Entertainment and ethics: see Amreeka

You can learn ethics from the movies. To Kill a Mockingbird is about speaking truth to power. The Magnificent Seven is about keeping your commitments. And now Amreeka.

The engrossing film—not at all preachy—is about treating people as “the other.” Nisreen Faour is award-nominated as Muna, the West Bank Christian Arab who is treated as other  by the Israelis, then emigrates with her teen age son to join her sister in Illinois just after the Iraq war begins, and is treated there too as other. Philosophers have written about the concept of “otherness,” where people of a different background or faith are deemed to be other—that is, not equivalent to the “self,” and therefore inferior, or even less than human.

The basis of all ethics is the Golden Rule, and that rule is smashed by treating people as other. Amreeka entertains, inspires, and teaches us. See it.

Ethics, profiling, and Major Hasan

The tragic killings at Fort Hood have again raised the issue of profiling, and of treating people as individuals rather than as part of a group of “others.” The Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey, has told Army leaders at all levels to be on the lookout for an anti-Muslim backlash that would hurt Muslim soldiers and damage the Army’s diversity, which he called a great strength.

My friend Jack Marshall has written eloquently in his blog, ethicsalarms.com, about the price of American principles, and about how we must always treat people as individuals and not as members of some group.

I posted a comment on his blog about the human tendency to fear the “other”–Muslims, homeless, African-Americans, cops, people with odd accents, etc. I wrote that our leaders need to constantly remind us of our shared humanity, like Bush did after 9/11 and like Army leaders are doing today. Jack pointed out the real trap to that attitude…

“is when one individual appears to confirm a negative stereotype. Hasan shouldn’t be regarded as any more of an “other” than you are. There were plenty of German-Americans in the forces during WWII (indeed, the commander!), but nobody regarded them as threats…they were Americans. Hasan is a perfect storm of factors leading him to this, and maybe someone should have caught the warning signs earlier. But his religion and nationality were not among them.”