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THE CALL TO love thy neighbor as thyself, says Sigmund Freud, is one of the fundamental precepts of civilized life (and, according to some, one of its fundamental ethical demands).1 But it is also most contrary to the kind of reason that such civilization promotes: the reason of self-interest, of pursuit of happiness. Is civilization therefore based on an irresolvable contradiction? So it seems; if one followed Freud’s suggestions, one would come to the conclusion that the founding precept of civilization might be embraced only if one adopted Tertullian’s famed admonition to credere quia absurdum (believe because it is absurd).
Indeed, it is enough to ask “Why should I do it?” “What good will it do me?” to realize the absurdity of the demand to love one’s neighbor “as thyself”—any neighbor, just because he or she happens to be within sight and reach. If I love someone, he or she must deserve it in some way. He deserves it if he is so much like me in so many important ways that I can love myself in him; she deserves it yet more if she is so much more perfect than I am that I can love in her the ideal of my own self. “But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him.”2 The demand feels even more inane and, above all, irksome because all too often I cannot find much evidence that the stranger whom I am supposed to love loves me, or even shows me “the slightest consideration. When it suits him, he would not hesitate to injure me, jeer at me, slander me and show me his superior power.” And so, Freud asks, “What is the point of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable?” One is tempted to conclude, he says, against good sense, that “love your neighbour” is “a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs as strongly counter to the original nature of man.”
The less likely a norm is to be obeyed, the more likely it is to be stated with resolve and obstinacy. And the injunction to love one’s neighbor is perhaps less likely to be obeyed than any other norm. When the Talmudic sage Rabbi Hillel was challenged by a prospective convert to explain God’s teaching while the challenger stood on one foot, he offered “love thy neighbor as thyself” as the only—and yet complete—answer, encapsulating the totality of God’s injunctions. But the Talmudic story does not tell whether the challenger’s conversion followed that answer. Indeed, accepting Rabbi Hillel’s command would be a leap of faith; a decisive but awfully difficult leap, through which man breaks out of the carapace of “natural” drives, urges, and predilections and sets himself against nature, turning into the “unnatural” being that humans are, unlike the beasts (and indeed the angels, as Aristotle pointed out).
Accepting the precept of loving one’s neighbor is the birth-act of humanity. All other routines of human cohabitation, as well as the predesigned or retrospectively discovered norms and rules, are but a never-complete list of footnotes to that precept. We can go a step further and say that, since this precept is the preliminary condition of humanity, civilization, and civilized humanity, if this precept were to be ignored or thrown away, there would be no one extant to recompose that list or ponder its completeness.
But let me add right away that although loving your neighbor may not be a staple product of the survival instinct, neither is self-love, which is designated the model of neighborly love. Self-love—what does that mean? What do I love “in myself”? What do I love when I love myself?
It is true that self-love prompts us to “stick to life,” to try hard to stay alive for better or worse, to resist and fight back against whatever may threaten life’s premature termination and to protect, or better yet increase, that fitness and vigor that we hope will make the resistance (and so the protection) effective. In this, however, our near or distant animal cousins are masters no less accomplished and seasoned than the most dedicated and artful fitness addicts and health fiends among us. Our animal cousins (except the domesticated ones, whom we have managed to strip of their natural endowments so that they can better serve our survival, rather than their own) need no experts to tell them how to stay alive and be fit. Nor do they need self-love to instruct them that staying alive and fit is the right thing to do.
Survival (the animal survival, the physical, bodily survival) can do without self-love. As a matter of fact, it may do better without it than with it. The survival instinct and self-love may be parallel roads, but they may also run in opposite directions. Self-love may rebel against the continuation of life if we find that life hateful rather than lovable. Self-love can prod us to reject survival if our life is not up to love’s standards and therefore not worth living.
What we love when we “love ourselves” is a self fit to be loved. What we love is the state, or the hope, of being loved—of being an object worthy of love, being recognized as such, and being given proof of that recognition.
In short: in order to have self-love, we need to be loved or to have hope of being loved. Refusal of love—a snub, a rejection, denial of the status of a love-worthy object—breeds self-hatred. Self-love is built of the love offered to us by others. Others must love us first, so that we can begin to love ourselves.
And how do we know that we have not been snubbed or dumped as a hopeless, unworthy case? How do we know that love is, may be, will be forthcoming, that we are worthy of it? We know it, we believe that we know it, and we are reassured that our belief is not mistaken when we are talked to and listened to; when we are listened to attentively, with an interest that signals the listener’s readiness to respond. We gather then that we are respected. It is from the state of being respected by others that we derive the conclusion that what we think, do, or intend to do counts. That we matter. That our staying alive makes a difference. That we are worthy of being cared for.
If others respect me, then, obviously, there must be “in me” something that only I can offer to others; and obviously there are such others who would be glad to be offered it and grateful if they were. I am important, and what I think and say and do is important as well. I am not a cipher, easily replaced and disposed of. I “make a difference,” and not just to myself. What I say and what I am and do matters—and this is not just my own flight of fancy. Whatever there is in the world around me, that world would be poorer, less interesting, and less promising if I were suddenly to cease to exist.
If this is what makes us right and proper objects of self-love, then the call to love our neighbors as ourselves (that is, to expect our neighbors to wish to be loved for the same reasons that prompt our self-love) invokes the neighbors’ desire to have the dignity of their unique, irreplaceable, and undisposable value similarly recognized and confirmed. That call prods us to assume that the neighbors do indeed represent such value—at least until proven otherwise. Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves would mean, then, respecting each other’s uniqueness—valuing each other for our differences, which enrich the world we jointly inhabit and make it a more fascinating and enjoyable place.
This is, however, one side of the story—the brighter side. To be in the presence of an Other also has its dark side. The Other may be a promise, but it is also a threat. He or she may arouse contempt as much as respect, fear as much as awe. The big question is, which of the two is more likely to happen?
Philosophers have been divided in their answers to this question. Hobbes, for instance, famously suggested that if people were not coerced to behave nicely, they would be at each other’s throats. Rousseau, however, equally famously supposed that it is because of coercion that people become cruel and harm each other. Some others still, for example, Nietzsche and Scheler, suggested that either possibility may come out on top, depending on what kinds of people engage (or are cast) in the mutual relationship, and under what circumstances.
Both Nietzsche and Scheler point to ressentiment as a major obstacle to loving the Other as thyself. (While they wrote in German, they used the French term ressentiment, the complex meaning of which is less than perfectly conveyed by the more straightforward English term “resentment.” To fully grasp what the two philosophers had in mind, when writing and thinking in English it would be better to deploy such terms as rancor, repugnance, acrimony, grudge, umbrage, spite, malignancy—or better still, a combination of all of them.) Though they use the same term, however, Nietzsche and Scheler refer to somewhat different types of enmity.
For Nietzsche, ressentiment is what the downcast, the deprived, the discriminated against, and the humiliated feel toward their “betters” (the self-proclaimed betters and self-established betters): the wealthy, the powerful, the free to self-assert and capable of self-asserting, those who claim the right to be respected together with the right to deny (or refute) their inferiors’ right to dignity. For those “inferiors” (the “lesser people,” the “lower classes,” the masses, plebeians, hoi polloi), acknowledging the rights of their “betters” would be tantamount to accepting their own inferiority and lesser, or nonexistent, dignity. Ressentiment is for that reason a curious, inherently ambiguous mixture of genuflection and acrimony, but also of envy and spite. We might say that the deepest cause of ressentiment is precisely the agony of that irresolvable ambivalence, or as Leon Festinger would say, that “cognitive dissonance”: approving of the qualities one does not possess necessarily involves disapprobation, and respect for the “betters” entails for the “lesser people” the surrendering of self-esteem. One would therefore expect in the case of ressentiment, as in all cases of acute cognitive dissonance, the emergence of an overwhelming desire to deny that double bind: to recover one’s own self-esteem (that is, the right to dignity) through denying the superiority of superiors—in other words, through postulating an equality of rank, at least, and the right to deference. For Nietzsche, this was the source of all religions, and of Christianity above all, with its postulate of the equality of all men before God and the same commandments, the same ethical code, binding all. In Nietzsche’s rendition, ressentiment leads not to more freedom but to mitigating the pain of one’s own un-freedom by denying freedom to all, and to alleviating the pain of one’s own indignity by pulling others down from the heights they managed to make their exclusive property to one’s own level of lowliness or mediocrity, slavery or semi-slavery.
For Max Scheler ressentiment is, however, a feeling most likely to appear among equals—felt by the members of the middle classes toward each other and prompting them to compete feverishly for similar stakes, to promote themselves while demoting the others “like them.” Scheler’s concept of ressentiment and of the role it plays in society is essentially opposite to Nietzsche’s. For Nietzsche, ressentiment results in a fight against inequality and a pressure to level down the extant social hierarchies. For Scheler, it is quite the opposite: starting from an equal social standing and a similar predicament, members of the middle classes—as self-asserting and self-defining free agents—strive to lift themselves up and push the others down. Freedom comes as part of a package deal with inequality: my freedom manifests itself in, and is measured by, the degree to which I manage to limit the liberty of others who claim to be my equals. Ressentiment results in competition, in an ongoing struggle for the redistribution of power and prestige, social reverence and socially recognized dignity. “Ostentatious consumption,” famously described by Thorstein Veblen—that shameless display of one’s own opulence and wealth to humiliate others who don’t have the resources to respond in kind—is a vivid example of the kind of behavior that Scheler’s variety of ressentiment tends to generate.
We may add a third instance of ressentiment, a timeless kind, but in our times probably the most indomitable obstacle to “loving thy neighbor.” Seemingly unstoppable, it rises in importance with the growing “fluidity” of social settings, the dissipation of comfortable routines, the increasing frailty of human bonds, and the atmosphere of uncertainty, insecurity, and diffuse, underdefined, free-floating, and unanchored fear in which we live. This is the ressentiment toward strangers—people who, precisely because they are unfamiliar and thus unpredictable and suspect, are vivid and tangible embodiments of the resented and feared fluidity of the world. They serve as natural, handy effigies in which the specter of the world falling apart may be burned; as natural props in exorcism rituals against the evil spirits threatening the orderly lives of the pious.
Among the resented strangers, pride of place is accorded today to the refugees, asylum seekers, and simply impoverished exiles from impoverished parts of the planet. They are, as Bertolt Brecht once put it, “the harbingers of ill tidings.” They remind us, on whose doors they knock, just how insecure our security is, how feeble and vulnerable our comfort, how poorly safeguarded our peace and quiet.
Tribal wars and massacres, the proliferation of guerrilla armies (often little more than bandit gangs in thin disguise) busy decimating each other’s ranks while absorbing and annihilating the “population surplus” (mostly the unemployable and prospectless youth)—these are some of the most spectacular and horrifying outcomes of the “negative globalization” that threatens conditions of life for everyone but affects most directly the so-called latecomers to modernity. Hundreds of thousands of people are chased from their homes, murdered or forced to run for their lives beyond the borders of their own country. It seems the sole thriving industry in the lands of the latecomers to modernity (deviously and deceitfully dubbed “developing countries”) is the mass production of refugees.
Refugees are stateless, but stateless in a new sense: their statelessness is raised to an entirely new level by the nonexistence of the state to which their statehood could be referred. They are, as Michel Agier put it in his most insightful study of the refugees in the era of globalization, hors du nomos—outside law; not this or that law of this or that country, but law as such.3 They are outcasts and outlaws of a novel kind, the products of globalization and the epitome and incarnation of its frontier spirit. To quote Agier again, they have been cast into a condition of “liminal drift,” which may be transitory or permanent; even if stationary for a time, they are in a state of movement that will never be complete because their destination (arrival or return) remains unclear, and a place they could call “final,” inaccessible. They are never to free themselves from the gnawing sense of transience, the indefiniteness and provisional nature of any settlement. They represent every premonition and fear that haunts our sleepless nights, even when we stifle and repress them with the busyness of our working days.
The human waste of the global frontier, the refugees, are the outsiders incarnate, the absolute outsiders, outsiders resented and greeted everywhere with rancor and spite. They are out of place everywhere except in places that are themselves out of place—the “nowhere places” that appear on no maps that ordinary tourists use on their travels. And once outside, indefinitely outside: a secure fence with watchtowers is all that is needed to make the “indefiniteness” of the out-of-place hold forever.
Emmanuel Levinas, acclaimed by many as the greatest ethical philosopher of the last century, was a disciple of Edmund Husserl. His own first studies and publications, starting with his prize-winning essay of 1930 on the role assigned to intuition in Husserl’s work, were dedicated to the exegesis and interpretation of the teachings of the founder of modern phenomenology; they remain explicit testimonies to that intellectual debt. And this starting point determined to a great extent the trajectory of Levinas’s own oeuvre—though his mode of reasoning and his methods, rather than his cognitive targets or his findings and substantive propositions, were in quite a few crucial respects the opposite of Husserl’s.
What Levinas owed to Husserl in the first place was the daring feat of phenomenological reduction—in Levinas’s own words, that “act of violence that man does to himself . . . in order to find himself again as pure thought”—and the stimulus, encouragement, and authoritative endorsement for the even greater boldness to allow the intuition of a philosophy to precede (and pre-form) the philosophy of intuition.4 It was on the authority of phenomenological reduction—the procedure conceived, practiced, and legitimized by Husserl—that the concept of putting ethics before ontology, the founding act of Levinas’s own philosophical system, was arrived at and endorsed.
Following the itinerary sketched and tested by Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, and deploying the tools of “bracketing away” and epochē (detachment, elimination, suspension), Levinas embarked on cracking the mystery of Kant’s “moral law inside me.” He began an exploration of “pure ethics”—absolute, pristine, extemporal, and exterritorial, unsoiled by the products of societal recycling and unadulterated by illegitimate, heterogeneous, accidental, and dispensable admixtures—and of the ethic’s pure meaning (intentional, as for Husserl all pure meanings must be), which makes all other ascribed and imputed meanings conceivable while also calling them into question and to account.
That voyage of exploration led Levinas, in stark opposition to Husserl, not to transcendental subjectivity but to the indomitable and impenetrable transcendental otherness of the Other. The ultimate station of the phenomenological reduction in Levinas’s style is alterity, that irreducible otherness of the Other that awakes the self to its own unique responsibilities and thereby assists, even if obliquely, at the birth of subjectivity. At the far end of Levinas’s reductive labors towers the encounter with the Other, the shock of that encounter and the silent challenge of the Other’s Face—and not the always-already-there, introverted, solitary, lonely, and unperturbed subjectivity that weaves meanings, spider-style, out of its own abdomen. In Harvie Ferguson’s masterly interpretation of Levinas’s findings, “The other is not a differentiated fragment, or projection, of what is first internal to consciousness, nor can it be assimilated to consciousness in any way; it is and remains ‘outside the subject’ . . . What emerges with the reduction of the actively constituted object-world of everyday life is neither the transcendental ego, nor the pure transition of temporality, but the mysterious, brute fact of exteriority.”5
It is not (as Husserl would aver) that the object-world is daily secreted by the transcendental ego and so could be returned to it, to its roots and original primeval purity, through the determinate effort of phenomenological reduction. The ego—the self and its self-awareness—is brought into being in the confrontation with, simultaneously, the limits to its creative potency and the limits-transcending challenge to its intentions and intuitions: by the absolute alterity of the Other as an ensconced and sealed, forever-external entity that stubbornly refuses to be absorbed and assimilated, and thereby simultaneously triggers and refutes the ego’s unstoppable effort to cross the abyss that separates them. In stark opposition to his philosophy teacher, Levinas uses the teacher’s methodology to reassert autonomy of the world as against the subject: emphatically not the world’s God-like designer and creator, the subject is called into being through assuming responsibility for the world’s indomitable and uncompromising alterity. If for Heidegger Sein (Being) was “ursprünglich” Mitsein—“from the beginning” being with—for Levinas it is (similarly ursprünglich) Fürsein, or being for. The self is born in the act of recognition of its being for the Other and thereby in the revelation of the insufficiency of a mere Mitsein.
The world in which the ego is immersed, the socially construed world, interferes in the confrontation of the thinking, feeling self with the Face of the Other. It does so by reducing the modality of “being for,” by its nature boundless and forever underdefined, to the finite set of commandments and prohibitions. Following Husserl, Levinas embarked on an exploratory voyage in search of the Sachen selbst (things themselves), in his case the essence of ethics, and found it at the far end of the phenomenological reduction, once he had “bracketed away” everything accidental, contingent, derivative, and supernumerary superimposed on ethics in the course of the human’s being-in-the-world. And like Husserl, he brought back from his voyage of discovery rich trophies hardly accessible in any other, less tortuous way: the inventory of the invariants of moral existence and ethical relationships—features of the pristine condition from which all moral existence starts and to which it returns in every moral act.
“The Other” and “the Face” are generic names, but in every moral encounter found in the heart of the “moral law inside me” mystery, each name stands for just one being—one only, never more than one: one Other, one Face. Neither name may appear in the plural at the far end of phenomenological reduction. The otherness of the Other is tantamount to its uniqueness; each Face is one and only, and its uniqueness defies the endemic impersonality of the rule.
It is their uncompromising singularity that renders redundant and irrelevant most or perhaps all of the things that fill the daily life of every flesh-and-blood human: the pursuit of survival, self-esteem, or self-aggrandizement, the rational juxtaposition of ends and means, the calculation of gains and losses, the search for pleasure, desire for peace or power. Entering Levinas’s moral space requires taking time off from the daily business of living and leaving aside its mundane norms and conventions. At the “moral party of two,” both I and the Other arrive disrobed, without our social trappings, stripped of status, social distinctions, and socially concocted or socially imposed identities, positions, or roles. We are neither rich nor poor, high nor lowly, mighty nor disempowered—neither “deserving” nor “undeserving.” None of those qualifiers applies, let alone matters, for the partners in the moral twosome. Whatever we might yet become will emerge only in and from our twosome-ness.
Within such a space, and only there, the moral self cannot but feel uncomfortable—confused, lost—the moment the moral party of two is broken into by a Third. And it is not just the moral self that feels uncomfortable but also Levinas, its explorer and spokesman. No better proof of his discomfort is needed than the obsessive, almost compulsive urgency with which he returns in his late writings and interviews to the “problem of the Third”: that is, to the possibility of salvaging the ethical relationship, born, raised, and groomed in the greenhouse of the twosome, in the setting of ordinary, mundane life, where interventions, intrusions, and “break-ins” of the uncountable “Thirds” are the daily norm.
As Georg Simmel pointed out in his groundbreaking comparison between dyadic and triadic relationships, “The decisive characteristic of the dyad is that each of the two (partners) must actually accomplish something, and that in case of failure only the other remains—not a supra-individual force, as prevails in a group even of three.”6 This, Simmel insists, “makes for a close and highly specific coloration of the dyadic relationship,” “as the dyadic element is much more frequently confronted with All or Nothing than is the member of the larger group.”
One can see why the dyadic relationship tends to turn almost naturally into (or even be identical with) the “moral party of two,” and why it tends to be a natural habitat (or even a nursery) for that unconditionality of responsibility that would be unlikely to emerge and take root otherwise; and why it would be well-nigh inconceivable for such unconditional responsibility to emerge spontaneously in the midst of larger groups, in which mediated relations prevail upon the unmediated face-to-face ones, providing a matrix for many alternative alliances and divisions. One can also see why a thinking, feeling entity brought up in the secure confinement of the dyad is unprepared and feels out of its element when drawn into a threesome setting. One can see why the tools and habits developed inside a dyadic relationship need to be overhauled and complemented to make a triad viable.
There is a remarkable similarity between the late Levinas’s keen yet ultimately inconclusive and frustrating effort to bring the pristine moral self he discovered at the end of phenomenological reduction back into the selfsame world from whose deforming traces he struggled all his life to free it, and the ageing Husserl’s exorbitant, indeed Herculean, yet similarly frustrated and frustrating effort to return to intersubjectivity from the “transcendental subjectivity” he spent his life cleansing of all “inter”-bound adulterations. The question is: can moral capacity and aptitude, made to the measure of responsibility for the Other as the Face, be capacious and potent enough, as well as sufficiently determined and vigorous, to carry an entirely different burden of responsibility for the “Other as such,” an indefinite and anonymous Other, a faceless (because dissolved in the multitude of “other others”) Other? Is the ethics born and cultivated inside the moral party of two fit to be transplanted into the imagined community of human society and, further, into the imagined global community of humanity?
To put it bluntly: does the moral initiation, upbringing, and education we receive inside the moral party of two prepare us for life in the world?
Before the world stubbornly and vexingly inhospitable to ethics had become his major preoccupation, Levinas visited it on relatively few occasions, and only briefly and gingerly—and seldom on his own initiative, unprompted by inquisitive interviewers. In “Morality Begins at Home; or the Rocky Road to Justice” I traced those visits, from Le moi et la totalité of 1954 up to De l’unicité, published in 1986.7 As time went by, however, the space and attention devoted by Levinas to the chances that the moral impulse would match on the broad societal stage “the kindness which gave it birth and keeps it alive” grew visibly; although gradual, it was unstoppable.8 The major message hammered home by Levinas toward the end of his life was that the moral impulse, though sovereign and self-sufficient within the moral party of two, is a poor guide once it ventures beyond that party’s limits. The stultifying infinity and unconditionality of moral responsibility (or, as the great Danish ethical philosopher Knud Løgstrup would say, the noxious silence of the ethical demand that insists that something needs to be done but stubbornly refuses to specify what) simply can’t be sustained when the “Other” appears in a plural, as he or she does in human society. In the densely populated world of human daily life, moral impulses need codes, laws, jurisdiction, and institutions that install and monitor them all: on the way to being thrown onto the large screen of society, moral sense reincarnates as, or is reprocessed into, social justice.
In the presence of the Third, says Levinas in conversation with François Poirié, “We leave what I call the order of ethics, or the order of saintliness or the order of mercy, or the order of love, or the order of charity—where the other human concerns me regardless of the place he occupies in the multitude of humans, and even regardless of our shared quality of individuals of the human species; he concerns me as one close to me, as the first to come. He is unique.”9 Simmel would certainly add that “the essential point is that within a dyad, there can be no majority which could outvote the individual. This majority, however, is made possible by the mere addition of a third member. But relations which permit the individual to be overruled by a majority devalue individuality.”10 And they thereby devalue uniqueness, and privileged closeness, and uncontested priorities, and unconditional responsibilities—all those foundation stones of a moral relationship.
The oft-repeated assurance “This is a free country” (meaning it is up to you what sort of life you wish to live, how you decide to live it, and what kind of choices you make to see the decision through; blame yourself and no one but yourself in case all that does not result in the bliss you hoped for) suggests the joy of emancipation closely intertwined with the horror of defeat. “A free man,” Joseph Brodsky would say, “when he fails, blames nobody” (nobody else, that is, except himself).11 However crowded that world out there, it contains no one onto whom the blame for my failure may be shifted. And as Levinas would repeat after Dostoyevsky, “We are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others,” and comment, “Responsibility is my affair. Reciprocity is his affair. The I always has one responsibility more than all the others.”12
The arrival of freedom is viewed as an exhilarating emancipation—be it from harrowing obligations and irritating prohibitions or monotonous and stultifying routines. Soon after freedom settles in, however, and becomes our daily bread, a new kind of horror, the horror of responsibility, not a bit less frightening than the terrors chased away through the advent of freedom, makes the memories of past sufferings pale. Nights that follow days of obligatory routine are filled with dreams of freedom from constraints. Nights that follow days of obligatory choices are filled with dreams of freedom from responsibility.
It is therefore remarkable but hardly surprising that the two most powerful and persuasive cases for the necessity of society (that is, of a comprehensive, solidly grounded, and efficiently protected system of constraints and rules), advanced by philosophers from the start of the world’s modern transformation, were prompted by the recognition of physical threats and spiritual burdens endemic to the condition of freedom.
The first case, articulated by Hobbes, elaborated at great length by Durkheim and Freud, and toward the middle of the twentieth century turned into the doxa of social philosophers and scientists, presented societal coercion and the constraints imposed on individual freedom by normative regulations as necessary, inevitable, and in the end salutary and beneficial means of protecting human togetherness against a “war of all against all,” and as guarding human individuals against a “life that is nasty, brutish and short.” The advocates of this case argued that the cessation of social coercion, if such cessation were at all feasible or even conceivable, would not liberate the individuals; on the contrary, it would only make them unable to resist the morbid pressures of their own essentially antisocial instincts. It would render them victims of a slavery more horrifying than that which all the pressures of tough social realities could possibly produce. Freud would present social coercion and the resulting limitation of individual freedom as the very essence of civilization: since the “pleasure principle” (the drive to seek immediate sexual gratification, for instance, or the inborn inclination to laziness) would guide, or rather misguide, individual conduct toward the wasteland of asociality or sociopathy unless it were constrained, trimmed, and counter-balanced by the power-aided, authority-operated “reality principle,” civilization without coercion is unthinkable.
The second case for the necessity, indeed the unavoidability, of socially operated normative regulations, and therefore also for the social coercion that constrains individual freedom, has been founded on the opposite premise, that of the ethical challenge to which humans are exposed by the very presence of others, by the “silent appeal of the Face”—a challenge that precedes all socially created and socially run ontological settings, which if anything try to neutralize, trim, and limit the otherwise boundless challenge to make it endurable. In this version, most fully elaborated by Emmanuel Levinas and Knud Løgstrup, society is primarily a contraption for reducing the essentially unconditional and unlimited responsibility-for-the-Other, or the infinity of “ethical demand,” to a set of prescriptions and proscriptions more on a par with human abilities to cope and manage. The principal function of normative regulation, and also the paramount source of its inevitability, is to make the exercise of responsibility (Levinas) or obeying the ethical demand (Løgstrup) a realistic task for “ordinary people,” who tend to stop short of the standards for saintliness—and must stop short of them—for society to be conceivable. As Levinas himself put it, “It is extremely important to know if society in the current sense of the term is the result of limitation of the principle that men are predators of one another, or if to the contrary it results from the limitation of the principle that men are for each other. Does the social, with its institutions, universal forms and laws, result from limiting the consequences of the war between men, or from limiting the infinity which opens in the ethical relationship of man to man?”13
To put it in a nutshell: is “society” the product of bridling the selfish, aggressive inclinations of its members with the duty of solidarity, or is it, on the contrary, an outcome of tempering their endemic and boundless altruism with the “order of egoism”?
Using the vocabulary of Emmanuel Levinas, we may say that the principal function of society, “with its institutions, universal forms and laws,” is to make the essentially unconditional and unlimited responsibility for the Other both conditional (in selected, duly enumerated, and clearly defined circumstances) and limited (to a select group of “others,” considerably smaller than the totality of humanity and, most important, narrower and thus more easily manageable that the indefinite sum total of “others” who may eventually awaken in the subjects the sentiments of inalienable, and boundless, responsibility). Using the vocabulary of Knud Løgstrup (a thinker remarkably close to Levinas’s viewpoint who, like Levinas, insists on the primacy of ethics over realities of life-in-society and calls the world to account for failing to rise to the standards of ethical responsibility), we would say that society is an arrangement for rendering the otherwise stubbornly and vexingly, harrowingly silent (because unspecific) ethical command audible—that is, specific and codified—and thereby reducing the infinite multitude of options such a command may imply to a much narrower, manageable range of obligations.
It so happened, however, that the advent of the liquid-modern society of consumers sapped the credibility and persuasive power of both cases for the ineluctability of societal imposition. Each was diminished in a different way, though for the same reason: for the ever more evident dismantling of the system of normative regulation, and thereby the releasing of ever larger chunks of human conduct from coercive patterning, supervision, and policing, and relegating ever larger numbers of previously socialized functions to the realm of individual “life politics.” In the deregulated and privatized setting focused on consumerist concerns and pursuits, the summary responsibility for choices—for the action that follows the choice and for the consequences of those actions—is cast squarely on the individual actors’ shoulders. As Pierre Bourdieu had already signaled two decades ago, coercion is being replaced by stimulation, forceful imposition of behavioral patterns by seduction, policing of conduct by PR and advertising, and the normative regulation, as such, by the arousal of new needs and desires. Apparently, the advent of consumerism has stripped the Hobbesian case of quite a lot of its credibility, as the catastrophic consequences it predicted for any retreat or emaciation of the socially administered normative regulation have failed to materialize.
The new profusion and unprecedented intensity of inter-individual antagonisms and open conflicts that followed the progressive deregulation and privatization of the previously societal functions are widely recognized and provide focus for ongoing debate, but the deregulated and privatized society of consumers is still far from the terrifying vision of Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes. Freud’s case for the necessarily coercive nature of civilization fared no better. It seems likely (even if the jury is still out) that once exposed to the logic of commodity markets and left to their own choices, consumers found the power relationship between pleasure and reality principles reversed. It is now the “reality principle” that has been forced to go on the defense; it is daily compelled to retreat, self-limit, and compromise in the face of renewed assaults by the “pleasure principle.” What the powers of the consumerist society seem to have discovered—and turned to their advantage—is that there is little to be gained from servicing the inert, hard-and-fast “social facts” deemed indomitable and irresistible at the time of Emile Durkheim, whereas catering to the infinitely expansible pleasure principle promises infinitely extendable commercial profits. The already blatant and still growing “softness,” flexibility, and brief life expectancy of liquid-modern “social facts” help to emancipate the search for pleasure from its past limitations and fully open it to profitable exploitation by the markets.
As to the case composed and advanced by Levinas and Løgstrup, the task of cutting down the suprahuman boundlessness of ethical responsibility to the capacity of an ordinary human’s sensitivity, an ordinary human’s power of judgment and ability to act, tends now (except in a few selected areas) to be “subsidiarized” to individual men and women. In the absence of an authoritative translation of the “unspoken demand” into a finite inventory of prescriptions and proscriptions, it is now up to each individual to set the limits of her or his responsibility for other humans and to draw the line between the plausible and the implausible among moral interventions—as well as to decide how far she or he is ready to go in sacrificing personal welfare for the sake of fulfilling moral responsibility to others. As Alain Ehrenberg convincingly argues, most common human sufferings tend to grow nowadays from the surfeit of possibilities, rather than from the profusion of prohibitions as they used to in the past.14 If the opposition between the possible and the impossible has taken over from the antinomy of the allowed and the forbidden as the cognitive frame and essential criterion for evaluating life choices and strategies, it is only to be expected that the depressions arising from the terror of inadequacy would replace the neuroses caused by the horror of guilt (that is, from the charge of nonconformity following the breach of rules) as the most characteristic and widespread psychic afflictions among the denizens of the consumer society.
Once shifted over (or abandoned) to individuals, the task of ethical decision making becomes overwhelming, as the stratagem of hiding behind a recognized and apparently indomitable authority, one that vouches to remove the responsibility (or at least a significant part of it) from their shoulders, is no longer a viable or reliable option. Struggling with so daunting a task casts the actors into a state of permanent uncertainty. All too often, it leads to harrowing and demeaning self-reprobation.
And yet the overall result of the privatization and subsidiarization of responsibility proves somewhat less incapacitating for the moral self and moral actors than Levinas, Løgstrup, and their disciples—myself included—would have expected. Somehow, a way has been found to mitigate the potentially devastating impact on individuals and limit the damage. There is, it appears, a profusion of commercial agencies eager to take up the tasks abandoned by the “great society” and to sell their services to the bereaved, ignorant, and perplexed consumers.
Under the deregulated/privatized regime, the formula for “relief from responsibility” has remained much the same as it was in the earlier stages of modern history: a measure of genuine or putative clarity is injected into a hopelessly opaque situation by replacing (more correctly, covering up) the mind-boggling complexity of the task with a set of straightforward must-do and mustn’t-do rules. Now, as then, individual actors are pressed, nudged, and cajoled to put their confidence in authorities trusted to decide and spell out what exactly the unspoken demand commands them to do in this or that situation, and just how far (and no further) their unconditional responsibility obliges them to go under those situations. In the pursuit of the same stratagem, however, different tools now tend to be deployed.
The concepts of responsibility and responsible choice, which used to reside in the semantic field of ethical duty and moral concern for the Other, have moved or have been shifted to the realm of self-fulfillment and calculation of risks. In the process, the Other as the trigger, the target, and the yardstick for a responsibility accepted, assumed, and fulfilled has all but disappeared from view, having been elbowed out or overshadowed by the actor’s own self. “Responsibility” means now, first and last, responsibility to oneself (“You owe this to yourself,” as the outspoken traders in relief from responsibility indefatigably repeat), while “responsible choices” are, first and last, such moves as serve well the interests and satisfy the desires of the actor and stave off the need to compromise.
The outcome is not much different from the “adiaphorizing” effects of the stratagem practiced by solid-modern bureaucracy.15 That stratagem was the substitution of the “responsibility to” (to a superior person, to an authority, to a cause and its spokesmen that originate an action) for the “responsibility for” (for the welfare, autonomy, and dignity of another human at the receiving end of the action). However, adiaphorizing effects (that is, rendering actions ethically neutral and exempting them from ethical evaluation and censure) tend to be achieved these days mostly through replacing responsibility for others with responsibility to oneself and responsibility for oneself rolled into one. The collateral victim of the leap to the consumerist rendition of freedom is the Other as object of ethical responsibility and moral concern.
Faithfully following the convoluted itinerary of the “public mood” in her widely read and highly influential book The Cinderella Complex, Colette Dowling declared the desire to be safe, warm, and taken care of to be a “dangerous feeling.”16 She warned the Cinderellas of the coming age to beware of falling into its trap: in the impulse to care for others and the desire to be cared for by others looms the awesome danger of dependency, of losing the ability to select the tide most comfortable for surfing and of swiftly moving from one wave to another the moment the tide turns. As Arlie Russell Hochschild comments, “Her fear of being dependent on another person evokes the image of the American cowboy, alone, detached, roaming free with his horse . . . On the ashes of Cinderella, then, rises a postmodern cowgirl.”17 The most popular of the empathizing, self-help best sellers of the day “whisper[ed] to the reader: ‘Let the emotional investor beware’ . . . Dowling cautions women to invest in the self as a solo enterprise,” writes Hochschild. “The commercial spirit of intimate life is made up of images that prepare the way for a paradigm of distrust . . . by offering as ideal a self well defended against getting hurt . . . The heroic acts a self can perform . . . are to detach, to leave, and to depend on and need others less . . . In many cool modern books, the author prepares us for people out there who don’t need our nurturance and for people who don’t or can’t nurture us.”
The possibility of populating the world with more caring people and inducing people to care more does not figure in the panoramas painted in the consumerist utopia. The privatized utopias of the cowboys and cowgirls of the consumerist era show instead vastly expanded “free space” (free for my self, of course)—a kind of empty space of which the liquid-modern consumer, bent on solo performances and solo performances only, never has enough. The space that liquid-modern consumers need and are advised from all sides to fight for can be conquered only by evicting other humans—and particularly the kind of humans who care for others or may need care themselves.
The consumer market took over from the solid-modern bureaucracy the task of adiaphorization: the task of squeezing the “being for” poison away from the “being with” booster shot. It is just as Emmanuel Levinas adumbrated, when musing that rather than being a contraption making peaceful and friendly human togetherness achievable for inborn egoists (as Hobbes suggested), society may be a stratagem for making a self-centered, self-referential, egotistic life attainable for inborn moral beings, through cutting down the responsibilities for others that go together with the presence of the Face of the Other, indeed, with human togetherness.
According to Frank Mort, who researched the quarterly reports of the Henley Centre for Forecasting, at the top of the list of pleasures preferred and most coveted by the British for the last two decades were such pastimes as are “principally made available through market-based forms of provision: personal shopping, eating out, DIY [do-it-yourself projects] and video watching. Right at the bottom of the list came politics; going to a political meeting ranked on a par with a visit to the circus as one of the British public’s least likely things to do.”18
In The Ethical Demand, Løgstrup aired an optimistic view of humans’ natural inclination. “It is a characteristic of human life that we normally encounter one another with natural trust,” he wrote. “Only because of some special circumstance do we ever distrust a stranger in advance . . . Under normal circumstances, however, we accept the stranger’s word and do not mistrust him until we have some particular reason to do so. We never suspect a person of falsehood until after we have caught him in a lie.”19 Let me emphasize that the author’s judgments are not intended as phenomenological statements but as empirical generalizations. If most of Levinas’s ethical theses enjoy the immunity of phenomenological status, this is not the case with Løgstrup, who induces his generalizations from daily interactions with his co-parishioners.
The Ethical Demand was conceived of by Løgstrup during the eight years following his marriage to Rosalie Maria Pauly, when they lived in the small and peaceful Danish parish of Funen Island. With due respect to the friendly and sociable residents of Aarhus, where Løgstrup was later to spend the rest of his life teaching theology at the local university, I doubt whether such ideas could have gestated in Løgstrup’s mind after he had settled in that town and then had to face point-blank the realities of the world at war, living under German occupation as an active member of the Danish resistance.
People tend to weave their images of the world out of the yarn of their experience. The present generation may find Løgstrup’s sunny and buoyant image of a trusting and trustworthy world rather far-fetched, if not sharply at odds with what they themselves learn daily and what is insinuated by the common narratives of human experience they hear every day. They would more likely recognize themselves in the acts and confessions of the characters on the recent wave of hugely popular television shows of the Big Brother, Survivor, and The Weakest Link type, which (sometimes explicitly but always implicitly) convey quite a different message: that strangers are not to be trusted. The Survivor series, for instance, bears a says-it-all subtitle—“Trust No One”—to which every successive installment of Big Brother also adds ample and vivid illustrations. Fans and addicts of these “reality” shows (and this means a large part, possibly a substantive majority, of our contemporaries) would reverse Løgstrup’s verdict on human society and decide that it is a characteristic of human life that we encounter one another with natural suspicion.
These TV spectacles that have taken millions of viewers by storm and immediately captured their imagination are public rehearsals of the concept of the disposability of humans. They carry an indulgence and a warning rolled into one story, their message being that no one is indispensable, no one has the right to his or her share in the fruits of joint effort just because he or she has added at some point to the group’s growth—let alone because of being, simply, a member of the team. Life is a hard game for hard people, so the message goes. Each game starts from scratch, past merits do not count, you are worth only as much as the results of your last duel. Each player in every moment is playing for herself (or himself), and to progress, not to mention to reach the top, one must (alas!) cooperate first in excluding those many others eager to survive and succeed who are blocking the way, and then outwit, one by one, all those with whom one has cooperated—after squeezing out their last drop of usefulness—and leave them behind. The others are first and foremost competitors; they are always scheming, as all competitors do, digging holes, laying ambushes, itching for us to stumble and fall.
The assets that help the winners to outlive their competitors, and thus to emerge victorious from the cutthroat battle, are of many sorts, ranging from blatant self-assertiveness to meek self-effacement. Whatever stratagem is deployed, however, and whatever are the assets of the survivors and liabilities of the defeated, the story of survival is bound to develop in the same monotonous way: In the game of survival, trust, compassion, and mercy (the paramount attributes of Løgstrup’s “sovereign expression of life”) are suicidal. If you are not tougher and less scrupulous than all the others, you will be done in by them, with or without remorse. We are back to the somber truth of the Darwinian world: it is the fittest who invariably survive—or, rather, surviving for longer than others do is the ultimate proof of fitness.
Were the young people of our times also readers of books, and particularly of old books not currently on the best-seller list, they would be likely to agree with the bitter, not at all sunny picture of the world painted by the Russian exile and philosopher at the Sorbonne, Leon Shestov: “Homo homini lupus is one of the most steadfast maxims of eternal morality. In each of our neighbours we fear a wolf . . . We are so poor, so weak, so easily ruined and destroyed! How can we help being afraid! . . . We see danger, danger only.”20 They would insist, like Shestov suggested they should and as the Big Brother shows have promoted to the rank of common sense, that this is a tough world, meant for tough people. It is a world of individuals left to rely solely on their own cunning, trying to outwit and outdo each other. Meeting a stranger, you need vigilance first, and vigilance second and third. Coming together, standing shoulder to shoulder, and working in teams make a lot of sense so long as they help you to get your way, but there is no reason for such teamwork to continue once it brings no more benefit, or brings less benefit than would shedding those commitments and canceling the obligations.
Bosses tend nowadays to dislike having employees who are burdened with personal commitments to others—particularly those with firm commitments and especially the firmly long-term commitments. The harsh demands of professional survival all too often confront men and women with morally devastating choices between the requirements of their career and caring for others. Bosses prefer to employ unburdened, free-floating individuals who are ready to break all bonds at a moment’s notice and who never think twice when “ethical demands” must be sacrificed to the “demands of the job.”
We live today in a global society of consumers, and the patterns of consumer behavior cannot but affect all other aspects of our life, including work and family life. We are all now pressed to consume more, and on the way, we become ourselves commodities on the consumer and labor markets.
In the words of J. Livingstone, “The commodity form penetrates and reshapes dimensions of social life hitherto exempt from its logic to the point where subjectivity itself becomes a commodity to be bought and sold in the market as beauty, cleanliness, sincerity and autonomy.”21 And as Colin Campbell puts it, the activity of consuming “has become a kind of template or model for the way in which citizens of contemporary Western societies have come to view all their activities. Since . . . more and more areas of contemporary society have become assimilated to a ‘consumer model’ it is perhaps hardly surprising that the underlying metaphysics of consumerism has in the process become a kind of default philosophy for all modern life.”22
Arlie Hochschild encapsulates the most seminal “collateral damage” perpetrated in the course of the consumerist invasion in a succinct and poignant phrase, to “materialize love”: “Consumerism acts to maintain the emotional reversal of work and family. Exposed to a continual bombardment of advertisements through a daily average of three hours of television (half of all their leisure time), workers are persuaded to ‘need’ more things. To buy what they now need, they need money. To earn money, they work longer hours. Being away from home so many hours, they make up for their absence at home with gifts that cost money. They materialize love. And so the cycle continues.”23
We may add that their new spiritual detachment and physical absence from the home scene makes male and female workers alike impatient with the conflicts, big, small, or downright tiny and trifling, that mixing daily under one roof inevitably entails.
As the skills needed to converse and to seek mutual understanding dwindle, what used to be a challenge meant to be confronted head-on and patiently negotiated increasingly becomes a pretext for individuals to break communication, to escape and burn bridges behind them. Busy earning more to buy things they feel they need in order to be happy, men and women have less time for empathy and the intense, sometimes tortuous and painful but always lengthy and energy-consuming negotiations, let alone resolutions, of their mutual misapprehensions and disagreements. This sets in motion another vicious cycle: the more they succeed in “materializing” their love relationship (as the continuous flow of advertising prompts them to do), the fewer opportunities they have left to achieve the mutually sympathetic understanding that the notorious power/care ambiguity of love calls for. Family members are tempted to avoid confrontation and seek respite (or better still, permanent shelter) from domestic infighting; then the urge to “materialize” love and loving care acquires further impetus because the time- and energy-consuming relationship negotiations have become even less attainable—just when that work is more and more needed because of the steadily growing number of grudges to be smoothed over and disagreements clamoring for resolution.
While highly qualified professionals—the apples of the company director’s eye—are often offered a workplace designed to serve as an agreeable substitute for the cozy homeyness missing at home (as Hochschild notes, for these employees the traditional division of roles between workplace and family homestead tends to be reversed)—nothing is offered for the employees who are lower in rank, the less skilled and easily replaceable. If some companies, notably Amerco, which was investigated in depth by Hochschild, “offer the old socialist utopia to an elite of knowledge workers in the top tier of an increasingly divided labour market, other companies may increasingly be offering the worst of early capitalism to semi-skilled and unskilled workers.” For the latter, “neither a kin network nor work associates provide emotional anchors for the individual but rather a gang, fellow drinkers on the corner, or other groups of this sort.”24
The search for individual pleasures articulated by the commodities currently on offer, a search guided and constantly redirected and refocused by successive advertising campaigns, provides the sole acceptable (indeed, badly needed and welcome) substitute for both the uplifting solidarity of workmates and the glowing warmth of caring for and being cared for by those near and dear in the family home and its immediate neighborhood.
Whoever calls to resuscitate the seriously wounded “family values”—and is serious about what such calls imply—should begin by thinking hard about the consumerist roots of, simultaneously, the wilting of social solidarity in the workplace and the fading of the caring-sharing impulse in the family home.
Having spent several years closely observing the changing patterns of employment in the most advanced sectors of the American economy, Hochschild noted and documented trends strikingly similar to those found in France and all over Europe and described in great detail by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello as the “new spirit of capitalism.”25 The strong preference among employers for unattached, flexible, ultimately disposable, and “generalist” employees (Jack-of-all-trades types, rather than specialists with narrowly focused training) has been the most seminal among the findings.
In our allegedly reflection-addicted society, trust is unlikely to receive much empirical reinforcement. Sober scrutiny of life’s evidence points in the opposite direction, repeatedly revealing the perpetual fickleness of rules and the frailty of bonds. Does this mean, however, that Løgstrup’s decision to invest his hope of morality in the spontaneous, endemic tendency to trust has been invalidated by the endemic uncertainty saturating the world of our times?
One would be entitled to say yes—if not for the fact that it was never Løgstrup’s view that moral impulses arise out of reflection. On the contrary, in his view the hope of morality is vested precisely in its prereflexive spontaneity: “Mercy is spontaneous because the least interruption, the least calculation, the least dilution of it in order to serve something else destroys it entirely, indeed turns it into the opposite of what it is, unmercifulness.”26
Emmanuel Levinas is known for insisting that the question “Why should I be moral?” (that is, arguments and protests such as, “What is there in it for me?” “What did she do for me to justify my care?” “Why should I care, if so many others don’t?” and “Couldn’t someone else do it instead of me?”) is not the starting point of moral conduct but a signal of its imminent demise—just as all amorality began with Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Løgstrup, with his reliance on spontaneity, impulse, and the urge to trust, rather than on calculating reflection, seems to agree.
Both philosophers also seem to agree that “the need of morality” (that expression is an oxymoron; whatever answers a “need” is something other than morality) or just “the advisability of morality” cannot be discursively established, let alone proved. Morality is nothing but an innately prompted manifestation of humanity—it does not serve any “purpose” and most surely is not guided by the expectation of profit, comfort, glory, or self-enhancement. It is true that objectively good—helpful and useful—deeds have been time and again performed out of the actor’s calculation of gain, be it Divine grace, public esteem, or absolution from mercilessness shown on other occasions; these deeds, however, cannot be classified as genuinely moral acts precisely because of having been so motivated.
In moral acts, “ulterior motive is ruled out,” Løgstrup insists.27 These spontaneous expressions are radical precisely thanks to the absence of ulterior motives—both amoral and moral. This is one more reason why the ethical demand, that “objective” pressure to be moral emanating from the very fact of being alive and sharing the planet with others, is and must stay silent. Since obedience to the ethical demand can easily turn (be deformed and distorted) into a motive for conduct, the ethical demand is at its best when it is forgotten and not thought of: its radicalism consists in its demand to be super-fluous. Immediacy of human contact is sustained by the immediate expressions of life, and it needs, and indeed tolerates, no other supports. Levinas would wholeheartedly agree with Løgstrup on this. As Richard Cohen, the translator of Levinas’s conversations with Philippe Nemo, summed it up: “Ethical exigency is not an ontological necessity. The prohibition against killing does not render murder impossible. It renders it evil.” The “being” of ethics consists solely in “disturbing the complacency of being.”28
In practical terms, it means that however much a human may resent being left alone to (in the last account) his or her own counsel and responsibility, it is precisely that loneliness that contains the hope of a morally impregnated togetherness. Hope—not certainty, and especially not a guaranteed certainty.
The spontaneity and sovereignty of life expressions do not ensure that the resulting conduct will be the ethically proper and laudable choice between good and evil. The point is, though, that blunders and the right choices arise from the same condition—as do the craven impulses to run for cover that authoritative commands obligingly provide, and the boldness to accept one’s own responsibility. Without bracing oneself for the possibility of wrong choices, little can be done toward persevering in the search for the right choice. Far from being a major threat to morality (and so an abomination to ethical philosophers), uncertainty is the home ground of the moral person and the only soil in which morality can sprout and flourish.
But, as Løgstrup rightly points out, it is the immediacy of human contact that is sustained by the immediate expressions of life. I presume that this connection and the mutual conditions go both ways. “Immediacy” seems to play in Løgstrup’s thinking a role similar to the “proximity” in Levinas’s writings. The “immediate expression of life” is triggered by proximity, or by the immediate presence of the other human being—who is weak and vulnerable, suffering and needing help. We are challenged by what we see, and we are challenged to act—to help, to defend, to bring solace, to cure or save.
Let me repeat: The world today seems to be conspiring against trust. Trust may remain, as Knud Løgstrup suggests, a natural outpouring of the “sovereign expression of life”—but once released it seeks in vain a place to anchor itself. Trust has been sentenced to a life of frustration. People (singly, severally, conjointly), companies, parties, communities, great causes, and the patterns and routines we invest with the authority to guide our lives all too often fail to repay trust’s devotion. At least, they are seldom paragons of consistency and long-term continuity. There is hardly a single reference point on which attention could be reliably and securely fixed, absolving the beguiled guidance seekers from the irksome duty of constant vigilance and the incessant retraction of steps already taken or as yet merely intended. No available orientations seem to have a longer life expectancy than the orientation seekers themselves, however abominably short their own corporeal lives might be. Individual experience stubbornly points to the self as the most likely focus for the duration and continuity we avidly seek.
These tendencies are starkly evident today particularly in the big cities, those ever-growing, sprawling conurbations in which, in a few years’ time, more than half of the planet’s population will live, and in which the high density of human interaction, combined with insecurity-born fears, provides especially fertile ground for ressentiment, and for the search for objects on which it might be focused.
As Nan Ellin, a most acute researcher and insightful analyst of contemporary urban trends, points out, protection from danger was “a principal incentive for building cities whose borders were often defined by vast walls or fences, from the ancient villages of Mesopotamia to medieval cities to Native American settlements.”29 The walls, moats, or stockades marked the boundary between “us” and “them,” order and wilderness, peace and warfare: enemies were those left on that other side of the fence and not allowed to cross over. “From being a relatively safe place,” writes Ellin, in the past hundred years or so the city has become associated “more with danger than with safety.”
Today, in a curious reversal of their historical role and in defiance of the original intentions of city builders and the expectations of city dwellers, our cities are turning swiftly from shelters against dangers into the dangers’ principal source. Diken and Laustsen go as far as to suggest that the millenniaold “link between civilization and barbarism is reversed. City life turns into a state of nature characterised by the rule of terror, accompanied by omnipresent fear.”30
It seems that the sources of danger have now moved almost wholly into the urban areas and settled there. Friends—and also enemies, and above all the elusive and mysterious strangers who veer threateningly between the two extremes—now mix and rub shoulders on the city streets. The war against insecurity, and particularly against dangers and risks to personal safety, is now waged inside the city, and inside the city the battlefields are set and front lines are drawn. Heavily armed trenches (impassable approaches) and bunkers (fortified and closely guarded buildings or building complexes) aimed at separating, keeping strangers away and barring their entry, have fast become one of the most visible aspects of contemporary cities, though they take many forms and their designers try hard to blend these creations into the cityscape, thereby “normalizing” the state of emergency in which urban residents, safety-addicted yet perpetually unsure of their safety, dwell daily.
“The more we detach from our immediate surroundings, the more we rely on surveillance of that environment . . . Homes in many urban areas around the world now exist to protect their inhabitants, not to integrate people with their communities,” observe Gumpert and Drucker.31 Separation and keeping distance has become the most common strategy in the urban struggle for survival. The continuum along which the results of the struggle are plotted stretches between the poles of voluntary and involuntary urban ghettos. Residents without means, and therefore viewed by the rest of the residents as potential threats to their safety, tend to be forced away from more benign and agreeable parts of the city and crowded in separate, ghetto-like districts. Resourceful residents buy into separate, also ghetto-like areas of their choice and bar all others from settling there; in addition, they do whatever they can to disconnect their own daily world from the worlds of the rest of the city’s inhabitants. Increasingly, their voluntary ghettos turn into outposts or garrisons of extraterritoriality.
The waste products of the new physical extraterritoriality of these privileged urban spaces inhabited and used by the global elite, whose “internal exile” is achieved through, manifested in, and sustained by means of “virtual connectedness,” are the disconnected and abandoned spaces, the “ghost wards,” as they have been called by Michael Schwarzer, places where “dreams have been replaced by nightmares and danger and violence are more commonplace than elsewhere.”32 If the areas surrounding the privileged spaces are to be kept impassable, to stave off the danger of leakage and contamination of the regional purity, a policy of zero tolerance toward the homeless—banishing them from the spaces where they can make a living but are also obtrusively and disturbingly visible, and confining them to such abandoned, off-limits spaces where they can do neither—comes in handy. “Prowlers,” “stalkers,” “loiterers,” “beggars,” “travelers,” and other kinds of trespassers become sinister characters in the nightmares of the elite. They are also the walking avatars of the hidden dangers of life on a densely populated planet—and the principal targets of ressentiment.
It seems that the “spontaneous expression of life” is in its current embodiment more likely to lead toward mistrust and “mixophobia” than to trust and care. “Mixophobia” is a highly predictable and widespread reaction to the mind-boggling, spine-chilling, and nerve-racking variety of human types and life-styles that meet and jostle for space in the streets of the contemporary cities—not only in the officially proclaimed (and thus avoided) rough districts or “mean streets” but also in the ordinary (read: unprotected by “interdictory spaces”) living areas. As the multivocality and cultural variegation of urban environments in the globalization era sets in—a condition that is likely to intensify in the course of time—the tensions arising from the vexing, confusing, irritating unfamiliarity of the setting will probably go on prompting segregationist urges.
The factors precipitating mixophobia are banal—not at all difficult to locate, easy to understand though not necessarily easy to forgive. As Richard Sennett suggests, “The ‘we’ feeling, which expresses a desire to be similar, is a way for men” and women “to avoid the necessity of looking deeper into each other.” It promises, we might say, some spiritual comfort: the prospect of making togetherness easier to bear by cutting off the effort to understand, to negotiate, to compromise that living amidst and with difference requires. “Innate to the process of forming a coherent image of community is the desire to avoid actual participation. Feeling common bonds without common experience occurs in the first place because men are afraid of participation, afraid of the dangers and the challenges of it, afraid of its pain.”33
The drive toward a “community of similarity” is a sign of withdrawal, not just from the otherness outside but also from the commitment to the lively yet turbulent, invigorating yet cumbersome interaction inside. The attraction of the community of sameness is that of an insurance policy against the risks with which daily life in a polyvocal world is fraught. Immersion in sameness does not decrease or stave off the risks that prompted it. Like all palliatives, it may at most promise only shelter from some of the risks’ most immediate and most feared effects.
Choosing the escape option as the cure for mixophobia has an insidious and deleterious consequence of its own: once adopted, the allegedly therapeutic regime becomes self-propelling, self-perpetuating, and self-reinforcing the more it is ineffective. Sennett explains why this is (indeed must be) the case: “Cities in America during the past two decades have grown in such a way that ethnic areas become relatively homogeneous; it appears no accident that the fear of the outsider has also grown to the extent that these ethnic communities have been cut off.”34 Once the territorial separation takes hold, and the longer people stay in their uniform environments—in the company of others “like them” with whom they can “socialize” perfunctorily and matter-of-factly, without the risk of miscomprehension and without struggling with the vexing need for the (forever risky) two-way translations between distinct universes of meaning—the more one is likely to “de-learn” the art of negotiating shared meanings and an agreeable modus covivendi.
The territorial wars waged on both sides of the barricade separating the well- and the ill-off cannot but deepen the communication breakdown. As the willing and unwilling soldiers in the permanent territorial wars fail to acquire the skills necessary for living a gratifying life amid difference, there is little wonder that those who practice “escape therapy” view with rising horror the prospect of confronting strangers face to face. “Strangers” (that is, people on the other side of the barrier) tend to appear ever more frightening as they become increasingly alien, unfamiliar, and incomprehensible, as the dialogue and interaction that could eventually assimilate their “otherness” to one’s own world fade out, or never take off in the first place. The drive to find a homogeneous, territorially isolated environment may be triggered by mixophobia, but the practicing of territorial separation is mixophobia’s lifeline and food source; it gradually becomes its principal reinforcing agent.
Alongside open, friendly, trustful “sovereign expressions of life,” Løgstrup names their powerful adversaries—the “constrained” expressions, expressions externally induced and so heteronomous instead of autonomous; or, rather (in an interpretation probably better attuned to Løgstrup’s intention) expressions whose motives (once represented, or rather mis-represented, as causes) are projected on the outside agents.
As examples of the constrained expressions, offense, jealousy, and envy are named—all those sentiments that we saw earlier lurking behind the phenomenon of ressentiment. But, as Løgstrup suggests, in each case the striking feature of conduct is the self-deception designed to disguise the genuine springs of action. For instance, the individual has too high an opinion of himself to tolerate the thought of having acted wrongly, and so imputation of an offense by an-Other is called for to deflect attention from his own misstep. We take satisfaction in being the wronged party, Løgstrup points out, and so we must invent wrongs to feed this self-indulgence. The autonomous nature of action is thereby concealed; it is the other party, charged with the original misconduct, with the starting-it-all felony, that is cast as the true actor in the drama. The self thereby stays wholly on the receiving side; the self is a sufferer of the other’s action rather than an actor in his own right.
Once embraced, this vision seems to be self-propelling and self-reinforcing. To retain credibility, the outrage imputed to the other side must be ever more awesome and, above all, ever less curable or redeemable, and the resulting sufferings of its victim must be declared ever more abominable and painful, so that one may go on justifying harsher and harsher measures undertaken by the self-declared victim as a “just response” to the committed offense or as a defense against offenses yet to be committed (or even, as quite recently in the new military doctrine of the Pentagon, as “preemptive”—that is, to stave off offenses that merely can be committed, even if there is no evidence of an intention to commit them). Constrained actions need constantly to deny their autonomy. It is for that reason that they constitute the most radical obstacle to the admission of the self’s sovereignty and to the self’s acting in a fashion resonant with such an admission. We may surmise that they are also the major obstacles to mitigating ressentiment; they are instead instrumental in creating ressentiment—what in Robert Merton’s terminology constitutes a “self-fulfilling prophesy.” The initial grudge, so to speak, is “justified” and “confirmed” by the actions of those who hold it.
Overcoming self-imposed constraints by unmasking and discrediting the self-deception on which they rest emerges, therefore, as the preliminary, indispensable condition of giving free rein to the sovereign life’s expression—the expression that manifests itself, first and foremost, in trust, compassion, and mercy.
We know, roughly, what must be done to neutralize, defuse, even disarm the temptation of ressentiment and thereby defend human togetherness against the practices it prompts. This does not mean, alas, that we know how to achieve it. And even if we knew, we would still have to confront the daunting task of discovering (or inventing) the resources and means that the task would require.
Ressentiment is a discharge, a by-product, of social settings that set interests in conflict and those who hold those interests at loggerheads. We have traced three types of relationships that are particularly prone to produce it: humiliation (denial of dignity), rivalry (status competition), and fearful ambivalence. All three are social products, not individual ones; all three, therefore, can be approached and tackled only through rearrangement of the social settings that are their sources. Fighting ressentiment and preventing its germination and proliferation cannot but be projects for the long haul.
And finally: the ethical challenge of “globalization,” or, more precisely, globalization as an ethical challenge.
Whatever else “globalization” may mean, it means that we are all dependent on each other. Distances matter little now. Something that happens in one place may have global consequences. With the resources, technical tools, and know-how humans have acquired, their actions can span enormous distances in space and time. However local their intentions might be, actors would be ill-advised to leave out of account global factors, since they could decide the success or failure of their actions. What we do (or abstain from doing) may influence the conditions of life (or death) for people in places we will never visit and of generations we will never know.
This is the situation in which, knowingly or not, we make our shared history these days. Though much—perhaps everything or almost everything—in that unraveling history depends on human choices, the conditions under which choices are made are not themselves a matter of choice. Having dismantled most of the space-time limits that used to confine the potential of our actions to the territory we could survey, monitor, and control, we can no longer shelter either ourselves or those at the receiving end of our actions from the global web of mutual dependency. Nothing can be done to arrest, let alone reverse, globalization. One can be “in favor of” or “against” the new planetwide interdependency, but the effect will be similar to that of supporting or resenting the next solar or lunar eclipse. However, much does depend on our consent or resistance to the lopsided form the globalization of the human plight has thus far taken.
Half a century ago Karl Jaspers could still neatly set apart “moral guilt” (the remorse we feel when causing harm to other humans—either by what we have done or by what we’ve failed to do) from “metaphysical guilt” (the guilt we feel when a human being is harmed, even if the harm was in no way connected to our action). With the progress of globalization, that distinction has since been stripped of its meaning. As never before, John Donne’s words, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,” represent the genuine solidarity of our fate; the point is, however, that the new solidarity of fate is as yet nowhere near being matched by the solidarity of our feelings, let alone our actions.
Within the world’s dense network of global interdependence, we cannot be sure of our moral innocence whenever other human beings suffer indignity, misery, or pain. We cannot declare that we do not know, nor can we be certain that there is nothing we could change in our conduct that would avert or at least alleviate the sufferers’ fate. We might be impotent individually, but we could do something together, and “togetherness” is made of and by the individuals. The trouble is—as another great twentieth-century philosopher, Hans Jonas, complained—although space and time no longer limit the effects of our actions, our moral imagination has not progressed much beyond the scope it had acquired in Adam-and-Eve times. The responsibilities we are ready to assume do not venture as far as the influence that our daily conduct exerts on the lives of ever more distant people.
The globalization process has thus far produced a network of interdependence penetrating every nook and cranny of the globe, but little else. It would be grossly premature to speak of even a global society or global culture, not to mention a global polity or global law. Is there a global social system emerging at the far end of the globalization process? If there is such a system, it does not as yet resemble the social systems we have learned to consider the norm. We used to think of social systems as totalities that coordinated and adjusted or adapted all aspects of human existence—most notably economic mechanisms, political power, and cultural patterns. Nowadays, though, what used to be coordinated at the same level and within the same totality has been set apart and placed at radically disparate levels. The planetary reach of capital, finances, and trade—the forces that decide the range of choices and the effectiveness of human action, the way humans live and the limits of their dreams and hopes—has not been matched on a similar scale by the resources that humanity developed to control those forces that control human lives.
Most important, that planetary dimension has not been matched by democratic control on a similarly global scale. We may say that power has “flown” from the historically developed institutions that used to exercise democratic control over uses and abuses of power in the modern nation-states. Globalization in its current form means a progressive disempowerment of nation-states and (so far) the absence of any effective substitute.
A similar Houdini act has been performed by economic actors once before, though obviously on a more modest scale. Max Weber, one of the most acute analysts of the logic (or illogicality) of modern history, noted that the birth-act of modern capitalism was the separation of business from household; the “household” standing for the dense web of mutual rights and obligations sustained by the village and township communities, parishes or craftsmen’s guilds, in which families and neighborhoods were tightly wrapped. With that separation (better named, with a bow to the famed Menenius Agrippa’s ancient allegory, “secession”) business ventured into a genuine frontier, a virtual no-man’s-land, free of all moral concerns and legal constraints and ready to be subordinated to the business’s own code of behavior. As we know, the unprecedented moral extraterritoriality of economic activities led in time to the spectacular advance of industrial potential and growth of wealth. We know as well, though, that for almost the whole of the nineteenth century the same extraterritoriality rebounded in a lot of human misery and poverty, and a mind-boggling polarization of living standards and opportunities. Finally, we also know that the emergent modern states reclaimed the no-man’s-land that business had staked out as its exclusive property. The rule- and norm-setting agencies of the state invaded that land and eventually, though only after overcoming ferocious resistance, annexed and colonized it, thereby filling the ethical void and mitigating its most unprepossessing consequences for the life of its subjects/citizens.
Globalization may be described as “Secession Mark Two.” Once more, business has escaped the household’s confinement, though this time the household left behind is the modern “imagined household,” circumscribed and protected by the nation-states’ economic, military, and cultural powers topped with political sovereignty. Once more, business has acquired an “extraterritorial territory,” a space of its own where it can roam freely, sweeping aside minor hurdles erected by weak local powers and steering clear of the obstacles built by the strong ones. It can pursue its own ends and ignore or bypass all others as economically irrelevant and therefore illegitimate. And once more we observe social effects similar to those that met with moral outrage at the time of the first secession, only now (like the second secession itself) on an immensely greater, global scale.
More than a century and a half ago, in the midst of the first secession, Karl Marx charged with the error of “utopianism” those advocates of a fairer, equitable, and just society who hoped to achieve their purpose by stopping the advance of capitalism in its tracks and returning to the starting point, to the premodern world of extended households and family workshops. There was no way back, Marx insisted, and on this point, at least, history proved him right. Whatever kind of justice and equity stand a chance of taking root in social reality must now, as then, start from where the irreversible transformations have already brought the human condition. This ought to be remembered when the options endemic to the second secession are contemplated.
A retreat from the globalization of human dependency, from the global reach of human technology and economic activities is, in all probability, no longer in the cards. Responses like “Circle the wagons” or “Back to the tribal (national, communal) tents” won’t do. The question is not how to turn back the river of history but how to fight against its pollution by human misery and how to channel its flow to achieve a more equitable distribution of the benefits it carries.
And another point to remember: Whatever form the postulated global control over global forces may take, it cannot be a magnified replica of the democratic institutions developed in the first two centuries of modern history. Such institutions were cut to the measure of the nation-state, then the largest all-encompassing “social totality,” and they are singularly unfit to be inflated to the global size. To be sure, the nation-state was not an extension of communal mechanisms either. It was, on the contrary, the end product of radically novel modes of human togetherness and new forms of social solidarity. Nor was it an outcome of negotiation and a consensus achieved through hard bargaining among local communities. The nation-state that in the end provided the sought-after response to the challenges of the “first secession” implemented it in spite of the die-hard defenders of communal traditions and through further erosion of the already shrinking and emaciated local sovereignties.
An effective response to globalization can only be global. And the fate of such a global response depends on the emergence and entrenchment of a global (as distinct from international or, more correctly, interstate) political arena. It is such an arena that is today most conspicuously missing. The existing global players are singularly unwilling to set it up. Their ostensible adversaries, trained in the old yet increasingly ineffective art of interstate diplomacy, seem to lack the ability and the necessary resources. New forces are needed to reestablish and reinvigorate a truly global forum adequate to the globalization era—and they may assert themselves only through bypassing both kinds of players.
This seems to be the only certainty—all the rest being a matter of our shared inventiveness and political trial-and-error practices. After all, few if any thinkers could envisage in the midst of the first secession the form that the damage-repairing operation would ultimately take. What they were sure of was that some operation of that kind was the paramount imperative of their time. We are all in debt to them for that insight.
Lacking the resources and institutions needed for collective effort, we are baffled by the question “Who is able to do it?”—even if we guess what there is to be done. But here we are, and there is no other place available at the moment. Hic Rhodos, as the ancients used to say: hic salta.
No one could claim to record better the dilemmas we face when climbing those stairs than with the words put in Marco Polo’s mouth by the great Italo Calvino in his Città invisibili: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be: if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”35
I guess that neither Levinas nor Løgstrup would decline to add his signature to that advice.