Judgement: Its Problems, Its Fullness, and the Age of Moral Exhaustion

Stunning, dense, rich, long article by Corey Robin in The Nation, on the eternal controversy over Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  Theorists, philosophers, novelists, PhD students, rabbis, and plenty of others have devoted and continue to devote their entire lives to this work, its meaning and implications, so I'll not respond to it in any direct way here.  (In any case, I couldn't -- I've never read it.)  Rather, I'll take this article's word for it that one of the central controversies of the book's vision has to do with the role of intentions in determining moral responsibility: does it matter what we mean to do, or why we do it; or is the deed all?

Arendt, according to Robin, spent parts of her career, including Eichmann, developing and elaborating upon the classical instinct that intentions, whatever their meaning, can never be determinative of moral innocence or culpability.  Rather, actions are the only salient data when it comes to judging good and evil.

This subject was a primary question as well in something I read yesterday, a bizarre and bewildering email exchange between Noam Chomsky and the writer Sam Harris.  (Also very long.  If you have the time to read all this, that's great, I think you'll be the better for it, but, as I frequently admonish myself: shouldn't you be working?)

Chomsky (whose indefensible belligerence throughout the exchange often renders his exact position undiscoverable) seems ultimately to hew to Arendt's view.  Muddied as his logic is by the imprecision of his own pique, Chomsky clearly rejects (or at least considers somehow irrelevant) Harris's position that the 9/11 hijackers' intention to kill as many innocent people as possible provides a meaningful way of distinguishing between the moral status of their act and the moral status of (the example Chomsky and Harris discuss) Bill Clinton's 1998 decision to bomb a chemical/pharmaceutical laboratory in Sudan, which Chomsky claims resulted in perhaps tens of thousands of Sudanese deaths.  (Note: as best I can tell, this is in dispute.)  Chomsky points out (over and over) that intentions, at least declared intentions, have been offered as either justification or exculpation for the most grievous crimes of history, Hitler's included.  They are, therefore, no guide to the morality or immorality of acts or actors.

My question is why so much energy is being spent resisting the felt reality that moral responsibility, both in itself, and as we are capable of judging it, is a composite of act and intention?  Every day, when faced with uncertainty regarding the moral status of actions (drone strikes, police tactics, votes in favor of free trade), we take into account both intentions and actions, we go through that complicated but familiar moral process of weighing and comparing, of judging the extent to which any given actor seems culpable.  Different cases warrant differing degrees of import assigned to the brute facts of the event and the intentions of the actors involved.  And this is fine.  We know how to do this.  We are capable of looking at a given case -- say Clinton's -- and determining that the relevant actor, whatever the outcome of his action, seemed to be doing his best; we are capable of looking next at a different case -- say Eichmann's -- and concluding that the sheer scale of horrific facts overwhelms any recourse to exculpatory motives.  In human lives, both elements are real, the mitigation of benevolent intent, and the conclusiveness of inescapable data.  To deny either of them is to deny us the fullness of our judgements about life and meaning.  We know how to do this.

Or do we?  Saul Bellow (of whose work I'm a great admirer -- see my rapturous post about discovering Augie March here) used to say that a distinguishing characteristic of modernity is that it calls upon us to make judgements almost constantly "about genocide...or about famine, or the blowing up of passenger planes" -- this is from a 1990 lecture Bellow gave at Oxford -- "and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately."  Elsewhere, Bellow adds to the list of those imponderables which we still somehow sense we must form the right opinion about: "The new Russia and... China, and drugs in the South Bronx, and racial strife in Los Angeles...the disgrace of the so-called educational system...ignorance, fanaticism...the clownish tactics of candidates for the presidency."  Bellow wrote that in 1992.  But it seems prescient now -- interested in 'liking' Hilary Clinton or Jeb Bush on Facebook; care to re-tweet a Foreign Affairs article written by a Putin apologist?

Bellow's point was that we can't do it anymore, we don't, after all, know how to judge all this moral flotsam.  In Bellow's view, shaped as it was by the social dissolutions of the second half of the 20th Century, the result of our inundation was a violent lashing out, drug use, crime, sexual profligacy, etc.

Leaving some of Bellow's legendary crankiness aside, and whether he was right or wrong about the causal relationship between demands on our evaluative faculties and the social upheavals of the post-war era -- and those upheavals themselves having become phenomena on which we're called to render judgement -- I wonder if we might not arrive at an understanding of our present age as what I've called it in the title of this post: The Age of Moral Exhaustion.

Using the Bellovian model where there was at least a correlation (causation?  Eh, maybe not...) between our heightened awareness of the universe of morally ambiguous facts, and the shattering instability of the 1960s and 70s, would we be entirely crazy to posit a current state of affairs in which Americans have simply given up moral parsing?  Is skyrocketing income inequality the result of surrender?  Do Arendt's and Chomsky's arguments against the moral relevance of something so messy and ineffable as intent represent a kind of desperation for starker, clearer means of determining moral responsibility?  Is America retreating into the tribal bitterness of partisan politics because it's just easier to pick a side than it is to evaluate every policy argument de novo?

Well, there's a lot of tangled (and perhaps some facile) thinking in the preceding paragraph, I admit.  But this is a blog post, not a dissertation or a legal brief.  Analysts could pick apart individual causal propositions, and they're welcome to do so.  What I'm aiming at, though (and maybe this is the only thing a blog post can do...if it can even do this) is not analytical accuracy, but an emotional insight, a definitive vision of who we are now.  I'm trying to name an epoch.  (Because, you know, why not?  What else have I got going on, right?)

The Age of Exhaustion.  Moral exhaustion.  Should we be arming the moderate Syrian opposition?  Can Iran ever be a partner in nuclear non-proliferation?  Is it wrong to buy vegetables that have to be shipped all the way from another hemisphere?  Shouldn't Europe be allocating more funds to assist in the rescue of refugees at peril in the Mediterranean? We used to know how to make exceedingly subtle judgements about people and their decisions.  And maybe we still do, somewhere in our beat-to-hell spirits.  But, Lord, we're tired now, civilizationally tired.  And we don't want to do it anymore.  Am I wrong?

Marilynne Robinson and the Project of Imaginative Compassion

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, stop it now, and check out from the library or buy on Amazon all the novels of Marilynne Robinson.  There are only three of them: Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home.  They will improve you, I promise.  Truly, there is no wiser, more generous, more patient, or (therefore) more powerful voice in literature.  I would describe her wisdom as devastating--her insights are so pure, so true, so right, that one trembles before them and begins to get a sense (in our non-theistic times) of what the ancients might actually have been up to in describing, and prescribing, a righteous fear of God.  That may sound like giddy overstatement, and I suppose it is, but she is the first writer in some time who has left me saying, My God, this is what literature can do.  Of course, literature can do other things as well--goodness knows I believe deeply in more volcanic stuff, Rushdie, Bellow, William Kennedy, etc.--but Robinson's great project of imaginative compassion is simply unparalleled in its directness, humility, clarity and moral force.  I've long had the sense that art can save us; if you are committed to the idea that it cannot, I wish you luck in maintaining your view upon reading Robinson.

American Augie

I cannot imagine a more electric opening for a novel than the one I've just read.  It is from The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, and it goes like this:

     "I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.  But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
     Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."

My God.  I mean, my God.  Such juice, such recklessness.  Who does this anymore, who has the courage to be so brusque and essential?  I'm only fifty pages into the book, I don't know yet what Augie's going to grow up to do or be (if you know, please don't spoil it for me), but he seems to announce himself here as a kind of butcher.  The frankness, the almost rude clarity of his formulations--whoever else he is, or will be, Bellow seems to indicate to us, Augie will cleave.

Of particular interest are the first four words: I am an American.  I can't get over it.  It feels like just about the most audacious thing anybody could ever say, it feels just berserk with irony, guts, muscle, regret, paranoia, almost disbelief.  But here's the question: did it feel that way to readers in 1953 when Adventures was published?  Did it feel like that to Bellow?  Or were we all a little more matter-of-fact back then?  How much, if anything, can we understand about ourselves by trying to understand the difference between what Augie's proclamation meant at mid-century, and what it might mean now?

Maybe I'm making too much of this.  As I'm working through it, it's beginning to sound a little like, I don't know, rehash Tom Brokaw or some such.  And I have to admit the chapters that follow Augie's opening salvo seem to me already to have taken a detour or two down the side alleys of their own rambunctiousness and rather herky-jerky enlightenment.  (All of which is, of course, entirely forgivable--the fifty pages of Adventures are the only fifty pages of Bellow I've ever read, but his restless mastery thus far earns him precisely what every author must earn: the right to follow his or her own inner dictates.)

Well, enough with the snooty parsing already.  I suppose the distillation of all this, the point, is to note, for the benefit of...whoever might benefit from it, that Augie's opening is no less than the reason any of us are in this literature business to begin with: the peril, the responsibility, the thrill of self-definition.  I am an American.  Beat that.