MIA > Archive > Kidron > Presence of Future
Imagine answering ‘what is the meaning of life?’ without hesitation or embarrassment. Not many can, and certainly not many in the heartlands of market society. Two hundred and fifty years ago most people would have been able to. Life was often cruel then – but it made sense. It had shape, purpose. Today, activities might have purpose. Life does not.
For the individual human, purpose provides the organizing and limiting principles in assembling the components of personality into the unique self whose behaviour constitutes the bedrock of relationships, of society itself – the context in which individual purposes develop.
Purpose affects the way we experience and structure reality. Time, for example – is it cyclical, or directional? does it progress, evolve, change its pace and meaning? is there a history that is different from a myth? does narrative reflect something objective, or merely shape our cultural prejudices? The questions roll endlessly. Purpose also affects the way we experience and structure relevance. Shared purposes define our moral community and determine its values, and inclusiveness.
Without shared purpose society no longer consists of ‘particular people’ who have both a fixed role of their own and a notion of how that contributes to the common good; it consists only of ‘individuals’ and their desires. The state no longer represents a sense of collective identity but a system of satisfying and denying needs. ‘Is’ loses sight of ‘ought’ and ethics loses authority as the means of transforming the one into the other. It becomes a mechanism, unanchored, a caprice, processing material that has no reality, likely to be ignored or disobeyed; and society sinks into a moral chaos in which anaemic, capriciously chosen, and competing moralities operate at random. The important distinction ceases to be between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, which could find a place in a school’s curriculum. It becomes a choice between ‘fairness’ and ‘unfairness’ or ‘sincerity’ and ‘insincerity’, between practical and impractical, effective and ineffective.
In politics, the activity which underwrites and enforces the ruling ethic, which in theory embodies the purpose of society, the consequences are especially clear – popular cynicism on the one hand, and a vast apparatus dedicated to enforcing public behaviour on the other. Far from being an ethically-suffused activity, enforcing ethically-sanctioned behaviour, politics becomes a civil war carried on by other means.
Where it is noticed, this incoherence is justified, even celebrated: such is the variety and heterogeneity of individual purposes, it is said, their pursuit cannot be subsumed under any single moral order and, consequently, any attempt at their reconciliation or at enforcing the hegemony of one set of precepts is bound to be oppressive. Let the hundred flowers bloom.
The absence or restriction of shared purpose weakens morality in another way. Virtuous behaviour has an internal, personal aspect, and an external social aspect, the one rewarded by inner peace and balance, the other by the allocation of goods and prestige. In an ethically whole society, the two would overlap. In a society like market society in which the ethical regime is at best fragmented, they are notoriously at odds: the cultivation of truthfulness, justice and courage will seldom make a person rich, powerful or famous, and public recognition will often cover nasty moral blemishes.
Purposelessness gnaws away at the idea of free will, and the associated notions of responsibility and conscience. A world without purpose unfolds according to immutable laws governing matter outside and inside us. Our actions are in thrall to some combination of social position, cultural context, DNA material and what have you. We cannot be held responsible for our behaviour, or be free in any significant sense. We can bemoan our fate or welcome it. We can be sorry about the results of our actions, or be happy with them. But we can’t help them, or change them. We can’t blame ourselves for outcomes.
We can move nothing – other than the earth perhaps. We cannot select or establish either our aims or our means. We know, we can react, but we can’t decide. We live in a premiss-less void, with immense power to create, but no reason to do so. If conscience means adherence to chosen means and ends, we are denied conscience. If reason is the location and defense of conscience, we are bereft of reason.
Without purpose there are no criteria for evaluation. Everything may be judged from whatever standpoint is adopted, including the choice of standpoint. In an inversion of tradition, moral agency becomes the capacity to stand back from any and every situation, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgement from a universal and abstract point of view wholly detached from social particularity. Of course once individual choice of evaluative principle is allowed, the authority of that principle is brought into question. If there are good reasons for choosing the principle, it will have corresponding authority. If the reasons are arbitrary, capricious or contingent, it will be empty of authority.
No society can exist in a moral vacuum. The very concept of society entails a more or less agreed web of interactions which in turn implies relatively fixed standards. If that unravels, society falls apart, or fragments or disappears – as many have in the past, and not only in the distant past.
Market society is no exception. In order to cohere at all, despite its strong commitment to individualism and instrumental rationality, it must find a way of nurturing solidarity and co-cooperativeness. That it manages to do so, is, in large part, due to the vestiges of alien ethics surviving from non-market cultures not fully dissolved in the acid of purposelessness.
This is famously true of the work ethic. The most successful market economies, it is often said, have come about because they have a fundamentally irrational, ‘pre-modern’ work ethic which induces people to live ascetically and drive themselves to an early death because work itself is held to be redeeming. Japan is the contemporary exemplar, although a rapidly fading one. The argument is equally true of liberal democracy which functions, it is said, only because the group loyalties surviving from pre-liberal traditions continuously re-create the civil society on which it rests.
One need not buy the particular examples that come with the thesis, nor indeed the thesis itself. It seems straightforward enough to think that no society, in the sense of a continuing, orderly arrangement between individuals, can exist without some element of mutual empathy and solidarity, without for example an internalized inhibition on eating our neighbours; or that it can exist without somehow inculcating the appropriate emotions at some point in the individual’s development. That ‘somehow’ requires a set of precepts which are absolute and not negotiable except in the details of their application. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ rules as a rule except in self-defence (so military spending is called defence expenditure); ‘Thou shalt not covet’ is another (unless it relates to market share, ‘the Joneses’ or the sophisticated consumer).
Like any cultural artefact, these precepts grow, propagate, and evolve in certain institutions whose inner workings and ethical standards express them in some form. Although recessed, the culture of these institutions – solidarity, mutuality, collectivity, responsibility, help, respect – is alien to the public standards professed in the wider social arena – egoism, possessiveness, individual autonomy, instrumental manipulation. It is an apologetic, recessive culture, but it continues to exist, if only because without it the connective tissues needed for society to exist – even market society – would unravel. Considered untouchable and even unseeable by the Brahmins of cultural orthodoxy, this apologetic counter-culture keeps the threads of social connectedness in some state of repair.
The counter-culture is not without small victories: ‘We are not interested in ethics because we are trying to create an ethics society or sub-culture at Nynex’, explained William Ferguson chairman of the ‘Baby Bell’ company serving north-eastern US, ‘Instead we are trying to make ethical behaviour an everyday norm ... because, basically, we believe ethics makes good business sense.’ ‘Ethics pays’ runs a Financial Times headline. ‘We don’t provide these benefits [allowing young children at work]’ explains Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, an outdoor-wear manufacturer, ‘because we’re nice. We provide them because they are good for our business.’
And so they must be. Eighty years after the Harvard Business School introduced its first course on ‘social factors in business enterprise’, there were over 500 courses on business ethics at American business schools. Three-fifths of the top American firms have codes of ethics; as do half of Europe’s biggest companies.
A paradox of market society is that its members are morally enfeebled at the same time as their moral community is growing in extent. It is growing inwards – to the human embryo in the very earliest moments of its development. And it is spreading outwards – there might not seem to be much to choose between the public response to genocide as practised in Turkey on the Armenians in 1915, the response to the Nazi genocide perpetrated against the Jews in the 1940s, and to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ practised by the parties to the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. But there is: the Armenians aroused little sympathy in the heartlands of market society; the Jews evoked a little more, as well as a slight sense of guilt, a feeling of failed responsibility that steps were not taken to save them; the victims in the Balkans aroused more sympathy, and even intervention, ineffectual though that proved.
It is easy to exaggerate the extension of the moral community. Few are fully committed to it. Even the heartlands of market society are fractured into mutually excluding communities, based on less than universal criteria – colour, religion, community, language, citizenship, class, profession and so on. Where people are mobile and relationships easily dropped, it is not difficult for friends to turn into strangers. It is easier to exchange things than it is to exchange understanding, concern, or love.
Beyond the heartlands there is even less commitment to moral inclusiveness. But the trend is clear and seemingly inexorable, locked into the spread of market society itself, the consequent interdependence of its members, and responding to increasing environmental stress. Fractured it might be in practice, the moral community is nonetheless larger than in previous periods, and is growing.
At the same time the ethical regime within that community is weakening.
A moral community is one whose members’ lives are of equal worth. If they are expendable, they are equally expendable. If sacred – equally so. There are exceptions: martyrdom for a common cause (a just war, for example, or in pursuit of a deeply held belief) or capital punishment (for infringing the mores of the community) break the rule, but they can be justified for preserving the continued health of the community at large.
The doctrine of equal worth is enshrined in medical practice where the injunction is normally to save a threatened life in all circumstances. But it is coming under pressure. Advances in medical technology and its high cost make for selection, or greater selection, of its beneficiaries and therefore a refinement of the criteria of individual worth.
Even if establishing such criteria did not imply – as it surely does – that people can be reduced to their social roles, and are not due equal respect and equal opportunity as individuals, a pluralistic society entertains many different conceptions of a valuable life. These are difficult to develop. When the attempt is made, the results are wild: the National Radiological Protection Board in Britain compared the average figures put on statistical life by different assessment methods in 1986. They ranged from £96,000 to something under £3 million. Different employers in different industries place different values on their workers’ lives.
Common to all these attempts is the idea that economic criteria should over-ride all others. Once that is accepted, comparison of one life with another becomes possible, indeed obligatory. And with that comes a relativization of life: some lives clearly become more important than others. It becomes ‘obvious’ that new recruits should be sent on patrol in a dangerous area in preference to experienced hands on whom more has been spent; it becomes equally obvious that heavy traffic should be routed through slums rather than through salubrious neighbourhoods where the potential victims of accidents are more valuable. By an easy progression, ‘the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that’ (Lawrence Summers, then Chief Economist at the World Bank in an internal Bank memo); and it seems natural to recruit ‘volunteers’ for experiments on humans in prisons rather than in universities say. Further down the line, it becomes perfectly reasonable to sterilize the ‘unfit’ (36,000 enforced sterilizations in the US in 1941 alone; 60,000 Swedish women between 1936 and 1976) or eliminate them: over 70,000 people suffering from congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy and severe alcoholism were killed in Germany between 1939 and the end of 1941, before the Holocaust consumed six million Jews, an unknown number of Gypsies, homosexuals, so-called ‘psychopaths’ and ‘anti-social individuals’, and 85 percent of patients in the country’s mental hospitals. It seems as reasonable to restrain population growth by forced sterilization as in India under Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, the sterilization supremo.
This edited extract is from the section titled Moral Disorder of Chapter 6 Culture.
Last updated on 13 November 2019