Ethical Entropy: In Defence of Soul

Restoring a fluid moral realism in the face of postmodern relativism.

It is well known by now that formal systems of ethics do not work. Utilitarianism, the idea that we should maximise “utility”, first articulated by Jeremy Bentham, is subject to obvious absurdities: how should we define “utility” or “happiness”? How can we reduce it to a commensurable measure? Even if we had some vague theory as to how to generate this measurement, how could we in practice calculate the optimal path for its “maximisation”? And what of Robert Nozick’s utility monster, a hypothetical being which receives much more “utility” from a certain source than anyone else? Should we feed everything we have to the utility monster? Forms of negative utilitarianism that insist we must primarily minimise “aggregate suffering” or “aggregate disvalue” are not much better: at their most extreme, they essentially justify the prevention of future pain through mass genocide. Deontology, the idea that we should follow a series of rules, principles and obligations, also quickly devolves into nonsense. For instance, take Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But divorced of any foundational orienting principle, this is far too easily corrupted: as Lacan understands, and Žižek elaborates in Kant and Sade, a “universal law” is meaningless without the implicit desire of the enunciator. Just as Kant would argue that we should reduce pain, Marquis de Sade could easily argue that we should enjoy the pain of others. And it is thus that in effect deontology, like utilitarianism, becomes a form of consequentialism, for it is impossible to detach the enunciation of a rule from the preferred consequences of that rule. Virtue ethics, the idea that one should cultivate virtue and character, can then be understood as the same folly.

Moreover, what of Hume’s guillotine, the is-ought problem, which points out that one cannot make claims about what ought to be based solely on statements about what is? For instance, can we “logically” derive that we should not cut off someone’s arm just from the observation that it is extremely likely to be excruciating? And even if we could, how could we universalise such a rule? Are there not instances where cutting off someone’s dangerously infected arm could actually save their life? So each universalisation ends up with a multitude of exceptions until we realise that it is impossible to universalise a single rule for an infinity of different scenarios, and it is revealed that we are in fact always inescapably moral particularists. And it is in reaction to this lack of dogmatic, simplistically generalisable certainty that many take a wrongheaded leap of faith and fall into rigid, magical thinking: we must totally eradicate pain; we must embrace pain to its fullest; we must never lie; we must always lie if it serves the Greater Good; we must rationally maximise value, as if value is unidimensionally quantifiable, objectively definable, or computationally reducible. Of course, such drastic flattening of nuance is the autistic, left-hemispheric mode of cognition criticised by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary: it is born from an inability to deal with complexity, an unbearable fear of uncertainty and indecision.

The inability to engage fluidly in response to a chaotic world in practice results in an often psychopathic lack of humility that has led many to the justification of atrocities such as genocide, totalitarianism, and torture. It is behind the religious fervour expressed by the so-called New Atheists: Richard Dawkins, the ideologues on LessWrong, and Sam Harris, who has explicitly defended the use of torture, among other absurdities. Hiding behind the ideals of Enlightenment rationality, these banal systemisers are the true face of evil hiding inconspicuously in our midst. In When Atheism Becomes Religion, Chris Hedges writes:

The Enlightenment empowered those who argued that superstition, blind instinct and ignorance had to be eradicated. Kant, in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, published in 1798, asserted that Africans were inherently predisposed to slavery. Thus the Enlightenment gave the world the “scientific racism” adopted as an ideological veneer for murder by nineteenth-and twentieth-century despots. Those who could not be educated and reformed, radical Enlightenment thinkers began to argue, should be eliminated so they could no longer poison human society. The Jacobins who seized control during the French Revolution were the first in a long line of totalitarian monsters who justified murder by invoking supposedly enlightened ideals. Their radical experiment in human engineering was embodied in the Republic of Virtue and the Reign of Terror, which saw 17,000 people executed. Belief in the moral superiority of Western civilization allowed the British to wipe out the Tasmanian Aborigines. British hunting parties were given licenses to exterminate this “inferior race,” whom the colonial authorities said should be “hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed.” The British captured many in traps and burned or tortured them to death. The same outlook led to the slaughter of the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as Native Americans. It justified the slave trade that abducted 15 million Africans and killed even more. And it was this long tradition of colonial genocide in the name of progress in places like King Leopold’s Congo that set the stage for the industrial-scale killing of the Holocaust and man-made famines of the Soviet Union.

Reigns of terror are thus the bastard children of the Enlightenment. Terror in the name of utopian ideals would rise again and again in the coming centuries. The Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags were spawned by the Enlightenment. Fascists and communists were bred on visions of human perfectibility. Tens of millions of people have been murdered in the futile effort to reform human nature and build utopian societies. During these reigns of terror, science and reason served, as they continue to serve, interests purportedly devoted to the common good—and to vast mechanisms of repression and mass killing.

Soul

The postmodern subject, upon noting the failure of structured morality, is inclined to reject any structure entirely, as I elaborate in Epistemic Transgression. Attempts to impose too much brittle moral order—ethical negentropy—inevitably backfire and lead to its corrosion into an infinite relativism—ethical entropy. But this is obviously not a pragmatic way to live: a world where anyone can justify infinite chaos is not good for anyone. As I explore in Epistemic Telos, there is a reason we evolved morality, generally oriented by feelings of guilt, shame, anger, gratitude, fairness, empathy, disgust and compassion. Mitigating chaos is good for everyone; we all on some level want to maintain order. And it is for this reason that I argue in Epistemic Entropy that no one is in truth a nihilist: anyone will reliably avert from having their face drenched in acid. The is-ought problem is therefore exposed as nonsensical once we realise that the ought—one should not pour acid on another—is a description of a prescription: how one should act if one cares about acting compassionately. Just as the statement “one plus one is two” can be thought of as a rhetorical appeal to recognise the pragmatism and reliability of such a declaration, the statement “murder is wrong” is in a sense a rhetorical appeal to notice how if one stays true to one’s conscience, one would prefer to live in a world without it. And when I say no one deserves to be raped, I am simply describing that I do not want to live in a world where anyone can be raped.

This description is not primarily logical, but beautiful: there is only a superficial appeal to immediate self-interest or formal reason. This mix between structured logic and fluid aesthetic, Apollonian rationality and Dionysian affirmation, exemplifies what Norman Packard calls the edge of chaos—that precarious liminality between order and chaos where all meaning arises. It is for this reason that Paul Bloom, despite his utilitarian confusions, is correct in Against Empathy when he argues that too much emotional empathy not counterbalanced by reason can impede effective ethical action, just as reason alone cannot constitute morality. As Hedges appeals in When Atheism Becomes Religion:

Science, when set up as a model for our moral and social existence, implicitly banishes compromise and tolerance. Scientific ideas, because they can be demonstrated or disproved, are embraced or rejected on the basis of quantifiable evidence. But human relationships and social organizations interact and function effectively when they are not rigid, when they accept moral ambiguity, and when they take into account the irrational. Politics, for example, is an endeavor that concerns the channeling and managing of human drives and desires. It is only fitfully in contact with reason.

Or Žižek in The Sublime Object of Ideology:

[I]t was Kierkegaard who wrote that to believe in Christ because we consider him wise and good is a dreadful blasphemy—it is, on the contrary, only the act of belief itself which can give us an insight into his goodness and wisdom. Certainly we must search for rational reasons which can substantiate our belief, our obedience to the religious command, but the crucial religious experience is that these reasons reveal themselves only to those who already believe—we find reasons attesting our belief because we already believe; we do not believe because we have found sufficient good reasons to believe.

We can therefore interpret Lacan’s injunction to not give way on one’s desire (ne pas céder sur son désir) not as an instruction to follow arbitrary chains of reasoning, nor to enact narcissistic whims of fantasy, but to act in accordance with one’s heartfelt belief that such an act would render oneself and the world more beautiful in a way not reducible to any logical “utility”. In other words, one does not avoid kicking kittens or raping women solely because one seeks the approval of one’s friends or lovers, nor because one is afraid of retribution, but because beneath all the equivocation and repression and narrative inflation, the desire of the conscience—the soul—would violently reject such a desecration of the fabric of love.

It is such that ethics derives an objective element that paradoxically resists formalisation: we have evolved an irreducible set of aesthetic preferences—many of which remain remarkably consistent throughout history, and some of which are more contingent—that compel us to render the world a more bearable place to live, to counter other evolved monstrosities. As Žižek argues: “if over-rapid universalization produces a quasi-universal Image whose function is to make us blind to its historical, socio-symbolic determination, over-rapid historicization makes us blind to the real kernel which returns as the same through diverse historicizations/symbolizations.” This irreducible, unassailable kernel of the Real, argues Alenka Zupančič in Ethics of the Real, is what orients true ethical action, and if we are to live in psychic harmony, we should always seek to carefully but boldly rupture our narrative order in fidelity to this impossible core of desire, the soul. Indeed, it is in stasis that monstrosity ossifies; we must always maintain a radical humility in the face of rupture. Of course, moral preference, like any other characteristic, is contingent on historical, cultural and environmental factors: fluidity does not make morality any less real; it just renders it slightly less solid, susceptible to rhetorically and structurally induced evolution over a more concrete base.

It is true that most of our values can be explained in terms of crude evolutionary motivations: to maintain social cohesion, ameliorate excess disorder, decelerate ecological destruction. These thermodynamic constraints are in fact what constitute the invariant, hard kernel of ethical desire: Donald Brown notes in Human Universals, for instance, that all functioning human societies generally proscribe rape and murder. And the iterated prisoner’s dilemma indicates that while in one-off interactions, it may be more advantageous for one person to screw over another, with repeated interactions, it is mutually beneficial to build trust. But to note that kindness serves as a reproductive advantage does not make it any less beautiful; it can instead serve as a source of gladness that we do not live in a hellworld where monstrosity is without consequence. To suggest that we should divorce morality of evolutionary constraints is nonsensical, given that morality is the product of evolutionary constraint. Those who would recoil at this observation, pointing out that we also evolved rape, are simply proving that our ethical intuition is oriented by an irreducible kernel of the conscience. It is also true that there exist a percentage of people who have destroyed their soul, or even rarer, were born without one. The inability of some to process morality does not disprove the practical existence of a fluid, objective ethics of the Real, or varying degrees of colourblindness would also disprove the solid existence of colour. As I show in Epistemic Entropy, there are degrees to relativism: some things are more solid than others, and subjectivity and objectivity are better described as a spectrum than a concrete dichotomy. In an interview with Kate Mossman, Žižek remarks:

We are in a regressive era. Some points should be simply out of debate. Like when people argue against rape. I don’t want to live in a society where you have to argue all the time against rape. I want to live in a society where if someone excuses rape—with all the stupidities they use—they appear an idiot.

The soulless do not get away without consequence. Since time immemorial, murder has annihilated our capacity to love, to feel safe and lovable, to look in the mirror and have our eyes light up in self-acceptance, which is really an appeal to our invisible God, the big Other which measures our worth. Our egoic narratives can patch up but never fully satisfy the id’s desire to be lovable, good, kind. The id always knows when we have committed monstrosity. In Epistemic Telos, I write:

To sadists, love is about transaction, control, power plays. The more they deny love, the more they deny their own death to compensate, and the more they embrace death as a consequence. They are terrified of real love. They do not understand that winning is losing, and losing is winning. The hollowness of dominance is embedded in our DNA: we evolved to seek communion, since paranoia is metabolically expensive. In Too Much and Never Enough, Mary L Trump describes the emptiness of her uncle Donald’s facade; George Bush paints self-portraits depicting him washing off the guilt of the Iraqis he murdered; at the end of The Act of Killing, Anwar Congo retches as he fails to maintain his denial of the horror of the hundreds of killings he brutally carried out. Sadism is not true enjoyment; it is a denial of it. The denial of the humanity of the Self and the Other always leads to sadism, as we flatten each other into fungible tokens. Eros succumbs to Thanatos.

It is love that allows us to accept death. Love provides the emotional strength necessary to face fear. And as ridiculous as it may be, it is difficult to accept the end when we know we have not lived beautifully, contributed in some small sense to the tribe. This is an important source of the modern obsession with longevity, a truth that Ted Kaczynski touched upon in his manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future before ironically murdering three innocent people to get it seen. It has been very rare indeed throughout history that the average person could gratuitously violate the fabric of love without some psychic consequence. In Execution, Geoffrey Abbott writes of executioners in medieval Europe:

Few of the early executioners could write or even sign their names, so no autobiographies exist to widen our knowledge. At best they were unimaginative and unemotional, at worst merciless and callous. Most of them drank heavily (and perhaps who could blame them?), they gambled, got into debt and even fell foul of the laws they enforced.

Slaveowners were often psychologically crippled, and lived in perpetual paranoia of slave uprisings like the Haitian Revolution: coercion, conflict and paranoia are energetically, psychically and morally expensive. They would often need to come up with elaborate, convoluted justifications to assuage their repressed guilt: George Fitzugh argued that the negro was “but a grown up child”, needing the economic and social protections of slavery. Moreover, I will present several passages from El Sicario, a monologue by a repentant Mexican hitman edited by Molly Molloy and Charles Bowden, where he describes the murder of women. Some might argue this veers too far into lurid thrill, but it is in fact morbid interest that permits us to sketch the edge of ethics. His account is fascinating and titillating and heartbreaking and monstrous all in one: there is nothing harmful or contradictory about curiosity unless it clearly distorts the fabric of love.

It is very ugly to see a woman tortured. It is very ugly to see the outrages that are done to them because the people doing this have no scruples. It is not the same thing as dealing with a man who knows he has been stealing, who owes money, and who has tried to disappear without paying what he owes. It is not the same to see a woman suffer until she begs for mercy, to see her violated, raped not by one but by five or six or seven men…and then to make her suffer until she loses consciousness…Oh, it is terrible to strangle them, at times like this it is better to just shoot them. To strangle a person, it is so horrible, to feel how they suffer, to see how they lose all hope. It is to feel how their life slips away from them little by little. It is to see that the person has a line and the moment comes when they are on the line, when they are dying, and all of the strength they are exerting to get free starts to dissipate and their body is ceasing to function, their life is slipping away. But no, then you can loosen the hold on them a little, and they gain a little strength and start to revive a little. It is necessary to make it last a long time so that the asphyxiation is slow and induces much suffering.

And of the hollowness of monstrosity:

You do not just become addicted to the money, the sex, the liquor and the drugs, but you get to the point where you really like all of this stuff. There are times, during the nights when you can really sleep well…but those nights are few. Really, you don’t often get the sleep that you need to take care of yourself or to maintain your personal integrity. But sometimes, when you do sleep, you realize that in the same group of three or more people this one is capable of pulling out a knife and killing another, and you realize that if that is the case he might be capable of killing you too. This is just to say that you always have to watch out for yourself.

And of the incapacity to love untarnished:

One time my wife tried to help me when I was dreaming. She felt how I was sweating and calling out in my sleep…Ah, ah, ah. She saw I was having a nightmare and tried to wake me up, but when she touched me—ARRRGGH—my reaction was to grab her by the throat, but I didn’t wake up in time and my hands were on her throat, I was strangling her, I was strangling my own wife!…And from that moment, that very moment, I realized that something very bad was happening to me. I was no longer any good. There was a line that I had respected between the work I did—as a guard, as an instructor, as an executioner—but this work no longer stayed on one side of the line. Now it had passed over into my life at home. I could no longer control my instinct to be violent and aggressive. I could no longer tell the difference between this world and that of my own family. You even start to think that your own family is against you and you can do harm to your own family.

When I saw the fear in her face, and to have my own wife paralyzed and defenseless in my own hands, unable to move…

In On the Precipice of Darkness, Hedges speaks of the trauma of those who kill in war:

It starts like this. All the skills they acquired as a killer on the outside are useless. Maybe they go back. Maybe they become a gun for hire. But this only delays the inevitable. They can run, for a while, but they cannot run forever. There will be reckoning. And it is the reckoning I will tell you about.

They will face a choice. Live the rest of their life, stunted, numb, cut off from themselves, cut off from those around them. Descend into a psychopathic fog, trapped in the absurd, interdependent lies that justify mass murder. There are killers, years later, who say they are proud of their work, who claim not a moment’s regret. But I have not been inside their nightmares. If this is the route they take they will never again truly live.

Of course, they do not talk about what they did to those around them, certainly not to their families. They are feted as heroes. But they know, even if they do not say it, that this is a lie. The numbness, usually, wears off. They look in the mirror, and if they have any shred of conscience left, their reflection disturbs you. They repress the bitterness. They escape down the rabbit hole of opioids and, like my uncle, who fought in the South Pacific in World War II, alcohol. Their intimate relationships, because they cannot feel, because they bury their self-loathing, disintegrate. This escape works. For a while. But then they go into such darkness that the stimulants used to blunt the pain begin to destroy them. And maybe that is how they die. I have known many who died like that. And I have known those who ended it quickly. A gun to the head.

I have trauma from war. But the worst trauma I do not have. The worst trauma from war is not what you saw. It is not what you experienced. The worst trauma is what you did. They have names for it. Moral injury. Perpetrator Induced Traumatic Stress. But that seems tepid given the hot, burning coals of rage, the night terrors, the despair. Those around them know something is terribly, terribly wrong. They fear this darkness. But they not let others into their labyrinth of pain.

And then, one day, they reach out for love. Love is the opposite of war. War is about death. It is about smut. It is about turning other human beings into objects, maybe sexual objects, but I also mean this literally, for war turns people into corpses. Corpses are the end products of war, what comes off its assembly line. So, they want love, but death has made a Faustian bargain. It is this. It is the hell of not being able to love. They carry this death inside them for the rest of their lives. It corrodes their souls. Yes. We have souls. They sold theirs. The cost is very, very high. It means that what they want, what they most desperately need in life, they cannot attain.

They spend days wanting to cry and not knowing why. They are consumed by guilt. They believe that because of what they did, the life a son or daughter or someone they love is in danger. Divine retribution. They tell themselves this is absurd, but they believe it anyway. They start to include little offerings of goodness to others as if these offerings will appease a vengeful god, as if these offerings will save someone they care about from harm, from death. But nothing wipes away the stain of murder.

They are overwhelmed with sorrow. Regret. Shame. Grief. Despair. Alienation. They face an existential crisis. They know that all the values they were taught to honor in school, at worship, at home, are not the values they upheld. They hate themselves. They do not say this out loud.

He concludes:

It is exhausting trying to ward off these demons. Maybe they will make it. Being human again. But that will mean a life of contrition. It will mean making the crimes public. It will mean begging for forgiveness. It will mean forgiving themselves. This is very hard. It will mean orientating every aspect of their lives to nurturing life rather than extinguishing it. This is the only hope for salvation. If they do not take it, they are damned.

It is thus that sadism can be conceptualised as an autoimmune disorder—the social organism attacking the very bonds that allow it to thrive.

Liberalism

Liberal moralism is a special form of this autoimmunity. It is characterised by what Leo Strauss coins permissive egalitarianism, which manifests as the ridiculous tabula rasa (blank slate) models of human behaviour that suggest that we are all highly malleable with minimal genetic determination, meaning we can all become good and happy. Of course, the distinction between nature and nurture is in fact highly fluid: we can distinguish physiological and genetic traits that tend to act as personality modifiers, and nurture is of course mediated by nature such that the two are inextricable. It is ridiculous to suggest, for instance, that someone who is naturally attractive and socially charming will not grow up with better self-esteem, which will of course have long-lasting effects on their psychic structure. There are obviously noticeable and important differences between ethnicities: as an inoffensive example, most East Asians do not meaningfully have body odour; and more interestingly, Michele Gelfand shows in Rule Makers, Rule Breakers that different ethnicities possess radically different psychic orientations with respect to the rigid or fluid adherence to norms and structure. These differences are an irreducible mix of genetics, culture and upbringing, which themselves are not separable. Moreover, the liberal hysteria over eugenics is exposed as overblown when one realises that nature is eugenic, and there is nothing wrong with wanting the next generation to have healthier, happier traits in a resource-constrained world. It is the imposition of eugenics by the state that so often devolves into bureaucratic bigotry.

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker argues that we are afraid to acknowledge biological differences due to the fear of inequality, imperfectibility, determinism and nihilism. Of course, these fears are total non sequiturs: we are unequal, and a world without difference would be a dead world of total stasis; we must accept our constraints, as I argue in Epistemic Telos and Epistemic Transgression; and the fact that we are deterministically constrained does not make morality useless, but is rather what makes it relevant in the first place, since total “freedom” would imply no one would ever need to suffer. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with the observation that we are inherently selfish: if we were not, we would all be dead very quickly. With respect to the fear of unfair treatment, Pinker argues in a broadly correct fashion:

So could discoveries in biology turn out to justify racism and sexism? Absolutely not! The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable…Discriminating against people on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity…would perpetuate the injustices of the past, in which African Americans, women, and other groups were enslaved or oppressed. It would rend society into hostile factions and could escalate into horrific persecution. But none of these arguments against discrimination depends on whether groups of people are or are not genetically indistinguishable.

Far from being conducive to discrimination, a conception of human nature is the reason we oppose it. Here is where the distinction between innate variation and innate universals is crucial. Regardless of IQ or physical strength or any other trait that can vary, all humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated. No one likes being treated unfairly…The revulsion we feel toward discrimination and slavery comes from a conviction that however much people vary on some traits, they do not vary on these. This conviction contrasts, by the way, with the supposedly progressive doctrine that people have no inherent concerns…

We are not, of course, inherently good or bad. Even Hitler was a vegetarian. We are both good, bad and neither, swayed one way or the other by will and circumstance, and it is all we can do to choose love every day knowing we will fail. It is in fact by veering into the boundary between compassion and sadism that we learn to love. Consequently, incessant shame is counterproductive to ethics, as shame impedes an honest connection with our shadow: the liberal obsession with shaming the Other must be superseded by a candid exploration into our collective darkness. Pessimistic philosophers such as Martin Butler in A Minority Interest, Julio Cabrera in A Critique of Affirmative Morality, and Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, though they often overstate their case, are correct when they note that all action constitutes a form of violence: helping one person means disregarding another; taking a job means another goes unemployed; and even basic emotions like jealousy and anger can be thought of as a form of violence towards another, even if they are not inherently wrong. Pessoa writes: “All of us, in some part or other, are loathsome. We all harbour a crime we’ve committed, or a crime our soul is begging us to commit.” It is hence we must not judge each other so quickly, nor see ourselves as uniquely bad or good, and remember our worst sins when we see those of others. And as Hedges writes in When Atheism Becomes Religion:

Our enemies have no monopoly on sin, nor have we one on virtue. We all stand in need of self-correction. We do not live in a world where we ever get to choose between pure virtue and pure vice. Human actions combine within them the moral and the immoral, no matter how pure they appear to us or to others. We are always like our enemy. Human virtue is always ambiguous.

Even if someone is overwhelmingly likely to turn into a monster due to catastrophic misfortune, a passive acceptance of this determination will turn the likelihood into a certainty. Here, we have the most cogent rebuttal to pessimistic thinkers such as John Gray in Straw Dogs: we do have monstrous tendencies, and no one fully chooses to be the way they are, but computational irreducibility means there is always a degree of uncertainty as to the outcome, and as long as we are alive there is always a narrow band of constrained freedom. In other words, our conscious agency is the method of the universe’s self-determination; our ethics is the process of evolution. As Carlo Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, the meaningful progression of time arises only from ignorance, the fact that everything is not already known: agency is uncertainty, ethics is confusion. A disavowal of this constitutes the reflexive impotence criticised by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, and guarantees the worst-case scenario. Things may never get better, but we evolved ethics so things do not get worse. Camille Paglia, though she is wrong about many things, is correct when she asserts:

We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. “I’m this way because my father made me this way. I’m this way because my husband made me this way.” Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.

A world where everyone is an eternal trauma victim and helplessly subject to conniving manipulators and impossible circumstances is a world where no one can ever be held responsible for anything, and nothing ever changes for the better. In fact, in his study of masochism, Lacan reveals that we frequently derive something of a sense of painful enjoyment from the abusive dynamics we are trapped in, often serving to perpetuate them: is it not true that the poorly treated woman often enjoys the fantasy of a better man, and in this enjoyment suffers immensely? Certainly, this does not absolve the abuser, but pretending that nuance does not exist in relational dynamics ensures they remain misunderstood and unmitigated. In truth, all relations are asymmetric in various different ways that may shift back and forth throughout their progression; the world is not so simply divided into abusers, victims, and equal partners.

Liberal moralism, with its fantastical commitment to egalitarianism, often veers into an impersonal utilitarianism where all subjects must be treated equally. As I explore in Epistemic Transgression, this violence of positivity, as Byung-Chul Han describes in Toplogy of Violence, is what constitutes the safetyism and ridiculous cancel culture excoriated by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind. But the idea of totally equal, positive treatment is obviously absurd: firstly, we are immediately bounded by geographic locality. We cannot reasonably be expected to care equally for a child living on the other side of the world as our neighbour. Moreover, a world where one is obligated to prioritise abstract strangers over oneself and loved ones is a world without any stable love, care, social cohesion, or emotional safety. Parenthood, partnership, and any sense of belonging would be annihilated. Mental health would be destroyed as every action is assessed for marginal gains in “utility”. It was indeed Nietzsche who waxed poetic that love occupies a space beyond good and evil. Stephen T Asma pushes against this liberal doctrine of “fairness” in Against Fairness, although he takes it too far:

If some science-fiction sorcerer came to me with a button and said that I could save my son’s life by pressing it, but then (cue the dissonant music) ten strangers would die somewhere I’d have my finger down on it before he finished his cryptic challenge. If he raised it to one hundred strangers, a million, or the whole population, it would still take the same microsecond for me to push the button.

Asma is correct, of course, that a world where everyone must be treated equally is a hellworld. We should prioritise family, friends, lovers. And there is nothing wrong with liking someone more for some arbitrary trait, whether it be appearance or gender or accent—nor is there anything wrong with being sadder when a beautiful person dies, as if it is somehow shameful to mourn the death of a pet while being indifferent to the plight of some wild zebra. Pretending that we must only treat people according to their personality is an impossible ideal, and is a desperate attempt to maintain the fantasy of perfectibility, that anyone can be loved and successful. As Pinker notes in The Blank Slate, no one wants to be judged based on characterisics they cannot control, so we should temper our biases where possible. But this sadistic denial of constraint can only create a schizoid culture of public denial and private optimisation, simultaneously disavowing beauty privilege while selling plastic surgery to the masses. Lovability beyond basic kindness is often largely a matter of luck, and it is in acknowledging this that we can mitigate heartbreak. Obviously, Asma takes his crusade against fairness much too far, dogmatically glorifying in-group loyalty rather than simply accepting it as necessary and occasionally beautiful. Héctor A García provides the necessary counterweight in Alpha God, showing that we must always put a check on hierarchy rather than attempting to annihilate it:

I argue that bias toward the in-group, and toward the dominance structures therein, are among the most deeply embedded and most dangerous characteristics of the human race. These traits underlie warfare, oppression, torture, and other cruelties and allow most humans to be incredibly skilled at moral hypocrisy, given the right in-group–out-group manipulation.

Just as evolution prefers that individual humans get along with others wherever possible, it also prefers that groups of humans get along with other groups: there is no limit to the benefit of cooperation and the mitigation of disorder where it is viable. This is why genocide can never truly be beautiful, why it stains the conscience of a nation even despite in-group loyalty. If we aim honestly to maintain fidelity to our conscience, compassion feels more harmonious on every scale. And it is such that we must balance our in-group affections and natural biases with a basic indiscriminate respect for the Other.

Rebellion

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainly of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Letters

The human psyche cannot survive without an orienting vector that promises some degree of completion, or even a minute source of optimism. Suicide results not because we do not want to live, but when we can no longer conceive of an escape from our perennial aimlessness, the total loss of love and hope, the insulating buffer against the horror of the void. Permanent rebellion against monstrosity is the only narrative structure that never fragments into incoherence, precisely because it resists chaos, because it can never reveal itself complete. And as Camus understands, hope is found not in the possibility of salvation, which is zero, but in the knowledge that there is always a way to live more beautifully, no matter the circumstance: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Beauty does not need some deeper justification other than that it is beautiful and healing. In American Sadism, Hedges writes:

Rebellion…must be its own justification. It is a moral imperative, not a practical one. It not only erodes, however imperceptibly, the structures of oppression, it sustains the embers of empathy and compassion, as well as justice, within us that defy the sadism that colors every layer of our existence. In short, it keeps us human. Rebellion must be embraced, finally, not only for what it will achieve, but for what it will allow us to become. In that becoming we find hope.

And finally, we resist because it is fun—genuine, wholesome fun; because it brings us untarnished joy; and because it feels impossibly wrong when we do not. I do not subscribe to the notion that morality must be joyless. There is no virtue in spending our entire lives suffering because others are suffering, when resistance of the same quality or better can be upheld with equanimity instead. It is thus that Patrick Lawrence is correct when he asserts that we have a duty of delight: the condemnation of joy in the presence of suffering does nothing but lead to a joyless world. A joyless world runs against everything we fight for; a joyless world is not beautiful. Even in the depths of hell, there is always an escape into the void: when all is lost, there is a final, tragic beauty in walking into the ocean. In Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, one resists total subjugation only by wholeheartedly accepting the possibility of annihilation—not by recklessly throwing away one’s life or through self-immiseration, which can only hamper rebellion, but by refusing inescapable monstrosity. It is from this position of existential leverage that we can always demand the impossible, never embarrassed to ask for more. We aim for the stars knowing we are lucky to even leave orbit. We learn to live through learning to die.

Coda

Sermons, when they are good, do not please a congregation. They do not make people happy. They are not a form of entertainment. They disturb many, if not most, of the listeners. They resonate with only a minority. Truth, at least as far as it can be discerned, is not comfortable or enjoyable to listen to, nor is the emotion and anger that accompanies all passionate assaults on lies and injustice. Sermons force those who hear them to be self-critical. They expose our inadequacies and failures. They demand that we become emotionally engaged. There are speakers and writers on the left and the right, including many preachers in pulpits, whose goal is to be admired and applauded. This is not my aim. It is not pleasant to be disliked—and I have faced crowds that deeply dislike me and my message—but it is necessary if your commitment is to truth and the harnessing of emotional energy and passion against those who carry out injustice. I write not with the anticipation of approval but often of hostility. And I write finally from the gut, not the head.

— Chris Hedges, The World As It Is

It is thus that intuitives like Hedges are perhaps wiser than any meta-ethicist that has walked the planet. Never once does he endeavour to rationalise and sterilise the metaphysics of his moral compass; he simply reveals without apprehension that which is true, that genocide is wrong, that sadistic pornography distorts the social fabric, that the greatest evil is war. It is a prediscursive, pre-symbolic clarity which derives from an intimate desire to maintain a spiritual sense of harmony and cohesion. The failure of analytic philosophy is in treating life and ethics like a clinical game of chess, when it is in reality more like a fluid dance. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that we cannot reason our way into rhythm; we forgot that philosophy was supposed to be useful. People like Hedges question themselves not based principally on what fits some arbitrary logical calculus, but what feels right if one stays true to one’s conscience, what kind of world is desirable to live in, without equivocation or obfuscation. For these people, those who are in tune with the fabric of love, those who have not been led astray by millennia of language games and sophistry, essays like mine are redundant. I write instead for those lost in analytic, disembodied abstraction, who are not in need of moralistic prescription, but simply to be shown what they are missing out on, the feeling of genuine, lasting warmth that arises from acting in accordance with the soul. Buddhists do not practise mettā (lovingkindness) just for show, but because they understand that love—the selfless kind, the terrifying kind without expectation—generates peace, and constitutes one of the only lasting pleasures not subject to the hedonic treadmill.

No one can live without a functional ethics, for at its core, an ethics is that which describes a way to live. Ethical argumentation is therefore equally an appeal to pragmatism and the conscience, for the two are not separate: to live pragmatically is to reduce chaos, psychic, environmental, or otherwise, and to reduce chaos is to live pragmatically in accordance with the conscience. And I appeal to this irreducible kernel of desire within you, trusting that you are animated by this same unconscious aesthetic, that beneath all the posturing and the manipulation there remains an ancient capacity for care. It is thus that we render ourselves lovable to the invisible God to which we appeal, distinct from the machinations of tribal politics and sanctimonious virtue signalling. To be loved, you must love; to love, you must not desecrate. And the final rebellion is loving a world that gave you no reason to other than the intuition that to not do so would be to make the world even uglier. I could tell you not to murder because it is a monstrous violation of agency, that it accelerates chaos and tears apart the social fabric, that it will backfire in a karmic fashion, but beneath it all you have no real reason to care about any of this except that it is not beautiful. Even at the end of the world, you may trust that it is not beautiful.

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