Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [95]
A final comment can be made about Dewey’s concept of freedom. Too often freedom is simply treated as the absence of restraints. But as Plato well knew, we may be prisoners of ignorance and bad desires. Dewey would agree. The key to freedom is not simply doing what we want but being able to do what is good. A baby left alone at birth is not thereby “free”—it dies. It must be cared for and raised to become a full human being. Thus acquiring habits is a key to freedom: we could not speak English without having learned it; we could not play a guitar unless we had learned how. It is because we were taught a language in our past that we can go on and learn others. It is by learning how to play a guitar that I might go on and learn another instrument. Thus the education of desire is a key aspect of freedom; desires need wise habits, and wise habits help us to evaluate past desires. Once again, education becomes a central topic for Dewey: a culture that believes in freedom needs to believe in education, the sort of education that helps cultivate growing, reflective, thoughtful, inquiring selves.
“Pragmatist ethics,” understood in its Deweyan rather than popular sense, offers an important alternative to most of contemporary moral theory. Dewey’s ideas suffered an eclipse for nearly half a century until a growing number of scholars from a variety of fields began to rediscover them. In time, ignorant misconceptions may be replaced by sounder readings, and once again ethics may actually speak to what Dewey termed “the problems of men” and not the problems of professional puzzle solvers. With his emphasis on education, Dewey would have found Dr. Seuss’s wonderful books as laying the foundations for the development of thoughtful, concerned moral characters.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Grinch’s Change of Heart: Whodunit?
Anthony Cunningham
In How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, we find a creature who experiences a remarkable metanoia, a profound change of heart. The same creature who would steal Christmas and delight in the stealthy scheme at the great expense of the Whos eventually returns all the trappings of Christmas and even carves the “roast beast” with the joyful denizens of Who-ville. By the end of the story, the Grinch is certainly a new and better Grinch. We have similar examples of such transformations for the better in other well-known stories. Like the Grinch, Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge experiences a Christmas conversion, turning from his miserly, misanthropic ways toward love, generosity, and good cheer. In much the same way, on his trip to Damascus to persecute Christians, the biblical Saul literally sees the light and becomes a new man.
Such dramatic changes are not confined to literature and biblical stories. Real-life cases are plentiful enough. George Wallace, the Alabama governor who defiantly stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama in 1963 to prevent Vivian Malone and James Hood from enrolling later renounced his staunch segregationist views and apologized to black civil rights leaders for his ways. Oskar Schindler, the crafty businessman who sought wealth and power and who was quite willing to exploit the lucrative opportunities that the war and the Nazi oppression of Jews offered in this vein, eventually spent his great fortune saving Jews from annihilation. Such stories are hardly the mundane stuff of everyday life, but neither are they exotic. They are simply famous examples on public stages. We certainly recognize them when we see them. The undeniable fact is that sometimes people, even