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Applying Existentialist Ethics

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The third and last chapter of The Ethics Of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir applies the ideas in the first two chapters to the question how one should respond to oppression and tyranny. She focuses on the responses to the Nazis and to the oppression of the proletariat by the capitalists.

The Aesthetic Attitude

Many Frenchmen also sought relief in this thought in 1940 and the years which followed. “Let’s try to take the point of view of history,” they said upon learning that the Germans had entered Paris. And during the whole occupation certain intellectuals sought to keep “aloof from the fray” and to consider impartially contingent facts which did not concern them. Pp. 75-6.

De Beauvoir calls this the aesthetic attitude, and says it is merely flight from reality. In the real world, we are all in this together. What happens to others is our concern. Our freedom exists only in the presence and freedom of others. The aesthetic attitude is an effort to hide from the reality of our own freedom. These people aren’t free: they are locked in a tiny bubble of like-minded cowards (my word, not de Beauvoir’s), people afraid of the existential truth of human existence in the moment of crisis.

She says that the responsibility of the intellectual, the artist, and the critic is to create awareness of existential freedom as a common goal for all humanity, and to encourage everyone to accept the demands of that freedom in the face of tyranny.

How can we do that today? It seems to me that the people carrying whistles and filming the thugs attacking my neighbors in Chicago demonstrate their freedom and challenge to the rest of us to exercise our freedom as best we can. [As a former lawyer I remind everyone that if the goons arrest you while you’re demonstrating your freedom, STFU.]

Freedom And Liberation

The next two sections take up the ethics of dealing with oppression and tyranny. She says we must resist both, with violence if necessary. De Beauvoir follows Kant’s assertion that we are not to treat other people as means to our ends, or as objects, as we would a lump of coal, but as ends in themselves, autonomous creatures acting from their own freedom.

De Beauvoir conflates the ideas of tyranny and oppression, but there’s a useful distinction. The capitalist system is oppressive, in the Marxian sense. The capitalists extract most of the wealth created by systems of production. They claim that this is the natural order of things, and that nothing can be done to correct it. I tell that story in this post.

The oligarchs tell their story everywhere, and vilify every competing story as socialist or communist while never taking it on seriously. This is a standard tactic of the dominant class, as we saw reading Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, as here.

Outside the workplace, the proles are free to pursue their own projects. De Beauvoir is contemptuous of many of those projects, seeing them as tools of further oppression:

… the trick of “enlightened” capitalism is to make [the worker] forget about his concern with genuine justification, offering him, when he leaves the factory where a mechanical job absorbs his transcendence, diversions in which this transcendence ends by petering out: there you have the politics of the American employing class which catches the worker in the trap of sports, “gadgets,” autos, and frigidaires. Pp. 87-88.

Tyranny is better seen as the domination of a social order by one person who treats all others as ends, fit only to fulfill the desires of the tyrant. Tyrants can limit the freedom of every individual in all aspects of their lives at all times, whether or not they choose to do so.

The difference between these two is reflected in the means used to resist. Oppression operates largely by mystification. People are acculturated to the capitalist system from birth, and have no means to construct an alternate view or attract a significant number of people even to question it. Thus this post. But this kind of change only occurs when enough people are ready to move into a different form of economic organization, Violence won’t make anyone change their minds about capitalism.

Tyranny either dies when the tyrant’s line dies out, as with Soviet Russia, or it is resisted with violence, as with Hitler and Mussolini. Treating the tyrants and their minions as objects is necessary if we are to remove their ability to restrict the freedom of ourselves and others. And it is fully justified.

The desirable thing would be to re-educate [them]; it would be necessary to expose the mystification and to put the men who are its victims in the presence of their freedom. But the urgency of the struggle forbids this slow labor. We are obliged to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint. P. 98.

The Future

De Beauvoir says that the struggle for freedom is never-ending. In part this is the necessary result of her notion of freedom as generating new ways to be human, opening new futures for all. But also it results from the fact that we are merely human, and thus operate under many different forces. Many people will not accept their freedom, some will not accept new freedoms, others will accept it partially, as with the Adventurer, and still others will use it for their own private ends. Some will use it to oppress or tyrannize others. Some will not be willing to see themselves as oppressors in the Capitalist System or otherwise. The future is open, but only if we make it so.

Conclusion

One problem with reading texts like this one is the nagging feeling of elitism they generate. Throughout this book, de Beauvoir is judgmental. The descriptions of her categories is a good example, as is her snide comment on Frigidaires above. In the end, she seems to say that most people will never achieve her notion of freedom, but that it is the goal of people like her to show everyone their freedom and let them choose. Should we characterize that as elitism? If so, is that bad, or just annoying to people unwilling to cope with her level of abstraction?

In the end, I don’t see answers to the question I raised at the outset: what should we do to defeat rising fascism. We see signposts for a bad future in Arendt and Polyani but we don’t see off-ramps. We get ideas about how people think in other readings. We see responses and justifications for those responses in de Beauvoir. It’s disappointing that the best minds of that era have no answers for their future readers. But there we are. People who want their freedom will find a way. Maybe it starts with whistles.

 

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Neoliberal Individuals

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Index to posts in this series

Note: This post may be helpful in understanding the ideas here and in other posts in this series.

Many of my early posts at Emptywheel were devoted to  neoliberalism. I focused on its impact on the national economy. I saw it as the intellectual (I use the term loosely) force behind the deregulation policies of both legacy parties in the post-Reagan era. These policies gave us several financial crashes that hurt millions of Americans. Also, they gave us at least 813 billionaires who have taken control of our government.

I thought that the success of Biden’s Keynesian economic policies proved once and for all that neoliberalism was trash. I was wrong.

Neoliberalism had another deadly barb: homo economicus. This cursed idea is that human beings are isolated rational consumers focused on maximizing their own utility in head-to-head conflict with other consumers. This is a stupid, evil idea. I thought that even religious fundamentalists would reject it because their preachers insist that humans were created in the image of the Almighty, and conflict-based consumption could never be an attribute of an all-powerful Deity. I was wrong.

People who hold this view of themselves think that everything they have is the result of their own actions, and is the just reward for their goodness and risk-taking. If they have little or nothing, it’s their own fault. They aren’t good enough at the conflict, and deserve what they get.

An ideal alternative

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition lays out a better view of human nature. I say better because it emphasizes the potential of our species. In my last post I quoted this summary of her thinking on our current situation.

For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. …

Snip

Arendt articulates her conception of modernity around a number of key features: these are world alienation .… World alienation refers to the loss of an intersubjectively constituted world of experience and action by means of which we establish our self-identity and an adequate sense of reality.

Arendt thinks we have lost  the source of our power as human beings. In Chapter 28, she says that our power comes from our ability to engage with each other in the public sphere by speech and action. Power disappears when that ability is not present. She writes:

What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss.

Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities. Kindle Edition p. 200, my paragraphing.

I read Arendt as saying that we have the ability to make and enforce decisions as a group, but only if we are prepared to meet each other in open discussion, in a setting where “words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities” and actions are used “to create new realities”. I think she is saying that we have lost this capacity.

Arendt contrasts forms of government arising from her conception of power with tyranny. Chairman Mao said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Arendt disagrees. She says that isn’t power, it’s violence.

Tyrants destroy power by isolating the tyrant from the subjects, and by isolating the subjects from each other. The primary tool of the tyrant is violence, which, she says, is stronger than power. Subjects might be able to pursue their own interests in arts, crafts, or manufacture. But they are impotent, they lack the power to  dream new dreams, to create new realities. She says  that the tyrant has the ability even to take from the subjects their own projects. This is what happened in George Orwell’s 1984.

Discussion

1. The theoretical framework of Arendt’s views of power seems to harmonize with my story of human evolution through cooperation.

2. There is no place for speaking and acting in our current political structure. The Republicans are a top-down group. The rubes who support it take their marching orders from its lieutenants, especially right-wing preachers, right-wing talking heads, and the incredible array of anti-vaxxers, Qrazies, and grifters on right-wing social media. They gain power by isolating their voters from alternative views.

The Democratic Party is just as bad, but in a different way. How many times have you written a legislator on an issue and gotten a reply email saying thank you for your interest I love to hear from you little people vote for me and give me money now go buy stuff?

There are plenty of smart people identifying problems and offering solutions, and plenty more working to sharpen those ideas. But professional Democrats don’t listen. They pat you on the head and smirk behind their hands. When things don’t go their way they blame you. We have forged places to do this public work, but we are ignored by the rich people and out-of-date incumbents who dominate the party..

Democratic politicians do not see the left as an element of power. I have no idea where they think power comes from. Money? Incumbency? Their magnetic personalities?

2. The people who voted for Trump are responsible for our immediate situation. They refused to participate in good faith in the political system. Their motivation is irrelevant. They want something and like good neoliberals they don’t care how they get it. Politics is a field of conflict, just like the fight for resources. They have internalized the neoliberal view of themselves as chimpanzees fighting over a termite mound.

If that means supporting a tyrant, then fine. The tyrant will crush their competitors and give them what they want.

3. The people who didn’t vote in the last election abdicated their own potential power and their own capacity to participate in power. They quietly submit to whatever damage Trump and his henchmen inflict on them and their families. They have internalized the second part of Homo Economicus: they believe they deserve whatever happens to them. They are passive and unseeing, unable even to recognize the depravity of their treatment.

4. I think both Trump voters and non-voters are to blame for our current situation. They cannot escape their responsibility and I will not excuse their behavior.

But they didn’t act randomly. Their attitudes are created by their experiences in their environment. The people shaping those environment are the truly contemptible shitheads.
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Front page image by Lear 21 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0,

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