[From Michael Burgess, edited by Seth.] A traditional means of founding political or moral philosophies in the west has been the construction of a point from which we can be seen and judged. This is an internalization and politicization of the Christian God who surveys and intervenes in his creation: we are always under the gaze of God and must therefore be Good.
For Hume this gaze was “the ideal moral observer” – a secularization of Our Father. For Bentham it was the merely potential gaze of an all-seeing (if not all powerful) human authority; his panoptical prison is the example par excellence of morality as the belief of another who watches. The logic here is simple: we are Good under this gaze because we act under its assumed morality – we do not have any morality ourselves.
This phenomenon of vicarious belief or acting because another believes is a predominant mode of commitment today. We do not really believe the planet is in crisis (wars, ecology, etc.) but we’re reassured that somewhere the scientists really believe it, or the journalists do, or the activists, etc. Indeed it seems the media and public reaction against government surveillance is a game of pass the parcel: the media is outraged because the lives of ordinary people are being invaded; the ordinary person is outraged because the media is. The problem is then when you look down, you find there is no parcel: few people really care.
The ideological trajectory we are thus on: exporting our beliefs to others who can believe them for us, culminating predictably in the breakdown of political motivation and trust. When God really existed his gaze could unite and motivate us (indeed motivate us to genocide, terror and war: such is the power of an All Powerful Gaze). When, however, these authorities breakdown – when we no longer care what they might see or fear how they might react the foundation of our principled action collapses.
In paganism the gaze of the gods was almost irrelevant. The gods did not believe in any moral system: they themselves conformed to it. In the most pagan Abrahamic religion, Judaism, there is a similar principle. In the Nitzavim, a portion of the Torah, two Jews argue over a point of God’s law. To settle the argument one asks God himself to intervene. When He comes down the other Jew sends him away on the grounds that it isn’t His job to interpret His law. God laughs with joy, saying, “My children have defeated Me, My children have defeated Me!” Even though God is the origin of The Law he must submit to it.
The idea of a transcendent principle, a Form to which the world must conform appears to be alien to contemporary individualist ideology. Nevertheless individualism itself is a shared collective commitment and unites many communities through the doctrine of ‘enlightened selfishness’. In light of this we might turn the teleology of contemporary ideology on its head under a Gaze. We deny the moral high-ground to the negation of traditional morality and to contemporary liberalism which keeps others at-a-distance. We are united by the acknowledgement that others have moral systems, even if they are different.
Under the Gaze in this position we are forced to ask the question: who are we to say what others should believe? That is, is our mind pure enough, convinced enough in the Good to gaze upon others as God? Invariably the answer is no. Our gaze isn’t sufficient to purify others. We must therefore set aside the Gaze as the origin of moral belief and recognize the teleology which actually operates within each person and over which they have little control.
In traditional moral philosophy – the philosophy that underlies the current surveillance state – the assumption of a Gaze is required to ensure adherence to the moral principles of the system. Avoidance of that Gaze – Privacy – is considered a a subversive and illegal if not terroristic act. Individualism as an ideology seems to stand opposed to the Gaze by offering a model where individuals are accountable only to their own (self-generated) teleology. It substitutes a transcendent form of the Gaze (e.g. God) for an immanent one (in each individual) which doesn’t suffice to guarantee adherence to even the minimal, individualist imperative.
We must therefore set aside the Gaze as the origin of moral belief and recognise the teleology which actually operates within each person and over which they have little control. We really are all committed to many things and conform our lives to these principles, and we can raise these principles above the gods themselves and whomever gazes upon us and once again make everything conform to a Form of the Good.
We can invert the accusation pragmatic liberalism makes today: privacy, the lack of a gaze, is not the opportunity for evil. Evil is in the ceaseless watching itself, and the assumption of its own necessity.
–Michael Burgess
for a modern pagan view with philosophical pedigree see:
http://www.apadivisions.org/division-39/publications/reviews/all-things-shining.aspx
Good book. Have you read it?
yep that’s why I recommended it.
http://www.academia.edu/7301963/_Melvilles_Creatures_In_American_Impersonal_Essays_with_Sharon_Cameron_ed._Branka_Arsic_
I followed you up until about paragraph 6. Your final paragraph is a call for what, exactly?
Well I’m really quite annoyed actually, I didnt realise that the last two paragraphs had been so substantially rewritten by whoever edited the article.
It originally read:
We must therefore set aside the gaze as the origin of moral belief and recognise the teleology which actually operates within each person and over which they have little control (in its objective subjectivity). We really are all committed to many things and conform our lives to these principles. And we can raise these principles above the gods themselves and whomever gazes upon us and once again make everything conform to a Form of the Good.
We can invert the accusation pragmatic liberalism makes today: privacy, the lack of a gaze, is not the opportunity for evil. Evil is in the ceaseless watching itself, and the assumption of its own necessity.
Another awesome post, Michael. Due for publication in September is “Avant demain:épigenèse et rationalité” (Before tomorrow: Epigenetics and Rationality) by Catherine Malabou which should be translated by the end of summer into English.
She springboards off of Meillassoux (After Finitude), and says we cannot abandon the transcendental (introduced by Kant), the a priori, the condition of the possibility of knowledge that comes before all experience. To abandon the transcendental is to neutralize our own world, and to create a world that can exist without us. We need to own our world and live in a world of transcendental contingency (not necessity).
For a preview see: http://mehdibelhajkacem.over-blog.com/article-catherine-malabou-affronte-egalement-l-effet-meillassoux-122734633.html
In other words, we need to learn how to bring value into the world which is no longer socially/morally defined by a transcendent God or by transcendent human morality, but by the transcendental which is both contingent and of value.
Hello, Wayne:
Re your last paragraph, what would this mean exactly? And is this what Michael is saying as well?
There is an extraordinary de-politicization of the article I wrote here. What’s there is, I agree, quite difficult to follow in places. The message, the “point” of the article was put clearly in several rhetorical asides which are designed to complement the more theoretical language. I’ll add a couple of these asides here:
> We are equally untied into a moral force by the view that others elsewhere really have different moral systems (today it is enough that people elsewhere believe regardless of what they believe: racist, homophobic, sexist, etc.). Of course this moral force is one of propagating the oppression of others by denying them a collective voice (to the oppressed Others we say: “no no, you’re mistaken, what you people really believe is all that deeply spiritual sexism; if you want to change what your people really believe I’m afraid you’ll have to do it alone. Recall Iraq…”).
> The gaze of our state should be purified but our gaze isn’t sufficient to purify others. It is this contradictory position which enables, for example, a blind-eye to be turned to the major American export to Africa: Christian fundamentalism (“well, if they really believe it…”).
> We can invert the accusation pragmatic liberalism makes today: privacy, the lack of a gaze, is not the opportunity for evil. Evil is in the ceaseless watching itself, and the assumption of its own necessity.
The point is that “the Gaze” approach to morality is individualizing, and de-moralizing. It says that no one is moral *really* and thus permits us to ignore moral attrocities here and around the world. We ignore invasions of privacy because we see these as ensuring morality not degrading it, and we ignore the effect of our ideological exports (religious fundamentalism) as it is increasing HIV, impoverishing nations, etc. And we ignore the stuggle of oppressed peoples around the world because their “culture” entails a moral system that “they just have to conform to”.
If women are wrapped up, hidden away, and require careful constant attention in “some muslim country” then “that’s the way *they* do it” … “who are we to…” etc. Thus my little remark “Recall Iraq…” is the refrain of those people who mistrust themselves and the rest of us so much that they would prefer the obvious immoralities of oppression to continue than join in solidarity with those who are oppressed. To individualistic liberalism today there is nothing that transcends.
There is another example here which I could also have included by it makes too many points. During WWII’s german occupation of france – both out of fear and other motives – the vast majority of the french people aggred and with the Nazis. If you had just asked them all in a poll, you would have record numbers assenting. Yet Charles de Gaul – speaking “on behalf of France” – said No. And few would disagree that he *was* speaking on behalf of france. There was a “No” there which transcended the mere individual, political, pragmatic circumstances of oppression. There was a struggle against oppression and a vast immorality so large that it was possible to connect to and speak on behalf. Liberals today I think would just point to a straw-poll and say “leave them to it”.
Well, I definitely think that there is something particular about contemporary Western society where people make a commitment to a lot of big ideas–global climate change, poverty and income inequality, declining democratic institutions, and so on, and yet leave it for other people to deal with. Me included. But there seem to be several reasons for that, and one of them might be not knowing how to organize to do something about these issues. For whatever reason, entertaining the idea feels sort of embarrassing for some strange reason. Like I think about how odd it would be if I got a group of people together in the office who claimed to be interested in solving the poverty problem, asked them if they wanted to get together to hammer out incremental ways to deal with poverty, and then start working away on them. I don’t know quite why that sort of sincerity is so looked down upon.
This is a very difficult subject, theoretically. On the surface my initial reaction is to say “whenever there is embarrassment, there is shame”. For example, consider a situation in a newspaper which appeared a few years ago: one father saved another’s boy from drowning in a swimming pool. The boy’s father shouted at the other guy. The explanation here is obvious: the boy’s father was embarrassed that he wasnt paying attention/etc. so “took it out on” on the guy that showed him up.
In feeling that sincerity is somehow naive, (vicariously) embarrassing or “cringe-worthy” are we doing something like the reverse of this situation?
Either way our spontaneous emotional reactions to things are not natural and entirely products of ideology. The deep conservatism (in the sense of conserving what is already in place) at the heart at this kind of embarressemnt suggests that the modern ideological system is extremely effective at self-preservation: not only are we unable to think of what is required to change the system, the attempts to think this are embarrassing.