3B. THE PLANET OF RIGHT AND WRONG

3B. THE PLANET OF RIGHT AND WRONG

On the Planet of Right and Wrong, we always act with the intent to do good or harm. How do we know what's good? The folks who talk with god --one or another of the gods-- tell us; so doing good is mainly a matter of doing what we're told. Celebrity nutritionist Laura Schlessinger puts it this way: "There are those who say it is feasible to be moral without God or religion. I think they are all wrong. . . . Being good is not natural. Being good requires you to overcome your own self-interest. . . . The notion of God is really, fundamentally, all we have to truly lead us to be good or else we make our own decisions and we become, individually, our own Gods" (Shermer 2004 p.152).

George F. Will trots out the same argument clothed in medieval natural-law language: "At VMI [VA Military Institute] [presidential candidate John] McCain said political freedom is 'the natural desire of the human heart.' Actually, it is not 'natural' to desire for oneself and others what is best for one's nature. It is, rather, a triumph of civilization over some of our natural inclinations" ("John McCain, Undeterred", Newsweek 4-23-07, p.72). And a recent letter to my home-town newspaper says just the same thing: "Our culture is quickly spinning towards a lack of absolute truth, and therefore we will see more people doing whatever they think is in their best interest, disregarding any harm they cause to others. Without a moral backbone to our society, the sufferings of humanity will greatly increase" (Mary Kane Rhodes, Knoxville News-Sentinel 2-11-07).

Note that this version acknowledges self-interest, but sees it as the font of our natural-born weakness, the recipe for conflict, a synonym for sin. Evil is making our own decisions on our own behalf, so the good can only be obedience to someone else. Only God and John Ashcroft stand between us and our own selfish, that is to say evil, natures. Faith, honor, duty, country, manly men and womanly women, these are the fonts of virtue and all part of the moral universe that says we're lost without a boss. A hundred talk shows, ten thousand pulpits echo the theme.

In this system, every decision carries with it right and wrong choices and we know what these are. The folks that offend us must be acting out of malice. Maybe you've met folks for whom life is a constant struggle against dark forces-- the co-worker who undermines them with the boss, the sinister mailman who must have trashed that awards letter from Publishers' Clearinghouse, the cascade of slights and thefts that assail us daily. Life is too often hard and ugly, and that must be because someone is out to get us. How else could we explain the seemingly endless string of humiliations and sorrows?

Lefties do it too sometimes, supposing that the CEO of MegaBanana Corp. finds nothing so delightful as plotting to murder ten thousand campesinos in Guatemala. O, they kill & kill, all right, but mostly with no more thought than they'd give to choosing a tie to wear to the charity ball. Which would horrify you more-- being the main target of the assembled hosts of hell, or merely collateral damage by desk jockeys who don't even know you exist?

Or listen to Jeremiah Wright, preacher at Obama's Chicago church. In response to the 9/11 murders, he listed crimes of the U.S. government, then said, God damn America! Boy, that's real helpful. He didn't say, Let's fight Dick Cheney, or the war contractors who make billions from building nuclear weapons, or the Japanese generals who started that war, he curses a nation of 300 million people. In this Wright is no different from all the other people who relieve their stress at great crimes by claiming that the victims deserved it. He fits wright in with Reagan and all the other big shots who prefer punitive, self-glorifying morality to the hard work of solving problems.

Above all, the battle of good and evil has been enshrined as the guiding spirit of U.S. government policy. "The evil empire," Reagan called the Soviet Union, which promptly expired from embarrassment. Iraq screamed Uncle, you bet, once Halliburton had placed it firmly in the "axis of evil." Any day now those other demons, Iran and North Korea, will fall to their knees and beg forgiveness. (That is, unless Allah smites us first, the U.S. being the Great Satan and all. But General Whatsizname assured us that our God can kick the other gods’ ass.)

As satisfying as the moral perspective can be, like TV wrestling, it doesn't bear close examination.

Evil is the all-purpose default label when we can't figure out why other people, or we ourselves, have chosen a particular path; sort of like Einstein's "cosmological constant" or the catch-all "dark matter", placeholders for something we think is out there but have no idea what it could be. But it's not an explanation. What if the bad guy picks his nose? Is that unspeakable evil too? Or an unforgiveable lapse from pure evilitude? And if the devil made me do it, why? I know! 'Cause he's evil!

If the bad guys don't always wear black hats, how about the good guys? How can we always be sure of the Right Thing to do? Our rules are crazily contradictory, even within the same tradition (think about the range of notions Christians have, for instance, about when it's OK to kill someone), and enforced, shall we say, conveniently. Our abstract agreements about right and wrong, or how to respond to sin, swiftly break down when it comes to particular cases. Very often right and wrong --right and wrong for other people, anyway-- boil down to our sense of whether they are helping us or hurting us; which is another way of asking how much they contribute to our own self-interest. True, if we pray to god he will tell us the right thing to do --usually along the lines of, "Kill the infidel"-- but apparently he gives different people different hit lists. So it seems a lot to expect that it's always clear what is right and wrong.

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George Feifer recounts a joke current among Russians at the height of the Cold War. A Soviet mathemetician gets to attend a conference in Paris.
"'How was it?" his friends press in to ask the upright man upon his return.
"It was just terrible!"
"You mean the homeless hordes?"
"No, everybody seemed to have these terrific apartments."
"The exploitation then? Seeing the workers mercilessly squeezed?
"Actually, I didn't see any ravages of capitalism, and the food was indescribable -- and also the fantastic streets. The Lido, wow! I never imagined such fabulous living."
"Then what was so terrible?"
"Of course it was morally terrible" (182).
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You can see why de Tocqueville's "self-interest well understood" infuriates the authorities, because it suggests that we will naturally help each other, out of our own self interest. In other words, we don't need to be tricked into obedience on the basis of rigid moral standards or phony kinship myths invented by the would-be big daddies. Can you imagine? Cooperative self-interest! The horror!

There's a second reason we are directed to scoff at the notion of self-interest: it makes it easier to claim our neighbors are crazy. "They're crazy," we say about the people we fear. "Osama, he's crazy." "Those Muslim / Christian / environmentalist / commynist fanatics" we call them, meaning, there are no rational motives for their actions, there is no historical background or development, they cannot be understood or bargained with. Media politicals like Tammy Bruce have been quite explicit about this (Horne Radio Network 3-3-06). The logical implication is that all we can do is kill 'm. On the pop culture side, think of the media's favorite villains: obsessed serial killers, leering Arabs, the Penguin . . . seeking destruction for its own sake, more machine than person. "They hate freedom," Junior told us, and he should know; he watches these movies too.

("Hysterical" is still a favorite crazy word for women, but I've heard it applied to other groups as well. "Hysterical environmentalists," shrieked the nuclear scientist at a hearing in Oak Ridge, flinging his arms about, trembling, spittle flying from his lips.) Kneejerk liberals, ignorant voters, stupid women they don't know what they want . . . . )

The crazy masses epithet goes way back, probably since possession by demons went out of fashion. A century ago LeBon wrote that "The mob man is fickle, credulous, and intolerant, showing the violence and ferocity of primitive beings, . . . women, children, savages, and lower classes . . . " (Atkinson 726). Some decades later, liberalish theologian Reinhold Niebuhr agreed that

collective behavior is primarily impulsive . . . its impulses are heedless and undirected and that will-to-live of every individual and social organism is easily transmuted into an imperial will-to-power. . . . the dominance of reason over impulse is much more tentative and insecure than modern culture realizes. (Marty 105).

But they lie. In fact, as George Rudé points out, even before text messaging many movements of resistance were very purposeful in their ends and means. If the peasants were starving, they seized the granaries and distributed food. In places landless laborers organized sales of stolen wheat (at low prices), and returned the money and empty bags to the farmers (Rudé 40). They demanded restoration of traditional privileges and services recently wiped by radical capitalists. As for mob violence, far from being random,

. . . it is certain enough that the houses of selected victims were picked out for special treatment. By such direct-action methods considerable damage was done, as we have noted; but it is also important to note that it was strictly discriminating and was directed against carefully selected targets. In the [anti-Catholic] Gordon riots, considerable care was taken to avoid damage to neighboring property, and where the wrong targets suffered it was due to the wind rather than to the rioters intentions. Violence was discriminating in another sense as well. It was limited to property and, of all the lives lost in 1780, it is remarkable that all were from the side of the rioters and not one from among their victims.
Nor were the rioters, on any of these occasions, the criminal elements, social riff-raff, or slum population imagined by those historians who have taken their cue from the prejudiced accounts of contemporary observers (60).

The machine-smashing Luddites of early industrial England, whose very name today smacks of unreasoning opposition to Progress, were likewise quite practical in aims and methods:

Luddism was by no means a merely blind and futile gesture by ignorant and desperate men; still less, of course, a last-ditch effort to arrest the course of technical progress. It was certainly, like the modern strike, an action not lightly undertaken but undertaken nevertheless when more peaceable and leisurely negotiations failed to bring redress (91).

This is not to say all mass movements are for the good of the people. Ever since the priest-kings of Mesopotamia, the bosses have known that it's too expensive to rule by violence alone, that they must also train their servants to adopt the bosses' goals as their own. In the last couple hundred years, with the downfall of the old monarchies, that kind of comprehensive social control has become even more important. For every democratizing mass movement, we can find a mass movement run by gangsters.

So we have to distinguish movements generated and run by exploited groups from those instigated by various elites to serve in their own power struggles. However "popular," movements led, sponsored, paid for or coopted by people in power will of necessity have very different goals than those springing from the grassroots. For instance, while lower income people are as liable to racist, homophobic, etc. reactions as anyone else, these tendencies dominate only when they are officially sponsored and rewarded (or semi-officially, as in the case of the nice decent Moderate law-abiding leaders who prefer not to soil their own delicate mitts with the unpleasant work of ridding their neighborhoods of black people, immigrants, gay people, Jews, Muslims, unionists, etc. etc., but arrange jobs and get-out-of-jail cards for those who do).

Sometimes one rich guy mobilizes popular racism, sexism, militarism, or jihad against another. (I'm always amazed when someone expresses amazement at the ethnic wars of the Middle East, given our own very murderous history.) Sometimes men or women from low status groups take advantage of inter-elite rivalries to advance themselves-- this is especially true at times when the big bosses are weak and floundering, as at the end of pointless wars. Even where working class rightists come to dominate their upper class allies, as in 1930s Germany and in some outbursts of ethnic violence, they could not have survived the early political battles without the shelter and encouragement of the elite-run institutions. Movements like these are all about self-interest-- the self-interest of those in power or reaching to grab it.

In this regard it’s a marvel to behold Halliburton complaining about “Islamo-fascism.” Classical fascism, as typified by 1930s Germany and Italy, is a phenomenon of faltering elites, too weakened by war and depression to hold on to their power through the old coercions of the authoritarian state. They find they have to combat democratic mass movements by recruiting their own rightist mass movements. We don’t have to cross the oceans to find examples.

Sometimes the monster outgrows Dr. Frankenstein. We may rightly wonder how the fantastic levels of violence in Baghdad, Juarez, or Memphis serve the interests of even the most ruthless killers, who themselves must be living in fear. But remember that for people who grew up amidst violence, constant killing might seem relatively normal. Furthermore, I doubt that anyone figures the situation can get out of control so fast. Gangsters depend on law and order like everyone else; a prosperous, orderly society delivers predictable costs and steady revenues. Indeed, many times criminal gangs get their first sponsorship from criminal governments, the way the U.S. and Pakistan sponsored the Taliban. But we’ve seen that gangs can grow so big they kill off most community leaders and paralyze governments. Then almost anyone can start killing on her own account; I think they call it low entry barriers. So instead of being richly rewarded, the pioneers of violence like as not get overwhelmed by competition.

(Various people have pointed out that the 9/11 murderers were mostly rich or middle class, usually by way of refuting the lefty view of jihadists as clinging to god and guns because of bitter political and economic circumstances. But the class origins of the killers only reminds us of the complexity of economic motivations, not that they don’t exist. First of all, in a country like Egypt, which churns out scores of university graduates for every middle class job, the general despair has reached levels our own doomed middle class won’t see for another couple generations. Add to economic uncertainty the daily humiliations they face under the U.S.-supported dictatorship. Most important, what makes terrorists so dangerous is not just their own murderous selves --that would be a police issue-- but the fact that they can inspire millions of supporters and imitators in the hellish slums of Cairo and Karachi.)

The left has its own version of the crazy mob story. When The Masses don't hasten to join the revolution, Vulgar Marxists (very different from Lace Curtain Marxists, Gangsta Marxists, and the rest of the restless tribes) say we've merely got a bad case of false consciousness, and sadly wag their beards. Oppressed people have a clear interest in overthrowing their oppressors, so the theory goes, and if we haven't yet joined the Revolution it's because we've been misled by capitalist propaganda, opiated by religion, seduced by the glitter of corporate consumerism. It's a turbl affliction, false consciousness, and catching.

The false consciousness theorists say we can come to know our true interests, but it's awfully tempting in the meantime to assume that most folks are mistaken, and the enlightened few must tell us what's good for us. It's a problem when democratizers give little value to their neighbors' decisions. And the theory presupposes that there is such a thing as self-interest, independent of our own values and judgments; values that the enlightened can see when we ourselves cannot.

Fortunately, it's more myth than substance. As the research by Rudé and others shows, most folks understand very well their choices at any given point, have a keen sense of self-interest, and act on it.

Even when that’s not obvious, the idea that many of us are blind to our own true interests must lead to a dead end. First, given that the corporate and authoritarian voices dominate the public discussion, such a theory dooms any chance of regime change. If we are simply creatures of mass-media manipulation, than we'll never be able to challenge the manipulating institutions. On the contrary, we know that people do in fact challenge and resist.

Second, as democrats, we cannot simply wave away others' understanding of the world. The writers of the U.S. constitution recognized that democracy could exist only where independent ideas could flow freely, and we appreciate how little that's the case today. At the same time, I know that my neighbors are quite as capable of understanding their situation and what to do about it as I am of mine.

Most important, how can we diagnose false consciousness when we can never know for sure a person's true self-interest? To know that, we'd have to know the future. One outlaw snitching on another has to consider the risk of reprisal versus the chances of favors from the police. (And having operated as an informer in the past is no guarantee of loyalty in the future. As someone pointed out, the house slaves who ended up poisoning their masters were the very people the masters trusted most.) An abused person would have to know the chances of getting killed in her partner's next drunken rage --which, statistically, we can know to some reliable degree, in the long run, but individual victims often do not, especially in terms of tomorrow and next week-- as opposed to the physical, emotional, and economic risks of breaking the relationship. Many times in our lives we come up against dilemmas where no one option seems obviously better than another. So it’s absurd for outsiders to claim they know best.

Evil, crazy, or stupid-- whichever stereotype you use to explain human motivation, none don’t help us to understand or change. I’d say that’s the biggest problem with the morality story: it substitutes lame excuses for the hard work of solving problems. Look how the right responded to the latest economic crisis, blaming workers and consumers. Auto workers should have meekly accepted Korean wage levels; working class families should never have tried to buy homes.

This is one response after another murder in my town:

“Dr. Walter Crouch at Central Baptist Church . . . . spoke of a ‘moral avalanche’ that has overwhelmed communities. ‘We’ve abused our freedoms,’ Crouch said, ‘and there’s no sense of shame or responsibility anymore. There’s no sense of accountability in our communities. There’s no sense there are certain actions we shouldn’t accept. We need to re-establish a sense of rightness and wrongness in our community’” (“Now the Question: What’s Wrong with Society?” Johnson 8-28-08).

Yup. One 15 year old shot another because we have too much freedom. Our problem is that we don’t think killing is wrong; on the contrary, we accept it. That’s Crouch’s analysis.

Democratizers want to change behavior, too, so that we help each other more and hurt each other less. But we understand that behavior is our response to specific material circumstances. The Reverend thinks saying “I forbid!” is a stronger force than our natural reluctance to kill each other, on the one hand, and all the social incentives to violence, on the other; not to mention the easy availability of guns.

Our problems are the result of our own individual failings, is the sum of the moralist perspective, and personal virtue the only solution. On the Planet of Right and Wrong, there are no environmental, institutional or systemic causes or solutions -- a position more bankrupt than Lehman Brothers.

A few years back a colleague told me about her trip to Auschwitz. You can almost feel the evil, she said. I'm sure she felt something. But mass murder isn't so convenient. If we could blame it on a few nut cases, we would know who to assassinate. If we could blame it on Satan or original sin, we could be sure it's all part of god's great plan for us. Hannah Arendt's insight is far scarier to me. She called what the Germans did in the 30s and 40s the "banality of evil." The Europeans, not just Nazis, who helped murder tens of millions, were also mostly good citizens, loved their dogs, mowed their yards, changed their underwear every Saturday; dutiful bureaucrats, content to do their jobs in exchange for regular meals and maybe a Christmas photo from Der Führer. The vast majority of mass murderers were ordinary people. They were like you and me, except for the institutional context. If you ask me, that's a far scarier reality than the zombified battalions of Beelzebub that this very moment are trying to crash the gated communities of Harlingen, Texas.

And if you still can't imagine the banality of evil, think for a minute what it means for us to drive our own cars, invest our pensions in transnational corporations, eat factory chicken, pay war taxes, spend more on electronic doodads than the average income of most Africans and Asians . . . .

Well, I'm not nice. But I know a lot of good people. What about all the folks who help their neighbors with no thought for themselves?