On the Way to the Fen, Ethical and Aesthetic Quandaries Arise — Genese Grill
The burning of the library at Alexandria is the most well-known example of the fact that [culture] can be destroyed; and the toppling of Pagan sculptures is the most perfect expression of the way in which culture is brought into line with general trends. At the highest level of its development at the time, the spirit of antiquity was dependent upon institutions like libraries and schools; and the people who embodied that spirit were dependent upon the indulgence and good will of their contemporaries. A change in the will of the times (to summarize) sufficed to sweep everything away.
— Robert Musil, 1930’s Austria
I. The Fen
In which an experience with a hurt mouse brings us to the thorny problem of cultural cancelling
On the way to the fen, we discovered a tiny helpless mouse shuddering in the middle of the dirt road. Upon approach, it did not scurry away, as mouses are known to do, and we three adults and one thirteen-year-old boy were faced with an ethical dilemma. After impulsively and frantically waving away the car that was swiftly approaching, we concluded that the poor little mouse was either hurt or had been born lame, as one of its legs was splayed out like a frog’s leg, rather than neatly tucked underneath its soft, furry body. We wanted to move it out of the road, and after many awkward attempts, some of which impelled the mouse to desperately try to walk—but it could only roll, a terribly irregular mode of mouse transport that was very painful to observe—we changed tactics. Using a large leaf and a flat rock, Andy and Suzanne managed to deposit the creature among the wild flowers and weeds along the roadside, a better place, we all felt, to be devoured by a hawk or a snake or a cat. A place out of the way of speeding cars.
On the lush and lovely path to the fen, which, Andy explained, is different from a bog in that it is fed not just by falling rain water but also by spring-like sources coming from below, I remarked to Suzanne that the more humane thing to do would probably have been to have bashed its little head with a rock; for it may have been in pain. Andy then began an excursus on the cruelty of nature, which is unceasing, even as we benighted humans go for nature walks imagining that the woods are Edens of bucolic peace and kindness. Suzanne shushed him so as not to scare off the two little birds who had alighted nearby. But no ethical person can ever fully quiet the voices in her head clamoring for some decisive answer about how we are to best live in a world of cruelty and suffering, a world where we may ignore, but only by willful ignorance, denial, or bad faith, the suffering of others. A world where—as we are increasingly informed by contemporary social morality—our own pleasures and happinesses may themselves be implicated in the sufferings of others.
The telescoping of attention, the measure of denial necessary to get through a day, let alone a life, the arbitrariness of outrage directed at one injustice, while completely ignoring another, are difficult to countenance. At any given moment, something is happening that is unbearable, if we only give it our attention, if we just stop to envision it. How rarely do we go beyond merely expressing empathy, to actually act as if the suffering of anyone anywhere is our own suffering?
When I was about thirteen years old, I discovered that there were children starving in Africa and started a campaign to raise money to feed them. I painted large ink-wash images of hungry, bloated children, their big eyes looking imploringly out at the viewer, and I brought them to the train station during the suburban morning commute to New York City. With the help of these irrefutable signs of injustice, I collected spare change from the guilty businesspeople before starting my school day. At recess, I was horrified when a friend flaunted a new seven-dollar frisbee, because that money could have fed a large number of children for a day. I formed a club, but the only person I can remember helping me was one friend, later a founder of a democratic think tank and then of an organization that tries to lead philanthropists to good causes. This friend, who was raised to believe in doing good works by his Catholic, moralist mother and by his ethicist father, accompanied me once or twice on my collection campaigns at the train station. I hope it does not tarnish his career to mention that one very cold morning, we did something we felt very conflicted about. We used a few dollars of our collected money to pay for a hot chocolate at the local diner.
Soon, in any case, a more cynical friend of ours informed me that any money I sent would just get swallowed by the administrative costs of the groups that allegedly distribute the funds; that I was silly to do it; that it made no difference. I sent the money we had raised off to some organization or other, despite his chastening words, but that was effectively the end, for the moment, of my particular obsession. I stopped paying attention—was I right to do so? I do not now think I was silly; nor do I think my friend was wrong to dissuade me. From a certain perspective, mine was a good impulse—to interrupt my privileged childhood life to try to right a wrong, however naively, however impractically. In any case, it raised an important and largely unanswered ethical question. When do we, why do we sometimes, even as more worldly adults, feel that something happening to someone else, elsewhere, is so egregious that our own business as usual must be stopped? When is a cause so urgent as to justify the interruption of a system that seems to be working more or less for our own interests (Thoreau’s question in “Civil Disobedience”)? When, on the other hand, does such a narrowing of attention on one particular distant ill ultimately make no sense, not significantly help, or even cause more harm? Is silence really violence? And does it matter what one says, or just that one expresses outrage?
I admit I have always been fascinated by terrorists, because they are the polar opposite of complacency. They decide that a particular situation is so terrible that going along with it any longer or settling for mere amelioration is insufferable. They take matters into their own hands, give up comforts, live underground under assumed names, risk their lives for something they strongly believe in. But the romantic notion that one could make things better by blowing up buildings or killing innocent people doesn’t usually hold up to scrutiny. For sometimes our machinations, our actions— even our more benign and peaceful protests—may be ill-advised, or may end up doing more harm than good or creating new problems we had not imagined in our zeal. As Joan Didion wrote, “If I could believe that going to a barricade would effect a man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often wish that I could.” One may certainly still, quite rightly, choose to go to one or another barricade, to bear witness against something too egregious to be silent about, or because one feels that it is always better to try than to be resigned.
But usually, instead of either jumping on a band wagon or getting into the complicated questions that must be asked before coming to certain conclusions, we blithely live like hypocrites, mouthing well-intentioned sentiments without actually suffering discomfort or changing our lives, or sacrificing anything we love for some supposedly greater good. I admit I do not know how to negotiate these paradoxes, or how to live with the knowledge that there is always something terrible happening somewhere and that we do not always actually know quite how to help. I think that we may best be able to act well when it comes to something right in front of our noses, in our own backyard (despite the sneer at nimby-ism), or when it comes to something that threatens us or the wide or narrow circle of those we recognize as our neighbors. Yet, barring such immediate threats, we go on living our little lives, doing what we do, suffering our private tragedies and celebrating our private victories. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do this. In fact, we must and should go on, while also bearing witness to what we do not condone near or far, also attempting in our own ways to right what wrongs we can. Yet, it seems we must learn to love the world as it is—a world both cruel and beautiful, a world often terribly unfair and always mortal.
One of my very sweet, kind, sensitive friends admitted that she hated Ethics class in high school because of that damned ‘life boat’ thought experiment. She just didn’t want to think about the world as a place where you would be forced to decide who gets to live and who to die; where you could logically conclude that you had to keep one person off the boat in order to save the other people on it; where having compassion for the person who might sink the boat meant killing everyone else, including that person. No one wants to think of life like this. Certainly, I do not; I would rather do almost anything else. There is also the terrible ‘trolley problem,’ wherein people are asked to decide whether they would let a trolley careening toward five people on the track continue or would choose to flip the lever to change the track, thereby killing only one person instead of five, but doing it by choice and action, rather than by letting things be. There is, purportedly, a difference between doing something evil and allowing something evil to happen. But, as Musil writes in The Man without Qualities, sometimes “not doing is as red-hot as doing”. According to the theory that differentiates between doing and just allowing, on the other hand, it is not so much the consequences of one’s action that are important, but the quality of one’s character. In that case, caring about the little mouse so much that one inadvertently increases its pain would not really be such a terrible thing. Yet, I am unsure.
For, since most of us rarely come into direct contact with an experience where we might have to make a direct decision about the life or death of others, we usually enjoy the luxury of pretending that such situations are merely abstract thought experiments invented by heartless philosophers. We enjoy the hypocritical luxury of pretending that our every comfort is not, in fact, directly a result of some such unconscious, invisible choice. For usually someone else is throwing the extra person off the boat for us, while we vociferously protest against it—protest against it while also enjoying the extra space and extra morsel of the dwindling provisions. Whoever is willing or able to look this dire truth in the face is perhaps on the path toward some sort of intellectual honesty; though not necessarily a clear conscience or a fully healthy appetite. I admit I can’t really do it. Instead, I suffer pangs of guilt, and worry often about whether I am a bad person—simultaneously realizing that this helps no one. And usually, unless we are Simone Weil—who refused to sleep in a bed since other people did not have that comfort, who basically starved herself to death out of compunction—we find some way to enjoy our relative privileges and affirm life.
One of those privileges is a life lived engaged with art—in my case, primarily, though certainly not exclusively, an art made by people living in the European-American cultural continuum, an art that, at is best, speaks to our shared humanity and also to the differences between each person, each culture, each time in history. But art, perhaps the only realm that might help to illuminate—without sublimating—the complexities inherent in this murky fen that is modern life, seems to be increasingly under attack by people who seem to think all of these questions about how to live and what to think are simple and crystal clear. It is, of course, not the first time that art has been accused of having deleterious effects on morals or social conceptions. Thus, maybe this current version of the attack on art should not be so surprising: for it occurs to me that art’s ability to contain multitudes may be precisely what the moral brigade objects to. Those who attack art—particularly the art of Western culture—allege that it is implicated in an unparalleled legacy of evil and oppression, thus implying that those who do not want to relinquish their attachment to it do not care about the suffering it supposedly caused and still causes, the harm it is said to perpetuate.
Last year, in response to massive protests surrounding the death of George Floyd, the University of Chicago’s English department published a statement asserting that English as a discipline “has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-Blackness” and that English literature has been “responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why.” But those of us who do not at all recognize the works we have loved in this caricature of evil, those of us who maintain the contrary—that a poem by Keats or a play by Shakespeare, a novel by George Eliot or an essay by Virginia Woolf, and myriad other instances of words upon paper have, in fact, contributed much to making the world more humane—are at a loss. It is one of those impossible situations when one is given two choices (either give up Western culture or ignore the pain of racism) where neither of them are possible or beneficial. We are told that we are bad people for wanting to preserve the works of our fellow human beings, works which have made us feel alive when despair was close to taking us over; works which made us feel less alone, when all around us was cold and alienating; works which helped us grapple with the challenges of being a human being, with love, with death, with ethical problems, irresolvable conflict and tragedy. But while the accusers seem righteous, they may, indeed, be merely riotous (a notorious chant goes: “hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”); carried away by a passionate belief in something that may actually be false. While I am sensitive to their pain and want very much myself to be a part of the solution to the problems they are clamoring to solve—which are my problems, too— I am not quite ready to confess that these books they want to ban or just denigrate are the cause of said problems, nor that I am, indeed, a (bad) witch after all.
Recently, Howard University, one of our nation’s historic African American educational institutions, dissolved its Classics department. Encouragingly, the decision by the administrators was met with voluble protest by students and faculty, none more eloquent than that of Dr. Anika Prather, an African American Classics professor at Howard, who, in an interview on National Public Radio, reminded the listeners of the story of Frederick Douglass learning to read, despite his master’s prohibition: “So,” Dr. Prather told us, “he teaches himself to read, and then at 12, while still enslaved, he gets his hands on a book called The Columbian Orator. And what it is, is a collection of excerpts of ancient texts. He said, when he would read them, he didn't feel like he was a slave. He didn't feel less than human. He didn't feel like he should be oppressed. Instead, his mind was liberated.” While I, personally, find this account very moving and convincing, I can already hear the snide protests of the critical theory crowd, insinuating that Dr. Prather has not grasped the dynamics of power or privilege or that she has been brainwashed to love her oppressors. While I have certainly done my own time in the halls of post-modernist academe, and have certainly felt the allure of its sophisticated perfume, I am now rather more repelled than attracted by what actually amounts to an astonishingly condescending and destructive (Molotov) cocktail.
I am not so much interested here in dialectical argument, in comparing narratives or intellectual analyses, or comparing which cultures have done more damage or good, who is innocent and who guilty. Western civilization, we all know, has unquestionably done its share of harm. Yet if one reads global history, one finds highly complexifying facts, i.e., that in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the Hutus murdered over 800,000 Tutsis—by beating them with sticks and knives and burning them alive—in only one hundred days. A mass extermination to rival any 100 days of horror committed by the Nazis or the Stalinists. There is no way to calculate such unimaginable carnage, in any of these cases. All of these events—what humans are capable of doing to each other—are horrendous hauntings, for all of us. Yet blaming Hutu, German, or Russian art for these atrocities would be invidious or perverse. None of these horrors I submit, justify condemning any whole society—any fraught, mixed, good and bad, vulgar and noble, heartless and benevolent heritage—to the garbage bin of history.
Needless to say, non-Western cultures have contributed invaluable literary and artistic treasures to the world at large; and while Western culture in itself comprises a complicated history of exchange, exploitation, and colonialist pillage, it is worth noting that we have always been extraordinarily interested in both the sacred and profane artifacts of the rest of the world—at least sometimes out of curiosity, reverence, and loving admiration. And, indeed, these non-Western works should be read and studied in depth—as, by the way, they have always been studied and appreciated by Western scholars, translators, linguists, enthusiasts. They should be studied, not—by using the same narrow moral lens trained upon Western works—to reveal that even non-Western cultures are riddled with legacies of unliberal, racist, classist, misogynous attitudes, but, rather, because these works are artifacts of incomparable richness, beauty, and humanity. In short: muddied, murky, mixed, all cultures bear markers of the highest and the lowest tendencies in human nature as a whole. All of this is difficult to untangle, but there is really no adequate accounting for everything that has been lost—lives, languages, ecosystems, human dignity—nor for what has been gained, learned, and shared along the way.
Instead of measuring blame and calling names, I want to talk about a measure of real sadness. A sorrow that the things that I love have been somehow accused of being the cause of terrors and tragedies. That my work and my lifetime of study is being devalued and misrepresented in what I can only feel is a blasphemous and misrepresentative narrative. Those who do not love and value these things, these books and works and ideas, may scoff at or belittle my concerns, arguing that the gains in social justice and equity to be won by censoring, cancelling, or denouncing great books far outweigh any loss. But the problem I see with this scoffing is twofold. Firstly: it is all too easy to call the concerns of others selfish or privileged if one does not, oneself, value what that other person (me in this case) sees as threatened. Those who do not love these things as I do, may feel that relinquishing them is not much of a loss. And secondly, and just as importantly: I am certain that my qualms are not just about my own personal loss, but rather about the loss of something that is deeply, broadly, and essentially necessary for the preservation of humanistic values. Not just the works themselves, but the very spirit of openness and curiosity which made them possible is threatened. While my protest against “cancel culture” might sound like “white fragility” to some, there is something more important at stake than my own personal likes and dislikes, or my own success or failure as a writer whose ideas do not quite fit into a contemporary publisher’s wish list.
I have always felt a deep sense of ethical responsibility; because I know by looking at history what happens when people don’t speak up. Whatever the reason, I feel compelled to think about things beyond the accepted truisms and repeated slogans, especially when it gets muddy and complicated. Even, or especially, if it means looking at ugly or inconvenient truths, or going out on a limb and expressing unpopular sentiments. I have learned to value the bravery of individual ethical agency over the cowardice of moral conformity. As it turns out, I have learned this mostly from reading books, the very literature and history on the chopping block, and by studying the lives of artists who have dared to live differently than everyone else, who have even sometimes dared to be—in today’s lingo—“problematical,” or “tone deaf,” but who thereby created new sounds and new ways of experiencing the world which have immeasurably enriched us all.
So, you can believe me or not, but having examined my conscience rather over much, I conclude that my defense of a free realm of artistic expression is not a matter of sour grapes or just a sorrow that people don’t care about what I care about, but a deeply held belief that these things that I love are actually vitally important for the maintenance of a just and humane world. That is, after all, a good part of the reason why I love them.
II. Art Versus Moral Certitude
In which we take a brief journey through aesthetic theories and consider the values of ambiguity, plurality, and even danger
Discourse concerning the value and purpose of art has swung back and forth, since Plato, for approximately three thousand years between the two poles of pleasure and instruction. Literature was thought by some to be frivolous, merely entertaining and seductive, or on the other hand, a repository of moral fables teaching readers that good is rewarded and evil duly punished. In between the two poles there have always been more nuanced conceptions, which sometimes elevated the pleasurable to something Sublime, perhaps, or who argued that an experience of merely sensual beauty redeems itself by leading one to an understanding of the allegedly higher spiritual entity, “the Beautiful.” Some conceptions, leaning more toward the moral didacticism of the other pole, still complexified the original certitude of the extreme position, positing that literature could teach us about particularities rather than just abstractions and simple dualisms, thus expanding our understanding of each other—or, more to the point, of “others,” and increasing compassion, thus making us better persons.
Some have celebrated an art for art’s sake aestheticism, while others have repudiated such stances as decadent and elitist, favoring instead works that clearly and emphatically promoted a particular social, moral, or political program. Today’s moral brigade is clearly against the aesthetic faction—and forgive me if I sometimes imagine them to be marching like the Maoist Red Guard in moralistic lock step against dissidents, aiming like those impassioned youngsters to eviscerate the “Four Olds,” i.e., old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs. In any case, the polarization between aesthetic and socially engaged art—as usually is the case with all species of black and white thinking—is, I submit, damagingly reductive and misleading. While morality—a realm of fixed and socially-enforced doxa—is, yes, inherently an enemy of art, ethics—a realm of individual bravery and perspectival agency—is by its very nature closely related to aesthetics. Certain 20th century thinkers—Adorno, say, or Musil and Wittgenstein—have emphatically noted that aesthetics and ethics are one, suggesting that questions of form and style are, in fact, in themselves also political and social in nature.
Schiller had earlier emphasized the importance of a realm of aesthetic play in his Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. Aesthetic education, a training in open-ended exploration, deepening of sensibility, and enrichment of imagination, was proffered as an antidote to what he saw as the encroachment of industrialization, treacherous utilitarianism, and machine-age conformism on another realm in need of protection: the rich and multi-faceted human. From a certain perspective, only art and form (regardless of the content of a work) are capable of teaching us about some experiences that shape political and social attitudes: experimentation, freedom, complexity, alterity, and subjectivity to name a few. Imagination—the ability to empathize, to consider how one thing may lead to some other thing, to envision something one has never seen before, to come face to face with the sort of tragic decisions one rarely has to make in real life, to feel something one does not usually feel, to be reminded of why we even would want to live and be free in the first place—imagination, yes, is perhaps the most essential ingredient of ethics. Grammar itself can be revelatory. For example, a wonderful essay on Musil, “Zum Gebrauch des Konjunktivs in Robert Musil” (On the Use of the Subjunctive Mood in Robert Musil) by Albrecht Schöne, argues that the decline in the use of the subjunctive mood, i.e., the mood of “were,” “might,” “could be,” is a terrible sign of our decreasing utopian vision. From art, from the sentence level upward, we learn about dynamics, the necessity for contrasting chiaroscuro, the pleasures and challenges of conflict, the value of the exceptional and even the aberrant. We learn that we don’t actually always like it when everything is nice and peaceful and uneventful—but that we also should be careful what we wish for when we desire some change or challenge! And we learn how to bear the presence of inevitable conflict in our lives, having rehearsed or recognized its contours in literature (or music or painting).
But over the last hundred years, artists and authors have been dragged to the guillotine: accused of creating false narratives, putting revolutionary energies to sleep, justifying the status quo, and, perhaps most absurdly of all, of failing to cure the world of all its ills. “Aesthetic redemption,” the hope that art would somehow redeem the world, tell us how to live, and bring everything into harmony, had been facilely ridiculed by Dadaists in pre- and post-World War I Europe. If the noble values supposedly espoused in art and literature had, they argued, led to such savage carnage, then art itself must be dragged down off its pedestal and replaced by something more efficacious—anti-art, perhaps; and then by politics, pure and simple. Art’s mysterious aura, famously decried by Walter Benjamin as seductive, anti-democratic, even fascist, was discredited. But even Dada’s subversive fun would eventually become taboo (the revolution devouring its own), as the enfant terrible was turned into a well-disciplined party sloganeer, celebrating the propaganda potential of accessible demotic mechanical reproductions: didactic Social Realism to the rescue!
But did art ever claim that it would right the wrongs, make the world happy for all, eliminate all pain and suffering in the world? Although certainly some works might be rightfully designated as escapist or (gasp!) entertaining, great art had always contained just as much criticism of the status quo as justification of it, and had not shied away from depictions of the real conflicts of life, had, in fact, exposed and analyzed received ideas and entrenched values. And as discussed above, great art has repeatedly created a realm—formal and aesthetic—where all manner of human feelings and sensations could be experienced and acknowledged, where complex truths could be faced in what the ancient Greeks called anagnorisis, that sudden stunning recognition of whatever it is one most fears.
If truth be told, the moralistic attacks on art were probably motivated by exactly the opposite fear than the one expressed. While moralists pointed to art’s defense of the people in power or of one entrenched side of a social and political battle, wasn’t the real target of the anti-artists actually art’s plurality, its ability to contain and celebrate complexity and conflict? Ironically, Roland Barthes, in his postmodern manifesto, “From Work to Text,” accused the “works” of the past of being monolithic, univocal, authoritative (see, also his “Death of the Author”), and proclaimed that the contemporary “text,” by contrast, was fluid, open-ended, liberatory, and multi-authored (because any purported author was considered merely the mouthpiece for the Zeitgeist). He generally avoided giving examples and thus was able to completely misrepresent the actual complex and dialogic or multi-vocal nature of the literature of the past, which in reality is better exemplified by what Keats famously called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—anathema to those who like their villains and heroes carefully typecast. Keats noted in a letter, that “it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—". Just as Barthes misrepresented the art of the past, contemporary moralists are still misrepresenting it, calling it complicit in just the sort of repression they themselves are engaged in promulgating. For the celebrated works of the moment are themselves guilty of the sin with which Barthes limned the works of the past. Today’s works—or texts—are the ones that are all too often speaking in one voice, mouthing one doxa, representing and defending one totalizing, totalitarian force of repression. As in the art of Social Realism or Nazi Propaganda, one always knows ahead of time which character is a good comrade and which not, that party discipline and right thinking will be rewarded and skepticism or individuality punished; everything is clear, simple, and moral. It should go without saying that this is not art at all, but something else. For art does not, cannot, make everything good or right, no more than any political ideology could.
Nevertheless, aesthetic redemption—or rather transfiguration—may be real up to a point; just as long as one realizes that its nature is not to make the pain go away or to eliminate conflicts from life, but to help us better bear the unease, the inevitable shocks and indignities, the perennial conflicts that are often unavoidable, despite all good intentions and social justice activism.
The battle between art and morals goes back, of course, at least as far as Plato, who considered banning art from his ideal Republic because it failed to promote the values and attitudes he deemed most conducive to good citizenship. For example, he supposed that the minor chords in music and the depiction of warriors weeping over the loss of comrades would not make for cheerfully smiling patriots. It is rather ironic that today’s culture cancellers, who probably would not relate to Plato’s values, are really direct descendants of this tradition of what seems to be basically social engineering. And yet, at the end of the dialogue wherein the idea of the banishment of the arts is floated, Socrates says that if anyone has any arguments as to why it should not be done, he would like to hear them. It is my view, thus, that Plato, whose own writing is a model of dialogic open-endedness and which itself famously includes the sorts of fables and fictions which he has Socrates condemn, did not really mean to literally banish the arts, but rather to raise a fundamental question—one that we still have not found an answer for thousands of years later. That is: what is to be gained and what lost in including or excluding art from a society? If, indeed (and this is a big if) we could gain perfect harmony, peace, and equity by banishing or policing art, would we, should we do so?
Martha Nussbaum, in her invaluable book The Fragility of Goodness, illuminates the conflict as one between moral certitude and the richness of a complexly human life. She sensitively describes why Socrates or Plato or anyone else for that matter might consider choosing safety and social conformity over plurality, complexity, and danger. Especially in times of crisis, one may feel compelled to shut down, lock out, limit possible threats—and undoubtedly this past year of pandemic and social unrest reflects this very human reflex. Pain, harm, or misfortune may more likely catch us if we are open to a plurality of values, if we depend upon others, if we let ourselves get carried away with passion or if we dare to have strong preferences (or love a particular person). Wouldn’t it be better, a frightened person might ask, to somehow ensure that no one and nothing could hurt us or be hurt? Wouldn’t it be better, a defensive person might demand, to create a purely logical society, where everything was properly and equitably organized and policed according to the very best moral values? But how? And according to whose determination of Good and True and Right?
Socrates famously asserted that to know the Good is to do the Good. But Nussbaum describes how the ancient tragedies of the 5th century B.C. told a very different story—one in which human life often consists in tragic conflicts, wherein one is faced with a choice between two things that are irreconcilable. Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, for example, is both necessary and blameworthy. If he does not fulfil the goddess Artemis’s condition, everyone, including his daughter, will die. An early iteration of those ghastly life boat ethics: “none of the possibilities is even harmless,” glosses Nusbaum. But Socrates attacked the truth of tragic conflict in his Euthyphro, claiming that, “in every case there is at most a single correct answer.” And Kant, in the introduction to his Metaphysics of Morals, Nussbaum reminds us, concurs, saying that it is in the nature of “every notion of a moral rule or principle that it can never conflict with another moral rule … two mutually opposing rules cannot be necessary at the same time.” In other words, a “conflict of duties and obligations is inconceivable.”
But both philosophers, according to Nussbaum, risk “giving up something of real importance” by yoking themselves to such one-sided and logical visions of life, which aim to exclude whatever does not fit into their carefully established norms. This “something of real importance” involves an acceptance of the real conflicts and differing values of individual community members, of the sometimes messy, and, yes, the potentially dangerous forces of life. “The richer my scheme of value,” writes Nussbaum, “the more I open myself to such a possibility [of danger]; and yet a life designed to ward off the possibility may prove to be impoverished.” And even Plato, Nussbaum explains, who seemed at first to favor this sort of careful life and carefully constructed or socially engineered society, acknowledged, “that the attainment of self-sufficiency will require giving up much of human life and its beauty, as we empirically know it,” and later argued against his earlier model, acknowledging the importance of passion and contingency to a Good life, as modeled in Greek Tragedies. The wisdom of life is learned in such complex works of art, taught just as much by their form (the oscillating voices of the chorus, dynamic contrast, multivalence, ambiguity) as by their content. “That I am an agent, but also a plant,” writes Nussbaum, “that much that I did not make goes toward making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing something wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one’s good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without them—all these I take to be not just the material of [Greek] tragedy, but everyday facts of lived practical reason.”
To learn from tragedy, to learn from art that engages in ambiguity is to learn that the real stakes of life are risky; that, in fact, every life—insofar as it ends in death—is a tragedy. And that there is no way around it. One may try to rule out dangers and pains, try to kill off and stifle the threats proclaimed by the oracle, but in the end, the prophecies come true, and then one has lived an impoverished life, killed off one’s loved ones, or existed in fear, for no good reason. A life thus lived is all-too declawed and neutered, without duende, without challenge, with neither hate nor love, ugliness nor beauty. For some conflicts can never be absolutely, finally resolved.
“Aeschylus,” writes Nussbaum, “then, shows us not so much a ‘solution’ to the ‘problem of practical conflict’ as the richness and depth of the problem itself … the only thing remotely like a solution here is, in fact, to describe and see the conflict clearly and to acknowledge that there is no way out. The best the agent can do is to have his suffering, the natural expression of his goodness of character, and not to stifle these responses out of a misguided optimism. The best we (the Chorus) can do for him is to respect the gravity of his predicament, to respect the responses that express his goodness, and to think about his case as showing a possibility for human life in general.” And, further, “If we were such that could in a crisis dissociate ourselves from one commitment because it clashed with another, we would be less good. Goodness itself, then, insists that there should be no further or more revisionary solving.” Neither happiness, nor truth, nor justice, nor choice are as simple as some moralistic people assert that they are. In another example, Nussbaum bluntly notes that the “attitudes necessary for an orderly marriage” are at odds with Eros. “Thus one divinity opposes another; Demeter is not the friend of Aphrodite; one legitimate claim dwells in tension with another.” Which to me suggests that, while we must not deny the claims of justice, honor, and relative safety, we must also recognize the claims of freedom, beauty, and passion.
But today’s moral brigade does not want to recognize those claims, and we can only conclude that attacks on the ambiguity of art and literature are not just attacks on particular wrong-thinking phrases, ideas, or words, but more deeply and fundamentally attacks on the very nature of art as a realm that contains the irreducible ambiguous complexity of human experience, of lived reality. Such attacks are protests, in short, against life itself.
III. Decolonialization of the Mind
In which we bravely or recklessly try to talk about some things that are notoriously difficult to broach
The first time I heard the call to “decolonize our minds” was at a weekend conference of the Institute for Social Ecology in rural Vermont. One of the speakers was telling us that we should cleanse our minds of the toxic influence of Western thought and, especially, of Enlightenment thinkers, in order to move toward greater liberation and the diminishment of harm. Murray Bookchin, the founder of Social Ecology, who had grown up a Marxist, delivering Party newspapers, had early become disillusioned with Party discipline and its dogmatism and had created a different kind of radicalism based upon freedom and decentralization, upon what he deemed the basic relationship between politics and ecology, and upon a practical direct democracy he called “municipalism.” He had based much of his liberatory philosophy upon the model of Ancient Athenian assembly democracy (and New England Town Meetings) and also upon the European Enlightenment thinkers’ battle against superstitions, upon their advocacy of tolerance, free and open discourse, and skeptical scientific inquiry into their own culture. The very idea of civil rights, the values of free speech, freedom, individual sovereignty, feminism, cultural pluralism, belief in universal human dignity, all can be traced, in great part, to these thinkers. Of course, they harbored deep and important disagreements amongst themselves. Of course, they assumed or did not question some things that today’s thinkers see as anathema to social progress. They also were not saints; but neither are we.
Thus, I felt justified in defending some of these thinkers from the speaker’s attack, by pointing out that if we were really concerned with diminishing harm, we would do well to consider whether the maligned Enlightenment thinkers had not, actually, contributed a great deal to making the world a more open, more kind, less violent place and to instigating the liberatory values we all purported to promote, the very ideas of human dignity and equality that led to the abolition of slavery in Europe and America. Consider John Locke, I said, who first introduced the idea of civil rights that led to the American revolution. What about Montaigne, who modelled exceptional freedom of thought and self-criticism by asking whether his contemporary 15th century Frenchmen were not themselves less civilized than cannibals? Imagine, if you can, our lives today without the bravery of Voltaire, whose attacks on superstition and intolerance paved the way for the scientific revolution. At the time, my objection and defense of these thinkers was heartily supported by a number of participants, and, unfortunately, the speaker left the conference early, probably disgruntled at our lack of what we now, for better and for worse, call “wokeness.” Today, four years later, when calls to decolonize our minds and curricula by banishing the works of these and other thinkers have entered the vernacular, I wonder whether my words would be as universally welcomed. But I still stand by them, albeit with shaky legs and a trembling in my voice.
Because of course I, too, want to make the world better for all people, all peoples. Although others have given their lives to community organizing, and I only about six years to it (which was what brought me to the ISE conference), I do know from experience how much there is to be outraged about; I know how corrupt the institutions and systems and people in power usually are, and how endlessly much there is to do to even make the smallest much needed reforms. I am not saying that everything is fine the way it is. By no means. But I also know that some reforms are more treacherous than the problems they aim to correct. And that a certain amount of messiness, murkiness, discomfort, and pain, a certain amount of … well, humanness, must be allowed if we are to remain humane. To try to eliminate human error, human preference, human difference, human complexity can only be achieved through inhumane means, i.e., through totalitarianism, enforced homogeneity, and the silencing of questions. The Enlightenment thinkers were instrumental in teaching us that lesson.
As already explained, I do know that this amorphous thing we call “Western culture” has not been only a great shining utopia on a hill; that horrific things have been done; that horrific things are still done, every day; that we are implicated in countless miseries at home and abroad. But we also have contributed much good in the world, and in many ways this mixed tradition has made the world a better, more humane, more beautiful place to live. As a liberal-minded lover of classical culture, I used to be able to profess and indulge in Europhilic preferences, while also exploring and admiring non-Western cultures—simultaneously working to both critique and correct both our own cultural injustices and those I perceived in other cultures. But to admit any preferences today for European-American life, or to even celebrate the works of our own cultural heritage, without even intending to disparage the cultural heritage of others, is now considered by some as racist and fascist. I want other peoples to affirm and love their cultural heritages and find joy in their customs and histories. How is it that only Western people are not allowed to take pleasure in their culture(s)? How did this change of attitude come about? And is it destructive or part of a long-overdue reform? Obviously, I think it is largely destructive and unjust. I also think that it is largely hypocritical.
For while today’s critics of Western culture aim their ire at cultural artifacts (books, art, philosophy), nevertheless, they seem to eagerly accept, without question, the utilitarian trappings of this same culture, its conveniences and sterile technological hollowness, trappings which, despite their obvious contributions (such as extension of life and health, reduction of pain, hot and cold running water, antibiotics, &c.) are things far more implicated in environmental devastation, consumerist commodification, and waste of resources than the works of art and culture. For the latter realm, unlike that of technology and money, is relatively non-commodified, and actually resists instrumentalization by party, creed, class, or power structures; is accessible to everyone; is an impetus to dreaming and re-truly imagining the world; and also a goad to criticism and reform; a realm of freedom and fruitful play like no other.
I know I speak for many others who are reluctant to say these things beyond a whisper, who not only feel very strongly about, but also who have spent many years of their lives working for political and social change. Experienced activists learn that political and social actions of the wrong kind can often do more harm than good. The fact that a cause is good does not guarantee that the cures and reforms rallied for in its defense are the right ones. But in today’s dogmatic and polarized discourse, if one does not agree with the vaunted methods used to attain change, one is considered de facto against the cause. Unfortunately, many people don’t dare to speak up in defense of our cultural artifacts because they don’t want to be associated with unsavory or unpopular people, who might seem to be saying something along similar lines. This bears repeating. Indeed, we need not throw out a book just because there are parts in it with which we strongly disagree. Likewise, we can learn many things from people who are very different from us. The question I dare to ask here is, thus, not whether reforms or improvements are needed, but just what they might be. Could ‘decolonizing our minds’ really be the right way to diminish harm?
The competing claims of the so-called Culture Wars are not going to just evaporate. We are faced with a terrible conundrum. A tragic conflict, if you will. Perhaps unresolvable. Without presuming to know how it feels, I think I can begin to imagine why people of color, some of whom are descendants of slaves, might not feel inspired to immerse themselves in the literature and culture of a people, a proportion of whom might once have been slave owners or at least silent condoners of slavery (while many others, it must be appreciated, gave their lives, at least in part, for abolition). I understand that racism is a real and present reality, and that there is still constant and chronic suffering—emotional, social, economic, and physical. Ghosts haunt, and racism is alive. I have felt the chill myself, as a daughter and granddaughter of holocaust survivors, in Germany and Austria, when the police in their high black boots (the Controls, they are called) came storming into the modern-day subway with their frightening dogs held tightly on their leashes, asking for papers or at least signs that one bought a ticket. I am also a woman, and know how it feels to be demeaned and silenced and belittled by a society built in large part by men. But the evils of Nazism are not going to make me cancel Goethe, Kant, or Walther von der Vogelweide. Nor does the evil of rape and misogyny make me want to read solely books by women or renounce the pleasures I experience in sex with men. Am I suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Have I gone over to the side of my oppressors? Believe me, if there were some other more clearly palatable side, I might consider joining it. But as it is, I see no cultural tradition anywhere that is pure or free of stain. I also see scarcely a single human being of any color or culture who is absolutely good and pure. Let she who has not sinned cast the first stone. There is no other human race, purer, better than the deeply mixed one we have.
If we go in the direction of absolute moral purity, we have to ask whether there is any culture that can survive this sort of scrutiny. Yes, men do more violence than women; yes, Western culture has perpetrated a large percentage of violence. But women harm too; and how many cultures are there that do not have slave owners in their history? How many cultures are there that have not wrought war, cruelty, violations, barbarism, corruption? What culture does not have a history of hierarchy, oppression, genocide even? There are virtually none. Proponents of Cancel Culture assume that if only we could get rid of all the present evil oppressors, everyone left would be nice and good and kind and there would be no more conflicts, no more wars, no more trouble. That a new oppressive class would not rise up from out of the ranks of the oppressed, to wield its own power over whomever it could. That, furthermore, such a nice society would be capable of producing great art that speaks empathically to the pain and suffering, the beauty and thrilling strangeness, which all lives, even the most sheltered, entail. I doubt these things.
I won’t tell anyone else how to feel. I have no right, certainly, and no interest in doing so. But I can tell you how I feel. Terribly sad and scared and concerned. For myself and for the future of the world. I don’t want to think about this. Surely, no one wants to think about this. That’s the white fragility part. It would be a lot easier if I could just continue to watch my Masterpiece Theater and guiltlessly enjoy the pleasures and comforts reaped by imperialism. But I also know that one sometimes does have to be made to feel the pain of others before one is willing to endure the discomforts that come along with making things better. But such upheaval is only advisable when those discomforts really do make the world better, not worse.
That being said, it is understandable that some people in this country would want the educational curriculum and the world of publishing to change in order to better reflect their own lives and particular experiences. An expansion of voices and difference is a positive thing on the whole. If it really is an expansion and not a reductive stranglehold of monoculture and orthodoxy. Since there are probably as many different opinions about the best way to respond to changing demographics as there are different people, I don’t really know what most people want, only what gets filtered down through media in the often misleading way such filtering works. Some snapshots: I hear people who boast about having had Homer removed from the classroom; I see photos of dumpsters filled with “objectionable” classics removed from libraries; I read threads that claim that 1984 is “rapey,” and should thus no longer be read; I see that university programs in English and Medieval Studies are “dismantled” and replaced by programs in Gender, Colonialism, Critical Race Theory, etc. I note that college literature departments across the nation employ professors whose expertise is in anything but literature: queer studies, Marxist theory, diasporas, indigenous justice—all interesting and valuable things to study, to be sure, but decidedly not the study of literature. A friend of mine noted that the situation is parallel to that of the university under Nazism or Soviet dictatorship, when professors were hired or fired solely on the basis of their political orthodoxy. In full disclosure, I am an interested party here. This political-social turn meant that I was far less likely to get a position teaching at a university upon receiving my doctorate in Germanic Literatures and Languages. Not because my politics were unacceptable, but because my field of study was, essentially, actually the study of literature, not of politics or human rights.
In any case, some people just want to expand the chorus of voices—a very good thing indeed; while others clearly want to cancel, dismantle, or “disrupt texts,” even going so far as to proclaim that writing itself—and Reason—is “white supremacist.” It is important here to note, as others have certainly done before me, that the definition of “white supremacist” has changed very rapidly over the last five years or so. A term that, along with “racist,” used to refer to a particularly egregious mindset that included dehumanizing and demeaning people who were of a different ethnicity or color, leading to justifications of slavery and even genocide, now may refer simply to someone who affiliates herself with the complexly mixed and often very multicultural customs and cultural artifacts of her own (in my case) European-American history. So that defending the presence of Western texts in schools and curriculum, to be studied as anything other than evidence of Western oppression and cruelty, is now, for some, tantamount to a racist white supremacy.
But certainly, I hear the voices of others, including those of people of color like Dr. Anika Prather of Howard University, who fervently advocate for the preservation of the western classics—along with the classics of the rest of the world, as riches for all of us. Some people will even admit that works, religions, ideas, and governments of non-Western countries also included—or even still include—ideas that are nowadays morally condemned in the West as misogynist, racist, all-too hierarchical or despotic. Yet, this honest acknowledgment of the true facts of history and human nature is just too complex for many others, who want to locate anti-liberal values only in the West. These people, then, feel justified in calling for a total dismantling of only the Western edifice. Since some people have clamored for such a dismantling, I believe that it is only respectful to take their demands seriously. Does a changing demographic impel an expansion of the texts we read and value? Certainly. But does such a change require, as cost—as reparation or just revenge—a wholesale denigration and sacrifice of the Western cultural tradition? Is this what most people—even most new Americans—really want?
Some other people say, Oh, don’t be silly, the classics will live on, no matter what. They are not going away. You are being paranoid or alarmist. It is just a conspiracy theory promulgated by the radical right. There is no real threat. But over the course of my lifetime, I have already seen the classics devalued and denigrated and cast aside to a damaging extent. The cancelling is not only coming, it has already taken its toll. Just as the polar ice caps are already melting and the polar bear already endangered, it may already be too late to save us.
So, for a moment, imagine: What if they were to really disappear? What if we took certain people at their word and assumed that their desire to dismantle the whole thing (“burn it down!”) were in earnest? I think it deserves a serious and respectful evaluation. As if it could be completed. What would that look like? Let us ask ourselves, ask each other: is there something to this idea of dismantling? Is there any merit, cause, reason in it? If yes, then shouldn’t we all work to help it along and throw the books in the fire ourselves?
What are our options? We can burn the whole thing down. It has been done, step by step, book by book, statue by statue, institution by institution, before. Religious zealots have burned libraries and toppled Pagan sculptures; totalitarians have burned mountains of books and imprisoned, institutionalized, and exterminated intellectuals, dissidents, and anyone who did not “go along” with the new regime. Stalinists and Nazis renamed streets and cities and schools to fit their current orthodoxy. We might, in our zeal to right the wrongs of history, do more than just “correct the imbalance,” by leaning for a while to one side rather than the other. We might actually succeed in taking down the whole thing. Is this what we want? And what happens to those of us who are not enthusiastic about the glorious new regime? Well, as Heine presciently noted, “Where they burn books, there they will also burn people.”
If this is not the way we want to go … what are our other options? Are there any? I admit I feel despair. I admit I don’t know how to make it “all good,” especially insofar as most models for doing so are forms of barbaric totalitarianism. I do feel sure that burning or dishonoring books is not the answer. On the contrary, I suspect that our best hope for the future is in a deep and unmediated immersion in books, in the non-conscriptable and open-ended free play of art.
Although I agree that art shapes the way we think, and thus the way we act, I would argue that the shaping it impels is usually for the better, not the worse, or that, more to the point, it is impossible to judge or ascertain which work of art has what amount of beneficial or deleterious effects on our social and political life. Precisely because art operates on a different level of consciousness than politics and morals—an aesthetic and ethical level—it is not reducible to dogmatic or black and white rights and wrongs or speech codes. The realm of aesthetic experience takes its power from unresolved tensions, from the exploration of dangerous edges, by creating a space where everything is imaginable, even the most taboo or unthinkable. To reduce such a realm to a narrow set of speech codes and allowed subjects is to eviscerate its very existence, and to impoverish human life.
It is my belief thus, that although practical reforms and changes in systems and processes are vitally necessary, the only thing that could really help humanity would be a turn toward an appreciation of spirit, as embodied in art and culture (language, customs, traditions, history), as the vital fire of our lives. We must immerse ourselves in these spiritual realms—not as escapism, but as impetus and goad. As a means to feeling more alive and as a way of giving thanks for the myriad beauties of this world.
When I grow despondent about the state of the world, the only “solution” I can fully endorse is one that allows us to bear the fact that there may not be any “final solution” to some of the tragic conflicts of life—knowing from history that attempts at finality are usually treacherous. We can immerse ourselves and feed ourselves with spiritual riches, instead of being slaves to the commodified virtual hollow world of business, utility, media … where, no matter how much money one has, one is leading a vapid and empty life. I take Thoreau over Marx, and insist that life is rich in proportion, not to how much capital one has, but to how much non-mediated time one has, how much attention one pays to nature, to history, to the brightness and the shadows of the world, how much love and human warmth is in one’s life. I believe that what we need is more, not less art, and more, not less literature, more scholarship, more preservation of languages and myths and words and works of all cultures everywhere. Not for their use or instrumentalization in any partisan political battle, not for their employment as commodities to enrich a few publishers or art gallery owners, but because art makes life more meaningful. One doesn’t have to possess it. It makes anyone who beholds it rich. As Robert Musil said at the dawn of the age of Totalitarianisms: “…all bullies and braggarts start out with the assumption that we had too much culture, that, in other words, we were already in a state of excess culture and cultural decline, while in reality we had too little culture”.
IV. An Aside: How Do We Know Anything?
In which we acknowledge the value of learning from others, but also affirm the importance of trusting one’s self
It is well known that we are likely to subscribe to philosophies and truths that more or less justify our comforts and our privileges. And thus a natural corrective to this bad faith or ethical laziness would be to listen to and learn from the perspective of those persons whose lives our comforts may harm. Indeed, this other-directed perspective is one of the benefits that literature has long been praised for providing. But to never question the assertions of others—especially when those others come to us not as individuals with unique personal experiences, but as a univocal moral throng—itself amounts to a relinquishment of personal ethical responsibility (which is also very dangerous). At this moment in history, when voices clamor on all sides telling us how we should feel, think, vote, speak, and act, with each side emphatically, piously sure of itself, each side ignoring contradictions in their rhetoric, each oblivious or blind to the dangers inherent in their “solutions,” perhaps it is a good time to “look within” and hearken to one’s own ethical compass? I personally am having a hard time hearing myself think amid all the talking points and information wars and the unexamined assumptions of others. Thoreau suggests one should try to find one’s own narrow, if crooked path, and follow it. I am trying to find mine, the rib of my own spine, my core.
Finding this path is not easy, nor is such “self-reliance” supported by today’s moral pundits who tell us instead to “read the room,” and to make sure not to say anything that would not immediately conform to the opinions of our interlocutors. Contemporary moral practice is to disregard one’s personal experience if it happens to go against the doxa, and assume that one has been conditioned by previous (wrong) doxa to believe toxic things that today’s morality now, finally, conclusively knows to have been wrong. Only the current common evaluation is correct and acceptable. If one looks within, the advice goes, one runs the risk of fooling oneself, especially if one’s feelings veer from the mores of the moment. If they are not acceptable, they must not really be one’s own, but must be merely conditioning from the toxic past. Thus, all previous thinkers and artists or anyone who would question the status quo are deemed ‘problematical’, ‘tone deaf’, pathetically ‘unwoke’. This reduction of perspectives ultimately leads, of course, to superficial and shallow mouthpieces, not complexly reflecting human beings—ducks really, who are quacking and quacking the same currently accepted ideologies and sharing the same memes out of fear that their own felt experience might just be the result of brainwashing. So, quick: wash your brain in the new shampoo; pick out any pesky, lousy, disruptive thoughts.
We are told: Don’t ask questions. Don’t raise objections. Just believe and repeat these articles of faith, sign this oath of allegiance, chant this chant—even if it is directly opposite from the one we were encouraged to chant last year (i.e., only recently ‘color blindness’ was the moral perspective; today it is racist not to take into consideration someone’s skin color). Here, put this sign in front of your door to ward off, if not the Angel of Death, then at least your neighbors’ condemnation. Isn’t it obvious how contrary this is to the basic ethical agency of the individual?
While learning from others is important, it is not the only part of learning. One must also learn from one’s own experience, learn to value it, trust it, build upon it. One’s own truth, one’s own experience, however limited, may yet be the right one…at least for oneself. Otherwise, if the Party insists that 2 x 2=5, if the whole world insists on an “alternate fact,” if all vestiges of a remembered aspect of history have been incinerated down the Memory Hole, one will have no defense at all against barbarism.
If we are not too egregious in our questioning, the holders of the moral line do not immediately condemn us, but do shake their heads at us and gently tell us that re-education is difficult work we all must do, to change our minds, to unlearn the evil. They will help us, teach us, show us the way. If we prove unregenerative, however, and persist in thinking for ourselves, then we are called terrible names, and no one will care if our homes are stoned, or if we get wounded in the crossfire of a skirmish. Let me be clear, if it comes to incinerating books and imprisoning dissidents: while I deeply regret being forced into such an absurd and wrong-headed battle, I will be on whatever side is defending the essential humanist value of free expression.
V. Return to the Fen
In which we try somehow to bring all of this provisionally together, without removing the inherent and inevitable ambiguities we so love
In my notebook, from October 3rd, 2020, I find this passage:
Yesterday I returned to the Fen, with Greg G., visiting from Brooklyn. It is an especially beautiful place, remnants of mossy ancient stone walls, sections of the path spongy, springy underfoot, layered with golden pine needles, bright against the dark soil beneath, other paths crossed over with braided tree roots, with open interstices, dark openings, which must be the entrances to animal homes, and in this season, fallen leaves of golden yellow and crimson, damp tree trunks, tawny copper beeches. Talking, again, of morality, of goodness. And ethics. Amid beauty. Talking of the current state of discourse wherein beauty seems pitted against social justice. I fumble for clarity … Whether properly or not, I delineated two realms, of justice and beauty, and asked: why should they be opposed to each other? Need they be? Can we not work for social good and celebrate an individualized life within the realm of art, beauty, ecstatic aesthetic-spiritual states? Well, of course, except when the one destroys the other in an attempt to reach its goal. If, by justice, a reformer means the elimination of nuance, freedom, individuality, dynamics, pleasure itself; if the road to justice becomes a dystopian totalitarianism and everything that makes us human, that makes life worth living is banished, then, paradoxically, it is not justice at all, not a good, moral, humanistic end. For the goal of any social reform should be the greater humanizing of us all, the greater access to a richer ore, more spiritually alive, more diverse, more freely individuated, and also more joyously communal—. If justice as it is often enacted today is a threat to the humanistic, then we must also honestly ask to what extent the humanistic is and has been a threat to justice. The humanistic, including free expression, freedom to love when, whom, and what one pleases at the risk of hurting others by rejection, the freedom to be better or worse, is itself a form of natural justice, an embrace of life without hypocritically covering the conflicts over with interventions and enforced sameness.
Of course, in one’s notebook, one entertains ideas one might not include in a finished essay, unless it be, like this, an essay celebrating free thinking and ambiguity. I wanted, then, to include the last idea in the passage, suggesting that natural justice is different from enforced justice and possibly even preferable. This slight bow to what may seem to be a sort of laissez faire attitude is not necessarily my final word on the subject of what makes a good world. It’s merely something worth considering, as anything is worth considering, as anything must be considered if one is to think deeply and freely and well. For in truth, of course, if it came to it, I would do whatever I could to counteract some natural force I didn’t like, defend someone or something I loved from harm, defend, say, a library from a flood or an angry mob; and in my everyday life I also make choices and take precautions that I hope will diminish pain and suffering and waste for myself and for others, no matter how far distant in space or in the future they may be.
Yet, I also have a certain respect for the power of what is, for reality, gravity, difference, and luck—whether good or bad—and for the remarkable indifference that nature and fate seem to have when it comes to our small mortal interests and desires. This respect may be most joyously indulged within the realm of art—a realm that plays with patterns and control while also acknowledging the possible chaos and cruel randomness of everything. “The pointlessness of art,” writes Iris Murdoch in her little book The Sovereignty of Good, “is not the pointlessness of a game, it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and a form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe. Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolute random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form.” Art, she continues, reminding us of Martha Nussbaum’s description of tragedy, shows us life without the consolation of predetermined pattern or meaning. “All is vanity,” Murdoch concludes, and “The only thing which is of real importance is the ability to see it all clearly and respond to it justly, which is inseparable from virtue.” Our greatest ethical task is thus an aesthetic one: to pay attention—a lesson Murdoch learned from Simone Weil. In other words, our task is, as Murdoch reiterates, to “come to see the world as it is.”
And how is the world, really? If we don’t learn immediately from our own limited sheltered experience, at least we may learn more about it from the voices and experiences of others, from art. The world, like each individual person and each culture or country, is vast, irreducible; it is a constant oscillation and tension between freedom and restraint, danger and safety, will and will-lessness, dominance and submission, law and overturning of law, beauty and ugliness, thrill and dullness, goodness and evil, tension and release of tension. As Heraclitus so perfectly imaged this union of opposites which makes up life: “It is in being at variance with itself that it coheres with itself: a back-stretching harmony, as of a bow or a lyre”. If this be true—and I think it is—then we had best think twice before removing the tension that holds this lyre, this whole world, together. Without it, there would be no music.
We may think we do not love the world the way it is—and we certainly sometimes have enough cause to lament; indeed, some of us more than others. We may clamor for something less disappointing, less confusing, less unfair, something more properly, absolutely moral, even going so far as to try to deconstruct in our anger and resentment everything that is the slightest bit imperfect. But we must also admit that we have no model—save a dystopian one—for a world pure enough to withstand such scrutiny. All is imperfect; all is complicated. As Nussbaum wrote in regard to Agamemnon’s choices, sometimes “none of the possibilities is even harmless.” Should we attempt, therefore, to entirely eliminate the shadows in our history and in ourselves, let us never forget that without darkness there is no light. Without shadows, without contrasts, there would not only be no art, but we would ultimately see nothing at all.
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Photo: Suzanne Levine
Genese Grill is a writer, scholar, and translator, fascinated with the remarkable words and images humans arrange in their attempts to make sense of the world. She is the author of The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil's 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften' (Camden House, 2012), translator of 3 editions of Musil's writing (all published by Contra Mundum Press), and also the tender, worried mother of many rapscallion and muddy-faced essays.