The Moral Relevance of

Strangers Panel Participants:

Professor Ed Martin Liberty UniversityProfessor Karen Prior Liberty UniversityProfessor Chidsey Dickson Lynchburg College

“I don't think we're in Kansas anymore”

“Leisure and her Cherub” 1895 Victorian ad for soap

Caliban, William Hogarth

Hip hopYard-o-philesGothsDevotees of Babylon 5

People with puzzling cultural politics

Unscrupulous CEOs and Politicians Degrade environment and exploit labor for profitConcerned mostly about their own careers

Producers and Consumers‘Pornified’ cultureGas guzzling vehiclesDisposable culture

People who do the wrong thing…

It seems I read a lot about powerful strangers who endanger values and people I hold close….

THEMThe Unscrupulous

Family&FriendsNear and Dear

THEMThe Unscrupulous

THEMThe Unscrupulous

THEMThe Unscrupulous

THEMThe Unscrupulous

THEMThe Unscrupulous

People I have influence over

(excluding family members and kumal)

My students Citizens in this town who benefit from my volunteerism and activism (or who don’t from my lack of volunteerism and activism)People who service my lifestylePeople who live in the future (not talking about Babylon 6 geeks)

citizen

son

friend

studentson

student

Makes my shoes

Lives in a country where my gas comes from

Works in factory farm

Most of the people I have influence over I don’t think about

10 billion alive in 2150mom

People whose choices I don’t understand (& maybe find risible)People who elicit my indignation (and cause me to fret)People over whom I have influence (but mostly don’t care to know about)

Strangers have an effect on us:

…but does this raise moral questions?

the stranger is the one who we fear in the state of nature, and the uncertainty of his intentions is what makes life in the state of nature solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short, a perpetual war of all against all that ceaseth only in death.

Dr. Dawson on Hobbes

we have no need to fear strangers unless or until scarcity kicks in…

Locke

Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.

Emile, Rousseau

…denounce slander in an opponent by saying that his strategy distracts from the real issues and also shows a lack of confidence in the merits of his own case…

Rhetoric, Aristotle

?

Theories on troubling strangersCritiques of unjust representations of

strangersStudies, aphorisms and homilies about

the value of strangers

The Ethical Significance of Monster Literature and Film

The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller

On Ugliness,Umberto Eco

Why are we fans of horror?•In horror stories, we seek to make a violent emotion (fear) accessible and safely remote…we can close the book….Its safe also b/c of the unreality of the imagery and the predictability of the plots…

•Horror stories work by dissipating terror in the act of creating it…

•Horror stories deal with supernatural events and fantastical characters…readers approach them with the expectation of an escape from the monotonous realities of daily grind…and from the conformity which is our social training (…we entertain the repressed) [Martin Tropp, Images of Fear)

How do our stories and films about monsters shape our encounters with real strangers?

How do they shape our ethics?

Ambroise Paré's Monsters and Prodigies

Those we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein.

Montaigne, “Of a Monstrous Child” (1595)

And to Thee is nothing whatsoever evil…Far be it then that I should say, ‘These things should not be’

St. Augustine, “Confessions” (5th C)

Monster 1: Biblical

Bestiary14th C moralized encyclopedia of real and fantastic animals

Hydrus (symbolizing Christ) killing a crocodile (Death)

Alien (1979) Harpy

Monster 2: Scary

Lenox Globe 16th C hic sunt dracones

Monster 3: Gothic

Grendel…

nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him/ to hear the din of the loud banquet/every day in the hall, the harp being struck/ and the clear song of a skilled poet/ telling with mastery of man’s beginnings/How the Almighty had made the earth/ a gleaming plain girdled with waters; in His splendor/ He set the sun and the moon/ to be earth’s lamplight, lanterns for men, and filled the broad lap of the world/ with branches and leaves and quickened life in every other thing that moved

At ten AM the young housewifemoves about in negligee behindthe wooden walls of her husband's house.

I pass solitary in my car.Then again she comes to the curbto call the ice-man, fish-man, and standsshy, uncorseted, tucking instray ends of hair, and I compare herto a fallen leaf.

The noiseless wheels of my carrush with a crackling sound overdried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.

William Carlos Williams

Monster 4: Sublime

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for youAs yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bendYour force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,Take me to you, imprison me, for I,Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne