(check 'classes' link, above, for updates on times and dates)
The Moral Commons
Ethics of the Modern World
Free Speech
What is Moral?
Sponsored by The Moral Commons.
Our goal is to reclaim public spaces through spiritual direct action.
"There can be no neutrality. Either we are ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil. Let the blasphemy of our time not become an eternal scandal. Let future generations not loathe us for having failed to preserve what prophets and saints, martyrs and scholars have created in thousands of years." Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 212.
What is the moral commons, and what do we need to protect and strengthen it? (This is related to our class: Industrial democracy: The commons.)
What causes harm?
What 'hurts' someone -- bodily, economically, politically,
and spiritually? How are you injured, and how do you cause injury? What
is degradation and profanity? What is manipulation, expoitation, and
superficiality? (This is also an introduction to the class: Free speech:
Public morality)
What is evil?
Is there evil in human nature? What is the 'banality of evil'? What
is the role of non-violence in the face of great evil? (These issues
explored in detail in our course on the Holocaust).
Manipulation and integrity. Superficiality and depth
Degradation and the sacred
What is wrong with vulgarity? How can we maintain our integrity
in the face of envy, greed and pride?
Complicity
What are we responsible for? Our complicity in economics (exploitation),
politics (marginalization), and culture (degradation). Is enjoyment
complicity? How can we take responsibility?
Why do we choose to harm?
The source of exploitation, and therefore inequality and injustice.
Key reading: Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You.
The
Moral Condition of the Modern World
“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Feodor
Dostoyevsky
Obscenity, cultural relativism, liberalism and political correctness,
and moral trends.
Essays by people like C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Heschel, Robert
Bork, Tammy Bruce, Carl Jung, Lewis Mumford, Kunstler, Allan Bloom,
Hannah Arendt, Neil Postman, Jacob Needleman, and more.
“Through a series of remarkable judicial interpretations,
we have acquired a new First Amendment. The past forty years have witnessed
nothing short of a revolution.” Democracy & the Problem of
Free Speech, Sunstein, 16
This is an essential class, if we want to understand our right to make
claims about the public moral climate. We must understand the value
and the limitations of First Amendment law. The original and primary
purpose of the First Amendment was to protect the free expression of
ideas, in particular political ideas. The current emphasis (and legal
protection) is on free expression not of ideas but of behavior. Current
law defends and promotes the primacy of economic markets, and sees freedom
of expression as a right of consumers rather than citizens.
Contact us if you have some background in this field, and are interested in helping to develop and offer the course (whether you sympathize with our views or hold others).
What
is Moral? Fundamental Questions
"I affirm freedom and reject domination, I affirm humaneness
and reject barbarism, I affirm peace and reject violence. These pairs
of opposites are the great poles between which the drama of universal
history is enacted." Rustow, Freedom and Domination
Exploring and understanding fundamental ethical questions through reading
a variety of important essays.
Subjects: What do you believe? What is your moral attitude? What
is hedonism and self-interest? What should we expect of society? Is
suffering essential in creating moral depth? What kind of help is needed
in becoming moral?
Essays: Benjamin Franklin, Mohandas Gandhi, St. Francis, Henry
David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leo Tolstoy, Hannah Arendt, Johann
Christoph Arnold, Dalai Lama, Abraham Heschel, and others.
future possible classes
Vegetarianism
A three week course examining vegetarian and vegan choices from the
perspective of health, environment, and ethics. During this class all
students will stop eating meat and/or dairy products.
Historical Eras
"Man's understanding of what is reasonable is subject
to change....Reverence, love, prayer, faith, go beyond the acts of shallow
reasoning." Heschel, God in Search of Man, 19
Pre-Columbian Indigenous American societies, Sumer, Ancient Greece,
Ancient Israel, Ancient Rome, Christian Monasticism, Medieval Europe,
The Enlightenment, 18th century America, The 19th century, Early 20th
century America
Religions
Indigenous, Hinduism, Tao, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sufism,
and New Age.
Philosophers
The subject matter of this class is what is normally studied in university
ethics departments: a dry, cold, abstract analysis which is the only
traditional offering for innocent students trying to figure our how
to act or what to do. Is it possible to bring depth to the study of
these classic texts? It is, but it will probably be one of the last
of our ethics courses to find existence (in academic-speak, ‘ontology.’)
Writers: Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume,
Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, etc.
