The Politics of Moralizing

Jane Bennett, Michael J. Shapiro, Jane Bennett, Michael J. Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415934787
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136705526
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

The Politics of Moralizing issues a stern warning about the risks of speaking, writing, and thinking in a manner too confident about one's own judgments and asks, "Can a clear line be drawn between dogmatism and simple certainty and indignation?" Bennett and Shapiro enter the debate by questioning what has become a popular, even pervasive, cultural narrative told by both the left and the right: the story of the West's moral decline, degeneration, or confusion. Contributors explore the dynamics and dilemmas of moralizing by advocates of patriotism, environmental protection, and women's rights while arguing that the current discourse gives free license to self-aggrandizement, cruelty, vengeance and punitiveness and a generalized resistance to or abjection of diversity.

_____________________ CHAPTER ONE

THE MORALINE

DRIFT

JANE BENNETT

WHAT IS IT ABOUT JEDEDIAH PURDY that gets under my skin? Purdy is the home-schooled, twenty-something, Yale law student who wrote the 1999 best-seller, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today. The book is a work of political theory broadly construed: it offers a (Hegelian) diagnosis of homesickness as our existential condition, a (Habermasian) critique of commercial culture, a (Tocquevillean) image of civil society as a set of concentric circles of participation, and a (Thoreauian) call for citizen-selves unafraid to be earnest idealists.¹ It's not just that this youngster's book received widespread attention in the United States, or even that he disparages my beloved Seinfeld for allegedly fostering a depoliticizing form of irony.² Neither is it because I would offer a different cultural diagnosis—less disenchanted—and a different politics “less communitarian” than the ones Purdy does. Though I would, I appreciate Purdy's desire to forward a positive political vision and to theorize in a way that also inspires.³

What gets under my skin is Purdy's drift toward moralism. But that's not all. I'm also irritated because his book has the uncanny effect of showing me that his drift is one that pulls me too. The moralizing that haunts his theory at some points haunts mine at others. By mine I mean a style of theory with an openly normative mission that aims not only to interpret social life but also to inflect it in a certain direction. It seems that there is a persistent affinity between an affirmative political theorizing and moralizing—between, as Wendy Brown puts it, “a galvanizing moral vision and a reproachful moralizing sensibility.”⁴ In what follows, I take my irritation with Purdy's position in For Common Things as the starting point for reflection about what makes moral discourse moralizing. (It turns out that what constitutes moralizing is more difficult to put into words than to feel under one's skin.) I also use Purdy to explore strategies for minimizing the most offensive effects of moralism. Purdy himself develops some of these; he drifts but sometimes he swims against the tide.

THREE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORALINE

Self-Certainty

What are the distinguishing characteristics of what Richard Flathman calls a “moraline” theory?⁵ The first consists in a too-high degree of self-certainty about one's judgments, diagnoses, and analyses. There are, for example, too few occasions when Purdy interrupts or provides competition for his urge to tell others what's fundamentally wrong with things and what should be done about it. When he takes the intensity of his sentiments and the clarity of his convictions as signs of their rightness, justness, or aptness to the situation at hand, Purdy drifts into moralism.

And yet such a drift may very well be integral to the moral sense itself: in both its critical and affirmative modes, the act of expressing a sense of ought seems to require considerable confidence in one's judgment. If so, then the danger cannot be eliminated, though it might be countered. Humor and self-irony can function as countering techniques; they can interrupt the flow from confident affirmation to self-certainty to dogmatism. For Common Things, however, rejects ironic humor, identifying it as precisely what is wrong with American culture today. Though Purdy acknowledges the need to temper claims to moral clarity and to confound distinctions “that might once have seemed obvious,”⁶ he rejects irony because of its tendency to reduce idealism to naïveté.

Seinfeld has turned this reduction into an art: “at ease in banter, versed in allusion, and almost debilitatingly self-aware,” Seinfeld promotes the suspicion that there are no authentic thoughts but only more or less clever repetitions.⁷ Purdy links the fact that (the character of) Jerry Seinfeld is unable to commit to anything or anyone in a whole-hearted way to the commercialized culture in which we all now live. As Purdy sees it, because “we can have no intimate moment… that we have not seen… on a thirty-foot screen before an audience of hundreds,” because we cannot apologize without recalling the apologies “put to cynical… use by politicians,” and because we know that any pleasure we get from “solitary encounters with nature … has been anticipated by a thousand L. L. Bean catalogues,” we come to believe that everything we think and feel is “trite.” The mercenary repetition of our words and sentiments render them “unreal” and induce the sense that “they are not ours, and it may be that nothing is properly ours.”⁸ Seinfeld, then, is a symptom of the real problem: the demise of a bona fide, that is, commodity-free, public sphere. In the absence of this kind of common space, the only things we are able to recognize as common are shared jingles, rock lyrics, or puns on sitcom lines—things that can't possibly (at least according to Purdy) inspire individuals to commit to one another or to practice civic responsibility. Irony desensitizes one to the commercialization of common things, or at least it does nothing to restore faith in the possibility of creating what is “real, true, or ours.”⁹

By reducing irony to cynicism—to what, to me, is only one of its potential effects— Purdy needlessly disqualifies one valuable tool in the struggle against the moraline drift. Irony can aerate the moralizing self, letting in surprising messages from those outside of its entrenched circle of judgments. For Common Things does acknowledge that “one advantage of an ironic culture is that it does not permit earnest declaration to come cheap,”¹⁰ and, after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Purdy further softened his stand. Fearing a wave of thoughtless nationalism, even xenophobia, in the wake of the attacks, he affirms the power of irony to “keep dangerous excesses of passion and self-righteousness and extreme conviction at bay.”¹¹

Quest for Purity

The first characteristic of the moraline consists in a tendency to take oneself too seriously, without enough grains of salt and without enough heed to internal and external forces that would complicate one's affirmations. The second characteristic of the moraline is linked to the first. It consists in an overidealization of purity. Moralism links the good too tightly to the pure. That this equation can produce cruelty and violence is especially obvious when the political realm is enlisted as the site of purity. Purdy himself warns against this: the lesson he takes from the fall of European communism is that we ought not to conceive of politics as capable of redeeming humans or fulfilling their highest potential. Purdy champions a more ambiguous picture in which politics appears as an admixture of good and bad things and does not exhaust what counts as public life. The ideal of a pure politics, says Purdy, actually impedes the emergence of a sense of civic responsibility.¹²

And yet, though Purdy rejects a pure politics, he consistently idealizes a kind of pure individuality-, a sincere, earnest, and authentic self. Sincerity, earnestness, and authenticity all have a purity of form, are simple rather than compound, internally smooth, of one piece. Purdy is also drawn to the idea of a pure cultural sphere, one purged of all commercial influence. For it is only within this commodity-free space, he believes, that citizens will be free to affirm “what is real, true, or ours.” It is my belief that it may not be humanly possible to eliminate entirely the desire for purity. And though this desire—when it lodges, for example, in notions of race or nation or ethnicity—produces cruelty, violence, and injustice, in other manifestations it can propel extraordinary works of art or exceptional acts of bravery and altruism. The act of imagining a pure version of the actual world can also, as I think it does in Henry Thoreau's transcendentalism, paradoxically lead to greater appreciation for the marvelous singularity of earthly things human and nonhuman. A transcendentalizing gaze can transform the banal and everyday into the wild and refreshing.¹³

There is much in Purdy's book that follows this Thoreauian strategy, though unlike Thoreau, he refuses to discern any wondrous potential at all in objects that participate in commercial culture. (Even the railroad for Thoreau possessed the inspirational power of “the Wild.”) Purdy distinguishes too sharply between, on the one hand, a bad common world of mass-market commodities (which thwarts the development of a socially responsible self-reliance), and, on the other hand, a good common world of locally produced culture (which fosters an earnest commitment to ideals and the capacity for “self-trust”).¹⁴ But if Purdy could get more distance from the shining lure of purity, he might come to view (good) culture as including elements of commercialization. He might come to define culture not as the stark other to commercialization but as a process of selecting a particular pattern of commercialization for its enlivening, uplifting, or educational value. On this view, the category of culture could include those commercial forces and products whose effects exceed the stimulation of material consumption.

By treating all commercial forms as a kind of pollution of what should be a pure sphere of (high) culture, Purdy ignores the moral complexity of commodities. There are, for example, moods and effects that, though generated by jingles, rock songs, and pop-culture puns, can and are put to charitable or socially responsible or otherwise admirable uses. This thesis stems from an understanding of both culture and capitalism as impure admixtures. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say, “there is always something that flows or flees, that escapes … the overcoding machine,” and though “capitalists may be the master of surplus value and its distribution, … they do not dominate the flows from which surplus value derives.”¹⁵

Moreover, though Purdy criticizes the commercialization of culture, he says little about the larger economic order that houses this process. To examine the complexities of this structure in relation to the conceivable alternatives would be, perhaps, to feel a need to develop a more subtle picture of just what capitalist commercialization does and what effects it has. It produces shiny commodities that obscure unjust conditions of production and distract from the less glamorous work of building civility, social justice, and a healthier natural environment.¹⁶ But it also seems sometimes to generate an affective energy, a lively fascination, that refuses to stay within the bounds of commercial consumption, and may even be drawn upon to fuel valuable noncommercial projects.¹⁷ The geographer J.K. Gibson-Graham argues, for example, that the image of global capital as a monster devouring everything in its path is both empirically inaccurate and politically disabling: “The impossibility of a global order must be affirmed. … If we can accept that it is impossible to subsume every individual being, place and practice to a universal law,… then it will follow that the local cannot be fully interior to the global, nor can its inventive potential be captured by any singular imagining [of the economy].”¹⁸

Purdy refuses to note the ethical potential within commercialized culture, perhaps for the same reason all of us sometimes eschew shades of gray: in order to craft a more authoritative idiom.¹⁹ Self-evident truths, common sense, and uncomplicated ideals make for powerful rhetoric. Again, the pull of this purism is that it will bestow upon the speaker the status of a decisive individual, a leader. Rarely—though Bill Clinton was sometimes an exception—will an American politician acknowledge that a situation is too complex to warrant a definitive stand just now, for to recognize ambiguity publicly is inevitably to invite the epithet weasel, waffler, and coward.

Punitiveness

This judgmentalism or proclivity toward harshness and punitiveness in one's assessment of others is the third characteristic of the moraline I will discuss. It is what George Kateb describes as “the tendency to condemnation and punishment”; what William Connolly writes about in terms of the “moralization of the desire to punish”; and what Tzvetan Todorov points to when he defines moralism as “a moral lesson taught to others that the dispenser takes some pride in giving…. The moralist thus resembles what the Bible calls the Pharisee, if we put less emphasis on his eventual hypocrisy… and more on his tendency to judge others harshly.”²⁰ Perhaps the fullest account of this dimension of the moraline is Nietzsche's discussion of ressentiment, or the attempt to find someone specific to blame and punish for the generic fact of human frailty, suffering, and death. Nietzsche admired the pre-Platonic Greeks for their resistance to this life-denying mood: the Greeks knew how to live—they used art to redeem life, the only successful theodicy ever invented.’²¹ Like Nietzsche, the cultural theorist John Docker also looks to polytheistic cultures for ways to dispel resentment against a human condition wherein few things are black or white and where not all the sources of injustice are within human power to overcome. Docker suggests that we might find help in combating resentment in the Egyptian mother-goddess Hathor, who, after being “sent down from the heavens by the sun-god Re to punish humanity whom he felt was plotting against him, instead gets drunk on a flood of beer and forgets to wreak vengeance.”²²

Drink can indeed help one to perform the wonderful feat of “forgetting” to wreak vengeance. But the more important point is that something special or deliberate has to be done in order to forget, in order to counter the desire to punish. For if Nietzsche i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One The Moraline Drift
• Chapter Two Generating a Virtuous Circle
• Chapter Three Political Not Patriotic
• Chapter Four Autobiography and Cultivating the Arts of the Female Self
• Chapter Five The Tragedy of the Ethical Commons
• Chapter Six Out for a Walk
• Chapter Seven Just the Facts, Please
• Chapter Eight The Challenge of Polytheism
• Chapter Nine Affirming the Political
• Contributors
• Index