May the Ethical Force Be With You

My friend Priscilla is in Seattle with her family this summer. She just wrote me an email about the really remarkable coaching, in debate and in soccer, that her sons have had over the years. Each time, the coach has been an ethical person who taught principles and practices and skills . . . not the manaical "win or I'll kill you" brute force mentality of so many coaches. She posed an interesting comment in her email: "I decided the power I want is the power to
compel people to behave ethically. Pretty dangerous fantasy, I know."

Oh, what a fantasy. And one that set me spinning. What if someone were to create a MMPOG where the most powerful people could compel others to behave ethically. What if instead of pain, torture, incarceration, or some other form of violence, the miscreant was forced to not only do good but to understand do-good thinking and practice it? If everything in the fantasy society were realigned so that the Feared Force was compelled ethical behavior, wouldn't most people start setting up ethics rather than might as the fantasy that all learning, education, prescription and proscription, dangers and pleasures were focused on? What would rebellion look like in such a society? Since rebellion is often the flip side of the normative, maybe the rebels would be radically ethical people . . . Robin Hood Writ Large. Another intriguing issue is whether kids would enjoy playing this game or if it would be so utterly unrealistic, relative to the world they live in and the other fantasy games they play, that they would simply ignore it. Is there a game like this out there already? I certainly know of lots of learning games designed to teach situational ethics, but power is the real fantasy here, that power to compel ethical behavior. I'm actually finding myself sliding into my project for the year, a consideration of how infants learn their worlds. Violence, fear of violence, "yes" and "no" based on danger, protection, but also social shame, social value, ethical value, and other cultural norms (many of which their parents aren't even aware of) are the kinds of things that serve as the structuring "concepts" by which kids learn "the world." Again, if we lived in Priscilla's world, the structuring principle would be ethics and other-directedness. Two year olds wouldn't rebel from all the infant constraints by shouting "Me!" and "No!" but "We!" and "Let's Consider that." LOL.

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Here's my Flickr Creative Commons-licensed appropriate (associational, sorta) photograph of the day, on the theme of social learning and normativity. This comes courtesy of ZaptheDingbat, with attribution and thanks for making his beautiful work available with a CC license.

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