Conflating Evil

Recently I’ve been particularly scornful of a certain trend in political discourse that necessitates finding a singular entity blamable for whatever issue the speaker is discussing. The problem isn’t simple scapegoating, but rather the tenuous philosophical underpinnings of a politics that does not allow for a more complex understanding of these deeply complex social issues. (See my post from September 28th for more detail.) I’ve come to realize that this problem goes much deeper than I was originally imagining it to, even coming to light in many radical leftwing politics that make many of the same criticisms of mainstream politics. I’d like to outline that problem.

First, consider for a moment the typical charge made against the Democratic party (or Parliamentarism as a whole) by the far left: in condemning the right wing as the source of all inequalities and injustices, they have overlooked their own role in propagating the ongoing, and unjust, social structure. Their moralizing against the right is a false moralizing serving merely to establish a rhetorical and psychological high ground that they then leverage for power. Their policy plans are far more palatable, but never actually aim at creating the “fair” society they claim to desire. For instance, consider the intense racism Blacks fought when they moved North after the Civil War, or the increase in power for the wealthiest Americans that grew out of the New Deal, or the continuing marginalization of immigrants and the poor. In short, the far left rejects the moralization of politics, aiming instead for a radical focus on social structures that, in descriptive language, necessitates dramatic shifts.

The problem, then, is that the far left still contains an implicit moralizing of politics. That is not to say that politics has been reduced to moral claims--as is true of mainstream politics and so-called Third Way theories. As just stated, the radical militant thinkers, such as Žižek and Badiou, that I take issue with here target that precise misunderstanding. Rather, their version of the problem is having allowed the same logical structure of moralistic thought, though without the specific moral language, to still hold within politics: the crimes of a situation are still ascribable to a specific entity. They have done away with blaming Morgan Stanley or, more vaguely, “Wall Street”, for the failures of our society, but they still ensure that, even more vaguely, Capitalism can be blamed.

In other words, they target the social structure itself--racist, misogynist, or classist. Such has been the impetus behind the last five decades of leftist politics, after all. However, in blaming Capitalism, as a system, for inequality, they are tacitly assuming that a social structure is the kind of thing that can be blamed. Though their claims now lack the ostensible moral values--you should have done otherwise, you ought not to have done that, you are being selfish--they still contain a logical structure that is specifically moral, leading them to justify policies or even violence on the fact that the Capitalist system must be fought. They have made their position far more complex, but in the anti-moral stance they have maintained lies, ironically, a moral structure.

For example, the recent glorification on the left of the Jacobins and the Terror of the French Revolution aims to distance the far left’s radical structural focus from the middle left’s empty moralizing. And yet the defenses of the Saint-Just and Robespierre always come down to an implicitly moral justification: the evils of pre-revolutionary France justify action against the institutions bolstering that system. In essence, moral blame is ascribed to the unjust system which is then attributed to the individual parts of that system. Though these arguments are mostly made without moral language and purport to be a-moral, they maintain the same form as the middle-left’s problematic thought, only going a step higher.

This philosophical difficulty is merely the political iteration of a Heideggerian logic. In Being and Time, Heidegger investigates the nature of being as such, going to great pains to explain how being as such--implying no specific way of being, mode of being, qualities, categories, etc.--is so ubiquitous that it is nearly impossible to discuss it. The finer points of Heidegger’s ontology are unimportant here, but there is a particular difficulty he points to in an interpretation of his work that is telling, offering an alternative to this false moral structure of politics.

Heidegger claims that the nature of being (being as such) manifests itself in humans (whom he calls Dasein) as a pure possibility. We are able to continually question our own beings, deciding upon particular manifestations of that being: in his words, our being is to have being at issue. However, the possibility of questioning is continually closed off. In modern times, that is often a result of our sociality--opinions of society at large impose themselves upon us, making it difficult (or even impossible) to continue to question the nature of our being or decide upon how we will manifest that being. To put it simply, our lives are determined for us. Heidegger refers to this phenomena as the “idle talk” of “the They.”

Those very terms--idle talk and the They--sound moral, but Heidegger insists they aren’t. He’s only being half-honest. Being and Time makes two simultaneous claims that amount to a kind of formal ethics. The first claim is that idle talk and the They are naturally arising. They are themselves essential parts of our being and thus cannot be a moral issue. It’s just a fact about human lives, like death and the need for oxygen. On the other hand, the second claim is that often, throughout the entire history of philosophy, those phenomena have been embraced, doubling their ill effect. To do so is an ethical failing. Humans are faced with a steep slope that ensures the difficulty Heidegger is concerned with and cannot be blamed for that. Yet to accept that slope and not continually attempt to combat the difficulty anyway is something blamable. Thus, Heidegger’s formal ethics are, in a way, non-moral: they outline where moral claims have validity, but ensure that some aspect of the very same issues cannot have blame ascribed to them. (For those interested, I wrote longer papers on this very issue. They can be found here and here.)

That is the very thought necessary in politics today. We must recognize that certain social structures are naturally arising, and cannot have claims legitimately made about them that adopt any semblance of morality--even its bare structure. Yet that does not justify those structures. We must still combat them, reaching for equality and understanding the absolute root of politics without any moral logic.