The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [88]
The need for diversity is a reason to continue affirmative action programs in government work, university admissions, and corporate hiring, even if invidious discrimination should someday cease to be a problem. In fact, the need for diversity would counsel expanding affirmative action for other classes of individuals who bring different perspectives to the table. A commitment to cultural and political diversity would also suggest that we should end the practice of gerrymandering congressional districts to make them safe Democratic or Republican strongholds. It might be better for all of us if we were forced to come out of our political enclaves every election year, to work with, fight with, and debate with those we oppose.
The need to encourage the habit of considering other perspectives would also suggest the importance of cross-cultural exposure. Educational exchange programs should be expanded, international and interstate cultural and artistic collaborations should be subsidized, and national service programs such as VISTA and the Peace Corps should be beefed up. English-only initiatives should be abandoned, along with the anti-immigrant xenophobia that motivates them.
Building the capacity for dissent in educational settings is also key. This is asking much of our educators, I admit, but teachers should insist less on socialization toward the broad middle and more on tolerance of difference and nurturing of the personal character necessary for dissent. This may mean less obsessing over saying the Pledge of Allegiance every day, and more protection of those who dress, think, or self-identify differently from the majority.
The third and final big idea I want to propose is that we should expand opportunities to make public commitments. People are sometimes able to protect themselves from the influences of situation through public or semi-public commitments. Two salient examples are the right to free speech and the institution of marriage. The constitutional right to free speech operates as a legal commitment to protect politically unpopular viewpoints even (or especially) in circumstances when a majority of the polity would not protect them. It’s a commitment, entered into coolly and in a moment of detached reflection, that protects the polity from acting rashly in the heat of the moment. Marriage is also a commitment, solemnized before friends and family, that operates to protect individuals from the biological, economic, and cultural prods toward infidelity and shirking.
Such commitments, made enforceable in various ways, have a long tradition. The ancient Greek orator Demosthenes once shaved half his head to make sure he did not appear in public until it grew back. He spent the next three months working on his rhetoric.16 Scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah has written about how the millennium-old practice of footbinding in China vanished in a generation in part because of public pledges made by families not to allow their daughters to be bound and not to allow their sons to marry daughters who were.17 A more current example is the website StickK.com, created by three Yale academics. StickK allows people to “put a contract out on yourself!” by signing up to meet some kind of goal—quitting smoking, or writing a dissertation—and establishing penalties for failure. The penalties can be a donation to what the site calls an “anti-charity”—groups whose mission you oppose. These anti-charities include both the Clinton and Bush Presidential Libraries, the National