Cartoon Ethics and Presumption's Ugly Face

Sometimes it's interesting to cut back on philosophical pretension and talk about something that everybody has the chance to interact with and, more than that, to enjoy. Wiley-Blackwell  lists 42 books in the Philosophy and... series, collections of authors and their articles employing philosophical lenses upon trending topics. The series gets mixed reviews, and John Shelton Lawrence addresses the issue of this popularizing trend over at Philosophy Now. He poses a few questions:
     

"Is this approach good for spreading philosophical awareness? Is it pandering to popularity, or progressive pedagogy that has finally realized where it must go to connect with student minds and hearts? Has philosophy sold its critical soul to entertainment franchises to recover student attentiveness?"

I want to claim that a philosopher ought to interact with social reality; could it be that we say that the philosopher dwells in an Ivory Tower because he refuses to engage with his immediate context too often? As a result and on the flipside, do those who are not philosophers ignore philosophy because the philosopher neglects to discuss things that exist outside of the academy? I think that these are worthy questions to ask, but in the meantime, I'm going to take the risk that philosophers should engage with social reality and trending topics sometimes. 

Last summer I decided to fill my few free hours between shifts at the gas station with episodes of Mike Judge's animated sitcom, King of the Hill. Proof of my interest in the series can be corroborated easily: check my last post--I use the character, Dale Gribble, as an example of the modern conception of a conspiracy theorist. The sitcom aired regularly for about twelve years and occupied a spot in Sunday night's primetime lineup. It was popular; actress Brittany Murphy voiced the character of Luanne Platter; it was on in a time-slot very close to the Simpsons. Kathleen Tuck, professor at Boise State University, described her summer time classes that connected pop culture and philosophy, and one source she drew from was the very same King of the Hill.

But now for the insight. I noticed something about the show's structure after running a marathon through the long list of episodes. If the specific episode's plot focused around a single character, the presentation of other characters was altered accordingly. When the patriarch of the Hill household, Hank, held most significance for the plot of the episode, his wife, Peggy, would appear dull or, at the very least, uninterested in Hank's conundra. Alternatively, if the plot of the episode concerned Peggy Hill's character the most, Hank would appear as a bumbling idiot with concerns that shouldn't be concerns.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, and perhaps it might not have been Mike Judge's conscious intention to form the rest of the characters in an episode around the mindset of the central character, but it appears to demonstrate a subtle, ethical point. Here we have a series about a fictional family that takes advantage of the average, white, Texan stereotype. But layered beneath the dilemmas in the story lines, the humor in the generalizations, and the entertainment value that depends sometimes on cartoonish excess, we can find a significant truth about the nature of human interaction. 

Both Hank and Peggy possess different lenses and each is probably ignorant of the opinions the other holds about them. The animated world literally seems to form itself around the central character of each episode. The ethical lesson is one of avoiding presumption. There's nothing worse than having someone believe or say that you're something or someone you're not. Misidentification hurts, especially when the one who isn't identifying correctly neglects to consult the object of identification.

The task before anyone hoping to intimately or purely understand God, a lover, a friend, or even a television series, is a laborious one that seems unsurmountable. But Peggy and Hank still live together, feel affection for one another; they bridge the gaps with something less impending than an inability to truly communicate and understand their respective worlds. Presumption thrives, of course, but we can stifle it back little by little, and we must, if we hope to make proper sense out of the beings we interact with.