by Aaron James
We find help here in the idea that Cohen sees in Jesus’ acceptance at Gethsemane: the idea that “we must accept some givens, not any and all givens, but plenty of givens …,” that “certain things are to be taken as they come: they are not to be shaped or controlled.”8 Cohen sees this as true conservatism.9 This is not simply the idea that we are wise for accepting the limits of our powers, as though we would change things if we could, or even expand our powers, potentially without limit, if that were possible. Cohen does suggest that “we court vertigo if we seek to place everything within our control,” but his point is not that, psychologically speaking, we simply can’t handle it. It is that we shouldn’t want to handle it, as a matter of value, even if we psychologically could, because “the attitude of universal mastery over everything is repugnant, and, at the limit, insane.” He illustrates that repugnance with this allegory:
Quite far along a certain continuum there sits a man who is surveying his own fleshly parts, that is, those of his parts which are still made of flesh, which includes some of his brain-flesh parts, and he is replacing defective bits of his flesh by perfect artificial substitutes, made out of whatever best serves, such as silicon, tungsten, reprocessed dung, and so forth. The man has been doing this for some time, and a lot of him is already artificial. That is surely a ghastly scenario.10
The scenario is ghastly because, so we all believe, “certain things are to be accepted from nature, and that includes aspects of ourselves.”
We might put the idea this way: much of what is given, including our fleshly nature, is, in a certain sense, to be respected. It is to be respected for what it just is, and therefore not to be wholly shaped or controlled (at least not without a pretty good justification). The body is not, then, the prison of the soul, as Plato thought, and the flesh is not to be resisted above all else, as for the neoplatonist Saint Augustine. Although the social body is not a fleshly thing, but rather made up of many different fleshly beings, it, too, is to be respected insofar as it is given to us, as are our basic forms of human relationship, human culture, and many of the social relations that assholes exploit: we are to respect those givens for the givens they are.11
That isn’t to say we have to accept the ways we are unjustly treated by assholes, or the damage they do to given social relations. There is nothing in injustice or degradation to respect. Nor are we suggesting that respect for many of the givens of social life could reconcile us to the human condition all by itself; it still won’t do if or when life is horrific. We still need reasonable hope.12 Our suggestion, then, is this: we can be reconciled to our given condition insofar as we have reason to respect it for what it is and reasonable hope that it can and will sufficiently improve. That is a good and proper basis for refusing to resign, for keeping faith.
CAN WE RECONCILE OURSELVES TO OUR WORLD OF ASSHOLES?
How does our world fare by that test? I leave a final verdict to the reader. But here are some reasons why prospects for reconciliation are fairly good, despite the alarming and apparently increasing number of assholes around.
For starters, there are our reasons to respect the many givens of life, whether our fleshly existence or the basic sociability of the human kind. We can add reasons why life can be beautiful and good, as even the poorest of the poor will agree when they gaze into their child’s bright eyes. To the extent that life can also be horrible, especially for the poorest of the poor, we can call injustice what it is and work toward its rectification. If life for many in our world is pretty good, the moral challenge is to make it pretty good for everyone. We can labor to that end in reasonable hopes of this and other forms of moral progress, if not this week, then not too far down the road.
In the bigger scheme of things, the arc of history does seem bent toward justice, even as progress comes at an agonizingly slow pace.13 In the twentieth century alone we have the rise of democracy, the likely end to world war, the fortunate avoidance of nuclear holocaust, the rise of human rights discourse, and unprecedented gains in reducing absolute poverty. Here in the early twenty-first century, in the middle of the Great Recession, when this book is being written and when it will mainly be read, the future seems less than rosy. But the darkness was much darker not long ago, during the two world wars and the interwar and Great Depression years. While it may not happen very soon, the fog of crises eventually does lift, and there is room for hope (but perhaps no more than hope) that some lessons about the prudent management of financial markets will have been learned, or at least not forgotten too soon. There is at the moment little chance of immediate action to dramatically reduce the threat of catastrophic global climate change. Yet we can at least hope for a thaw in frozen political will. (Even as that may not happen in time to prevent collective doom, we can hope it happens in time.) Grounds for reasonable hope don’t have to be conclusive or decisive. Reasonable hope, again, isn’t predictive confidence.
ROUSSEAU BEATS HOBBES
All of this will look like wishful thinking, like “utopianism” of the bad kind, on bleaker views of human nature. We said in chapter 6 that Hobbes was right and Marx wrong about the fragility of cooperation and its progress. But Hobbes’s explanation of the instability of society goes to the very impossibility of human beings ever being brought very far beyond assholish motives, given, as he puts it, a “generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.”14 People inherently seek to do well for themselves by doing better than others. Fragile peace among people locked in a relentless competition for relative standing—for “vaine-glory,” in Hobbes’s term—is possible, if at all, only with threats of sharp punishment meted out by a heavy, authoritarian hand. If human nature is that bad, that fallen or sinful in the religious idiom, then hope for progress is unreasonable: it just doesn’t square with what we already know about what people are like.
But are assholes really born and not made? Are they not made by the society that deeply shapes them, as we have suggested? Rousseau, our hero in chapter 1, argued, against Hobbes, that our obsessive concern with relative standing over others is not natural. Inflamed amour propre, as he called it, is created by society’s failure to recognize each as a full moral and political equal. It forces people moved by their good and natural sense of self-worth to seek recognition in established marks of relative standing—in being richer or smarter or hotter than their perceived peers. When society instead meets that need, people can be satisfied without having to be seen as better than others. They can sign on to cooperation with others, on fair terms that reflect the true moral equality of each and all.
In that case, even if a world without assholes isn’t very likely, it is still fully consistent with the human social condition and so something we can reasonably hope for and work toward. Indeed, although Rousseau was content with speculative conjecture, which could be refuted by historical experience, history does seem to be working out as he hoped. As we have suggested, the rise of democracy, founded on the equality of each, has indeed coincided with a reduction in war.15
Hobbes’s insight, which we developed in chapter 6, is that cooperative progress is not inevitable. The extent to which assholes pervade and undermine social life is to a large extent up to us. Assholes are produced by society, but society is ours to make and remake. So the acceptability of our social world is not a simple matter of accepting a given; it is ours to choose. We can together reject asshole capitalism and firmly resolve to move toward a more stable, more decent, and more just capitalist order, on a national and global scale.
To the extent we do not, it is because we have collectively chosen not to, not because we must accept and resign ourselves to a lesser fate. (Hence the paradox of Italy: it keeps bringing asshole capitalism onto itself. And yet we can hope that Berlusconi’s ouster is the beginning of its end.) Although we have emphasized that success in any such collective choice depends on fortunate circumstances, and that no one measure for asshole management could suffice,
there is nevertheless much we can do to help ourselves along, to put ourselves in a position to get lucky, and together seize the moments of grace.
Those who are already cooperatively disposed can hold out in cooperative faith and adopt the attitudes that encourage it—attitudes such as tolerance, mutual understanding, and long-suffering. Those of us not yet cooperatively disposed will need a bit of help. Rousseau thus emphasized the paramount importance of moral education.16 In most present-day societies, we aren’t starting from scratch; the question is whether the institutions of moral learning can be sustained and improved. That will probably mean doubling down on public education, with more humanistic study and less economics (at least at the university level, where it has been shown to make people selfish). It will also probably mean improving religious culture. Catholics might be encouraged to regularly confess the sin of pride. Evangelicals might learn to be less selective in their concern for social justice. It could even mean teaching intelligent design in schools—albeit in philosophy courses rather than science class (which may need to be instituted). To the extent we are on the sinking asshole-capitalist ship, the tired culture wars (e.g., in the United States) are themselves a grave and gathering threat. The proper attitude is “all hands on deck.”
If humanity had a body, it would have an asshole—namely, the asshole himself. Life invariably has a certain foulness, and he embodies it. All too often, fair is foul and foul is fair. Yet the witches of social life cannot foretell our fates. Social life can be fairer and less foul, if, but only if, cooperators of the world unite.
* * *
1. G. A. Cohen, “Rescuing Conservativism: A Defense of Existing Value,” in Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar, and Samuel Freeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 203.
2. How would the attempt work? Would we adopt asshole three-strikes laws? If you swerve through three lanes in traffic, park in the handicapped zone, and speak rudely to the coffee shop barista, you get ten years in jail plus time in an asshole reeducation camp. But would we not invariably sweep up innocent non-asshole jerks or pricks in the enforcement juggernaut? And would not assholes take over the asshole witch hunt?
3. Immanuel Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 473.
4. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 128.
5. As in the ancient Hebrew mountaintop fortress of Masada, whose inhabitants chose dignified mass suicide instead of the murder, rape, and enslavement that would have ensued from an impending Roman invasion.
6. As portrayed, e.g., in the film Titanic. Nero fiddled as Rome burned, but presumably was in a position to do or have done something about it.
7. These ideas are clearly present in Rawls’s The Law of Peoples, but also in his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and, to a less evident degree, in his landmark A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
8. Cohen, “Rescuing Conservativism,” 207–8.
9. Or rather one of three central elements of conservative conviction. The first is “a bias in favor of retaining what is of [intrinsic] value, even in the face of replacing it by something of greater value.” The second is the personally valued. The third, which is our focus, is “the idea that some things must be accepted as given that not everything can, or should, be shaped to our aims and requirements; the attitude that goes with seeking to shape everything to our requirements both violates intrinsic value and contradicts our own spiritual requirements.” Cohen, “Rescuing Conservatism,” 207.
10. Cohen, “Rescuing Conservatism,” 208.
11. Note that Cohen is Rawls’s most famous critic from Rawls’s left and that he means to challenge the “conservativism” of the present-day right as a perversion of its own conservative values. As he puts it, “For the sake of protecting and extending the powers of big wealth, big-C Conservatives regularly sacrifice the small-c conservativism that many of them genuinely cherish. They blather on (as Prime Minister John Major did) about warm beer and sturdy spinsters cycling to church and then they hand Wal-Mart the keys to the kingdom” (“Rescuing Conservativism,” 225). The conventional ways of speaking of “liberal” and “conservative” outlooks, say, in England or the United States, have little meaning from a philosophical perspective.
12. Rawls would happily accept the Cohen-inspired idea as a friendly amendment. He might also agree that Cohen’s conservativism supplies grounds for rejecting a wealth-maximizing and fetishistic style of capitalism that both Cohen and Rawls reject.
13. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), argues that violence has markedly declined through history. Pinker suggests that the key to still less violence or greater peace is to use reason to seek not justice but peace itself, since people will disagree and perhaps go to war over their different views of justice. A major theme in Rawls’s thought (e.g., in The Law of Peoples) is that a good measure of (nonretributive) social justice, duly sensitive to “reasonable pluralism,” is a precondition for stable, lasting peace. People must feel they are being treated with sufficient fairness if their willing cooperation is to be sustained.
14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 70.
15. This is Rawls’s Rousseauian argument in The Law of Peoples.
16. Especially in Émile.
LETTER TO AN ASSHOLE
(Written in the spirit of Horace’s epistles: “Now therefore I lay aside both verses, and all other sportive matters; my study and inquiry is after what is true and fitting, and I am wholly engaged in this.”)1
My friend:
I write hoping to persuade you to change your basic way of being. I do not presume that you will come to agree with me that you do not have the entitlements you so often assume. Nothing I could say by way of pure reason can coerce you into accepting a view you are simply unwilling to hold. But I do at least want to offer some reasons why you might reconsider your firm stance. Ultimately, of course, you can take them or leave them. My hope is that you give them a hearing.
I’m sure you found my chapters quite unfair to you. I have written much about you without speaking to you directly. I claim you won’t listen, but I have not given you a serious argument. I say you are mistaken but presume that reason supports my position. All of which must lead you to wonder about my motives. Do I think I have a serious argument or not? Instead of my soft, crowd-pleasing disputations, why won’t I just make my case honestly and forthrightly? Am I too lazy, or too cowardly, to follow reason where it leads? Do I perhaps know and rightly fear that the weakness of my arguments will be exposed?
I take your point. So I address you here to give you my argument, an argument that you really should come to recognize others as equals, that you should in this way change your basic way of being.
I admit that I present my argument in writing in part for fear of speaking to you in person. When Kafka wrote to his father, he had plenty to say but feared that the right words would evade him under the glare of his father’s supreme confidence. I, too, worry about getting a word in edgewise in person. But while Kafka hoped he and his father could each accept the other’s innocence, I do not seek that way of making peace. I still maintain that, in the dispute between us, you are the one in the wrong. Even if you won’t finally agree with me in this, I have, as you’ll recall from chapter 7, made my own kind of peace with this, my own way of accepting as a given that you may never change.
As for why you would listen to me at all, my sense is that I might pique your curiosity. Might I actually understand your much misunderstood position? I have labored, in anger but also in sympathy, to appreciate your perspective. I even have a distant gratitude to you for all I have learned with an uneasy sense that, but by grace and fortune, I could eas
ily be much the same as you. I am also well aware of the intellectual resources at your disposal. Having read Nietzsche, I know that “morality” can be seen as a device of the masses’ wretched envy, of insecure pride expressed in moral language, as a flailing effort to subdue the few and the strong by the weak and the many. In that view of morality, which you might well agree with, you are the authentic moral hero, while my arguments only aid in the oppression of the great by the small. So I have a sense of what I am up against. Finally, I understand that there can be no refutation of the dug-in skeptic, who denies our knowledge of external things or of objective values. Descartes showed us the folly in expecting proof of human affairs as in mathematics, with its clear and distinct certainty. Reason is a gentler method, which one can decide not to hear. So, you might say, if the envious and unworthy masses will not see good reason to bow to true talent, to accord you the special treatment you in fact deserve, then what can be done about them? Why grant them a hearing at all?
Before I give you my own argument, you might find it of interest to remember the wise and chatty Horace, who shares your appreciation of superiority. He writes to Maecenas:
The wise man’s second only to Jupiter: