Author Archives: Miranda Nell

What Is Performance Philosophy?

Posted by on April 19, 2013 12 comments

Last weekend I attended a conference of philosophers, artists, and various people with ideas called “Performance Philosophy: Staging a New Field.” The aim was to mark out an area of concentration that could be distinguished from studies of performance arts, as well as from the focus on the performative within philosophy, but which would link the two and even take seriously the possibility that performance is a kind of philosophy, and philosophy is a kind of performance. As someone who works on the multiplicity of knowledge, and therefore non-discursive forms of knowing and thinking, this interests me, but really my connection to the topic goes further than that.

I’ve always thought the rise of theatre and philosophy around the same era in Ancient Greece was not coincidental – they are two sides of a coin, extroverted and introverted methods of human self-reflection. Life as a self-reflective creature is performative, and like the actor, we might accept a role, seek out a better one, sink our teeth into a part or ‘strut and fret the hour upon the stage’. The theatre mimics while philosophy wonders but both are triggered by and concerned with the duplicitous nature of the human experience, the ability to think one thing and do another (for instance), the separability of the mind.

As technology increases, the overlap is only more pervasive – documentaries, mockumentaries, reality television, and all forms of social media find new shades on the performative-introspective scale, and while the intended topic is obviously not always existential, it is a continuous undercurrent to any observation of life. The aesthetic has seemed like the modern world’s answer when faced with a search for meaning, but life itself as aesthetic brings us back full circle.

The conference included many points of view and approaches, and there was clearly interest from a range of different backgrounds. One plenary speaker warned against fusing philosophy and performance, suggesting that it is only in their distinction that we gain from the discussion.  Others presented as practitioners with philosophical interests – a musician exploring time theory, a dancer interested in the body as a cartographic machine, a map of history – and part of the purpose of the conference was to work out how broad the area is, and whether it is distinct from, or perhaps more a bringing together of, various other fields already undertaken. In any case, it was certainly a place full of ideas and discussion, which is the key component of a good conference, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Time for Biology, or Must We Burn Nagel?

Posted by on February 18, 2013 28 comments

 

NYU Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s new book Mind and Cosmos has faced quite a bit of criticism from reviewers so far. And perhaps that’s simply to be expected, as the book is clearly an attempt to poke holes in a standard mechanistic view of life, rather than lay out any other fully formed vision. The strength seems to lie in the possibility of starting up a conversation. The weakness, unfortunately, seems to be in the recycling of some unconvincing arguments that make that unlikely.

The key issue that I think deserves closer inspection is the concept of teleology. Nagel reaches too far into mystical territory in his attempt to incorporate a kind of final cause, but some of his critics are too quick to reject the benefit of interpreting physics with a broader scope. While functionalists, or systemic or emergence theorists, may be more aware of the larger meaning of causality, it is still the case that many philosophers express a simplistic view of matter.

The word teleology has become associated with medieval religious beliefs, and much like the word virtue, this has overshadowed the original Aristotelian meaning. Teleology, in its classic sense, does not represent God’s intention, or call for “thinking raindrops.” Instead, it is a way to look at systems rather than billiard balls. Efficient causes are those individual balls knocking into each other, the immediate chain of events that Hume so adeptly tore apart. Final causes are the overall organization of events. The heart beats because an electrical impulse occurs in your atria, but it also beats because there is a specific set of genetic codes that sets up a circulatory system. No one imagines it is mere probability that an electrical impulse happens to occur each second.

Likewise, the rain falls because the water vapor has condensed, but it also falls because it is part of a larger weather system that has a certain amount of CO2 due to the amount of greenery in the area. It falls in order to water the grass not in the sense that it intends to water the grass, but in the sense that it is part of a larger meteorological relationship, and it has become organized to water the grass which will grow to produce the right atmosphere to allow it to rain, so the grass can grow, so the rain can fall. These larger systemic views are what determine teleological causes, because they provide causes within systems, or goals that each part must play. This is distinct from the simple random movement that results from probability. It is obvious in some situations that systems exist, but sometimes we can’t see the larger system, and sometimes even when we do, we can’t explain its interdependence or unified behavior from individuated perspectives. Relying on efficient causality is thinking in terms of those interactions we see directly. Final causality means figuring out what the larger relationships are.

Now, those larger relationships may build out of smaller and more direct relationships, but a final cause is the assumption of an underlying holistic system. And if this were not the case, Zeno would be right and Einstein would be wrong; Hume’s skepticism would be validated and we truly would live in randomness – or really, we wouldn’t, as nothing would sustain itself in such a world. The primary thing about a world like this is that it is static, based only on matter but not on movement, which is to say, based only on a very abstracted and unreal form of matter that does not persist through time. Instead, the classic formation requires a final system that joins the activity of the world.

What this system is or how it works is not easily answered, but it must involve the awareness that temporality and interconnectedness are not the same as mysticism or magic. To boil all science down to a series of probabilistic events misunderstands the essential philosophical interest in understanding the bigger picture, or why the relation of cause and effect is reliable. The primary options are a metaphysics like Aristotle’s that unites being, a Humean skepticism about causality, or a Kantian idealism that attributes it to human perspective.  Contemporary philosophers often run from the metaphysical picture, preferring to accept the skeptic’s outlook with a shrug (anything’s possible, but, back to what we’ve actually seen…) or work with some kind of neo-Kantian framework (nature only looks organized to us because we’re the result of it).

But attempts to think about the unified nature of being – as seen in the history of philosophy everywhere from the ancients through thinkers as diverse as Schopenhauer, Emerson, or Heidegger – should not be dismissed as incompatible with science. Too often it is a political split instead of a truly thoughtful one that leads to the rejection of holistic accounts. What I appreciate about Nagel’s attempt here is that he is honestly thinking rather than assuming that experts have worked things out. Philosophers tend to defer to scientists in contemporary discussions, which means physicists have been doing most of the metaphysics (which has hardly made it less speculative). It seems that exploring the meaning of scientific assumptions and paradigms is exactly the area we should be in.

Questioning a mechanistic abiogenesis or natural selection may be untenable in current biological journals, but philosophy’s purview is the bigger picture, and it is healthy for us to reach beyond the curtain, not feeling constrained by what’s already been accepted. While my questions are not the same as Nagel’s (and I won’t review his case here), I am glad at least to see the connection made coherently. Writers in philosophy of mind often make arguments that seem incompatible with certain scientistic assumptions but simply do not address the issue. There are options beyond ignoring the natural sciences or demanding a boiled down, mechanical, deterministic view of life. Scientific research has inched toward more dynamic or creative ideas of natural change (like emergence, complexity theory, or neuroplasticity) and theories of holism (at least in physics) so challenges should not be associated with a rejection of investigation or an embracing of mythology. We all know philosophy is meant to begin in wonder – but perhaps that’s become too much of a cliche and not enough of a mission statement.

Violence, Fantasy and Civilization: Django Unchained

Posted by on January 14, 2013 10 comments

The current issue of reducing gun violence in America has cleaved into two basic premises: that there is a problem of violence, and that there is a problem of technology. Both of these are rich areas of discussion, but in this post I’m going to focus on the role of violence in America.

One of the strangest parts of the Sandy Hook massacre was its growing familiarity. Details were new and horrific – reading the names of 20 tiny children brought President Obama close to tears, and many who saw his speech besides – but the lone gunman killing helpless targets en masse, not for specific reasons but rather out of spite, rage, entitlement or power seems to be a cultural pattern and already stories have followed that confirm that. Yet in looking to history it’s hard to think anything has changed about humanity—the opening of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, for instance, famously describes a man being torn apart by horses. The notion that violence could be specific to the modern American landscape seems laughable to anyone who’s dipped into the archives at all.

So can the enormous disparity of gun deaths be attributed directly to which deadly technologies are available to the consumer in the United States? Before going into this question too far, we have to consider why there would be such an interest in those technologies among a population to begin with, and while there are a number of potential arguments, one of them is certainly aesthetic. This returns us to the question of the American relationship to violence. The issue here is that danger, excitement, risk and power are symbolized by weapons, and associated with an ideal of freedom. In other words, violence of a certain kind is associated with the aesthetic of freedom.

Quentin Tarantino got a little upset the other day at being asked whether he thought the violence in his movies was socially destructive. His reaction is understandable given how often he has been asked to explain himself, although it’s too bad he wasn’t willing to have the discussion about Django Unchained in particular, as the movie is an interesting reflection on the American psyche. The line that sums it up is delivered during a tense moment: “He’s just not as used to Americans,” Django says, referring to his German friend’s discomfort at a brutal scene. Given that Tarantino just made a movie that was explicit about German brutality it’s clear this is not a simple claim that America is full of worse people than other parts of the world. But there is something worth thinking about in this quote.

In general, Tarantino’s movies depict a hero within a corrupt world of some kind, and shows the complications of belonging to a moral subculture (accentuated by connecting the characters to the broad popular culture otherwise—like jewel thieves talking about Madonna or hit men discussing burgers). In Django Unchained, the corrupt world is America. Actually, it’s a hybrid of two Americas, the antebellum South and the Wild West—and each of these plays an important role in the larger concept of America.

Both the South and the Wild West have been romanticized in American cultural history. Looked at from the perspective of the powerless, there is very little to find charming about the South, and in Django Unchained Tarantino puts on display torture methods and practices commonly brushed under the carpet in other depictions—things like neck irons, hot boxes, angry dogs and brandings.

The constant, oppressive violence of the South is systemic, and it can be seen as based on the acceptance of the economy that perpetuates it. Human usury is woven into the market and so into the culture, and post-hoc defenses are easily created and believed by those in charge. Slaves have the choice of seeking a relative level of comfort within the system or risking torture and death, and are labeled by their oppressors as naturally incapable of self-determination when they choose the more prudent if less admirable route. The system does not provide a method by which to change the system.

The Wild West, however, is a storybook form of America—the individual cowboy who can bring about justice on his own. The violence that occurs here is understood differently, as it is not the result of an oppressive system, but of an individual taking a stand. Tarantino divides the two types of violence clearly in the way that they’re presented, and there is a gloss of fantasy over the actions of the cowboys. Nonetheless the complications peek through.

There is a scene in Django Unchained when the surviving plantation owners are returning from a funeral, thinking Django is on his way to a punitive fate, and we see them entering in their finery to a home whose walls are literally stained with blood. It’s humorous somehow, and visually evocative, but it is also deeply tragic and metaphorically apt. Even if we root for Django to bring chaos to the lives of hateful masters, the impotence of this devastation is ultimately evident. The violence of the Wild West is optimistic whereas the Southern violence is repressive, and Tarantino’s presentation of a cowboy as a counterpoint to a slave-master is perfectly intuitive. But revenge is not as simple as some (perhaps even the director, at times) imagine it to be: although the violence is cathartic and exciting, it still brings baggage with it, and the emotional weight of causing death and destruction doesn’t result in a clean slate. The Wild West violence may be a positive when compared with the authoritarian, systemic violence it is reacting to, but in a larger sense it is hardly more than a further part of the structure, the other and more risky option initially provided (quietly enforce a corrupted system, or become a corrupted individual in response to it.) The movie is not just a revenge fantasy; it’s an epic tragedy.

Freedom in its deeper sense comes with its own burdens. Sartre addressed this on an individual level through the idea of personal anguish, claiming that once you truly understand what it is to make a choice, you recognize the weight you bear. Victor Frankl put it in broader social terms, and suggested that a “Statue of Responsibility” should be built on America’s West Coast to balance the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. In Man’s Search for Meaning he wrote “Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibility. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibility.”

Technology and Freedom [Freedom, part II]

Posted by on November 28, 2012 2 comments

In my earlier post, I suggested that we could look at freedom from three perspectives, and I will get back to that at the end of this post. But I want to also look at the way that the ideal of freedom has been affected by technological shifts.

The environment of nature has always put limitations on freedom in that it has always required certain behaviors and disallowed others: there have always been “laws” in nature that we do not have the freedom to surpass. The environment demands a certain amount of food, air, water, work and rest, regardless of how those things are achieved. Nonetheless, so long as no person interferes, the natural difficulties which arise are shrugged off as amoral, merely luck and not much to account for. By this understanding, freedom as an ideal is only limited when human laws get in the way, not when disaster, illness, accident or other natural causes do. This classic American vision of freedom at first seems to contain a Rousseauian assumption that a social contract is unnecessary, that life without a social contract consists of individuals who leave one another alone and seek out what they need in relative peace.

However, such a viewpoint is radically at odds with a world of business. In order for industry and technology to grow, for capitalism to achieve its goals, it is vital that networks and groups – companies and corporations – are formed, compete and grow as well. In fact it seems that the 19th century assumption is more Hobbesian in its premise but just draws a different conclusion: life without a social contract is nasty, brutish, short – and totally awesome. The fewer rules prescribed, the more battles must be fought, but this is a benefit rather than a cost, and the “collateral damage” of those lost in the fight is worth the rise of empire.

But all of this becomes more complicated as technology expands. While nature provided limitations that could not be denied, the freedoms of individuals allow for the alteration of nature and new rules are put into play. In other words, the environment of a contemporary person is less limited by natural factors than by the structure of society. Unless born into specific circumstances, a person cannot simply start hiking, foraging, farming or hunting to survive. Instead, to afford food, shelter and transportation it’s necessary to take part in the economy, and this is thanks to the revolutionary changes put into place by businessmen. Thus the freedom to do anything leads, through technology, to particular limitations for the citizen. It is not the forces of government that put those rules into place, but the forces of invention; even Amish communities allow themselves limited use of certain technologies just to be able to survive (once local resources like lumber get used up and trading becomes necessary).

In other words, society takes over for nature as the primary environmental setting in which people live, and the needs and options are determined according to social rules. The very basics – a job and a place to live – come with various strings attached, and many other aspects will seem necessary to the majority as well, things like the right sort of clothing, cable TV, household appliances, a diamond ring, a nice car, or an iPhone. Conveniences and achievable luxuries in life change expectations until it is assumed that everyone ought to be taking advantage of their availability, and they become simply “the norm”. The more such social roles become defined, not just according to gender or family but also generation, musical preferences, political parties, brands or stores, and all manner of interests, the more identity is socially secured, and freedom is harder to reach. (While one may be free to break social norms, it is always easier for those with resources than those without, as social approval is usually needed to get a job, and in any case social acceptance is a constant component of life choices.)

To return to the three aspects of freedom I discussed in part one of this post, we can link back to a classic trichotomy: one could think of these forms of freedom as elements of the true, the good and the beautiful. The first form, freedom as what you are physically able to do, describes what is actually possible and factual—but truth as potential, through the lens of technology, is an active and relative descriptive. What is possible is always becoming, not a final determination. As technology grows, even nails in coffins are looked upon like puzzles that might unlock.

The second, the choice an individual can make, is clearly in keeping with the history of the good, the right, or the legal. This too is entangled with the changing options of a world with new identities and roles. Goodness has always been perspectival in practice given the necessity of conflicting interests, even if certain thinkers have maintained belief in an ultimate form, but here it takes on a Sartrean component—what is good is whatever you are willing to live with. The individual bears the burden of complete freedom to make moral decisions, as even those who claim absolute answers can at best be “one absolute answer among many.”

Finally, the notion of what is most beautiful or appealing to the soul includes freedom in another way. Here it is the feeling of freedom as an emotion being connected to the feeling of beauty. Kant’s theory of beauty speaks of aesthetic judgment, or the mental sensation of recognizing something as beautiful, as a “free play” between imagination and understanding. Since the understanding is the ability to conceptualize or see things as belonging to categories, beauty is the ability to go beyond that and experience the item in a way that breaks free from rules or standards. Although it is merely concerned with a direct experience of the environment, and not the meaning of one’s larger social role or way of life, there is something analogous about beauty and freedom in an anarchic sense.

Altogether, then, the larger idea of freedom seems to combine an awareness of an unknown future, the weight of responsibility, and the sense of excitement of breaking out of routines. Which aspects are people worried about? It is probable that when spoken of in theoretical terms, it is the second one, a moral freedom to determine one’s own values, that is cited most, but when referred to simply as a broad worry, there are aspects of the other two as well—a sense of fear that opportunities just won’t be available or social constrictions will hold us all hostage.

In fact, I think a strong case could be made that it is that third one, the aesthetic of freedom, that drives concerns about losing freedom. And of course, the more determinations are made to assure factual freedoms, the less the aesthetic of freedom has any place. In reality, the aesthetic of freedom includes tragedy, pain, and risk – it includes competition and even violence – but the volatility inherent to this sensory freedom is at odds with the stability and reliability expected from guarantees and laws, even those that protect freedoms. Freedom writ large cannot be simply defended, but has to be understood as a whole variety of different issues and desires that can be taken in turn.

If the post-Industrial age has brought with it new problems of freedom, they are not tied to certain policies but a much more complex series of historical and technological changes that has produced roles not of family members or craftsmen, but of consumers and servers – roles heavily tied into an economy rather than a community.

The Multiplicity of Freedom [Freedom, part I]

Posted by on November 26, 2012 16 comments

There is a claim made by a portion of Americans—especially among those who lost the most recent election—that they defend the ideal of “freedom” and that it is in danger of slipping away, either under the current administration or just in contemporary culture generally. But the idea of freedom is both vague and complex. Although this is an enormous topic, there are a couple points I’d like to make, one regarding the multiple angles of the concept to begin with, and one regarding how history and technology have had an effect. Today, I’ll look at three ways that the concept of freedom may be grasped: as ability, as choice, and as feeling. In my next post, I’ll follow up with what this means in context.

The first version of freedom is the simple capacity to do something. This is originally inhibited only by the laws of nature—I can walk but I can’t fly, and though I am free to be lazy I still must find food if I wish to stay alive. However, as history progresses this aspect of freedom is impacted by technology and society. For instance, my first example is now false in everyday parlance –modern human beings fly all the time. Donna Haraway’s theory of cyborgs exploits this use of freedom: ultimately, what we are able to do is what makes us free, so technology is a beneficient force. For Haraway, women in particular suffer when reduced to that which nature intends—or demands—and not allowed the creativity of the artificial. Once intertwined with technological possibilities, embracing a “cyborg” nature as she calls it, women can actuate a new level of freedom. This goes against tradition and any idea of natural law, of course, in which freedom is met by clear boundaries.

The second concept is the idea of free will or autonomy, which is not the physical possibility of performing a particular action, but the process of choosing intentionally to do so. (This is the kind of freedom that usually gets tied up in theories of determinism, which I am not going to address here). Nonetheless, autonomy is always complicated by secondary pressures and forces. That is, the individual may define this notion of freedom externally by some form of law or moral boundary that is not identical across the population. It is easy to say we should all be free, but harder to agree on whether that freedom includes certain choices—and as it turns out, much of what is considered taking away freedom by one group is seen as a way to save or protect freedom by another. It is an argument of definitions as much as policy: Is it the freedom of the mother or the fetus that should be under consideration when discussing abortion? Is it freedom of speech to be able to demean someone for their belief, or freedom of religion to be able to practice that religion without persecution? The autonomy of multiple parties has to be accounted for, and is commonly in conflict. The most libertarian approach, where existence and action always win over persecution and impediment, runs into trouble when trying to explain why people can’t be watched, used, and generally exploited since it’s the freedom of the big guys to keep expanding their enterprises. Limitations that recognize protecting freedoms to, for instance, pursue happiness and not just maintain one’s existence, complicate definitions and also leave the edges of each person’s liberty rubbing against each other.

The third is a less specific ideal and one that permeates the American psyche. It is the fantasy of a new beginning, of wild horses and open land on an uncharted continent allowing for anything to happen. This notion can change as time passes, and history begins to settle in. America is a young country, but no longer adolescent. When Emerson wondered what the “new American Scholar” would be like, the Civil War had not even taken place yet. He advised members of the childlike country to stick closer to Nature and Action than Books, to explore things anew instead of being weighed down by history, but now Americans are bound to the traditions of our own books, quoting Emerson instead of following his advice. Even so, the feeling of excitement towards free, open space, a sense of boundlessness and lawlessness, is clearly universal, and there are multiple ways that this desire manifests. The question may be how it is related to the more distilled forms of freedom mentioned earlier.

In our most everyday use, we might say freedom is the ability to do as you choose. This definition could be thought to include both capacity and self-rule. One might presume it to be boundless unless directly challenged, but on closer inspection neither component requires there to be an immediate enemy in order to be reduced. Both the potential avenues a person can travel, as well as their own awareness and determination in making active choices, can face severe erosion due to social and environmental factors alone. In other words, a person’s freedom can be limited by the chance experiences they undergo in life, so that they are stuck in a situation where there truly is no other choice, or in terms of our definition, where they have no freedom.

Does such a situation count as a society taking away freedom? I will look into how this multiplicity of freedom can clarify the nature of the concept, as well as discuss the historical arc of technological change, next.

Our Father vs Big Brother

Posted by on September 26, 2012 31 comments

The tape of Mitt Romney speaking to his cohorts in what could be described as a proverbial back-room seems to have had a lasting effect – we’ll see if it turns out to make all the difference, but it certainly brought into focus the image of Romney as oblivious aristocrat.

But even more interesting to me than the specifics of this candidate’s attitudes was the evidence of a change in certain social and technological expectations. Many people responded to Romney’s comments by shaking their heads at the fact that he would say those things out loud, that he would speak so candidly. Sure, he was at a fundraiser with other super-rich political puppeteers, but he must have known the information could get out…

Of course, a couple decades ago, it probably would not have. Even if a member of the staff could afford a hidden camera it would have taken a lot of planning and setting up to get the material, and once it was on tape it would have taken a lot of work to get it nationally aired. It may not seem like that’s that much commitment, but it’s definitely active and organized: hide tiny expensive specialty technology beforehand, and then transfer incriminating material to a standard medium, and try to get a national news outlet’s attention without being dismissed as some kind of conspirator (in fact, many journalists back then might have rejected the tape as unethical just because Romney clearly doesn’t realize he’s being taped).

Today, a person does not even have to really care about the consequences – sometimes people will record things just because they can. In a room with a famous person and some number of non-guests with iPhones, it is not at all surprising that someone recorded Romney speaking and then put a portion of it on YouTube—there did not even need to be intent behind it. The ease of catching a person in the act has increased so monumentally that the very idea of a backroom deal is in trouble.* Anyone can tape the conversation and show it to a potential audience of millions, and they don’t even need to dislike you or want to cause harm. It’s just information sharing—the connotations or potential impact of the information is not always considered (this happens on Facebook all the time: a photo posted in fun in one context is evidence of a promise broken in another, for instance).

The idea that we are losing privacy, and even losing the desire for privacy, has been argued about since technology and the internet especially first began allowing for these new methods of disclosure. An angle I want to focus on is the concurrence this has with a rise in atheism. There are plenty of other reasons that the idea of God is not as popular as it once was, and technology and the internet can contribute to the phenomenon in other ways. But there’s a social, pragmatic level at which God is becoming obsolete that could be a factor.

One of the classic reasons to have a concept of God from society’s point of view is the same as a reason to have Santa: “he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.” From an intellectual standpoint this may not be convincing – Plato, for instance, attempts to show why we can’t use God as a referee when discussing the question of ethics in The Republic. The story of the Ring of Gyges, a ring which allows its wearer to become invisible and thus get away with any sort of immoral behavior she chooses with no repercussions, leads to the argument that even if the wearer is invisible, surely the Gods still know and can still judge. The original argument illustrated by the story of the ring is that people only act ethically when they are being watched, and this comeback says, well, you are always being watched by God so the point is moot. God serves as an external conscience.
But in The Republic, this idea is debunked—God is unreliable, and can be appeased by gifts or pleas for forgiveness. If you do something wrong, you can always get back on His good side. In other words, your conscience may know you were unethical this once, but do something extra-nice next week, and you’ll feel it’s been evened out.

In that way, Big Brother is more effective. If a person wants to steal something in a store, but thinks “No, God will know what I’ve done,” they might stop themselves. But they may also imagine that they can bargain with the big guy and promise to never do something like this ever again. On the other hand, if they believe there is a camera coming at them in every direction it will be harder to make that kind of deal. Our increasingly Panoptic forms of life make it possible to see this particular utility of God being overshadowed, since people with videos are a lot more direct and aggressive.

I am not suggesting that would consciously affect beliefs, but if the fear of moral oversight were to shift realistically toward peers, one of God’s greatest strengths would be made irrelevant. Sure, no video can see into your heart: but if it becomes widely expected that everything that happens in a public or semi-public space could be broadcast, that knowledge could play the part of an external conscience just as well as religion.

It’s true that God was famously described as dead over a century ago by Nietzsche, and he too was concerned with moral issues. However, his focus was on the lack of cohesion or agreement in beliefs, whereas I am addressing the much more mundane but perhaps more convincing issue of the cohesion of facts. That is, Nietzsche thought the concept of God was coextensive with the idea of absolute truth, and as that became untenable, religion would die. It’s arguable to what degree that happened, but the issue here is not what is right, but whether the right thing has to be done. God as an externalized conscience becomes less effective when society is doing the job in a more obvious and graspable way (which doesn’t require that God isn’t real, just that His methods are less convincing).

It could easily be coincidence that secularism is on the rise at the same time as surveillance and general recording become the norm, but I’m suggesting that it is part of larger cultural shift, and that the notion of God just fits less easily into a world where we can already picture a very ordinary kind of “all-seeing, all-knowing” presence. What was once supernatural is now merely artificial.

*I wouldn’t want to imply that therefore people will start being ethical, however. There are always adaptations and ways around – the idea is just that a fear of being seen is becoming much more real.

Pro-Life Associative Thinking

Posted by on August 28, 2012 14 comments

The Republican convention is coming up in the US, and the party is about to confirm a hardline platform that includes an extreme position on abortion (though, as pointed out by various members of the party, it is not new). The platform calls for a “right to life” amendment and makes no mention of exceptions for cases of rape or incest, a position that many voters didn’t think much about until Todd Akin’s recent comment suggesting such a need would be unnecessary. It turns out that although about half the country identifies as pro-life, over 80% support exceptions in cases of rape or incest.

The position of Todd Akin (and VP Candidate Paul Ryan) that exceptions like this are wrong is more rationally consistent, however. If abortion is literally murder, then pre-approving exceptions is surprising, and it does seem a case of punishing the child for the sins of the father. Of course, if abortion were murder, then the deaths of fetuses would deserve death certificates, which implies they’d have birth certificate, which obviously a fetus does not have – so would we then start requiring conception certificates? This notion of “pro-life” is specifically an idea of beginning citizenship before most people even tell their friends they are expecting (well, in this form of thinking, they aren’t so much “expecting” as already parents). If the claim “abortion is murder” is taken seriously, it leads to a rather severe position.

Akin’s comment was offensive on its own terms, as it showed a lack of scientific understanding and implied that a woman impregnated by rape must not really have been raped after all. But it also seemed to suggest that a woman’s body knows better than a woman’s mind which pregnancies to keep, and even that it’s okay if the body wants to abort some of them, just not if her mind chooses to do so. Beyond that it showed a complete ignorance of women’s history, as it is extremely likely that rape has been a popular method of fatherhood in many times and places. A woman with no rights does not have the right to say no. She is at the mercy of men around her who may take an interest in her wishes and respect them, but who ultimately make the choices.

But all of this is specific to his attempt to avoid the actual question of whether there ought to be an exception for rape. If only there weren’t this problem of rape, Akin’s excuse seems to say, abortion could be argued as a case of fetal life without taking note of the vessel in which the fetus develops. But the case of rape – no matter if it is uncommon – reminds us how big a deal a pregnancy is for the woman herself. If it is unfair to burden someone with an unwanted pregnancy due to rape, is it fair to ask them to accept it when it is unwanted due to birth control malfunction? If the environment and options available are exactly the same and the only difference is whether the woman was sexually interested, the consistency begins to look weak again.

Considering the widespread rejection of Akin’s comment and the broad agreement that exceptions in the case of rape should be allowed, we can determine that many pro-lifers are more interested in a general social preference than the technical details. As we saw with Palin, they might claim to “choose life” without recognizing that in choosing they are not endorsing the position as it is written. To hope women don’t have abortions – to prefer to see a movie ending with a baby rather than a procedure – is different from desiring to outlaw something or change the status of citizenship.

There is a powerful element of self-expression in voting, even though the ballots are secret. Much like those who vote for third parties, some single-issue voters aren’t necessarily hoping to cause the outcome they are voting for to be realized. Instead, their intent is making a statement that the whole country can hear. Yet, some of the proponents do wish to implement those legal changes. While they merely preach their opinion, those who take the platforms to be serious, on both sides of the issue, are concerned for real consequences.

Response and Responsibility

Posted by on August 10, 2012 17 comments

I grew up at the end of the cold war so I think the image of the mushroom cloud was imprinted in me as a symbol of dread from a young age, and even now it shocks me to think that two atom bombs were used to end the Second World War. Sixty-seven years ago today, Truman was considering the need to drop a third. What’s more surprising, though, is that in that time, no U.S. President has visited the sites in Hiroshima and Nagasaki marking those nuclear explosions. Truman’s grandson attended a memorial this year, and Obama broke protocol two years ago by sending a representative, but the idea that the President would attend a memorial is still seen as an admission of guilt. For now, the U.S. just ignores it.

Although a nuclear disaster is about as likely as ever, I imagine today’s children fear plane hijackings more than annihilation and radiation, due to the images and ideas that come up when danger and evil are discussed. My parents did not intend to give me a particular impression but I learned from cultural background noise that nuclear explosions are terrifying long before I had specific reasons to think so. Unlike abstract formulations like “killing is wrong,” which could become complicated or unclear, certain aesthetic facts were absolute precisely because they were not arguments. Hitler was evil before I knew any history, just due to his salute, his mustache, his voice – and the bomb was horrific not because of numbers but because of a red button and a white cloud.

The feeling about Hitler remains in the public consciousness; he is still a standard representative of evil. But the atom bomb has a more complicated story and its level of terror has been reduced. From a consequentialist point of view the choice to use it can be defended with the claim that the casualty rate would have been much worse had the US gone in traditionally (and certainly it’s true if Allied soldiers are kept distinct), and that the war would have gone on indefinitely without the terror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to hit the point home (and the point was made not just to Japan but internationally). Other justifications are also offered, ranging from a right to punish the Japanese to a need to use the new technology once it had been developed.

But having grown up with that basic sense of horror about a nuclear bomb, arguments about the particulars are never quite convincing. Legalistically, terms may be set that show an action is allowable, but ethics can’t be boiled down so completely. There is some human component, a sense of self, of aspiration, of recognition, that will not fit into the equation. Abstract comparisons of right and wrong can be satisfying but when the story is intertwined with life our charts sometimes fade to the background. Agamben describes such a difference between the ethical and the juridical when addressing Auschwitz, claiming that ethical responsibility cannot be handled like a debt. When an ethical bond is broken, it cannot just be paid off. Ethical responsibility is of another kind, not another amount.

Of course no one would try to defend the need for Auschwitz. But were we to accept a consequentialist point of view, the primary difference between the two would be a question of debit or credit—Germany’s actions would leave them in terrible moral debt, whereas Hiroshima might not quite bankrupt the U.S. account thanks to moral credit earned for ending the war and stopping the aggressors. The question is simply, can an act be balanced out by an equal and opposite act, or are some values invaluable? Is ethics more like physics or art?

There is an argument against Agamben’s view that it merely results in a kind of infinite guilt or a burden that will never be paid off, but that is only when it is viewed from the utilitarian, almost economic, perspective. If responsibility is more like response or recognition toward those who have experienced wrong, and less a feeling of debt toward a given party, the notion of feeling responsible can be a source of connection. In this sense the purpose of ethics is more creative than restrictive – to be the best form of ourselves, rather than to negotiate acceptable boundaries.

Last weekend I saw the German filmmaker Wim Wenders in a one-on-one with Michael Moore, and they got into a conversation about what it was like to grow up in post-Nazi Germany. Wenders opened up to Moore and revealed his experience traveling in France as a young man where he was routinely ostracized for the association, and seemed affected when he spoke of one Jewish family that eventually forgave him.

Moore didn’t miss a beat – he didn’t dwell on how Wenders hadn’t even been born yet when the Nazis were in power – and asked how the family could possibly have forgiven him, considering what they went through. Nor did Wenders try to defend himself; he simply said the human spirit is strong, and sometimes forgiveness is for the ones forgiving.