Complicity and What Works

Diane McWhorter, writing in Slate (via a commenter at By Neddie Jingo!):

...For some reason, I keep thinking about an observation Eleanor Roosevelt made in an unpublished interview conducted in May of 1940, as the German Wehrmacht swept across France. She expressed dismay that a "great many Americans" would look with favor on a Hitler victory in Europe and be greatly attracted to fascism. Why? "Simply because we are a people who tend to admire things that work," she said. So, were the voters last month protesting Bush's policies—or were they complaining that he had not made those policies work? If Operation Iraqi Freedom had not been such an unqualified catastrophe, how long would the public have assented to the programs that accompanied the "war on terror": the legalization of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, the unauthorized surveillance of law-abiding Americans, the unilateral exercise of executive power, and the Bush team's avowed prerogative to "create our own reality"?...

The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today's America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It's that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny...

We have become such "good Americans" that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it "enemy combatant" or "illegal immigrant." Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn't give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don't use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.

I'm in a constant struggle with students over the questions underlying these passages. Not my graduate students, but some off-campus intelligence people I'm teaching this semester (of whom I should probably say nothing further). But I also see it everywhere - the claim, basically, that "morals" are subordinate to "what works." We live in a complex world, after all, they say, faced with terrible choices we simply have to make. There's no time for considering "what a bunch of philosophers say about morality" in such situations. And, in fact, we mostly just act based on our own "subjective" views and anything else is a function of power, the story goes. This series of claims is so very problematic that it's difficult to know where to start. I have my usual responses for purposes of class. But here I want to say something a little different.

One way of approaching this is to talk about "practice" or what's "practical." This has a certain satisfying ring for most Americans. Americans are fond of saying things like, "well, that may be fine in theory, but in practice..." and "that's just a theory" or "the facts say..." or "yes, but will it work?" The valued element of human action is workability, practicality, efficiency, productivity, etc., all of which, the old-timey technological determinists told us, are characteristics of the machine. The unreflective machine.

Of course, we don't want to do things that don't "work." That would be silly, if not simply pathological. Little attention, however, is paid by the American go-get-'em practice-minded folks to the fact that theory and what "works" are two sides to the same coin. We can't know whether or not something "works" unless we have a picture of what successful working would look like. And that picture is a product of both a cumulative epistemological history of mistakes and "successes" as well as a collection of interpretive schemes, beliefs, and value judgments. It makes no sense to talk about practice otherwise.

Yet, when it comes to examining underlying assumptions, new normative goals, feedback loops of values-in-practice, Americans are often rather immature. We have a few codes - the US Constitution, the Ten Commandments, and mom and dad's list - and that is deemed good enough. But there's very little ability to navigate the invariable conflicts that arise - via practice - regarding questions of value. When the list in question breaks down in the face of actual experience we'll often resort to either puerile sophisms or qualities of the machine. Since the qualities of the machine are empirically measurable in terms of quantities, we'll tend to call it a day regarding questions of objectivity. In other words, since value questions aren't measurable in these terms, they're simply "subjective" and not worthy of further discussion via-a-vis policy practices. Objectivity derives from the measurements of efficiency, cost, benefit, productivity.

Think of how we talk about that typically American fetish, "security." How do we know if we're more or less "secure"? Measurements of quantities: the number of police, the number of troops, the amounts of money, how many people in prison, how many bad people killed, the number of video cameras, the height of the wall, etc. All of these contain questions of value that strike at the deepest roots of any society. Ignoring them is perilous in that we then have little control over our collective future because we can't envision a future that might look better than the present except in terms of such measured quantities. The same goes for how we think of economy ("growth" is good), as well as how we think about democracy (as aggregative - the tally of individual votes - rather than deliberative - an intelligent, experimental discussion about policy directions).

Okay, I'm sounding like a curmudgeonly cultural theorist here. But I am dismayed when I encounter this form of thought among students; among anyone, really. Many want to talk about "values," in fact, but take that to mean what's already on the lists mentioned above. Sure, they're important, but values are under constant negotiation and they are not separate from practice, facts, or what works.

I'm afraid that this is where being "masters of our own destiny" ends, complicit in an ad hoc, blind future that allows us to toss out human decency in the name of what works. We can't see that reflective, human decency is the way out of the blindness.