Everyday Ethics and Social Change

The Education of Desire

Anna Peterson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231520553
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

Americans increasingly cite moral values as a factor in how they vote, but when we define morality simply in terms of a voter's position on gay marriage and abortion, we lose sight of the ethical decisions that guide our everyday lives. In our encounters with friends, family members, nature, and nonhuman creatures, we practice a nonutilitarian morality that makes sacrifice a rational and reasonable choice. Recognizing these everyday ethics, Anna L. Peterson argues, helps us move past the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts of culture and refocus on issues that affect real social change.

Peterson begins by divining a "second language" for personal and political values, a vocabulary derived from the loving and mutually beneficial relationships of daily life. Even if our interactions with others are fleeting and fragmentary, they provide a viable alternative to the contractual and atomistic attitudes of mainstream culture. Everyday ethics point toward a more just, humane, and sustainable society, and to acknowledge moments of grace in our daily encounters is to realize a different way of relating to people and nonhuman nature—an alternative ethic to cynicism and rank consumerism. In redefining the parameters of morality, Peterson enables us to make fundamental problems such as the distribution of wealth, the use of public land and natural resources, labor and employment policy, and the character of political institutions the preferred focus of debate and action.

A PRESENCE AND A BEGINNING

We live in difficult times. We face social and environmental problems that are massive in scope, for which effective solutions are elusive, at best. These problems are well symbolized by global warming, which threatens nonhuman species, unique ecosystems, and human communities equally. Climate change is so disturbing that my twelve-year-old son, who is passionately interested in public affairs in general and the environment in particular, refuses to discuss it. It is too depressing, he says; he cannot see a way out; he cannot bear to think about what it means for his future. His despair breaks my heart, but I have no comforting words to offer. I feel depressed and overwhelmed as well. I am tempted to retreat into a more comfortable and manageable universe, to shrink the world into something I can control.¹

I know that I am far from alone in feeling this. It is hard to look at the world outside and not find reasons for discouragement and motivation to retreat. As the bumper sticker says, “If you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention.” Any of us who love something in this threatened world—our children, our students, wild nature, humanity in general—are right to worry. What is much less sure is whether we are right to hope. This book is a reflection on where we might direct our attention to uncover reasons to hope.

Perhaps reason is not the right word, insofar as it suggests rational arguments and evidence. I suspect that the grounds for hope are more akin to what Saint Paul expressed in his letter to the Romans: “In hope he believed against hope” (Romans 4:18). One of my favorite theologians, Paul Tillich, quoted this line at the start of an essay on “The Right to Hope.” For Tillich, believing against hope meant going “ever again through the narrows of a painful and courageous ‘in-spite-of.’ For hope cannot be verified by sense experience or rational proof.”² Tillich’s “in spite of” rests on the “ground of being,” the God whose existence we trust not because of rational proofs but because we experience existential courage. “There are no valid arguments for the ‘existence’ of God,” explains Tillich, “but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not.”³ Nor are there valid arguments to justify moral and political hope. In place of rational arguments, we know acts of hopefulness in which we affirm the possibility of something better. We hold fast to visions of this something better even when nothing in our world indicates progress is possible. This hope is utopian: utopia means, literally, “no place,” and our hope rests in no place we can know for sure.

Utopias are always transcendent, beyond the here and now. Some utopias, however, are also immanent. They already exist, albeit in partial and embryonic form. We know relations of love and solidarity, even if these are fragile and fragmentary. We know connectedness with other people and with members of other species. We play freely and joyfully. We find satisfaction in taking care of those who need us and in being cared for. In these moments we glimpse what Tillich calls “the seed-like presence of that which is hoped for. In the seed of a tree, stem and leaves are already present, and this gives us the right to sow the seed in hope for the fruit.” Here we find, if not reasons, then a right to hope: the seed that might develop into something bigger, that has no guarantee but which represents “a presence, a beginning of what is hoped for.” This presence makes hope possible: “We hope for the fulfillment of our work, often against hope, because it is already in us as vision and driving force. We hope for a lasting love, because we feel the power of this love present. But it is hope, not certainty.”⁴

This book is about the connection between the presence of “that which is hoped for” in our everyday lives and the possibility of this good on a larger and more lasting scale. Hope may or may not be justified in the end, but it is real. It is real because it is rooted in something that exists here and now. Without this presence and beginning, “hope is foolishness,” as Tillich insists.⁵ We must know love, fulfillment, peace, or any other good in some way in order to ground larger hopes. We find the presence and beginning of hope for a better world in loving friendships, family ties, encounters with nonhuman creatures, and ventures into wild nature. These relationships and experiences give meaning and value to our lives. They find us at our best: relating to human and nonhuman others in nonutilitarian ways, sacrificing for larger goods, finding satisfaction in experience and relationship rather than consumption and calculation. Because they embody not only alternative values but also alternative sources of joy, these experiences constitute the immanent utopias of everyday life.

I am interested in these moments of grace not only in themselves but also for their potential and actual connections to the public sphere and to large-scale social change. I believe that some of these relationships, experiences, and practices embody not just private but public hopes and values. To fulfill their political potential, however, we face uphill battles, sacrifices of time, convenience, and perhaps more, risks of failure and disappointment. We have to resist the lure of retreat into private pleasures, avoiding the temptation to keep our hope small and private—which in the end, as Tillich asserts, is “a poor and foolish hope.”⁶ We need to hope together, for each other: to connect our private hopes and dreams to the common good.

A vital tool in any process of social change is what English Marxist historian E. P. Thompson calls “the education of desire.” Thompson describes hopes that “teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all, to desire in a different way.”⁷ This, according to Thompson, is the “proper and new-found space” of Utopia. Rather than a utopia that is “no place,” Thompson proposes one intimately connected to ordinary lives and aspirations. This utopia entails a vision of a qualitatively different and better life without which we cannot think about creating better societies. As feminist poet Adrienne Rich puts it, “If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment.”⁸ These alternatives, however, must not seem utterly disconnected from the lives we are currently living. Utopian ideas have power only if they resonate with the people who need them. Impossible dreams, extraterrestrial fantasies, and descriptions of societies unimaginably far removed from our own might help spark imagination and critique, but they do not generate sustained energy for resistance and construction. The education of desire, like the right to hope, must be rooted in the soil of everyday life.

I argue in this book that the education of desire begins with the realization that the experiences that give meaning and value to our personal lives are not random or isolated exceptions to “the way things really are.” Rather, they reflect an alternative ethic, in operation only in fragmented, fleeting instances. This ethic assumes that human nature can be social and cooperative, not only individualistic and competitive. People can relate to each other in unselfish, mutually responsive ways. They can seek common goods and not only private benefits. People can also relate to nonhuman nature with wonder and respect, seeking understanding without exploiting every resource for personal gain. If this sounds as fantastic as any work of science fiction, consider that most of us embody these qualities and live by these values every day of our lives, at least momentarily. In family life, with friends, with companion animals, in wild places, we find countless occasions to live according to a moral system that differs radically from the voluntaristic, individualistic, and utilitarian assumptions that rule most of our lives.

We cannot easily expand this alternative morality to all facets of our lives, all or even most of the time. However, I believe that we can benefit from recognizing this ethic, analyzing and appreciating it more fully, even in its present constrained circumstances. If we can identify the contents of this ethic and the circumstances under which it operates, we might even expand it into parts of our shared public life. This means understanding the relations between values and politics in a way that has not yet been done very systematically.

This effort must begin with the acknowledgment that most of our everyday lives are far from utopian. The fragmentary and rare moments when it all works illuminate the flip side, the more frequent times when things fall apart. Family life, for example, is stressful and hard just as often as it is joyous and comforting. As fallible and limited creatures, humans will probably always experience conflict and misunderstandings in our interpersonal relationships. We will always be prone to illness, pain, conflicts, and disappointments. These existential challenges are compounded by political and economie ones. Stress, overwork, social violence, and ecological damage all make it impossible for even the most fortunate and caring of families to make the good a permanent condition. Poverty further constrains the efforts of many more parents. Popular culture and media reinforce negative ways of interacting with others, often making our private lives just as competitive, utilitarian, exploitative, or shallow as the larger world from which we want to escape.

I have no illusions of an end to conflict, suffering, or unpleasantness. As some humanist revisers of Marx, including Tillich, have pointed out, even the end of capitalism would not eliminate all forms of existential, physical, and emotional suffering. With our limitations firmly in mind, however, I am convinced we can do better. To do so, we need to distinguish more clearly between the obstacles that are existential and ineradicable and those that are socially imposed and open to transformation. This process of discernment leads not to “the naive denial of any genuine limits,” as feminist ethicist Sharon Welch explains, but rather to “a sophisticated questioning of what a social system has set as ‘genuine limits.’” Such questioning can expand the “boundaries of human hope,” expanding our dreams beyond what we have been taught to expect—educating us, in short, to desire more and better.⁹ I am convinced that we can achieve this education and that the immanent utopias of everyday life are crucial not only to the education of desire but also to the development of effective practices of social change. These mundane utopias—the moments when we experience something qualitatively different from utilitarian calculus and consumption—provide embodied proof that a different, better life is possible.

These utopian moments, however, are also fleeting, fragmentary, and embattled. Their fragility has long been recognized in Christian understandings of the reign of God. This reign is already here and now—“in the midst of you,” as Jesus told the Pharisees (Luke 17:20–21)—at the same time it is never full realized, always “not yet.” What makes the world into the reign of God, or any community a utopia, is its capacity to embody ultimate hopes and values, to live “the kingdom as social ethic.”¹⁰ The “already not yet” of the Christian tradition is the immanent utopia most familiar to me, but it is far from the only one. Buddhism teaches that enlightenment and nirvana are achieved not by leaving the physical world behind but rather by understanding, and living in, this world differently.¹¹ Nonattachment is an immanent utopia insofar as it is an embodied way of being differently here and now. Other traditions also have visions and experiences that help flesh out the many possible immanent utopias we might encounter or build in our various places on Earth. The grounded messianism of Judaism reveals Israel as a state that is both earthly and spiritual, utopian insofar as its hopes must always transcend any concrete embodiment. The recognition of this transcendence is crucial, or there is a risk of “idolatry,” of making a particular institution or experience into an end in itself. We might here invoke Tillich’s “Protestant principle,” which protests “against every power that claims divine character for itself.”¹² This is a danger for many forms of utopianism, religious and secular, which risk “absolutizing what is not absolute” as they look toward radically different values and ways of living.¹³ Despite the dangers, many religious traditions, as well as other philosophical and cultural streams, offer insights and models that can help flesh out, in particular times and places, what a better world should and might be.

In this book I want, first, to identify the sources of meaning and joy that constitute the kingdoms in our midst, the utopias that we already live. I hope then to tease out these fragments, to identify experiences and practices that challenge destructive social patterns and especially the habitual emphasis on individual self-interest at the cost of larger goods. I want to build on these ideas in order to explore the different values we live by, constituting different worlds, experienced and embodied in the moments of everyday grace. Finally, I explore the ways these beginnings can educate our desires so that we might expand them into our collective lives.

PRIVATE AND PUBLIC LIFE

This hope might seem foolish given the decidedly nonutopian character of everyday life in the contemporary United States. North American society is characterized by growing political and cultural polarization, social inequalities, poverty, environmental destruction, and endless war. Related to these problems is the fact that we are increasingly cut off from other people and from a larger public sphere. The decline of connectedness, of community, and of “social capital” in the United States has been well documented in recent decades, most notably in Habits of the Heart (first published in 1985) by sociologist Robert Bellah and four coauthors and in Bowling Alone (1995) by political scientist Robert Putnam. These and other studies offer extensive evidence that both private and public relationships have declined in the past several decades. Formal public sphere organizations, such as political parties and trade unions, have lost participation and membership, as have charitable and volunteer groups, from parent-teacher associations to bridge clubs.

The authors of Habits of the Heart note in particular the increasing scarcity of what they term “communities of memory,” in which people know themselves “as social selves . . . members of a people, inheritors of a history and a culture that we must nurture through memory and hope.” The community is held together by a constitutive narrative and by “examples of the men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community. For Bellah and his colleagues, this points to a more general definition of community, which “is not a collection of self-seeking individuals, not a temporary remedy, like Parents without Partners, that can be abandoned as soon as a partner has been found, but a context within which personal identity is formed, a place where fluent self-awareness follows the currents of communal conversation and contributes to them.”¹⁴ They give examples of such communities, which range from a traditional Protestant church to people held together by labor union activism. What these ideologically and demographically diverse groups hold in common is that for each, civic engagement is not simply a voluntary choice but a complex identity, a heritage carried from the past that demands a response in the present. Activism that is not tied in this way to participants’ identities and histories, reinforced by overlapping formal and informal social connections, is unlikely to endure for the necessary long haul.

Civic engagement must not only be rooted in a common history but also look toward the future. Often overlooked in readings of Habits of the Heart is the authors’ insistence that while communities of memory tie members to the past, they also point to the future as “communities of hope” that can “allow us to connect our aspirations for ourselves and those closest to us with the aspirations of a larger whole and see our own efforts as being in part contributions to the common good.”¹⁵ Some innovative cultural and political groups today might qualify as communities of hope or expectation in this sense, united by a sense of possibility, a commitment to a common good, by shared moral and social values, even if their collective memories do not reach far into the past.

The emergence of new social movements and networks counterbalances, to some extent, the decline in communities of memory and traditional organizations that Bellah, Putnam, and others lament. Some new groups rely heavily on new media, compensating for the loss of economic and geographic ties by finding other ways to build relationships and accomplish goals. Many of these movements consist of “‘invisible’ networks of small groups submerged in everyday life,” as the Italian sociologist Alberto Melucci contends. They rarely participate directly in the public sphere, focusing instead on “new forms of everyday life” that embody their values and goals in the present.¹⁶ Such movements are formed not because of a shared heritage or material interests but rather through the recognition of common values and orientations. By embodying these values in its own organization and practices, a movement helps constitute and reinforce an identity for the participants. The movement itself, as Melucci argues, becomes the message; it is not simply an instrument for achieving a separate end.¹⁷

This point is echoed by another scholar of new social movements, the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells, who describes contemporary urban movements as expressions of a new way of doing politics, rooted in everyday life experiences and embodying personal identity and values as much as explicitly public commitments.¹⁸ As examples of this sort of movement, Castells mentions environmental, feminist, gay rights, and urbanist groups, among others. All are concerned primarily with the quality of their everyday lives and with the expression of personal identity, especially identities that are not valued by larger cultural and social institutions. Other examples of new social movements might include those focused on local food, neighborhood revivals, or alternative approaches to parenting, among many others. All of these are relevant to this book, insofar as their values and their social ties are rooted in alternative forms of relationship that are, or at least can be, embodied in everyday life.

The values and relationships embodied in everyday life are not limited to humans. Neither humanistic social scientists such as Bellah and Putnam nor new social movement theorists like Melucci and Castells have paid much attention to social connections between human and nonhuman animals, what philosopher Mary M...