Ping Pong 63: Six Themes to Conjure With
The last few Rants have centred upon a series of deep problems that modernity raises for the form of Justice. These old themes, stretching back to Plato, have not run out of steam so much as become apparently intricately and irrevocably knotted. It is no longer really that clear, how we are ‘just’ to the world or to each other, and without that being simple, so many different problems shift out of focus and become highly problematic. Perhaps all it means to be just is actually to be a patriot, well perhaps? But then exactly who is it just for? Yourself, the nation or the world? (Plato). Or again, as never before the issue of massive environmental change implies an entire physics of justice and yet to what or for whom is one acting? Posterity? Or for the bluebells? Self interest? Or merely because one ought to in a Kantian sense? Or again, how does one behave towards a group of people who apparently have, for various different reasons and at various different levels of intensity, sworn to destroy part or all of one’s ‘way of life’. Does one call them all terrorists and invent a part mythic war where they are on the opposing side? Or does one attempt to break up their alliances and treat them as radically different individuals? Does one shoot them or bribe them? All problems that our conventional account of justice finds rather difficult to create fixed and definitive answers for. It is of course part of the problem that everyone has their own solution, and will claim that they could, if asked, solve the entire problem. The problem however is then, that there are not only as many solutions as people, but also that most (if not all) of those solutions are both impractical and likely to create further problems elsewhere.
It has become therefore very difficult to understand what platonic justice would feel like in the modern age. And yet of course we still hanker after the old simplicity. No doubt part of the hype about Obama (but in a different way it was also about Bush) was that he had the unworldly properties which we associate with a Philosopher King. There is a feeling therefore that he (Obama) will use reason to do the right thing (as some believed that Bush would use faith). Be that as it may (and it is not clear that he will be allowed to be just, he is after all, not even allowed to close to Guantanamo Bay), this hankering is at once 'noble’ and natural, but also highly dangerous. At its heart their lies the desire to have rulers that are actually ‘other’ than the rest of us. That is, rulers who are able to seize reality by the balls and make it work, and render it just in a way which the rest of us cannot dream of. The promise that there are leaders who really can do this are at best few and far between (or confined to the pages of Plato and Aristotle), but charlatans and demagogues who claim to be able to do this are ten a penny, and often rather persuasive. Democracy’s only desire to better itself is actually potentially rather dangerous.
This series of difficulties have been identified over these rants in six fairly basic families of difference; there are problems of leadership; of power; of money; of otherness; of events; and finally of science. In the rest of this Rant each of these different problems will be considered very briefly, before in the subsequent fours Rant (the last in this series), solutions for ways to understand the problems are finally suggested.
The problem of leadership has become intense over the last two weeks in Britain, but the problem of course goes right back to Plato. Plato suggested that those who were best suited to lead were not only those who did not want to (they were the philosophers, who had better things to do with their time), but also those who had access to the eternal. This latter criterion mattered, as this atemporal eternity allowed leaders to act not for one time but all times. A leader was therefore, Plato suggested, to be citizen of many times and to act in regard to the future and the past as much as the present. We have of course by and large lost sight of most of this faith in leaders. And yet we have very clearly kept the temporal anomaly aspect of this move. That is, we look to leaders to be the ones who forecast problems which we did not (or at least they should have done) and who have by ‘good’ leadership led a debate (or the herd of cats which we actually are) away from difficult problems and towards a resolution. Our leaders are expected then to almost don the robes of Old Father Time. They are expected to provide unity and solutions to elements that are utterly disparate and cannot be currently resolved (but will resolve in time).
House of Commons Speaker Martin was therefore condemned for not being able to forecast where events were leading the House of Commons, and not being ready with a quip or a scheme which would mitigate that future which broke upon him. We want our current crop of leaders to be in effect soothsayers: those able to read and respond (or even avoid) what is happening now. So that the task of leadership has in effect become defined only by the negative. We all know what bad leadership is (it is getting us here), but we have lost sight of what good leaders might do or be. What does it mean to provide effective leadership, and who should rule, is of course a Platonic problem, but one that surely currently haunts our democratic age as never before.
The second problem mentioned, centred on the issue of exactly what money is. In a sense the current global credit crisis is tied to that age old problem of exactly who owns or is responsible for the money, or at least whose promise of protection was enough to guarantee it. This guarantee was in fact that the rest of us need not worry over much about the future, as if we all waited long enough, and all trusted the banks to arrange matters, then (at some unspecified time in the future) the system would be wealthy enough to absorb all current problems and all current debts. A guarantee which in itself was in a sense reasonable. If one waits long enough and trusts hard enough, then most problems do indeed fizzle out. However the entire system immediately came unstuck the moment that anyone questioned this fairly basic belief. That is, the moment that one thought that money might be tied to global oil production or that it might be affected by the growth of chance or global warming, then the idea that the banks could reasonably control the future, appeared problematic and highly dubious in the extreme. And once that faith was questioned, the entire process collapsed, as it was only kept going by that belief.
Money is therefore caught between two distinct systems. There is a hard rind of money at the extreme end, money the medium of exchange between all peoples and places. But also and at a different level, there is money as a private concern, money as what I have or have a right to claim or use. There is then money as whole (the salaries we are paid), and money as it is mine (expenses claims), and the two have clearly come out of kilter with one another. The current problems with MP’s salaries and expenses is then merely an expression of a far wider malaise that has seen us lose faith in the private world of money in which we live, as we live in dread of the public face of money which is endlessly thrashing about and complicating our lives. In this respect, ‘modern’ solutions to our global economic woes (of mass borrowing and printing money) amount to the assertion of the rights and duties of the private over the public face of money. It will work then only as this assertion is valid, a fact we cannot yet ascertain.
The third modern problem concerns the problem of power. On the one hand it is very easy to define power in the negative. It is therefore easy to claim that the power of the state is not what it used to be. States simply cannot make unilateral calls any more. The Iraq War was quite the disaster for America that it was, because it blunted its claims to be the global military power. Likewise the currently economic problems are firmly being understood on a global level. The state’s ‘day’ appears to be over (or delimited) and yet there appears no real effective counter organization. One can very easily invent them (the media, the terrorist, the E.U., etc), and yet it is never very clear that any of these fictions really has the influence, let alone the power that is claimed for it. This very lack in a sense is the problem. It is not really clear how the lines of power, and their attendant complexities of information, run in our society. That is how the information that the media have (or make up) gives them their power, and how politicians counter with their own powers and their own way of thinking. Moreover this conflict is made all the more intense as it is clear that in any such conflict, very different streams of thinking need to be considered. The media invariably generalize from events or single surveys, while the government, a while ago found that statistics are easier to govern than people. The two sides (or the many sides) are therefore no longer reliably even talking about the same thing or thinking about it, and yet their conflicts rage on. It therefore follows that without a realistic attempt to unpick the complexities of power and its relation to knowledge, one cannot understand even how one might start becoming just (and so do the right thing) within this world.
The fourth problem concerned that odd problem of ‘the other’. On the one hand our society is clearly a society which is fascinated by the other. What else are travel books or self-care manuals but an encounter with that other person or that other self one might also be. Likewise the entire multicultural enterprise always rested on an engagement with another. However, of course that other is either being sanitized in these engagements or else covered up within the convenient language of culture and respect. Or to put it slightly differently, in attempting to respect another culture we allow them their own differences without needing or even feeling that we can confront those differences (save in the rare cases such as child abuse or domestic violence where those practices feel just too problematic for us to handle).
In such a quest for tolerance we stifle what is actually difficult in other cultures, namely the fact that all culture is rather like fibreglass. It looks soft and gentle and even unified, but once one touches it all kinds of material embeds itself within one hands or mind. Cultures are then by their very nature exploding (or imploding) forces. Each culture therefore exists more as an axis for change and dislocation then a fixed body of rules. Or to put it slightly differently, they exist as a dimension within which individuals are othered by one another, and they conflict with other dimensions (that is other cultures). They are never static or simple. To confront another culture is therefore to have to allow for how that culture is already changing what you are, and changing in the light of you.
This conversation or confliction with another, this anothering which we are facing, is tricky to understand and very hard to think about. Does one include in one’s account of it, the fact that we are anothering the climate and that the climate is therefore threatening to another us (and render our lives difficult)? If so, any attempt to do justice to another’s power over one, ought to include an account of the climate and how it is being bought into human society or culture as the ultimate othering (and therefore divine) force. Our problem of course is that since we lost faith, (i.e. mass organized religion), we lost the language to talk about what one does not yet know, and therefore any serious ability to do justice to our own differences. And one of the challenges of modern philosophy must surely be to allow this texture back in.
The fifth problem mentioned above centred upon events. It is no longer clear that the world is human- or God-centred. But if it is not, what does it move around? Perhaps (modern philosophy but also the media suggest) it ought to be understood in terms of events. That is, those occasions beyond any one of us, that catch us up in them, and make individuals resonate across one another though action and in memory. Maybe then what we all share, and what in sharing makes us, is our ability to participate within an event or as a part of system of events, whose effects are always felt, with varying intensities elsewhere. But if this is the case exactly what do such events look like? Are they the big showy things of the media occasion, or the private and small scale movement of mood or swerve of atoms? If occasions really are the central plank of reality, then it would be well to understand the nature and type of these occasions, and how and when one should or must respond to and through them.
The final problem mentioned above concerned the problem of science and technology. This problem in effect centres around an odd paradox. Most of human thought and understanding has been rather slow moving with nothing formerly resolved and no definitive answers. And yet in all this morass there appears one discipline, that of the hard sciences, that appears able to both theorize out the world effectively and then unwind those theories into practical actions. This by itself would be troubling enough (why this sphere, what is it doing differently?), but it is made all the more trying because science, in creating changes, means that many of the old assumptions about the world are simply blasted apart. We are therefore faced with the problem of having to update our moralities or develop new ethics in the face of what can be achieved (issues around embryos only surfaced once there was equipment to analyse their development). Science therefore in extending what can be done, constantly challenges those otherwise rather staid forms of reasoning.
However this problem is made all the more tricky because one simply cannot make the obvious move, that is, one cannot apparently form an easy science of humanity itself (any attempt to do this has tended to falter becoming a religion, a tyranny, or about statistics, and therefore losing sight of what it describes). One is therefore not able to convert humanity into a science, but rather must modify what one already is to face up to what one can now do, while respecting the differences in thinking that allowed for the new possibilities in the first place. It is not enough therefore to rethink old ways of thought according to new ones, one also must do so in a space that respects science’s difference and independence. If is one thing therefore to peer into a mind and watch decisions being made (and even model those thoughts), it is a rather different one to work out how as a society, one relates to this ability, and does so in a space between every individual (and therefore in one that is a little harder to watch). The problem of science therefore gets caught up with the problem of doing science justice by allowing it its own space, but also of not rushing quickly into assuming that there is any easy solution to this respect. It needs rather to be understood as a problem. Or perhaps an endless endeavour to avoid simple solutions which would assert the rights of either science or 'humanity’ to assert its unity against the other. One must rather do real justice to differences of thought.
What it is to think and to be just, has therefore become over the last decades very difficult. It is no longer really that clear that there is one form of justice. Justice to humanity as a whole, might very well be different from being justice for one nation or justice to a theme in thought. But likewise it is a mistake to simply dismiss all attempts to hook up different types of justice, because it is very likely that events occur such that one does need to think about the connections between otherwise different spheres. In a sense it is thinking about just such differences that was always what justice was in the first place. It has become therefore absolutely necessary to think about justice as the relationship between differences. But at same time then in order to be just we must also respect these differences and allow them to be different. A seemingly impossible impasse, that over the next four Rants I will explore in detail, and attempt (at least partially) to resolve.
