Dis-entangled Morality!

Our school assemblies were a site of vain repetition. Little did I (or anyone else, I believe) derive, or remember, much of use. Nonetheless, on occasions words slipped out of the regular speakers, that segued from the tedious routine. On one such occasion, while our principal was sermoning about good individual morality, and students, with not much of a choice at offer, listened silently, a parable was cited in the midst which caught my attention. Apparently, a child by the shore, repeatedly saw hundreds of fish washing up. He started picking them up, one by one, and throwing them back into the water. As someone questioned the rationale of this intervention, as being in vain against the overwhelming odds of the monstrous flow, the child replied with stoic innocence, I am saving one fish at a time.

Thankfully, I no longer have to attend those assemblies, and can no longer be ordered into silence. I afford the luxury of analyzing the story. We clearly grasp the moral here - Do what you can do, and don’t worry about the results. In part, I agree with this maxim, and appreciate the fabled child. Nonetheless, we must also caution from a generalizing principle. A (adult) person who cared enough about the washed-up fish, and was willing to look at the larger picture, would not have confined himself to ‘one fish at a time’. Besides the immediate help, he would have rendered some thought about the larger phenomena. Why do the fish wash up in the first place? What are the different levels of oceanic water? What causes these changes? How does climate affect marine life? If so, what changes climatic patterns? Can we do something to alter the larger phenomenon? In the latter discourse, you see that the person while present in the moment, is not imprisoned in it. He is willing to look at the bigger picture - to comprehend it – hence, to offer better and lasting solutions. To the question of washed-up fish, this discourse offers a more integrative thesis. It does not look at the phenomenon in an isolated manner and does not seek solutions only for the immediate.

Moving from the parable to social life - We often find the ethical propositions of the upper and upper middle-classes, laying claim to universal morality, more akin to the former case than the latter. The ethical norms and purported moral values of these classes suffer from the same short sightedness – not looking beyond the immediate. It looks at morality as a body of metaphysical tenets hovering above our heads. Ethical norms are seen as somehow divorced from the larger make-up of the socio-cultural setting in which these are conceived. Morality for it is essentially a-historical. It is a dis-entangled morality.

The far-reaching results of this class-centric disentangled morality is that it fractures society into multiple fragments – looking at each separately. As such, not only the people, but the various settings that make these people – political, social, cultural, economic, linguistic, are looked as fragments that can be studied in isolation, and remedied with distinctive moral medication. Not able to envision the totality of things and the entangled nature of the social being, it fails to offer a plausible theory sketching society as a whole in its barest outlines. Unable to see the complex nature of intertwining causes that make up a social being, it confines ethics to verbal niceties, facile mannerism, and moral chastisement. It professes its class culture as universal values; failing to situate it in its social and political economy. Much like the child in the story, it remains contained in intellectual infantilism, and refuses to ask bigger and more theoretical questions. Naturally, such a fragmented and ahistorical reading of morality never resonates beyond a certain class setting. Its fragmented nature makes it confined to a sheltered segment of a certain moral arena. Further, it remains couched in a language disassociated with the lived experience of the working classes; who see it as mere class condescension. Its analysis seems far removed from the gross realities of their lives, and its solutions, mere upper-class jargon. The discursive space, however, remains uncontested – ironically, not due to the weight of these arguments, but their laughable implausibility. Consequently, it never gives rise to any significant change, beyond living room discussions; essentially deriding the rest of the world for its loose ethical conduct. Poverty of theory, hence, turns into the theory of inaction.

Acknowledging this poverty of theory is the first step to bridge the gap between social/political economy, and morality. Next, is needed a conception of morality in its historical setting and evolution. As the upper classes hold sway over the public sphere they get to impose their class values as universal values. From podcasts to global conferences, the people, the issues, and the language, is heavily concentrated in upper classes ethos – a form of ‘cultural hegemony’. This imposition however doesn’t work beyond a certain limit. The lived experience of the working classes belies the universal framing of these values. Some forms of (petty) bourgeoisie mannerism and appeal to order doesn’t, and cannot, satisfy the working classes. They find it a comically baffling mix of fashion and opportunism. They might try to emulate it, as a marker of social mobility, but they deeply feel its contents as terrifyingly alien. The limits of bourgeoisie liberalism, as a form of political opportunism, is also apparent. While it again lays claim to universal political morality, its contents are confined to certain reforms without disturbing the larger socio-politico-economic order. Its political morality, much like its ethical propositions, remain deeply class-centric, gendered, and superficial. While it positions its class aspirations as universal, it is only within the narrow frame of the prevalent hierarchical order it wishes to fidget.

This vacuum for organized thought requires an answer. The answer doesn’t lie in the exhortations of ‘dis-entangled morality’, but in an attempt to understand the very nature of entangled morality. This demands not only acknowledging the evolutionary trajectory and historical nature of social norms and ethical values, but also a holistic, discursive, inclusive, gender sensitive, and classless alternative to such exclusive pronouncements of morality. It needs to envision life beyond class-centric frames. Good-Bad binaries must give way to a nuanced picture of how and why people live the way they live. The social nature of the human project, it must recognize, is far more complex than a class - centric approach can possibly see. ‘Being in the world’ is the only way ‘being’ can be understood or posed. Part of the elaborate tapestry of social, political, economic, as well as linguistic community, man is subject to many forces. Morality if it has to mean anything beyond class-fashion or social niceties, has to acknowledge, and factor-in, this complexity. It has to move theoretically, beyond the confines of a cultural ‘habitus’ - a handbook on how to function respectably within a class. Only with such a multifarious approach can windows open into the actual understanding of not only how people behave, but also why they behave the way they do. This does not imply denying freedom or agency to individuals. It only hints at a ‘pre-understanding’ (as hermeneutic philosophy would term it), that is rooted in the enmeshed nature of our being within the historical world. Such an approach to morality allows us to engage in a dialogic process with others, despite different backgrounds. This dialogic nature of interaction brings forth the concerns, reluctances, fears, aspirations, and most of all - agency, for everyone. It is only in this dialogic act that any claim over universally shared ethical norms can be made.  Until then, moral pronouncements of the upper classes, remain nothing more than (petty) bourgeoise fashion.