Category: Liberalism

Two Kinds of Reason?

The semester has obviously gotten the better of me. Loads of things to catch up on in these notes. So let me try to make at least a beginning.

I am reading Bertrand Russell’s 1953 book, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (Simon and Shuster, 1955), which is a summary of his ethics and political views. Russell’s prose is extraordinary. He is so clear, so direct, and so ready, in every instance, with an illustrative example. He really seems to have mastered that Wordsworthian goal of being a man speaking to men (sic). The tone is conversational, ever even-toned and reasonable, with a trick of his taking you (the reader) into his confidence when he reaches those knotty moments where he has no surefire solution to offer.

Russell is just about 100% a Humean utilitarian. His position is that there is only one kind of reason: instrumental reason. Reason is only at play when we are determining what means are most appropriate to the achievement of a particular end. What Kant called the “hypothetical imperative”—willing the means that will lead to our announced goal. For Russell, ends are determined by desire or passion (in the classic Humean formula). Furthermore, Russell is pretty wedded to the notion that a pleasure/pain calculus can explain our desires—even if he rejects the idea (so loved by economists) that self-interest is “rational.” The pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain is passional for Russell, not rational, based in feeling, not thought or logic. Pleasure as an end is not a product of rational calculation, although figuring out how to achieve that end is a matter of rational calculation.

Russell even ends up asserting (as do Adam Smith and Hume) that there is a “natural” (and, hence, presumably universal) tendency in humans to sympathize with the pain/suffering in others in ways that make the observation of others’ sorrows painful to the observer. But he has to admit that this “natural” emotion is not everywhere present. “Sympathy with suffering, especially with physical suffering, is to some extent a natural impulse: children are apt to cry when they hear their brothers or sisters crying. [Not true in my experience.] This natural impulse has to be curbed by slaveowners, and when curbed it easily passes into its opposite, producing an impulse to cruelty for its own sake” (87).

A thin reed indeed, if it so “easily” turns into its opposite: a delight in the suffering of others. Yet it is very hard to see how you can even get ethics founded on emotion rather than reason started if you don’t posit some kind of sympathy. That is, if your ethics must be derived from a primitive pleasure/pain impulse, then you have to figure out a way to ground caring about others’ pain in the fact of feelings of pleasure and pain confined to the self. Here’s Russell again; “I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine motive, and that some people at some times are made somewhat uncomfortable by the sufferings of other people. It is sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian advances of the last hundred years. . . . Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy” (155-56). The extremely cautious language here (some, somewhat) perhaps reflects Russell’s recalling how Hume, despite his thoughts on sympathy, speculated/worried that it is not irrational for me to care more about a cut to my little finger than about 10,000 deaths in China. If you begin from egotistic premises about pain and pleasure, that Humean thought is hard to refute. I experience my pain quite differently from the ways I experience the pain of someone else, no matter how deeply I might feel for them.

The Continental tradition, ever hostile to utilitarianism, has sought to solve this problem by appeal to another kind of reason—one that is quite distinct from instrumental reason. In Kant, it’s the reason of logic. Ethics is to be grounded in the pain (I use this word advisably) we feel at self-contradiction. The categorical imperative basically says that I cannot, except on the pain of contradiction, assume goods to myself that I would deny to others. A radical egalitarianism is the only path to an ethics that avoids contradiction—and, this goes mostly unsaid in Kant, our sense of self-worth, of dignity, and integrity would be lost if we contradicted ourselves. Just what our stake is in self-worth, dignity etc. is never specified. It is simply assumed that we desire to esteem ourselves. Russell, along with other utilitarians, would say that Kant, at bottom, also relies on pain—just the pain of being inconsistent instead of the pain of witnessing the suffering of others. Then the question becomes which of these two pains would we take more pains to avoid, which is the more powerful motive.

Habermas’ version of a second kind of reason is “discursive reason.” It shares some features with Kantian reason, especially in its egalitarian strictures that all are provided with equal access to the discourse that Habermas identifies as central to human interactions. But Habermas also adds the rationality of being convinced by arguments (or viewpoints or even conclusions) that are best supported by the evidence and by the “reasons” provided to believe them. Our beliefs, in other words, are potentially rational for Habermas—and those beliefs are not just confined to the designation of efficacious means. Our ends can also be determined (at least in part) through rational argument, through discursive processes of intersubjective consultation/contestation that yield conclusions about what ends to pursue. Desire is important, but does not entirely rule the roost. We don’t necessarily have to express it as desire being tempered or corrected or revised by reason. We can imagine desire and reason as born in the same moment, that way avoiding giving desire some of temporal or psychological priority—a priority that may get translated into thinking desire a stronger force or one that must be tamed (as in Plato’s image of desire as the horse that must be controlled by the weaker, but smarter, rider). I think Habermas (like Martha Nussbaum in a somewhat different way) would want to say that desire and reason are intertwined (perhaps completely inextricably) from the start—a position that makes human beliefs and behavior susceptible to argument/persuasion, thus giving “discursive reason” a space in which to operate.

Reason in Habermas and Nussbaum, then, is secular and immanent; it is produced in and through human sociality. And I think they would say that it works to create “sensibilities,” that our “moral intuitions” are the products of cultural interactions. Certainly, I read Dewey as taking that position, which is a way of reconciling what can seem his over-optimistic faith in “intelligence” (that key Deweyean term) with his equally firm insistence that “morality is social.” There is no transcendent rational dictate (as there is in Kant) that grounds morals, that even pronounces its fundamental “law” (i. e. never do anything that you cannot will that everyone do). Dewey’s social historicism tries to account for both the variety in moral beliefs/intuitions across time and space and to capture the “force” of those intuitions, the fact that they are motivating and that we feel shame/guilt when we do not act in accordance with them. The “intelligence” on which Dewey relies does seem to be consequence-based. He seems to be saying that things go better for human lives—whether focused on individual lives or on the collective life of societies—when we adopt modes of “democratic association” that stress cooperation over conflict/competition and proved the means for all to actively pursue their chosen ends.

Still, the rub is there: what cultivates the sensibility of, commitment to, enhancing the well-being of others. What, in Kantian terms, keeps me from using the other as means to my self-fulfillment, just as I use various non-human things that the world affords as means. The Kantian path basically says we must have some way to designate some things (primarily human lives) as sacred, as never to be used as means. Otherwise, utilitarianism will run roughshod over the world—and the people in it—during its pursuit of pleasure. What is unclear is whether “reason” can get us to that designation of “the sacred” (defined as the “untouchable,” or as that which is always an ends, not a means).

The alternative seems to be some kind of arbitrary fiat, the kind of decisionism that Derrida seems to adapt in the later stages of his career, or perhaps the kind of pre-rational “call” (or intuition) upon which Levinas bases his ethics. The sacredness of the other is just asserted; it is not justifiable in any rational or argumentative way. Just what the nature of its appeal is remains unclear. What motivates one to heed the call? To what within the self does the call touch? One answer leads to a kind of pantheism (I would read Hegel this way): the call resonates with that fragment of the spirit (or of the divine) that lurks within us, but which lies buried until activated by this voice from without. That path, not surprisingly, is too mystical for me. Yet it is clear that I am almost as equally suspicious of “reason” as some kind of power that can pull us up by our bootstraps, that can give us the terms of an ethics that we embrace as our own.

I am left, I think, with the idea that there are certain images of human possibility—both of individual exemplars (call them “saints” if you like) and of livable communities (call them “utopias” if you like)—that appeal to us as desirable visions of the forms life could take. These visions are given to us by history (by religion, by literature, by philosophy, by the stories we tell)—and can become the focus of desire/aspirations, as well as the standards by which we criticize what does exist now. In other words, articulations of the ideal (of ideas of justice) by philosophy and imaginations of the ideal in stories and literature, as well as certain concrete examples pulled from history form the basis of commitments that also are seen as ethical obligations, since it is shameful to act in ways that make realization of those ideals unlikely or impossible. Is this “rational”? Not fully or categorically. But it can involve the deployment of reasons (in the plural), of arguments. And in that sense Dewey’s appeal to “intelligence” might not seem quite so silly. Intelligence is not a bad term to use for the assessment of our ideals and of the reasons they give us to act in certain ways as well as for assessing the possibility of the realization of those ideals. At the same time, it seems to me that ideals do make an emotional appeal, so that the passional nature of our commitments can be acknowledged as well.

“Intelligence,” then, is a smudge term. It’s meant the bridge the classical divide between passion and reason—in much the same way that Martha Nussbaum, in her work upon the emotions, has worked hard to demonstrate the contribution to “cognition” made by them. Of course, the term “emotional intelligence” has entered the language in the past fifteen to twenty years. It’s hard not to think that “intelligence” is doing a similar work to “judgment” in traditional faculty psychology. In other words, as opposed to the Plato/Hegel line, which appeals to a transcendent Reason (with a capital R), or the Catholic theological line, which appeals to Revelation (with a capital R), we get the Aristotelean line, which aims to remain firmly grounded in the human and the here and now. No divine interventions or even implanted divine sparks, just what our inborn mental capacities and emotional make-up renders possible. Russell is as addicted to appeals to intelligence as is Dewey. “I would say, in conclusion, that if what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence. And this, after all, is an optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a thing that can be fostered by known methods of education” (158). I think it is almost inevitable that liberals will always end up appealing to education as the motor of improvement because they believe our ills are not permanently grounded in some kind of “nature” that cannot be re-formed. Education is the means toward that re-formation.

But in that line (to which Hume and Kant, despite all their differences, both belong), the other sky hooks (besides education) that can get us out of being the mere pigs of J. S. Mill’s fears turn out to be either the needs generated out of human sociality or the mysterious processes of judgment (the topic of Kant’s third critique). A utilitarianism shorn of both of these mechanisms can either throw up its hands at the issue of ends, just taking them for granted, in all their variety and perversity, as modern economic thought does. Or it seems doomed to finding “altruism” and various other moral behaviors a deep puzzle, one only slightly assuaged by notions of “enlightened self-interest.” In short, the problem for an utilitarianism—for any one who, like Russell, says there is only instrumental reason—is that it leaves us no way to talk about the formation of, the fixation on, ends. (This is the most customary complaint about pragmatism.) Those ends are just the product of passion, of the fundamental desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain. Yet the actual variety of human ends, the number of things to which people are committed defies a simple calculation of pleasure or pain, indicates that utilitarianism’s psychology, its understanding of human motivations, is woefully inadequate to the actual complexities of human desires and calculations.

That said, accounting for the production of ends still remains a puzzler. “Judgment” merely names the puzzle, gives it a site to reside. It hardly solves it. Judgment stands as a way to explain that our moral views and our desired ends are not completely dictated to us by our culture. That individuals in all worlds that we know of have the capacity to stand out against the prevailing practices and beliefs of their society. They can, in short, submit those practices and beliefs to judgment. But where do the standards by which the judgment is made come from? That’s where some kind of notion of “intelligence” or “reason” or “cognition” (aided or not by the emotions) comes in. Even in cases where the fact that judgment can be refined by education, where it can be developed in particular ways by particular exercises, there is still the sense that judgment also imparts an ability to stand apart from that education and those practices, to sit in judgment upon them. I will be looking to see how Russell smuggles something like this capacity into his account of morals. Judgment, I am saying, takes the place of that second kind of reason, that other “faculty,” that can do more than just indicate suitable means, instead offering us a way to make choices about ends.

Religion, Sect, Party (Part Two)

Having given you Taylor’s definition of religion last time, I now want to move over to Slezkine’s discussion of religion (which then bleeds over into politics) in The House of Government.

He offers a few attempts at defining religion, the first from Steve Bruce: religion “consists of beliefs, actions, and institutions which assume the existence of supernatural entities with powers of action, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose. Such a formulation seems to encompass what ordinary people mean when they talk of religion” (73; all the words in quotes are Bruce’s, not Slezkine’s). If we go to Durkheim, Slezkine says we get “another approach. ‘Religion, according to his [Durkheim’s] definition, is ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.’ Sacred things are things that ‘the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity.’ The function of the sacred is to unite humans into moral communities” (74).

Durkheim’s position is functionalist; religion serves human need, especially the needs of human sociality. Slezkine continues: “Subsequent elaborations of functionalism describe religion as a process by which humans create a sense of the self and an ‘objective and moral universe of meaning’ [Thomas Luckmann]; a ‘set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence’ [Robert Bellah]; and, in Clifford Geertz’s much cited version, ‘ a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these with such an aura of facticity that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (74).

In Bruce’s terms, I don’t think I can be considered religious, since I think morality is uniquely human; I don’t think there are impersonal or divine processes/beings that have a moral purpose and are capable of acting to further that moral purpose.

But the Durkheim/functionalist positions seem closer to home. What I have been worrying for months on this blog concerns the “sacredness” of “life.” Does taking life as sacred, as the ultimate value, as the thing that profane hands (the state, other agents of violence, the lords of capitalism) should not destroy or even render less full, fall within the realm of religion? It does seem to aim at some of the same ends—certainly at establishing a “moral community” united by its reverence for life; certainly in establishing a “moral universe of meaning” underwritten by the ultimate value of life; and certainly in paying attention to “the ultimate conditions of existence,” i.e. the drama of life and death, of being given a precious thing—life—that can only be possessed for a limited time.

I am never sure what all this (that is, the “formal” consonance of religion with humanism) amounts to. If it is something as general as saying that the question of meaning inevitable arises for humans, and that the ways they answer that question has inevitable consequences for human sociality/communities, then the resemblance doesn’t seem to me to have much bite. It is so general, so abstract, a similarity that it doesn’t tell us anything of much import. It is like saying that all animals eat. Yes, but the devil is in the details. Some are vegetarians, some kill other animals for food, some are omnivores.

All human communities must be organized, in part, around securing enough food to live. But hunter/gatherers are pretty radically different from agrarians—and all the important stuff seems to lie in the differences, not in the general similarity of needing to secure food. I suspect it is the same for religion/atheism. Yes, they must both address questions of meaning and of creating/sustaining livable communities, but the differences in how they go about those tasks are the significant thing.

More interesting to me is how both Taylor and Slekzine use Karl Jasper’s notion of the “Axial Revolution.” Taylor leans heavily on Max Weber’s notion of a “disenchanted” world; Slekzine is interested in how the Axial revolution displaces the transcendent from the here and now into some entirely separate realm. Or, I guess, we could say that the Axial revolution creates the transcendent realm. In animist versions of the world, the sacred is in the here and now, the spirits that reside in the tree or the stream or the wind. The sacred doesn’t have its own special place. But now it is removed from the ordinary world—which is fallen, in need of salvation, and material/mechanical. Spirit and matter are alienated from one another. The real and the ideal do not coincide.

For Slekzine, then, every politics (like every post-Axial religion) has to provide a path for moving from here (the fallen real of the world we inhabit day by day) to there (the ideal world of moral and spiritual perfection). He is particularly interested in millennial versions of that pathway since he thinks revolutionaries are quintessential millennialists. And he clearly believes that all millennialists promise much more than they can deliver—and then must deal with the disappointment that inevitably follows from the failure of their predictions to come true.

That’s where I retain a liberal optimism—which is also a moral condemnation of the pessimist. My position, quite simply, is that some social orders (namely, social democracy as it has been established and lived in various countries, including Sweden, Denmark, Canada etc.) are demonstrably better than some other social orders if our standard is affording the means for a flourishing life to the largest number of the society’s members. Measurements such as poverty and education levels, life expectancy etc. can help us make the case for the superiority of these societies to some others.

The point is that the gap between the real and the ideal is actual—even in the best social democracies. But the point is also that this gap is bridgeable; we have concrete ways to make our societies better, and to move them closer to the ideal of a flourishing life for all. Pessimists take the easy way out, pronouncing (usually from a fairly comfortable position), that all effort is useless, that our fallen condition is incorrigible. A humanist politics, then, aims to re-locate the ideal in this world (as opposed to exiling it to a transcendent other-worldly place), while also affirming that movement toward the ideal is possible—and should be the focus of our political efforts.

In these terms, the ideal is, I guess, transcendent in the sense that it is not present in the here and now. The ordinary does not suffice even within a politics that wants to affirm the ordinary, the basic pleasures and needs of sustaining life. But there is also the insistence that the ordinary supplies everything we need to improve it—and that such improvements have been achieved in various places at various times, even if we can agree that no society has achieved perfection. There is no need to appeal to outside forces, to something that transcends the human, in order to move toward the ideal.

How a society handles, responds to, the gap between now (the real) and the ideal seems to me an important way to think about its politics. Looking at 2018 America, it seems (for starters) that we have a deep division over what the ideal should be. The liberal ideal is universal flourishing. It seems very difficult not to caricature the ideal of liberalism’s opponents. I think it is fair (but they probably would not) to say their view is premised on the notion of scarcity. There is not enough of the good, life-sustaining, stuff to go around—which generates endless competition for the scarce goods. In that competition, there is nothing wrong (in fact, it makes emotional and moral sense), to fight to secure the goods for one’s own group (family, ethnicity, nation). A good (ideal) world would be one in which the scarce goods would go to those who truly deserve them (because hard workers, or good people, or “one of us.”) But the real world is unfair, all kinds of cheaters and other morally unworthy types, get the goods, so politics should be geared to pushing such moochers away from the trough. That seems to me to be the rightist mindset in this country these days.

But both sides seem to be humanists of my sort, since both seem to think politics can move us to the ideal in this world. There is not some hope in a transcendent realm—or an orientation toward that realm.

Perfectionism and Liberalism

Adam Gopnik has become one of the most astute theorists/apologists for liberalism, even though his thoughts on that subject simply come as asides in the occasional pieces he writes for the New Yorker. In the July 30, 2018 edition, in a review of a book about the utopian fictions of the 1890 to 1910 period, he has this to say: “Liberalism is a perpetual program of reform, intended to alleviate the cruelty we see around us. The result will not be a utopia but merely another society, with its own unanticipated defects to correct, though with some of the worst injustices—tearing limbs from people or keeping them as perpetual chattel or depriving half the population of the right to speak to their own future—gone, we hope for good. That is as close as liberalism gets to utopia: a future society that is flawed, like our own, but less cruel as time goes on.”

The complaint of non-liberals is that liberals aim too low, that they timidly rule out as impossible things they should be fighting to accomplish. And surely there is much to be said for the view that liberals are particularly ineffective if they are not constantly pushed by a more radical “left.” On the other hand, liberal timidity, what Judith Shklar memorably called “the liberalism of fear,” is a commitment to minimizing concentrations of power and maximizing the distribution of power in order to prevent tyranny. Power deployed for economic gain or power deployed to bring about a utopian vision of solidarity/common effort are equally to be feared. Pluralism is the by-word, also known as liberal “permissiveness.” As much as possible, keep to an absolute minimum the power of any entity (be it state, business, church, or another person) to dictate to me the terms of my life.

Another common critique of liberalism comes from a different direction. The issue here is not that liberals don’t fight hard enough for the justice they claim to cherish, but that the individualism that liberal permissiveness establishes is unsatisfying. Left to their own devices, individuals will either (this is the elitist, right-wing critique of liberal individualism) choose “low,” materialist desires that are undignified and recognizably bestial or (the left-wing, “communitarian” critique) be left adrift, exiled from all the kinds of intersubjective associations/relationships that actually make life meaningful.

In short, a straight-forward “materialism,” which accepts that our primary motives are for bodily comforts and other basic pleasures—what I called “hedonism” a few posts back—is deemed insufficient for a “full” (now the term is Charles Taylor’s) human life. There must be more, Taylor keeps saying.

Here’s my dilemma—and kudos to Taylor for bringing it home so forcefully. A certain version of materialism, with its notion that personal interest in securing material goods plus the psychological satisfactions of familial love and social respect are primary and “enough”, reigns among the aggressive right-wing in the US today. The old line conservative, elitist critics of the Alan Bloom and Harold Bloom sort are just about total dinosaurs now. The current right wing scorns elites and their fancy views of human dignity and attachment to “higher” things. “Freedom” for Samuel Alioto is complete liberal permissiveness in economic matters, tied to a lingering moralistic attempt to suppress non-economically motivated “vices.”

So I certainly want to combat what Taylor insists is the “reductionism” of a materialist utilitarianism—the notion that all value resides in the extent to which something contributes to well-being, with “well-being” defined in very restrictive, mostly economic, terms. The humanities, as a whole, have understood this as the battleground: the effort to get the public and the body politic to accept (and act on that acceptance) the value of non-economically motivated or remunerated activities. (In a future post, I will return to this topic aand try to think through what the “more” is that a secularist humanities would offer.)

What path should one take in this effort to combat economistic utilitarianism? Taylor writes that “the question [that] arises here [is] what ontology can underpin our moral commitments” (607). Now, of course, Richard Rorty (of whom more in a moment) would argue that we needn’t have any ontology to underwrite our commitments, that the whole (traditional) philosophical game of thinking that “foundations” somehow explain and/or secure our commitments is a misunderstanding of how human psychology works. (Basically, Rorty is accepting William James’s insistence that we have our commitments first and then invent fancy justifications for them after the fact.) The critics reply (inevitably) that Rorty thus shows that he has an ontology—basically, the ontological description of “human nature” that is James’s psychology. If, like Rorty, you are committed to the liberal ideal (as expressed by Gopnik, who is consciously or not, channeling Rorty on this point) of reducing cruelty, then you are going to undertake that work in relation to how you understand human psychology. In Rorty’s case, that means working on “sensibility” and believing that affective tales of cruelty that will awaken our disgust at such behavior will be more effective than Kantian arguments about the way cruelty violates the categorical imperative.

The Humean (and Rorty, like Dewey, is a complete Humean when it comes to morality/ethics) gambit is that humans have everything they need in their normal, ordinary equipment to move toward less cruel societies. We don’t need “grace” or some other kind of leg up to be better than we have been in the past. Our politics, we might say in this Humean vein, consist of the rhetorical, legal, and extra-legal battles waged between those who would “liberate” the drives toward economic and other sorts of power and accumulation versus those who would engage the “sympathetic” emotions that highlight cooperation and affective ties to our fellow human beings. The Humean liberal, therefore, will endorse political arrangements that do not stifle ordinary human desires (for sex, companionship, fellowship, material comforts, recognition, the pleasures of work and play) while working against all accumulations of power that would allow someone to interfere in the pursuit of those ordinary desires.

What Taylor argues is that this liberal approach is not enough. And it is “not enough” in two quite different ways. First, it is not enough because it still leaves us with a deep deficit of “meaning.” It is a “shallow” conception of human life, one that does not answer to a felt—and everywhere demonstrated need—for a “fuller” sense of what life is for and about. Humans want their lives to connect up to something greater than just their own self-generated desires. (I have already, in a prior post, expressed my skepticism that this hankering for a “deeper meaning” is as widespread, even universal, as Taylor presumes. To put it bluntly, I believe many more people today–July 28, 2018–are suffering from physical hunger than from spiritual hunger.) People, in Taylor’s view, want to experience the connection of their desires to some “higher” or “larger” purpose in things. So the ontology in question is not just a description of “human Nature” but also of the non-human—and a description of how the human “connects” to that non-human. You can, of course, claim (like the existentialists) that there is no connection, that we are mistaken when we project one and would be better off getting rid of our longing for one, but that is still an ontological claim about the nature of the non-human and about its relation to the human. In that existential case, you are then going to locate “meaning” (a la Camus) in the heroic, if futile, human effort to create meaning within a meaningless universe.

Taylor’s second objection to Humean naturalism is more interesting to me because I find it much more troubling, much more difficult to think through given my own predilections. Put most bluntly, Taylor says (I paraphrase): “OK, your naturalistic account posits a basic ‘sympathy” for others within the human self. But, by the same token, your naturalistic account is going to have to acknowledge the aggressive and violent impulses within the self. Your liberal polity is going to have to have some strategy for handling or transforming or suppressing those violent tendencies. In short, there are desires embedded in selves that are not conducive to ‘less cruel’ futures, so what are you going to do about them?”

Taylor’s own position is clear. He doesn’t use the term “perfectionist” (that, instead, is a recurrent feature of Stanley Cavell’s objections to Deweyean pragmatism), but he is clearly (at least in my view) in perfectionist territory. Taylor is certainly insistent that what non-religious views (those that adhere to a strictly “immanent frame”—his term) miss is a drive toward “transformation” that is often motivated or underwritten by the desire to connect to some “transcendent.” Liberal “permissiveness” doesn’t recognize, or provide any space for, this urge to transformation—or for the fact that those who pursue this goal most fervently are often the humans we most admire. Self-overcoming, we might say, is view more favorably than simply “care of the self.” Taylor is very, very good on how the arguments about all this go—with the liberal proponents of care of the self seeing the self-overcomers as dangerous, with their heroic visions that tend toward utopian-seeking tyranny or a religious denigration of the ordinary, the here and now; and the proponents of transformative striving seeing the liberals as selfish, limited in vision, stuck in the most mundane and least noble/dignified of the possible human ways to live a life, to pursue and achieve meaning.

I am clearly of the non-heroic camp, but the challenge Taylor poses is most difficult to me when he says that even the liberal aims at a transformation of human nature, of built in human desires, insofar as the liberal seeks to minimize violence and even to banish it entirely. The conundrum: how do you either transform or (where necessary) suppress desire without being tyrannical? The easy way out is to say it is not tyrannical to suppress the rapist. But that just gets us into the business of what desires are so beyond the pale that their suppression is justified as contrasted to the desires we should let express themselves. The prevailing liberal answer to that problem remains Mill’s harm principle—which is, admittedly, imperfect but the best we’ve got on hand.

Meanwhile, it would seem that liberals would also be working on another front to transform those violent desires so that the need for suppression wouldn’t arise as often. Liberals, it would seem, can’t completely sidestep a “perfectionist” ethics, one that seeks to re-form some basic attributes of human nature–as it has so far manifested itself in history. To put it in the starkest terms: every human society and every moment in human history has manifested some version of war. Yet the liberal is committed to (in utopian fashion) the idea that war is not inevitable, that we can create a world in which wars would not occur. But the path to that war-free world must involve a “perfectionist” transformation of what humanity has shown itself to be up to our current point in time. The issue then becomes: “What is the perfectionist strategy to that end?” How does the Humean liberal propose to get from here (war) to there (perpetual peace)?

Taylor is not denying that the liberal has possible strategies. But he thinks those strategies are “excarnated”—divorced from the body and emotion, the opposite of “incarnated.” This is Taylor’s version of the familiar critique that liberalism is “bloodless,” that it disconnects the body from the mind in its celebration of the disengaged, objective spectator view of knowledge at the same time that it extracts individuals (in the name of autonomy) from their embedding in social practices and social communities. The ideal liberal self stands apart, capable of putting to the question everything, including the most basic constituents of his life (his own desires and his own relations to others.) This is Rorty’s liberal ironist, cultivating a certain distance from everything, even his own beliefs. The liberal, then, only has “reasons”—the consequentialist argument that life would be more pleasant, less “nasty, brutish, and short”—if we managed to stop war, stop being violent and cruel to one another. Or, if we go the Humean/Rorty route, the liberal can work to enhance the inbuilt “sympathy” that makes us find cruelty appalling—and mobilize that sentiment against the other sentiments that lead to finding violence thrilling, pleasurable, or ecstatic.

Taylor, instead, favors a non-liberal route that avoids “excarnation.” Instead, it recognizes that “in archaic, pre-Axial forms, ritual in war or sacrifice consecrates violence; it relates violence to the sacred, and gives a numinous depth to killing and the excitement and inebriation of killing; just as it does through the rituals mentioned above for sexual desire and union” (611-612). The Christian experience/virtue of agape, Taylor insists, is fully bodily and emotional—and affords a sense of connection to non-human, transcendent powers and purposes. And there can be a similar sense of connection in expressions/experiences of violence.

Of course, Taylor relies here on the “containment” that ritual performs. A safe space, we might say, is created for the expression of violence—a space that highlights the connection to the transcendent that violence can afford but which also keeps that violence from getting out of hand. (I continue to be very interested in all the ways violence is “contained.” Why don’t all wars become “total”? Why do states, in dealing with criminals, or other authority figures, like parents, stop short of total violence, of killing? Think of spanking; how it is ritualized, how it stops short of doing real physical harm—or how, in other instances, it pushes right through that boundary and does lead to real physical harm. What keeps the limits intact in one case and not in the other?)

But the ritual is not only “containment” for Taylor; it is also a path toward “transformation.” Think of how the ritual of marriage transforms the love relation between the two partners. Do we really want to argue that marriage is meaningless, that it does not change anything between the couple? The marriage ritual is not, as we all well know, magically efficacious—but that hardly seems to justify claiming it has no effect at all. What Taylor is pointing toward is some kind of similar ritual(s) to deal with aggressive desires (a complement to marriage’s relation to potentially anarchistic and violent sexual desires).

So what Taylor thinks we lose if we are a-religious secularists is this way (habit?) of thinking about the connection between desires found in selves and some kind of larger forces out there in the universe. And losing that sense of connection means losing any taste (or search) for rituals that take individual desire and place it in relation to those larger, non-human forces. As a result, we lose an effective strategy for the transformation of those desires into something more “perfect,” more in accord with our (utopian?) visions of what human life could be—where that utopian vision in Taylor’s case includes both a more meaningful life on the personal level (since connected to powers and purposes beyond the isolated self) and a more just, less cruel society because rituals contain the destructive potential of sex and violence.

Rorty’s alternative is instructive if we consider the modesty, the anti-utopianism, of liberalism. Rorty doesn’t rule out perfectionism (that would violate liberal permissiveness), but he relegates it to the “private” sphere. Self-overcoming is all well and good—from training for marathons to trying to overcome one’s tendencies to anger—but is a “project” undertaken by a self—not a path mandated by any other power. The “public” sphere is devoted (for Rorty) to overcoming cruelty and to something like a minimal social justice (making sure everyone has the means to sustain life). But any public mandate to “transformation” is opening the path to tyranny. What this Rorty formula leaves unanswered is whether the public (think of the French Revolutionaries and their festivals) should strive to create rituals for the expression/transformation of basic desires. These rituals need not be mandatory, but could still be useful in the effort to curb cruelty and heighten (emotional and moral) commitment to social justice. That is, even a minimalist public sphere (in terms of what it hopes to achieve and in terms of how much its leaves to the discretion of individuals when it comes to where they find meaning and how they spend their time) might still benefit from not being so minimalist in terms of the occasions for public gatherings and rituals that it provides.

Let me end here by saying that I am one of those anti-clerical, anti-religious people (so well described by Taylor) who worries that religion’s focus on the transcendent implies a neglect of, even a contempt for, the ordinary. I am always troubled by a search for salvation—whether that search take a religious or a Utopian form. I think we are better off if, as Gopnik puts it, we accept the imperfections of the human condition, and work on improving that condition, without thinking that some kind of “transformation” will change our lot very dramatically or, once and for all, insure that peace and justice will reign undisturbed from now on.

In my most extreme moments, I want to say not only can’t we be “saved” from the human condition as we now experience it, but that we don’t need to be “saved.” What we need is to take up the work at hand, work that is fairly obvious to anyone who looks around and sees the rising temperatures and the homeless people on our streets and the people going bankrupt trying to pay medical bills. There isn’t a “transformation” of a political or religious/ethical reality that is going to address such issues. It’s doing the gritty down-to-earth work of attending to those issues that will lead to some desirable changes, although not to the end of all our cares and worries. In short, I am secularist insofar as I don’t think help is coming from elsewhere. I have no faith that there are non-human powers to which we can connect—and that those powers will enable some kind of “transformation” that will solve our (humanly created) problems.

“Perfectionism” is a fully permissible add-on, but please do that on your own time (i.e. I accept the Rortyean notion that it is “private”), while the “public” of legal politics will demand that you act decently toward your fellows. Still—with all that—I acknowledge that Taylor poses a significant challenge when he says that even the liberal (whether a Humean or a Kantian liberal) will look to “transform” certain human desires in the name of a more just and less violent society.

Gandhi on Fear and Political Action

Here is yet another attempt to state succinctly one question I have been worrying on this blog for the last six or seven months: if you deny any legitimacy at all to currently constituted order (whether that order is political, economic, or social), what does that entail for the strategy and tactics to be adopted by your politics? If there is no justice to be found or means toward gaining democratic access within current political institutions (i.e. if our democracy is rotten to the core, completely unreachable by its citizens), then how to move forward? Not surprisingly, good answers to these questions are scarce. In the place of good answers, what I have encountered in my readings over the past year (Hardt/Negri, the material on contemporary social movements, Butler on assembly, Moten and now Livingston’s essay) either gesture toward some kind of “multitude” that gathers (but then does what?) or suggests a retreat into some kind of elsewhere, outside of the prevailing madness of the current political/economic reality.

One claim, found in almost all writing about non-violence as a political strategy (so it is present in Todd May and Gene Sharp), is found in Livingston as well: the jujitsu argument. Basically, the idea is that non-violence often works by making the adversaries’ power/strength into a weakness. As Livingston puts it, “the police and the state cannot threaten or coerce where there is no fear of death” (12). Bertrand Russell’s somewhat different version of this argument was to say that if the Belgians had simply laid down arms in 1914 when the Germans came marching in, there would have been much less bloodshed. Armies are not going to kill people who are not actively resisting/fighting against them. Set aside for the moment the fact that 20^th century tyrannies have been all too willing to kill non-resisting, passive people. More germane to my concerns here is that such non-resistance does nothing to undo, to effect a transformation, of the status quo. Just because power is nonplussed or embarrassed, that hardly means it is going to dissolve.

If non-violence effects a jujitsu reversal of the relations of force it can only do so because of the effect on witnesses—witnesses who have some kind of power within the polity. In Gandhi’s case, that appeal would have to be to British subjects. He would demonstrate to those people the moral outrages of empire—and thus make empire unsustainable. King’s work in the South followed a similar path. He was out to demonstrate to the polity the cruelties of Jim Crow. In other words, as I said in the last post, sacrifice is only politically efficacious if it is theater, if it is public. If the state (or other constituted authorities) can kill and keep the fact of its killing a secret, then non-violence has no other way of achieving that hoped-for jujitsu. In short, I don’t see how any non-violent strategy is not deeply and unavoidably dependent on moral appeal–and such appeals rely on the faith/hope that political actors can be swayed by moral considerations. Our current hopelessness resides, in large part, in loss of faith in the efficacy of a politics based on morality–where the key framework for moral positions circle around questions of justice.

But today I want to go down a different path, one that engages with the problematic of “life.” Basically, another track I have been trying to tread this past year concerns the suspicion of “life” as a goal/end, a suspicion found in the work of Foucault, Arendt, Agamben, Charles Taylor, and (now) in Gandhi as represented by Livingston. An attachment to “life” and a notion that the primary political goal is to ensure its “flourishing” is identified as an absolutely core feature of liberalism (Martha Nussbaum is one key figure here) and is seen, at best, as the legitimizing premise of a “bio-power” that augments the power of the state in the name of its ability (through public health measures, compulsory education, policing measures that promote “public safety,” food and drug administrations, welfare policies, and other interventions) to make its citizens lives better. In more extreme critiques, such as found in Taylor and Gandhi (it would seem, as I will show in what follows), those suspicious of setting up “life” as a goal argue that, perversely, the attachment to life serves to create political regimes that end up violently dealing in destruction and death. Such writers employ the rhetorical strategy that Albert O. Hirschman, in his wonderful book The Rhetoric of Reaction, called the most exhilarating piece of reactionary rhetoric, namely the argument that the efforts to cure a certain ill were actually the means toward perpetuating and even augmenting that ill. Hence, in Hirschman’s example, the Charles Murray argument that welfare payments actually make their recipients worse off than if you left them in utter poverty.

Gandhi (let’s leave Taylor aside for the moment; I will return to him in subsequent posts) was undoubtedly a reactionary, if we mean by that term someone who wishes to turn aside or even reverse what is deemed “modern.” Gandhi unabashedly denigrates and wishes to secede from “modern civilization.” In the Western context, as Corey Robin has shown, reactionary thought is almost always tied to a repudiation of the modern in its egalitarian clothes. Western reactionaries are defenders of privilege against what is seen as the leveling effects of modernity—both its political attachment to the equality of all citizens (reactionaries thus fight against the extension of political and social rights—such as the right to vote—against each attempt to extend those rights to new groups like non-whites and women) and modernity’s more radical (in all its leftist forms) attachment to social (status) and economic equality.

It is not clear to me where Gandhi stands on equality; I suspect that he believes the path to “self-rule” that is to be achieved by the practices of satyagraha (the quest for truth) are open to all. So he is not a western style reactionary, fighting against the vulgar masses’ accession to the privileges, status, rights, and prosperity of the chosen few.

But Gandhi is deploying the perversity thesis in his attempt to step outside of modern civilization. The linchpin of his argument (as Livingston portrays it) is an analysis of “fear.” “Modern civilization is intoxicated by its attachment to a materialist conception of the self as an organic body struggling to sustain its corporeal integrity in a hostile environment. The highest good of modern civilization . . . is to promote bodily happiness” (10). It is this attachment to bodily happiness that underwrites the modern subject’s willingness to grant the state such huge amounts of power—power ostensibly used to help secure that bodily happiness, i.e. “bio-power” (although, of course, Gandhi does not use that term). However, “the attachment to bodily happiness engendered by civilization produces illness, disappointment and, ultimately, fear. The modern self clings to bodily happiness out of a fear of harm and death; civilization unwittedly perpetuates this very fear in its attempt to redress it” (11).

We are slaves to our body—and to the fears generated by that body’s vulnerability to various harms, most drastically death. We are incapable of “self-rule,” of true freedom, in Gandhi’s view if we do not get over that fear. “Cultivating fearlessness in the face of death is not simply a preparation for political action; it is itself the practice of freedom itself” (13). Gandhi preaches the abandonment of “the cowardly attachment to mere life. ‘If we are unmanly today,’ Gandhi asserts in 1916, ‘we are so, not because we do not know how to strike, but because we fear to die’”(12). In advocating for this “courage,” this fearlessness, that is required for those aspiring to “self-rule,” Gandhi “fuses the renunciation of the sannyasi priest with the fearless activity of the warrior class (Kshatriya) as two sides of a singular search for truth” (16).

The priestly side is premised on a metaphysics of spirituality. Gandhi writes: “The body exists because of our ego. The utter extinction of the body is maksha [attainment of the truth; full self-realization]” (16). I don’t have anything to say about such a claim, except to say that if Gandhian politics is dependent on accepting that the body is illusion, that it does not truly exist—or that its existence can be nullified by some act of self-transcendence—then I can not participate in Gandhian politics nor do I want to. The pleasures of the body—food, sex, vigorous exercise—seem to me among the chief goods of human life—and I am looking for a politics that affirms and enables the ordinary rather than one which extols a repudiation of the ordinary in the name of some “higher” good. Furthermore, I think the historical record rather convincingly demonstrates that politics driven by “non-ordinary” pursuits have a considerable track record of proving tyrannous and death-dealing.

But I want to focus on the “warrior” side of the occasion at the moment. I think Gandhi’s understanding of the stakes—and even as the way the game plays out—are eerily and disturbingly reminiscent of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic. Basically, it seems that the fundamental path to freedom for Gandhi is to overcome the fear of one’s death. Recall that in Hegel the one who lets the fear of death motivate him becomes the slave; the one who can put his life unreservedly on the line becomes the master. The Gandhian twist is to achieve that overcoming of fear by basically declaring that life—at least bodily life—has no value anyway. The master tries to gain control over me by playing on my fear of death. So the best response is to overcome that fear, to be fearless. And the benefit of—what I gain by—overcoming that fear is freedom. (A pretty empty freedom to my mind if it entails renouncing all bodily pleasures, but maybe freedom is worth that high price.)

My kids gave me a bumper sticker that read: “Oh well, I wasn’t using my civil liberties anyway.” Gandhi’s position strikes me in some ways as similar. The outrage of tyrants is that they make living my ordinary life impossible; they threaten that life everyday, and make it miserable in various ways when they don’t actually take it away. And the best response is to say, “well, life isn’t valuable to me anyway. Do your worst.” Hard for me to swallow.

What also troubles me is the very acceptance of the Hegelian scenario. It leads to two things: first, the notion that manhood—i.e. true courage, the status of warrior—rests on this confrontational encounter with the other. You can only have political freedom, full status, by facing down this other who aims to dominate you. Your options are very few: a) you have to dominate him instead, b) you can cowardly submit and hence become a slave, or c) (in Gandhi’s playing out of the game) you can achieve fearlessness by showing that you don’t care a fig for the life that your adversary aims to take from you. A zero-sum game if there ever was one—and one that fatalistically seems to accept that there is no other basis, no other way for organizing, fundamental human social relations. Our relations to others are antagonistic to the core; it’s a pretty fable to tell ourselves otherwise. No wonder there is then the spiritualist temptation to say there is another realm altogether, one where we can step out of this terrible scenario of endless antagonism. This world is inevitably so bad that we need to invent one elsewhere.

Hegel, of course, then is at pains to show that the master’s “victory” is hollow; the battle over, the master’s life becomes meaningless. The struggle is all for the warrior. Once it is over, his occupation is gone. Whereas the slave finds meaning in his occupation, in the very work that the master makes him do. Not surprisingly, I interpret that next step in Hegel’s text as a discovery of the resources resting in the ordinary. Apart from the heightened moment of confrontation, in the daily rounds of living a life, lie meanings and pleasures sufficient to day thereof.

I want to develop that notion of the ordinary—and of a politics that would nurture/attend to/be built on the cooperative relations that function within the ordinary in subsequent posts (while continuing to think about Taylor’s claim that such “bodily happiness”—to use Gandhi’s term—is “shallow.”)

But to finish up today’s post, I want to highlight something else: namely, the implied (or not so implied) contempt in using the term “coward” to refer to those who are attached to “bodily happiness.” It is no accident that Gandhi resorts to gendered terms (lack of “manliness”) when his thoughts turn to fear and fearlessness—and no accident that this proponent of non-violence talks of “warriors.” (Livingston tries to claim Gandhi upends traditional gendered associations, but I find his argument strained at that point.) Running throughout all the critiques of “life”—which entail, as I have been suggesting, the recognition that attachment to life is joined to an intense valuation of “the ordinary”—is an affinity to the long-standing disdain for the “bourgeois,” for the unheroic lives of the classes that have the nerve to push the aristocracy to the sidelines, and who devote such attention to “getting and spending.” (I think we get this contempt for the bad taste and vulgar pleasures and petty ambitions of the masses in spades in Arendt’s hatred of the social and her diatribes against a politics geared toward issues of sustaining life. Her politics is meant to be heroic through and through by showing its disregard of such material issues. “As for living, we have our servants to do that for us”—a favorite quote of Yeats’s, taken from a French symbolist writer.) The haughty aristocrat merges with the splendid warrior, the one who doesn’t count costs and give a fig for his life, willing to put it on the line at any moment since his honor, his sense of self-worth, and his dignity are all far more valuable than life. (Nietzsche also obviously partakes in this lingering aristocratic disdain for the bourgeois and his material concerns.)

Gandhi is hardly as outrageous as Arendt and Nietzsche in his contempt for the masses. I have already mentioned that he certainly seems to believe that the quest for truth is open to all. (Similarly, Arendt certainly believes that the realm of political action is open to all. She just laments that the moderns, because of misplaced desires and allegiances, seem to prefer social activities to political action. Nietzsche is another matter altogether; he does think most humans incapable of heroic action.) Nevertheless, Gandhi is accusing the mass of men of cowardice. He is saying that lots of people desire the wrong thing. They are living their lives in a fundamentally misguided way, one that also entails their unfreedom. The use of the term “mere life” (12) is a strong indicator here. Somehow, “life” itself is not a sufficient reason for living; there needs to be something more. It is that insistence, that hectoring admonishment, that I am suspicious of. I think the heroic life, with its attachment to the agonistic encounter we find in Hegel, much more trouble than it is worth.