Monthly Archives: June 2008

the ethics of liking a fictional character

(Waltham, Mass.) I have mentioned before that Middlemarch is my favorite book. Specifically, I am fond of Dorothea Brooke, its heroine. I like her; I want her to succeed and be happy. Allowing for the fact that she is a fictional character, I care about her.

Such feelings represent moral choices. Caring about someone is less important when that person happens to be fictional, but novels are at least good tests of judgment. Thus I am interested in whether I am right to care about the elder Miss Brooke. It seems to me that George Eliot was also especially fond of her heroine, and one could ask whether that was an ethical stance. Or, to put the question differently, was Eliot right to pull together a set of traits into one fictional person and describe that person in such a way as to make us like her?

The traits that seem especially problematic are Dorothea’s beauty, her high birth, and her youth. She is a young woman from the very highest social stratum in the hierarchical community of Middlemarch, surpassed by no one in rank. She is consistently described as beautiful, not only by other characters, but also by the narrator. In fact, these are the very first lines of Chapter One:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,–or from one of our elder poets,–in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.

This introduction contains no physical detail, in contrast to the portrayals of other characters in the same novel, such as Rosamond and Ladislaw. The simple fact of Dorothea’s beauty is not complicated by the mention of any particular form of beauty that a reader might happen not to like.

We have a tendency, I think, to want beautiful and high-born but lonely young ladies to live happily ever after. When we were young, we heard a lot of stories about princesses. We expect a princess to become happy by uniting with a young and attractive man; and whether that will happen to Dorothea is a suspenseful question in Middlemarch.

If we are prone to admire and like Dorothea because she is beautiful, Eliot complicates matters in three ways. First, she produces a second beautiful young woman in need of a husband, but this one is bad and thoroughly unlikable. (At least, it is very challenging to see things from Rosamond’s perspective, as perhaps we should try to do.) Second, in Mary Garth, Eliot creates a deeply appealing young female character who, we are told, is simply plain. Third, Eliot makes Dorothea not only beautiful, but also “clever” and good.

Evidently, beauty does not guarantee goodness, nor vice-versa; yet several people in Middlemarch think that Dorothea’s appearance and quality of voice manifest or reflect her inner character. This seems to be a kind of pathetic fallacy: people attribute virtues to her face, body, and voice as poets sometimes do to flowers or stars. But of course the characters who admire Dorothea’s appearance as a manifestation of her soul may be right, within the world that Eliot has created in Middlemarch. Or perhaps character and appearance really are linked. Rosamond, for instance, could not be the same kind of person if she were less pretty.

I presume that it is right to like someone for being good, but it is not right to like someone because she is beautiful. One could raise questions about this general principle. Is someone’s goodness really within his or her control? Perhaps we should pity (and care about) people like Rosamond who are not very virtuous. On the other hand, if we can admire beauty in nature and art, why not in human beings? And what about cleverness, which is not a moral quality but is certainly admired?

One interpretation of the novel is that Dorothea does not have a moral right to her inheritance or to her social status. These are arbitrary matters of good fortune, and she is wise to be critical of them. She does, however, according to the novel, deserve a happy marriage to a handsome man because she is both good and beautiful (and also passionate). The end of the novel feels happy to the extent that she gets the marriage she deserves. Does this make any sense as a moral doctrine? Is it an acceptable moral doctrine within a fictional world, but inapplicable to the real world?

Beautiful people tend to find other beautiful people, just as the rich tend to marry the rich and (nowadays) the clever marry the clever. Lucky people have assets in the market for partners. But is this something we should want to see? What if the plain but nice Mary Garth ended up with a broodingly handsome romantic outsider, and Dorothea married a nice young man from the neighborhood? Would that ending be wrong because beauty deserves beauty, or would it only be an aesthetic mistake (or a market failure)?

CIRCLE’s youth primary wrap-up

Today we released our analysis of youth turnout in the whole primary season. Youth voting almost doubled, compared to the best comparison year, 2000. That makes the primary the third straight federal election in which there has been a substantial increase.

For ages 18-29, these are the recent trends in national elections:

CIRCLE’s fact sheet and press release are here.

If the increase continues in the general, it will be interesting to see the impact on certain states where youth turnout was relatively low in 2004. Our interactive map allows you to explore these patterns. Especially interesting are Virginia (41% turnout of under-25s in 2008), New Mexico (42% turnout), and Florida (46% turnout). In each of these states, people between the ages of 18 and 25 represent 9% or 10% of the voting age population. For comparison, 69% of Minnesota’s youth voted 2004 (28 percentage-points more than in Virginia). Substantial increases this year in states like Virginia and Florida could shape the Electoral College.

the public and history

Here are two rival stories about the role of American history today:

1. American history used to be told in an elitist fashion. It was all about the intentions and actions of a few powerful individuals, almost all white men. Ordinary people (including ordinary white men) were marginal or invisible. Historical writing failed to give citizens a sense of agency, because all the power and influence seemed to belong to national elites. Then social historians began to democratize the past and bring it closer to students’ and readers’ experience by uncovering the daily world of farmers, soldiers, mothers, slaves, and others, in their specific circumstances. All kinds of people could find themselves in the past.

2. Many Americans are fascinated by great events and leaders. There is a huge audience for biographies, especially of presidents and generals. Millions visit battlefields and the historic homes of leaders; they want to know where Lincoln spoke or Stonewall stood. But historians write about minute details of social life, often using grand abstractions, like race and gender. They push schools and public facilities to emphasize traditionally oppressed people. For example, Chris Mackowski and Kristopher White noted at their talk on Tuesday that the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefield site has a sign about slave cabins even though there are no extant cabins or other remains to be seen there. Mackowski and White argued that this sort of display is alienating. People want to learn about Robert E. Lee, not about social history. Experts are responsible for the dominance of social history, which explains why students don’t major in history and why young people don’t know historical facts. (For instance, most 17-year-old Americans cannot place the Civil War in the period 1850-1900.)

I’m not sure what to think, myself. I will note that young people do study American history (it’s a requirement virtually everywhere), and they still recall a fairly traditional curriculum. We find that the three themes that young Americans remember studying most are: the Constitution and the American political system, “great American heroes and the virtues of the American system of government,” and wars and battles. Only 9 percent of young people recall any emphasis on “racism and other forms of injustice” in their social studies classes. Therefore, I can’t buy the argument that because young people are forced to study depressing facts about social life, they don’t know exciting facts about heroes. But that still leaves a deep question about what we ought to know.

philosophy and the city

I’m a philosopher by training. All my work now involves civic engagement or civic education (broadly defined). And I have always lived in and loved cities. Thus I am the perfect person to appreciate Sharon Meagher’s website (and book) entitled Philosophy and the City. I learned about this project from Meagher herself, when she spoke yesterday at a conference called Beyond the Academy: Engaging Public Life. Meagher has her students investigate, explore, and appreciate Scranton, where they are enrolled as undergraduates. In the process, these young people (mostly from suburbs) think about cities: what they mean; how they are linked to virtues and vices (both in stereotypes and in reality); what defines citizenship of a city, and other great philosophical questions.

simulating citizenship

It seems to be the season for new civic simulations. Yesterday, I introduced “Budget Hero” from American Public Media. The same day’s New York Times covered Our Courts, a simulation promoted by Sandra Day O’Connor. (“Our Courts” does not seem to be ready to play quite yet.) Then this morning’s Washington Post mentioned Peace Corps Challenge, a site that allows kids to pretend they are Peace Corps volunteers in the imaginary village of Wanzuzu. They get a local guide, Narina, with whom they tackle problems such as water contamination and girls’ education.

Simulations are as old as Model UN and mock trial. Critics say that they convey the wrong message–that real citizenship begins only later on, when kids turn into adults. Simulations do not tap the actual assets of young people (such as their knowledge of their own communities) or allow them to address real problems. And most children will never grow up to fill the roles that they simulate in the game. For example, there is only one US Representative to the UN, out of 300 million citizens. The Peace Corps is more accessible, but it still turns away, I believe, three quarters of its applicants.

But games have advantages, too. They are absorbing, intellectually challenging, and cost-effective. They can be carefully constructed to promote particular lessons or skills that may then generalize to other domains. The Peace Corps simulation, for example, will be a success if it plants the idea of joining the real Corps or if players learn community problem-solving skills that they can use at home.