Eruditorum Press

Doxing gods

morality

Force Decides

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Israel is currently killing hundreds of people in Gaza.  As they do from time to time.  To make something Abba Eban once said true by simply inverting his meaning: the Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.  Though even that is too kind to them.  As even White House senior staff acknowledge, the Israelis don’t want peace.  Give them everything they’ve ever wanted, and it still isn’t enough – because what they say they want isn’t what they want.  What they really want is to continue the war until they have finally completed the work that David Ben-Gurion left unfinished, and eradicated the Palestinians.  The mindset of Israel is genocidal, and becoming more openly so by the day.

It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy.  The idea is so commonplace it’s become a sentimental truism in pop-culture.  Well, Israel had not done very much that America didn’t do in the process of getting where it is today.  Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire.  Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself.  Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory.  Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations.  And so on.  And yet the obvious – that ‘what happened’ to the Native Americans was terrible – doesn’t seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you’re talking about the Palestinians.  People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it – rightly – in the context of the Native American’s fight against territorial displacement and dispossession.  Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel is currently visiting upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp.  Context be damned.

Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people – the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power.  The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted – with a sigh and a tear – by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies.  Sometimes ‘we’ are even allowed to be the baddies – as long as it was a long time ago, and we’re all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today.  We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.…

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Apropos of Nothing

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Bourgeois law sets up a system which seems, superficially, to draw its moral force from the common sense morality of ordinary people (in the West this is filtered through the formal Christian ethics internalised by our civilisation).  Its actual function, of course, is to promote and enforce a social orderliness which allows the relatively untrammelled existence of social hierarchy.

(This isn’t a conspiratorial view, by the way.  Conspiracies undoubtedly happen – the ruling class, and their adjutants, are as capable of getting together and discretely working towards their own agendas and advantages as anyone else – but conspiracy is not the basis of the system.  Conspiracies are often criminal and, though frequently winked at by The Law, they are theoretically punishable.  They are, in a very real sense, an aberration.  An endemic aberration certainly – and more endemic the more confident the ruling classes get – but an aberration nonetheless.  It’s important not to be too cynical about the concept of law, to imagine that it is just a sham, and that everyone at the top knows it to be.  That isn’t how systems of control endure.  Systems of control endure by being extremely plausible both to those who are screwed by them and those who benefit from them.  Corruption is real.  It is a by-product of a system that generates unaccountable and hierarchical structures.  Corruption is also an important psychological category for making the system seem plausible, for making it seem to have validity and integrity.  Everyone – the corrupt and the non-corrupt – partly derives their idea of what constitutes legitimacy from their idea of what constitutes illegitimacy.)

Part of how bourgeois law manages to be an effective and enduring system of control is by appearing to be impartial in its normal operation, to be aimed at securing justice except in aberrant circumstances, and to be based on moral categories… and one way in which it manages this is by, to some degree, some of the time, actually bothering to be all those things.  You can get good results from the bourgeois justice system.  It has to be capable of working properly in order to look like what it claims to be.  You can trace the influence of popular ideas of morality in its structure and strictures.  This is, to the greatest extent, the accreted result of popular pressure to reform the system.  But then the absorbtion and adaptation of popular demands, the rationed distribution of progressive gains, the assimilation of democratic ideas, is another part of how systems of control survive.  Ultimately, all worthwhile conceptions of ‘justice’ come from the democratic impulse from below.  This isn’t to say that they come from the innate goodness of people, or the nobility of the oppressed, or the spirit of mankind, or anything like that.  Rather, the oppressed – always the more universal class because they are the most widespread and the most thwarted – develop the democratic impulse towards justice precisely because they are denied it.  Injustice breeds the idea of justice in people. …

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Unredeemed

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Spoilers for Game of Thrones… if the writers haven’t already spoiled it enough.
 

Aside from being just horribly and needlessly misogynistic (Moffat has nothing on this. Nothing.) and basically relying on the assumption that Jaime can be redeemed despite being a rapist (presumably because Cersei is such a b*tch that its okay to rape her), it also perfectly illustrates something I was banging on about in a post about The Borgias a few years back. 

It illustrates what happens when you purposefully remove consistent moral thinking from narrative texts just for the show-offy hell of it. 

Now, I’m not a moralising finger-wagger (at least, I try not to be because it’s a deeply unattractive and narcissistic trait) but I do believe that morality is a vital part of fiction.  Not in the sense that all stories should contain clear moral messages, or avowedly support a certain moral position, or anything like that, but rather in the sense that they should be aware that questions of justice and injustice are built into storytelling, at least in the Western tradition, and that it is literally impossible to tell a story in that tradition without raising moral questions, whether one wants to or not. 

Such narratives depend, for their interest, on our moral engagement.  (Would I do that?  How would I respond to someone who did?  That happened to me, I know how I felt.  Would I react the way he did?  Have I ever done anything that bad/good?  Would I have the courage to intervene?  Does anyone I know think like that? Etc.) 

The adaptors of GoT have committed to the Jaime-gets-redeemed arc that is in the books.  This clashes with their increasingly evident intent to make the GoT universe as brazenly nasty and cruel and violent and hateful and abusive as possible.  I realise that its pretty nasty as GRRM wrote it, but the TV has repeatedly added to his nastiness quotient.  The Jaime-redemption arc has now clashed with their rather adolescent – but also, sadly, rather widespread – intent to make the show into one without much of a moral compass, to show everyone as radically morally inconsistent. 

Now, on one level – fine.  People are not morally consistent.  People all do bad things, even broadly good people.  And shitty people sometimes do good things, etc etc etc.  This is all obvious, or should be.  And nobody wants simplistic, moralistic storylines which give us clear goodies and baddies and reassuringly makes the goodies perfect and the baddies irredeemable, and comfortingly has the goodies resoundingly and unambiguously triumphant.  That sort of thing just makes for bad stories, at any level. 

But.  But but butty but butty but but but.  Butsworth.  Buttington Buttarama.

There is still such a thing as a yardstick to judge people by.  It may be fuzzy and subjective, but its there.  Even in stories.  Perhaps especially in stories.  It’s easier to judge people in stories, and it always will be, and you can’t deny or efface that, any more than you can deny that stories inherently raise questions of justice and injustice. …

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A Town Without Context

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On ‘A Town Called Mercy’

The ends can justify the means, but there needs to be something which justifies the ends.

 – Trotsky

Jex experiments on people in order to create a cyborg supersoldier.  His motive is to end a war which is killing his people.  But were his people the attackers or the attacked?  That this is ignored tells us a great deal about the writer/s but deprives us of the possibility of making moral sense of the story.  It is ignored, presumably because it is considered irrelevant.  Yet, the whole point of the story appears to be the question of whether Jex is a bad man or a good one… with the answer being, of course, “yes”.  But I’d argue that the wider social context of Jex’s actions (beyond just saying that ‘it was war’) is as important as it is obscure.

The notion – that war is, as Jex puts it, “a different world” in which normality shifts drastically and morality becomes fuzzy – is, for a start, a somewhat glib truism.  Like all such glib truisms, it can be pressed into service (i.e. “Yes, an invasion will kill lots of Iraqi people… but we have to do something; Saddam has WMD!!!”) or ignored (i.e. “Those Muslamic terrorists are killing Our Boys!!!  Why do they hate us???”) according to ideological needs and preferences.

Kryten would find it easier to get rid of the Apocalypse Boys
now that he’d been assimilated by the Borg.

‘A Town Called Mercy’ actually tries to hone in on questions of moral ambiguity, and to try to represent that ambiguity in a sustained way, which is actually fairly good going for the series (at this time).  Usual practice for Moffat-era Who is to suggest extremely crude, superficially worrying moral equivalences in dialogue which are then papered-over by the actual behaviour of the Doctor and his gang (whom we might want to start calling ‘Our Boys and Girls’, since it is assumed that they deserve ‘our’ support whatever they do).  ‘Mercy’, by contrast, briefly shows the lead characters in genuine quandries about what to do for the best.  Sadly, however, vital information is omitted from their calculations… and the omissions are interesting.

As I say, it’s not exactly an earth-shattering observation that a basically good guy can do horrible things.  Orwell begins The Lion & The Unicorn – written during the Blitz – with a passage saying that, as he writes, civilised people are flying overhead trying to kill him.  The pilot in the bomber, Orwell remarks, “is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.”

Jex is, of course, serving his ‘country’, so to speak.  But is he from Space Poland or from the empire of the Space Nazis?  To translate into geek: is he as much of a Bajoran as he seems, or is he a Cardassian?  Or is the situation more complex than that?  Is it more like America vs Japan?  Two rival empires clashing.  One the overt aggressor, but the other also implicated in bringing the conflict on via, say, provocation.…

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Categorically Speaking

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Kant’s categorical imperative is an expression of the bourgeois liberal ideas of the 18th century, expressed as morality.  It is progressive in the sense that it attempts to derive morality from Reason.  It is part of the Enlightenment.  It also expresses the new, universal promises of the bourgeois revolutions in that it universalises (i.e. “All men are created equal”).  It is based on the principle of universality.  What you do must apply to all people or it fails to be truly moral. 

However, it is also based on a bourgeois notion of rights.  The concept of ‘rights’ is a product of the rise of bourgeois property/trade relations.  One brings one’s rights to the market place and, on that basis, one participates in the putatively level playing field.  For Kant, one negotiates the conflicts between these rights on the basis of contractual clauses.  If the Party of the First Part undertakes to do such and such, the Party of the Second part will be understood to be obliged to do so and so.  It is this which finally inverts the universality of the notion into an entire bourgeois conception of individualism.  Through this embedded notion of contractual obligations, the decision as to universal moral actions rests with the individual’s willingness to enter into a personal contract regarding his conduct, his willingness to be bound.

The sting in the tail lies in the fact that different people will always have different notions as to what is or isn’t universally desirable.  One individual may consider it highly desirable that theft be considered universally immoral because they have a great personal interest in the institution of private property (i.e. because they own lots of it).  Another (who perhaps owns little) may be prepared to risk universalising the permissability of theft if he thinks he can steal what he wants and then protect his stolen goods by force.  Alternatively, there may be those who feel that there are worse prospects for the future than the fall of private property.  And, in practice, the guardians of morality will always be ready to claim the universality of laws that they themselves break, simply because they take a more pragmatic view of Reason.

The R/reasonable promises of bourgeois liberalism and Enlightenment will always have such loopholes in their social contracts and, as a result, will always find themselves in full or partial, official or unofficial abeyance.  The Enlightenment declared that all men were created equal, but oversaw (and, indeed, was partially built upon) all black men (and women) being crated equally… for shipping.  Why should a white man who profits from the slave trade care if ‘enslave black people’ became a universal moral maxim?  He knows the colour of his own skin will exempt him from the chains, and the inequality of property and opportunity will protect him from universal business competition.…

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