can see in this LA Times article. This problem includes the toxic levels of landfill-released gas into the atmosphere.
Claims of Value
Greene and Lidinsky write, “A claim of fact is different from a claim of value, which expresses an evaluation of a problem or condition that has existed, exists, or will exist. Is a condition good or bad? Is it important or inconsequential?
In other words, the claim isn’t whether or not a crisis or problem exists: The emphasis is on HOW serious the problem is.
How serious is global warming?
How serious is gender discrimination in schools?
How serious is racism in law enforcement and incarceration?
How serious is the threat of injury for people who engage in Cross-Fit training?
How serious are the health threats rendered from providing sodas in public schools?
How serious is the income gap between the haves and the have-nots?
How a Claim of Value Affects a Debate on Recycling
No one disputes that toxic gas is released from landfills. The debate is HOW BAD is the problem? You might refer to legit studies of how toxic landfill gasses cause increased risk of cancer.
Claims of Policy
Greene and Lidinsky write, “A claim of policy is an argument for what should be the case, that a condition should exist. It is a call for change or a solution to a problem.
Examples
We must decriminalize drugs.
We must increase the minimum wage to X per hour.
We must have stricter laws that defend worker rights for temporary and migrant workers.
We must integrate more autistic children in mainstream classes.
We must implement universal health care.
If we are to keep capital punishment, then we must air it on TV.
We must implement stricter laws for texting while driving.
One. In the context of Caleb Crain's "The Case Against Democracy" and Ilya Somin's "Democracy vs. Epistocracy" support, defend, or complicate the argument that an uninformed public lacking adequate critical thinking skills cannot support a democracy as we tend to idealize democracies but rather, at best, maintains a democracy so flawed many would argue that it cannot be called a democracy at all, but rather some grotesque sub-version of a democracy.
Four. In the context of Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "The Case for Reparations," defend, refute, or complicate that America is morally obligated to exact qualified African-Americans reparations for America's crime of an ongoing kleptocracy, which includes slavery, Jim Crow, and their ongoing legacy today.
Five. Develop an analytical thesis that shows how Jordan Peeles' movie Get Out builds on Ta-Nehisi Coates' notion of American kleptocracy.
Six. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that recycling is a liberal white middle class religion that speaks more to Kool-Aid-drinking tribalism than it does improving the Earth. Consult John Tierney's "The Reign of Recycling," Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism is a Religion," and Stephen Asma's "Green Guilt."
Seven. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that radical changes in the job market over the next 20 years due to robots and high-tech will compel country's to provide their citizens with a Universal Basic Income. Consult the following:
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is.
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable.
Eight. Develop a thesis that in the context of the documentary Merchants of Doubt addresses the question: Should we have faith that "reason and faith can defeat propaganda and falsehoods." Or is such a message optimistic bias rooted in delusion?
Nine: Develop an analytical thesis that in the context of Merchants of Doubt explains the fallacies behind spin and how these fallacies can be constructed to effectively cause doubt and confusion over the legitimate claims of science.
Essay based on Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" (considered the essay of record by liberals who celebrate the essay and by conservatives who critique the essay; it's the essay of record by people from both sides of the political aisle)
Essay Option Four. In the context of Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "The Case for Reparations," defend, refute, or complicate that America is morally obligated to exact qualified African-Americans reparations for America's crime of an ongoing kleptocracy, which includes slavery, Jim Crow, and their ongoing legacy today.
Essay Option Five. Develop an analytical thesis that shows how Jordan Peele's movie Get Out builds on Ta-Nehisi Coates' notion of American kleptocracy.
Kleptocracy Argument
A kleptocracy is a government that steals from its citizens and essentially exploits its citizens for personal gain. Ta-Nehisi Coates is arguing that America has imposed a kleptocracy on black Americans since the days of slavery.
Ongoing Injustice Argument
The ongoing injustice argument defends reparations on the claim that while slavery and Jim Crow happened in the past, the injustices against African-Americans continue in the present with a legacy of segregation in job deserts, education deserts, and mass incarceration, part of the prison industrial complex's money-making system built on the backs of people of color. See Adam Gopnik's "The Caging of America."
Moral Statement Argument
Even if one cannot draft a reparations program that will be a "game-changer," the argument goes, societies must make moral statements for the betterment of the society as a whole. For this reason, for example, America gave reparations to the Japanese for the injustice of the internment camps.
If we base reparations on injustices to an oppressed people, where do we stop? What about American Indians? What about migrant and restaurant workers who are abused and exploited to this very day? What about women who make 83% of for every dollar a man makes? Where does this end? We'll tax our way into bankruptcy.
This is a weak argument. Why?
Band-Aid Argument
Reparations does not address the roots of systemic racism. Rather, it is just a Band-Aid. The commonly estimated 20K per qualified citizen won't be a game-changer. Even 40K won't be a game-changer. At what point does money make this a game-changer? Is this a road we want to go down? Is this a road we can go down?
The injustices that happened to African-Americans happened so long ago that it is absurd and unjust to give payment to the descendants of the exploited.
This argument doesn't work if you believe that mass incarceration is "The New Jim Crow."
Proxy Argument
The billions the government has spent on welfare programs are a proxy, that is substitute, for reparations. In other words, reparations have already been rendered by welfare programs.
Unfair Burden on the Innocent Argument
All Americans will have to pay taxes for reparations, but many, if not most, Americans don't even have white ancestors who engaged in the crimes of slavery and Jim Crow. Moreover, many Americans, people of color, will be paying taxes and not receiving any benefits even though they were never accountable for crimes of the past. Nor are they enjoying the "white privilege" of the present.
Victimization Argument
As Shelby Steele contends, the reparations movement encourages victimization, dependence, and infantilization in the black community, traits that contradict the heroism and warriorhood of great Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King.
Rebuttal of Victimization Argument
But the above could said to be a Straw Man Fallacy. Some might counter by observing that too many whites are playing "victims" to "reverse racism," too many whites show an unhealthy dependence on their white privilege, and too many whites are "infants" in their refusal to accept responsibility for America's original sin: a country whose wealth and identity were built on racism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
Class Argument
We should help people based on economic class, not race.Reparations blindly gives to race with no consideration of how rich the recipient is. Economic injustice is better remedied through class reparations.
Accountability Argument is Euphemism for Collective Guilt Argument
It is impossible to impose collective guilt on diverse Americans, many of whom had nothing to do with slavery, racial injustice or white privilege.
Counterfactual Argument (considered an offensive and racist logical fallacy even by some people who oppose reparations)
Some make this offensive argument against reparations: "African-Americans are owed nothing because they are better off living in America than they would be in Africa." This fallacy is discussed in the following essay: Cutting Through the Nonsense (refutation of logical fallacy against opponents of reparations from writer who is against reparations)
To underscore his point that the kleptocracy, the systematic stealing from the lives of African-Americans, compels us to consider reparations, Coates quotes Yale historian David W. Blight: “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together.”
Coates writes, “The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.”
This wealth was built on crimes against humanity, specifically crimes against black people. As we read:
When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:
The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.
In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”
One. How were black slaves equated with property?
Coates writes:
The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.
We see to this day, especially in the South but not limited there, that there are sympathizers of the Confederacy who erect the Confederate flag and talk about “state rights” and “Northern aggression” in the context of slavery. For them, their white identity rests on the “right” to have slavery. For them “state rights” really means the right to own slaves. To discuss this topic in front of these sympathizers to this day is to endanger one’s own life.
Two. How did terrorism afflict black Americans?
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave. . . . “
Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.
Such criminal and terrorist activities were condoned because of the "fake news" about black Americans, painting them in hateful terms that justified their exploitation.
Three. How has the plunder of black Americans continued after slavery?
We read:
The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.
Other examples of the plunder, in addition to predatory lending, are the profits made from mass incarceration, and the criminalizing of poverty, which leads to municipal violations.
Four. What are the two main reasons Coates champions reparations?
The first is lost money. As we read:
Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
**
The second reason is intangible: The much needed history lesson to correct the Myth of American Innocence. As we read:
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.
Five. Why does Coates bring up the reparations debate in Germany?
Coates writes:
We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.
In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.
“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ”
Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.”
Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
Coates continues:
The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”
Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes.
Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.
Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:
For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.
Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ”
Six. Can we put a price tag on these reparations?
Coates writes:
Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
Summary of Coates' Reasons for Supporting Reparations
One. Predatory, discriminatory housing laws plundered African-Americans’ money in the past and present for lining the coffers of white people.
Two. Black lives—including the very body—were plundered as part of America’s Kleptocracy in which white slave owners and business people became millionaires at a rate faster than in any part of the world.
Three. Reparations are not a radical, fringe idea but have historical precedent in mainstream thought from the Colonial period in America, to post WWII Germany, and to post WWII America (we gave reparations to Japanese Americans who suffered in the internment camps in 1988).
Four. Centuries of racial discrimination and Jim Crow laws have created “ecologically distinct” poverty communities that perpetuate poverty. These communities are deserts of opportunity, nutrition, jobs, education, health care, etc., and no one in their right mind would want to live in these places. They are hell on earth, places long abandoned and ignored by the rest of America.
Five. Four hundred years of racial discrimination have created a social stigma in which blacks are perceived as being the lowest on the totem pole. It is difficult to measure the psychological effects of this demonization and social stigma. It is difficult to measure the plunder of identity of a people taken here on ships and told for centuries that they are subhuman and mere pieces of property to be bartered and sold like cattle. In contrast, African blacks who immigrate to America navigate the American Dream in the absence of this incomprehensible psychological baggage.
Six. The powerhouse of the American economy that made it a dominant economy in the world before the Civil War and made whites in the South the richest people in the world was built on the blood of slavery.
Seven. The plunder of African-Americans continues centuries after slavery. They are demonized, left in the inner city opportunity deserts, and plucked off the streets into the Industrial Prison Complex, part of a privatized multi-billion-dollar business that employs over 2.5 million Americans and has created an immoral economy on the backs of people of color.
Eight. Reparations are superior to Affirmative Action whose aims remain vague and wishy-washy. In contrast, reparations have a clear objective: To recompense African-Americans for money lost and to correct the Myth of American Innocence.
Nine. Reparations are a corrective to America’s Great Lie: Its Myth of Innocence and Equality. Destroying this Myth is an essential part of a moral reckoning and spiritual awakening.
This Great Lie is so deep that millions of white Americans, especially in the South, still worship the lie of White Supremacy and believe they have the “right” to own slaves and that slave ownership is essential to their “white identity” and the “legacy of honoring their white ancestors.” These white people engage in all sorts of mythologies, erecting statues of white Confederate generals in front of government buildings, waving Confederate flags, and re-enacting the Civil War in which the Confederate Army is venerated of a noble mission. All of these romantic mythologies sweep the evils of slavery under the carpet and are therefore a lie and a moral abomination.
Student Who Opposes Reparations
While I concede that Coates’ analysis of America’s racist history is both true and morally compelling, his defense of the US government’s obligation to make financial reparations to qualified black Americans fails when we consider the slippery slope argument (where do we stop?), the Band-Aid argument (20k per citizen is just a Band-Aid), the distant history argument (slavery ended 160 years ago), the proxy argument (billions of dollar spent to subsidize poor communities have already been in effect proxies for reparations), and the unfair cost argument (millions of non-whites who had nothing to do with slavery will have to spend tax dollars on reparations and receive nothing).
Student Who Defends Reparations
While I concede that reparations are a messy, imperfect “pay-back” for the injustices of slavery and racism, we are morally compelled to heed Ta Nehisi-Coates’ call for reparations when we seriously look at the kleptocracy argument (racial injustice didn’t stop 160 years ago but continues today), the moral gesture argument (reparations is a moral announcement that society will not tolerate racism and this gesture has a huge effect on cultural mores), the education argument (reparations could be targeted to help black Americans’ education, which would redress the injustices of educational opportunities), and the legal argument (unpaid services demand payment; in a court of law this is never open to debate).
Argument for "Individual-Based Reparations"
Opposition to Coates
Opposition #1: We should help people based on economic class, not race.
This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.
Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?
Opposition #2: A trillion-dollar payment would result in $20,000 for every African-American. This would make a symbolic statement, but not be enough to make a significant difference in changing the power hierarchy. Not even a 3 trillion dollar payment would make a real difference.
We could concede that the above is true; however 20K could help someone go to college and make a small dent in helping that person. That is better than nothing.
But overall, the sad truth is that even a trillion-dollar payment is a "drop in the bucket" and that "The Man" will still be the "shot caller."
Opposition #3: "Distant harm from centuries ago does not affect African-Americans today."
We could counter argue that segregation still exists, environmental deserts still exist, the wealth gap still exists, and mass incarceration, a form of profit for the government and big business built on mostly people of color flourishes today.
Opposition #4: If we give reparations to African-Americans, where does all this reparations business end? What about migrant workers who are exploited in the fields and forced to work for a subhuman wage? What about the stolen wages from immigrants in the restaurant business? Is it fair to give reparations to one disadvantaged group but not another?
We should give reparations to ALL people. Coates' argument is not to give reparations to one group at the exclusion of another. To say so is to commit a Straw Man fallacy.
Opposition #5: As Shelby Steele contends, the reparations movement encourages victimization, dependence, and infantilization in the black community, traits that contradict the heroism and warriorhood of great Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King.
But the above could said to be a Straw Man Fallacy. Some might counter by observing that too many whites are playing "victims" to "reverse racism," too many whites show an unhealthy dependence on their white privilege, and too many whites are "infants" in their refusal to accept responsibility for America's original sin: a country whose wealth and identity were built on racism, slavery, and Jim Crow.
Opposition #6: Kevin Williamson observes that Coates' argument isn't really for reparations but for America to expose the truth about the depths of racism in American history. We read from Williamson's refutation essay:
Mr. Coates does not make the case so much for reparations as for a South Africa–style truth-and-reconciliation commission. “The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.” The purpose of a debate on a reparations bill of the sort being offered by John Conyers Jr. is not so much to construct a program of economic compensation as it is to have another verse of that Democratic hymn, an honest conversation about race. (As though we ever talked about anything else.) And this gets to the real defect in Mr. Coates’s approach. The purpose of public policy in this area can be one of two things. The first is a program focused on trying to improve in real terms the lives of those who are poorly off and those born into circumstances that are likely to lead to their being poorly off adults, proceeding with the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that such programs will disproportionately benefit black Americans, as they should. The second option is a symbolic political process designed to confer a degree of psychic satisfaction on relatively well-off men and women such as Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Opposition #7: Williamson charges that Coates' reparations arguments encourages tribalism, which is anti-liberal and anti-democratic:
Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress. Mr. Coates also, I think, miscalculates what the real-world effects of converting our liberal conception of justice into a system of racial appropriation might mean. There are still, after all, an awful lot of white people, and though many of them might be inclined to make amends under some sort of racial truce following the process Mr. Coates imagines, many of them might simply be inclined to prevail. The fact is that the situation of African Americans in the United States has improved precisely to the extent that whites have begun to forgo tribalism and to genuinely commit themselves to the principles of liberalism, the long march toward a more perfect Union. The alternative — a system of exclusive interests in which black and white operate effectively in opposition — is not only morally repugnant, but likely to undermine the genuine political and economic interests of African Americans.
Coates' Rebuttals to Williamson
Rebutal #1: Williams charges that reparations are a form of racial apportionment, but according to Coates reparations are not about racial apportionment; they are about injury apportionment. As Coates argues:
Williamson says he is opposed to "converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment." He then observes that, in fact, that tradition, itself, has always been deeply concerned with "racial apportionment." Thus within the second paragraph, Williamson is undermining his own thesis—if the Anglo-American tradition is what he concedes it to be, no "converting" is required. We reverse polarity for a time, and then we all live happily ever after.
Or probably not. That is because Williamson's entire framing is wrong. Reparations are not due because black people are black, but because black people have been injured. And the Anglo-American tradition has never been a system of "racial apportionment," but of racist apportionment. Like most writers and public intellectuals (liberal and conservative) Williamson's reply is rooted in the idea of "race" as constant—i.e. there is a "black race" that can be traced back to Africa, and a "white race" that can be traced back to Europe. There certainly is such a thing as African and European ancestry, and that ancestry is not entirely irrelevant to our world. But ancestry is tangential, and sometimes wholly unrelated, to racism, injury, and reparations.
We know this because there is no constant idea of "black" or "white" across time or space. We know this because Charlie Patton fathered the blues, and Alessandro de Medici ruled in Venice. Black in America is not black in Brazil, and black in modern America is not even black in 18th-century Louisiana. Nor are people we consider "white" today any sort of constant. Throughout American history it has been common to speak of an "Italian race," an "Irish race," a "Frankish race," a "Jewish race" even a "Southern race." One might take a hard look at Williamson's agreeable portrait, for instance, and note the problem of assigning anyone to a race. "Race," writes the imminent historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact."
In this country, at this moment, "African-Americans" are an ethnic group comprised of individuals of varying degrees of direct African ancestry. Nothing about this fact necessitated plunder or injury, and it is the injury—through red-lining, black codes, slaves codes, lynching, ghettoization, fraud, rape, and murder—with which reparations concerns itself. The point is not "racial apportionment," which is to say giving people things because they are black. It is injury apportionment, which is to say restoring things to people who have been plundered.
Rebuttal #2: Williamson and others point out that reparations money won't make a difference in the distribution of wealth. Coates' reply is this:
Racism, and its progeny white supremacy, is concerned with dividing human beings, on the basis of ancestry (which is very real) and slotting them into a hierarchy (which is an invention). "Race" is that hierarchy—and any study of the word across history bears out its relationship to assigning value and scale across humanity. In polite society we've moved past overtly hierarchal ideas about "race," but the problem of imprecise naming remains with us. Let us bypass that imprecision—the Anglo-American tradition which Williamson extolls has, as he concedes, sought to erect and uphold a racist hierarchy. Reparations seeks its total and complete destruction.
**
Here is perhaps a weakness in Coates' essay: If we agree with Coates that, "Reparations seek its [racial hierarchy's] total and complete destruction," we did not see such a plan in Coates' essay. He needs to explain how reparations, the kind he wants, will achieve this.
Rebuttal #3: To Williamson's point that not all African-Americans should get reparations because not all African-Americans have been victimized by racism, Coates rebuts:
Williamson believes that reparations must either boil down to a "symbolic political process" or a series of polices that helps America's poor and disproportionately aids African-Americans. How, Williamson asks, can one make a claim on behalf of Sasha and Malia Obama, in a world of poor whites? In much the same way that a factory which pumps toxins into a poor neighborhood is not indemnified because a plaintiff rises to become a millionaire. Taking Williamson's argument to its logical conclusion, a businessman brutalized by the police should never sue the city because, well, homelessness.
People who are injured sometimes achieve great things—this does not obviate the fact of their injury, nor their claim to recompense. Warren Moon achieved more than the vast majority of white quarterbacks. Had racism not forced him into the CFL for the first five crucial years of his career, he might have had more success than any quarterback to ever play the game. Satchel Paige enjoys an honor which the vast majority of white baseball players shall never glimpse—induction in the Hall of Fame. What might Paige achieved had he not been injured by white supremacy for the vast majority of his career? Mr. Clyde Ross is a homeowner, and considerably better off than many of his North Lawndale neighbors. To achieve this he worked three jobs and lost time that he should have been able to invest in his children. What might Mr. Ross have been had he not endured racist plunder from Clarksdale to Chicago?
Rebuttal #4: Williamson says that economic injustice should address poverty, not race, but Coates counters:
The problem of racism is not synonymous with the problem of the poverty line. Indeed, it is often in the fate of the most conventionally successful African-Americans that we see the full horror of a corrupt social contract. The injury of racism means many things, virtually all of them bad. It means making $100,000 a year but living in neighborhoods equivalent to white people who make $30,000 a year. It means belonging to a class whose men comprise some eight percent of the world's entire prison population. It means, if you do go to college, still enjoying lesser employment prospects than white college graduates. It means living in a family with roughly a 20th of the wealth of those who do not suffer your particular ailment. In short, it means quite a bit—and these effects do not merely haunt the poor. My heart bleeds for the white child injured by the departure of parents. But God forbid the injury of racism be added to the burden.
The pervasive effects of the injury should not surprise—the injuring and exploitation of black people regardless of economic class has been one of the dominant themes of American history. It is only the obviation, or ignorance, of history that allows us to escape this. The result must be an especially tortured specimen of reasoning:
Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not. Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism.
Williamson's "fact" can not be acknowledged because, even by Williamson's crude measures, it is artifice. There are—at most—1.5 million people who use heroin in this country. The ranks of the African-American poor are roughly eight times that.
Rebuttal #5: Reparations are not "anti-white," or intended to divide the country racially. As Coates explains:
More importantly, the claim of reparations does not hinge on every individual white person everywhere being wealthy. That is because reparations is not a claim against white Americans, anymore than reparations paid to interned Japanese-Americans was a claim against non-Japanese-Americans. The claim was brought before the multi-ethnic United States of America.
Rebuttal #6: It doesn't make sense to make current whites who didn't enforce slavery pay black Americans who weren't slaves. To this point, Coates counters:
There seems to be great confusion on this point. The governments of the United States of America—local, state and federal—are deeply implicated in enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, New Deal racism, terrorism, ghettoization, housing segregation. The fact that one's ancestors were not slave-traders or that one arrived here in 1980 is irrelevant. I did not live in New York when the city railroaded the Central Park Five. But my tax dollars will pay for the settlement. That is because a state is more than the natural lives, or occupancy, of its citizens. People who object to reparations for African-Americans because they, individually, did nothing should also object to reparations to Japanese-Americans, but they should not stop there. They should object to the Fourth of July, since they, individually, did nothing to aid the American Revolution. They should object to the payment of pensions for the Spanish-American War, a war fought before they were alive. Indeed they should object to government and society itself, because its existence depends on outliving its individual citizens.
Rebuttal #7: Reparations are useless since black Americans are doomed to be economically behind whites, even in a world without racism. Coates' replies:
Williamson then posits that black people would still be poor because they'd be far behind the native white population. Williamson never considers that the two groups might intermarry—because he believes in "race," which is to say creationism. For that same reason he ignores the fact there was no "New World" with "native whites" to come to without the labor of African-Americans. Europeans did not purchase enslaved Africans because they disliked the cut of their jib. They did it because they had taken a great deal of land and needed bonded labor to extract resources from it. Africans—aliens to society, existing beyond the protections of the crown—fit the bill.
"The people to whom reparations were owed," Williamson concludes. "Are long dead." Only because we need them to be. Mr. Clyde Ross is very much alive—as are many of the victims of redlining. And it is not hard to identify them. We know where redlining took place and where it didn't. We have the maps. We know who lived there and who didn't.
This was American policy. We have never accounted for it, and it is unlikely that we ever will. That is not because of any African-American's life-span but because of a powerful desire to run out the clock. Reparations claims were made within the natural lifetimes of emancipated African-Americans. They were unsuccessful. They were not unsuccessful because they lacked merit. They were unsuccessful because their country lacked the courage to dispense with creationism.
So it goes.
Sample Thesis Statements with Concession Clauses
Student Who Opposes Reparations
While I concede that Coates’ analysis of America’s racist history is both true and morally compelling, his defense of the US government’s obligation to make financial reparations to qualified black Americans fails when we consider the slippery slope argument (where do we stop?), the Band-Aid argument (20k per citizen is just a Band-Aid), the distant history argument (slavery ended 160 years ago), the proxy argument (billions of dollar spent to subsidize poor communities have already been in effect proxies for reparations), and the unfair cost argument (millions of non-whites who had nothing to do with slavery will have to spend tax dollars on reparations and receive nothing).
Student Who Defends Reparations
While I concede that reparations are a messy, imperfect “pay-back” for the injustices of slavery and racism, we are morally compelled to heed Ta Nehisi-Coates’ call for reparations when we seriously look at the kleptocracy argument (racial injustice didn’t stop 160 years ago but continues today), the moral gesture argument (reparations is a moral announcement that society will not tolerate racism and this gesture has a huge effect on cultural mores), the education argument (reparations could be targeted to help black Americans’ education, which would redress the injustices of educational opportunities), and the legal argument (unpaid services demand payment; in a court of law this is never open to debate).
One. In the context of Caleb Crain's "The Case Against Democracy" and Ilya Somin's "Democracy vs. Epistocracy" support, defend, or complicate the argument that an uninformed public lacking adequate critical thinking skills cannot support a democracy as we tend to idealize democracies but rather, at best, maintains a democracy so flawed many would argue that it cannot be called a democracy at all, but rather some grotesque sub-version of a democracy.
Four. In the context of Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, "The Case for Reparations," defend, refute, or complicate that America is morally obligated to exact qualified African-Americans reparations for America's crime of an ongoing kleptocracy, which includes slavery, Jim Crow, and their ongoing legacy today.
Five. Develop an analytical thesis that shows how Jordan Peeles' movie Get Out builds on Ta-Nehisi Coates' notion of American kleptocracy.
Six. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that recycling is a liberal white middle class religion that speaks more to Kool-Aid-drinking tribalism than it does improving the Earth. Consult John Tierney's "The Reign of Recycling," Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism is a Religion," and Stephen Asma's "Green Guilt."
Seven. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that radical changes in the job market over the next 20 years due to robots and high-tech will compel country's to provide their citizens with a Universal Basic Income. Consult the following:
One. A dependent society is a dysfunctional society.
Two. A lack of self-reliance diseases the soul and corrupts society.
Three. Acute dependence leads to totalitarianism and dehumanization. See The Giver.
Four. Acute dependence breaks down the family unit. Parents aren't responsible for their children; the government is.
Five. Being "off the grid" makes one chronically depressed, non-productive, and unemployable.
Eight. Develop a thesis that in the context of the documentary Merchants of Doubt addresses the question: Should we have faith that "reason and faith can defeat propaganda and falsehoods." Or is such a message optimistic bias rooted in delusion?
Nine: Develop an analytical thesis that in the context of Merchants of Doubt explains the fallacies behind spin and how these fallacies can be constructed to effectively cause doubt and confusion over the legitimate claims of science.
While Twitter is a legitimate way to receive news from our favorite journalists and while I support maintaining a Twitter account with the caveat that we’re not being bombarded by trolls, I would agree with the argument that for those Twitter users who are in a collision course with the troll community, it would be better to delete their Twitter account for several reasons.
Some Reasons to Delete One's Twitter Account
For the undisciplined, Twitter can be, as Lindy West has noted, a bottomless “time suck” in which people start arguing endlessly back and forth just for the sport of arguing. This time suck becomes unpaid work.
Going on Twitter for “stress relief,” as Liny West observes, can quickly become a reversal and afflict the user with even more stress than before.
Arguing with a troll becomes a waste of time and exercise in futility. In fact, trolls want to argue. Arguing back with them is their nourishment. We are “feeding” them, as Lindy West points out.
We can’t even report threats from trolls, Lindy West chronicles, without being called “censors” by the Twitter community.
Twitter cannot stop trolls who are creating pollution on the site. Lindy West has concluded that in a way Twitter is enabling trolls, so it’s best to bail from this toxic landscape altogether.
Twitter makes you more vulnerable to people who can be hateful toward your political views. In contrast, you can manage your Facebook page to create a cozy bubble in which you converse with like-minded souls.
Joel Stein makes excellent point that Twitter, and other social media, produce the online disinhibition effect: Without face-to-face interaction and hiding behind anonymity, people who are normally cowards feel emboldened to unleash their inner demons of hate, rage, and obnoxious bullying so that online discourse becomes a toxic environment stripped of ethical mores and civil decorum.
Trolls and others can engage in “doxxing,” the act of stealing people’s personal data and publishing it.
Joel Stein observes that trolls are not just losers on the fringe; they are mainstream people who, frustrated, and shackled by Internet addiction, including the need for attention, develop into trolls.
Reminder: You need at least one counterargument-rebuttal paragraph.
Should We Delete Our Facebook and Other Social Media Accounts?
Facebook and all social media are enemies to our intelligence, dignity, and well-being evidenced by ___________________, ______________________, _______________________, _________________, and ___________________________.
Frank Bruni points out that Facebook is a place where we lose our intellect and critical thinking. In their place, we indulge in cognitive bias: reinforcing our foregone conclusions by conversing with other like-minded people.
Reinforcing our opinions with others in our Echo Chamber, we use Facebook, Bruni observes, as what McMahon calls a "Mutual Sycophant Society," in which we kiss each other's butts and feel empowered by our bold political beliefs.
Matthew Warner points out that Facebook makes us brain-dead because it's a default setting for killing snippets of time rather than being comfortable with being alone with ourselves and focusing on our deepest thoughts.
Kim Lachance Shandow criticizes parents for posting photos of their children and violating their children's privacy.
Shandow observes the stupidity of the FOMO effect, the fear of missing out as we see Facebook friends curate their staged happy lives, what is in fact contrived BS.
We tell our children to avoid strangers, Shandow points out, but Facebook's "friend suggestions" encourages us to accept strangers into our Facebook orbit. Even if these strangers are safe, they represent potential lost time as we may have to comment and deal with messages from these strangers.
Bosses and potential employers can snoop on your Facebook page, Shandow warns, to judge your character and credibility.
Oversharing is embarrassing. Shandow wants us to spare our dignity and get off Facebook before we're seduced by the false need to share.
Reminder: You need at least one counterargument-rebuttal paragraph.
The Addictive Effects of Facebook and Social Media
“Never Get High on Your Own Supply”
Adam Alter in his book Irresistible makes the point that even as Steve Jobs wallowed in glory of making the greatest Internet device ever, the iPad, he refused to use one or let his children use one.
Likewise, other tech avatars refuse to let their children use iPads. They sent their kids to expensive private anti-technology Waldorf schools.
The point is that drug dealers stay strong and rich by not getting high on their own supply.
Alter asks a great question: Why are all the world’s greatest public technocrats also in private the world’s greatest technophobes?
Clearly, they know the dirt. They know the hell that is at the end of the iPad journey. They’ve seen the darkness, and they don’t want to go there. They don’t want their kids to go there.
But they want you and me to go there. They want our money. Their moral integrity is seriously lacking.
Alter is making the point that we might reconsider embracing technology made by people who have no moral integrity and who secondly wouldn’t privately use the gadgets they make so seductive to the rest of us.
Adler asks: Could you imagine the outcry if religious leaders didn’t let their children practice the religion they preach to you?
This book introduction is piece of rhetorical brilliance as it drives home the point that the technology that is being foisted upon us is by its very nature addictive. It’s not built to help us. It’s built to manipulate us. The technology makes money for its creators after all.
Video game designers avoid World of Warcraft.
An Instagram engineer admits Instagram is designed to send its users down a bottomless pit of addiction.
Smartwatches, Facebook and Netflix, like Instagram, are designed to maximize addiction and obsession.
The smartphone is an opium-drip gadget you carry around with you 24/7.
Normal people succumb to addiction.
Because addiction is about immersion into environment and circumstance.
Steve Jobs and other successful technocrats know the secrets of addiction, and the addiction model is what fuels their designs.
Making irresistible tools to ensnare us is the formula for success in the crowded tech space.
Therefore, technocrats are in the addiction business.
“Design ethicist” Tristan Harris says even normal people with strong levels of willpower will succumb to addiction when “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”
New York Times journalist Nick Bolton, who doesn’t allow himself or his children to use an iPad, observes that the environment and circumstances for addiction in the digital age have no precedent in human history.
We can be snared by many digital hooks:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Porn
Email
Online shopping
The list goes one until we’ve lost the very core of our being.
In the early 2000s, tech was slow and “clunky,” but now it’s fast. It has to be fast if it’s to have sufficient addictive powers.
Tech engineers do thousands of experiments to make the visual experience appealing and addictive. They’ve created a sort of digital Las Vegas to seduce us.
Newer and newer versions of these digital Las Vegas seductive machines keep coming out until they’re “weaponized.”
“In 2004, Facebook was fun. In 2016, it’s addictive.”
Behavioral psychologists say everyone has an addiction, even successful, educated people, and they learn to compartmentalize, which means be functional addicts, like the teacher who has $80,000 debt from online shopping.
Our substance addictions and behavioral addictions are similar.
Both stimulate the same area of the brain. But there’s a big difference. If you’re a speed or alcohol addict, you can do a lot to change your environment to avoid speed and alcohol.
But technology is different. It’s part of who we are, where we work, and how we connect with others. It is ubiquitous, meaning it is everywhere.
We can create boundaries and minimize digital addiction if we understand how behavioral addiction works.
6 Ingredients technology uses to create behavioral addictions:
One, it creates compelling goals just beyond our reach. We can never have enough likes or followers, for example.
Two, it gives us irresistible and unpredictable feedback.
Three, it creates a sense of incremental progress and improvement.
Four, it creates tasks that slowly become more difficult over time.
Five, it creates unresolved tensions that demand resolution.
Six, it provides a sense (delusion?) of strong social connection.
Smartphone screen time a day:
About 3 hours. We can infer that people who don’t use Moment are on a lot more. Not knowing how much we use something, and not wanting to know, contributes to behavioral addiction.
In the same way, food obsessives are asked to keep a food journal in which they write down everything they eat. This cuts down on eating.
Most smartphone users are addicts. They spend over a quarter of their life on the smartphone. And they don’t even know it.
Addiction is not passion:
Addiction is deep attachment to an experience that is harmful and difficult to do without.
Addictions arise when a person can’t resist a behavior (compulsion), which, despite addressing a deep psychological need in the short-term, produces significant harm in the long-term.
Addictions bring promise of immediate award, or positive reinforcement.
Original use of the word addiction was in ancient Rome, and it meant a strong bond to something like slavery. So the first sense of the word addiction was to be enslaved to something.
Passion is different than addiction.
Passion is a strong drive for an activity that is important and valued as bringing meaning to one’s life. Because this passion is valued, it is worth the time and energy devoted to pursuing it.
Whereas we feel free to choose our passion, we are slaves to addiction, which is a form of compulsion.
Internet Addiction Test (IAT)
The Internet Addiction Test (IAT) is the first Validated measure of Internet Addiction described in theIAT Manual to measure Internet use in terms of mild, moderate, to several levels of addiction.
For more information on using the IAT and building an Internet Addiction treatment program in your practice, visit RestoreRecovery.netfor our comprehensive workbook and training programs.
Based upon the following five-point likert scale, select the response that best represents the frequency of the behavior described in the following 20-item questionnaire.
0 = Not Applicable 1 = Rarely 2 = Occasionally 3 = Frequently 4 = Often 5 = Always
___How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended?
___How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online?
___How often do you prefer the excitement of the Internet to intimacy with your partner?
___How often do you form new relationships with fellow online users?
___How often do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend online?
___How often do your grades or school work suffer because of the amount of time you spend online?
___How often do you check your e-mail before something else that you need to do?
___How often does your job performance or productivity suffer because of the Internet?
___How often do you become defensive or secretive when anyone asks you what you do online?
___How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the Internet?
___How often do you find yourself anticipating when you will go online again?
___How often do you fear that life without the Internet would be boring, empty, and joyless?
___How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are online?
___How often do you lose sleep due to late-night log-ins?
___How often do you feel preoccupied with the Internet when off-line, or fantasize about being online?
___How often do you find yourself saying “just a few more minutes” when online?
___How often do you try to cut down the amount of time you spend online and fail?
___How often do you try to hide how long you’ve been online?
___How often do you choose to spend more time online over going out with others?
___How often do you feel depressed, moody, or nervous when you are off-line, which goes away once you are back online?
After all the questions have been answered, add the numbers for each response to obtain a final score. The higher the score, the greater the level of addiction and creation of problems resultant from such Internet usage. The severity impairment index is as follows:
NONE 0 – 30 points
MILD 31- 49 points: You are an average online user. You may surf the Web a bit too long at times, but you have control over your usage.
MODERATE 50 -79 points: You are experiencing occasional or frequent problems because of the Internet. You should consider their full impact on your life.
SEVERE 80 – 100 points: Your Internet usage is causing significant problems in your life. You should evaluate the impact of the Internet on your life and address the problems directly caused by your Internet usage.
Personal Score
I took the test and scored a 57, which is a low moderate addiction.
University Students
We see that 48% of university students suffer Internet addiction.
Worldwide, Internet addiction is about 40%.
Game-changing study radically alters our view of addiction:
In 1954, Olds and Milner discovered that stimulating the pleasure centers of rats’ brains made them addicts.
Before this experiment, it was believed that certain people had a predisposition to addiction.
But juxtaposing the Olds and Milner Study with Vietnam Vets (20% developed heroin addiction), we saw that addiction was based on environment and circumstance.
You could have a healthy “non-addict” disposition, but still be a victim of addiction if your brain’s pleasure centers were stimulated effectively.
