Week 2: Social and Political Philosophy and Frederick
[edit] Teaching Frederick
The central question that Frederick addresses is whether everyone who belongs to a community needs to make an equal contribution to it. But prior to answering that question, another one should be addressed: What makes a group of people into a community? Any time you have more than one person together, they are a group. So, for example, all the people shopping in a grocery store at the same time are a group of people. But not all groups of people are communities, for communities are a very special type of group. The question we want to address is what type. Here, it is useful to also distinguish a community from an organization. These are issues in social ontology, a branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of social groups.
For a group of people to become a community, they need to be united for some purpose, but that is not enough. The children you are teaching are members of at least one community, that of the MLK School. The goal of that community is to educate the young people who attend it, so that they can achieve a level of academic excellence, while also becoming whole, thriving human beings. (This about what we have said about Aristotle's theory of the virtues and you may see the school as educating its charges in a set of intellectual and practical virtues, to use his terms.) But for an organization to become a community, the individuals that make it up need to have an affective attachment to it and a cognitive awareness of themselves as members of it. And this attitude must also be generalized to the other members of the community: Each sees the other members of a community as equally aware of themselves as part of the same community they take themselves to be part of.
We don't need to go into all the details of the distinction between an organization and a community, for we want to raise a specific question about a community: Must every member of a community make an equal contribution to its ongoing existence? This seems to be a reasonable principle of social organization, but the word “equal” conceals a number of issues. Most centrally, there is the question of whether “equal” means “the same.” Except in very basic communities, it is pretty clear that not everyone can contribution the exact same thing to the community. Take the school. It's pretty clear that the administrators, the teachers, and the students all make contributions to the community that is the school, but their contributions vary. Mr. Katz sets up the general structure of the community. That's his contribution to it. The students have to follow the rules of the school as well as study hard. When they do so, they are making their contribution to it.
Just as different members make different contributions to a community, they get different things out of their membership in it. Mr. Katz earns a salary that he can use to keep his family housed and fed. Students do not get paid, but they receive educations, an important asset. So just a people in different roles in the community give differently to it, they also benefit differently from being in it.
Karl Marx, who was a philosopher as well as an economist, developed a pithy saying about how he thought people should contribute to and benefit from a community: From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs. This is his gloss on what “equality” means in our earlier claim that each should contribute equally to the community. There would not be quantitative equality in his society, but an equality based on differential needs and abilities. Incidentally, the word “communism” comes from the same root as that of “community,” and indicates Marx's optimistic view that people living in the sort of society he envisioned would see themselves as members of not just a society, but a community.
But even if we agree that people don't have to contribute equally but only proportional to their ability to do so, we haven't yet specified what sorts of things count as contributions to the community. How should we determine the sorts of activities that someone can undertake for the benefit of the community? Certainly, we would all agree that raising food should count as such a contribution. (Even here, though, we can question whether raising truffles should count, though it's clear that raising corn should. Vegetarians might object to beef herding counting. Problems abound.) But what about writing plays or playing professional basketball? Some people would probably say they count but others might not.
Once again, Marx had a proposal: That only those activities that are necessary to the reproduction of the society should count as socially necessary labor. This might seem to help, since growing corn is clearly necessary for people in the society to maintain themselves, while watching pro-basketball is not. But should we limit society to the bare minimum?
Marx suggested that by limiting our labor or work to a minimum, we would have plenty of time left over for other activities, the realm of play. So our investigation now leads us into the distinction between work and play, another distinction it's hard to specify clearly. Although it is tempting to think that work differs from play in that the former is onerous and the latter pleasurable, this won't do, since many work activities also give us pleasure.
The MLK Session
This book involves some difficult metaphors for poetry: gathering words and colors. When you get to this part of the book, you should ask them what they think it means. They may not know. That's o.k. Tell them that you think they'll figure it out by the end of the book. At the end, return to this by asking whether they now know what it means. You can actually reread Frederick's poem to get them to see how he gathers words and colors.
When you teach the book, these are the areas you should delve into:
1. The first topic is what makes a group into a community. You could start by pointing out that the mice formed a community. You could then ask them if they are part of a community. Presumably, they will answer that MLK is a community. You then can ask them what makes it into a community.
2. The second topic concerns the contributions people make to a community. Here, I'd continue talking about MLK, asking whether everyone contributes to the community: Do they? Do the teachers? Does Mr. Katz? The idea is to get them to think about the different contributions that people make to a community. You then should return to the book and ask them how the mice make contributions to the community. The real issue is whether Frederick makes a contribution to the community. Usually, there is some disagreement about this, with some thinking he does and others thinking he doesn't really. You need to get them to explain their reasons for holding the positions they do.
3. Third, we want to discuss the difference between work and play. This can grow out of the previous discussion by asking those who don't think that Frederick is really contributing to the community to explain why. Some will think he's not really working. You can then simply ask them what makes something work.
4. The final topic is poetry and, more generally, art. You want them to think about what a world without art would be like. You need to start with Frederick and his poems, but probably would do well to switch to music and television as art forms they are more familiar with and wouldn't want to give up. This can be tied into the issue of whether artists are contributing to the commmunity.
