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Brian Villanueva's avatar

I've found my civics students better able to evaluate the conflict between maximal individual autonomy vs the common good when I reset it into a society outside of their own.

Here's the question I ask them. Jordan is generally a conservative Muslim society and its politics reflect that culture. So, does every Jordanian have an individual right to march in a Pride parade if they choose? Or do Jordanians have a collective right to decide whether to allow Pride parades? If my students answer the former, I ask them why Jordanians aren't entitled to preserve their own culture.

Recasting the "villain who wants to take away civil rights" as a member of a "sacred victim class" (brown and Muslim) challenges the reflexive progressive paradigm most of these kids are raised with, and forces them to really think through the problem and understand the conflict. They nearly always still say that Jordanians ought to have Pride parades, but they're able to at least glimpse why a Jordanian Muslim might not agree with them.

A society built only to support a collective definition of virtue (the common good) is stultifying. But a society built without any collective definition of virtue is highly unstable. The tug-o-war between these two poles essentially is liberal politics.

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