Radical Ethics: An Introduction

THE PROBLEM

The old narratives, within which all of our ethical models have been couched, can no longer be appealed to for a global ethics because they are socially constructed. In more plain language, your religious faith, scientific worldview, or governmental model (all narratives, all requiring faith) work great so long as you’re interacting with other adherents of your faith. It’s good to have faith—it’s part of what makes us human. But each of these faiths has a geneology, a history which can be traced to someone somewhere, which has been sculpted and shaped by the passage of time and interaction with cultures. For example, what it meant to be a Christian looked vastly different in the first century than it does in ours.

Again, nothing can ever preclude you from having faith. I have a faith—a faith I’m willing to die for. But accepting the consequences for your faith is entirely different than imposing consequences on others who do not share your faith. You can, like Ghandi, suffer violence for your faith. You cannot, like Hitler, commit violence on its behalf. Why? Because each human on the planet was raised under different circumstances, told different stories, inheriting different behaviors along the way. No one on earth can arbitrate between them. Not the priests, not the scientists, not the philosophers—precisely because they are human beings.

So the problem is: How do we determine right action when interacting with those outside our faith? It would be great if we could answer Rodney King when he asks “Can we all get along?” with a resounding YES! Unfortunately, we live under limited circumstances, among scarce resources, with conflicting agendas. So the problem stands, and I think it’s the most important problem in the world.

THE STANDING “SOLUTION”

Thus far, the “solution” has been to wait. To let the truth (or lack of truth) seep in and become internalized, hopefully manifesting itself as a form of humility. We’ve hoped that in light of a lack of absolute certainty, we'll become more careful with our faith-become-opinions, more reluctant to commit violence at all. Some of us have elevated this humility to a new religion, believing in its power, over time, to save us all. Others have simply embraced the violence, seeing it much like the way many economists see foreclosures in the free market as the tool of a self-correcting system. This latter stance is hypocrisy, because in order for its adherents to presume to rise above the turmoil and watch it from their indifferent heights, they must be privileged—and once this privilege is threatened, they’re the first to become indignant and step into the fray.

But while the “humble” (who manage to be arrogant about their humility) sequester themselves away in their ivory towers, the rest of the world has crept out into the twilight and seized upon a new and hideous opportunity: Without the underpinnings of absolute truth (which we never really had), who’s to keep us from constructing our own realities? Who’s to keep the yarn spinners, the puppet masters, the cult leaders, the manipulators and exploiters from making up the rules as they go along? These rules have an uncanny tendency to benefit the rule-makers. They manifest themselves as tax codes, voter districting, morality legislation, and discrimination policies that are ever vigilant over the rights of the disabled, the minority, or the sexually harassed, only to be completely blind to the plight of lower socio-economic classes.

Don’t get me wrong—we never had absolute truth, and manipulation is as old as the world. But without that nagging feeling in the back of their minds that they’re violating unassailable truths, the exploiters have become emboldened. They feel safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing on the planet that can challenge their rhetoric. Or if they do find themselves under mounting social pressure, they can always shrug their shoulders and claim to be victims of their environment. “I,” they say, “am the monster you created.”

THE PROPOSED SOLUTION

Radical Ethics. The etymology of the word radical is “to the root.” Radical Ethics insists there are a handful of things we can all agree on, and that from this mustard seed of common ground, we can take mountains and toss them into the sea. I will use the rest of this already bloated post to enumerate a set of assumptions I believe every human on the planet can share, each assumption elaborating on the previous.

1. We exist. We weren’t privy to the deliberations leading up to our existence, nor can we agree there even were deliberations. We can’t answer why there’s something rather than nothing, but by virtue of reading this sentence, we can attest to the fact there is something.
2. Objects are real. An object is anything that has causal power—anything that can affect other objects. According to this definition, a rock is an object, and so is a mortgage. A zygote is an object, and so is an ideology. We are objects.
3. Objects are stratified (sub-points a and b explain each other).
   1. The categories of concrete and abstract don’t make sense anymore when referring to objects, by virtue of the fact that our only access to the world is via the abstraction of language. Let’s toss them out. In their place we can speak of stratified layers. What I mean by this is that on one layer of stratification we have a cell. At a higher layer we have an organ. At a higher layer we have a human being. At a higher layer we have a community. At a higher level we have a culture, etc.
   2. Processes are objects. A process is when objects interact with other objects in rhythmic patterns over time. This process, once sustainable, becomes an object. The human being is a process that has become an object. In the same way, a government is an object, and so is a computer.
4. Objects, by default, have a right to exist. This is simply an issue of integrity. If you agree that you have a right to exist, then you must concede the same mechanism which brought you into existence (whether it be the Big Bang or the Words of God) also brought everything else into existence, and to deny their right to exist is to deny your own.
5. Existence cannot be separated from flourishing. Flourishing is defined as the ability for an object (or a group of objects) to coalesce into a higher stratification of its own volition. Caging a wild animal and oppressing the poor are examples of the denial of flourishing, which is no different than denying them the right to exist.
6. Some objects become unsustainable, thus foregoing their right to exist. Sustainability is defined as the ability for an object to flourish over an indefinite period of time in such a way that does not threaten the flourishing of other objects. War is an object. We can consider it in terms of stratification like this: Citizens->Nations->War. Since nations now have nuclear weapons they are willing to deploy, war is unsustainable. Cancer is unsustainable. The meat industry, in its current form, is unsustainable. A natural ecology can be sustainable because, even though animals higher up in the food chain threaten individual creatures, those individual creatures could not exist in a healthy, balanced environment without their predators.
7. Agents have the responsibility to actively seek sustainability. Agents are sentient objects that have the ability to mourn the loss of other objects, to contemplate non-existence and choose not to exist (suicide), and to understand sustainability. Again, as an issue of integrity, if an agent comes to the understanding that they exist by virtue of stratified layers of sustainable objects, and if an agent chooses to exist, they must seek sustainability. This seeking out of sustainability becomes right action.

I'd be remiss not to give credit to Roy Bhaskar for strongly influencing my thinking. Some, if not most of these ideas come straight out of his Critical Realism. Unfortunately, the language used to convey critical realist theory is jargon laden to the point of being undecipherable by anyone without a specialialization in philosophy. Any idea is only as good as the language with which it's expressed, making Critical Realism a philosopher's philosophy.

The Myth of Progress

Among the more damaging myths embedded in the cultural milieu of the West is the myth of progress, and more specifically, the myth that some people are more advanced than others.  At it's broadest scope, this myth manifests itself as a criteria by which other nations are judged.  Western nations deploy the word democratic, which  stands in for advanced.  A non-democratic nation is referred to as tribal, it's rulers are a regime, and it's people are oppressed by tyranny.  All this rhetoric stands in for a lack of progress.  This rhetoric produces suggestions that a non-democratic nation is comprised of humans that aren't quite fully human yet, and are therefore subject to the exact same kind of discrimination produced by racism.  If the Occupy Wall Street movement suggests anything, it's that a supposedly democratic nation can be experienced by its citizens as oppressive.  Much has been written about the manifestation of the myth of progress at this broader level.  What has occupied my thinking tonight is about the way the myth manifests at a much more granular level.

You'd have to be living under a rock not to hear about the new iPhone.  Each subsequent release of Apple's device is greeted by an ever more fervent and global media frenzy.  There is no other phenomenon in human history that comes close to attracting such perennial attention.  If John Lennon came back from the dead and released a new Beatles album, it wouldn't come close.  Frankly, it's sickening to watch.  Steve Job has become a martyr for the iPhone 5, which hasn't even been announced by Apple as existing.  Something is wrong.  The American (and now global) consumer is obviously exhibiting dangerous addictive behavior.  Like a junky whose value judgments are grossly distorted by the object of their addiction, consumers have blown the importance of the late CEO of Apple way out of proportion, and even more insidiously, they have conflated his death with a magic and non-existent device.  The problem is that there's no one left to diagnose the patient.  Every psychologist in the country would have to excuse themselves for a moment while they check Facebook on their iPhone.  Even this blogger has one.

At its most granular level, the myth of progress manifests itself in the way we make value judgments of others based on the phone in their pocket.  The iPhone 3G toting business-woman is taken less seriously by her 4S toting peers.  This behavior is internalized, generating crowds of people who line up in the freezing cold outside Apple stores.  Humans, in effect, have become cyborgs, and the cyborg with the newest phone wins, and in increasingly less subtle ways.  The iPhone 4S equipped cyborg now has an artificially intelligent familiar, and its iPhone 4 equipped competitors are now inferior in tangible ways.

I'm calling it now:  there is a new kind of discrimination on the horizon, and it's name is techism.  It will replace classism, and will be no less oppressive.  The economically challenged will one day occupy Apple stores rather than Wall Street.  These devices are so expensive, we might as well start calling birthdays and Christmas "iPhone Day."  This is price gouging.  There's no other way to see it, once you realize that Apple has more cash than the U.S. government.  I'm not sure how to fix the problem.  All I know is that I'm not buying the iPhone 4S.  I'm sure Apple's OS upgrades will keep me from keeping my iPhone 4 in perpetuity, but I'll hold out as long as possible.  I will also make a concentrated effort to see people as people, not cyborgs, and to learn to cherish the outdated.  It's sad to think that holding on to your $500 purchase for *gasp* five years is rebellious behavior.  But such is the nature of the myth of progress.

Romantic Readings

Through a series of recent conversations I’ve had with a dear friend and mentor who happens to be a conservative theologian, I’ve learned that there is a stigma placed on liberal theologians; namely, that we are intellectually dishonest. It’s pretty easy to see how this stigma developed. Liberal theologians tend to have a “low” view of scripture, one that admits that the various works that comprise any religious canon come to us filtered through disparate cultures and personalities, leaving them full of claims that, when held up to a modern historical account (or a modern conception of ethics and morality), don’t necessarily line up.

To admit such a thing doesn’t seem like much of a problem to me. The problem, according to those with a “high” view of scripture (stereotypically seen as deeming scripture to be inerrant), is that liberal theologians shouldn’t be claiming that scripture has the power to reveal the truth or provide a moral framework for one’s life. Therefore, liberal preachers who tell entire congregations how the world works or how to act based off of a scripture they don’t actually consider to be “true” are engaging in intellectual dishonesty.

I’m not a preacher. I’m technically not a qualified theologian. That said, this controversy touches on something very dear to my heart: romantic readings. What is a romantic reading? The most iconic example of romantic reading is the way Don Quixote reads the world around him. He is obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in the books he has read, and believes with all his heart that he is a knight errant charged with the duty to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. He sees a windmill and reads it as an evil giant he is duty-bound to slay. In the end, he is killed because of this belief. He was willing to die for a romantic reading of reality.

There is obvious danger in this kind of faith. Religious fanatics engage in bloody crusades motivated by this kind of faith, and I by no means condone such acts. On the other hand, Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer also had this kind of faith. He admits in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus that Jesus believed the end of the world was coming within a generation. He admits that the Bible is probably not “true” in the literal sense of the word. Yet, he gave up all the celebrity and fame he’d acquired in Europe and moved to Africa in order to establish a world-class hospital, where he died.

The point is, you don’t have to believe something is actually true in order to give your life to it. You don’t have to empirically prove something before you consider it worth sharing. And even though I don’t think the Bible is literally true, that doesn’t preclude me from believing that it was divinely inspired, and it certainly doesn’t preclude me from reading it romantically, and in turn reading the world around me romantically. I believe in Jesus Christ and am willing to die for this belief. Does this make me intellectually dishonest?

The Poet Must Be Mistaken

I wrote the following as a creative response to Yeat's "The Second Coming:"

This is a story about the end of time. There are stories about how we got here. There’s the story about a forbidden apple hanging from a tree. About brothers murdering brothers, divine promises and descendents flung out over the earth like sand on the seashore. There’s the story about volcanic heat and seafloor proteins and the inauguration of a spark of life which catches and spreads like a wildfire, shifting and molding itself until it manifests in as many variations as there are stars in the sky. There are other stories, too.

Since the beginning, we have been a people of creation. We’ve created music and words, art and traditions, towering structures and beautiful ideologies. Most of all, we’ve created stories. Our greatest strength lies in our ability to realize these stories, to render them across the face of reality the way a muralist paints a fresco over a drab gray wall. All of our social institutions, all the shoes we grow up to fill, are nothing but stories in the process of becoming real.

Each of these accomplishments, however, has come at a staggering cost. Since the beginning, our hands have been stained with the blood of our brothers. We distinguished ourselves from the animals only to become more calculating in our destruction. We hammered bronze out of molten rock only to slice open each other’s bellies. We crafted wheels only to grind our families beneath them. We mastered fire only to set entire cities ablaze and to watch them burn. We established religion only to divide the world into the divine and the blasphemous, only to feed our hungry while we slaughter their soldiers. We have unlocked the secrets of energy and physics only to massacre entire races, defile entire continents with nuclear fallout and acid rain.

Here, at the end of time, we stand on our heap of rubble and stare backward, clutching our meager jewels, wishing we could trade it all to start over again knowing everything we know now. We’ve taken the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and have let it ferment into a fine vintage, enough wisdom to stay our killing hand. We’ve planted gardens, we’ve cured diseases, we’ve eradicated poverty, and we’ve managed to weave science and faith and culture and politics into a seamless, synergetic fabric. But it’s not enough. The cost was too high, there are too many unmarked graves pocking the cratered landscape of our memory.

This is a story about the end of time, but also about the beginning. We’ve started telling a new story, a story about building a machine capable of throwing us backward, of skipping us like a stone over the surface of the waters of time, so that we might land on the shore of the first dawn. We hope to encounter our first ancestors and convince them that we are like Gods, and that they should walk with us in the cool of the evening as we tell them our tragic story. Our hope is to impart a cautionary tale, to give them the meat of wisdom along with the knowledge they’ll inevitably cultivate.

Has this been the first time? Is our idea of God nothing but the wisdom of a future race, a desperate attempt to keep us from destroying ourselves all over again? If so, then we must believe that, as the coral shell folds back in on itself, so with human beings and time. Though we will circle and gyre back to where we started, the poet must be mistaken, the center must hold. It must be a beacon for our upward spiral, our outward shine, as we reflect ever increasing glory back to the heavens. Maybe we’ll shine bright enough to turn God’s head; or at least become the God we never stopped dreaming about.

Religious Stuff

I've decided to keep my religious musings off of this blog, and make it more geared toward literary theory, Critical Realism, etc. If you're interested in the religious stuff, however, I've been writing some notes on Facebook you might be interested in (you'll have to befriend me on Facebook in order to read them):

• Why I Go To Church
• The Historicity of Genesis
• The Scandal of Particularity
• Genocide in the Holy Land

Critical Realism in Literary Theory, pt 1.5: Transcendent Semiosis

This model I've been putting forth raises some questions. I can imagine someone accusing me of trying to bring about the death of meaning. This would be at once an overstatement and a misunderstanding. I thought of another analogy the other day which I find helpful. Think of a computer. It is designed by its "author" to perform a function, but that function is not realized until someone plugs it in, boots it up, and uses it. No one would point at a calculator and say "that plastic case contains calculation." Instead, you would say "that calculator can be used to calculate."

But why insist on such a subtle distinction? As I said earlier, the various moments which comprise the act of reading require various disciplines to fully determine the [most efficient] function of a text. But I think there's an even more important payoff. Think of Biblical hermeneuticists, who devote time and energy into interpreting a text because they believe what God intends for humanity is encoded into this collection of words. By thinking in terms of semiosis rather than inherent meaning, they are forced to acknowledge that this decoding will always be ongoing. At least until people unplug the computer, or stop reading the Bible.

Consider what Umberto Eco says about hermeneutics:

The problem with the actual world is that, since the dawn of time, humans have been wondering whether there is a message and, if so, whether this message makes sense. With fictional universes, we know without a doubt that they do have a message and that an authorial entity stands behind them as creator, as well as within them as a set of reading instructions.

Thus, our quest for the model author is an Ersatz for that other quest, in the course of which the Image of the Father fades into the Fog of the Infinity, and we never stop wondering why there is something rather than nothing.

So, if for Eco interpreting a text is an Ersatz for interpreting life itself, according to this model the meaning-making we engage in when we read a text is, in my opinion, more than just a substitution for the meaning-making we engage in as societies. Through semiosis, we as communities of readers cultivate our own ecology of meaning--something that is living rather than just in flux, something much more like the electrons pulsing through a computer than just the hard drive itself.

Critical Realism in Literary Theory, pt 1: Semiosis

This is an expansion on my last post, in which I gloss over why I think Critical Realism (CR) should break into literary theory.

From my friend Greg, whose opinions matter to me greatly:

Can the solution to the hermeneutical fixation *solely* on the meaning of the text be legitimately compensated by an assertion that meaning is *not* found in words [as signs]? It seems to me that it would be much more reasonable given the problem to say that meaning is not *only* found in the semiotic function but also in the performative function of words (to say nothing of the author's subjectivity).

Just to be sure I'm accurately representing Fairclough, Jessop, and Sayer's 2001 article "Critical Realism and Semiosis," let me make clear that what they prescribe is exactly what you suggest: that even-handed attention should be given to both the constantive (semiotic) and performative (extra-semiotic) functions of a text. I am going to differ with them, however, in suggesting that focusing on the constative (or denotative) function of a text reveals that we still believe that texts somehow hold meaning when no one is reading them. I'd like to debunk this notion. I don't believe that texts magically contain meaning within their margins. This misconception is similar to the misconception that people have about batteries, that somehow energy is coursing within the battery casing like a hamster on an exercise wheel.

In both cases (meaning in text and energy in battery), a process has been misidentified as an object. In the case of a battery, what one might mistake for "energy" is actually a process in which two chemicals interact with each other once the positive and negative terminals form a loop. This produces an electric current, which can then be used as energy. In the case of a text, a collection of signs lies there on the pages. Once read by a subject, the reading of each word sets off a kind of Pavlovian reflex in the mind of the reader, conjuring a meme that the reader associates with this word. This meme (or idea-gene) is shaped by the reader's experiences with those words (how the word has been used by others [social component] and how the word has been used successfully by the reader [human agency component]). Each of these memes are filtered through the reader's current mental/emotional milieu, and have a feedback effect, in which they in turn affect the reader's meme->word association and mental/emotional milieu. What I'm describing here is a series of events that form a process (semiosis, or the creation of meaning), not an object.

Critical Realism is helpful here, because it asserts that reality is comprised of objects (texts) that possess emergent powers (the power to catalyze semiosis in the mind of the reader) which interact to form processes (semiosis). But what does thinking in terms of semiosis instead of meaning buy us?

It helps debunk the idea that texts are a magical flagon of meaning to be poured out by English professors or theologians. Texts become more like a cultural artifact whose exhaustive study must also involve sociologists, historians, linguists, etc. I envision the text to be like a patient who interfaces with a wide variety of medical professionals (clerks, nurses, physicians, surgeons, x-ray technicians, anesthesiologists, etc). Except, instead of trying to cure the text of a disease (hermeneutics sees a text as a puzzle that needs solving, a patient that needs curing), the text becomes the cure--as a locus for interdisciplinary studies (involving all of the humanities). The text forces us to read humanity itself.