We can note, to begin with, what an imposing conception of morality this is, in every sense of the word. It reworks in new language the rather antiquated idea, nowadays much under fire, that morality is mainly about imposition or obligation. But it is also imposing in the sense of being sublime, edifying, high-minded. It forgets, in other words, the sheer banality of the ethical. Like some religious thought, it sees ethics more in relation to the eternal than to the everyday. The ethical is a privileged realm in which the Other turns his luminous face to us and places upon us some inscrutable but ineluctable claim. It is an ethics bathed in an aura of religiosity – in a rhetoric of religion which has nonetheless emptied religious language of very much determinate meaning. It hijacks the halo of such thought while discarding the disreputable content, as Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis also did in their day.
The New Testament’s view of ethics, by contrast, is distinctly irreligious. Matthew’s gospel speaks of the second coming of Jesus, beginning with some familiar, reach-me-down Old Testament imagery of angels, thrones and clouds of glory. The effect, however, is one of carefully contrived bathos. What salvation comes down to is the humdrum material business of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and visiting the sick. In typically Judaic style, salvation is an ethical matter, not a cultic one. It turns on the question of whether you have sought to protect the poor against the violence of the rich, not of how scrupulous you have been in your ritual observances. It is basically a biological affair. Even heaven is something of a let-down. The New Testament also adopts a fairly relaxed attitude to sex, and takes a notably dim view of the family.
To say that morality is basically a biological affair is to say that, like everything else about us, it is rooted ultimately in the body. 4 As Alasdair MacIntyre observes, ‘Human identity is primarily, even if not only, bodily and therefore animal identity.’5 It is the mortal, fragile, suffering, ecstatic, needy, dependent, desirous, compassionate body which furnishes the basis of all moral thought. Moral thought puts the body back into our discourse. Friedrich Nietzsche maintained that the roots of justice, prudence, bravery and moderation, indeed the whole phenomenon of morality, were essentially animal. In this sense, ethics resembles aesthetics, which started life in the mid-eighteenth century not as a language about art, but as a way of investigating bodily experience. The eighteenth century, with its cults of sentiment and sensibility, understood in its own extravagant way that moral talk was basically talk of the body. The cult of sensibility evolved a language which could cope in the same breath with the moral and the material, sympathy and the nervous system. Talk of melting, softening, swooning, palpitating, excitation and stimulation hovered ambiguously between the physical and spiritual. The nineteenth century, by contrast, was a good deal more high-minded about the whole affair.
It is because of the body, not in the first place because of Enlightenment abstraction, that we can speak of morality as universal. The material body is what we share most significantly with the whole of the rest of our species, extended both in time and space. Of course it is true that our needs, desires and sufferings are always culturally specific. But our material bodies are such that they are, indeed must be, in principle capable of feeling compassion for any others of their kind. It is on this capacity for fellow-feeling that moral values are founded; and this is based in turn on our material dependency on each other. Angels, if they existed, would not be moral beings in anything like our sense.
What may persuade us that certain human bodies lack all claim on our compassion is culture. Regarding some of our fellow humans as inhuman requires a fair degree of cultural sophistication. It means having literally to disregard the testimony of our senses. This, at any rate, should give pause to those for whom ‘culture’ is instinctively an affirmative term. There is another sense in which culture can interpose itself between human bodies, known as technology. Technology is an extension of our bodies which can blunt their capacity to feel for one another. It is simple to destroy others at long range, but not when you have to listen to the screams. Military technology creates death but destroys the experience of it. It is easier to launch a missile attack which will wipe out thousands than run a single sentry through the guts. The painless death for which the victims have always hankered is now also prized by the perpetrators. Technology makes our bodies far more flexible and capacious, but in some ways much less responsive. It reorganizes our senses for swiftness and multiplicity rather than depth, persistence or intensity. Marx considered that by turning even our senses into commodities, capitalism had plundered us of our bodies. In his view, we would need a considerable political transformation in order to come to our senses.
Drawing parallels between humans and the other animals used to be distasteful to humanists, who insist on the unspannable gap between the two. These days it is unpalatable to culturalists. Culturalists differ from humanists in rejecting the idea of a human nature or essence; but they see eye to eye with them in maintaining a sharp distinction between language and culture on the one hand, and dumb, brute nature on the other. Alternatively, they allow culture to colonize nature from end to end, so that materiality is dissolved into meaning. In the opposite corner from both humanists and culturalists are so-called naturalists, who highlight the natural aspects of humanity and see a continuity between humans and other animals.
In fact, the link between the natural and the human, the material and the meaningful, is morality. The moral body, so to speak, is where our material nature converges with meaning and value. Both culturalists and naturalists miss this convergence from opposite ends, either underplaying or overrating the continuity between humans and their fellow creatures. In one sense, the culturalists are right: to acquire language involves a quantum leap which transfigures one’s entire world, including the world of one’s senses. It is not just being an animal with a linguistic bonus. Yet Alasdair MacIntyre is surely also right to insist that even as cultural beings, ‘we remain animal selves with animal identities’.6 Between the non-linguistic and the linguistic there is what one might call transformative continuity, rather as there was between the court of Charles I and that of William III, or between Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot.
We are universal animals, then, because of the kind of bodies we are born with. Stoats are a good deal more parochial. Because their bodies are not geared to complex production and communication, they are more restricted by their sensory existence than we are. Like village idiots and neighbourhood police officers, they are essentially local beings. This is absolutely no reason to patronize them. Stoats seem to do well enough in their provincial way, and are no doubt splendid creatures in every respect. Because they are more or less confined to the immediate life of their senses, they do not go in for such abstract enterprises as constructing Cruise missiles and lobbing them at each other, unless they are being remarkably furtive about it. It is true that the ‘higher’, more intelligent animals can sit looser to their senses and extend their reach further beyond their bodies; but the extent to which they can do this is still meagre compared to sign-wielding beasts like ourselves. The existence of stoats is a lot more tedious than ours, but by the same token far less precarious. Because our bodies are the way they are, we can in principle enter into forms of communication far deeper and richer than physical contact with any member of our species whatsoever.
In principle, to be sure, is a vital qualification. Roughly speaking, it is culture and politics which makes it hard, and occasionally impossible, for us to do so. It is culture which is our primary source of division, as Robert Musil sardonically points out in his novel The Man Without Qualities: ‘Admittedly they hit each other over the head and spat at each other, but they did this only because of higher cultural considerations…’ Those today for whom culture is a buzz word, or who unequivocally celebrate cultural difference, should recall how much more peaceable human history would almost certainly have been if cultural differences had never sprung on the scene, and if the world had been almost excl
usively populated by gay Chinese.
To claim, as Marx does, that individual humans share a ‘species being’ in common is to claim, for example, that they can conflict and conspire, kill each other for cultural or political reasons and virulently disagree. This, then, is how cosy it is to share a nature with others. We have no quarrel with stoats. Our needs may sometimes conflict with theirs, as when we destroy their natural habitat in order to bulldoze a motorway through it; but because we cannot talk to them about this, we cannot be said to disagree. Stoats cannot affirm their difference from us. They do not have the concept of difference. Only someone with whom you can communicate can affirm their difference from you. Only within some kind of common framework is conflict possible. Socialists and capitalists, or feminists and patriarchs, are not at daggers drawn if they are simply speaking about different things. Difference presupposes affinity.
The shared human nature which makes for murderous contention, however, also makes for solidarity. You cannot celebrate solidarity with a stoat. Its body is simply too different, and so therefore are the things it gets up to. You can feel sympathy for stoats, not least if some fellow human is intent on wiping them out; but you cannot strike up a deeply fulfilling, mutually satisfying relationship with them, at least not if you wish to save yourself a lot of nerve-racking visits to psychiatrists.
Human bodies are of the kind that can survive and flourish only through culture. Culture is what is natural to us. Without it we would die very quickly. Because our bodies are materially geared to culture – because meaning, symbolism, interpretation and the like are essential to what we are – we can get on terms with those from other cultures as we cannot get on terms with stoats. Because we cannot speak to stoats, their lives are eternally closed off from us. We can observe what they do, but we do not know how they make sense of it themselves. And at least one philosopher has maintained that even if such animals could speak, we would not be able to understand what they said, exactly because their bodies, and therefore their material practices, differ so radically from our own. A stoat does not have our kind of ‘soul’. How do we know this? We know it by looking at what it does. A body, for example, that is not shaped so as to be able to engage in complex material production could not be said to have a human ‘soul’. Stoats just don’t have the paws for it.
This may not be the greatest of tragedies confronting modern humanity. There are more pressing matters to worry about than the eternal silence of the stoats. The point, however, is that humans from cultures far different from our own are in principle much more accessible than one’s lovable, long-standing spaniel. This is so partly because what we share with them is just the fact that they are cultural creatures like ourselves. Being a cultural creature presupposes a whole lot of shared practices. But it is also because the kind of communication we can set up with those from different cultures, whatever the obstacles between us, is incomparably richer than our dealings with non-linguistic creatures. The very word ‘understanding’ is transformed when we stop talking about spaniels and start talking about Sardinians instead.
Compare, then, this materialist idea of universality, one based on our bodies, with the familiar bogeyman of universality peddled by postmodernists. On this view, universality is a Western conspiracy which speciously projects our local values and beliefs on to the entire globe. A great deal of this in fact goes on. Indeed, at the time of writing, this phoney universalism is known as George Bush. The price the West now demands of weaker, poorer cultures which wish simply to survive is that they erase their differences. To flourish, you need by and large to stop being who you are. But it is significant that when postmodernists turn their thoughts to universality, they see it first of all in terms of values and ideas. Which, as it happens, is just the way George Bush sees it too. This is an idealist, not a materialist conception of universality.
Universality today is in one sense a material fact. The aim of socialism has been to translate that fact into a value. The fact that we have become a universally communicative species – a fact which, by and large, we have capitalism to thank for – should lay the basis for a global order in which the needs of every individual can be satisfied. The global village must become the co-operative commonwealth. But this is not just a moral prescription. ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’: the very resources which have brought a global existence into being have also made possible in principle a new form of political existence. Such a life, Marxists have traditionally insisted, is no longer an idle dream, as it would have been in 1500. Just because of some of the technologies developed by capitalism, we now have the material basis on which it might be realized. In fact, if we do not realize it we might end up with no material basis at all. Once everyone can be in on the political act, furnished with a sufficiency of spiritual and material goods, we can expect conflict, argument, difference and dissent to thrive. For one thing, there would be a great many more people able to articulate their views and gain a public hearing. The situation would be exactly the opposite of some anodyne utopia.
Spurious kinds of universality insist that we are all the same. But from whose standpoint? They eradicate differences, but only to reinstate them as conflicts. Eradicating differences is a violent business, and those whose identities are imperilled by it tend to respond in much the same bloodstained coin. Genuine kinds of universality, however, understand that difference belongs to our common nature. It is not the opposite of it. The body may be the fundamental way that we belong to each other, but it is also the way in which we are uniquely individuated. To encounter another human body is thus to encounter, indissociably, both sameness and difference. The body of the other is at once strange and familiar. It is exactly the fact that we can relate to it which highlights its otherness. Other things in the world are not strange to us in the same sense at all.
Individuation is one of the activities proper to our species being. It is a practice, not a given condition. It is something that we do, as we come to negotiate a unique identity for ourselves in the very media that we share in common. Being an individual human being is not like being an individual peach. It is a project we have to accomplish. It is an autonomy we forge for ourselves on the basis of our shared existence, and thus a function of our dependency rather than an alternative to it. Our species life is such that it enables us to establish a unique relationship to the species known as personal identity. Matter is always a particular business: it is always this specific bit of the stuff, not just any old stuff. The word ‘specific’ itself means both peculiar and ‘of the species’.
For present-day cultural theory, all such properly zoological talk of human beings as a natural species is profoundly suspect. Since humanism – a belief in the unique status of human beings within Nature – is no longer much in fashion, the task of safeguarding human supremacy has passed instead to culturalism. Culturalism is the form of reductionism which sees everything in cultural terms, as economism sees everything in economic terms. It is thus uncomfortable with the truth that we are, among other things, natural material objects or animals, and insists instead that our material nature is culturally constructed.
To convert the whole world into culture is one way of disavowing its independence of us, and thus of disowning the possibility of our death. If the world depends for its reality on our discourse about it, then this seems to lend the human animal, however ‘decentred’, an imposing centrality. It makes our existence appear less contingent, more ontologically solid, and so less of a prey to mortality. We are the precious custodians of meaning, since we are all that stands between reality and utter chaos. It is we who give tongue to the dumb things around us. Culturalism is of course right that a natural event like death can be signified in a myriad cultural styles. But we die anyway. Death represents Nature’s final victory over culture. The fact that it is culturally signified does not stop it from being a non-contingent part of our creaturely nature. It is our perishing, not our bestowals of meaning, which is necessary. The dumb things around us fare
d perfectly well before we happened upon the scene. Indeed, they were not at that time dumb at all, since it is only we who define them as mute. Death, however, which sketches an intolerable limit to the omnipotent will, is too indecent an event to be much spoken of in the society (the United States) from which a good deal of culturalist thought springs, which may be one reason why such thought can prosper there.
Culturalists are afraid that unless we keep reminding ourselves that we are cultural animals, we will slip back into the insidious habit of ‘naturalizing’ our existence, treating ourselves as unalterable beings. Hence their protests against essentialism, which would have been much commended by such doyens of bourgeois thought as John Locke and Jeremy Bentham. In fact, one can be just as essentialist about culture as one can be about Nature. In any case, this case sometimes appears to assume that all permanence is objectionable and all change desirable, which is absurd. There are many reasonably permanent features of human existence which we have cause to be grateful for, and many sorts of change which are destructive.
Change is not desirable in itself, whatever the postmodern advocates of perpetual plasticity may consider. Nor is it undesirable in itself. One can be moved by the laconic pathos of W. B. Yeats’s lament, ‘Man is in love, and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?’ Yet there are many things, from plague to patriarchy, which cannot vanish quickly enough. There are also a good many aspects of our condition which we cannot in fact change, without our needing to feel especially dispirited about it. That human beings are always and everywhere social animals is an unchanging fact, but scarcely a tragic one. Much permanence is to be celebrated. The long-standing tradition that academics over the age of fifty are not automatically put to the sword is a cause for rejoicing, for some of us if not for others. In any case, if some ideology makes the historical appear natural, by no means all ideology does so. Some of it does just the opposite, triumphantly making Nature seem mere clay in our hands.
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