Today's Progress, Tomorrow's Barbarism?
I'm mildly surprised that Ross Douthat didn't say what I'm about to in his recent post about Kwame Anthony Appiah's thought-provoking op-ed on what future generations will count against us morally. Appiah gives us three indications that a current moral sentiment is going to be overturned:
First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)
And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.
Appiah is very a learned fellow, which makes it all the more scandalous -- if seemingly inevitable -- that he has held forth on evil and moral argument without even once mentioning religion. Appiah's systematic blindness to religion is responsible for some major malfunctions. Appiah comes dangerously close, for instance, to allowing us to think that invocations of human tradition, human nature, and human limits are not components of moral arguments but alternatives to them. Even a cursory treatment of the role of religion in moral argument would quickly disabuse us of this notion.
Next, take Appiah's use of religious language. To be precise, consider his single, but pivotal, use of the word "evils" to describe moral wrongs and their consequences. You don't have to be religious to earn the right to say "evil," but you do -- if you're a noted professor of philosophy, at least -- have an obligation to address the way that religion proposes to help us understand evil, in contrast to, say, the ways of competing varieties of worldview. As the most insightful and entertaining liberal philosopher, Richard Rorty, has observed, agreeing with Judith Shlkar, for liberals cruelty is the worst thing we do. Shklar, in her book Ordinary Vices, calls moral cruelty "deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else."
Any Christian, for instance, is apt to see the face of evil in Shklar's moral cruelty, but the point is not so much that liberal morality has Christian roots, or that liberal and Christian morality have some common root in (gasp) human nature or human limits. The point is Rorty's -- that Shklar's liberal morality is highly compatible with a worldview in which religion plays no role and is, in fact, something that human beings should labor to erase from our words, our deeds, and our thoughts. In the secular liberal worldview, evil, as (Biblical) religion understands it, is at best a useless concept, at worst a morally counterproductive one.
Editing this important point out of a discussion like Appiah's seems to me its own act of strategic ignorance. (I'll extend the benefit of the doubt that it's not also an evil one.) The teaching of Biblical religion is that evil is the worst thing we do, and that the eradication of human suffering is not our moral goal because that mission is at profound odds with the truth about what it is to be a human person. In the absence of the language of evil indebted to that religion, our talk of moral wrongs must rely on the language of harm. To move in that direction may seem today like progress. Will future generations recognize in it our own kind of barbarism?
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May '10
Re: Today's Progress, Tomorrow's Barbarism?
I found Appiah's essay oddly devoid of moral reasoning--almost completely lacking insight into the nature of moral wrong--even apart from the question of God and religion.
His lack of insight is exposed by his failure to recognize abortion, euthanasia, cloning, genetic engineering, and the abuse and trivialization of human sexuality as being among the gravest offenses against the dignity of the human person widely tolerated in our society.
I agree with Vatican II and Christian personalists like Karol Wojtyla: our understanding of the ethical demands of personal life has been emerging across time (which is not to say mankind has been improving, morally speaking.) This is why we can now see so clearly what we couldn't see before: e.g. that slavery is essentially evil; that persons are endowed with unalienable rights; that women should not be subordinated to men, nor one race subordinated to another.
That we resist seeing the evil of things we do is because we have an interest in not seeing it. Maybe money, maybe pleasure, maybe power. These things are hard to give up. It's easier to ignore or rationalize away wrong--until it becomes too manifest to too many.
May '10
Re: Today's Progress, Tomorrow's Barbarism?
Rare honesty -- In "Ends and Means", Aldous Huxley wrote:
"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suites their books that the world should be meaningless. ... No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need, conciously or unconciously felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers"
He continued:
"For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust."
Re: Today's Progress, Tomorrow's Barbarism?
Tom Lindholtz: Rare honesty -- In "Ends and Means", Aldous Huxley wrote:
[...]
He continued:
"For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust." · Sep 30 at 10:51am
Great quotes, Tom. Notice how some strange invisible toggle switch allows Huxley to move from liberty as the category relevant to sexual behavior to justice as the category relevant to politics and economics. As if the first wasn't social, or had no bearing on public life! That sharped and forced division is reflective itself of some entirely preexisting motives.
May '10
Re: Today's Progress, Tomorrow's Barbarism?
Slavery equated with beef production and burning fossil fuels?
Kind of gives one the essence of post-modernism morality.