Dear American Liberals: You Are Not Good and Neither Is Anybody Else
“How did this almost go wrong?” This is the question many American liberals are asking themselves in the aftermath of the razor-thin Biden-Harris victory that left us on the harrowing edge of Donald Trump getting a second term that, without his need to worry about reelection, would probably have been appreciably nastier than the first, which, in fairness, was already pretty gross. I get it. I shared your perpetual surprise once— as recently as 2016, in fact.
But my thinking on the matter has changed a lot in the interim, and the change has mainly involved modelling how people think about other people’s thinking vs. their own. I like to think about how the atheist Stephen F Roberts wrote in 1995 that when theists come to understand how they, as believers, can dismiss the existence of every other god of every other religion, then they’ll understand how atheists can dismiss theirs, as atheists just take the idea one god further than monotheists.
While it’s a clever argument on its own, it’s also key to understanding a great deal of this era’s liberal discourse about politics and ethics, and specifically how we think about how other people think and feel. One rhetorical tactic that I’m specifically describing is something I like to call “how-can-you-ism.” It’s a way of picking a particular practice that one finds beyond the ethical pale and then using the fact that ones political opponents ignore, tolerate, endorse, or conduct such practices as proof that the latter are monsters unworthy of having their ideas taken seriously. It’s a subspecies of virtue-signaling and other related performances of goodness. We saw a lot of it with Trump’s family separation policies, and more of it for the murder of George Floyd. How can anyone stand by while such things occur, the argument goes, and still consider themselves moral individuals? How can they even go so far as to vote for more of it?
So let’s look at that. Besides the fact that this narrative implicitly suggests that our moral priorities should be determined by the stories told by a tiny handful of Western media outlets, it ignores the (much)bigger point: if you are an American liberal, your life and its net impact, viewed from the outside, looks nearly identical to that of an American conservative. I mean, sure, they’re monsters, but so are you (and so am I). You’re just monsters with marginally different views on aesthetics.
Let’s unpack this a little bit by looking at a single day of a typical liberal American life. You wake up to an alarm on a phone that was built by slave labor. That’s not hyperbole: your phone and laptop have parts that were produced by actual, contemporary, modern-day enslaved persons. You then shower, wasting huge sums of water, a precious and finite commodity, while using personal hygiene products that were approved for sale to the public through the process of, really and honestly, torturing bunnies to death. Unless you either buy used clothing or get it from boutique domestic houses, the clothes that you bought and wear were sewn overwhelmingly by women working in dismal sweatshops in the developing world.
By lunch, unless you’re vegan or paying $10-$15 a pound for your meat, eggs, and dairy, you’ve probably eaten food from factory farms that are bottomless sources of animal misery. Don’t care about nonhuman animals? Well, given what we know about the sentience of almost anything more advanced than a clam, you’re already pointlessly and arbitrary dismissing the suffering of most living beings on earth, so congratulations on being a sociopath. But then there are the deplorable working conditions of mostly undocumented people and the dire environmental impact that is disproportionately borne by poor people of color, and the fact that you’re driving risks for future pandemics, so you’re not doing any better there. For — bacon. Sit with that for a minute. As a bonus, if you keep a cat or dog, or more, or both, on a diet of meat, you’re deepening your cruel and destructive imprint while telling yourself the exact opposite story: you are kind and love animals.
Let’s keep in mind that I’m not yet talking about the wrongs — “wrongs” as you would define them were they done by groups you dislike — that you’ve ignored: I’m talking about things that you paid for, things that you ordered to happen in exactly the same way that would get you charged with murder if you hired a hit man. This is the life that you wish to hold up as a shining moral exemplar because you have a Black Lives Matter poster in your window and your neighbor does not.
But let’s talk about what you ignore: If at any point in the day you buy a dessert or a beer or anything beyond what’s necessary for basic survival, you spent money that could have saved dozens of children in the poorest nations of the world from dying of something as cheaply and easily prevented as dysentery. There’s no particularly good philosophical reason, again, according to the values by which you judge others, to think that your obligations are void because someone is far away from you. You might as well have watched a kid drown in a swimming pool, to paraphrase the ethicist Peter Singer.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, there are a couple of points that I want to make here, American liberals: first of all, minus a couple of the behaviors I listed above, my life looks very much like yours. I’m not arguing for my own goodness here — that argument is exactly as ridiculous as yours when you write things like “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You that You Should Care about Other People.”
And I’m also not selling moral nihilism, per se. Just because we’re monsters doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work on it. It is our nature as beings to seek change in the ways that we desire, and any work on improving ourselves and the world is probably better than none — or at least I like it better. Nor am I suggesting that only morally blameless people have grounds to criticize the behaviors of others — it’s also wired into the ways that we think and speak to complain about conditions of the world we dislike.
My argument is simply that there are none righteous, or at least none righteous in any traditional ethical realist sense, and the moment we start thinking that the moral boundaries of others are set in fundamentally different ways from how we set our own — i.e. selective attention, willful ignorance, and cognitive bias towards our own interests — we are thinking something very wrong indeed. Well, at very least, we are thinking something that’s going to lead to the same species of shock, disapproval, and disappointment until we learn to stop thinking it.
By now, someone has probably began formulating one of the more common responses to this kind of critique: the capitalism opt-out. This argument contends that the issues that I’m describing are systemic issues endemic to unregulated, profit-driven economies and that I’m recommending a personal solution to what are problems that require governmental intervention. This argument has two meaningful features: it is both completely accurate and utterly irrelevant.
I’ve actually seen this argument literally formulated as:
- If every Western liberal quit doing awful things, awful things would still be on the rise because the population of Asia is still growing pretty rapidly.
- Therefore, I excuse myself for doing awful things, such as eating tortured animals and contributing massively to the degradation of the global ecology.
It’s true, of course, that individuals, even many individuals acting in concert, will make little impact on certain issues of global import. It’s also true that we will all die one day, that the growing human population will almost certainly lead to quantitatively more rape and murder, and that baseball is better than other sports. That doesn’t, in any sane analysis, mean that on a personal level we should indulge in genocide, rape, murder, or football, just because it will all happen anyway. In fact, it’s worse than mere rationalization to make such claims: it is asking powerful people to compel changed behaviors on a grand scale that one is not willing to observe personally. The stickiness and inevitability of bad things in the long view is not really a very good excuse to enable or advance them in any given moment. Or at least it’s not a good excuse if you want to think that goodness is something that transcends your self-interested ideas about it.
The other common argument I see in response to the idea that Westerners are burning the place down is couched in the language of “self-care.” It’s okay to indulge in what we would otherwise define as immoral activities, because those activities will grant one the energy and mental health necessary to do better things concurrently or later. While the claim that one builds virtue by practicing vice is dubious at best on philosophical grounds, it at least has the benefit of according with the psychology that suggests that building better habits gradually and forgiving ourselves for slips along the way makes better behaviors — or at least ones that we desire more for purposes of our own self-image — more likely to persist in the long run. So there’s that.
It’s just that when speaking about the perceived moral shortcomings of their political opponents, American liberals are rarely ever willing to grant this same flexibility. The former’s subsidies to slavery and environmental degradation and sweatshops and animal torture are all part of the process of keeping ourselves well in difficult times: for everybody else, it’s proof of their inherent badness. And there’s the rub.
So where does this leave us? Well, if we really want to be good in a traditional philosophical sense, we should all probably change the way we live some, and, alas, few of us probably will. But that’s not really the main issue. The issue is that we actually have very little interest in and devote very little effort to living that kind of life, and we should maybe instead recognize that morality functions as a personal and political economy in which we derive real gains from our communities by the way we talk about our moral lives. It’s a rhetorical construction, functionally speaking. Morality doesn’t look anything like pure altruism, or at least if it does, then we are all epic failures at it. We’re all inclined to tolerate suffering if the ones causing it directly make even the slightest effort to conceal it from us, if it occurs far from where we live, or if it’s simply the norm of our group to ignore it. These are plain empirical facts.
So how do 70 million-plus people vote for an obvious con man to retain great power without a shred of accountability? How do they stand by in the face of state-endorsed police brutality or continue to tolerate children in cages? You just read an essay on a device made by slaves. That’s how.
