My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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A beautiful color photograph from 1942 by Jack Delano: “Steam locomotives of the Chicago & North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards.” Delano was one of the photographers employed by the FSA, on whose work Errol Morris has posted a typically long and interesting series of articles this week.
Robert McNamara, quoted by Errol Morris in his phenomenal NYT obituary on him: “McNamara in Context.” Morris’ profound moral gift is his insistence that we view all humans in context, from those some consider war criminals to holocaust-deniers to murderers; reading the comments on his piece, one can see how rare this gift is.
In the clarity of their own purported rationality, of their own pristine, crystalline worldview -their own systems, all failures of integrity- the harshest judges fail to learn the most important lesson McNamara, and Kennedy and Johnson and all the others, can teach: rationality isn’t enough, systems of analysis aren’t enough, belief isn’t enough to safeguard against the real essence of human existence: error.
How morally culpable is someone who is in error? How do we judge the mistaken? Does the intent to do good mitigate the accomplishment of evil? If it doesn’t, how do we make it less likely that we err? More democracy? More technocracy? More intellectualism? More emphasis on morality? Every answer has attendant historical disasters.
McNamara wanted desperately that we should learn from failed history, and in his memoir noted that because we are not omniscient we should never act violently when allies who share our morality tell us we are wrong to do so: error is too easy, and only a kind of democratic deference to others can restrain our stupidity. I would add, although he wouldn’t, that without omniscience we ought try -harder than we think reasonable- to not make irrevocable decisions involving human life. We should not kill; we should not put to death; we should not make war. We don’t know enough, cannot predict enough, and are wrong too often.
But -and I don’t mean this flippantly- it is easy enough to problematize that assertion, easy enough to see that it too could be wrong: what about the necessary war? And if there is a necessary war, is there a necessary murder, to use Auden’s regretted phrase? All human judgments are subjective assertions that strive towards objectivity; we all aspire to rationality, and sometimes must act on it whether it is sufficient or not.
(See this note, too, from Gospel of Moll: that McNamara attempted to answer these questions honestly did not protect him from grave error; if sincerity won’t, if intelligence won’t, if morality won’t, what will?)
Will, quoting (and posting a photo of) a favorite piece of New Orleans graffiti. A perpetually interrogatory relationship with one’s conclusions can lead to the archetypal paralysis of Hamlet, but it is a crucial element of real humanism and the only possible defense against arrogance and intellectual atrophy.
The always-excellent Rabsteen added an amusing anecdote and, to complement a cited Karl Popper aphorism, this quote from Betrand Russell: “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” Immediately we see the tension between doubt and self-assurance, between the courage to question oneself and the courage to not.
Not long ago, Jeff Miller and I had an appropriately inconclusive discussion about the problem of certainty, of ideological passion: it drove the Inquisition and the abolitionists, the Nazis and the Founders, Lenin and Gandhi. Milan Kundera noted that the eternal precondition of tragedy is the “existence of ideals that are considered more valuable than human life,” but that is also one of the components of historical progress, individual transcendence, and heroism. For every erroneous conviction there may be one that advances us all. Certainty, then, cannot be the enemy; only error can. And, for the umpteenth time, “Error is the central feature of human existence.”
I’m fortunate to be wrong all the time, often in crucially important ways (as many here can attest). This idea is thus never far from my mind, although it scarcely saves me the frequent embarrassment. But it does remind me of my limitless fallibility, a lesson I cannot learn too often (apparently!).
Although I am an atheist, I am very fond of religions and respect belief in them completely (for reasons I’ve discussed previously). Much, though not all, religious tradition is codified morality of a very fine sort, the sort imbued with an otherworldly detachment from ends. While the practitioners of religious morality -being human- have often been deviously barbaric, the ideas themselves and their interwoven mythical justifications can be both beautiful and transformative.
Ordinary morality, concerned with praxis and outcomes, is problematized by subjectivity as well as human nature; as Nietzsche noted, “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” From the start, any individual or collective assessments of reality and their according moral deliberations are debatable, endlessly so. This does not mean that nothing is good or that nothing is evil, but it does multiply the gradations of gray between those poles. And since “error is the central feature of human existence,” the most important moral decisions about when we may kill, when we should die, how many civilians we may incinerate incidentally and for what ends, are in my view fundamentally indecent to make. We are too likely to be wrong to take life. As J.U. Neuf put it in 1950, “The total wars of our time have been the result of a series of intellectual mistakes.”
When I say pure morality is unconcerned with ends, I mean it is concerned only with means, with the conduct of the individual. The state of the world is never within your control; only your behavior is. A pure moral system -which arbitrates your relationship with the world- cannot depend at all on variables beyond your control or it is worthless, contingent, ungoverning. Thus pure morality has little to say about justice or peace or other political concepts involving the group; rather, justice and peace emerge from aggregated individual morality.
(This is why efforts to “legislate morality” are deeply problematic. As social morality is an emergent phenomenon, it is not within our capacity to lead the horse with the cart by enforcing ends; we must be and inspire moral individuals, a process nearly impossible except on the interpersonal scale).
Long ago, I asked my father what was extraordinary about Jesus’ willingness to be crucified. After all, I asked: if I proposed to him that he might die painfully but would in doing so give eternal and blissful life to every human being who wanted it, wouldn’t he say yes? Given the context of the Gospels, wouldn’t he be elated to save sinful humanity? I ask this of parents: wouldn’t you die to give your child infinite life without suffering? Wouldn’t we all love to have this: a chance to sacrifice for the good of all humanity, a chance to redeem the world? And to know while doing so that an afterlife awaited you?
If we posit that there was a heroic and incontestably valuable end, we reduce the power of his self-sacrifice, though not completely. (My father proposed that Christians assume Jesus was so fully human that he didn’t know or couldn’t believe in those aspects of his mission, particularly while on the cross; if that is the case, I regret proposing my analysis).
In World War II, Gandhi advised Jews threatened by Nazism that they “…should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife… They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… Collective suicide would have been heroism.” We shudder at his morality, but that is purity: the “hatred of the world” Kierkegaard spoke of, the refusal to engage in any defense of self, family, or friend at the expense of another life. Gandhi will not defend Indians; Jesus will not save the crucified thieves. (This is why the Buddha felt that children were chains: they bind you in love to the world your status in it; you cannot, for example, martyr yourself resisting the SS if you have a family who will suffer for your deed).
This morality is difficult if one hopes to improve the world-which I why I would never engage in political action- and I admit that in any material sense it is indefensible. Civilization is the result of ever-improving efforts at implementing broader moral systems (efforts with fits and starts, to be sure), which is another reason why moral teachers and prophets are typically renunciatory: they have no business in society.
The world cannot and perhaps should not be composed of such people: pure in moral austerity, willing to die, willing to let kin die, willing to let the world do whatever it may without ever resisting, mindful of the fact that to fight for is always to fight against and disinclined therefore to fight at all. In extremity, morality becomes unacceptable to us; Gandhi’s ahimsa seems loathsome when we think of Hitler. And indeed, what would we say now to Jesus, who would not kill Bin Laden, or even assassinate Hitler himself?
This morality seems inhuman, practically, but it is in this morality that I am most interested, in how it problematizes the affairs of state, the laws we enact, the deeds we condone, and most of all in how in emulating the exemplars of this morality we achieve the very ends we’ve turned away from in doing so: justice and peace.
Hence Gandhi’s wonderful quote: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Do not seek it; do not legislate it; do not fight for it. Be it.
