The Morality of Cynics
In a lecture on politics as a vocation (Politik als Beruf), given to the Free Student Association of Munich in 1919, Max Weber distinguished between two kinds of morality to which all “ethically oriented” human actions could be traced: the ethic of responsibility and the ethic of ultimate ends. This soon-to-be-famous formula was almost as instrumental in establishing the German sociologist’s reputation as his studies anticipating bureaucratic government and charismatic leaders or linking the Protestant Reformation and the development of capitalism.
At first glance at least, the division seems precise, illuminating, and irrefutable. The man who follows the ethic of ultimate ends says what he thinks and acts on his beliefs without pausing to consider the consequences, because in his view authenticity and truth must always prevail and trump quotidian or circumstantial concerns. The man who follows the ethic of responsibility adjusts his convictions and principles to a conduct attuned to the effects of what he says and does, so that his actions don’t provoke catastrophes or bring about results contrary to an overarching design. For the former, morality is above all personal and associated with God or with fixed ideas and beliefs that are abstract and dissociated from the collective human experience; for the latter, morality cannot be divorced from concrete matters, social life, efficiency, and history.
One ethic is not superior to the other; they are different in nature and can’t be ranked in a hierarchical system of values, although in a few ideal cases they are confused in one individual or act. It is more common, however, that they stand in contrast to each other and be incarnated in different people, whose paradigms are the intellectual and the politician. Among these people, certain figures appear who best illustrate cases at either end of the spectrum. In these figures the difference and irreconcilability of these two ways of acting are revealed with luminous eloquence.
If the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas had taken into consideration the interests of his country or his monarch when he set out to chronicle the evils of the conquest and colonization of America, his denunciations—from which stemmed the Latin American narrative of resentment of Spain, or the “Black Legend,” as it is known—would not have been so fierce. But for Las Casas, the typical follower of an ethic of ultimate ends, the truth was more important than the Spanish empire. Nor did Sartre care if he caused France to “lose face” during the war with Algeria when he accused the French army of torturing Arab rebels. It didn’t matter to him that he was judged unpatriotic and a traitor by the majority of his fellow citizens when he made it known that he would have no qualms about carrying “suitcases full of arms” for the FLN (National Liberation Front) if he were asked, since he believed that the anticolonial struggle was just.
General de Gaulle could not have behaved with such Olympian disdain for his personal popularity without failing miserably as a leader and launching France into an even graver crisis than the one that precipitated the collapse of the Fourth Republic. The model of the responsible moralist, he came to power in 1958, disguising his true position on the explosive colonial question with ambiguous rhetoric and clever misunderstandings. In doing so, he brought peace and order to a society on the verge of anarchy. Once in the Elysée, the man who a majority of French citizens trusted to save Algeria employed silences, half-truths, and half-lies to push the stubborn public toward a shift in opinion, artfully leading them to resign themselves to the idea of decolonization, which de Gaulle would ultimately undertake not just in Algeria but in all of France’s African possessions. The happy conclusion of decolonization retroactively transformed what had once seemed government inconsistencies, contradictions, and betrayals into coherent episodes in a long-term plan, evidence of the wise strategizing of a statesman.
Where Las Casas, Sartre, and de Gaulle are concerned, and in other, similar cases, all of this is clear because the integrity underlying individual actions gives consistency to seemingly erratic behavior. The weakness in this conception of the divide between those who follow an ethic of responsibility and those who follow an ethic of ultimate ends is that it assumes an essential integrity in everyone and does not take into account the impostors, the scoundrels, the irreverent, and the insincere.
There is, after all, an unbridgeable moral gap between a man like Bertrand Russell, who went to jail for being eccentric—for practicing the pacifism he preached—and one with the convictions of a Dalí, whose strident remarks and bizarre habits never made him run any kind of risk and in fact helped sell his paintings. Should the maudit extravagances that drove Antonin Artaud to alienation and the madhouse be equated with those that made Jean Cocteau the darling of high society and a member of the Academy of Immortals?
But it is above all among politicians that the ethic of responsibility splits into conducts which, though they seem to resemble each other, are revealed to be at odds when considered more carefully. De Gaulle’s lies to the activists of French Algeria—“Je vous ai compris”—acquire a certain grandeur when considered in perspective, judged and understood in the context of his full time in office. Are they comparable, in moral terms, to the myriad lies leaders tell every day, aiming only to keep their hold on power or to save themselves trouble? For minor reasons, that is, without the least hint of historical transcendence?
This query is not academic, but has to do with a matter of tremendous present-day importance: What will the future of liberal democracy be? The collapse of totalitarianism in Europe and parts of Asia has, in theory, infused democratic culture with new vitality. But this is true only in theory, since in practice we are witnessing a profound crisis of the system in countries like France and the United States, where it seemed firmly rooted and inviolable. In many societies liberated from Marxist rule, democracy doesn’t work properly, as in Ukraine, or is a caricature of itself, as in Serbia, or seems to hang by a thread, as in Russia and Poland. And in Latin America, where the authoritarian beast seemed vanquished, it has lifted its head again in Haiti and Peru and tirelessly besieges Venezuela.
The sad fact is that almost everywhere the majority values democracy only in contrast to what works less well, not for what it is in itself or one day could be. When compared with the fundamentalist satrapy of Iran, the dictatorship of Cuba, or the despotic regime of Kim Il Sung, democracy seems preferable. But how many would be willing to put their lives on the line—to risk everything—for a system that shows an increasing inability to solve problems and in so many countries seems paralyzed by corruption, routine, bureaucracy, and mediocrity?
The discrediting of the political class, which is accused of having expropriated the democratic system for itself and of governing in its own interests, behind the backs and in defiance of the common citizen, is discussed everywhere and to exhaustion. This chorus, which has allowed Jean-Marie Le Pen and the neofascist National Front to claim a considerable swath of the French electorate, has also been taken up by the apprentice dictator of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, who rails against “party-ocracy.” It is the hobbyhorse of the Texan Ross Perot, too, who could surprise everyone in the upcoming U.S. elections and overthrow the country’s traditional parties for the first time in history.
The exaggerations and demagoguery of critics like these aside, there is still plenty to find fault with, and this bodes ill for a system that, despite its flaws, has been the greatest champion in history of prosperity, liberty, and respect for human rights. The most serious problem democratic societies now face is the distance—sometimes great and sometimes enormous—separating those who govern from those who are governed. The main reason for this divide and lack of communication between the common citizen and those who decide from executive offices, ministerial cabinets, or parliamentary seats how common citizens live (and sometimes die) is not government’s growing complexity (the bureaucratization of the state, so well analyzed by Max Weber). The main reason is a loss of confidence. The electorate votes for those who legislate and govern, but with ever rarer exceptions it doesn’t believe in them. Voters go to the polls at fixed intervals and cast their ballots mechanically, as if resigning themselves to a ritual stripped of all significance. Sometimes they don’t even take that trouble: abstention, a widespread phenomenon of liberal democracy, reaches dizzying levels in some countries.
This lack of participation is obvious at election time, but it is even more endemic and critical in the daily functioning of political parties, which are key institutions of democracy. Democracy is not conceivable without parties, associations formed, on the one hand, to ensure the pluralism of ideas and proposals and, on the other, to maintain a permanent dialogue between officials and citizens on a local and a national level. The democratic parties play that role less and less frequently because almost everywhere—in democracies young and old—fewer members take an active role and popular disaffection turns parties into professionalized bureaucracies or coteries of power brokers, with few if any ties to the bulk of the population from which they must receive their lifeblood.
A number of explanations are offered as to why there is such a broad lack of enthusiasm for our institutions when the health of a democracy depends in good measure on their constant renewal and creativity. But many of the explanations tend to confuse cause with effect. For example, it is claimed that political parties fail to inspire loyalty because they lack competent leaders, leaders endowed with the kind of charisma Weber described (never imagining the type of charismatic leader who would very soon be visited on Germany). The truth is the inverse, of course: it is because the citizen masses lose interest in the parties and in political life in general that such leaders do not appear. (Not long ago I read a survey of the career choices of students graduating with the highest grade point averages from North American universities: the great majority of them elected to work for corporations, and the next-largest group chose various liberal professions; only an insignificant minority chose politics.)
The common citizen’s lack of faith and loss of confidence in his political representatives—the result of which is the general loss of authority of the political class—have come about, in essence, because reality has made the ethic of responsibility into a shameful farce, the luxury of the irresponsible. A kind of consensus has been established that reduces political activity in democratic societies to playacting. The things said or done are shorn of conviction and obey motives and designs unrelated to those explicitly stated by those who govern; the worst mischief and trickery are justified in the name of efficiency and pragmatism. In truth, the only justification for such mischief is society’s tacit understanding that politics is a separate and cloistered space (similar to that which Johan Huizinga defined for games) with its own rules, its own discourse, and its own moral code, outside the boundaries and free of the rules that regulate the behavior of ordinary men and women.
This divide between two increasingly impermeable worlds is weakening democracy, causing many citizens to become disenchanted with their governments and making them vulnerable to the xenophobic and racist siren songs of a Le Pen, the authoritarian rabble-rousing of a Fujimori, the nationalist demagoguery of a Vladimír Meciar, and the anti-party populism of a Ross Perot. It also allows many beneficiaries of democracy to keep alive their romantic solidarity with Third World dictatorships.
That is why it is a good idea, as a first step toward the rebirth of the democratic system, to abolish the ethic of responsibility, which, in practice—where it matters—only serves to provide cynics with alibis. We must also demand of our representatives not the half-truths of responsibility but the full and unadorned truth, dangerous as it might be. Despite the obvious risks involved for the politician who chooses not to lie and instead imitates Churchill—offering blood, sweat, and tears to those who elect him—the odds will always be better in the middle and the long term for the survival and rebirth of the democratic system. There are not two moral systems, one for those who shoulder the immense task of guiding society and the other for those who suffer or gain from what is decided for them. There is only one, with its shared uncertainties, challenges, and dangers, in which conviction and responsibility go together like voice and word, or the two sides of a coin.