Category: Violence

The Perplexities of Violence

I have been gnawing at this issue for some forty years now and am no nearer to a formulation that satisfies me. I think it’s because there are no generalizations about violence and its effects that stand up to even the most cursory encounter with historical examples. I would love to believe that violence is always (in the long run) counter-productive. Certainly in any utilitarian calculus that measures whether people (in the aggregate) are better off as a result of violence, the answer most usually will be a clear-cut NO. Apart from its immediate (in the moment) victims, violence breeds violence. The definition of violence from which I work is “physical harm done to a person by another person.” To perpetuate violence is to insure that physical harm will be done—either to others or to oneself.

But before I even try to consider how violence leads to more violence, let me dwell a moment on my definition. I do not intend to deny the extended use of the term “violence” to denote psychological or material (destruction of a person’s goods or livelihood) harm done to people. And destruction of non-human entities (whether human built, like cities, or non-human built, like forests) could also be covered by the word violence. It is also the case that physical harm is done by earthquakes and the like. But, for simplicity’s sake, I want to stick with direct physical harm done by some human to another human in trying to come to grips with how violence is deployed in various cases, and what that violence causes or does not cause to happen. In other words, what motivates the action of inflicting physical harm on others? What benefits does the perpetrator of violence believe the violence will give him? What are the actual consequences of acts of violence? (This question indicates my belief that perpetrators of violence are routinely mistaken about violence’s effects.) And, finally, how does violence either underwrite or undermine power? (The relation of violence to power is an ongoing puzzle.)

Again, let’s be simple about it for starters. People deploy violence either 1) to force others to do things they would, if left to themselves, not do and 2) to eliminate people who are actual (or are perceived to be) obstacles to what the agent of violence desires. Violence as intimidation and/or coercion (1) or violence as the means to winning a competition that is understood as either/or (2). Either I win or you do—therefore, I will use whatever means necessary to assure that I win. And violence appears the most compelling strategy to assure victory. There can be no compromise. It is, as we say, a fight to the death. As long as you still are present in the field, I am threatened. You must be eliminated for me to be at peace (the term “peace” used ironically here to indicate a sense of security that is impossible as long as my opponent lives).

In short, violence is, one, the great persuader (in the coercion case) or, two, the surest means for victory in a competition. The argument against claiming violence is always counter-productive is that it can secure submissive obedience and the absence of competitors over very long stretches of time. Terror deployed by either state or non-state actors can subdue whole populations. (Definition of terror: the use of sporadic violence against one’s opponents. Many opponents can be left unharmed, but the key is that they know themselves subject to violence at all times and that acts of violence are unpredictable. When and where violence will be inflicted cannot be calculated; thus, violence is ever present as a threat that is then actuated sometimes.) Historical examples abound, including the killing and corralling of native American populations as an instance of the “elimination” path, with the reign of Jim Crow in the American South offers a case of terror’s effectiveness when deployed over a one hundred year span.

The reductionist view of the relation of violence to power is that power is, at bottom, just violence. Or, to put it differently, power’s ultimate recourse is always violence (the ability of the state—or of other actors—to physically harm with impunity). The knowledge that the powerful can harm you is what keeps those who would resist power in line. Power can inflict harms short of physical destruction to keep resistors in line (including economic destitution and incarceration), but it remains the fact that harm done to bodies is the ultimate threat—and power remains dependent on that threat. Inevitably, power will act upon that threat at times.

The problem is that the reductionist view does not work—or, at least, not in all cases. When power resorts to violence to secure obedience is precisely when it is weakest, Arendt argued. Her generalization is as false as the reductionist generalization. But she was on to something. Any law (or other device to govern behavior) is only effective if the vast majority obey it voluntarily. The power of the law resides (in this analysis) in the governed’s acceptance that the law as binding. One classic case is the American experiment with prohibition of alcohol. And history offers many examples of seemingly powerful regimes that simply collapsed without much in the way of a battle. The French and Russian revolutions are cases in point; the governments in both instances were “taken over” very quickly and with very little bloodshed. It was only after the revolution had occurred that reactionary forces gathered themselves together and instigated civil wars.

So, it would seem, power based solely on violence follows the Hemingway description of bankruptcy: the power seeps away slowly until it suddenly collapses. Again, to be clear: the seeping away period can be very long indeed, and collapse (if we take the very long view) in inevitable and multi-caused since nothing human lasts forever.

What interests me in thinking about the relation between power and violence is the extent to which power’s resorting to violence is delegitimizing. When and where power relies on violence, it admits that its edicts are not acceptable to those who can only be compelled by violence. On the one hand, that admission necessitates the creation of the category “criminal.” Power must insist that there are deviants who simply (for whatever perverse or self-interested reasons) will not obey the law. On the other hand, extensive reliance on violence will indicate the law’s unreasonableness, its inability to win voluntary consent. Violence may cow many, but it will not win their respect. (Exceptions to this assertion, of course. There will always be those who are impressed by violence, who aspire to be enlisted in the ranks of its foot soldiers. I will get back to my thoughts on this sub-section of any population.)

The “on the one hand and on the other hand” of the previous paragraph reveals how completely acts of violence are entangled in speech acts. The act of violence itself is a speech act. It can only have its effect if the act is publicly known and the message it is meant to convey is somewhat unambiguous. Thus, a Mafia killing must clearly indicate this is the result of encroaching on our territory. Revenge killings must make the fact that this “was for revenge” obvious. State violence must say “this kind of behavior/disobedience” will not be tolerated. And, in a secondary speech act, the state creates the category “criminal” to justify its violence against those who disobey. An exception to violence being public (as it must be if it is to send a message) are private murders where the perpetrator hopes to get away with the act never being ascribed to him. Such murders only make sense if there is one victim, without any future intention to deploy violence—and hence no audience to whom a message needs to be sent. Even serial killers, it seems to me, are message senders. They get off on the terror they inspire among a certain population.

Because violence is embedded in message sending, the meaning of any act of violence inevitably becomes a contested field. Violence is rhetoric. Acts of violence are intended to persuade. The regime (Romans against Christians; South Africa against black dissenters) that creates martyrs aims to dissuade others from acting as the martyr did; the martyr’s peers hold up his death as an inspiration to further acts of resistance. War aims to persuade another country to bend to my country’s will just as violence against the “criminal” aims to persuade others to follow the law. But just as violence often inspires violent resistance, the meanings attached to any act of violence will also generate resistance. There will be competing interpretations.

I think that all of this means that acts of violence always need to be justified. That is, every act of violence will be accompanied by a set of speech acts that strive to justify that act. This is hardly to say that such justifications are equally plausible. Some will be downright risible, but I daresay few acts of violence go unspoken. This, admittedly, is tricky. There are black holes, and people who are simply “disappeared.” And regimes (or the Mafia) are rarely explicit about the kinds of torture they deploy. Similarly, the Nazi concentration camps were (sort of) secret, while what was going on in those camps was even more secret. Still, in all these cases it was generally known that “enemies” (of the state, of the people, of our clan) were targets, even if the details were left to the imagination or only whispered in various quarters. And leaving things to the imagination might even be a more effective way to instigate terror.

If I am right that all acts of violence need to be justified, that suggests there is a prima facie assumption that violence is wrong. It can only be justifiable if compelling reasons as to its necessity are offered. Violence is “moralized” (made moral) when it is claimed that only its deployment can insure the health of morality against the threats posed by the immoral. Wherever an attempt to justify violence is made, the term “necessary” will almost invariably appear. The perpetrator of violence will almost always express regret that violence had to be resorted to. But his victim left him no choice. It was a species of self-defense; without the recourse to violence, some horrible consequence would have unfolded.

To appeal to self-defense is always an attractive option because self-defense is almost universally accepted as the one obvious, incontrovertible, justification for violence. No one currently thinks the Ukrainians are engaging in unjustified violence against the Russian invaders—unless they buy Russian propaganda in all its absurdity. But even here matters are not simple. Firstly, because self-defense gets entangled with questions of revenge, which may explain why the desire for revenge is so powerful. But revenge notoriously generates cycles of violence and, thus, is not (in many cases) a successful remedy to inflicted violence. It just keeps violence going.

Secondly, self-defense gets tangled up in notions of “proportionate violence.” There is some sense that violence inflicted as a response to a prior act of violence should be proportionate. To escalate the scale of violence, even in cases of self-defense, is usually seen as morally dubious. The obvious current example is Israel’s response to the attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The whole notion of “proportionate violence” is bizarre. Who is doing the measuring? Yet the moral intuition underlying the notion is real and strongly felt. Even in a no holds barred war (such as World War II) some limitations on violence are still respected. The Germans did not kill downed Allied airmen wholesale, or non-Russian prisoners of war. How to understand where and how some limitations are imposed on possible acts of violence is extremely difficult. There is no formula; there is a tendency toward escalation; and yet since 1945 no belligerent with nuclear arms has used them. Whether that restraint is solely a result of a rational fear of retaliation is an open question. In any case, whether with the notion of proportion in violent responses to acts of violence or in self-imposed limitations on the means of violence deployed in conflicts, there is a shaky, unenforceable, yet real set of constraints. When those constraints are ignored, the violent actors lose any plausible grounds for justification. And it proves both difficult and rare for any person or any regime to say “fuck it” to all attempts at justification. The rule does seem to apply even in the most egregious cases: those engaged in violence will attempt to justify their actions. Violent actors will try to win the rhetorical battle in the court of public opinion. (In international affairs currently, that court is often the United Nations. Its lack of enforcement powers make it seem absurd in many cases, yet state actors still care about its verdicts.)

Because self-defense is almost always accepted as a justification, those who initiate violence have a much harder row to hoe. For that reason, peremptory violence is most often justified in the name of preventing an even greater harm than the violence itself. The speech acts here are counter-factual; if I don’t act violently, these things will happen.

Presumably, violence could be deployed to bring a better world into existence (Soviet violence was perhaps an instance), but much more usually violence is justified as overcoming the threat certain others pose to the current state of affairs. Still, preventive violence can morph into (or be merged with) creative violence. The Nazis offer an example of such intertwining. They preached (and practiced) violence against the threat posed by Jews and communists, but they also used the violence to create a whole new political order, one they claimed would be strong enough to combat those threats. In its own way, the current Trump administration is following that path. It has designated a set of enemies (including the “deep state”) fit to be punished while also attempting to create a whole new form of government (rule by executive) justified as the only means to overcome the enemies.

Since the revulsion against violence, the prima facie assumption of its being morally wrong, is so prevalent, the demonization of enemies is required. Such enemies must be deemed outside the moral pale. This gets complicated, of course, in the modern state system, with its distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Even the Nazis felt compelled to strip people of citizenship first before making them the victims of violence. It remains to be seen how much the Trump administration will refrain from violence against citizens. Or if it will begin to strip citizenship from current citizens. For now, Trump has declared open season on non-citizens, while only (?) depriving citizens of employment while not sending them off to prison. (But his “lock ’em up” fantasies might lead to that next step.)

But what about those for whom violence is not wrong, but actually to be celebrated as a sign of strength. Easy enough for Arendt to make fun of such losers for mistaking a capacity for violence with real power. Those losers still can cause severe havoc in the world. And it’s also easy to pathologize these incels, spending hours and hours “gaming,” and frustrated by their lack of access to good jobs, sexual partners, or social respect. It remains the fact that for some people (mostly men) violence is the means to self-esteem, to showing that they are here and can make a difference in (an impact on) the world. The recruits for para-military and state thuggery are standing by. And, as Christopher Browning’s work has shown, just the need to go along, to be accepted as a member of a group, can facilitate violence once someone else instigates it. Fear of ostracism from the only group that is offering one membership can be sufficient motive to participate in acts of violence in good conscience. The point: any attempt to come to grips with violence that appeals only to its rationality or to the justifications offered to render it compatible with morality will miss the non-rational and non-moral motivations that enable much violence. From sadism and crimes of unreflective passion to conformism and ecstatic participation in group actions, the sources of violence are multiple and defy calculation along cost/benefit lines, or in terms of what can be morally justified.

To be continued. These musings are, in large part, only the preliminaries to considering the use of violence as a tactic of resistance to established regimes. I will take up that question of strategy in subsequent posts.

Moral Renewal?

I write in response to two provocative short essays that pay attention to figures on the right (intellectual supporters of Trump) who claim that liberalism is morally bankrupt and that contemporary illiberalism offers a pathway to moral renewal. Here’s the links to the two essays, one by Alexandre Lefebvre, the other by Noah Smith.

From Statecraft To Soulcraft

https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/this-thing-will-fail?r=1jua0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

My response to this talk/hope/dream of moral renewal is not very coherent. I think a lot of things on the subject. So this post will try to articulate that variety without concerning itself too much with how what I have to say “hangs together.”

But let’s start by seeing what the critique of liberalism has to say for itself.

Here is N. S. Lyons, as quoted by Noah Smith, on the failure of the liberal project that was put into place after World War II in response to the horrors of fascism and the fear of communism.

“Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”

Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism…

Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.” (N. S. Lyons)

This is certainly a different understanding of “deaths of despair” than the one offered by Angus Deaton. More on that later. For now, I have two preliminary reactions. 1) This kind of diagnosis of the ills of modernity, of plural societies grounded in norms of tolerance and equality, is standard fare from the Romantics of the 1790s through the reactionaries opposing the French Revolution to Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft social thinkers to the high modernist cultural right (Yeats, Pound, T. S. Eliot) up to various theological thinkers (including the soft version offered up by Charles Taylor) and now including intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. Hannah Arendt in 1951 identifies “the essential homelessness of the masses” as the conditions in which totalitarianism can take root. “The revolt of the masses against ‘realism,’ common sense, and all ‘the plausibilities of the world’ (Edmund Burke) was the result of their atomization, their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense” (Origins of Totalitarianism, 352, my emphasis). The whole world has gone crazy. You, as Arendt’s parenthetic citation indicates, can already find much the same argument in Edmund Burke.

Here’s Talbot Brewer, hardly a radical soul, a sober minded philosopher at the University of Virginia who, nonetheless buys into Alasdair MacIntyre’s sweeping vision of the barren landscape we all now inhabit. “We are inarticulate in the face of questions that cannot be left to specialists, questions that are basic and unshirkable markers of the human condition, questions such as how we ought to live our lives and what we ought ideally to be like. MacIntyre’s view . . . is that if we are to recover depth and coherence in our thought about the human good, we must first strive to recover a sense of the cultural and intellectual history whose fragmentary conceptual remains provide us with the only resources for framing a livable conception of the good life” (The Retrieval of Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.3, my emphasis).

The narrative of modernity is a narrative of loss—and the loss is always of an imagined past when life was full of meaning, when we actually had (according to MacIntyre) the ability to ask questions about meaning, purpose, and “the good.” Now we are all wanderers in the wilderness, bereft of any meaningful ties to others, or to our history, or to the intellectual resources we would need to live good lives. We can’t even articulate the question of the good life. Ethics needs to be “retrieved”; community needs to be reestablished.

Can we just, for one moment, ask if this portrait of modernity is even slightly plausible? Should we not be suspicious that the date of the fall into modernity shifts depending on the writer. For Arendt, apparently, it’s the end of the classical world; for T. S. Eliot it’s the early 17^th century (right after Shakespeare’s death); for Macintyre, it’s the end of the Middle Ages.

Let’s engage full-heartedly in a thoughtful assessment of conditions on the ground for people living in 2025 or 1945 or any other date you want to pick—with full attention to how different those conditions are depending on where on the globe you live. But could we at least stop claiming there was a time in the past when all was hunky-dory, that something vital was once possessed but is now lost? Any clear eyed view of human history demonstrates there was never a time when humans had it all figured out. And can’t we dispense with huge generalizations about civilizational despair and a global loss of meaning? Really? What evidence is offered that people experience their lives as lacking meaning? Or that people in modernity are any less or more capable of considering how to live a good life than people in ancient Greece or medieval Europe or, for that matter, various indigenous peoples outside of Europe’s sphere prior to 1492?

Funny how the people making these condemnatory judgments of modernity always exempt themselves. They don’t claim their own lives lack meaning. It’s the other guy they are trying to lift out of the slough of despond. (How thoughtful of them to offer a helping hand!)

My second reaction is that I begin to suspect that the critique is really all a matter of taste—and that Nietzsche was the one to understand that. For starters, the soulless modern societies are always the prosperous ones of the West. Having for the most part dropped (by the end of the 20^th century) benighted ideas about bringing “civilization” to the savages, now the widely differing conditions (material and otherwise) in which different global populations live is just passed over in silence. What really seems to irk the mandarin critics of modern life (Kierkegaard, Ruskin, Arendt, Eliot, Adorno, MacIntyre all fit this bill) is just how badly the masses use the leisure time that modernity has afforded them. The underclasses—the unheard and unseen for millennia—emerge from their obscurity and are interested in and pleased by the vulgar, the meretricious. What “they”(the plebeians) seem to value, how they choose to spend their time and energy, is appalling. Surely such pursuits can only indicate non-serious lives, ones dedicated to things of no lasting value or true meaning. (This contempt for the bourgeois, for shopkeepers, can be accompanied by a romantic view of “the folk,” of peasants and the like who have been uncorrupted by modernity. Hokum of this variety can be found in Wordsworth and Yeats.)

If only people would be content with the station they were born into–and would listen to the exhortations of their betters–all would be well. The career open to talents has just opened the door to the crass, the grasping, the people who lack class (in its sense of a refined set of desires and tastes).

Even J. S. Mill, who hates the paternalistic tenor of all efforts to call the masses to behavior their betters approve of, can’t keep from introducing a hierarchy between worthy pursuits and those not worthy of human beings. Mill says no person can be a better judge of an individual’s interest than that individual him- or herself. So butt out! Yet he can’t keep his disapproval of how some people live their lives to himself.

In short, it’s freedom for me but not for thee for most of these critics of modernity. The lack of “strong gods” as Lyons puts it means, in practice, I can freely choose to follow such gods, but you are not free to not follow them. Your not following them is (in ways never very clearly explained) screwing up my following them. It’s the puzzle of the whole gay marriage debate played out again and again. You are against gay sex and gay marriage. Great. Don’t indulge in either. But what harm is it to you if I practice either one. You can lament that someone lives a frivolous life, that they have not made it meaningful along the lines that you deem confer meaning, but how does that detract from your meaning? Why can’t you just let me be?

In his book on liberalism, Lefebvre calls “reciprocity the cardinal virtue of liberal democracy” (146). I don’t think that’s right—or, at least, reciprocity rests upon a prior virtue: tolerance. I define tolerance as “cultivated indifference.” Cultivated because it does not come naturally. We as human beings just seem prone to being outraged by what someone else is doing, saying, thinking. One man’s meat is another’s poison–and we can’t resist trying to change what that other guy is eating. We can’t just shrug and just let him go his way. We have the urge to, at the very least, voice our disapproval and, at the very most, intervene to make him stop doing that. It’s a cliché that liberalism has its origins in establishing religious tolerance sometime around 1750 as a way to stop over two hundred years of Protestants and Catholics killing each. (The Irish did not get the memo.) What an incredible achievement! One of the true glories of human history. And those who pine for “strong gods” want to roll back that achievement.

So the real moral challenge is how to cultivate tolerance, how to get people to live in a world that is crowded with other people of whom they disapprove. Learning how to accept how you can’t change others’ behavior to fit your notions of how to live a life–and, crucially, that you shouldn’t want to change their behavior–is the vary basis of a decent society and a moral modus vivendi in a pluralistic world. Liberalism is about trying to extend as far as possible the things any individual is allowed to do without fear of interference from others or from the state. Of course, that desire poses moral dilemmas of its own, most notably the issue of where to draw the line. What behaviors cannot and should not be tolerated. Not an easy call to make–and that decision will constantly be revised and contested.

Still, this is where I believe the rubber hits the road. It’s either tolerance or violence. I want no part of a “moral renewal” that it is founded on coercion and violence. And I refuse to believe that modernity means the loss of a communal unanimity “we” once enjoyed. We never enjoyed the unanimity, the unity, that Lyons bemoans losing. Read Thucydides. Or take the Middle Ages for another example; they were full of internal wars against “heretics” as well as the external wars (the Crusades) against Muslims. Every creed based on “strong gods” identifies enemies. And it doesn’t take much or long to justify violence against those enemies.

The existence of enemies serves an additional crucial purpose: it serves to explain why the utopia of a society united in its allegiance to the strong gods is never achieved. Noah Smith (in the blog post linked above) is especially good in describing this dynamic.

“But anyway, yes, this thing will fail, because nothing is being built. Yes, every ideological movement assures us that after the old order is completely torn down, a utopia will arise in its place. Somehow the utopia never seems to arrive. Instead, the supposedly temporary period of pain and sacrifice stretches on longer and longer, and the ideologues running the show become ever more zealous about blaming their enemies and rooting out the enemies of the revolution. At some point it becomes clear that the promises of utopia were just an excuse for the rooting out of enemies — thumos as an end in and of itself.” (Noah Smith; “thumos” is a term from Harvey Mansfield referring to masculine strength).

Even on a topic as mundane as the economy (not pie-in-the-sky transcendent like “meaning”), the inability of the right to ever admit failure, to always blame various scapegoats, is evident. Like communism, right wing fantasies can never fail; they can only be failed. And as anger at failure increases, so does the level of violence against those blamed for those failures.

I want to make three further points, neither of which is very related to what I have said thus far.

First is the puzzle of how these right wing moralists could fixate on Donald Trump, a man without a moral bone in his body or moral thought in his head, as the agent of moral renewal. The only possible explanation is that they see in him the kind of strength, the kind of contempt for received norms and institutions, and the callous relationship to suffering on the ground required to raze liberal culture and political structures. They are placing their faith in destruction (since Trump is clearly only capable of that phase), thinking that somehow the work of constructing their illiberal order can than proceed. If nothing else, they show an astounding lack of imagination in their failure to see what destruction entails. The same lack of imagination led to the two World Wars of the 20^th century. Somehow we can’t wrap our heads around how destructive humans can be, even with glaring historical examples (or the current wars in Ukraine and Israel) to show us the truth.

Second: in early 2017, I was in a DC restaurant just shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration. At the next table was a guy from Notre Dame (he could have been Patrick Deneen for all I knew) talking about how Trump’s presidency opened up the path to moral regeneration. He was talking to three other men, all of whom were obviously Washington politicos of one stripe or another, possibly members of Congress or of Congressional staffs, or functionaries in the federal bureaucracy. The Notre Dame guy focused, not surprisingly, on abortion and the disintegration of the family as the ills that were to be remedied—with the Catholic Church lighting the way. Only my wife kicking me under the table kept me from leaning over and asking him about the moral bona fides of a church that enabled and covered up sexual abuse of children.

I am hardly the only one to have noticed how completely the intellectual right wing (Harvey Mansfield as one prime example, but J. D. Vance has stepped forward as another) associates moral decline with the changes in women’s roles and behavior wrought by feminism. Yes, there is also deep resentment of non-whites taking up positions in the public sphere and civil society. (Non-whites are tolerable as entertainers—sports heroes and singers/rappers–but keep them out of board rooms and the classrooms where we credential professionals.) Still, I can’t help but be amazed at how much it comes down to sex. The Church’s attempt to deny sex (the absurd requirement of chastity for its clergy), along with its refusal to ordain women, and its refusal to countenance sex as anything other than a means to reproduction. So it refuses to see sexual abuse of children even as it is horrified by the thought of women as sexual creatures with any right to self-determination in matters ranging from sex to how to live their lives. That resentment of women is a red thread throughout much contemporary right wing moralizing. Women, like blacks, should not get “uppity,” should not show any disquiet or discontent with the roles to which white men want to confine them. As many have pointed out, abuse of women seems to have been an essential requirement to being given a position within this second Trump administration.

My third point. Deaths of despair. Lyons talks of civilization committing suicide—and apparently the rationale is the lack of meaning, is the “thinness” of liberal life (a time-worn complaint). But, surely, when it comes to actual suicides (not the abstract one of a society doing itself in), the culprit is economic precarity combined with the necessities of holding a job and keeping it. People (I would assert—but admittedly without concrete evidence) know where meaning lies in their lives. They find it in the struggle to maintain a decent life, day to day, for themselves and for their loved one. A roof over their heads, food to eat, vacations, friends, a way forward for their children. Sneer if you like, but surviving in our cruel society–where vast numbers don’t have enough to eat, where the minimum wage is not remotely close to a living wage, where one is one medical emergency away from complete bankruptcy, and where one holds a job at the sufferance of an employer who can (and will) lay you off tomorrow—is an achievement worthy of profound respect.

It constantly amazes me how most people manage to keep on keeping on, that they do not collapse under the burdens and anxieties that are daily life in these United States. Yes, some people go under (as Deaton has documented), but I am surprised it isn’t more. And, yes, I know that Deaton’s study has been criticized. But even if he got some of the exact facts/numbers wrong, there remains the fact that many people in our society live precarious lives. They cannot afford (quite literally) to relax for a moment; they must keep their noses to the grindstone. That’s meaning enough, wrestling a living and a life out of such harsh conditions.

No need for strong gods—and wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could get some respite from the powerful humans who keep them at that grindstone, not to mention the scolds who tell them that their lives lack meaning, that they lack the intellectual and spiritual resources to contemplate how to live a good life. That they are, in short, morally bereft as well as economically burdened. I think their morals are just fine–until they become prey from demagogues just as they live as prey for their economic overlords. Or to put it yet another way, the degradations of modernity which should command out attention–and call for remedy–are material, not spiritual. Somehow, our moral preachers always assume that those they exhort to find meaning are suffering from a soulless material prosperity. If only . . . We have millions on earth (billions, in fact) who would be blessed if burdened with soulless material prosperity.

Disparate Economies 4: Power

Warning: this post is even more essayistic than most. A lot of speculation as I drunkenly weave through a variety of topics and musings.

The previous posts on disparate economies have tried to consider how economies of status, love/sex, and fame are structured. What is the “good” or “goods” that such markets make available, and what are the terms under which those goods are acquired, competed for, and exchanged. Finally, what power enforces the structures and the norms that keep a market from being an anarchic free-for-all. Markets (or specific economies among the multiple economies that exist—hence my overall heading “disparate economies”) are institutions, by which I mean they a) have discernible organizational shape, along with legitimated and non-legitimated practices by human agents within them; b) are not the product of any individual actor or even a small cadre of actors but are socially produced over a fairly long span of time; and c) change only through collective action (sometimes explicit as in the case of new laws, but much more often implicitly as practices and norms shift almost imperceptibly through the repetitions of use.) Institutions exist on a different scale than individual actors—or even collective actors. A sports team exists within the larger container of the institution that is the sport itself, just as a business corporation exists within the market in which it strives to compete.

It is a well recognized fact that power is among the goods that human compete for. In one sense, this fact is very odd. Here is one of Hobbes’ many reflections on power:

The signs by which we know our own power are those actions which proceed from the same; and the signs by which other men know it, are such actions, gesture, countenance and speech, as usually such powers produce: and the acknowledgment of power is called Honour; and to honour a man (inwardly in the mind) is to conceive or acknowledge, that that man hath the odds or excess of power above him that contendeth or compareth himself . . . and according to the signs of honour and dishonour, so we estimate and make the value or Worth of a man. (1969 [1640], 34–35) The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic. Ed. Ferdinand Tönnies. London: Frank Cass and Co.

Hobbes, sensibly it would seem, focuses on what power can “produce.” For him, power is a means not an end. Power is capacity. We know someone is powerful when he is able to produce the ends toward which he aims. This is power to, the possession of the resources and capabilities required for successful action. Such power, Hobbes goes on to say, also produces, as a by-product, “honor.” The powerful man is esteemed by others; in fact, Hobbes states, power is the ultimate measure by which we determine a person’s “value or worth.” Since, presumably, we want others to esteem us and to think of us as worth something, as having value, it makes sense that we would seek power not only because it yields the satisfaction of accomplishing our aims, but also because it gains us the respect of our peers.

Still, power is instrumental here; it is valuable for what it enables one to get. There is no sense of power as an end-in-itself. In that respect, power is like money. Human perversity is such that something (money or power) which has no intrinsic value of its own, but is only a means toward something else that is of intrinsic value, nonetheless becomes the object of one’s desires. Power, like money, is stored capacity—and, like money, one can devote oneself to increasing one’s store. Yes, spending power, like spending money, has its own pleasures, but there is an independent urge, an independent compulsion, to increase one’s holdings. And that urge can become a dominant, even over-riding, compulsion.

Of course, money and power can be converted into one another. Still, the insanities of current-day American plutocracy illustrate that the conversion is not easy or straight-forward. Think of the Koch brothers (or any other number of megalomaniac billionaires). The Kochs think their money should allow them to dictate public policy. Why, as Gary Will asked many years ago, are these rich people so angry? Why are they so convinced that their country is in terribly bad shape—when they have done and are doing extremely well? They don’t lack money, but they believe their will is being thwarted. Their money has been able to buy them power—but not the kind of absolute power they aspire to. They meet obstacles at every turn, obstacles they can only partially overcome. And from all appearances, it seems to drive them crazy. They want to be able to dictate to the nation in the same way they can dictate to their employees. The thrill of being able to say “you’re fired.” Donald Trump on The Apprentice. Apparently, just the thrill of watching some one else exercise that absolute power is a turn-on for lots of people.

Which reminds us that power is not only capacity, power to, but also domination, power over. Returning to the issue of “an economy,” in this matter of power, the competition is over the resources necessary to possess power. On the one hand, power to depends on assembling enough resources (time, money, health, opportunity, freedom) to set one’s own goals and accomplish them. On the other hand, among the resources one can require, especially for complex enterprises, is the cooperation of others. One person alone cannot accomplish many of the things humans find worth aiming for. How to ensure the contributions of others to one’s projects? Being the person who controls the flow of resources to those people is one solution. Help me—or you won’t be given the necessities for pursuing your own projects. Hegel famously reduces this dynamic to its most fundamental terms. Your project is to live—and unless you do my bidding, you will not be given the means to live. The calculus of power over, of mastery over another human being, is based on life being valued—and thus serving as the basic unit of exchange—in struggles for mastery.

I have in my previous posts on these different economies attempted to specify the norms (or rules in more formal economies) that structure competition and exchange in each case. And I have tried to indicate the power(s) that enforce those norms/rules. Thus in the sex/love market there is an ideal of reciprocity; the partners to an exchange freely and willingly give to each other. Where that norm is violated (most frequently in male coercion of women) family and/or the state will, in some cases, intervene. The deck is stacked against women because family and state intervention is imperfect and intermittent. But there are still some mechanisms of enforcement, even if they are not terribly effective, just as there are recognized ideal norms even if they are frequently violated. Similarly, the billionaire may have gained his wealth through shady means, but he has still operated in a structured market where violation of the rules can lead to prison (even if it seldom does). Outright theft, just like rape in the sex/love market, is generally deemed a crime.

How to translate these considerations over into the competition for power? It would seem that slavery is the equivalent of rape and theft—something now universally condemned as beyond the pale. But it seems significant to me that the condemnation of slavery is not even 200 years old—while slavery as a practice persists. Of course, rape and theft persist as well. And I guess we could say that minimum wage laws and various labor protecting regulations/statutes also aim at limiting the kinds of resource withholding that allows one to gain power over another. So there is some attempt to avoid a Hobbesian war of all against all, with no holds barred. Still, within any economy that enables—and mostly allows—large inequalities, the ability of some to leverage those avenues to inequality into power over others will go mostly unchecked.

Where there is no structure and no norms, the result appears to be endless violence. From Plato on, the insecurity of tyrants has been often noted. Power might be accumulated as a means to warding off the threat that others will gain the upper hand. In this free-for-all, no one is to be trusted. Hence the endless civil wars in ancient Rome and late medieval England (as documented in Shakespeare’s plays among other places), along with the murders of one’s political rivals—and erstwhile allies. From Stalin’s murderous paranoia to Mafia killings, we have ample evidence that struggles for power/dominance are very, very hard to bring to closure. Competition simply breeds more competition—and the establishment of some kind of modus vivendi among the contenders that allows them to live is elusive. Power does seem, at least to the most extreme competitors in this contest, a zero sum game. If my rival has any power at all, he is a threat.

In his life of Mark Antony, Plutarch has this to say of Julius Caesar: “The real motive which drove him to make war upon mankind, just as it had urged Alexander and Cyrus before him, was an insatiable love of power and an insane desire to be the first and greatest man in the world” (Makers of Rome, Penguin Classics, 1965: p. 277.) There’s a reason we think of men like Caesar—or like some of today’s billionaires—as megalomaniacs. They harbor an “insane desire” for preeminence over all other humans. If power equals preeminence, then, in their case, it is an end-in-itself. They desire that all bow before them—which is what power over entails. There is still the suspicion, however, that power is the means to the “honor” of being deemed “the first and greatest man in the world.” And there is certainly no doubt in Plutarch’s mind, as there was no doubt in Hegel’s, that killing others is a requirement for gaining such power. Only a man who “makes war upon mankind” can ascend to that kind of preeminence.

For Nietzsche, of course, the desire for power is primary. But even in his case, it’s not clear if power is an end or merely a means. What is insufferable to Nietzsche is submission. Life is a struggle among beings who each strive to make others submit to them. It would seem that “autonomy” is the ultimate good in Nietzsche, the ability to be complete master over one’s own fate. That’s what power means: having utter control over one’s self. Except . . . everything is always contradictory in Nietzsche. At times he doesn’t even believe there is a self to gain mastery over. And there is his insistence that one must submit completely to powers external to the self; amor fati is the difficult attitude one should strive to cultivate. We are, he seems to say, ultimately powerless in the face of larger, nonhuman forces, that dwarf us. In short, I don’t think Nietzsche is very helpful in thinking about power. His descriptions of it and of the things that threaten it are just too contradictory.

Machiavelli is, I think, a better guide. His work returns us to the issue of security. When I teach Machiavelli, I always have some students who say he is absolutely right: it’s a dog eat dog world. Arm yourself against the inevitable aggression of the other or you will be easily and ignominously defeated. I think this is a very prevalent belief system out there in the world—usually attached to a certain brand of right wing politics. To ventriloquize this position: It is naïve to expect cooperation or good will from others, especially from others not part of your tribe. They are out to get you—and you must arm yourself for self-protection (if nothing else). Your good intentions or behavior is worth nothing because there are bad actors out there. It is inevitable that you will have to fight to defend what is yours against these predators.

This right wing attitude often goes hand-in-hand with a deeply felt acknowledgement that war is hell, the most horrible thing known. But it’s sentimental and weak to think that war can be avoided. It is necessary—and the clear-eyed, manly thing is to face that necessity squarely. Trying to sidestep that necessity, to come to accommodations that avoid it (appeasement!) are just liberal self-delusions, the liberal inability to believe in the existence of evil. Power in this case is the only surety in an insecure world—and even power will still get involved in the tragedy of war, where the costs will be borne by one’s own side as well as by the evil persons one is trying to subdue. Power cannot fully insulate you from harm. (I think John McCain embodied this view–along with the notions of warrior honor that often accompany it.)

It is a testament to the human desire (need? compulsion?) to structure our economies, our competitions, that there are also “rules” of war. On the extreme right wing, there is utter contempt for that effort. There are no rules for a knife fight, as we learn in Butch Cassidy. It’s silly to attempt to establish rules of war—and crazy to abide by them since it only hands an advantage to your adversary. And certainly it is odd, on the face of things, to try to establish what counts as legitimate killing as contrasted to illegitimate killing when the enterprise is to kill so many people that your adversary can no longer fight against you, no longer having the human resources required to continue the fight.

I don’t know what to think about this. Except to say that the specter of completely unstructured competitions scares humans enough that they will attempt to establish rules of engagement even as they are involved in a struggle to the death. But I guess this fact also makes clear how indispensable, how built in as a fundamental psychological/social fact, morality has become for humans. On very tricky and speculative grounds here. But it seems to me that any effort to distinguish between murder and non-murder means that some kind of system of morality is in play. Murder will be punished, whereas non-murder will be deemed acceptable. The most basic case, of course, is that soldiers are not deemed guilty of murder. The killing they do falls into a different category. What I am saying is that once you take the same basic action—killing someone—and begin to sort it into different categories, you have a moral system. The rules of war offer one instance of the proliferation of such categories as moral systems get refined; differentiations between degrees of murder, manslaughter, self-defense and the like offer another example of such refinements. My suspicion (although I don’t have all the evidence that would be required to justify the universal claim I am about to make) is that every society makes some distinction between murder (unsanctioned and punished) and non-murder (cases where killing is seen as justified and, then, non-punishable.) At its most rudimentary, I suspect that distinction follows in-group and out-of-group lines. That is, killing outsiders, especially in states of war, is not murder, whereas killing insiders often is. The idea of a distinction between combatants and non-combatants comes along much later.

Similarly, worrying about “just” versus “unjust” wars also comes much later. Morality is no slouch when it comes to generating endless complications.

I may seem to have wandered far from the issue of an economy in which the good that is competed for is power. But not really. War is the inevitable end game of struggles for power if Hegel is right to say that life is the ultimate stake in the effort to gain mastery over others. If the economy of power is utterly anarchic, is not structured by any rules, then conquest is its only possible conclusion. It is the ultimate zero-sum game. The introduction of rules is an attempt to avoid that harsh zero-sum logic. Putin out to conquer the Ukraine and Netanyahu out to destroy Hamas are zero-sum logics in action. As is the Greek practice of killing all the male inhabitants of a conquered city while taking the women off into slavery. The rules—like negotiated peace deals—try to leave both parties to the conflict some life, to avoid its being a fight to the total destruction of one party.

The alternative (dare I say “liberal”) model is the attempt to distribute power (understood as the capacity to do things that one has chosen for oneself as worth doing) widely. This is not just an ideology of individual liberty, of equal worth and its right to self-determination free from the domination of others. It is also about checks and balances, on the theory that power is only checked by other powers—and that all outsized accumulations of power lead to various abuses. Various mechanisms (not the least of which is a constitution, but also some version of a “separation of powers”) are put in place to prevent power being gathered into one or into a small number of hands. The problem, of course, in current day America is that there are not parallel mechanisms to prevent the accumulation of wealth into a few hands—and there are no safeguards against using that wealth to gain power in other domains, including the political one. That’s why we live in a plutocracy. Our safeguards against accumulations of power are not capable of effectively counteracting the kinds of accumulation that are taking place in real time.

Recently, on the Crooked Timber blog, Kevin Munger offers this nugget (it appears to be a quote from somewhere, not Munger’s own formulation. But he does not offer a source for it.)

“There is a great gap between the overthrow of authority and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt. We are in it today.”

On this pessimistic reading, power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Any situation in which authority/power is dispersed (as it is in the ideal liberal polity) will be experienced as unstable, unsettling, and chaotic. The desire for order will triumph over the liberties and capacities for self-determination that the “overthrow of authority” enables. Authoritarianism, the concentration (centralization) of power into a few hands, will rise again. Liberalism is always only a temporary stop-gap between authoritarian regimes. Humans, in this pessimistic scenario, simply prefer the certainties of domination to the fluidity (“drifts and doubts”) generated by less hierarchical social orders. Just keep your head down and let those insane for power fight it out among themselves, hoping they will mostly leave you alone and let you focus on the struggles of your not-very-capaciously resourced life.

Unfair as a characterization of a certain form of political quietism that skews rightward? I don’t know. But many people are content to not strive terribly hard for riches, power, or fame—and think their moderation of desire is the only sensible way to live. They just want to be left in peace to make of life what they can with the extremely modest resources available to them. Here we see yet another great divide in current-day American politics. (It is hardly the only divide and not, I think, among even the three most important divides between left and right in our time. But it still exists.) Namely, the idea that it is authoritarian government that will give them the peace they desire, get government off their backs, and curb the chaos of social mores that they feel threatens their children. Liberal permissiveness, along with the liberal coddling of the unworthy, is the real danger to the country and to their “values”—and a healthy dose of authority is just the remedy we need.

Gaita (5): Seriously?

“Socrates called his partners in conversation to a kind of seriousness. They could respond to that call only if they spoke in an effort of disciplined lucidity out of what they had made of themselves. That does not mean that he wanted them to voice their sincere personal opinion. Their sincere personal opinion was worthless unless constrained by the discipline of thought and character which conditions the proper contrast between what is personal and what is impersonal in moral thought and discussion” (Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2^nd edition, 2004, p. 275; my italics).

Lots to unpack here. At a minimum, an effort to attain “lucidity”—and “disciplined thought”—are required to be accorded the accolade of “serious” for Gaita. And one hallmark of seriousness is attention to one’s character, to the integrity and unity of that character, to the way it develops over time, and is instantiated in one’s actions, especially the way one treats others. Furthermore, morality attains “impersonality,” a kind of validity that transcends a merely personal sense of right and wrong, when one approaches moral questions with disciplined thought. Only that way could a moral claim actually carry any obligation for someone beyond the self. Socrates in the dialogues is working to establish articulations of morality that carry weight (may even ascend to a right to be called “true”) for everyone.

Gaita, in fact, seems utterly incapable of presenting the most central planks of his thought without the word “serious” slipped in. Here’s two examples:

“When we ask what makes a principle a moral principle, a rule a moral rule, an obligation a moral obligation—then I think we should seek a least some part of the answer in the kind of elaboration we give when we express most seriously our sense of what it means to wrong someone. Nowhere is that sense more sober than in lucid remorse” (xxi.)

“The concept of goodness is closely tied to need, to being responsive to the needs of others. Simone Weil went so far as to say that all obligation is tied to need. That is to link two notions of necessity—moral necessity and the necessity of need. Whether one wishes to go so far, it seems to me that she is clearly right in thinking that moral necessity is (conceptually) tied (not always directly) to what is inescapably serious in life” (90).

You always know a philosopher is at ground zero of his thinking when the term “necessity” is trotted out. There’s the hard stuff: the inescapable. That to which you must pay heed. If you ignore it, you are not serious. (Please hear John McEnroe ringing in your head at this point.)

I am on record as hating the way philosophers deploy the terms “necessity” and “serious.” I think 95% of such uses are question-begging. Those terms simply plant a flag where the philosopher has run out of arguments against some opposing position. That other position will be dismissed as “not serious.” Gaita devotes the whole last chapter of his book to denouncing various philosophical positions (including moral skepticism) as non-serious and corrupt. I wish some wise editor had told him that this chapter is a terrible way to end his superb—and often inspiring—book. Here’s a good sample of the sputtering that characterizes that final chapter:

“It seems that we cannot take seriously the idea that people could reject or even question the reality of evil . . . merely because they have thought themselves to such a position—no more than we can take seriously the idea that genuine despair could issue merely from an argument that concluded that life is meaningless. There are many different kinds of propositions that cannot be seriously asserted, or seriously asserted as the conclusions of a process of reasoning. I have called them, disparagingly, ‘blackboard conclusions,’ because a proposition which cannot seriously be asserted, or one which we take to be asserted seriously only when we see that it was not and could not be the outcome only of thought, is a conclusion in a secondary sense” (316-317). Six uses of the word “serious” in three sentences! I think he protests too much.

Certainly, you can offer reasons why you will not engage with someone else’s thoughts and beliefs. They may prove uninteresting to you or offer you no point of entry for engagement. But trotting out the charge that they are not “serious” does no work at all. To say Sidney Powell was not “serious” when she proffered her claims about the election of 2020 being “stolen” adds nothing. It’s just another way of saying you think she is wrong—with perhaps the additional claim that she is insincere when advancing those claims. But you need to provide evidence and reasons for the conclusion that the election was not stolen—and for the conclusion that she, in fact, knows that her claims otherwise are false. Throwing around the term “not serious” is not part of that work. In fact, the “not serious” charge absolves you from doing that work. As I have said, one is not obliged to respond to every position someone out there is taking. But dismissing such positions as “not serious,” while a convenient short cut, is simply a refusal to engage, not an actual (dare I say not a “serious”) refutation of a position.

Similarly, as I have written in the past, philosophers repeatedly in my view appeal to “false” necessities. It is one of the professional deformations of philosophy that its work is oriented to identifying a bedrock of necessity. (That’s why it is pretty comical that Gaita claims his position in “non-foundational,” but then can go on to talk of “moral necessity,” and the “necessity of needs,” and the “absolute” obligation that the preciousness of every human individual imposes on us. And can insist we are “not serious” when we don’t pay attention to what is “inescapably serious” in a human life.) Wherever a philosopher identifies a “necessity” is exactly where we should begin any examination of his thought and the ways in which it is warranted.

More globally, I suspect that “necessities” tend to over-simplify, to work to gather within a single framework what is a diverse range of phenomena that don’t actually all boil down to being rooted in the same overarching necessity. I have always taken Wittgenstein’s attack on essentialism, on the idea that everything we call a “game” shares some essential quality in common, to advocate for a pluralism that finds appeals to necessity suspect. J. L. Austin makes the same point in his usual wry way:

“And is it complicated? Well, it is complicated a bit; but life and truth and things do tend to be complicated. It’s not things, it’s philosophers that are simple. You will have heard it said, I expect, that over-simplification is the occupational disease of philosophers, and in a way one might agree with that. But for a sneaking suspicion that it’s their occupation” (“Performative Utterances,” last paragraph of that essay).

Ruling certain positions out of bounds as “not serious” is just a way of narrowing down the complexities of human behavior, reasoning, and beliefs.

OK. My antipathy to the habitual use of “serious” as a gate keeper for many philosophers is clear enough. But now I want to shift ground and consider how Gaita makes me wonder if the term “serious” points me toward something I want to (for lack of a better phrase) take seriously.

Here’s the issue for me. I went to grad school with a number of people whose lives seemed to me to be adrift. I was very focused: I wanted to get my degree and I wanted to have a career as a college teacher. Similarly, I was in a committed relationship which I thought of as having no end point (turns out I was wrong about that.) In short, I was very earnest, very goal directed, very invested in what I was doing. I could be characterized as “serious.” I also, I think it is fair to say, had a fairly strong sense of “integrity.” There were things I would not allow myself to do because I believed not just that they were wrong, but that they besmirched my sense of myself, would undermine my self-respect. I would have called such things shabby, or beneath me, or unworthy of the kind of person I took myself to be. Was I a prig? No doubt, but what I am trying to express here was that I had a strong sense of self, of who I was and who I wanted to be—and that sense of self governed a lot of my choices and actions. In short, I aspired to the kind of “unity” of character and faithfulness to that character that Gaita associates with Socrates. (More on Socrates in a bit.)

It is this kind of “seriousness” to which Gaita appeals when trying to flesh out his sense that every individual is precious—and thus obliges us to care for them (with the full resonance of what “care” means, i.e. an object of concern that calls for our active work to promote its well-being.) “We must not only see that someone has ‘projects and categorical desires with which that person is identified.’ [The quote is from Bernard Williams.] We must be able to take those desires and projects, and so him, seriously. This is a condition of his having the kind of individuality that we mark by speaking of his irreplaceability” (153).

Within these terms, some of my fellow grad students, I think it fair to say, did not take life seriously. They were not bound to projects and desires that were the cornerstones of their identities. They had no strong sense of identity at all—and thus had only the most nebulous of “projects.” They vaguely wanted to get their PhD, but were not making any progress toward that goal. There was a kind of magical thinking here. I am standing at point A and say to myself that some day I will be standing at point D. I may firmly believe that point D will be my position sometime in the future—and claim to be deeply committed to getting there. But I am doing nothing that will actually get me from point A to point D. I am adrift. Similarly, I am sleeping with E, F, or G, but only casually, with no sense that my life is entangled with theirs, or that we have some kind of partnership.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I am not saying that monogamy, some form of committed and open-ended relationship, is the only kind to be considered “proper” or “morally” acceptable. What I am trying to get at is living a life in which one does things (goes to classes, has friends and sexual partners, works as a barista in order to pay the rent) that are not expected to “add up” to anything in particular, that are done in relation to immediate imperatives, but are not seen as having any long-term consequences (or only in the most vague way)—and are certainly not viewed in relation to some notion of one’s character, of one’s selfhood, of one’s considered way of being-in-the-world and with others.

Again, I want to do justice to the full diversity of human desires and needs. It would be absurd to say that everyone wants a committed relationship or a PhD. What I am trying to get at are lives lived without any kind of attention to desires one is committed to. I am tempted to say: my “unserious” friends were handicapped by having learned (no matter how) that they were unworthy of having desires—or of straight-forwardly pursuing them. Another version: you could say they simply didn’t know what they wanted, and were just trying things out. In either of these two cases, what they lacked was a strong sense of self, an idea of who they were and of how that identity could then be expressed through their actions. They weren’t acting seriously because they didn’t take themselves seriously.

Lots of possible reasons for not taking oneself seriously. Having imbibed the notion that self-assertion is wrong. Fearing failure; feeling like one wasn’t capable to achieving things that looked attractive from afar, but which one had no idea of how to actually achieve; feeling out of place in an environment where the expectations and unwritten rules were an almost complete mystery; diffidence of all kinds; lack of self confidence etc. etc.

What I want to emphasize, however, is the way that such “unseriousness” goes along with a disbelief in the consequences of action. Since I am pretty much a non-entity, then the things that I do make little to no impact on the world, on others, and (perhaps most importantly) on myself. Nothing comes of my actions. Nothing connects up. I am just going from day to day, dealing with what is throws in my path. This has the superficial attraction of the grasshopper life in Aesop’s fable, but is really underwritten by a failure to take myself seriously, a failure to believe I am anything of account. I am adrift—and nothing I do matters.

I think Gaita’s reflections on Socrates push in this direction. Recall his announced “strong commitment to a version of the Socratic claim that an unexamined life—a life that does not rise to a requirement to be lucid about its meaning(s)—is unworthy of a human life” (xxii). Unless we are “serious” in this sense, we have done less with our life than we should have. We have not risen to the occasion that life affords us, we have fallen short of being “worthy” or admirable.

No matter how much I bristle as such moralism, at its arrogant scolding tone, I do have to admit that some lives are more admirable than others, more worthy of emulation. Are those lives characterized by “lucid” reflection, by an ever-vigilant examination of “its meaning(s)?” I am not sure. Temperament, forbearance, kindness all seem crucial here—and I am not sure any of those things are products of reflection, or even require reflection for their presence.

But I do think Gaita may well be right that some kind of image of self that cannot be violated without a strong sense of disquiet is important here. An investment in a certain form of integrity, an investment underwritten by a strong sense of self (both the self I am and the self I aspire to be), if not a sine non qua of an admirable life does seem to offer a strong support of efforts to live that life. Gaita turns to Socrates’s “point . . . that there are things which are impossible to do even though no obstacles of the kind which may be overcome with force, efforts of will or ingenious strategies stand in the way” (292). Rather, the impossibility comes from the fact that doing that action would utterly devastate the agent, completely dissolve his lived understanding of who he is, leave him being nothing at all—or with the despair of self-contempt.

Within these terms, Gaita spends a long time trying to defend Socrates’ claim that “it is better to suffer evil than to do it.” His exposition of his reasoning here is meandering and often (at least for me) hard to follow. But the core is that to do evil would be to violate an identity on which one’s whole sense of one’s life (its significance, its integrity, its unity, its worthiness) is based. If I cannot respect myself, I have no place to stand. I will be devastated. And it seems that if I am not someone who could be devastated in that way, then I am someone who is not taking his life “seriously.” I neither have a sense of an identity in which I am invested, nor a sense of actions being possible violations of that identity. I am (it is only a slight exaggeration to say) no one.

I don’t know what to do with this line of thinking. It seems harsh to me, using “seriousness,” and “lucidity,” and “integrity,” and “the examined life” as clubs to beat the vast unwashed unworthies. Yet I suspect that some sense of integrity, some sensibility that responds to some possible actions as things “it is impossible for me to do” simply because of “who I am,” is central to ethics, to my distinctive answer to what is the best way for me to live my life. And it does seem “unserious” to simply never consider the question of “how I should live my life,” to simply drift through life, taking it as it comes.

I am going to end my engagement with Gaita here. Certainly, we can say that my “unserious” fellow grad students did little harm in the world. They may have heedlessly hurt others or themselves, but the extent of the harm they did was very limited. The harms being done currently by Russia, Israel, and Hamas encompass evils that Gaita’s account seems woefully inadequate to even contemplate, no less explain or ameliorate. Killings that do not generate an ounce of remorse are way outside his ken. It is one thing to be careless and/or thoughtless about the hurt one inflicts on others. It is quite another thing to actively and deliberately act to harm others. Such acts of harm are not heedless, nor the product of a lack of reflection. They are chosen quite self-consciously.