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After Theory

Page 14

by Terry Eagleton


  Trying to be objective is an arduous, fatiguing business, which in the end only the virtuous can attain. Only those with patience, honesty, courage and persistence can delve through the dense layers of self-deception which prevent us from seeing the situation as it really is. This is especially difficult for those who wield power – for power tends to breed fantasy, reducing the self to a state of querulous narcissism. For all its tough-minded pragmatism, it is riddled with delusion, assuming that the whole world centres subserviently upon itself. It dissolves reality to a mirror of its own desires. It is those whose material existence is pretty solid who tend to assume that the world is not. Power is naturally solipsistic, incapable of getting outside its own skin. Like sexuality, it is where we are most infantile. It is the powerless who are more likely to appreciate that the world does not exist to pander to our needs, and rolls on its own sweet way with scarcely a side-glance at us.

  Knowledge and morality, then, are not finally separable, as the modern age has tended to assume. One can see this particularly in the case of our knowledge of each other, which involves moral capacities like imagination, sensitivity, emotional intelligence and the like. Knowing another person is not like knowing the flashiest bars in Rio; it is kind of knowledge bound up with moral value. The modern age drives a wedge between knowledge and morality, fact and value; but since establishing the facts is usually a gruelling process, given the complexity of the world, the deceptiveness of some of its appearances, and our own chronic tendency to self-delusion, it is bound to involve value of a kind. Knowledge needs to be disciplined, judicious, meticulous, self-critical, discriminating and so on, so that nobody without some sort of virtue could write a great history of the boll weevil or come up with a stunning scientific discovery. Perhaps this was what Ludwig Wittgenstein had in mind when he asked himself how he could be a good logician without being a decent human being. Nobody who was not open to dialogue with others, willing to listen, argue honestly and admit when he or she was wrong could make real headway in investigating the world.

  To see the other’s situation as it really is is the opposite of sentimentalism. Sentimentalism sees the world as benignly coloured by itself, whereas selfishness colours the world malignly with itself. The opposite of this self-centredness, for which the world is just an imaginary doubling of one’s ego, is what modern theory calls ‘decentring’, or what has been more traditionally known as disinterestedness. Disinterestedness, a notion almost universally scorned by the cultural left nowadays for its bogus impartiality, grew up in the eighteenth century as the opposite not of interests, but of self-interest. It was a weapon to wield against the Hobbesians and possessive individualists. Disinterestedness means not viewing the world from some sublime Olympian height, but a kind of compassion or fellow-feeling. It means trying to feel your way imaginatively into the experience of another, sharing their delight and sorrow without thinking of oneself.5 George Eliot is one of the great nineteenth-century inheritors of this ethical lineage. To this extent, the moral and the aesthetic are closely allied. It is not that we do not have interests: it is just that our interest lies in another rather than in ourselves. This kind of imaginative sympathy, like virtue for Aristotle, is its own reward; it does not seek for profit, but takes pleasure in the well-being of others with a well-nigh sensuous relish. Disinterestedness – for postmodern theory, the last word in delusion – is a smack at the egoistic individualism of early middle-class society. It is in origin a radical political concept.

  Striving for dispassionate judgement is an emotionally taxing affair. It does not come at all naturally. Objectivity requires a fair degree of passion – in particular, the passion for doing the kind of justice which might throw open your most deep-seated prejudices to revision. Disinterestedness does not mean being magically absolved from interests, but recognizing that some of your interests are doing you no good, or that it is in the interests of doing an effective job to set certain of them apart for the moment. It demands imagination, sympathy and self-discipline. You do not need to rise majestically above the fray to decide that in a specific situation, somebody else’s interests should be promoted over yours. On the contrary, to judge this accurately involves being in the thick of the affray, assessing the situation from the inside, not loitering in some no man’s land where you would be incapable of knowing anything. You do not have to be standing in metaphysical outer space to recognize that sending your valet off on a fifteen-mile walk through bandit-infested woods in the dead of winter to buy you a small bar of Turkish Delight should yield precedence to letting him linger by his father’s deathbed. Someone who insisted on dispatching the valet would be being unreasonable – a point worth pondering for those for whom it is reason, not unreason, which is cold and clinical.

  Of course you may spare the valet his fifteen-mile hike for self-interested reasons. Perhaps you want to overwhelm him with your generosity so as to get away with slashing his wages, or fear that he may deliberately burn your underwear in an act of reprisal when he next irons it. What counts, however, is what you do. It is not that your intentions do not matter at all, just that they matter less. An obsession with intentions has been the bugbear of some moral thought. It is thus a point in favour of the classical ethics we have been examining that for it, moral value lies in the world rather than in your mind. In that sense, it resembles meaning, which is in the first place in history rather than our heads.

  Virtue for Aristotle is not a state of mind but a disposition – which means being permanently geared for acting in a certain way even when you are not acting at all. It is a matter of how you would customarily behave in a given situation. Goodness is a matter of habit. Like playing the flute, you get better at it the more you practise. It is not, as we post-Romantics tend to assume, that we start off with inner moral feelings which then issue in actions. This would be like imagining that someone could spend three years learning inwardly how to play the flute, pick up the instrument and coax it instantly into melodious sound. It is rather that our actions create the appropriate states of mind. We become brave or generous by habitually doing brave or generous things. This, once more, is rather like the question of meaning. We do not have the concept of exasperation and then put it into words; having the concept of exasperation is a matter of being familiar with the social custom of how the word is used.

  Objectivity does not mean judging from nowhere. On the contrary, you can only know how the situation is if you are in a position to know. Only by standing at a certain angle to reality can it be illuminated for you. The wretched of the earth, for example, are likely to appreciate more of the truth of human history than their masters – not because they are innately more perceptive, but because they can glean from their own everyday experience that history for the vast majority of men and women has been largely a matter of despotic power and fruitless toil. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put the point in their study Empire: ‘Only the poor lives radically the actual and present being, in destitution and suffering, and thus only the poor has the ability to renew being.’6 Only those who know how calamitous things actually are can be sufficiently free of illusion or vested interests to change them. You cannot change the situation effectively unless you appreciate the depth of the problem; and to do that fully you need to be at the sticky end of it, or at least to have heard the news from there.

  At the level of tacit or informal knowledge, then, the poor know better than their governors how it is with history. Objectivity and partisanship are allies, not rivals. What is not conducive to objectivity on this score is the judicious even-handedness of the liberal. It is the liberal who falls for the myth that you can only see things aright if you don’t take sides. It is the industrial chaplain view of reality. The liberal has difficulty with situations in which one side has a good deal more of the truth than the other – which is to say, all the key political situations. For this is to equate truth with one-sidedness rather than with symmetry, which is not how liberals tend to see the matter. Fo
r them, the truth generally lies somewhere in the middle. Or, as Raymond Williams once commented: when in doubt, the Englishman thinks of a pendulum. Faced with the poor’s view of history as for the most part wretchedness and adversity, the liberal reaches instinctively to trim the balance: hasn’t there also been a great deal of splendour and value? Indeed there has; but to claim that the two balance each other out is surely to falsify. Even-handedness here is not in the service of objectivity. True judiciousness means taking sides.

  We tend to think of the subjective as pertaining to the self, and the objective to the world. The subjective is a matter of value, while the world is a matter of fact. And how these two come together is often something of a mystery. Yet one way in which they converge is in the act of self-reflection. Or, if you like, in that curious somersault or backward flip in which the self takes itself as an object of knowledge. Objectivity is not just a condition outside the self. In the form of self-knowledge, it is the pre-condition of all successful living. Self-knowledge is inseparably a matter of fact and value. It is a question of knowing your self, but this very act of knowing reflects a kind of value which is beyond the reach of orchids and alligators.

  If knowing the world often enough means burrowing through complex swathes of self-deception, knowing oneself involves this even more. Only someone unusually secure could have the courage to confront themselves in this way without either rationalizing away what they unearth, or being consumed by fruitless guilt. Only someone confident of being loved and trusted can achieve that kind of security. This is another linkage between knowledge and moral value. Since fear is one of our natural conditions, men and women can only truly make themselves known to those whom they love or trust. As the Duke comments to the cynical Lucio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, ‘Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love.’ In the act of trusting self-disclosure, knowledge and value go hand in hand. Similarly, only if one knows that one will still be accepted can one dare to encounter the truth of oneself. In these senses, too, value and objectivity are not the opposites which so many seem to think them.

  One of the opposites of objectivity is narcissism. To believe that the world is an object independent of my life is to accept that it will trundle on with supreme indifference after my death.7 This is at once pure speculation on my part, since I will not be around to confirm it, and, so to speak, a dead certainty. The world is impeccably democratic and even-handed: it has no regard for any of us. It does not depend for its survival on our favourable opinions of it, as a slave might do on his master’s. It is only those who fantasize that reality is the kind of thing that might have a regard for them, or maybe once did, who behave like jilted lovers. Those who imagine that the world has taken a shine to them, that its existence depends in some sense on their own, will never be able to grow up. It is true, if Freud is to be credited, that we never grow up anyway, and that maturity is a fantasy entertained only by the young. But there are degrees of infantilism. Supermodels and idealist philosophers rank high in the scale.

  Such people are also likely to have problems in acknowledging the autonomy of others. One way in which we recognize that the world is objective is by recognizing the presence of others whose behaviour manifests the fact that, at a very basic level, reality is pretty much the same for them as it is for ourselves. Or, if it seems not to be, then at least there is someone out there with whom we can argue the toss. Indeed, it is others who are the paradigm case of objectivity. They are not only pieces of the world which are independent of us, but the only fragments of the world’s furniture which can actually impress upon us this truth. Other persons are objectivity in action. It is exactly because they are fellow subjects that they can reveal to us their otherness, and in that act disclose to us our own. For conservatives, there is that in the world which cannot be tampered with, known as property. For radicals, too, there is that which is beyond our meddling, known as the autonomy of others. It is this which grounds our notions of objectivity. Liberals, characteristically, back both horses, believing in both property and autonomy.

  6

  Morality

  For a long time, cultural theorists avoided the question of morality as something of an embarrassment. It seemed preachy, unhistorical, priggish and heavy-handed. For the harder-nosed kind of theorist, it was also soppy and unscientific. It was too often just a fancy name for oppressing other people. Morality is a question of what our parents believe, not what we think. Most of it seems to be about sex, or more precisely about why you should not have it. Since having sex in the 1960s was a kind of sacred obligation, like wearing mascara or worshipping your ancestors, morality rapidly gave way to style. Or, indeed, to politics. The ethical was for suburbanites, while the political was cool.

  Ethics were for those who made a fuss about whether to go to bed with each other, not for political types. It was not that political types did not go to bed with each other, just that they did not make a fuss about it. So-called moral questions, such as whether to steal an expensive volume of Nietzsche from the local bookstore, could be resolved by asking how far this action was likely to promote or retard the emancipation of the working class. Since it was unlikely to retard that emancipation in any dramatic way, it was probably all right to go ahead and steal it. Whole shelfloads of Nietzsche and Marcuse accordingly disappeared from libraries and bookshops, leaving Walter Scott and the correspondence of Winston Churchill behind.

  We have suggested already that this view of morality is a mistaken one. Morality is all about enjoyment and abundance of life, and for classical thought ethics and politics are hard to distinguish. Despite this, cultural theorists felt uneasy with moral questions because they seemed to pass over the political for the personal. Wasn’t morality about such matters as keeping your promises and not fornicating, rather than wage agreements and TV franchises? It is true that morality has been often enough a way of ducking hard political questions by reducing them to the personal. In the so-called war against terrorism, for example, the word ‘evil’ really means: Don’t look for a political explanation. It is a wonderfully time-saving device. If terrorists are simply Satanic, then you do not need to investigate what lies behind their atrocious acts of violence. You can ignore the plight of the Palestinian people, or of those Arabs who have suffered under squalid right-wing autocracies supported by the West for its own selfish, oil-hungry purposes.

  The word ‘evil’ transfers the question from this mundane realm to a sinisterly metaphysical one. You cannot acknowledge that the terrible crimes which terrorists commit have a purpose behind them, since to ascribe purposes to such people is to recognize them as rational creatures, however desperately wrong-headed. It is easier to caricature your enemy as a bunch of blood-crazed beasts – a deeply dangerous move, since to defeat an opponent you have first to understand him. The British tabloid press may have seen the IRA as gorillas rather than guerrillas, savages with no rationale for their actions, but British Intelligence knew better. They understood that Republican murders and massacres were not without a purpose. Indeed, to label your enemy as mad is to let him, morally speaking, off the hook, absolving him of responsibility for his crimes.

  To define morality in purely individual terms is to believe, say, that a history of abuse and emotional deprivation has nothing whatsoever to do with a teenager becoming a petty criminal. It is sometimes pointed out by those who hold this view that not all abused children become criminals; but then not all smokers develop lung cancer. This does not refute the relation between the two. Moral values must be as independent of social forces as artistic ones. The fear lurking behind this view is that to explain is to condone – that one will fall for a sentimentalist, social-worker theory of morality which disavows the reality of human wickedness.

  Yet almost nobody believes that to explain the complex historical factors involved in the rise of Hitler is to forgive him his crimes. At least almost nobody believes that now, though at the time it might well have been seen as a
thought crime. It is partly because terrorism is here and now that political explanations are considered to lend it comfort, even though political explanations will in fact help to defeat it. On a more moderate version of this view, there are certain immoral acts which we can explain in social terms, and a special class of acts known as evil which we cannot. We shall be taking issue with this opinion later on.

  Appeals to morality, like appeals to psychology, have often enough been a way of avoiding political argument. Protestors don’t have a point, they just had over-indulgent parents. Women who object to Cruise missiles are simply consumed by penis-envy. Anarchists are the effect of poor potty training. In the light of classical moral thought, all this is deeply ironic. For Aristotle, as we have seen, ethics and politics are intimately related. Ethics is about excelling at being human, and nobody can do this in isolation. Moreover, nobody can do it unless the political institutions which allow you to do it are available. It is this kind of moral thinking which was inherited by Karl Marx, who was much indebted to Aristotle even in his economic thought. Questions of good and bad had been falsely abstracted from their social contexts, and had to be restored to them again. In this sense, Marx was a moralist in the classical sense of the word. He believed that moral inquiry had to examine all of the factors which went to make up a specific action or way of life, not just personal ones.

  Unfortunately, Marx was a classical moralist who did not seem aware that he was, rather as Dante was not aware that he was living in the middle ages. Like a lot of radicals since his time, Marx thought on the whole that morality was just ideology.1 This is because he made the characteristically bourgeois mistake of confusing morality with moralism. Moralism believes that there is a set of questions known as moral questions which are quite distinct from social or political ones. It does not see that ‘moral’ means exploring the texture and quality of human behaviour as richly and sensitively as you can, and that you cannot do this by abstracting men and women from their social surroundings. This is morality as, say, the novelist Henry James understood it, as opposed to those who believe you can reduce it to rules, prohibitions and obligations.

 

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