Department of Lost Things: Moral Disappointment

We here in the DoD continue our efforts to pick up the shards of our curiosity following the unhappy discovery that indeed we did not, and do not, want to know all the things.  Worried that this discovery could prompt others equally unhappy, we decided instead to focus on something we would like to know:  How to get good at moral disappointment.  This seems to us an understudied area in need of urgent attention.

See, what strikes us here in the DoD is that the world is presently full of provocations to rage.  Well, to be fair, moral outrage.  There is much to inspire anger and a lot of it would be righteous moral outrage.  But the problems with this are several.  Rage, and its better-groomed cousin, moral outrage, can get pretty indiscriminate.  It’s hard sometimes to attach them to the right targets and we note in ourselves a vulnerability to making one target the symbolic stand-in for many.  Which is to say pity the poor hapless creature that encounters us in that moment long accumulated outrage must at long last erupt.  Rage and outrage resist our efforts at measure, though we fancifully sometimes imagine how delightful it would be to host a dinner party of rage, one in which we invite all our enemies and serve each just his allotted portion.  Alas, we do know ourselves well enough to realize it could never be so.  We might start decorously, allotting a teaspoon here and a ladle there, but in the end, ‘twould be but a food fight.    

Not only are we bad at keeping things in measure with our targets, we also note about ourselves a certain inconstancy with rage.  What sets us off can be unpredictable and a little arbitrary.  This is nothing so simple as getting mad at the wrong things for the wrong reasons, but about how fractious and unreliable our attention is.  We’re never sure we’re noticing all the things we ought, and so have to grant that we might well be raging at one while legions pass by without note.  We’re a little worried that we’re sounding like Seneca, that endearing old hypocrite, but he did know how to turn a phrase so let’s go ahead and imitate him to say plainly:  Why get angry at parts of life when all of it calls for your rage?  That may be a bit too far – surely we can summon enough optimism not to write off all of life – but the point is that rage arrives when it does, not always when it ought.  And if it did arrive when it ought, it would have to set up house with us.

Noticing all of this, we decided that the better course than raging would be to address ourselves to resisting it.  So we engaged in one of our more reliable strategies for building equanimity.  To wit, the Buddhist injunction to greet rage with the mental recitation:  “We here are struggling.”  Alas, times are tough and we are weak, and our efforts to quell enmity this way produced but pain. For it turns out that, at least for us unenlightened sorts in the DoD, a good thing can go bad if overused.  Like an overtaxed racehorse, we pulled up lame with the massive effort at answering so much of life this way:  “We here are struggling.   We here are struggling.  We here are struggling!  We here are GODDAMN FUCKING STRUGGLING! AUGH!”  That’s a more entertaining way of saying something radically disappointing about ourselves:  We find that peaceful strategies for containing rage sometimes just piss us right off.

In light of this, we have had to resort to more elaborate strategies of managing ourselves.  If the Buddha could not help, perhaps a little judicious navel-gazing could.  What, we asked ourselves, is it about us that so tempts us to rage?  Not wanting to get derailed by the easy misanthropic thought that it is the awfulness of other people that so provokes us, we looked elsewhere.  What we found is that, at root, it comes out of a rather optimistic longing: We really want to think well of other people.  We like liking other people.  This is not to say that liking them is easy, but to say that it is nice.  Nicer still is when they make it easy to like them – like by not fucking up, doing awful shit, and being mean.  One way to think about our rage, then, is to see it as hooked in to disappointed hope, a way of saying:  You are making it really hard for me to like you.  And maybe in the worst cases, making it hard not to hate all of humanity.  But if that’s the case at least some of the time, then what we need most is a way to register all of this without resorting to rage.  Enter moral disappointment.

Compared to moral disappointment, rage seems easy.  We’re not entirely sure what all a philosophy of moral disappointment would need to include, but it would have a heady dose of longing:  longing to want to think well of others, longing to have relationships with them stay fruitful and meaningful, longing to take both moral challenges and the people who stumble through them seriously.  It would avidly partition and parcel rather than totalize, seeking to hold out for hard thoughts, that good people can still be good even when they let us down.  It would avidly resist contempt and humiliation in favor of cultivating a capacity to tarry in the knotty mess of human complexity and incompleteness.

We thus find ourselves wishing that somewhere along the way philosophy had swerved into close study of this, into the phenomenology of moral disappointment.  All of the usual stuff that moral philosophers natter on about – moral evaluation, judgment, accountability, responsibility – can obscure this far less abstract human side of it all.  Assuming all those things are in the right place and you did morally mess up, the more experientially salient thing might just be this:  I wanted you to be better than that precisely because I want to like you and want powerfully not to despair of you or of humanity as a whole.  (Not to mention that when we ourselves mess up, it would be nice to have others feel this way about us.) Because of that, what we need is not some way to justify outrage and attach it to you, but instead a rich emotional language of moral disappointment, a way to feel our way through the contradictions and complexities of human relational hopes.  That would be nice.

Department of Lost Things: Herd Sense

Out at the DoD satellite ag campus, we recently found ourselves idly studying cattle and courting dangerous ideas.  The cows were napping en masse in the shade of some trees.  Then, as one, they all headed into the sun to graze awhile.  Presumably having eaten their fill, they then meandered to the muddy pond for some spa bathing.  Finally, all together, they headed back for the shade and another round of napping. 

We here at the DoD are well familiar with the ways bovine and herd are deployed pejoratively to describe people. And of course, deviant itself is a term that might well invoke the opposite of just these pejoratives, the deviant being that which strays from the herd.  But given that we inhabit an age in which purported independence and non-conformity are all the rage, perhaps the more deviant gesture is to cast a more charitable eye on cattle?  At any rate, what we’re really ruing around here is that too few thinker types ever engaged in farming or indeed any manner of manual labor.  The lack of hard physical work among the intellectual class of course leaves all sorts lacunae in human inquiry, but we’ll stick for now to cattle or, more particularly, exposure to actual cows, as opposed to the fictive cows of thinker-imaginings from the armchair.

 Professional Bovine Types Doing Herd Stuff

In watching the DoD satellite ag campus cattle, we could not help noticing how much plain good sense their behavior makes.  We can’t go so far as to say we want to be like cows, but neither can we find being bovine or part of the herd the insult it is meant to be.  For we were struck by how admirably untroubled those cattle were by anxiety about their group and how none brought any pressure to bear on their peers to come along and follow.  It was more as if when one cow acted as a pilot cow, going off in some new way, the others thought, huh, that looks interesting, let’s try that. 

It’s surely fanciful to suppose that cattle know a good idea when they see it, but there are some more commendable things going on here.  Where human “herds” are depicted as coercive, cattle herds seem significantly more friendly.  Cattle are vulnerable creatures and so their tendency to stick together is sensible.  When a calf gets separated from the herd – say, by straying through a fence – the others tend to wait around rather than leaving it behind to fend for itself.  Likewise, cows appear to babysit each other’s calves, such that an unrelated heifer may take charge of another’s offspring for a bit.  Where calves are concerned, they seem to get that it takes a village.  Or a herd.  Best of all, cattle generally accept newcomers to their herds.  They’re not prima facie suspicious of additions and incomers, but instead tend generally to greet new cows with an unexceptional, “Oh, hey, let’s eat.”  So while they together constitute a bovine herd, it’s not the bovine herd your sneering non-conformist thinker types warn you about.  In fact, it looks a lot like a rather generous solidarity.   

Because of all of this, we can’t help wondering how thinker-types with actual farming experience might have swerved human sociality and solidarity differently.  Or how much more interesting discussion of the individual might get if we could drop the dripping disdain in announcing the “bovine” in others.

Department of Lost Things: Moral Motivation

As announced previously, we now have a Department of Lost Things.  While our post heading might suggest we’ve lost our moral motivation, today is one of our better days on that score.  Yesterday, not so much.  Still, there are things we wish we knew, ways we wish talk of moral motivation had swerved back in the day.

Lost:  Why be Moral?  Poor Folks Edition

We wish knew what might have happened to the why-be-moral question had it been asked without the jewelry.  From what we see, this question swerved at the Ring of Gyges and so a whole trajectory of thought confesses its origins right there:  Why be moral if you can get away with whatever you want?  That question strikes us as rich.  Not “rich” in the sense of full of depth, but “rich” in the sense of being a rich folks’ query. 

By the time anyone has the language or cognitive resources to ask, “why be moral?” they also already have a social existence that grounds the question.  For a rich person, it seems compelling to wonder why I should be moral if I could get away with anything I want.  The wealthy and the comfortable are free to see this in a variety of ways:  morality as a barrier to full exertion of power and morality as a possible path to even better living, to name just two.

But, we wonder, how different would inquiry into the question be if it had originated with the poor? The social situation of the question seems to be a difference that makes a difference.  A poor person would be asking the question embedded in a social existence in which “morality” is already suspect.  And not because morality is the thing standing between me and some excellent jewelry-induced adventures, but because morality might well seem like a bogus construct that hasn’t done me any favors.  Or because I’m just too hungry and tired to see the point of much beyond securing survival a little bit longer.  Such is to say that the question seems transformed if given an inflection of hopelessness and righteously cynical despair.  Maybe asking the question from poverty would expose how very much the question already is and always was social?  And make far less plausible and compelling all the answers dwelling on the individual’s motivations for morality?  We don’t know.  That’s why we wish a poor folks’ swerve in why-be-moral question had happened.

DoD Founds Department of Lost Things

Given our mission of trying to know more things, we here in the DoD perennially rue things lost along the way through the vagaries of history.  Philosophy, it seems to us, has contingent swerves, not unlike Lucretian atomic movement.  A seemingly simple swerve in how a question is framed or in what question gets taken up or by whom, and the philosophical trajectory takes one shape rather than another.  What sometimes fills our idle moments in the DoD is wondering how things might have shaped up if a swerve had gone some different way.  And we get a touch of the wistful melancholy realizing we’ll likely never know.  Some things are just lost.

Because of this, we decided some way to manage the chaos of unfulfilled curiosity was in order, so we have created a Department of Lost Things.  So, here’s what we’re missing today.

Lost:  What pregnant Roman women thought about Seneca’s rather martial counsel on death anxiety, with his many military and warrior-like exemplars.  Did they laugh at this quaint, brave boy boldly scorning death?  After all, their chances of dying in childbirth exceeded any Roman soldier’s chance of meeting death on the battlefield.  And if they survived pregnancy, chances are they ended up burying some of their children anyway.  Those women must have been tough as nails.  Pregnant Roman women swerving philosophical death dialogue would have been something to behold, we’re sure.  We wish we knew what they thought.