Over the past few weeks, I've felt two passions coming together and I can't - I don't want to - pull them apart.
It does seem to me that the Arts, more than some idealised Millian battle of ideas, offers a route to an ethical life.
Before I go on, let me say that I think the Millian battle of ideas is actually of vital importance - my issue is that I don't think many people engage in it in good faith, with generosity, with a sense that they may not have the whole truth. What we see now in the public sphere is combatants barricading their position and seeking to shout down or shame the opposition. This is not fruitful.
Where this does take place - perhaps in some long-form discussions or in academic publishing and surely in many other domains of which I am unaware - and where people who have put in the hard graft to both research and to think, the ideal offers our best course, I feel, to ethical confidence (I remain doubtful of there being 'truth', 'certainty' or 'knowledge' in this area, though I do think that, as with other explorations, like the origin of the universe, we can attain a workable confidence that tracks well political, social and psychological well-being).
I was stimulated to write about this here after reading Zadie Smith's excellent article in defense of fiction. Here she states that, against a current trend to claim that if one writes about anyone who is not 'just like oneself', one is involved in an immoral act of appropriation. In the course of the argument she implicitly supports the values that Martha Nussbaum propose in the final sections of The Monarchy of Fear while expanding them to embrace a passionate (as well as compassionate) curiosity.
What really struck me, though, was the first step on her journey - a magical combination of imagination and contingency. These are interwoven, as without imagination, one cannot be aware of how contingent one's own identity is and yet without that knowledge of contingency, the imagination would not have this ethically valuable spur to action.
Let's start by looking at contingency. I had no choice about where I was born, when I was born or to whom. I could have been a peasant or a princess in the Middle Ages; a slave in Ancient Greece or a soldier in the Napoleonic wars. I could have been born at the same time on the same day in Moscow or Addis Ababa or Santiago. I could have been a male. My parents could have been people of colour; they could have been Jains; they could have been refugees. I could have inherited sickle cell anaemia or the ability to become a maths prodigy.
One thing this thought process allows is a humbling realisation of chance - and good fortune in many cases. It would have been far worse to have been born at almost any point earlier in human history. And, apart from my gender, I was born into all the privileges on offer. White, Western democracy, relative economic stability, loving parents and so on. I did not 'deserve' this good fortune: it is all a matter of luck. To assume that anyone not granted such privileges is on a level playing field is dishonest and disingenuous.
Indeed, this realisation puts, one could argue, some moral weight to bear on my judgments of others. I have to recognise not just my relative good fortune but also the fact that the experiences of others - and in this case, any others - will be different. Different families, cultures, schools, religions, daily lives. Even my twin, if I had a twin, would have different experiences - being fed first or second, having a different group of friends, having different accidents and opportunities. All this should serve to remind us that our perspective is one perspective not the only perspective.
Further, if we could have been anyone, then maybe we would be more likely to feel a sense of duty to others more widely because we don't feel so 'essentially' singular. Our essence arose through chance and contingency, just like everyone else's: to that extent we truly are all, in a way, the same - products of chance in large part, the non-determining inheritors of unchosen fates.
Of course, there are choices that we make and much for which we are responsible - but there is also a great deal, a groundwork of existence, in which we have no say.
And here comes the role of the imagination - the moral imagination - what would it have been like to have been born then? To have endured that? Can I feel my way into what that context, that world view, that life would be like? We will never get it 'right' - but with curiosity and compassion, with engaged exploration, we can perhaps sense something of the alterity of the other. Such an expanded understanding may not guarantee greater generosity, but the lack of it, one has to assume, wouldn't even get off the starting blocks.
It does not require that one suspends judgment entirely, nor that one confers an abnegation of responsibility to the other - but what it should assure is that judgments are fairer and that responsibility is put in context.
It is this imaginative process which I believe that the Arts can enhance - and, in turn, can then ignite that awareness of contingency, which generates the generous understanding.
Without any engagement in such a process of realisation and perspective-taking, we can risk having a profound sense of ourselves as centres of a moral universe. That what we believe is right, is indisputably right. If we feel this way, we can become incredibly defensive (manifested in aggression) when any alternative version is proposed. We can also fail to feel any sense of responsibility beyond a set and localised sphere of concern, centred on the self.
This is not analogous to the 'intimacy orientation' we have looked at before. Intimacy sees not just moral responsibility to those one is intimate with, or even just to one's community or state: it recognises interconnectivity and interdependency across all frameworks. Thus, while responsibilities to a parent might outweigh certain other duties, those other duties continue to exist. The respect and thoughtfulness owed to strangers on a train (to make space, to keep one's music below the level that it leaks from the headphones, for example) are salient and binding. Intimacy recognises the value of every other and the sense of responsibility permeates through a society. Indeed, people will feel a sense of shame about and responsibility for acts performed by family members and by their community and state as a whole. There is a sense of being bound together in a web of responsibility toward one another.
So, the constrained circle of interest that I am critiquing is not related to the particular moral weight placed on inner circles within an intimacy culture; what I am suggesting as a problem is the inherently limited circle of ethical concern around an individual in an integrity culture. On a personal level, responsibility weakens beyond family and immediate local community. On a national level, there are no duties beyond the state. On a temporal level, there is no responsibility to future generations.
I am not advocating the universalised utilitarian view per se, but I do think that this view offers a profound corrective to a state of too-narrow concerns. The problem is that even trying to explain it to very individual-focused people generates anger and resentment. You know from what what I have written before that it causes a similar tension in me - and yet I having followed the arguments, I have had to admit that they are persuasive. Indeed, I feel they are vital for state- and institution-level decision making and useful, too, for individuals in opening up their moral horizons. I just feel that they rest on a premise (or a raft of premises) that are not incontrovertible. Or, rather, are not the only premises which have weight in this area.
Many of us behave like passive recipients of information or cynical deniers of different opinions and unwelcome conclusions rather than agents with an active role in deconstructing and reconstructing a rich smorgasbord of varied ideas and insights. If the imagination can be roused from its quiescent role, perhaps we'd begin to discover new connections and alliances. Perhaps we'd regenerate an active and wide-ranging sense of agency that stretches outwards. Perhaps we'd value each other's individuality rather than focusing on ourselves as individuals. Perhaps we'd embrace differences rather than being afraid of them. Perhaps we'd see that concern isn't just for 'people like us'. Perhaps we'd be able to accept not just that others have needs and dependencies for which we bear some responsibility, but that we have needs and dependencies too and we don't have to hide that away in shameful solipsism, a state that makes us constitutionally unable to love others or support anything outside the neurotically protected self. Perhaps we could break out of our self-imposed constraints. Perhaps we'd become more free.
Because I have written various posts related to this theme - complexity, empathy, perspective-taking, imagined lives, art's insistence that the subject attend and so on - I have listed many of them here:
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