Assholes (24 page)
Authors: Aaron James
Hobbes’s insight, which we developed in
chapter 6
, is that cooperative progress is not inevitable. The extent to which assholes pervade and undermine social life is to a large extent up to us. Assholes are produced by society, but society is ours to make and remake. So the acceptability of our social world is not a simple matter of accepting a given; it is ours to choose. We can together reject asshole capitalism and firmly resolve to move toward a more stable, more decent, and more just capitalist order, on a national and global scale.
To the extent we do not, it is because we have collectively chosen not to, not because we must accept and resign ourselves to a lesser fate. (Hence the paradox of Italy: it keeps bringing asshole capitalism onto itself. And yet we can hope that Berlusconi’s ouster is the beginning of its end.) Although
we have emphasized that success in any such collective choice depends on fortunate circumstances, and that no one measure for asshole management could suffice, there is nevertheless much we can do to help ourselves along, to put ourselves in a position to get lucky, and together seize the moments of grace.
Those who are already cooperatively disposed can hold out in cooperative faith and adopt the attitudes that encourage it—attitudes such as tolerance, mutual understanding, and long-suffering. Those of us not yet cooperatively disposed will need a bit of help. Rousseau thus emphasized the paramount importance of moral education.
16
In most present-day societies, we aren’t starting from scratch; the question is whether the institutions of moral learning can be sustained and improved. That will probably mean doubling down on public education, with more humanistic study and less economics (at least at the university level, where it has been shown to make people selfish). It will also probably mean improving religious culture. Catholics might be encouraged to regularly confess the sin of pride. Evangelicals might learn to be less selective in their concern for social justice. It could even mean teaching intelligent design in schools—albeit in philosophy courses rather than science class (which may need to be instituted). To the extent we are on the sinking asshole-capitalist ship, the tired culture wars (e.g., in the United States) are themselves a grave and gathering threat. The proper attitude is “all hands on deck.”
If humanity had a body, it would have an asshole—namely, the asshole himself. Life invariably has a certain foulness, and he embodies it. All too often, fair is foul and foul is fair. Yet the witches of social life cannot foretell our fates. Social life can be fairer and less foul, if, but only if, cooperators of the world unite.
1
. G. A. Cohen, “Rescuing Conservativism: A Defense of Existing Value,” in
Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon
, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar, and Samuel Freeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 203.
2
. How would the attempt work? Would we adopt asshole three-strikes laws? If you swerve through three lanes in traffic, park in the handicapped zone, and speak rudely to the coffee shop barista, you get ten years in jail plus time in an asshole reeducation camp. But would we not invariably sweep up innocent non-asshole jerks or pricks in the enforcement juggernaut? And would not assholes take over the asshole witch hunt?
3
. Immanuel Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” in
Practical Philosophy
, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 473.
4
. John Rawls,
The Law of Peoples
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 128.
5
. As in the ancient Hebrew mountaintop fortress of Masada, whose inhabitants chose dignified mass suicide instead of the murder, rape, and enslavement that would have ensued from an impending Roman invasion.
6
. As portrayed, e.g., in the film
Titanic
. Nero fiddled as Rome burned, but presumably was in a position to do or have done something about it.
7
. These ideas are clearly present in Rawls’s
The Law of Peoples
, but also in his
Political Liberalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and, to a less evident degree, in his landmark
A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
8
. Cohen, “Rescuing Conservativism,” 207–8.
9
. Or rather one of three central elements of conservative conviction. The first is “a bias in favor of retaining what is of [intrinsic] value, even in the face of replacing it by something of greater value.” The second is the personally valued. The third, which is our focus, is “the idea that some things must be accepted as
given
that not everything can, or should, be shaped to
our
aims and requirements; the attitude that goes with seeking to shape everything to
our
requirements both violates intrinsic value and contradicts our own spiritual requirements.” Cohen, “Rescuing Conservatism,” 207.
10
. Cohen, “Rescuing Conservatism,” 208.
11
. Note that Cohen is Rawls’s most famous critic from Rawls’s left and that he means to challenge the “conservativism” of the present-day right as a perversion of its own conservative values. As he puts it, “For the sake of protecting and extending the powers of big wealth, big-C Conservatives regularly sacrifice the small-c conservativism that many of them genuinely cherish. They blather on (as Prime Minister John Major did) about warm beer and sturdy spinsters cycling to church and then they hand Wal-Mart the keys to the kingdom” (“Rescuing Conservativism,” 225). The conventional ways of speaking of “liberal” and “conservative” outlooks, say, in England or the United States, have little meaning from a philosophical perspective.
12
. Rawls would happily accept the Cohen-inspired idea as a friendly amendment. He might also agree that Cohen’s conservativism supplies grounds for rejecting a wealth-maximizing and fetishistic style of capitalism that both Cohen and Rawls reject.
13
. Steven Pinker, in
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
(New York: Viking, 2011), argues that violence has markedly declined through history. Pinker suggests that the key to still less violence or greater peace is to use reason to seek not justice but peace itself, since people will disagree and perhaps go to war over their different views of justice. A major theme in Rawls’s thought (e.g., in
The Law of Peoples
) is that a good measure of (nonretributive) social justice, duly sensitive to “reasonable pluralism,” is a precondition for stable, lasting peace. People must feel they are being treated with sufficient fairness if their willing cooperation is to be sustained.
14
. Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 70.
15
. This is Rawls’s Rousseauian argument in
The Law of Peoples
.
16
. Especially in
Émile
.
(
Written in the spirit of Horace’s epistles: “Now therefore I lay aside both verses, and all other sportive matters; my study and inquiry is after what is true and fitting, and I am wholly engaged in this.”
)
1
My friend:
I write hoping to persuade you to change your basic way of being. I do not presume that you will come to agree with me that you do not have the entitlements you so often assume. Nothing I could say by way of pure reason can coerce you into accepting a view you are simply unwilling to hold. But I do at least want to offer some reasons why you might reconsider your firm stance. Ultimately, of course, you can take them or leave them. My hope is that you give them a hearing.
I’m sure you found my chapters quite unfair to you. I have written much about you without speaking to you directly. I claim you won’t listen, but I have not given you a serious argument. I say you are mistaken but presume that reason supports my position. All of which must lead you to wonder about my motives. Do I think I have a serious argument or not? Instead of my soft, crowd-pleasing disputations, why won’t I just
make my case honestly and forthrightly? Am I too lazy, or too cowardly, to follow reason where it leads? Do I perhaps know and rightly fear that the weakness of my arguments will be exposed?
I take your point. So I address you here to give you my argument, an argument that you really
should
come to recognize others as equals, that you
should
in this way change your basic way of being.
I admit that I present my argument in writing in part for fear of speaking to you in person. When Kafka wrote to his father, he had plenty to say but feared that the right words would evade him under the glare of his father’s supreme confidence. I, too, worry about getting a word in edgewise in person. But while Kafka hoped he and his father could each accept the other’s innocence, I do not seek that way of making peace. I still maintain that, in the dispute between us, you are the one in the wrong. Even if you won’t finally agree with me in this, I have, as you’ll recall from
chapter 7
, made my own kind of peace with this, my own way of accepting as a given that you may never change.
As for why you would listen to me at all, my sense is that I might pique your curiosity. Might I actually understand your much misunderstood position? I have labored, in anger but also in sympathy, to appreciate your perspective. I even have a distant gratitude to you for all I have learned with an uneasy sense that, but by grace and fortune, I could easily be much the same as you. I am also well aware of the intellectual resources at your disposal. Having read Nietzsche, I know that “morality” can be seen as a device of the masses’ wretched envy, of insecure pride expressed in moral language, as a flailing effort to subdue the few and the strong by the weak and the
many. In that view of morality, which you might well agree with, you are the authentic moral hero, while my arguments only aid in the oppression of the great by the small. So I have a sense of what I am up against. Finally, I understand that there can be no refutation of the dug-in skeptic, who denies our knowledge of external things or of objective values. Descartes showed us the folly in expecting proof of human affairs as in mathematics, with its clear and distinct certainty. Reason is a gentler method, which one can decide not to hear. So, you might say, if the envious and unworthy masses will not see good reason to bow to true talent, to accord you the special treatment you in fact deserve, then what can be done about them? Why grant them a hearing at all?
Before I give you my own argument, you might find it of interest to remember the wise and chatty Horace, who shares your appreciation of superiority. He writes to Maecenas:
The wise man’s second only to Jupiter:
He is a king of kings in his own life,
As the Stoics say; free, beautiful, most honored,
And above all else he’s reasonable and sane,
Unless, of course, he’s got a bad toothache.
2
You style yourself as the king of kings in your domain, but not simply because you
do
dominate others. You are
worthy
of ruling others, because you are their better. If so, you must not be like bad poets, of whom Horace says: “If they hear no praise from you, what do they care? / Deaf to your silence
they’ll praise themselves, serenely.”
3
You should be open to wise counsel—if not from me, then maybe from Horace. “All swollen up with love of glory, are you?” Horace offers ironic reassurance:
Nobody’s so far gone in savagery—
A slave of envy, wrath, lust, drunkenness, sloth—
That he can’t be civilized, if he’ll only listen
Patiently to the doctor’s good advice.
4
What might Horace recommend to you? First off, he might suggest taking it easy. You are tense. You stand ever ready to guard your special standing in a bold showing of how you will not be questioned. That cannot be terribly comfortable. And surely you do like to relax, to be at ease, alone or among friends. With a friend, you sometimes grant him his point or cut him slack if he makes a simple error. So why not extend the courtesy to others, if you happened to commit the wrong? Why not be the one who, this time, just admits the mistake, instead of defending your innocence and convincing only yourself? The admission can be quickly made and forgotten, leaving you free for pleasant activities without stewing in hot resentment. Horace and I agree: you should take a long, cold, intelligent look at pleasure; it hurts you if you purchase it with pain. The man whose anger gets out of hand will wish he hadn’t done the things he did to satisfy the hunger of his rage. A fit of rage is a fit of honest-to-goodness madness.
5