Category: Liberalism

Sacrifice and Politics

Every day it seems I discover a new reason to understand how completely I am a secular, liberal humanist. And I am pushed each time to double down on that commitment. The latest occasion is reading a superb essay by Alexander Livingston, “Fidelity to Truth: Gandhi and the Genealogy of Civil Disobedience,” published in the journal Political Theory (2017: pp. 1-26).

Livingston makes a compelling case that Gandhi’s understanding of non-violence and of political action are severely misunderstood (“creatively misread” if we want to be more generous) if adapted to a means-ends understanding of politics (i.e. non-violence adopted as a tactic to gain certain ends) or if non-violent civil disobedience in Gandhi is interpreted as entailing an appeal to (hence a respect for) constituted legal forms and authorities. Livingston calls the theory of disobedience that sees it as mobilizing a certain kind of action in order to sway constituted authority “liberal”—and claims (persuasively) that such a view accords those authorities a legitimacy that Gandhi does not grant them. Gandhi, instead, advocates a political practice that steps outside of constituted modernity and its self-praising notion of itself as “civilized” in order to seek an elsewhere. That search is, in Gandhi, the search for truth—which should be the locus of action. Gandhi seeks “to reorient the time of action away from the teleological pursuit of abstractions, like principles of justice, towards giving oneself over to the experience of seeking truth in the lived present” (19). “The pursuit of truth reorients political action inwards toward a transformation of the self rather than primarily outwards as an appeal to the law” (14). It entails “courageously acting without attachment to the fruits of action” (18). As contrasted to the “impatience” that characterizes ends-driven political movements, Gandhi issues a “call for patience” that “by contrast, repudiates the very idea that the future can provide redress to the present” (9).

The similarities to Fred Moten’s work (my post on Moten here) are apparent to me. On the one hand, there is the totalizing rejection of modernity as rotten all the way down. (Livingston explains to us how Gandhi includes modern medicine in his totalizing renunciation.) On the other hand, there is a search for an “elsewhere” to modernity, a place where one can live somewhat sheltered by its horrors. For Moten, that elsewhere is “black sociality,” the undercommons. For Gandhi, it is the pursuit of truth. In both cases, I find the elsewhere disappointingly vague. Truth in Gandhi is radically unspecified, which (of course) its adherents would say is partly the point. The closest we get is the recommendation of a set of practices of “humility and self-renunciation” that, combined with exhortations to be “fearless” in the face of death, are supposed to lead (admittedly paradoxically) to “self-realization” (16). Equally paradoxically, this patient self-renunciation will prove politically more efficacious than more direct, ends-oriented political action.

I don’t see it. Here’s my basic position. We live in a social/political order that imposes sacrifices on the many. That imposition is wildly unequal. The politics to which I subscribe is oriented toward challenging—and changing—that inequality. Three issues immediately arise.

One: is the goal access to the goods that the privileged already enjoy or to establish an entirely new social/political order? I read the suffragette movement (with which, as Livingston shows, Gandhi was in continuous dialogue) and the American civil rights movement as seeking access. Hence the huge emphasis on the getting the vote. They wanted in; so, I guess, their movements qualify as “liberal” in Livingston’s terms. They affirmed the current order of law; they just sought a voice within it.

A similar question would arise in relation to economics. Is the goal a piece of the pie—or a transformation of the whole economic order? Social democracy, as I understand it and am committed to it, looks to state/political intervention in the economic to see that its goods are more widely and equitably distributed while also attending to the conditions of labor, and controlling environmental devastation—not some vision of an entirely alternative economic order.

It looks like Gandhian politics doesn’t even address those questions in any specific way. There is the total condemnation of modernity and the desire/set of practices to step entirely aside from it—but no strategy for the dismantling of the modernity that is loathed. Except perhaps the old “what if they declared a war and no one showed up.” Seceding from modernity seems to be the path both Moten and Gandhi offer.

Which leads me to number two of my responses. Here’s the oddity of my—and many other intellectuals’ political position: I am doing just fine, thank you. The inequalities of the current order do not afflict me. So what is the appropriate political action for someone of my sort? I cannot help but feel that devotion to self-realization through a search for a vague and never to be fully attained truth is a cop-out. It may be a deeply satisfying practice, but I can’t see how it does anything for the many who are living lives of misery in the current order. The powers that be would be very happy to see all the trouble-making activists and intellectuals turn to the path of truth-seeking.

In short, politics is rhetorical. And a key feature of its rhetoric is appeals to principles of, intuitions about, justice. Practices of political action take place in public and are meant to persuade others of the righteousness of one’s cause. Gandhi’s truth-seeking is only political because it was conducted in public—and was meant to sway the many fence-sitters, those who were still sitting on the sidelines. The extent to which such political action does accord legitimacy to currently constituted power depends on the extent to which it rests on a notion that democratic power should rest in the majority. Politics as rhetoric is premised on the need to create that majority through public action/speech that tries to win the undecided (or even your adversaries) to your side. Non-violence to my mind always involves this acknowledgement (even if never explicitly enunciated) that the only means to legitimate power is through democratic processes and persuasion. To seize power through violence is illegitimate—and (furthermore) usually has deeply undesirable consequences.

So: I can’t buy the notion of political action that does not have any eye on its “fruits.” The pursuit of self-realization is not political (to my mind) unless it aims for political effects—and I prefer action that aims for those effects by trying to mobilize a democratic majority. What worries me about Moten—less about Gandhi–is that their attempt to step outside of modernity leads to a non-political quietism that doesn’t challenge modernity on the grounds on which it could be changed. Non-political efforts of self-realization are not outlawed; I just don’t like it when they claim to be political, to be transformative as some level beyond that of the self.

Third, I have the traditional worries about power when I read this account of Gandhi. I.e. that established power is perfectly happy to allow people to sacrifice themselves and/or retreat into some space of spiritual transformation. If we live in a world of unequally imposed sacrifices, then it seems dangerous to me to embrace sacrifice. Furthermore, the worldview that sees sacrifice as a (necessary?) pathway to achieving certain goods is precisely the one I wish to combat. The logic of sacrifice partakes of an economic logic—that everything has its cost—that I want to repudiate. It seems to me that adherence to that logic only augments suffering—while providing a facile explanation of why suffering must be endured. I want to see sacrifice as (in the vast majority of cases) as what power imposes on the non-powerful—so I respond to an embrace of sacrifice as the non-powerful doing power’s work for it.

Additionally, I don’t see any compelling reason to believe that practices of self-renunciation and self-sacrifice will lead to “truth.” Just as possible to claim—like Blake or Wilhelm Reich—that a full-scale embrace of one’s desires is the path to full self-realization. What would/could count as evidence here? When the desired end—truth or self-realization—is so nebulous? Even if self-sacrifice has pay-offs you affirm, what would lead me to believe I would get similar results? Try and see is fine. But praising sacrifice in the name of truth doesn’t seem to me enough. Livingston writes: “Truth is one but our perspectives on it are plural” (19), but I would argue (instead) that truths are many. The pluralism goes deeper than just a multiplicity of perspectives. There is not one Truth with a capital T, but many truths—and they are not even all compatible with one another. It’s a messy universe we inhabit—and I am suspicious of all efforts to clean up the mess via assertion of a unifying truth (or any other covering term one prefers.) In short, I am not a monotheist, but a full-bore pagan.

“Ends-oriented political action characterizes the weapons of the weak: non-violence is a commitment that remains conditional on the good will of others to concede to the justice of one’s demands,” Livingston writes (15). But I would read it exactly in reverse. Stepping aside from pushing for ends and eschewing incessant clamoring for justice is the weapon of the weak. It is tossing in the towel, using non-participation as the only option open because the battle is lost. And, yes, politics is about trying to engage the “good will” of others by convincing them of the facts of injustice that need to be addressed. There is no politics without that rhetorical work, without that attempt to sway the others with whom one lives in the polis. To cede to others the political work that centers around disputes about justice is simply to accept defeat.

I am going to stop here—but will use tomorrow’s post to take up another thread in the Livingston’s essay: Gandhi’s analysis of “fear.” Let me finish by saying that I have no doubt that Livingston’s reading of Gandhi is correct—and that Livingston, in channeling Gandhi, is not necessarily fully endorsing his views. My point is to say how those Gandhian views do not seem to me terribly productive in the context of our current political battles.

Death and Hedonism

Here’s Charles Taylor on the failure of modern humanism to confront/adequately understand death:

“Modern humanism tends to develop a notion of human flourishing which has no place for death. Death is simply the negation, the ultimate negation, of flourishing; it must be combated, and held off till the very last moment. Against this, there have developed a whole range of views in the post-Enlightenment world, which while remaining atheist, or at least ambivalent and unclear about transcendence, have seen in death, at least the moment of death, or the standpoint of death, a privileged position, one at which the meaning, the point of life comes clear, or can be more closely attained than in the fullness of life. Mallarmé, Heidegger, Camus, Célan, Beckett: the important thing is that these figures have not been marginal, forgotten figures, but their work has seized the imagination of their age” (The Secular Age, 320-21).

Where to begin? Let me start by trying to state the “modern humanist” position—which is where I take my stand. First, life is a precious good. It is not necessarily the only good. There are situations in which life may be sacrificed in the name of an other good. Within the plurality of goods, there are always going to be trade-offs, compromises. But within that plurality of goods, life stands as a very high good, one that is sacrificed only in very severe (what might be appropriately called “tragic”) circumstances.

Second, life is a good possessed by every living creature. (I am going to put aside the issue of non-human living creatures for the moment, but acknowledge that a humanist like Martha Nussbaum accepts that placing such a high value on life entails extending that value to non-human creatures.) For that reason, decisions and actions that deprive humans of life are to be viewed with great suspicion. The burden of proof is always on the one who wants to sacrifice life in the name of a different good. I think individuals have a right to suicide—to deciding that their individual life is not worth extending in relation to any number of different considerations. But I just as firmly want to hold to the illegitimacy of any third party imposing or inflicting death on another individual. Here’s where I buy into liberal notions of self-possession. One’s life belongs to, is possessed by, the person in whom that life inheres. How to live that life and how to end it are the individual’s prerogative. It is a formula for tyranny to hand that prerogative over to another.

Third, I completely buy into the Sen/Nussbaum reincarnation of the Aristotelean notion of “flourishing.” The quality of a life matters—and, to a certain extent, can be measured. There are material necessities to the sustenance of life, and there are political/social necessities to the ability to act effectively to live the life one desires to live. Full autonomous freedom is not possible given the facts of human sociality, starting with the extended dependence of children upon the nurture/care of parents and the ongoing dependence of all upon various forms of social cooperation to create the material and emotional goods humans require to flourish. In other words, the notion of “flourishing” complicates enormously any notion of individual autonomy and “self-possession.” But such complications do not render meaningless the idea that selves should get to choose their sexual partners, their friends, their occupations, their manner of living. And certainly those complications do not mean that an individual’s life is at the disposal of others. The reverse. All the obligation runs the other way. It is the responsibility of a well-ordered just society to do everything in its power to assure the flourishing of its members.

Fourth, as Taylor puts it, death is the antithesis of flourishing. There are many other ills life is subject to, but death is an absolute negation. As I have already said, there are circumstances in which death is not the worst option. But I would say that such circumstances are understood in relation to the goal of “flourishing.” Thus, many old people in our society are kept alive past the point where a flourishing life is possible. In such cases, death can be preferable to the diminished—and often painful—life that is its alternative.

Fifth. Even in such cases—where death is chosen over a diminished life—I can’t see how (except in a spiritualist or Romantic view that is utterly foreign to me and seems, in fact, dangerous in ways I am about to explain) one can imagine that death offers some kind of special insight (is a “privileged position” to quote Taylor). For starters, most deaths are random. Not just accidental deaths, but also cancers and heart attacks. Who gets a brain tumor has no relation to the way the sick person led her life. Moralistically, we may like to link some cancers and heart attacks to bad habits: smoking, bad diet, lack of exercise. But even there the results are random. Smoking increases your chances of lung cancer and stroke, but doesn’t guarantee either outcome. Death is, no doubt, a momentous event. But to “privilege” it is to (desperately it seems to me) attempt to assign meaning to something that is devoid of meaning.

Maybe here is where my “humanism” is most obvious. Life has meaning, I would say, precisely to the extent that humans create or assign that meaning. Life in and of itself is just a biological fact, generated out of the randomness and chance that is Darwinian biology. Death is no different. It, too, is a biological fact. Any meaning it acquires comes from humans, the meaning-creating, meaning-obsessed species. And given that I value life over death, I find a claim that death is “privileged” in some kind of way troublesome. It seems wrong to take one moment in a long history (the whole trajectory of a life) as somehow definitive. I don’t think lives possess that kind of unity; lives are much messier, pluralistic things, composed of many parts, not all of which fit together. In other words, I don’t see a life as generating a narrative that somehow accounts for all of it. And, even more, if I did think some special moments offer a particular insight into the nature of the life an individual lived, I would not be inclined to say that the way that person died was especially significant. Yes, in some cases, the death tells us a huge amount. Think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer or even Primo Levi. But I would say that in many more cases, other moments are more significant. For most of the victims of the Holocaust, to say their deaths offered the moment (again to quote Taylor) when “the point of life comes clear” borders on obscenity. In their case—as in many other cases—how would we think of death in any more meaningful terms than (again to quote Taylor) as “the negation, the ultimate negation, of flourishing?” I don’t see any more acceptable way of describing what their deaths mean, or how we should think about those deaths.

Sixth. All of this relates back to my central reason for reading the Taylor. He is convinced that “life” is not enough. That humans need something more than life, some connection to a divine, some relation to a world apart from the biological, material one, in order to . . . what? Lead a full life? (But that would return us to ground of life.) Be fully moral? (He usually wants to eschew moralism.) Realize their full potential? (He does seem attracted to this notion, as I will consider in subsequent posts.) Avoid selfish, mindless hedonism. (Again, a hint of this idea in Taylor. The issue is, even if I value my life and its flourishing, why should I value others’ lives, and what if my flourishing can only be purchased at others’ expense? Taking a flourishing life as an extremely high value might lead to behavior roughly characterized as social Darwinism.) Even if we grant all of these Taylor worries about valuing life, none of them would justify giving death some special privilege. Altruism, sacrifice, a relation to a transcendent are all understandable alternatives to a cult of life—but it is much less clear what a focus on death has to offer. That focus seems tied to two ideas that seem to me simply wrong. One, the idea that a life possesses a unifying narrative that locks into place at the moment of death, with that moment serving a particularly salient purpose in shaping that narrative. Two, that the meaning of human life is only secured by a relation to something that transcends life—and that death offers some kind of privileged access to the transcendent realm.

The bottom line, I guess, is that I believe that the nothingness that preceded coming into conscious life is mirrored by the nothingness that comes after death. If death has some privileged relation to meaning, it can only have that for the living, for the survivors, not for the dead person himself. Meaning is tied to consciousness—and dead people are not conscious. And I don’t believe that in the moment of death, for a fleeting instant, “the point of life comes clear” to the person who is dying.

All of this is not to say that the fact of death is irrelevant to the meaning of life. But the fact of death is not more relevant or more crucial than the facts of love, of sex, of our need to eat food and drink water, of our dependence on a whole social order to survive. All of those facts and many others add up to what we might call “the human condition.” And we can certainly identify the ways that different cultures have understood and responded to death. But I still don’t see where the “modern humanist” response to death is so obviously less adequate than other possibilities. And let me go on record as saying, yes, death “must be combated” (to quote Taylor again.) A society that thought illnesses should just be passively accepted or, more germane to actual cases, or thought that death on a mass scale was to be accepted as the price for social progress, or glory, or victory/revenge over one’s enemies, or economic prosperity for the few would not qualify as a “good” or desirable society for this modern humanist. Placing life as a very, very high value—and combating all the ways humans have denigrated life and cultivated death—seems to me the right way to go.

What could ground this high valuation placed on life? Mostly I would like to resist this call for grounding. I want to say (after Wittgenstein) that the spade turns here, that the mistake is to ask for grounding, as if skepticism about the fact that most people value their lives, try in their every day practices to sustain, nurture, and enhance life is not enough. That somehow they need some other reason to be devoted to their lives and the lives of the people they care for, they love. (The primary goal of a liberal ethics is to extend that circle of care out to include all with whom I share the world; Rorty is particularly good on this point.)

We can give a fancy name to this devotion to life. Hedonism—a name that the philosophic tradition has usually used pejoratively. I would define hedonism as “the effort to live the best life possible, given the inevitable constraints under which any life is lived.” How “the best life possible” is understood varies widely, which is what gives us human variety even as it is also a source of conflict. But I am taking the position that hedonism ought to be a respectable position. Here is life—a gift given to us out of nowhere or, at least, out of a void of which I, the holder of this life, have no knowledge and no experience—and one possible response is to live this life to the fullest, knowing that it will end as it began, with the passing away of my consciousness into that void. Life presents a myriad of possibilities—and I undertake to realize at least some of them, trying to activate the ones that make me feel most alive.

The specter haunting hedonism, of course, is selfishness. Two responses have been to say that happiness and flourishing, feeling most alive, are best served in collective, cooperative enterprises with others (from raising a family to engagement in larger social endeavors) or, alternatively, to a feeling that my flourishing is not fully enjoyable, is somehow spoiled, by seeing others who cannot flourish in the world I and they inhabit together. Taylor calls such views the “modern social order” and sees them, with their focus on altruism and on the equality of all individuals (their equal right to the means for flourishing) as legacies of Christianity. I actually don’t care much one way or the other if he is right about that. I do think that such views are more a matter of sensibility than of rational argument. (My understanding of morality goes back to John Dewey and Richard Rorty.) And it is certainly a matter of history and one’s upbringing in a particular social milieu that shapes sensibility–and I hardly want to deny that my personal history and my society’s history includes much Christianity, as one among other shaping influences. How to weigh the various inputs and their respective contribution to my own–and to a “modern moral order’s”–sensibility is a trickier matter.

In any case, hedonism can incorporate altruism if the path to happiness includes attention to the needs of others as part and parcel of my well-being.

Now, quite obviously, others find well-being in competitive relations to others and seem unable to even experience their own good fortune unless bolstered by the sight of less fortunate others. The moralism that an atheist links to religion finds plenty of secular analogues here, with the notions of the undeserving poor, and attachment to the idea that the market somehow rewards the virtuous and justly punishes the ne’er do wells. The hedonist cannot discount the pleasure humans take in punishing other humans, even the pleasure humans have taken in inflicting death on other humans.

But the impossibility of a fail-safe hedonism (or humanism for that matter) adheres to every other –ism and every religion. The mistake is to think that some system of thought or of beliefs will guarantee for once and for all virtuous human behavior. No system is up to that demand. That’s why I am saying that morality is not a matter of ideas or arguments or grounding principles or beliefs. Nothing in human history suggests that such things will insure that the most fundamental of moral tenets—say, the injunction against murder—will be upheld. Just the opposite. The systems will be used to justify murder. So hedonism—an attachment to life and its flourishing—fares no worse than the alternatives.

Can I argue it fares better? I want to, if only because placing such a high value on life should give pause before spreading death about. But I will leave off here—saving for another time the attempt to claim humanistic hedonism will have less blood on its hands than its rivals.

Meaninglessness and Modernity

My goal for the month is to get through Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age, which was the “it” book about ten years ago. I read 250 pages of it at the time, then put it down and only picked it up again about a month ago. Now I have managed to get through another 80 pages or so—which only leaves about 350 pages to go.

Anyway, Taylor has always been a liberal critic of liberalism—going all the way back to his first “big book,” the one on Hegel, published in 1975. He was thought of as a “communitarian” in those days because his theme was the emptiness of “negative liberty” as contrasted to the notion of “situated freedom” that he derived from Hegel. (In A Secular Age, Taylor calls the liberal, autonomous self “the buffered self,” barricaded against “communion” with others or with the world, taking a detached, “objectivist” view of things, better to maintain its disengaged, “cold” autonomy.) The basic idea was that the autonomous, disconnected self, that sits at the center of any idea of negative freedom, is so contentless that its freedom to act is basically meaningless. I was greatly influenced by Taylor in my Postmodernism and its Critics, where I took his “situated freedom” in a more materialist direction, thinking about the ways in which social structures and access to/distribution of material resources were central to any ability to act. From there, I later moved to using the term “effective freedom,” which I got from John Dewey. The notion is fairly simple: freedom is just another word for nothing unless you have the wherewithal to actually enact the things you dream of accomplishing. In other words, a certain social organization that attends to material needs is required for freedom to be enjoyed. A version, in other words, of the Marxist critique of the “formal freedoms” of a bourgeois society.

But I want now to think about Taylor’s assertion that modernity is afflicted with a certain kind of spiritual “malaise” (his word), a pervasive uneasiness (not felt by all, but by many) that their lives lack purpose or meaning. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche saw all around him, or Durkheim’s anomie, or Baudelaire’s ennui. Taylor insists this is new. “What you won’t hear at other times and places is one of the commonplaces of our day (right or wrong is beside my point), that our age suffers from a threatened loss of meaning. This malaise is specific to a buffered identity, whose very invulnerability opens it to the danger that not just evil spirits, cosmic forces or gods won’t ‘get to’ it, but that nothing significant will stand out for it” (303).

Note the hedge: Taylor doesn’t commit himself fully to asserting that modernity is truly a realm of meaninglessness. He only insists that the feeling that one lacks meaning is prevalent. And, elsewhere, he also admits that this feeling is mostly articulated by elites.

My basic reaction is to say that I don’t see it. Sufficient unto the day is the meaning thereof. What strikes me as much more evident is that the daily round, the struggle to keep life going and halfway bearable, provides more than enough purpose for most people. I am fully persuaded that meaning is generated through the daily entanglement within social practices and our relations with/to others. One possibility, I guess, is that modernity pushes more people into loneliness, into disconnected lives that exclude them from being embedded in larger social relations. And I don’t doubt that something like “modern individualism” means that some selves (again, we need to think about privilege and elites here) develop strategies that provide them greater autonomy vis a vis the social orders in which they are embedded. Buffered selves are not, however, necessarily (or even, I would argue, primarily) disconnected selves. Rather, they are selves who enjoy (I choose this word deliberately) some power within the social relations in which they are entangled. Everything we know about human social orders tells us that power will be abused where it is possessed. Which is why idealizing traditional communities, with their strict hierarchies, is either foolishly naïve or tantamount to an inegalitarian defense of privilege. As with wealth, the only good way forward is for a fuller, more equitable distribution of power. Unbuffered selves are exploited selves.

But back to nihilism. I just don’t see it (as I have said.) I am tempted to go so far as to say it takes leisure—and lots of it—to suffer from ennui. Just getting by takes all the time and attention of lots of people—and they don’t seem inclined to wonder if somehow there is more, that somehow their lives are missing something. Rather, I think it much more likely that what we have is a case of elites who disparage what keeps “ordinary people” engaged. I am thinking here of Thoreau’s claim that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” or even of Wordsworth’s complaint that “getting and spending takes all our power.” What is troublesome about the masses is that they don’t experience anomie, that they find “getting and spending” good enough for them, thank you very much. They aren’t searching for meaning, they are searching for a way to get ahead. Life is hard enough to keep one going; it provides plenty of purpose in its daily rounds.

Let me be clear: I don’t think it actually functions all that differently for elites. I think that they, too, are mostly sustained by the demands that each day brings, along with their own ambitions (for acclaim, recognition etc within their own social spheres). I just think elites are endlessly snobby about the form that they see non-elite desires taking. (I am somewhat channeling Bourdieu’s Distinction here, with its wonderful discussions of how elite taste scorns everything bodily and material in the name of “higher” pleasures. We arrive here at J. S. Mill’s worries about and scorn of the pleasures of the pig.) Elites may have a different content for their purposes, but I think the form is much the same, i.e. generated out of the social relations in which they are embedded.

What to conclude? 1. I am with Taylor in seeing “meaning” as a function of social entanglements. Thus, if modernity truly extracts people from such entanglements, then modernity would be afflicted by a loss of meaning. But that is a very, very different claim than saying that a secular age that only offers entanglement in the here and now—and not some kind of additional relationship to the transcendent—leaves us short of meaning or purpose. I am willing to grant to Taylor that for some people a relationship to the divine stands as an important motivator in their lives. But that is, for me, just like saying that for some people reading books, with their relationship to absent, often dead, authors is important to their lives. Many don’t read books—and never feel any absence of purpose because they don’t read. Similarly, many will do just fine without any relation to a divine.

I am suspicious, as is obvious, as anyone imputing to others a state of desperation, anomie, loss of purpose etc. I don’t quite know what would stand as evidence to back up such a claim. I suspect that, much more often, the basis for the claim is a distaste for, even incredulity about, the things in which people find purpose. Surely, the critic says, that can’t be enough to sustain a meaningful life? There must be more, there must be a longing for more. Why? Just because it wouldn’t satisfy you, that’s no evidence that it is unsatisfactory to that other guy.
I hardly want to deny the existence of despair. (Let me for the moment make a false distinction between despair and depression, where depression is [as we say these days] a “clinical” condition while despair is something produced by the external circumstances in which the self finds itself.) I suspect that despair is rarely a function of the general conditions of modernity; in other words, I don’t believe in some general malaise inflicting our (or some other) culture. Rather, despair (at least within the structures of feeling that I see as fairly general in our culture) comes from one of three sources. (Pardon the wild generalizations here.) 1. Suffering, either one’s own and [even worse] that of one’s loved ones that cannot be alleviated. 2. Being caught into dismal situations that one cannot alter or escape. Such situations can be a job which one hates because constantly humiliated or exploited or made to do things that are shameful, or caught in certain social relations that, for whatever reason, one thinks must be endured even though terrible. 3. Being excluded from entanglement in the kinds of social relations that generate meaning. The obvious case here is unemployment. Work is a central producer of meaning in modern societies. The weight (in terms of senses of self-worth and of engagement with others in a collective enterprise) placed on work in our society is truly frightening—and is what makes unemployment an existential as well as a financial disaster. I do think Taylor is good in pushing us to think about the possibility of societies which would have many more sources of meaning aside from one’s work.

Three further thoughts for today. The first is that (again, generalizing wildly) I don’t actually think religion (at least in contemporary American society) functions primarily as a source of meaning. Or if it does, it does so by way of conferring an identity and offering a set of social relations apart from work and family. I don’t think it has much to do at all with a relation to the transcendent, to god. I do think it offers some consolation for suffering, some modes of coping with sickness, death, and other ills. But it does not seem to be offering some kind of alternative path through the modern world, some other way of constructing a life. Again, for a few it does do that. But the Simone Weils among us are few and far between. For the vast majority, their religion sits comfortably with their leading completely conventional modern lives. I just don’t see where the religious in America today acknowledge or act upon some kind of “malaise,” some kind of awareness of modernity’s constitutive shortcomings. The religious, in other words, are as casually modern as the rest of us, unmoved (by all appearances) by a sense that there must be “more.” Religion is a source of meaning, yes, in that it affords participation in another, different, set of communal relations, but it hardly seems at odds with modernity. Evangelicals may deplore modern permissiveness and keep their children out of public schools, but they still associate virtue with toeing the line in a capitalist economy and find purpose in constructing a life in the here and now.

The second thought concerns “bullshit jobs.” Reading David Graeber’s book of that title is on my to-do list. The issue it raises is the extent to which people find their jobs meaningless. Again, I suspect this is an elitist projection. I could never find that job meaningful, so how could someone else. There must be millions and millions of people unhappy at work, pushing paper and doing it only out of raw economic necessity, the elite observer opines.

I spent eight years running an institute, with eight to ten employees underneath me. At least four of them did jobs I could never stand doing for more than three weeks. But they were conscientious and engaged workers. Some were less competent than others, but the less competent ones were, in some ways, even more engaged because it took all of their effort and attention not to screw up. There was some grousing, of course, about various kinds of bureaucratic requirements that created work for our staff, but, generally speaking, loyalty to our little platoon trumped issues about the meaningfulness of (or need for) the work that had to get done. In short, like soldiers (as every study of them has shown), the meaning is generated out of the relation to one’s comrades, one’s fellow workers, without much attention paid (no less worrying about) larger meanings or purposes or the larger organization’s stated goals (or “mission” in today’s jargon.) Thus, cynicism about the larger organization (again, a mainstay of soldier’s lives) can easily be combined with a deep, and satisfying, engagement with the daily round of tasks performed in the company of a group of comrades.

As I say, I will read Graeber, since he has done some field work among those who have bull shit jobs—and maybe he will convince me that a pervasive sense of meaninglessness exists among such workers. For now, I don’t see an epidemic of meaninglessness all around me.

Third, and finally, I do however see an epidemic of depression (coupled with its evil twin, anxiety). But I see it as produced by the crisis of work. Even in 1951, Arendt (in Origins of Totalitarianism) could point to the problem of “superfluouness,” her euphemism for unemployment. The idea was that the Depression created the opening for fascism. People want to be needed, to be put to work, to be asked to join something, to be given something to join. The Nazis offered the nation, while the work was war. Our current epidemic of depression is caused by the lack of work—and the deep insecurity of those who do have jobs. [Neat that the same word, depression, stands for the economic condition that causes unemployment and the psychological condition that follows upon unemployment.] For our young people, finding a job that in some ways matches up with what they were educated to do has become a terrifying—and often unsuccessful—quest as the ranks of the solidly middle class are depleted. For our blue collar workers, either the jobs have disappeared forever or are on the verge of disappearing. Here is where the devil of the modern location of primary meaning in employment makes its horrors most felt. We need to proliferate the sites of meaning production, of social entanglement in cooperative endeavors that strike people as meaningful. We have to learn how not to work—and to not feel bad when we are not working. And if there are bullshit jobs, ones that people find utterly meaningless, then the problem is compounded.

Perhaps (it is at least a plausible argument) the loss of a sense of transcendence, of a relation to the divine, partly causes the way meaning gets so centered in work in the modern age. And if meaning and work are so entangled, an end to work (on the personal level as involuntary unemployment, and on a societal level with the advent of robots) is a disaster that we need to figure out how to address. But I still want to say that engagement in the things of this world, with the people with whom we share it, provides plenty of meaning for the vast majority. If there is a “malaise,” it is a product of the specific ill of unemployment (taking that term in its largest possible sense of exclusion from doing things with others) that is to blame, not some sickness unto death lodged in the modern soul. And if the remedy is to learn how to find meaning in things apart from work, that doesn’t necessarily entail turning our eyes away from the things of this world.

“Good Enough”

In my last post, I said that liberals are believers in the “good enough,” in accepting the better in place of holding out for the best.

But I can only endorse that position with some serious qualifications. The first is that “good enough” is always contestable. That was the point of saying politics is endless. Political debate, deliberation, and conflict is often about what good the polity should be aiming to achieve. But, in other cases, the debate is about whether the extent to which we have reached a particular good is “good enough.” Could we do better? 80% of the population has health insurance. Should we be content with that level of achievement?

There will always be people who say we are not doing well enough. And such people are to be cherished. The “good enough” position asserts that any arrangement is imperfect. Under that condition there is much to be gained, and little to be lost, by encouraging those who point out how short of perfection we fall. Every halting point, every compromise, is unsatisfactory to some degree—and we hardly want to lose sight of the imperfections that mar every temporary arrangement/agreement.

We stand on muddy, messy ground here—and that is partly the point. Politics is messy because we never know for sure if different tactics will bring us closer to our goal—or if we have maximized what we can achieve. I am loath (allergic to) declaring imperfection inevitable. I hate appeals to “necessity” that seem designed to shut down utopian aspirations or radical critiques. Keeping the realm of possibility as open as possible seems, to me, essential to an imaginative progressive politics. To be called utopian should be an honorific, not a slur.

But—here’s the muddiness—some way of organizing things has to prevail in the imperfect meantime; we cannot leave everything entirely open, fully in flux, waiting upon the perfect. So political fights will also be about whether this current set of arrangements is “good enough” to accept for now, even as we acknowledge its falling short of the ideal. When, in other words, is “good enough” good enough? A very, very, very, difficult question to answer—and one that logic, reason, theory, philosophy cannot do much to help answer. We are here in the thick of the underdetermined world where “truth” has little or no role to play, the world that Arendt identified as quintessentially political.

Temperamentally, I find myself fairly often impatient with the perfectionists who refuse to sign on to an existing arrangement. I say, very likely unfairly, that they prefer their purity, prefer keeping their hands clean, to pitching in to do work required in the here and now. Keeping aloof becomes, all too easily, a permanent stance, a kind of ironic negation of anything that actually exists. It can, no doubt, be difficult to find anything to affirm in this sublunary world—that is, anything to affirm besides the ideals that would allow us to escape our sublunary condition.

But I guess—I never really thought of it this way before—I feel some kind of duty of affirmation. If one is, as I am, an absolute atheist, then there is nothing other than this world. And, yes, we humans have managed to fuck it up mightily. Still, that we have the power to fuck it up means we also should take at least some responsibility for it, for the ways it is arranged and unfolds. Ironic aloofness is one way of denying responsibility. It’s not my fault. I did no harm. But it is also a strategy for not making anything at all happen; I sit aside waiting for the arrival of a perfection that never comes, of a world that will live up to my standards. Good luck with that.

I prefer the route of saying “find something to affirm—and build out from there.” The great good things in my world are my family, my friends, my students, and my colleagues. With all of them I am able to have interactions that are life-affirming, that yield pleasure and insight, and provide opportunities for giving and receiving. From there, it makes sense to affirm (even reserving a right to criticize all their imperfections) the institutions and social arrangement that make those interactions possible. There are worldly settings for our relationships and it seems foolish to ignore or condemn those settings wholesale.

The liberal is often derided as a compromiser, as someone who muddles through, trying to have a little bit of this and a little bit of that, lacking a firm sense of contradiction. And the liberal is also seen as a Pollyanna, resolutely closely his eyes to injustices that undergird the social arrangements and institutions he proclaims “good enough.” But the liberal is not a conservative, not someone who is deeply committed to defending the status quo as the best we can do. And the liberal is not a reactionary, insisting that the golden age was somewhere in the past, and we must tear down the present to return to that prior era. The liberal is (in William James’s terms) a meliorist, forward-looking, in favor of improvement, always willing to measure our imperfect present against the ideals we espouse—and that we fall short of achieving. But the liberal refuses to condemn the present tout court and refuses to believe that absolute and violent repudiation of that present is likely to create even a better world than the present, no less a perfect one.

Again, to conclude, no theory or philosophy can guide us here. When is the status quo so unjust, so bad, that drastic action is justified to change it? When are more moderate strategies for improvement the better course? These are matters of judgment, and there is no determinative calculus to tell us which judgments are correct. Politics takes place on the field of judgment—and all we have to guide us are past instances, analogies and examples, and projective (imaginative) suppositions, none of which comes with any guarantees. Judgment, like social arrangements, are good and better, but rarely vault into the land of the “best.” We can only try to make our judgments “good enough.” Which means those judgments lead to tolerable decisions and actions, to doing things that introduce at least some improvement over the currently existing state of affairs. And then we count on “the cries of the wounded” (another phrase from William James) to let us know how the new arrangement still falls short.