Born nice,
post-puberty smart-ass,
accidental philosophy class.
Why This Book?
Like many people, I sometimes find myself arguing with family and friends about the issues of the day. We discuss religion and politics, fairness and taxes—what does justice really mean?
Often I’d spout strong opinions, but with little reasoning, and rarely with any real resolution. What exactly was I trying to say?
This book is my attempt to answer that question.
Many of the chapters that follow grew out of ordinary conversations around the dinner table or late-night discussions in the living room. Someone would confidently assert something that sounded obviously true, or obviously false.
Sometimes the conversations were thoughtful. Sometimes they became contentious. What gnawed at me was the realization that many of us believe things we’ve never seriously thought about before.
Part of the problem is that often we don’t fully understand what we’re trying to say until we actually say it out loud. And even then, sometimes we just get more confused.
That’s the spirit in which this book was written.
Not to get more confused; to get more clarity.
But be warned.
Read Quietly To Myself quietly to yourself; otherwise reading it aloud may irritate others around you—especially since much of what follows will strike many as annoying, scandalous, or even blasphemous.
Some people are naturally kind, others funny, some just knuckleheaded asshats. Sadly, sometimes I’m a bit of all three. But I didn’t use to be.
In the Beginning
I used to be like my mom, nice. But then puberty hit, and I became a smart-ass.
“It’s better than being a dumb-shit,” I’d say, when someone called me a smart-ass. That’s how much of a smart-ass I was.
After barely surviving high school, I had a choice to make: get a job, or go to college. At the time, I didn’t like either option, but figured I’d find more beer, girls, and parties at college than I ever would staying home and flipping burgers.
So I went to college.
Back then you were supposed to know what you wanted to do with the rest of your life so that you could pick an appropriate major and thus choose the relevant classes and courses of action.
Are you kidding?
Half a century later I still don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life. Fortunately, there was an easy way out. You could start school as an “open major” and then decide later what major to choose, when you knew more about what you might want to do.
The college professor randomly assigned to guide me through my freshman year as an “open major” happened to be a philosophy professor.
When he asked, “What courses would you like to take?” I said I didn’t know. He suggested I take an introduction to philosophy course.
Philosophy?
That sounded fun. Who teaches it?
He taught it.
In hindsight, the course was one of the notable turning points in my life because I was quietly changed. Mostly without even realizing it—as you will see.
So what happened?
Let There Be Light
My intellectual awakening, so to speak—i.e., the realization that I was wholly ignorant and that ideas could be played with like Tinkertoys—occurred in that Introduction to Philosophy class that was suggested to me because I was an “open major.” We were discussing popular social issues of the day. The issue that day was abortion.
I had a weird relationship with abortion because a few years before, in high school, everyone in my class was required to attend a presentation in our school auditorium on the evils of abortion. They didn’t call it the evils of abortion, but that’s what it was. Today we’d call groups like that right-to-lifers.
It was weird for me because I knew nothing about sex, abortion, pregnancy—or anything, really. Everything was new. They handed out four-color glossy brochures with pictures that were also later projected on the big screen in the auditorium behind the speaker standing at the lectern.
The pictures were of saline-injected fetuses and cut-up baby body parts—the tiny feet and hands of some poor kid who never got a chance to be born.
I saved the brochure for years because it astounded me so. I was young, innocent, impressionable. It was like driving past a terrible accident; I couldn’t help but look. I didn’t want to forget, and I didn’t think I should.
And so, “My God,” I thought. “What if the next baby we abort is the one kid who can save us all from the world’s problems? The next Einstein, or Jesus. What if it had been… me?”
The message was clear. Abortion is wrong.
That’s what I thought going into my Introduction to Philosophy class later, in college. I didn’t have the four-color glossy brochure with me, but I sure remembered it.
But something happened in that class. I changed my mind.
It’s often said that you can’t force someone to change their mind, certainly not by throwing more facts at them. But minds do change, and that’s worth remembering. My thinking changed after reading one of the class assignments: “A Defense of Abortion,” by Judith Jarvis Thomson. (See Chapter 9, “Abortion Trade-Offs.”)
It was a change of mind, but also a change of heart. I felt differently about abortion and about my own views. What else am I wrong about, I wondered?
It turns out that I liked changing my mind. It felt good because I now saw the world more clearly, more maturely, as if I was finally growing up. My mind changed not because of what I now believed, but because I was the one who had decided what to believe.
By the end of this book, I hope that you, too, are the one who decides what you believe.
It’s harder to do than you think.
