After reading the Judith Butler article and the material below please respond to any one of these statements as a working American. This might mean looking at the contemporary issues as they effect your role as an employee tasked with enforcing mask rules at your place of work, or as a worker ordered to wear (or not wear) face covering; or as a business owner or government worker tasked with drawing up protocols that will be enforced by others; or as a citizen marching in protests coming up against hundreds of others masked or unmasked; or as an onlooker seeing conflict or confrontation over the politics of mask-wearing, etc. (Feel free to expand the categories of contexts for this discussion.)

In your post be sure to explain, what you believe Butler is trying to express in the quote you chose; how it relates to the issue of ethics and vulnerability; how these ideas of ethical obligations and vulnerability relate to the experience as a working American.

1. Is what is happening so far from me that I can bear no responsibility for it? Is what is happening so close to me that I cannot bear having to take responsibility for it? (p. 135)

2. Sometimes, not always, the images that are imposed upon us operate as an ethical solicitation... I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations that do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered. (p. 135)

3. Is there a Levinasian* undercurrent in this moment of having to listen to the voice of someone we never chose to hear or to see an image that we never elected to see? (p. 136)

*Emmanual Levinas was a French-Lithuanian philosopher who, during his years as a prisoner of war, developed an ethics based on the face of the Otherwith its "infinite moral demands." See article for more details.

4. [I]f I am only bound to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary...If I am only bound to those who suffer at a distance, but never those who are close to me, then I evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling and even feel myself to be ethical. (p. 138)

5. The set of ethical values by which one population is bound to another in no way depends on those two populations bearing similar marks of national, cultural, religious, racial belonging. (pp. 139-140)

6. [F]rom unchosen cohabitation, Arendt* derives notions of universality and equality that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable. (p. 145)

*Hannah Arendt, a famous Jewish-American philosopher best known for her work in post-Holocaust ethics. See article for more details.

7. If we try to understand in concrete terms what it means to commit ourselves to preserving the life of the other, we are invariably confronted with the bodily conditions of life and so, a commitment not only to the other's corporeal persistence but to all those environmental conditions that make life livable. (p. 147)

8. We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together. We live together because we have no choice, and though we sometimes rail against that unchosen condition, we remain obligated to struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, an affirmation that is not quite a choice, a struggle that makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives. (p. 150)

Reading material:

All quotes taken from this week's article, "Precarious life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation" by Judith Butler

Review of topic from the instructor's perspective:

The new culture wars are being fought . . . in Costco?

Yes, and at Target and Walmart and the local grocery store and gas station, and sometime soon, wherever it is that you work. The fifty-cent piece of 3-ply tissue called the disposable face mask has become the epicenter of American disagreement about the nature of civic duty vs. civil right. The "mask wars" may be the petty flashpoints in this pandemic, but the "Black Lives Matter" movement is the unexpected meteor, cutting through the personal inconveniences of mask-wearing like a streak of lightning that illuminates the genuine horrors and causes uprisings across the globe. I will argue that in some very important ways the underlying and often invisible cause beneath both these movements has to do with vulnerability and the human reaction against it.

To ground our discussion this week we will be using an article by the major feminist philosopher, Judith Butler, who posed two critical questions about ethical responses when she asked if "any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place."

Her second query, which is so pertinent right now is "what it means for our ethical obligations when we are up against another person or group, find ourselves invariably joined to those we never chose, and must respond to solicitations in languages we may not understand or even wish to understand...what we might call "up againstness."

Butler's article is, in many ways, a stance against the Enlightenment assumption about social ethics which found its core in the idea of "the social contract" - which is still the basis for Libertarian views about personal freedom. That foundational belief is that we are all born free and accept only certain limits on those personal freedoms in exchange for protection against major assaults. Butler's position, which is shared by a vast majority of feminist philosophers, is that our original position is one of mutual interdependence, not autonomy, and that responsibility for one another's vulnerability is at the heart of an ethics of care.

This tension between the idea of an original autonomy for able-bodied, rational, willful individuals focused on self-reliance, and that of an original bondedness within groups representing all variations of capability and need, focused on mutuality, will be an ongoing investigation of this course.

Butler says: "Sometimes, not always, the images that are imposed upon us operate as an ethical solicitation. I want for the moment to call attention to this formulation, since I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, without our being able to anticipate or prepare for it in advance, and this means that we are in such moments affronted by something that is beyond our will, not of our making, that comes to us from the outside, as an imposition but also as an ethical demand. I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations that do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered." Here she could be writing directly about the experience so many of us in the U.S., but also around the world, had in response to the 8:46 minute video of George Floyd that propelled people out of their chairs and into the streets. Affronted by what that image said, humans all over the world accepted the ethical demand imposed upon them by that image - even among those outside the country who, presumably, were not in any way bound by a social contract with the United States.

Then Butler asks the most psychologically astute question in her paper: "Is what is happening so far from me that I can bear no responsibility for it? Is what is happening so close to me that I cannot bear having to take responsibility for it?" In trying to answer these two questions we will find the hidden link between the resistance to wearing a mask and the call to end racism, which is - vulnerability, or what Butler calls "precarity," the precarious, vulnerable reality that is the essence of human life.

Any beginning course in psychology will have introduced you to the existence of "the ego" - that function in the psyche which constructs and defends a sense of an individual selfhood. Our ego is that activity of the mind which can put memories together to make a past, can assemble fantasies to create a desired future, can select actions in the present deemed to be in line with our self-image. The ego can also take offense. What offends the ego are accusations that run counter to the preferred self-image that the ego has constructed, and for many Americans, white Americans in particular, the self-image is that of rational, well-off, strong and capable good guy; redeemer in the white hat. This is one reason that white Americans are so resistant to charges of racism; it doesn't fit with our self-image. It also drives our need to distance ourselves from people who do not embody those characteristics we embrace; the poor, the sick, the needy, the downtrodden are the ones who endanger our sense of self - when we see them as close to us, and we ourselves as potentially becoming them. When the 16^th century Protestant reformer, John Bradford, saw a group of prisoners being led to the gallows he supposedly cried out "There but for the grace of God go I," a sentiment which has become part of the lexicon of the English language. It requires great humility to see ourselves in the misfortune of others, but that is the requirement for humanity; there is nothing that is not ultimately shared, nothing human in which all humans do not somehow participate. "We are All in This Together" is as much a statement of ontological and psychological truth as it is a call to action.

Another thing that can be learned in a psychology class is that empathy is not universal and requires some basic factors before it is "turned on." One of those necessary factors is that there has to be some link between the "victim" and the onlooker - something that connects the two in a way that overcomes that emotional distance leading to indifference that Judith Butler refers to. My hunch is that George Floyd's death leaped over those difference boundaries precisely because of the pandemic; because millions of us have been seeing people struggle to breathe in hospitals and hospital corridors and old folks homes and in back bedrooms; because we ourselves have been having a hard time breathing through the fear of what comes next; because it's harder to breathe through a mask and we literally are experiencing the sensation of finding it difficult to breathe. When George Floyd gasped "I can't breathe," we all felt an immediate, powerful connection to that. Our collective "Yes - we can't breathe!" is what propelled us into the streets. We could identify with George Floyd and thus we had to respond (to paraphrase Judith Butler) to a solicitation in a language we did not wish to understand, because we were "up against it."

The wearing of a mask is related to the Black Lives Matter because the mask is not simply a matter of common sense protection against contagion; the wearing of a mask signals our acceptance of our own vulnerability, the vulnerability of others and our acceptance of the implied ethical duty to "the other" in an ethics of care that supersedes individual rights.

rda 6.20.20

Note: This introduction is my own model of the kind of mental wrestling I hope each of you will do with this week's topic. It is not something that I expect you to accept without questioning simply because I'm the instructor and you are the student. Like you, and most Americans, I am trying to grapple with the unraveling of social norms and expectations, and to do so with as much integrity and intellectual rigor as I am capable. What I am looking for in your Discussion posts is a similar level of intelligent questioning, probing, and introspection - not definite answers or "right" answers, which may be a long time in coming. If you're used to educational experiences where someone has the "right answers" and you're supposed to give those same "right answers" back to get a good grade, please drop that assumption in this class. I will guide you in getting the right tools and habits of mind to deal with the big questions, but I can't/won't give you any right answers. We're trying to discover those together as we go along.

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In addition to the Judith Butler article, here are some highlights from the mask-wearing issue that has been raging across the country for the last month. Follow the article links for more details.

"Three months ago, it would have been unthinkable for most Americans to go out in public wearing surgical masks, homemade face coverings or bank-robber-style bandannas. Who could have imagined that some states, including Illinois, would actually require people to wear masks in stores and offices? That the decision of when, where or whether to cover your face might be viewed as controversial? That fights would break out over it?

The COVID-19 pandemic has led us to this point."

https://herald-review.com/news/state-and-regional/as-illinois-gradually-reopens-will-you-be-wearing-a-mask/article_64d5d427-258c-521c-87e8-861db8b7cf1f.html

"JACKSONVILLE, Fla. Max Parsell hasn't been wearing a mask during the coronavirus pandemic and doesn't intend to start. It's a matter of principle.

"Making individual decisions is the American way," Parsell, a 29-year-old lineman for a power company, said as he picked up his lunch at a barbecue joint at a rural crossroads south of Jacksonville. "I'll social distance from you if you want, but I don't want the government telling me I have to wear a mask."

Mask-wearing for some people is an identifier of broader beliefs and political leanings. Like so many issues rooted in science and medicine, the pandemic is now fully entangled with ideological tribalism. This has played out before: helmets for motorcyclists, seat belts in cars, smoking bans in restaurants. All of those measures provoked battles over personal liberty.

Now it's masks and the coronavirus, with face coverings emerging as an emblem for what cleaves the nation. A flurry ofrecent studiessupports wearing cloth face coverings as a means to limit transmission of the novel coronavirus, which causes the illness covid-19. To many people, masks represent adherence to civic duty and a willingness to make individual sacrifices for the greater good of public health. To others, masks symbolize government overreach and a violation of personal liberty."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-battle-over-masks-in-a-pandemic-an-all-american-story/2020/06/19/3ad25564-b245-11ea-8f56-63f38c990077_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most

"I think people are hesitant to wear masks due to our culture and humans are used to using their faces to express emotions and communicate," says Dr. Henry Redel, the Chief of Infectious Disease atSaint Peter's University Hospitalin New Brunswick, NJ. "It is a big change. Cultures in Asia, where respiratory viruses have caused epidemics in the past, have adapted culturally to the practice and had better results during this pandemic. I think the American public can, too."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2020/05/06/a-doctor-explains-why-45-of-all-americans-refuse-to-wear-a-protective-mask/#112d205c213d

"What is it about a seemingly neutral piece of protective gear that can be so inflammatory? Like many points of controversy, it's not the thing itself but what it represents... Those who lean left politically tend to see the virus as a more dire threat; those on the right are more likely to downplay its seriousness or compare it to less deadly strains like the flu, often following the lead of conservative politicians.

Accordingly, masks may be seen as a marker of political loyalty, triggering feelings of us-versus-them. A politically liberal person may assume that someone wearing a mask is "on their team," while those who don't wear masks must be Fox News-watching Republicans. The anger they feel is not simply about the mask, but about believing the non-mask wearer is a certaintypeof person.

On the flip side, the politically conservative might interpret calls for masks as politically-driven efforts to play up the seriousness of the coronavirus. Being asked to don a mask then becomes not just a request to protect the health of others, but to give up their worldview and political allegiance. It may feel like asking a Red Sox fan to put on a Yankees jersey."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/think-act-be/202005/why-are-masks-triggering-conflict-and-rage