I was feeling pretty drained the other day. Got back from work at stupid o'clock, not enough sleep, brain addled by the shock to the system of long drives, seeing people in the flesh and being away from home, all that. Anyway, I was talking to my father on a video call and he showed me the book he's reading. About Lancasters. The aeroplanes. He'd told me how many of the thousands got shot down in World War 2 the last time we'd talked and I said, 'I really don't want to hear about Lancasters.' He said, 'It's about the war.' And I said, 'Yeah, I'm not really interested right now.' At this point he did a moral grand-standing thing, he said, 'It's about 18 year old boys who died so that you and I could live in freedom.'
OK. I get it. Debt of gratitude. Really, I get it. Of course, we all owe a great deal to those who fought in the Allied cause. Apart from the people in Dresden. Or, maybe even them, the descendants of the survivors, at any rate.
What I said, piqued by the condemnatory tone - he was making a normative point, after all - that one should always at all times be interested in the war - was that I'm more interested in suffering that's happening right now rather than heroism in the past.
Now, first off, having cooled down a little, I'd say that in England - I don't know about the rest of the UK - there's an obsession with our history. What make Britain Great. But it's history as told by the victors and history that misses out the less salubrious matters like brutal acts in the colonies, the slave trade and the carving up of the Middle East for our benefit. It's history that fails to acknowledge the fact that we're mostly descended from invaders from other European nations. It's history that fails to recall the signs on boarding houses that read, 'No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs.' A lot really. It's history that says, look! A wonderful monarchy and 2-0 against Germany in the World Wars!
Theodore Adorno was strong on this. He said that empathy with the victors' narrative inevitably benefits the present rulers and is prepared to forgive and cherish the dubious, morally-questionable, misunderstood events of a far from innocent past. We do have to bear in mind that acts like lying and hypocrisy may have served an important political purpose in a good end, but we also have to recognise when corruption, prejudice or mismanagement led to unwarranted suffering.
But perhaps more importantly, because I do actually agree that we should honour those who died for their country - even if wars are often fought more through the inept actions of blundering governments rather than for strictly moral reasons, which just 'sweeten the narrative' for the populace, the debt should be paid not in sentimental recollections, but in making this a society worth dying for. One with freedom and opportunity for all; one where each person has equal status - or as equal as possible given the luck and contingencies of real life. At least, no one should be handicapped by the very structure of society.
As my post on inequality suggested - and The Inner Level continues to impress upon me the horrors of the way we are going - Britain is not Great right now.
The past is another country. And we have to be careful when we go there. Residing there uncritically may lead to a reactionary conservatism that solidifies existing injustices and wrongs for fear of changing things for the worse. But, surely, if we are to credit those who acted well, surely we have to criticise those who acted badly? If we are to learn from history, surely we have to try to see it as clearly as possible? Surely we have to take on board the unpalatable as well as the palatable facts? If we are to feel positive emotion at the acts of courage, then surely we should also feel negative emotions at the acts of wickedness? And, at the same time, we have to see that beliefs and values in the past, what was known then, what was unappreciated and what was unappreciated then, may be different, very different, from our world view now? That we may condemn actions and behaviours but, while we do not give the bad actors a pass, we have to understand the context. It's complicated - but it is part of the responsibility of growing up. We are not children who believe that Mummy and Daddy are always right; or who blame our parents for absolutely everything.
Today I listened to an interesting debate on the Very Bad Wizards podcast, in which Dave and Tammler considered the role of anger in politics. They, and Amia Srinivasan (the philosopher whose article they were discussing - the link to the podcast provides a link to the article) were critical of Martha Nussbaum's claim that anger is always a moral mistake. I was persuaded by Nussbaum's view after reading her book Anger and Forgiveness. I wonder if this is due to the role that anger has played in my life and my usual attempts, both consciously and, I think, unconsciously, to suppress it? But this isn't about me...
So, Nussbaum sides with Seneca who sees anger as corroding reason. She believes that it always contains a desire for revenge which is irrational (taking your eye doesn't bring my eye back) and always morally wrong. She believes that one must always be focused on action to make the future better, not on retribution. However, she does admit that righteous anger may be a spur to action - but she prefers a concept of transition anger, in which one recognises that a moral harm has been done and commits to work to prevent such an event happening again.
So far so reasonable. And those who agree - like me - might cite Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. Or indeed Christ. I'll deal with Jesus first. The message of the gospels - to turn the other cheek and the meek will inherit the earth - should be taken in its context. At the time, the gospel writers thought that the world was about to end. Thus, a message about the meek entering the kingdom of heaven was a soothing encouragement for those who were suffering in life. Soon enough, God would wipe everyone out, but they'd be fine. No point going through the hell of some kind of revolution. It was in a sense a justification of submission, which might, like Stoicism, offer consolation, but not guarantee a good life.
We are not - quite yet - facing the end of the world and so there is cause to try to make our societies better and fairer.
Srinivasan suggests that anger, as a reaction to a moral transgression and as a forward looking emotion, is valuable in social change. She also makes the claim that it is in fact a further injustice to be told that one should quell or not feel or calm one's apt anger - at a moral transgression (as Aristotle might say, anger at the right time, directed at the right target, in the right amount and for the right reason). It is wrong, foe example, that women are told that they are 'shrill feminazis' when they are angered by discrimination. In addition, she suggests that King might not have achieved so much had the US authorities not also felt the threat of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. South Africa's story is not an entirely straightforward affair either.
There is much to ponder in all this.
Another idea that came up in the discussion relates to what I have been reading lately: Srinivasan considers that there is something odd about a person who does not have an emotional response to great injustice, someone who can retain cool reason faced with severe moral transgression. It's like, she says, contemplating a great work of art and not having an affective response. The lack of evaluative appreciation - which does not mean a failure to recognise the skill, for example - seems verging on inhuman. For sure, one may apprecite, be more moved, by something, the greater one's understanding is - this is the role of education and experience in developing sensitivity and vision, but even a novice would feel something, wouldn't they?
Murdoch writes that Sartre's novel Nausea expresses 'the horror of those who can no longer love or attend to or even really see the contingent, and fear it as a threat to their imaginary freedom and self-regarding "authenticity".' (Taken from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals) The object - of art or of suffering - is swallowed up by concerns about the self, or drawn into a self-imposed framework rather than being experienced 'as it is'. This is why she sees perception as a moral and and why the practice of creating space is important. It's also why she. like Adorno, is critical of mass-media - violence on TV, advertising, the plethora of disturbing and manipulative messages - as damaging. It harms our ability to perceive clearly and to judge purely - or as purely as a subject can.
Interestingly, Adorno is disparaging too about those - whom I discussed in the post Selfie - whose concern with purifying the ego removes them from any active participation in or perception of the world around them. He criticises Nietszche and Kierkegaard on this score.
There is a battle on two fronts: to see the object (whether a wonder-inducing work of art or a moral violation) in its own right by limiting the story-telling, prejudiced, self-interested ego and at the same time sharpening its moral compass, allowing for its affective responses that, when attuned, can guide us correctly (this is part of what Hume is getting at when he says the reason should be the slave of the passions) while also not turning attention entirely toward the monitoring of that internal eye. We have to learn to see through ourselves - drawing on emotional reactions and reason, educating both, but not being fixated by them and thus losing our engagement with the object. 'Right' reason and passion can hold the object as a truth in itself and respond to it intelligently and morally.
All this made me think about listening to strict utilitarians. Their use of language and tone seems to me affect free. It is like they are considering a mathematical equation. As Kant sees Reason as inevitably supporting Categorical Imperatives, so utilitarians seem to be able to rest with rationalising. But then Dave on the podcast referenced the mathematician Nash in A Beautiful Mind, having a powerful aesthetic-emotional response to equations and formulae. You can be different and still have feelings, I suppose.
But anyway. If some people are encouraged to be sentimental (in my use of that term, you may perhaps note a tone of disapproval, considering a previous post - choice of words is seldom value free) about the past in an effort to preserve it, perhaps it's all the more important that others get angry and seek to bring about change.
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