Is instructing "weirdness" good, bad or both for our children within our society, ...past and present?
- sciart0
- Jan 27
- 1 min read
Excerpt: As an ethicist, I believe that the Enlightenment represented genuine progress in moral ideas. Human beings really do have an innate dignity, derived from our power of reason, that constrains the ways that we are permitted to treat one another.
I also agree, at least in some ways, with the influential critiques put forward by thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, to the effect that the Enlightenment overemphasized individualism.
Being a person is too hard a job to leave to a single person. We can’t do it on our own, not even as adults. Figuring out how to be a person is a group project, and we have to help each other.
But the catch is that we don’t really know what we are doing, so sometimes we end up hurting each other instead. When you are weird, you experience this hurt. Social categories have been poorly constructed and fail to conduce to human happiness. The weird person is a record of the mistakes we have made.
The children’s books say, “It’s OK, kids. We’re going to fix them,” which is not a lie, except the part about the timing. The truth is that we are going to fix them, and you’re all going to help, but the happy ending may be a very long time coming.