MORAL CONFLICT

A Communication Mid-Term Essay by Fred Slocombe What is a moral conflict? Is it useful to think of the debate over hate speech as a moral conflict? In their book Moral Conflict, Pierce and Littlejohn describe moral conflict as when people deeply enmeshed in incommensurate worlds come to clash (p. 49-50). The groups in question have incommensurate moral orders or a set of rules by which these groups lead their daily lives that cannot be questioned for fear of being banished by their own community. Part of these rituals include adhering to a religious doctrine or set of beliefs that are designed to regard other segments of people in the world that are unknown within that culture as Evil at one end of the spectrum or Crazy at the other end. The pliability of cultural differences appear to have been articulated, perhaps inadvertently, at the website http://www.beliefnet.com. This chart was compiled from information freely available at http://www.beliefnet.com The numbers below represent 3414 registered members of the site who completed the online survey that measures the strength of their beliefs. By no means is the data considered by beliefnet. com as scientific, however, there are specific message boards for each of the aforementioned categories where opinions can be further studied. Overall, since I scored forty-one a scale of twenty five to one hundred and I consider myself liberal and skeptical of religion, its safe to assume that the vast majority of members at beliefnet.com are open-minded and therefore share flexible beliefs about what constitutes a moral action. Using the above data, a moral conflict may be sustained indefinitely between Hardcore Skeptics and Candidates for Clergy. They each represent the two extremes of the spectrum and are characterized by the degree to which members adhere to moral orders. The scale appears to be monolithic at each end, and polylithic towards the middle with the Spiritual Stradlers. Pierce and Littlejohn, using Cooper (1981) on page 59 of Moral Conflict, may interpret the spectrum from Monolithic to Polylithic as inversely proportional to the score given by the beliefnet.com survey, Candidates for Clergy as

monolithic and Hardcore Skeptics as polylithic. A paradigm change at each end of the spectrum may be impossible unless the communication is moderated through the intermediate groups along with the appropriate reinterpretation that can maintain the same context of the original message. Therein may lie the real challenge. The debate over Hate Speech as a moral conflict is highly subjective in that everyone denies advocating hate speech. But as Charles R. Lawrence III states on page 77 of If He Hollers Let Him Go racism is ubiquitous. Hate speech has evolved through education from a cultural protest before the Civil Rights Movement, to a crime of ignorance among new students transplanted from racially and geographically isolated segments of society where they previously did not have to hide their feelings about other cultures, and whose virtues were measured by a community standard based on an interpretation of religious doctrine. The most extreme examples would be Salem Massachusetts in the 1600s where aberrant behavior resulted in death by inescapable tests of faith. Contemporary versions of extremism can be seen today in communities like Michigan City Indiana, a lakeside upper class community that is surrounded by Chicago on one side and Gary Indiana on the other, where Outlaw Hammerskins, a group of Racist Skinheads, have been known to scrawl epithets and use other forms of intimidation to keep African Americans out of their community. More is available at the Southern Poverty Law Center website: www.splcenter.org The ever-present racism in contemporary mass media can be easily seen by simply watching the commercials for Verizon Wireless, Midas Muffler, Dairy Queen, SBC Communications, and commercial for a minivan competing with Honda (funny, I cant remember the brand), where a white man with a cell phone is telling a disheveled Asian cab driver to continuously change locations to find a good signal, a black man is wired to a polygraph lie detector, a black man eats all the ice cream while his girlfriend savors only one bite, a bunch of old white men in a retirement community who are harassed by phone calls are being tended to by a black man , and a white man is telling a black couple to bang themselves in the head with removable head rests from a Honda minivan after they ask him what they should do with those removable head rests. Racist incidents at colleges and universities that arise out of the medias perpetuation of condescension toward other cultures and the geographically isolated communities from which some students come has precipitated overt acts

of ignorance that result in knee-jerk reactions that create animosity on the right where terms like politically correct are used, and on the left with responses like Bigot and Hypocrite. The approach to handling these students and their actions has created a chilling effect that stifles cultural development. Expulsion of students and transfers of professors or staff members only serves to sweep the issue under the rug and does not confront the issue. As a member of the U.S. Navys 6th Fleet Command Assessment Team investigating race related incidents aboard the USS Iwo Jima, I encountered racial conflicts arising out of simple misunderstandings that resulted in harsher than necessary treatment and ultimately resentment toward authority and aggravated racial cynicism that actually created racist coalitions. Ethnocentrism within the dominant class have perpetuated a silent resistance to integration by marketing strategies such as promoting violent and controversial Rap music to white suburban teenagers; reinforcing basic fears and cynicism. Hate speech will continue to exist and be expressed among those who are unwilling to change their outward behavior and are fiercely loyal to their heritage. The White Supremacist Movement will gradually fade into the background conversely as homosexuality is emerging, from the shadows of social stigma. A retired close friend of my mother, who is a staunch Conservative and openly refuses to watch any other television network than Fox News, once told my mother I like Nascar. You know why I like Nascar? Because its all white. Im not going to make any inferences here. What does it mean to say that the quality of communication affects the quality of our relationships and the quality of our communities? Explore this idea in relation to the kind of communication that occurs in conflict situations. Be sure to cite relevant course reading and lecture notes to make your point (dont just freewrite on the quote with no reference to readings, course concepts). The quality of our communication first begins with thinking critically about how we perceive the world around us, and how we selectively filter and arrange that information. you need to choose what to focus your attention on. What you choose to perceivewhether that choice is conscious or notdetermines the subject matter of your communication. -Berko, Rosenfeld, and Samovar. Connecting, A culture-Sensitive Approach to Interpersonal Communication Competency 1997. (67)

The Intrapersonal communicationthe communication that occurs within us, is the most efficient method of communication in that it links symbols and emotional responses to form the Interpersonal tool called an opinion. When a person lacks a common frame of reference to a symbol or a behavior of another group of individuals that appear to share common mysterious symbols or behaviors, the other group becomes classified as another culture. There may be many different ways to define the term culture and there are varying degrees of separation between segments of society within a classically defined culture that are more frequently defined as separate cultures by virtue of their immutable differences and perceived aberrant behavior. What the American public perceives as dominant is the white middle class. What truly dominates American society is the legacy of a few families with old money and even fewer late blooming innovative treasure hoarding capitalists. Their attempts to manage the United States has often resulted in catastrophic failures, and gradually, these few who have so much, are giving up their humanity in favor of what Dietrich Dorner calls vertical flight on page 104 in his book The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations. Metropolitan Books (1996) [] resignation induced torpor, refusal to gather and analyze information, distortion of information, and sudden, frantic fits of action. Out of frustration with the rest of us, our leaders are succumbing to their self-interests and leaving the rest of America to fight among our selves and shoot each other in shopping malls. Our elected representatives, by virtue of their economic advantage, are so far removed from the rest of us that they dont understand us, nor are they willing to seriously try anymore. When president Bush cut the funding he promised to the first responders of the September 11 tragedy then used the Firemen in his first major campaign advertisement after stating he would not, such vertical flight is easy to see. Makau and Marty refers to Cynicism as a common substitute for critical thinking [] The willingness to believe the worst then can be institutionalized through mean spirited dialogue, such as in television and radio talk shows, and through public and corporate policies that come at the expense of the most vulnerable in society. Makau, Josina M. and Marty, Debian L. Cooperative Argumentation: A Model for Deliberative Community Waveland Press (2001). 13

Humans can be divided into people who struggle and people who are content. It follows common sense that those who have power are content to maintain the status quo. The challenge to those who struggle is to provoke awareness in those who are content, that it is in their best interest and the best interest of society as a whole, to be cooperative enough to open a dialogue. As it stands, the level within society where all debates over controversial issues take place is nowhere near core problems that truly affect our lives. Our masters are now resigned to shutting us up through brute force by the below examples of vertical flight (Dorner. 104). In March of 2003 in New York City, antiwar demonstrators were prohibited to march past the United Nations complex or anywhere else in Manhattan by a federal judge ruling. The judge said the organizers would have to settle for a stationary rally five blocks north of the complex, saying that free-speech rights were adequately addressed in this counteroffer. [] Most recently, last November in Miami at the FTAA summit, unarmed demonstrators, local residents, and journalists were said to be assaulted with tear gas, pepper spray, beanbag projectiles, electric-shock tasers, and other police weapons. NOWs Criminalizing Dissent? examines what happened in Miami from the perspective of protesters and police. --(Public Broadcasting System. Now With Bill Moyer) www.pbs.org/now/politics/protest.html The hierarchical structure of our society has gatekeepers for information that flows up the chain as well as gatekeepers in the mass media that choose the topics for our debates. Organizations tend to institutionalize the separation of their information-gathering and decision-making branches. A business executive has an office manager; presidents have councils of advisers; military commanders have chiefs of staff. The point of this separation may well be to provide decision makers with the only bare outlines of all of the available information so that they will not be hobbled by excessive detail when they are obliged to render decisions. Anyone who is fully informed will see much more than the bare outlines and will therefore find it extremely difficult to reach a clear decision. Dorner, Dietrich. The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and avoiding error in complex situations. Metropolitan books 1996 (99) The system of communication in our social structure is so densely filtered between the

classes that those sitting on corporate boards or government posts may never pick up a newspaper, turn on the television, or listen to the radio to get the information they need to achieve their goals. As for the rest of us, it is our duty to identify the slightest influence against members of our own class. The slightest misrepresentation of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or lifestyle must be scrutinized. The overwhelming outcry in our society occurs when people try to control the lives of others. Unfortunately, many sects of religion believe that they cannot fulfill their own righteous destinies without interfering with the lives of others. By trying to force changes in others lives, they generate the need for debate and consequently the diversions and divisions we experience today. The goal of creating a deliberative community requires active participation from all parties. Getting everyone to recognize underlying values and assumptions behind their positions without provoking an adversarial situation poses a real challenge. It reminds me of the movie They Live where the lead role played by Roddy Piper, trying to make someone literally see the truth through a pair of special glasses, must physically fight with him just to get him to try on the glasses. With free speech comes responsibility. Explain how readings and discussions in this class apply to this quote. Should responsibility encourage us to reconsider absolutist notions of the First Amendment? (In other words, do you advocate regulating certain kinds of speech because it is not responsible to individuals, to society, to democratic principles?) Free speech is a metaphor for freedom overall. Limiting free speech is limiting freedom, for some. Unlimited free speech in a society where one culture dominates another culture in number, places the smaller culture at a disadvantage. The perception of even the slightest shift in power by the dominant culture is a highly exaggerated swing of a large heavy pendulum. Hate speech should be treated as a symptom of mental or emotional illness that can be diagnosed as a symptom of failing to thrive. Hate occurs when a segment or individual of the dominant culture finds him or her self at a disadvantage to what is perceived to be the overall condition of the dominant culture as portrayed by the mass media. Poor, underachieving, uneducated, and often addicted white people make up the vast majority of haters. Hate facilitators are comprised of those who see fortune and power in maintaining divisions within the larger community.

Supporters of the Marketplace of Ideas and Absolutists have been considered at least in part, as prejudice facilitators, unconsciously acting on behalf of the dominant culture. Prejudice that is unconscious or unacknowledged causes the most significant distortions in the market [] when individuals are unaware of their prejudice, neither reason nor moral persuasion will likely succeed. (Lawrence, Charles R. III. If He Hollers Let Him Go: Regulating Racist Speech on Campus [Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Westview Press] 78) Hate is often displaced toward a conveniently located unconventional culture that is vulnerable. A vulnerable culture is defined as a group of people separated from the dominant culture and who appear to not share the same rights or protections of the dominant culture, and have been ignored in the past by regulators, legislators, and law enforcement officials who are overwhelmingly made of members of the dominant culture. A conventional culture is determined by what is dominant in the media as the accepted culture. The group that has all of the answers, the group to which good things happen, and the group that enjoys all the products (with the exception of cleaning supplies), services, and travel destinations. Members of the dominant culture in the media are portrayed as having the solutions to the problem rather than the questions, as in the Midas Muffler commercial. The black man behind the counter was giving the answers to the customers questions, but they had to be reinforced by the white man facilitating the lie detector test. Damon Wayans car being destroyed in the SBC commercial wasnt bad enough. He had to say We should have brought moms car. Once again reinforcing the notion that good things happen to good people and visa versa. Charles R. Lawrence III proposes: narrowly framed restrictions on only the most abusive, least substantive forms of racist speech []. He writes that he is rebutted with the argument that any restriction on speech will endanger first amendment liberties. (Lawrence 80). As an example of what might happen under such conditions, the policies aboard United States Navy ships today with regard to racist speech are harsh because of a poor public image. During the Vietnam War, the Navy was a refuge for whites and especially affluent whites, while minorities and the poor were sent to the front lines of combat. To repair its image, the Navy officially states that it does not tolerate racism. Today, an accusation

of racism in the Navy carries with it immediate punishment and any question about the validity of the accusation is suppressed out of fear of accusations of collusion and conspiracy.

Bibliography
Makau, Josina M. and Marty, Debian L. Cooperative Argumentation: A Model for Deliberative Community Waveland Press (2001). Lawrence, Charles R. III. If He Hollers Let Him Go: Regulating Racist Speech on Campus [Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Westview Press] Berko, Roy M. Rosenfeld, Lawrence B. Samovar, Larry A. Connecting, A culture-Sensitive Approach to Interpersonal Communication Competency Harcourt Brace & Company 1997. Dorner, Dietrich. [Logik des Misslingens. English] The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and avoiding error in complex situations. Translated by Rita and Robert Kimba. Metropolitan books 1996 Pearce, W. Barnett. Littlejohn, Stephen W. Moral Conflict: When Social Worlds Collide. Sage Publications 1997 Chart data from BeliefNet.com: http://www. beliefnet.com collected on March 8, 2004. Subject to change. Public Broadcasting System. Now With Bill Moyer. www.pbs.org/now/politics/protest.html