A Different Spin on ‘Bounce’ (3/3): morality and giftedness

One of the themes that comes up a number of times in Freeman’s book, Gifted Lives, is morality. I’ve picked on this one to discuss, in preference to the others I haven’t so far touched on, because I have a quibble with her treatment of it.

The Bodhissatva of Compassion

For example, she picks up on the issue of moral character in her chapter on The Good Samaritan which tells Suzanne’s story. On the back of this story, she goes on to analyse the relationship between giftedness and empathy (pages 140-141):

The gifted, I suggest, have no greater claims to morality than anyone else, but what they do have is the capacity to intellectually understand moral conundrums in life and to perceive arguments for what they are, set in their social contexts. Suzanne practises a very high degree of Western morality, caring for others without obliging them to believe as she does.

She then makes a distinction that does not make complete sense to me (page 135):

Morality is as much a part of Suzanne as her gift of empathy. That is to say, she has principles by which she works, and at the same time a feeling for others with different views.

I need to unpick my unease with this distinction between morality and empathy. For a start, it seems more intuitively reasonable to see empathy as intertwined with morality rather than as something completely distinct, and this, for me, is not undermined by empathy – and its sister, compassion – being a feeling whereas morality is more language-locked, spelling out the ‘oughts’ which are underpinned by such fuzzy intimations as ‘fairness’ or ‘kindness.’

I’d like to take this further though. It will help if we start with Susan Neiman‘s discussion of Kant in her brilliant book, Moral Clarity (page 95):

Truth is a matter of the way the world is; morality is a matter of the way the world ought to be.

She is as aware an anyone, including Jonathan Haidt, that the idealism that stems from our sense of what ought to be can often be partially, and sometimes totally, lacking in empathy. He writes, in his humane and compassionate book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis‘, that, in his view, idealism, which he links with morality, has caused more violence in human history than almost any other single thing (page 75).

The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism. . . . Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism — the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end.

Neiman tempers this with what for her is the other side of the coin (page 112):

. . . . contemporary suicide terrorists . . . are determined to kill others in the pursuit of their ideals. . . . . . But while focusing on the fundamentalist terrorists’ willingness to kill for ideals, we have paid to little attention to their willlingness to die for them.

The latter impulse she links to the desire for transcendence quoting Jessica Stern in support (page 113):

As odd as it sounds, a sense of transcendence is one of many attractions of religious violence for terrorists, beyond the appeal of achieving their goals.

So, there are clearly ways in which principles and values, abstractly conceived, can be antithetical to empathy and compassion. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy acknowledges that sometimes a client’s values are so different from the therapist’s that therapeutic work becomes impossible. This would presumably be the case in the unlikely event of a Western Liberal therapist treating a fundamentalist terrorist. It presumably does occur with the extremes of intractable narcissism and psychopathy.

In any case, I have come to prefer the word compassion because it has been pointed out that an effective torturer can use his ability to enter another person’s feeling state to enhance the pain.

Even when we see compassion at work, if the compass of the moral imagination is too narrow our compassion for one individual or group can cause us to inflict great cruelty on another.  The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the book more effectively than the ITV drama, spoke to this kind of complexity in human motivation and the entangled moral maze that can result.

Constance Kent

It is probable, in the version of the story in Kate Summerscale’s book, that Constance Kent, the girl who finally confessed to the killing of her three-year old half-brother and who was aged 16 at the time of the murder, was motivated more by feelings of pity for what her younger brother, aged 14, had gone through than by some hatred of her own. Mr Kent had married again after the death of his first wife, and the children of his first marriage had apparently not fared well in the household of the second. William, the 14 year old, suffered the worst perhaps and Constance was very protective of him. It seemed almost certain that both Constance and William committed the crime together. Constance could never have done it alone.

At the original court hearing the case against her was thrown out, but six years later she confessed, insisting that she alone was responsible. Summerscale explains the likely reason for this delayed confession (page 301-302):

Though she had complained to her schoolfriends about how [William] was treated by Samuel and Mary [his father and stepmother] – the humiliating comparisons to Saville, the way he was made to push a perambulator around the village – she made no reference to this in 1865. She said of her father and stepmother, ‘I have never had any ill will towards either of them on account of their behaviour to me,’ carefully avoiding the ill will she might bear them on anyone else’s account. The answer to the mystery of Saville’s murder might lie in Constance’s silence after all; specifically, her silence about the brother she loved.

Constance gave herself up in the year before William’s twenty-first birthday, when he was due to inherit a £1,000 bequest from their mother. He hoped to use the money to fund a career in science, but was still hampered by the uncertainty and suspicion surrounding the family. Rather than both of them live under the cloud of murder, Constance chose to gather the darkness to herself. Her act of atonement liberated William, made his future possible.

So, it is obvious why empathy, and even compassion, in themselves, when divorced from some clear and wider standard, are not enough to ensure that cruel actions will not be committed and are therefore not the basis for a secure and adequate morality. But it is also true that all values are not good. How else would it be possible to say, ‘Evil be thou my Good’? Some compassion is far better than none, and some values are better than others. The question is how to ensure that receiving compassion is not conditional upon membership of an in-group and that values are not conducive to wrong-doing?

My own understanding, derived from Bahá’í scripture and supported by my reading of such searching thinkers as Robert Wright and Iain McGilchrist, is that only upon an unshakable sense of humanity as being one indivisible entity at the deepest level and upon our inextricable connection with all life, can a world enhancing morality be built. The best summary of all this entails comes probably in the statement from the Bahá’í International Community, The Prosperity of Humankind:

The task of creating a global development strategy that will accelerate humanity’s coming-of-age constitutes a challenge to reshape fundamentally all the institutions of society. The protagonists to whom the challenge addresses itself are all of the inhabitants of the planet: the generality of humankind, members of governing institutions at all levels, persons serving in agencies of international coordination, scientists and social thinkers, all those endowed with artistic talents or with access to the media of communication, and leaders of non-governmental organizations. The response called for must base itself on an unconditioned recognition of the oneness of humankind, a commitment to the establishment of justice as the organizing principle of society, and a determination to exploit to their utmost the possibilities that a systematic dialogue between the scientific and religious genius of the race can bring to the building of human capacity. The enterprise requires a radical rethinking of most of the concepts and assumptions currently governing social and economic life. It must be wedded, as well, to a conviction that, however long the process and whatever setbacks may be encountered, the governance of human affairs can be conducted along lines that serve humanity’s real needs.

We have come rather a long way from considering whether the gifted are more likely to be moral than the rest of us, and where empathy comes into the equation. Even though Freeman was not centrally concerned with morality she did press an electrode somewhere in my brain when she made that comment about morality and empathy. I hope the tangled paths of thought it led me down have been of some interest to more people than just myself. Either way I feel a bit clearer on the issue, till the next time some button in my mind gets pressed.

There are other themes in her book that contribute to its interest. I summarised them in the first post in this series. I may come back to them at a much later stage. I have written quite enough already on this book, I think

Russian Icon of the Good Samaritan

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Swallowing Tablets of Stone

Humourists know that the best jokes are mined from the most serious topics. Morality is no exception.

Moses trudges down from Mt. Sinai, tablets in hand, and announces to the assembled multitudes: “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. The bad news is ‘adultery’ is still in.”

(From Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar: page 78)

Nobody likes taking tablets at the best of times so who’s going to take kindly to swallowing tablets of stone, especially when they taste so bitter to so many palates? After all, when was the last time a great religion told us to covet our neighbour’s wife?

The humour lies partly in drawing our attention to the conflict between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ that Susan Neiman discusses so perceptively.  What we should do is so often in conflict with what we would like to do yet we know we ought to like doing what we should: we just can’t seem to get to that point somehow. Commandments are forever over-riding instincts that refuse to go away.

Part of the reason for this is that we have evolved to think in the short term and be unduly influenced by concrete specifics in the here and now, including the stories people tell us as well as what we experience ourselves. We’re particularly poor with probabilities (Dan Gardner‘s book, Risk, deals with this brilliantly so I won’t go into that here).

Let’s focus on consequences and time scales. Smoking provides an easy way to illustrate this. The table gives a few pointers in each box just as examples. If I’m a smoker, the short-term costs are virtually invisible: I enjoy my addiction so it doesn’t feel like a cost and buying cigarettes looks like choosing to dispose of my income as I feel like.  The habit tastes sweet for the benefits it brings which I value greatly and are very obvious to me. The distant disasters my present pleasure could well bring seem very remote and unlikely to my primate brain. So I show a callous lack of empathy for my future self whose suffering I don’t trouble myself to imagine. After all, things like that don’t happen to me.

And if that wasn’t enough to make sure that I’ll carry on smoking (or indulging in any other ‘vice’ you care to mention) the same examination of what quitting would feel like stacks the odds even further against giving up. The present becomes soured with discomforts of all kinds while future benefits fade into invisibility in the mists of distance. The gain in disposable income will probably weigh little in my mind compared with the horrible unsatisfied cravings alone, never mind the weight gain and the social costs.

In short, the long-term costs of continuing to smoke and the long-term benefits of quitting have far less impact on behaviour than the short-term costs of stopping and the immediate pleasures of continuing the  habit. And this is true for almost any insistent pattern of behaviour you care to name including those which are morally loaded. Virtue goes against the grain of our animal nature in similar ways.

We are though animals with some very special powers, rational thought being one of the most obvious – well, perhaps not obvious all the time. So, we shouldn’t give up on the idea of giving up our bad habits, as Neiman explains:

You think that what failed in the past will fail in the future?  Kant reminds us of how many sheer technological advances have disproved this old saw. . . . . If we don’t abandon efforts where science hopes we may create technology, how dare we abandon them where morality demands we create justice? . . . Of course ideas of reason conflict with the claims of experience. That’s what ideas are meant to do. Ideals are not measured by whether they confirm reality: reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals. (Her emphasis.)

(Moral Clarity: page 153)

However, she does not underestimate the difficulty of acting on this realisation.

If you tell yourself that a world without injustice is a childish wish-fantasy, you have no obligation to work toward it. . . . Keeping ideals alive is much harder than dismissing them, for it guarantees a lifetime of dissatisfaction. Ideas are like horizons – goals toward which you can move but never actually attain. . . . . The abyss that separates is from ought is too deep to bridge entirely; the most we can hope to do is narrow it.

(pages 159-162)

And that can seem like a bad bargain — too much immediate discomfort for too little immediate gain once more. However, reason may not be as feeble and error prone as we sometimes think and there may be more at work in the world to push towards virtue than is immediately  obvious. Even if we are not convinced there is a God or that we have a soul that survives death, the way the world works should give us pause for thought.

Philo of Alexandria

Robert Wright‘s perceptive analysis, of how morality is essential (and perhaps inevitable) if civilisation is to progress and chaos to be avoided, deserves close attention from both the materially and the spiritually minded, as Neiman’s does also in its different way. It begins to tip the balance against the inertia of bad habits and hints that there is more to life than matter.

The same thread of thinking runs through the whole of his book, The Evolution of God, so a small sample of his argument will have to suffice. One of the most charming facets of this argument, that morality is a social cement that we ignore for long only at the risk of chaos, comes in his discussion of Philo of Alexandria.

The order at work [in the world] is the Logos, and it came originally from God. He set up the world so that mere self-interested learning – the study of cause and effect, and preference for happy effects  – would steer people towards virtue. So when Proverbs reports that ‘whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on the one who starts it rolling,’ we can think of God not as pushing people into pits and pushing stones back on people, but as the one who designed the social ‘gravity’  that brings these effects.

(page 227)

Virtue seems painful, if you accept this line of reasoning, only to those who do not understand its value. The difficult task for education and parenting is to enable developing minds to defer immediate gratification long enough to secure the benefits of self-restraint — benefits that accrue both to the individual and to society. I will return to that issue in a future post, drawing amongst other things on some useful recent material, while recognising that this delay might not help any of us deal with present temptations.

A last thought for now.

Perhaps this perspective, if they would only pause to consider it carefully, would help those who kick against moral constraints, whatever their origin, to understand the words of Bahá’u'lláh when He explains:

3. O ye peoples of the world! Know assuredly that My commandments are the lamps of My loving providence among My servants, and the keys of My mercy for My creatures. Thus hath it been sent down from the heaven of the Will of your Lord, the Lord of Revelation. Were any man to taste the sweetness of the words which the lips of the All-Merciful have willed to utter, he would, though the treasures of the earth be in his possession, renounce them one and all, that he might vindicate the truth of even one of His commandments, shining above the Dayspring of His bountiful care and loving-kindness. . . .

5. Think not that We have revealed unto you a mere code of laws. Nay, rather, We have unsealed the choice Wine with the fingers of might and power. To this beareth witness that which the Pen of Revelation hath revealed. Meditate upon this, O men of insight!

(Kitáb-i-Aqdas)

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Humanity is our Business (3/5): Capacity Building (b)

Empowerment

To mistakenly identify Bahá’í community life with the mode of religious activity that characterises the general society — in which the believer is a member of a congregation, leadership comes from an individual or individuals presumed to be qualified for the purpose, and personal participation is fitted into a schedule dominated by concerns of a very different nature — can only have the effect of marginalising the Faith and robbing the community of the spiritual vitality available to it.

(Universal House of Justice, 22 August 2002)

Training is helping move us from a passive congregational culture to an actively empowered one.

Referred to as the “chief propellant” of the change in culture, the training institutes, with their ability to produce an expanding number of human resources, have fundamentally altered the approach of the Bahá’í community to the tasks at hand. More than ever the rank and file of the believers are involved in meaningful and vital service to the Cause. Whether by holding devotional meetings, facilitating study circles, or teaching children’s classes, a greater number of friends have found paths of service that do not depend on public-speaking prowess.

(Building Momentum: pages 18-19)

The three activities referred to in that last quotation have often been described as ‘core activities.’  Core does not, however, mean only. The analogy of the spear has also been used, with these activities, or some aspect of them, referred to as the spearhead. This metaphor points up (terrible unintended pun – sorry!) the  issue here. A spearhead without a  shaft is not much use. So, there are many other things that we need to do as well as those three important components of our plan if they are to have the impact we would like.

The House of Justice has remarked on this increase in empowered participation:

It is especially gratifying to note the high degree of participation of believers in the various aspects of the growth process.

(Building Momentum: pages 18-19)

People offer refer to how, in most organisations, 20% of the people do 80% of the work. Bahá’ís are learning how to buck this trend.

A Sequence of Courses

A critical tool in this process is a sequence of courses devised by the Ruhi Institute in Colombia, tested in the field there and gradually improved in the light of experience. Certain principles underpin the components of this set of materials:

From among the various possibilities, the Ruhi institute has chosen ‘service to the Cause’ as the organising principle of its educational activities.

(Learning about Growth: page 50)

They describe this further in one of the modules of the course:

The purpose of our courses is to empower the friends spiritually and morally to serve the Faith . . .

(Book Seven: page 102)

Learning to implement these courses here and in other countries has not been without its problems of course:

Out of a desire to apply the guidance ‘correctly,’ there was a tendency in isolated cases to go to extremes: either everyone was to be a tutor or restrictions were imposed; people who had taught children for years were told they couldn’t continue unless they did Book Three; firesides [informal introductory meetings usually with an invited speaker] were abandoned in place of study circles; people were rushed through the courses without doing the practice.

(Paul Lample: Revelation and Social Reality, pages 64 and 92)

This pain and discomfort of learning by these mistakes is perhaps the inevitable accompaniment of creativity and enacting higher values. There is no doubt though that the basic methodology is sound and has proved itself in many places, in spite of these teething problems, to be a powerful means of giving people the confidence to act. People are also learning how to dovetail the activities connected with the sequence of training courses with previously existing patterns of action such as the fireside and courses designed to further deepen our understanding of the Writings of the Faith.

Refining What We Do

We are also learning not only to be more active in service of the community as a whole, but also to think about what we are doing in order to do it better. The methodology for this was part of the Colombian experience and draws on models of action research (see Peter Reason for example) undertaken in the wider community.

The most [the teachers and administrators] could expect from themselves was to engage wholeheartedly in an intensive plan of action and an accompanying process of reflection and consultation. This reflection and consultation had to be carried out in unshakeable unity and with a spirit of utmost humility. The main thrust of the consultation had to be the objective analysis of possible courses of action and the evaluation of methods and results, all carried out in the light of the Writings of the Faith.

(Learning About Growth: page 10)

Other posts on this blog examine in considerable detail what Bahá’ís mean by consultation and reflection. The key components of the process described here are study, consultation, action and reflection.

Relating to Scripture

In using scripture as part of this process of empowerment certain aspects are emphasised:

. . . to reach true understanding . . . one must think deeply about the meaning of each statement and its applications in one’s own life and in the life of society. Three levels of comprehension are: basic understanding of the meaning of words and sentences, applying some of the concepts to one’s daily life, and thinking about the implications of a quotation for situations having no apparent or immediate connection with its theme.

(Learning about Growth: pages 30-31)

A good mnemonic for this is AIMs. The ‘A’ stands for applications, the ‘I’ for implications and the ‘M’ for meanings. The bedrock of the process of empowerment here is to enable us all to relate to the Word of God in a way that inspires us to put what we have understood into action for the betterment of the world.

The Links to Civilisation-Building

It is important to have a brief look now at how the work of each book including its ‘service’ component links to the aim of building a better world for everyone.

This is made quite explicit at the beginning of the first book in the sequence (page 9):

The betterment of the world can be accomplished through pure and goodly deeds, through commendable and seemly conduct.

(The Advent of Divine Justice: pages 24-25)

The theme is continued in the other books, for example:

Book Two (page 46):

The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh encompasses all units of human society; integrates the spiritual, administrative and social processes of life; and canalises human expression in its various forms towards the construction of a new civilisation.

(Universal House of Justice: 1989)

Book Three (page 9):

Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education, alone, can cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.

(Gleanings: CXXIII)

Book Four (page 8):

It is incumbent upon all the peoples of the world to reconcile their differences, and with perfect unity and peace, abide beneath the shadow of the Tree of His care and loving-kindness.

(Gleanings: IV)

It is perhaps worth stressing here that specific patterns of action are linked to the work of each book and are central to the purposes of that book. Book Three is designed for example to empower people to run children’s classes. Book Four encourages us to speak to people about the lives of the central figures of the faith as a way to inspire them to a new way of living. The lives of the Báb and His disciples, for example, unfold before our eyes a quality of moral heroism that  many profound thinkers lament is missing from modern life.  Zimbardo devotes the closing chapter of his book  The Lucifer Effect to describing ways of cultivating exactly that quality in the ordinary challenges of life. Susan Neiman describes examples of such heroism in her book Moral Clarity.

Civilisation-building is the underpinning purpose of the courses and it is seen to begin with small changes in our patterns of daily action. Again in a later book:

Book Six (page 11):

The world is in great turmoil, and its problems seem to become daily more acute. We should, therefore, not sit idle . . . Bahá’u’lláh has not given us His Teachings to treasure them and hide them for our personal delight and pleasure. He gave them to us that we may pass them from mouth to mouth, until all the world . . . . enjoys their blessings and uplifting influence.

(Shoghi Effendi, The Guardian: 27 March 1933)

Book Seven (page 67):

Children are the most precious treasure a community can possess, for in them are the promise and guarantee of the future. They bear the seeds of the character of future society which is largely shaped by what the adults constituting the community do or fail to do with respect to children.

(Universal House of Justice: Ridván  2000)

The Purpose of the Core Activities

Many people has felt confused at times about the exact purpose of the ‘core activities.’ A member of the Universal House of Justice has reportedly offered the following clarification.

He gave the example of a glass. He said that while it is not inaccurate to say that the glass is transparent, it is evident that transparency is not the purpose of the glass. Transparency is one of the attributes of the glass, but its purpose is to hold liquid. Similarly, one of the attributes of our core activities is that they become instruments for teaching – but that is not their purpose. He stressed that the purpose of our core activities is to enable us to serve society and help “translate that which hath been written into reality and action”.

The primary purpose of our core activities is to raise our capacity to serve society, such that these activities become instruments for developing communities, and not merely instruments for teaching the Faith.

He encouraged the participants present at the seminar to re-look at the Ruhi Institute books from 1 – 7 with the eye of society and to reflect on how the concepts embedded in them could be used for social action and not just for the sake of bringing more people into the Faith.

He developed this further. It is clear that we need to imbue participants engaged in our core activities with a vision of social transformation as well as personal transformation. Now if someone were to ask us whether the purpose of our inviting them to join study circles is to make them Bahá’ís, we can confidently say ‘no’ and tell them that the purpose of our core activities is to assist in the transformation and betterment of society.

The next posts will look more closely at the nature and value of devotional meetings and the compelling need for the spiritual education and proper nurturing  of children.

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‘Moral Clarity’ by Susan Neiman: a review

The individual must be educated to such a high degree that he would rather have his throat cut than tell a lie, and would think it easier to be slashed with a sword or pierced with a spear than to utter calumny or be carried away by wrath.

(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: page 136)

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality from under one’s feet.

(Twilight of the Gods: Friedrich Nietzsche)

There are two kinds of book that normally cause me problems: books about physics and books about philosophy. My shelves are populated with many such volumes whose bookmarks stall about halfway through, just about where good intentions foundered on the rocks of complete incomprehension.

At last, though, I’ve found a philosophy book that I could finish and not only that: I could follow its main lines of argument relatively easily and immediately see their relevance to our problems today. This is the book.

Neiman’s starting point is to renege on the ‘non-interference pact’ in which philosophers agree not to meddle with the details of history as it unfolds and historians sign up not to interfere with morality. She sees it as critical that philosophical acumen is brought to bear on political realities. Once she has asserted her right to participate in the debate, she proceeds to argue that the typical understanding of the relationship between religion and morality is flawed. In her view, though deeply intertwined, they are essentially independent. Her position, though, is not simplistic (page 112):

To be human is to have needs for transcendence over the brute and shiny objects of experience, needs that both religion and morality at their best fulfil.

While I still think it is possible and rational to argue the case for a different relationship between religion and morality, one which places our idea of God not just our idea of good at centre stage, her position leads to some interesting possibilities not least a revision of the current distortion of the enlightenment viewpoint. This is typically seen to be atheist with a potentially lethal utopian view of the power of reason (see John Gray’s Black Mass for an eloquent example of this view). By contrast she contends (page 126):

The Enlightment took aim not at reverence, but at idolatry and superstition; it never believed progress is necessary, only that it is possible.

She goes on to add that the Enlightenment also confronted torture and inherited privilege. She sees it as referring back to Plato’s belief that truth, beauty and goodness are connected. She goes onto examine in detail its commitment to ‘happiness, reason, reverence, and hope.’

She focuses on the thinking of Kant, for example the way he treats the discrepancies between is and ought. She summarises this by saying (page 153):

Ideals are not measured by whether they conform to reality: reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals.

She argues that (page 158-159):

The gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be is too great to be bridged by good intentions. . . . . Ideas are like horizons – goals towards which you can move but never actually attain.

She is wonderfully clear about the relationship between happiness, virtue and social progress (page 177):

Devote yourself to my happiness and your own perfection, and I’ll do the same in return. In a world where everyone did that, both happiness and virtue would double.

She sees this as an essential corrective to self-righteous abuses of power, especially if we focus on the other person’s concept of happiness not our own. This is very close to the Bahá’í view where we are urged to focus on ploughing our own furrow straight rather than causing ourselves to stray off line by picking holes in our neighbour’s ploughing.

She seeks to correct what she regards as a fundamental misconception of the Enlightenment view of reason (page 190):

One nearly constant theme [of the Enlightenment] was the idea that reason is not omnipotent.

Nor, she feels (page 194), was reason set up as opposed to feeling but rather to its bête noire: ‘authority based on revelation, superstition, and fanaticism.’ Reason, she argues, is what enables us not to be restricted by our biology: we have become able to create our own ends, and should not simply become means to other people’s ends (pages 202-203).

She follows this analysis with detailed examinations of examples through which she seeks to rehabilitate the tarnished concepts of heroism and evil. Her treatment of these nicely complements Zimbardo’s psychological approach, which he explores in depth in The Lucifer Effect.

At the end of the 450 pages of this excellent and supremely accessible book, where does she leave us?

Other posts on this blog, for example on the nature of reflection and the limits of reason, explain in depth why I can’t accept as a complete and adequate explanation her view that reason alone is the means for our transcendence. However, much else that she derives from this argument is compelling.

For example, a key point she makes is that moral conviction and a sense of evil have been highjacked by powerful interests and thereby devalued in the public eye. They need to be reclaimed and put to proper use if we are to understand the nature of the realities that confront us and which demand appropriate and proportional responses.

We have lost a sense of moral clarity that would give rise to fear that certain actions – whether we privately feel guilty about them or not – could lead to disgrace. For they don’t. If enough, and enough well-placed people do them, the only disgrace you need fear is the failure to get away with it.

She concludes her analysis, before moving on to considering particular examples, by stating in ringing terms (page 380):

Evil presents an unacceptable gap between ideals and reality; judging something to be evil is a way of setting limits on what we are willing to endure. The language of good and evil is vulnerable to exploitation because it’s the most powerful language we have. . . . . To abandon talk of evil is to leave that weapon in the hands of those who are least equipped to use it.

This book raises serious and important issues and reflects deeply upon them. While I do not agree with everything she says, I respect the way she says it and have to acknowledge that she has significantly deepened my understanding of these themes.

This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the direction our civilisation is taking. And it’s readable enough for me to have finished it – no mean achievement for any author writing from a philosophical perspective.

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