Book Recommendation: Amsterdam

I’m not much of a fiction reader, but this book is just superb! I read it in a single sitting last week, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for more than a few hours. Check it out.

On Complexity in Ethics

Literary critics are moral advisers simply because they have an exceptionally large range of acquaintance. They are moral advisers not because they have special access to moral truth but because they have been around. They have read more books and are thus in a better position not to get trapped in the vocabulary of any single book.

– Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p. 80-81

In this typically provocative remark, Richard Rorty suggests that literary critics, poets and authors ought to be humanity’s moral guides, rather than philosophers, scientists or Christians. The reason for this is because ‘they have been around.’ They have read or written books in which you encounter strange people, strange families and strange communities. They have experienced some of the depth of human possibility.

What I like about this quote in the way in which Rorty prioritizes an awareness of and an empathy with complexity. He holds that the person most qualified to speak about right and wrong is the person who is aware of how socially conditioned moral norms can be, of how many different shapes and sizes ethical expression can take, of how contingent upon a tradition ethical reasoning can be, of how any moral system can be shot through with subjectivity and fragmentation, of how fragile and intricate moral agents can be, and how complex, messy and confusing ethical problems can be.

I ultimately disagree with Rorty’s prioritizing of experience over knowledge, as  I think the epistemic task of attempting to access moral truth is far from a fruitless one. But I agree that there is a complexity to ethics which those who chase after the epistemic certainties can often ignore, or at least dilute. People, cultures, norms, attempts at reasoning, actions, history’s consequences, and institutions are complex. Ethics which impose an overly simple framework on this complexity often do so by trimming away diversity and difference, and in the process, excluding certain people’s experiences from really counting, or deeming some people’s way of life as being not that important.

What do you think of Rorty’s remark? What do you think the role of ‘experts’ who are aware of complexities ought to be in an ethical conversation?

For an interesting take on this theme from a different angle, check out Jamie Dunk’s review of the film The Reader. (Pun unintended.)

How a Novel Can Save the World

[Political progress] is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers…This process of coming to see other human beings as ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of the re-description of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as…the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens…gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like…Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us re-describe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principle vehicles of moral change and progress.

– Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p. xvi.

In this fascinating excerpt Richard Rorty makes a few large claims. First, he claims that societies make progress in the most important sense not from the results of inquiry, but through imagination. Because of this, art, literature and film take on an enormously important political role, which leaves philosophy and other areas of inquiry relatively sidelined. Rorty believes that art is able to change and affect the way we see the world in a way which inquiry is never able to. It is important in both educating a society about the ‘other’ and in affecting their sentiments towards this ‘other’ such that reconciliation is not only a possibility but is put forward as the most attractive and human option. Through the telling of a story, a novel is able to affect the way in which you see the world. It catches you and your limited point of view up in its narrative and tells you about people and place in new ways which leave you changed. This is similar to what Foucault thought the purpose of descriptive history was – to show you hidden complexities and anomalies about the world you thought you knew, and in the process, to show you hidden complexities and anomalies about yourself.

Given this, I’m surprised at Rorty’s quick dismissal of the sermon as a vehicle of cultural change. Actually, I’m not surprised since Rorty is no fan of formal religion, least of all Christianity, but I think this statement is in tension with the really interesting point he is making. Christianity has a rich tradition of story telling. It tells a story about hope, love and overcoming otherness. A story which millions of people have listened to and have heard echos of their own story in, and which has gradually re-described the world and the self to them. A story which through re-describing the world and what it is to be a human has compelled many to the positive social and political activity of caring for the forgotten and despised, and of reaching out to the other. Two quotes put this in a nice light.

English Bishop Tom Wright has said,

[Scripture] is not, for a start, a list of rules, though it contains many commandments of various sorts and in various contexts. Nor is it a compendium of true doctrines, though of course many parts of the Bible declare great truths about God, Jesus, the world and ourselves in no uncertain terms. Most of its constituent parts, and all of it when put together whether in the Jewsih canonical form or the Christian one, can best be described as story.

– N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God (2005), p. 19

American theologian Stanley Hauerwas has said,

Too often we have conceived of salvation – what God does to us in Jesus – as a purely personal decision, or a matter of finally getting our heads straight on basic beliefs, or of having some inner feelings of righteousness about ourselves and God, or of having our social attitudes readjusted. I suggest that salvation is not so much a new beginning but rather a beginning in the middle, so to speak. Faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance. The story began without us, as a story of the peculiar way God is redeeming the world, a story that invites us to come forth and be saved by sharing in the work of a new people whom God has created in Israel and Jesus. Such movement saves us by (1) placing us within an adventure that is nothing less than God’s purposes for the whole world, and (2) communally training us to fashion our lives in accordance with what is true rather than what is false…

The little story I call my life is given cosmic, eternal significance as it is caught up within God’s larger account of history. ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves…, the Lord brought us out…that he might preserve us’. The significance of our lives is frighteningly contingent on the story of another. Christians are those who hear this story and are able to tell it as our salvation.

– Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (1989), p. 52, 55.