Category: Violence

Detour: Hatred, Fear, and Violence

“What was most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write” (James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” p. 8, Library of America edition of Baldwin’s Collected Essays).

It is notable in Baldwin’s case—and to a large extent in the case of African-Americans more generally—that the stimulus to violence that we assume hatred and fear to provide is turned inward. Black on black violence is much more prevalent than black on white violence. Baldwin’s work circles around this fact, even though he approaches it obliquely because violence is only very rarely an explicit topic for him. His topic, rather, is self-hatred, the warping of soul, the alienation from (or fear of) one’s emotional self, that is the result of self-hatred.

More usually, we think of the effects of hatred and fear as directed outwards—toward the object of those emotions. In my short thoughts about hatred two posts back, I think I got it wrong, which is why I want to return to the topic today (detouring for the moment away from Raimond Gaita’s work).

I said that hatred is spurred by impotence in the face of ongoing injury. We hate the one who is inflicting that injury. But I was wrong to stress “ongoing.” It is perfectly ordinary to hate someone for a past injury that is no longer being inflicted. The politics of grievance and the pleasures of revenge do not depend on current injury. Another way to say this is that hatred is retrospective—it is always generated by something that has already been done. (Note that it makes little difference if the injury is a real one or an imagined one. More accurate perhaps to say that most descriptions of injury done combine fact and fantasy. Grievance doesn’t do understatement. Inflation is its more characteristic mode.) The injury may be ongoing, but it also may be over and done with, but not forgotten or forgiven, still a potent source of hate.

I think there are two particularly characteristic forms of grievance (which fosters hate). The first is a response to injuries done. The second, however, is closer to what social psychologists characterize as envy, shading into resentment. This form of hate is directed to those who are deemed to enjoy undeserved benefits (fame, acclaim, respect, money, among other possibilities). Self-righteous indignation is a keynote of this form of hatred. The other is accused of any number of sins (hypocrisy almost always on that list since the wool is being pulled over most of the world’s eyes). The worldly success of whatever form the hated one enjoys is based on fraud, on a covering up of his true unworthiness. Hence the resentment—and the proclivity of this kind of hatred for conspiracy theories. The truth is being hidden by nefarious means. Everyone except the hater—and his fellow truth-sayers—is in on the cover-up, on the refusal to see and/or speak the truth.

Envy, resentment, suspicion, hatred. Plus a sense of grievance. The world is against me and stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the truth that the hated one enjoys benefits he does not deserve. In fact, this person who is living high off the hog should be punished for his misdeeds.

It should be obvious that a certain kind of politics can follow from this form of hatred. And that the alleged injuries this politics claims to address need not be connected to an injury done personally to oneself. Rather, this politics can present itself as civic-minded, as working to clear society of corruption, of the rot that leads to the wrong people sitting on top of the heap.

As is well documented, ambitious politicians can find appealing to such grievances (and identifying specific targets for those grievances) a good way to build a group of supporters. It doesn’t matter if the politician is cynically using the fact of grievance or actually himself shares that sense. Either way, once in power only a punitive approach to the designated unworthies will satisfy his followers and allow him to retain their support. Grievance politics leads to evil in Gaita’s sense—to treating other human beings in ways that one would never treat oneself. All in the name of what is “deserved.”

This is why punishment is always queasy making. It has too deep an entanglement in hatred to not exceed (no matter what the effort to make the punishment “proportionate” to the crime) the attempts to place bounds upon it. (The legal guardrails I discussed in my first post on Gaita are an attempt to keep the reins on punishment.) Underneath that apparent rationalism of putting the rapist in prison is the physical abuse that prison entails. We have never extirpated corporeal punishment from our criminal justice system. That system, instead, gives license to hatred and violence at certain specific sites within it—even if those sites are usually hidden from view. The cell phone camera has made police violence on the streets more visible; what goes on in jails and prisons remains almost entirely out of sight.

In sum: hatred focuses on what has already happened, on the status that some people enjoy or the injury some people have done, and it justifies violence. It can even lend a kind of righteousness to violence, a sense of “righting” wrongs.

A very common idea these days is that violence is enabled by rendering another human being “other”—putting him in a different category by virtue of his race, his religion, his sexual orientation. What I am saying is that such “othering” does not (in my view) enable violence unless that other is deemed a reprobate, an offender against some moral code. Hatred goes hand in hand with moral condemnation. Not in every case, but more often than not—or such is my suspicion.

This is a way of saying that violence is so terrible, is such a strong taboo, that some notion of self-righteousness is need to lead someone to kill or to torture.

Hamas does seem motivated by hatred—and by a hatred so pure in its desire to inflict injury on the hated ones that all consequences be damned. Their attack looks to me like the kind of murder/suicide we get in some of the mass shootings in the US, and even more frequently in domestic violence cases. There is, it seems to me, no notion that violence could be a solution in Hamas’ case (unlike the delusional notion that violence could actually accomplish something, a notion the US indulged to its and others’ cost both in Vietnam and Iraq). Hamas is just striking out in fury because it has no better ideas about how to improve things—and has decided instead to just destroy things and take as many of the “enemy” with them as they proceed to doom.

Is that evil? Certainly inflicting pain just for the sake of inflicting pain, killing others just for the sake (pleasure?) of killing them, would seem to fit the bill as at one of the forms evil takes. (Here, as elsewhere, human ingenuity and perversity leads to diversity. It would be a mistake to believe evil does not come in myriad forms.)

To pivot to fear. If hatred is retrospective, fear is anticipatory. You can’t fear something that has already happened. You can only fear what is still coming down the pike. I can fear the consequences (still to come) of what I did, but it makes no sense to say that I now fear what I did yesterday. Fear of the other can certainly be used to justify violence—the “preemptive strike” doctrine that the George W. Bush administration promulgated.

Fear can often go hand in hand with a politics of grievance. That undeserving group is also a threat because of what it will do in the future if left unchecked. More generally, a politics of fear can be used to declare certain groups in a society outside the bounds of inclusion. “They” are not to be tolerated, or given a voice in decision-making, or (most dramatically) allowed to assume power because they will destroy the society if given the opportunity. So fear, like hatred, can be a great “justifier.” It can offer a reason for violence—in order to preempt the harm (the injury) “those people” will do if given the chance.

And, of course, hatred/grievance and fear can co-exist–often in ways that reinforce one another.

I don’t think we can reach any easy conclusions about whether a politics of grievance and/or of fear is more characteristic of what we call the “right” as contrasted to the “left.” Much of that would depend on how willing proponents of either wing are to act violently against those they hate or fear. I do think it true that politicians of the right over the past 100 years have been more likely to try to ride the wave of grievance than politicians of the left—and much less reluctant to use violence. But why FDR’s outright demonization of “economic royalists” has mostly disappeared from the rhetoric of left-leaning politicians is a mystery (one that conspiracy theories about leftist politicians having been “bought out” by Wall Street and corporate money claims to explain.)

In sum, what interests me is how people permit themselves to be violent, to treat other human beings as much less than precious (to use Gaita’s understanding of “evil.”) Hatred and fear, which gravitate toward seeing others as either morally condemnable or as a threat, play a huge role in such justifications of violence.

Evil: Remorse and Moral Understanding (Gaita 2)

I am envisioning four or five posts on Raimond Gaita’s book, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Routledge, 2^nd edition, 2004). This is the second of those posts.

The topic today (and in at least one subsequent post) is how Gaita thinks one might achieve moral understanding, where that understanding is 1) a realization of the other’s preciousness (with the corollary of understanding evil as treating a person in a way that violates his/her preciousness) and 2) not a kind of knowledge, i.e. not a fact owned as an intellectual possession (the way I know that Paris is the largest city in France), but instead is experienced as an orientation, a fundamental disposition, that infuses everything I think and do and feel. It is primary and absolute, the most important determinant of how I am in the world, of how I treat others, and of how I understand myself.

Since it is obvious that many people lack that understanding, that they treat others as mere things, there must be some way to think about how one might be moved from dispositional states that enable evil deeds (where evil is defined as mistreating others either physically or psychologically.) James Baldwin speaks in his essay “Equal in Paris” of those for whom “the pain of the living is not real.” Gaita associates evil with exactly the sort of imaginative lack that Baldwin notes. We might, following Wittgenstein, call this failure “aspect blindness.” Evil is done by those who blind themselves, either willfully or involuntarily, to the reality of the other person as fully human, fully capable of the kinds of pain, aspirations, goodness, and worth as myself. One way that Gaita expresses this idea is to say moral understanding recognizes the other “as an intelligible object of someone’s love” (146). {I will, inspired in part by Baldwin, want to talk about “hate” presently.}

Gaita offers three ways in which someone who lacks that imaginative grasp of the other as fully human might come to understand it. 1) Remorse; 2) example of goodness; 3) “conversation.” I will be examining each of these in turn. From the outset, let it be noted that stated baldly each of these looks remarkably feeble. How could they even remotely be up to the task? But think about the usual recourses in efforts to “convert” the perpetrator of evil. Here’s the four I can think of.

1)Moral injunctions, stated either as commandments or principles.

2) Legal constraints, i.e. sets of strictures that attempt to establish guardrails against various kinds of behavior deemed unacceptable/harmful, underwritten by sanctions against those who trespass against those strictures.

3) Persuasion via rational argumentation (i.e. moral philosophies that set out to “demonstrate” by one means or another) that evil is bad, so you shouldn’t do it.

4)Violent coercion, either through various forms of punishment (exile, confinement [prison], ostracism, or corporeal harm) or through extermination (execution, war).

The limits of #3, persuasion, are all too obvious. #4, Violence, doesn’t so much address the conversion issue as conclude, despairingly, that no conversion is possible, so evil doers must not be tolerated and should be punished—with the well known effect that violence becomes reciprocal and escalates. Violence does not solve anything; it just leads to more violence. #2, legal constraints, are an attempt to structure coercions in ways that stop short of violence in at least some cases (where voluntary compliance can be achieved for the vast majority) and to establish safeguards against arbitrary exercises of power. The “rule of law” is not to be sneezed at; in a highly imperfect world, the law is about the best expedient we have come up with to reign in some of human beings’ worst impulses/failings. The chaos endemic to “failed states” makes the achievements of legal realms precious. But the ability—and endless efforts—of people to twist the law to their own advantage means that it is very hard to credit the law with the kinds of “moral understanding” that Gaita aspires to. The law is always only a “second best,” a prudent response to the despairing conclusion that humans are everywhere prone to evil and that we need to safeguard against that proclivity. And it prove a tricky task, one that is very often not successfully achieved, to keep the law from being simply a disguised and apparently more “civil” version of violence. The link between the law and punishment is the bridge from the legal to the violent. Finessing that connection is difficult indeed–especially for someone, like me, who wants to believe that the law does not necessarily reduce to violence, that it can have a legitimacy and an efficacy separate from its deployment of violence in certain instances. Finally, #1, moral injunctions (whether arrived at through philosophical reasoning such as found in Kant or Bentham, or announced as commandments that come from on high) hardly seem very effective when weighed against the atrocities of human history. Ages of faith (such as the Middle Ages are sometimes claimed to be) hardly seem more free of abuses of fellow humans by the faithful than ages deemed decadent because obedience to divine commandments is lacking. No set of beliefs in either principles developed by moral philosophy or in commandments proffered by religion seems to insure virtue or to prevent doing grevious harm to others. As is often noted, such principles and commandments are all too often used to justify harming others–as heretics, reprobates, or not fully human.

In short, Gaita’s list of transformative possibilities only looks excessively feeble if we have some exalted (and, to my mind, unrealistic) idea of other possible means of moving the evil-doer to goodness. It is certainly worth noting that Gaita’s bias here is very individualistic. His antipathy to “principle” and to rationalist arguments means that he is uninterested in general remedies, eschewing (quite explicitly) what might be called “systematic” or “overarching” approaches.

This individualistic bias is, in fact, central to his whole approach to morality. The preciousness of the other can only, for Gaita, be experienced meaningfully in the individual instance. We experience (understand) humanity’s preciousness only through the encounter with an individual we recognize as precious. He has no truck with generalized sentiments about universal brotherhood or loving all human kind. He deems those notions “sentimental” and is scathing throughout his book about the delusional, self-deceiving, and non-lucid fatuities of sentimentalism. (See pages 306-307).

Remorse is absolutely central to Gaita’s whole book because it focuses in on the individual—both the individual who does the harm and the individual who has been harmed. Remorse generates moral understanding through the lens of the individual experience of having done harm and now feeling remorseful about it. “Remorse teaches us what it is to wrong another. I would put the point more generally like this. . . . It [remorse] discloses the fundamental determinant of our understanding of what it is to be a human being. It is fundamental because it radically transforms what conditions it. What it is to be a friend, what it is to be a husband, what it is to be a lover, what it is to be a respondent to another’s call to seriousness—these are transformed under the shock of what a human being is disclosed to be in serious remorse” (151).

My first reaction to this passage is to summon up a word Gaita never uses: vulnerability. What makes a human precious, or at least what Gaita terms an “immediately intelligible object of remorse,” is the fact of how vulnerable that human is to being hurt (by what I or another might do). The “condition” that remorse causes to come dramatically into view is that susceptibility to being hurt. Humans are fragile creatures—and evil is taking advantage of that fragility, sometime for reasons of gaining certain advantages, and sometimes for the sheer pleasure of harming another. Remorse is being repulsed by the vision of the hurt one has caused. That vision brings home the fact of the other’s vulnerability—and, thus (in Gaita’s view), not only a reaction against my having exploited that vulnerability, but also a more general recognition of the “condition” of vulnerability I share with all other humans. Some essential element (“fundamental” Gaita says) has been “disclosed” through this individual experience of remorse.

“When we ask what makes . . . an obligation a moral obligation–then I think we should seek at 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. ‘My God what have I done. How could I have done it?’ Those are the typical accents of remorse. They do not (I argue) express an emotional reaction to what one has done, but a pained, bewildered–or perhaps, better, incredulous–realisation of the full meaning of what one has done” (xxi). My italics–because I want to return to these issues of “meaning,” “lucidity,” and “seriousness” in subsequent posts. For now, I just need to highlight that remorse entails a “realisation” of 1) what doing wrong to another means and 2) a recognition that I am the one who did this wrong.

Gaita places a huge emphasis on the way that remorse is connected to “haunting.” “One way of characterising remorse in its difference from some other moral reactions is to say that it is possible only over what has the power to haunt us. That power is a certain kind of individuality . . . . [It would] be a form of her humanity becoming manifest to him, of his seeing her as ‘another perspective on the world’ (in the sense in which we use that expression to remind ourselves, and others, of the reality of another human being)”.(157). The concrete example (which explains the use of the pronoun “her”) is of a man who has raped a woman. Remorse would entail his being “haunted” by that rape—and would entail her now being “manifest to him” as another human being. Similarly, Gaita returns several times to the idea of a murderer being “haunted” by his victim. “A murderer’s remorse is as it is because he murdered a human being, but in order for him to understand that, his victim must remain with him in his distinctively human individuality, for that is what it is to be a human being in any sense that makes the murder of a human being an immediately intelligible object of remorse. . . . He is haunted by the particular being that he murdered” (149; 148).

What can we say about this “haunting”? It is all so Dickensian, conjuring up pictures of Jonas Chuzzlewit in the throes of the maddening aftermath of committing murder. Are murderers and rapists really haunted by their misdeeds—and, even more to the point, by their victims? I suspect, in the case of rape at least, that the victim is much more likely to be haunted by the crime than its perpetrator. Is PTSD triggered by having killed—or by having been wounded or by having been a witness to the killing of one’s comrades? I mean this as an open question. But it is one that has Socratic implications (to be explored in subsequent posts) because Gaita is deeply committed to–and tries to explain as best he can–the Soctratic claim that it is worse to do evil than to suffer evil. Some kind of “haunting” (the exact nature of which I will need to tease out) appears necessary to this notion that the consequences of doing evil are dire.

Maybe worrying about the absence of any haunting in so many case just points to the obvious fact that many fail to achieve moral understanding, they (I) never have the full reality of another human being come home to them. And, of course, being haunted by the harm one did to one’s spouse is quite different from being haunted by the harm one did to someone deemed (by whatever line of reasoning) an “enemy.” Remorse—and its concomitant haunting—is all too rare. To rely on it to combat evil seems a forlorn hope.

Yet. What can bring home to anyone the realization that doing harm to another is repugnant? Gaita will spend lots of time thinking about the harm one does to oneself when inflicting harm on others, the Socratic position. I will get to that. But for today I want to end with two final considerations.

First, Gaita usefully distinguishes between regret and remorse. In my own case, I can illustrate this by saying I have no regrets about the end of my first marriage. In every imaginable way, I think that my not remaining married to my first wife was a good thing for both of us. I have no regrets at all that we ended up divorced. But I am full of remorse for the pain I caused her as we made our way toward that divorce. I don’t know how I could have avoided causing her that pain, but I hate the fact that I did cause it. Am I haunted by the image of the “me” who inflicted that pain and by the image of the “she” who was its victim? That seems a fair characterization of the way those memories inhabit me. Am I more haunted by the harm I did than she is by the memory of the harm done to her? I sure hope so (but have no way of knowing since I have had no contact with my ex-wife since our divorce.) Has my remorse increased my “moral understanding” or made me a better person? I would say that it is hardly in my hands to answer that question. I certainly would like to think it has influenced how I have behaved in my second marriage. But I would hardly claim that it transformed me wholesale. I still have fallen into habitual patterns of relating to my partner that are harmful—and not radically different from ways I interacted with my first wife. All of which might only be a way of saying that transformation is hard, is rarely (ever?) very radical, and that our tendency toward evil (toward a failure to imagine the other as a full-bore human being) is always there and always very difficult to overcome. Transformation, especially imagined as located in one epiphanic moment, an eclat, seems to me more the stuff of theater (with those Aristotelian moments of recognition and/or reversal) than of how most lives unfold. Remorse is more endemic (at least in my experience) than marking some clear boundary before and after its arrival.

Second, I want to think briefly about hatred. Gaita (inspired particularly by Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil, both of whom he invokes many times) wants to activate what he calls “the language of love” (119) as a much more adequate way to think about a “moral understanding” of our desirable relationship to others than the vocabularies offered by the various extant moral philosophies (Kant, Bentham, and Aristotle for short). That’s why Gaita gravitates toward Socrates (along with Weil and Murdoch), because Plato places such a strong emphasis on love (in the Symposium obviously, but in other places as well).

What to say then about hatred? Gaita basically doesn’t mention it. Evil for him is blindness to the other’s humanity. But what about an active, hate-generated, desire to harm the other? A desire that might, in fact, revel in the fact of the other’s humanity, since it is precisely the fact of that humanity that makes one’s intended victim so susceptible to harm. I am thinking of torture here in all its possible manifestations. It makes little sense to torture an animal because we don’t have as extensive a sense of the kinds of suffering an animal can experience. (This might very well be a mistaken understanding of the range of animal sensations, but it remains the case—I would argue—that you cannot torture an animal by describing in full detail ahead of time what physical suffering you intend to inflict on him.)

Hatred would seem to rule out remorse, not because you deny to the one you hate full humanity, but because you believe him to be a depraved example of humanity. I have been led to think about hatred because I have been reading James Baldwin, specifically his earliest collection of essays, “Notes of a Native Son.” In that collection (all essays written between the ages of 24 and 31), Baldwin openly states that he hates white people and that he hates his stepfather. In fact, Baldwin says, having been turned by racism into a hater is one of the worst things racism did to him. “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law” (Notes of a Native Son, 84, Library of America edition of Baldwin’s essays). Baldwin desires to purge himself of hatred (and in later writings after this volume will move to talking a lot about love), but not because of any concern for those he hates—only because of what hatred does to him.

It seems to me, however, that hatred is much easier to explain than evil; hatred is not “mysterious” the way evil can seem to be. Hatred, I would suggest, has three prerequisites: 1) an ongoing injury or harm, 2) lacking the power to either end or otherwise escape that harm being done to one, and, finally, 3) an ability to identify a specific person or persons who is inflicting the harm. (Yes, you can hate someone who has harmed you in the past but no longer has the ability to harm you. But it seems to me that hatred in such a case is unlikely to lead to action. The harmed one has managed to escape the infliction of harm and, thus, can let it go. But I am perhaps very much underestimating the strength of the desire for–and the pleasures of–enacting revenge.)

Despair rather than hatred might best describe the case where the first two requirements are met—i.e. a continuing harm one is powerless to alleviate—but where identifying the perpetrator seems impossible. (I take it this is the case for many of the economically exploited. Who concretely and specifically to blame for having a dead end job that doesn’t pay enough to afford the rent? Who to focus one’s hatred on?)

When there is a focus for the hatred, then inflicting harm can be a pleasure positively to be desired—even if the infliction of harm has little to no chance of alleviating the conditions that generated the hatred. Hence the actions of the suicide bomber or the sadism of ethno-nationalism. The desire to lash out is strong—and can prove to dominate over other desires.

I do think Gaita’s book suffers from neglecting this “positive” incentive (or driver) toward inflicting harm on others. His thinking is dominated by the “negative” driver, by the lack of an imagination capacious enough to recognize the full humanity of the other. But that lack is often willful—or, even more disturbing, not lacking at all. Instead there is a hatred of that other and a fully deliberate decision to take advantage of the other’s sharing the human condition of vulnerability.

Morality—and the State

In The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986), Thomas Nagel writes: “moral requirements have their source in the claims of other persons” (197) and that “the basic moral insight is that objectively no one matters more than anyone else, and that this acknowledgment should be of fundamental importance to each of us” (205).

This seems to me both pretty accurate—and utterly wrong—about what morality is and what it does. Morality, I want to say, is a two-edged sword. And that makes it very hard to decide whether, in the final analysis, morality is a good thing or a bad one. Does it do more harm than good in the world? I don’t think that is an easy question to answer.

Why? Because morality attempts to order the relationships among people—and between people and other inhabitants of the globe. What is the right way to interact with others? What attention, consideration, and resources do I owe to others—and they owe to me? What actions and attitudes do I find admirable, even worthy of imitation as well as esteem? What actions and attitudes, all things considered, make things go better in this sublunary world—reduce suffering, promote happiness and flourishing? It is unthinkable that humans would not ponder such questions—and attempt to provide answers. Nagel seems to think that if we ponder these questions—taking into consideration the claims of others and our own claims on others—that we will, in Kant-like fashion, reach a radical version of egalitarianism. No human matters any more than any other. I cannot make an exception of myself (or of my family, or of my compatriots); I am to be treated the same as everyone else. What I feel due to myself is due to them.

Now Nagel does take seriously Bernard Williams’ objection that Kantian universalism asks something that is not only impossible to achieve, but in actual practice would be fairly objectionable, perhaps even monstrous. Any morality that asks us to treat our mother or our spouse exactly as we would treat everyone else in the world flies in the face of human psychology—and of human flourishing (since rich particularized relationships with a small set of others are essential to flourishing). Nagel’s response is that the “gap” between universalist (“objective” in his terms) morality and personal partiality cannot be closed. It is a tension we must needs live with—and negotiate on a case by case basis.

My concern is rather different. I do think a moral politics looks something like Nagel says it does. “An important task of politics,” he writes, “is to arrange the world so everyone can live a good life, without doing wrong, injuring others, benefiting unfairly from their misfortunes, and so forth. . . [The best would be a world in which] “the great bulk of impersonal claims were met by institutions that left individuals . . . free to devote considerable attention and energy to their own lives and to values that could not be impersonally acknowledged” (206-207). In other words, a social democracy that served the resource needs of all while regulating against exploitation and other forms of special privileges as the public business of politics, while leaving individuals both free and resource-enabled to pursue their individualized, private visions of the good life. Again: a vision premised on the notion that all are equally entitled to the means for flourishing, and that many different versions of how to flourish are to be tolerated.

The problem is that there is a very different view of what morality entails. This other morality is more prescriptive (more restrictive) in its vision of the ways one might choose to flourish—and still be found morally acceptable. Even more crucially, this second “other” morality is not based on a vision of the equality of all. Just the opposite. This morality divides between the worthy and the reprobate—and feels fully justified (in fact finds the grounds for that justification in morality itself) to deny to some what is granted to others. Sinners are not entitled to anything; they deserve nothing, except to be punished. Far from being an equalizer, morality is deployed to be a great divider. It gives us the means to identify those who are not equal, who are not worthy of consideration and respect and a sufficient share of the world’s goods.

In other words, it seems like the height of wishful thinking for Nagel to say that the (objective, impersonal”) view of morality leads to the conclusion that all are equal. It is pretty implausible, it seems to me, that even 25% of humanity holds to that conclusion as a moral demand upon themselves—and, as Williams points out, even that 25% makes exceptions to equal treatment all the time. More obvious is that the vast majority of humans distinguish between worthy and less worthy people—and use morality to both make that distinction and to justify treating the unworthy in various differential ways, ranging from indifference to and lack of sympathy with their troubles to active deprivation and punishment as what they deserve.

This divisive use of morality—accompanied as it often is with a distasteful, sanctimonious self-righteousness—is more than enough to give morality a bad name. Many have argued that morality is the source of more harm to humans than any absence of morality. In morality’s name, we meet out punishment, deprivation, contempt, and hate-filled condemnations.

So what’s the answer? Does morality do any good at all—or should we dispense with it altogether? (Note here that I have loaded the question to the liberal, social democrat side. The practitioner of divisive morality would say it does good; it is fit and proper that we identify sinners and deal with them as they deserve. After all, isn’t justice getting what you deserve, not this namby-pandy liberal idea that everyone is deserving just by the fact of showing up?) In any case, I can only say that the Kantian, equality affirming morality has done good in the world; there has been progress toward increasing equality inspired by that viewpoint. But there is no denying that divisive morality has justified great cruelty and massive exclusions. So we can’t say morality is to be endorsed tout court. It is an ambiguous—and very dangerous—tool that can be used in contradictory ways.

Would we be better off without morality at all, without these attempts to delineate worthy ways of living and of arranging our social relations? I am not prepared to go that far, but I do think we should be wary of any self-congratulation about our tendency to partake of such attempts to use morality to advance the egalitarian thesis. Those attempts (as Nietzsche among others alerts us) might very well be more despicable than otherwise.

Reflecting on these matters led me to realize that much the same can be said about the State. Let me explain. Despite the resistance to this idea in certain leftist circles, I think there is little doubt that States work against pan-violence. The historical record of pre-state societies is one unbroken litany of violence. Hobbes was mostly right: the war of all against all (or, at least, of tribe/clan against neighboring tribe/clan) was endemic. Men strove to grab what other men possessed. (That all this is a pathology of masculinity seems indubitable.) Plunder and rapine were hardly abhorred; they were the source of honor even in Homeric epics that could also register their horror and insist that an unattainable peace would be preferable.

What some deny is that states bring this omnipresence of violence to an end. “War is the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne proclaimed. And that statement is hardly nonsense. We can say of the Western states formed in the period from 1500 to 1900 that they 1) exported violence/war to the regions that became their “empires”; 2) that they exerted violence (in the form of various types of punishment) on their own domestic populations of criminals, religious and political dissidents, and those deemed mentally or morally deficient; and 3) that they fought one another with astonishing regularity. Periods of peace and security for people trying to live out a normal life-span untainted by violence against them were short and uncertain.

Furthermore, and this is usually the clincher in such arguments, is that (starting with the Napoleonic wars at the very least, but likely true of the earlier religious wars) the organizational powers of centralized states meant that violence was carried out at a scale impossible for the clashes between clans/tribes characteristic of pre-Columbian America, pre-monarchy in Scotland, or in various locales of the Middle East before the rise of the Ottoman Empire (to take just a few examples).

The State, in other words, is also double-faced: it suppresses one kind of anarchic and ever-present violence, the outright kleptocracy of pre-state conditions. But in its gathering the means of violence to itself (partly as a way to cow other actors into non-violence) it periodically (and with depressing regularity) deploys that violence with results (in terms of deaths, suffering, and destruction) that dwarfs pre-state violence. So the state, like morality, seems both a pathway to peace and forms of society that allow for peaceful co-existence—and the source of the most horrific violence.

Can you get one without the other? The anarchist dreams that getting rid of the state will eliminate violence altogether as we live in ways that realize our mutual dependence on one another. The Kantian dreams of a perpetual peace if only we can have one super state (thus eliminating in one fell stroke wars of one state against another and the violence of pre-state societies). Like morality, the state delivers something that is good (control over omnipresent violence) and something terrible: the infliction of violence on vast numbers.

And there is more than just an analogy between that state and morality on the level of their doubleness. There is also a clear connection in that both work to designate those who are legitimate targets of differential treatment—reaching all the way to killing them. The reprobate for morality are the non-citizens for the state (even as the state will also treat citizens deemed reprobate differentially).

I sometimes think it all comes down to punishment. Both morality and the state identify those who should be punished. These people deserve punishment, are worthy of being punished. When it comes to the state, the justification is even more arbitrary than it is for morality. The non-citizen can be legitimately deprived of various things simply on the basis of bad luck. The non-citizen was born elsewhere, so has no claim to the state’s protection or its largesse.

There are multiple ways to configure the assertion that some human being is not entitled to what I have. Morality and that state (through the law and through the category of citizenship) enact that sorting function all the time. It is to a certain extent their raison d’etre. That an alternative morality aims to establish the equal entitlement of all, just as an alternative politics looks to use state power to distribute to all the resources needed to flourish, stands as one justification for holding on to morality and the state as necessary contributors to what this alternative vision wants to accomplish. But it’s such a steep climb because morality and the state are tainted with the ways in which they actively thwart what the social democratic, Kantian vision aims for.

Change, Violence, and Innocence

Two passages from two different novels by Salman Rushdie.

The first from Quichotte:

“After you were badly beaten, the essential part of you that made you a human being could come loose from the world, as if the self were a small boat and the rope mooring it to the dock slid off its cleats so that the dinghy drifted out helplessly into the middle of the pond; or as if a large vessel, a merchant ship, perhaps, began in the grip of a powerful current to drag its anchor and ran the risk of colliding with other ships or disastrously running aground. He now understood that this loosening was perhaps not only physical but also ethical, that when violence was done to a person, then violence entered the range of what the person—previously peacable and law-abiding—afterwards included in the spectrum of what was possible. It became an option” (339).

The psychology of violence, how it can be committed and why so many turn to it, has been a puzzle I have returned to again and again over the past forty years, without ever getting anything close to a solution that satisfied me. That violence is contagious seems indisputable; that people become inured to violence is demonstrated by the behavior of soldiers in wartime; that much violence stems from an enraged self-righteousness also seems true. But what has eluded me is how one commits the act itself—the plunging of the knife into another’s body, the pulling of the trigger of the gun whose barrel sits in one’s own mouth. That seems non-human, which is perhaps why violence is often outsourced as bestial but also divine (Charles Taylor’s “numinous violence.”) I don’t say Rushdie’s thought here is the answer, but it seems very shrewd to me, focusing in on the dehumanization that underlies the ability to act violently, while also highlighting the ways in which violence is done by those to whom violence has been done. A curse handed down in various ways through time.

The second from Golden House:

“When I looked at the world beyond myself I saw my own moral weakness reflected in it. My parents had grown up in a fantasyland, the last generation in full employment, the last age of sex without fear, the last moment of politics without religion, but somehow their years in the fairy tale had grounded them, strengthened them, given them the conviction that by their own direct action they could change and improve the world, and allowed them to eat the apple of Eden, which gave them the knowledge of good and evil, without falling under the spell of the spiraling Jungle Book Kaa-eyes of the fatal trust-in-me Snake. Whereas horror was spreading everywhere at high speed and we closed our eyes or appeased it” (188).

I always want to resist narratives of lost innocence—or of ancestors whose strength and virtues we cannot hope to reproduce. Lost innocence is in many ways the favorite American narrative, and it will play us as false as narratives about a lost greatness. Yet Rushdie’s list of what we have lost resonates with me. I graduated from college in 1974, into the gas crisis recession that started the ball rolling away from full employment and endless, inescapable precarity. I turned 30 in 1983, just as AIDS appeared over the horizon and put an end to the promiscuity of the 1970s, my 20s. And the emergence of the religious right in the Reagan triumphs of the 1980s was a shock to those of us who had assumed we lived in the secular world of the modern. In short, the three things Rushdie lists were actual and momentous changes, registered (at least by me) in the moment. The kind of thing that history throws at you—and you discover you are powerless to thwart.

To discover one’s powerlessness is to lose a kind of innocent optimism, a faith that things can be made better. But let’s not get carried away in either direction. Life in 1955 America was terrible for blacks and gays, as J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy reigned. That things in 2022 are better for blacks and gays is the result of hard, persistent political work. We are never fully powerless, even if we are also never in the clear. The forces of reaction are never annihilated. The gains made yesterday can always be lost tomorrow. The struggle is never decided once and for all in either direction. 2022 is better for gays and blacks than 1955, but in various ways worse than 2012.

And it didn’t take the 1980s to teach us lessons in powerlessness. The US waged a pointless and cruel war in Vietnam that millions of protesters were powerless to stop. Nothing seemed capable of knocking the military-industrial complex off its keel, and the logic of doubling down on bad decisions, of not losing face, led the government to lie, spy on domestic dissenters, and pile violence upon violence. History’s imperviousness to efforts to divert its floods coming at us from upriver is always ready to humble naïve political projects and hopes.

Still, it is important to note changes. It is not just the same old same old. Plus ça change and all that shrugging of the shoulders cynicism never has an accurate grasp of facts on the ground. The terms of the struggle shift. To take just one example: capitalism today is not the same as capitalism in 1955 or even 1990. It is organized very differently, while the alignment of forces for and against various of its manifestations has also shifted dramatically. Similarly, the obstacles blacks face in America today are very different from those they faced in 1955, and somewhat different from those faced in 1990.

So I think Rushdie does name three crucial things that did change in my lifetime, as someone who was just a bit too young to really live through the 60s (I was a freshman in high school in 1967), and for whom the 1970s and early 1980s were the truly formative years, the time of my coming into my own, picking my head up and actually getting a view of how this world I was entering was configured. The loss of economic security was evident immediately in the way I and my classmates navigated the years after college. No security assumed; it was going to be dog eat dog. And the glee with which Reagan and his ilk embraced that inhuman and dehumanizing competition was appalling. Especially when that cruelty was wrapped in the pieties of a Christianity that saw the sufferings of the poor as their just desert.

I was mostly a bystander to the promiscuity—both hetero- and homo- –of the 70s. But a bystander in fairly close proximity to both of those worlds. Some of its was tawdry, some of it exploitative (the abuse of unequal hierarchical relationships was rampant). But there was also a joyousness that has been lost. Not having sex always be a serious business has things to recommend it. All the studies indicate that young people today (caught in the evermore insecure world of precarity) are having much less sex than my generation did at their age. And I really can’t see that as a good thing. Sex under the right conditions is one of the great goods of life. It is a mark of our human perversity that we can also manage to turn it to evil so often and (apparently) so effortlessly.

When Rushdie’s narrator contemplates his parents’ faith that humans are moral and by striving can make a better world, he ends up demurring:

“And they were wrong. The human race was savage, not moral. I had lived in an enchanted garden but the savagery, the meaninglessness, the fury had come in over the walls and killed what I loved most” (152).

This is Rushdie’s valediction to a certain form of hopeful liberalism, a form he thinks was only made possible by the Trentes Glorieuses, those thirty halcyon years (ignoring Vietnam, Korea, and the violences of decolonization) in the West following the second World War. I, of course, still want to hold on to that hopeful liberalism, to its vision of a social democracy that does its utmost to deliver to all a life now reserved to the privileged.

Rushdie’s narrator’s viewpoint is echoed in one of the book’s epigraphs, which itself echoes the currently fashionable academic preoccupation with ways of living in the ruins. The passage is taken from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover: “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road to the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

Giving in to a notion of a necessarily ruined world, about which we can do nothing except try to carve out a “little habitat,” a way to keep on keeping on, seems defeatist to me. But forging such a separate peace is also deeply alluring since the general madness and cruelty are so relentless and so resistant to alteration.