Marx, however, made the mistake of denning morality as moralism, and so quite understandably rejected it. He did not seem to realize that he was the Aristotle of the modern age. The paradigm of classical morality in our own time has been feminism, which insists in its own way on the interwovenness of the moral and political, power and the personal. It is in this tradition above all that the precious heritage of Aristotle and Marx has been deepened and renewed. This is not to imagine that the personal and the political are the same thing. One can overpoliticize as well as overpersonalize. The English feminist who in a moment of irascibility once considered wearing a lapel-badge reading ‘The personal is personal too, so sod off’ was making precisely this point. It is just that the distinction between the personal and the political is not the same as that between the moral and the political. And it is feminism, above all, which has been the custodian of this precious insight in our time.
To grasp morality as a great novelist understands it is to see it as an intricately woven texture of nuances, qualities and fine gradations. Novels convey moral truths, though not in any sense of the term that Oral Roberts or Ian Paisley would recognize. A novel with a moral is not likely to be morally interesting. ‘Goldilocks’ is not the most profound of fables. But this, as we have seen, is not to dismiss rules, principles and obligations out of hand. Indeed, there are quite a few of them in Henry James. It is rather to set them in a different context. Some ways of behaving are so vital to the flourishing of human life all round, or alternatively so injurious to it, that we hedge them around with laws, principles and obligations. They are part of the scaffolding of the good life, not ends in themselves. It is not that principles are unbending while the rest of our conduct is a matter of rule-of-thumb. Principles can be flexible and still be principles. It is not their unbendability which distinguishes them from the rest of our life. It is the vital nature of what they safeguard or promote – vital from the viewpoint of fostering an abundance of life. You can’t do this, for example, unless you have a law prohibiting unjust killing. Any thriving form of life will have its obligations and prohibitions. The only problem is that you may then come to identify morality with the obligations and prohibitions, rather than with the thriving.
This is roughly St Paul’s position on the Mosaic Law. St Paul is critical of the law, but not because he makes the mistake of assuming that the law of Judaism is just about ritual observances and legalistic prohibitions, whereas the Christian gospel is about love. As a devout Jew himself, St Paul understands perfectly well that the Mosaic law is the law of love and justice. It is not just a neurotic fussing about washing and diet. It was not contrary to Jewish law to set the law aside in the name of human compassion. The law against fashioning graven images of God, for example, is really a prohibition on fetishism. To carve a totem of God is to make an ideological idol of him, which you can then manipulate as a magical device to get him to fall in with your wishes. For the Jewish scriptures, you cannot manufacture images of God or even give him a name, because the only image of God is humanity. And humanity is equally resistant to definition. Another such ideological fetish is labour, which is why the law insists that men and women are granted a periodic rest from it on the sabbath. It has nothing to do with going to church. There were no churches. It has to do with leisure.
Similarly, the prohibition on stealing has almost certainly nothing to do with private property. Most Old Testament scholars would now agree that it was probably about stealing people: kidnapping. Quite a lot of this went on at the time, not least so you could lay your hands on the labour-power of young men from other tribes. The Old Testament Jews were not so flush in private property that they needed a special edict from Mount Sinai on the subject – as opposed, say, to adultery, which was rather more in evidence. Honouring your father and your mother is almost certainly about how to treat the old and economically useless of the tribe, not about the nuclear family. There was no nuclear family.
The idea that the Old Testament Jews were a bunch of bureaucratic legalists is a piece of Christian anti-Semitism. It is already present in the sporadically anti-Semitic New Testament, which caricatures the Pharisees in this manner. The Pharisees were certainly purists, but they were also anti-imperial Jewish nationalists sympathetic to the revolutionary underground Zealots. Quite a lot of what Jesus has to say sounds like standard Pharisaical stuff – though he cursed the Pharisees pretty ferociously as well, partly perhaps to put some daylight between them and himself.
Equally, there can be no love without law. Love for the Judaeo-Christian tradition means acting in certain material ways, not feeling a warm glow in your heart. It means, say, caring for the sick and imprisoned, not feeling Romantic about them. And all this occasionally needs to be codified, partly because the poor need the law for their protection. They would be foolish to rely on the big – hearted whimsicality of their superiors. Love is a notoriously obscure, complicated affair, and moral language is a way of trying to get what counts as love into sharper focus. The injunction to love your neighbour is not a Christian invention, but stems from the Old Testament Book of Leviticus. People did not have to wait upon the arrival of an obscure first-century Jewish prophet, who was probably less of a crowd-puller than his mentor John the Baptist, in order to start being nice to each other.
Laws have to be precise because the result of fuzziness may be injustice. A rapist may get off because a legal draughtsman was too vague. Those negotiating with harsh employers would be well advised to seek a contract as tightly worded as possible. The spirit of the law is not always to be preferred to its letter. If Shakespeare’s Shylock sticks ‘inhumanly’ to the letter of his bond, it is for one reason because in doing so he seeks to expose the hypocrisy of a Christian ruling class which will resort to any shabby stratagem or disingenuous verbal quibbling to get one of their own kind off the hook. Shylock’s legalism might show up their own, in a monstrous parody of it. And this, for a contemptible Jew, would be no mean achievement.
The exactitude of the law, then, is not to be deplored in some bout of soft-hearted sentimentalism. Jesus rails against legalism, but for the most part he upholds the Judaic law. One reason why the Jewish ruling class handed him over to the Roman colonial power was perhaps because they could not agree that he had violated the Mosaic Law. The law needs to be ruthlessly impersonal so as to treat all those who take shelter under it in an equal manner. ‘Privilege’ means ‘private law’. Treating people in an equal manner does not mean treating them as if they were all the same; it means attending even-handedly to each individual’s unique situation. Equality means giving as much weight to one individual’s particularity as to another’s. We shall see later that there is a similar kind of inhuman anonymity about love.
It is just that for St Paul, the law is really for children and novices. It is for those who are not yet morally independent, and who therefore have to be propped up by a scaffolding of codes and censures. They have not yet developed the spontaneous habit of virtue, and still see morality in superstitious fashion as a matter of offending or placating some higher authority. They have the toddler’s theory of ethics. The law may help them to grow into an enjoyable moral autonomy, but they will have done so only when they are able to throw its crutch away and manage by themselves. In a similar way, we know that someone is fluent in Albanian when they are able to dispense with the dictionary. Or we can see that someone’s artistic career has really taken fire when she begins to stretch and improvise on the rules of painting or prosody she has been taught. Learning the rules helps her to intuit when to throw them away.
It was not long before cultural theorists came to realize that you could not live without moral discourse altogether. Those in political power might be capable of this feat, because they could always define their power purely in administrative terms. Politics was the technical business of public administration, whereas morality was a private affair. Politics belonged to the boardroom, and morality to the bedroom. This led to a lot of immor
al boardrooms and politically oppressive bedrooms. Because politics had been redefined as purely calculative and pragmatic, it was now almost the opposite of the ethical. But since it was hardly barefaced enough to shuck off the ethical altogether, politics had to be conducted in the name of certain moral values which at the same time it could not avoid violating. Power needed those values to lend itself legitimacy, but they also threatened to get seriously in its way. This is one reason why we could now be witnessing the dawn of a new, post-ethical epoch, in which world powers no longer bother to dress up their naked self-interest in speciously altruistic language, but are insolently candid about it instead.
The political left, however, cannot define the political in this purely technical way, since its brand of emancipatory politics inescapably involves questions of value. The problem for some traditional leftist thought was that the more you tried to firm up your political agenda, making it a scientific, materialist affair rather than an idle Utopian dream, the more you threatened to discredit the very values it aimed to realize. It seemed impossible to establish, say, the idea of justice on a scientific basis; so what exactly did you denounce capitalism, slavery or sexism in the name of? You cannot describe someone as oppressed unless you have some dim notion of what not being oppressed might look like, and why being oppressed is a bad idea in the first place. And this involves normative judgements, which then makes politics look uncomfortably like ethics.
On the whole, cultural theory has proved fairly unsuccessful at this business. It has been unable to argue convincingly against those who see nothing wrong with shackling or ill-treating others. The only reason it has got away with this so far is that there are few such people around. Almost everybody agrees that exploiting people is wrong. It is just that they cannot agree on why they agree on this. Neither can they agree on what counts as exploitation, which is why, for example, the socialist critique of capitalism, or the feminist critique of patriarchy, are far from self-evident. To see a situation as abusive or exploitative is inevitably to offer an interpretation of it. We will only see it as such within a certain context of assumptions. Oppression is not there before our eyes in the sense that a patch of purple is.
Does this mean that oppression is just a matter of opinion? Not at all. To argue over whether a situation is anti-Semitic or not is to clash over our interpretations of what is going on, not over our subjective reponses to it. It is not a matter of our both seeing the same set of morally neutral physical actions, to which you then add the subjective value-judgement ‘good’ and I add the subjective value-judgement ‘bad’. Moral language is not just a set of notions we use to record our approval or disapproval of actions; it enters into the description of the actions themselves. If I describe an anti-Semitic assault in purely physiological terms, I am not seeing what actually happened. We cannot describe what is actually there without recourse to the beliefs and motivations which it involves. In the same way, we could not describe to an observer ignorant of children what was happening when one small child snatched a toy from another, without resort to concepts like envy, rivalry and resentment. And this is one sense in which moral language is not just subjective.
The radical has two ways of answering the question of why exploitation is wrong, neither of which seems all that appealing. You can go universal and speak of what belongs to the dignity of humanity as a species; or you can go local, and see ideas of freedom and justice as springing from traditions which, despite being purely cultural and historical, nonetheless exert a compelling force over us. The problem with the first approach is that it seems to squeeze out history, whereas the problem with the second approach is that it seems too narrowly invested in it. The first appears too general to be of much use, while the second runs into the usual problems of moral relativism. What if your tribe or tradition, like Aristotle’s, finds nothing wrong with slavery? Does this make it acceptable? Is it all right for you to hold that revenge is immoral, but all right for your colonial subjects not to? Are they simply not up to such high-minded ideals? Is the point to understand the cannibals rather than to change them? If so, why does this not also apply to drug traffickers?
By and large, cultural theory has been massively evasive on these matters, on the rare occasions when it has got round to raising them. But the period when this was more or less acceptable may be coming to an end. At the moment, pragmatic kinds of moral justification are popular in the West. We believe in, say, freedom of speech or the inevitability of a degree of unemployment because that is part of our cultural heritage. It is an entirely contingent heritage, with no metaphysical backing to it; but so by the same logic is your alternative way of doing things. If we can give no absolute force to our values, you can offer no knock-down arguments against them. In a sense, we do what we do because we do what we do. After a long enough while, history becomes its own justification, as Edmund Burke insisted in defending the British Empire and the House of Lords. Custom and practice are the best arguments of all.
This kind of case, associated not only with Romantic conservatives like Burke but with postmodern philosophers like Richard Rorty, has served Western civilization tolerably well in these post-metaphysical times. But its hour, for all that, may be about to strike. For one thing, it becomes harder to justify your form of life in such laid-back, off-the-cuff terms when it has launched upon a new extremist, globally aggressive phase. The United States government is at present in the hands of extremists and semi-fanatical fundamentalists, and not at all because it has been taken over by al-Qaida. For another thing, it becomes harder for intellectuals to justify a form of life which has grown increasingly lax and nonchalant about justifying itself. Not long ago, Western civilization resorted to various solemn-sounding doctrines to legitimate some of its shadier activities: the Will of God, the Destiny of the West, the White Man’s Burden. The embarrassment of these ideals was that they clashed somewhat grotesquely with what people were actually up to. A credibility gap opened up between fact and value, which it was hard to paper over. In practice, capitalism is restive with all restrictions; traditionally, however, it has concealed that anarchic impulse beneath its restrictive moral codes.
As Western capitalism embarks upon its post-metaphysical phase, these codes begin to shed their credibility. The very secular, pragmatic climate which capitalism has itself created lends them the hollow, parsonical ring of a sermon on why God permits genocide. High-sounding hypocrisy begins to give way to arrogantly explicit self-interest. Strict moral codes start to loosen up, as the solidly reputable middle classes become increasingly a thing of the past, and as morals and manners begin to reflect a two-dimensional world of drift, cynicism and self-seeking. Moral values which state what you ought to do are impressively idealistic, but too blatantly at odds with your behaviour; moral values which reflect what you actually do are far more plausible, but only at the cost of no longer serving to legitimate your activity.
In any case, as the Western system in its post-Cold War stage found itself less and less constrained by a political adversary, it was able to expand and intensify its activities in ways which made them harder to conceal beneath a cloak of humanitarianism or global altruism. There were also fewer critics to whom it needed to justify itself. At the same time, however, the rise of a metaphysical adversary of the West, in the shape of fundamentalist Islam, means that the West is in the end going to have to do rather better than claiming that a distaste for authoritarianism or fiddling the books of gigantic corporations just happen to be the kind of thing it goes in for. The more predatory and corrupt capitalism grows, the less easily it can mount convincing defences of its way of life; yet in the face of the rising political hostility caused by its expanding ambitions, the more urgently it needs to do so. However, such appeals to fundamental values may become hard to distinguish from the kind of fundamentalism which the West is out to combat. One way in which its enemies may thus prove victorious is by turning it inexorably into a mirror-image of themselves – and this, ironically, in th
e very act of the West’s struggling to oppose them.
When cultural theory finally did get round to tackling ethical questions, it did so, surprisingly, in a Kantian kind of way. Surprisingly, because Kant’s moral thought is absolutist in a way at odds with the drift of much contemporary theory. The austere climate of Kantian ethics hardly consorts well with the hedonistic playfulness of postmodern thought. (It is true, however, that some of that theory has even managed to convert play into a solemn, cerebral, mildly intimidating affair.) The kind of moral theory which began finally to emerge, in the work of critics and philosophers like Paul de Man, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and J. Hillis Miller, was that of a mysterious, unknowable moral law, embodied for us in some Other, which laid upon us an absolute, unconditional demand, and which evoked from us an equally infinite sense of responsibility.2
On this viewpoint, there are moral judgements, but they lack any sort of criteria or rational basis. There is no longer any relation, as there was for Aristotle or Marx, between the way the world is and how we ought to act within it, or between the way we are and what we ought to do. Because the way we and the world are, for these thinkers, is no way in particular, they cannot serve as a basis for moral judgement. Those judgements are accordingly left hanging in the air, demanded of us in apparently gratuitous fashion by some sublimely enigmatic Law or Other. For Jacques Derrida, ethics is a matter of absolute decisions – decisions which are vital and necessary but also utterly ‘impossible’, and which fall outside all given norms, forms of knowledge and modes of conceptualization.3 One can only hope that he is not on the jury when one’s case comes up in court.
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