The other day I wrote a bit about my concept-of-hope and previously about the difficulty of expressing reality, as far as we know it, at any rate, in words. The brooding on ambiguity in tragedy has taken me a little further down these paths.
Plato's Republic starts with the attempt to define justice - is it about giving people what they deserve or about laws dictated from on high? Socrates creates a city in speech to offer his view on the subject. And not all of what he says is perhaps how everyone sees justice. It can only ever be a starting point. John Rawls has the veil of ignorance; John Stuart Mill claims that the only intervention allowable is to prevent an individual causing harm to others; Immanual Kant feels that Reason creates Categorical Imperatives - just acts are those which one could wish to be universalised. Moral absolutists feel that one set of rules (theirs) is the only true code.
But what tragedy shows us is that life is seldom so simple. Things look different from how they are. Things snowball. Our past catches up with us. People hate us because of our father or brother. We hate them because of something their country did 100 years ago. We break the rules because we're looking after a child; but when someone else does it, we condemn them.
We have a gut feeling and think that's a justifiable cause to turn a petitioner away. We claim that 'they' made us angry or sad or ashamed and therefore 'they' are bad and acted wrongly.
We say that because they broke the rules, it's ok for us to.
We say we're too tired or too busy or too anxious to do whatever it is we otherwise could be considered to have a duty to do.
How often, really, do we not put ourselves first? We hold up the rules we want to hold up and break those which we can't be bothered to stick to. Justice is always in our heads. There's always a good reason why we, or those we favour, did such and such - and never, ever a good reason why those we dislike might have acted in some dubious fashion.
I wouldn't mind rules so much if they weren't used to bolster egos and break spirits, but that, it seems, is how we use them.
I mentioned before the social contract - and I think that I do like this as a format. I seek to behave to those in one group according the the shared contract we have. And those rules should not be broken just because I feel like it - or I will let down my half of the bargain. The problem, of course, is that it's all unstated and the others, whom I think are part of the same contract, seldom seem to operate according to the same norms. It's very disappointing.
Say they did: friends are not too tired or too busy to help; citizens are treated equally and with dignity; colleagues are treated with respect and there's a duty of one kind to bosses, another to peers; family can ask for support and expect to get it; police and firemen and doctors can expect their advice - or orders - to be followed. It's not that hard, is it?
Maybe it's the aspect of the contract one has with friends or family that's most challenging. We're not good at recognising an equivalence of duty nor, in social situations, do we seem good at recognising that there's any duty at all. We seem to think it should all be based on what we feel like, what we want - and that the other person should just accept the primacy of our volition in our decision-making.
Aristotle cites friendship as one of the chief goods of life. But it seemed that for him friendship did involve the pursuit of a shared project (perhaps just that of friendship) and that puts friendship inevitably on a kind of contractual footing. Maybe he wouldn't have appreciated so much the more fly-by-night relationships that we categorise as friendship these days.
This has taken me a long way from tragedy. But I guess it's 'where I wanted to go' and as I have no contractual relationship with the opening paragraphs of my posts - though maybe I should? - it doesn't matter so very much.
Well, maybe I can draw it together: many modern-day friendships bear more comparison with the ambiguous nature of tragedy than with the simplistic happy-ever-after of comedy and romance.
And perhaps the fault lies not entirely with the individuals but with a general pervasive sense of contracts breaking down throughout society. In America, democracy itself is called into question by the changes to electoral law that saw polling stations removed from poor, largely black and hispanic, urban neighbourhoods, thus preventing these people from making their votes count. Not that the electoral college system is especially fair anyway.
The mega-rich make little contribution to society at large, in terms of the percentage of income subject to taxation. They live lives, go to restaurants, buy products, in a sphere of expenditure that even the fairly rich can scarcely imagine.They make great claims, some of them, for their philanthropy - but that enables the mega-rich to choose - above the state - who is deserving of their largesse. Do they fund public health and early education and intervention - schemes that would improve the life of the nation's dispossessed?
Advertisers tell stories that manipulate our desires, encourage us to consume foods that make us sick and urge pointless expenditure. Food is priced so that what poisons us is cheap and what nourishes us is expensive.
Political parties are bound by the commercial and business lobby through donations to steer their policy-making to favour the corporation rather than the individuals.
Russia intrudes on democratic processes in foreign states.
Short-termism devalues the lives and flourishing of future generations in favour of us, we, those now alive. Especially if we are already privileged.
Religious bodies have lost their divine lustre - and, in the case of the Church of Rome, at least, much of their respect as institutions.
Across society, across the world, we see those in power favour themselves and their cronies, so why should not we do the same? And what codes are there to guide us otherwise?
Some blame post-modernism - but post-modernism has not created this; it just highlights it. I accept there is no Truth with a capital T. I accept the fluctuating, ambivalent nature of Meaning with a capital M. But it does not follow from this that a better society would not establish guidelines that secure a level of honesty, integrity and equality. Just because it may be impossible to state what is Right does not mean that it is impossible to see from which sides damage comes.
What we see now is not chaos, it is the manipulation of order in favour of certain interests. What we should, I think, seek now is not a claim for absolutism, which I deny is possible, but a re-imagining of the structures of social living that values compassion, generates the potential for all to flourish - now and in the future - and offers structures that enable citizens to take pride in their duties, responsibilities and labour because those effects are rewarded with welfare, health systems and trustworthy social institutions.
It 'just' takes my concept-of-hope.
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