Moralising myopia
I was having a drink the other night with an agreeable-enough fellow, let’s call him Henry. All was going well until Henry, like the Guardian reader that he is, felt it necessary to bring up the war in Iraq.
Wanting to a) talk about something more interesting, and b) provoke dear old Henry, I treated the topic with a healthy mixture of mockery and flippancy, remarking how at least it was nice that the US military was getting to test out some of its weapons given that they’ve spent so much money developing some pretty cool stuff, and other quips along similar lines.
Henry bore this for a while with a forced knowing smile and a growing sense of indignation. His welling worthiness was never going to stay quiet for long however, and when I expressed shame that Saddam’s beautiful palaces had been turned into the much less attractive ‘rubble with optional civilian body parts and weeping women’, he lost it, and proceeded to make himself look very silly.
Optional blood-soaked Independent-front-page accessories aside, he said, the razing of the palaces was one of the few good things to come out of the war, the symbols of oppression felled, the totems of tyranny terminated. The city could now be rebuilt, he continued, to represent a fairer, democratic, way of life.
Which is all complete crap, of course. Anyone who claims to be unquestioningly opposed to all forms and occurrences of flagrantly oppressive hierarchical structures is a fraud and a liar.
“Henry, you hypocritical swine,” I muttered, “where did you go on your last holiday?”
“Why, Egypt; you know that; but what relevance does it have here? And how am I a hypocrite?”
“Do you remember, upon your return, describing the pyramids as the most amazing thing you’d ever seen (and thus replacing the previous title holder, Moscow)?”
“Yes, and…”
“Were those edifices which so stirred your soul the result of an anarcho-syndacalist commune with a rather nifty aptitude for lumping bricks on top of each other? Or were they rather the result of the taking of some liberties that would make Blair blush? Khufu the Pharoah wasn’t big on workers’ rights, I hear.”
“Don’t be daft. That’s different.”
“Go on…” says I
“They’re not so closely associated with the evils that built them.”
“Give it time. Anyway, by going all goo-goo over the glories of Giza, you’re saying quite clearly that the methods that built them are justified, because it makes you happy to look at them and marvel. If you ask yourself whether you would rather they existed or that both they and the evils employed in their construction didn’t exist, you’re going for the former. That’s okay. They are rather cool, and a bunchâ€â€hell, millionsâ€â€of dead Egyptian slaves mean tit-all to me.
“If you deny such a thing, you bracket yourself with the queer moralisers that think that so long as dead Iraqi babies aren’t on the front pages, then they aren’t so important. And that’s not a pretty place to be. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that oppression has its upsides. We’re all heartless goons; at least some of us are honest.”
At which point Henry finished his drink, uttered a soft, but deliberately audible “idiot”, and got up to leave.
“Same time next week?” I said.
“Of course” replied the deluded, dishonest fool.
It may be that the only difference between the Pyramids and Saddam’s palaces is time. The same may be true of the dialogues of Plato and pub arguments rewritten to grant yourself all the eloquence. But most people would consider there to be a gulf in aesthetic merit, for starters.
My understanding is the pyramids were built by paid workers, not slaves.
Never said they were slaves. Merely intimated that they probably weren’t treated all that well. Khutu was apparently a bit of a nasty chap.
EDIT: Oops, maybe I did. Wrote in a rush. My bad. (Not that it makes a difference to me or the point whether they were slaves or not, but I suppose one really should get these technicalities right now and then…)
Totalitarian/Absolutist* systems build all the best stuff. Fact. And say what you like about the Nazis, they had a great sense of aesthetics – as did the Soviets, when it came to their propaganda posters, at any rate…
(* please note that taking absolutist in the philosophical sense, this also includes the Medieval/early Early Modern Roman Catholic Church, responsible for some of the finest buildings and works of art in Europe – and also for some of the most unpleasant repression of those same periods…)
I was going to include the Nazis and the Soviets (well I did sort of include the Soviets, but I lumped ’em in with the Tsars in the Moscow reference) and the Churches, but in the end, when you can’t be arsed…
St Petersburg is one of my favourite cities, architecturally… slummy wasteland punctuated by amazing enormous statues, palaces and churches. Makes a change from capitalist London – one fairly big impressive building after another, all over the place.
What a weird view, that you have to endorse all of the causal antecedents to some object or event if you approve in any way of any part of it. Just think how easily it generates paradox: say someone cheats on their current spouse, who leaves them, and then marries again, with a renewed faith in fidelity, partly because in light of the harms they and others suffered as a result of the previous infidelity. If there’s any sense in the view you state, they can’t think that their current fidelity is good without equally endorsing their previous infidelity. But that would seem to mean that we can’t learn from mistakes, which, if the story I’ve told plausible, we can.
Other than the fact I was more spitting words than outlining an established view on something, I’m not sure that’s on the same lines.
The point of the above, if there was one, was that “Anyone who claims to be unquestioningly opposed to all forms and occurrences of flagrantly oppressive hierarchical structures is a fraud and a liar.” So, the equivalent in your idea would be that if the infidel went about shouting about the fabness of their newfound faith in fidelity, and that all infidelity was rubbish and crap, they’d be a fraud and a liar, because they’d be failing to see the upside of the original mischief, in that it brought them to where they are now, all happy and stuff.
But if we take this too far, we get into Nietzschean ‘eternal recurrence’ territory, at which point we might as well all go home and read Zarathustra. Actually, we may as well do that anyway, it’s always going to be an astronomically more useful way to spend time than reading blog vomit.
But “unquestion[ing] oppos[ition] to all forms and occurrences of flagrantly oppressive hierarchical structures” isn’t the only position your disputant could have been holding. They could well have been holding another, more obviously reasonable position: that the people who built Saddam’s palaces, and who were denied various goods by the building of those palaces, are still here, and are entitled to resent the existence of them, whereas everyone who built the pyramids is long-dead and past caring about them; that the pyramids are more beautiful/interesting/whatever than Saddam’s by-all-accounts stunningly bad taste palaces. There are all kinds of relevant differences between the pyramids and Saddam’s palaces. To return to the infidelity example, rather than the hypocrisy you imagine, to my mind it’s like saying, there are some goods associated with being unfaithful – the pleasurable thrill of vice, most obviously – but that infidelity is still, on balance, bad. It’s not like the building of monuments of variable merit is a central element in the badness of authoritarian regimes – although such monuments may well come to synbolise certain parts of the badness of those regimes to those who suffer under them. I suppose now, though, you’re going to call me a cold empiricist frog.
“They could well have been holding another, more obviously reasonable position: that the people who built Saddam’s palaces, and who were denied various goods by the building of those palaces, are still here, and are entitled to resent the existence of them, whereas everyone who built the pyramids is long-dead and past caring about them”
One shouldn’t waste their time resenting buildings. Such time is better spent resenting the torturing bastards that might have lived there. I don’t resent the Palace of Westminster because it’s full of people that waste my money. I look at it and think it’s pretty. Fair enough, they then wouldn’t be a fraud and a liar, they’d be an uncouth imbecile instead.
“by-all-accounts stunningly bad taste palaces”
Largely irrelevant, but prettier up and in one piece than down and in several thousand.
“but that infidelity is still, on balance, bad. It’s not like the building of monuments of variable merit is a central element in the badness of authoritarian regimes – although such monuments may well come to synbolise [sic] certain parts of the badness of those regimes to those who suffer under them.”
And we have to lump them together because…? Whether the infidelity is on balance good or bad is a bit too airy for me to give a crap about. ‘On balance’ is a way to oversimplify and obfuscate. The original dispute was over overlooking architectural merit because of some random, ephemeral political nonsense.
“I suppose now, though, you’re going to call me a cold empiricist frog.”
If I was going to go in for shameless personal attacks, I’d start with some entertaining variation on ‘Oxford Scum’ and go from there… but I won’t, so I shan’t… Besides, I don’t think there’s anything that empiricist about your, or my, position. It’s more a question of disassociation and chronological relativism. I, for instance, don’t think the point about people still being alive who might like to see Saddam’s palaces in rubble is important, but that’s probably because I’m a cold-hearted toad, or something…
Either way, I still think the most important part of this discourse is that we would all be better off with the actual Discourses, from which we’d all learn a lot more, even assuming that we’ve all read it a couple of times already.
But if you wish to distract me from my work some more, you’re most welcome, although I can’t promise not to get stratospherically bored extremely quickly…