A Little Sunday Reading: Anomie and Moral Struggle
It’s A Good Day To Face The Hard Things
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
Frederick Douglass
I care very little about the legal situation in the trial of George Zimmerman. Legal arguments are nearly always facile (neat, comprehensive, and missing the point) and they are necessarily time bound (the evolving cultural fashion of a people deployed in its most strident form). It is the moral circumstances from which legal cases are brought that interests me.
That work is involved in morality is something I’ve found many people have a difficult time parsing. Morality is often seen in simple, static terms. One is moral or one is not. It is seen simply as a motivating force that is already there or a signaling posture that is, calculatingly or naively, the demarcation between us and them—a membrane clarifying otherness. These characterizations of morality are not misguided. They are simply not enough.
We are a sense-making species. I have proposed elsewhere that it is this autopoietic sense-making (that, in large part, comes through the substratum of pre-theoretical motivation and signaling) that is integral to our ontogenetic development as individuals in societies. The activity of our primal (inter)subjectivity generates, through a capacity to inherit and extend, what we call morality. These are “simply not enough” in the sense that we cannot finally count on any given state of this primal subjectivity we each have already become and continue to sediment and function from as long as we are alive. We must lean into our becoming. We must do the work of explicit moral development, just as we do the work of explicit societal and scientific development, if we are to be anything more than ad hoc in our subtle motivations. For it is in doing the explicit work that we generate the conditions of forgetting well, contributing to the sedimentary layers of pre-calculating self that are always being built up in some way.
Quite pressingly, if we do not do the work of moral development, the societal and scientific work, that becomes self-perpetuating (at least along trajectories of political and economic self-interest), will begin to function apart from the human rootedness that orients and catalyzes them in the first place. This estrangement of socioeconomic and technoscientific advancement from the human socialities that generate them is what phenomenologists have rightly called the conditions of civilizational crisis.
Moral work isn’t calculating how to be right under present circumstances. Moral work is wielding circumstances to generate novel possibilities. It is re-creating the world through the raw materials of moral imagination and the tenacious generosity to risk the violence of definitive action to manifest the good, the beautiful,and the just through the ways our personal and social bodies etch out the human conditions of the world. This definitive action that is spawned by moral imagination is rooted in the catalyzing substratum of subtle motivation built up over time through moral work.
The struggle of moral hospitality has the power to set off a chain reaction of trust and transformation that echoes into the generations to come by making demands on the powers that be in the name of those without voice, power or pedigree. The stingy legalisms and tactics of advantage that calcifying incumbent systems (and those using them for power) employ only ever accelerate a race to the bottom. New realities come about through the more difficult work of putting at risk our rights and advantages to generate the wider civilizational conditions of the same for those systematically excluded from, hidden behind, and bearing up the empty names of the valorized structures of a given time (salvation, freedom, choice, capital, et al).
Morality only exists through bodies. The individual and her communities embody the nested and co-mingled collections of cultural practice that function as the moral fabric of a people. Inheriting social fabric is intrinsic to the human experience. Bearing a critical responsibility for it is where inheritance becomes stewardship. This is moral work. This is the base pattern of social maturity: the passage from being curated to responsibility; from heritage to creation; from inheritance to bequeathing. This is what we must be, and what we must be about, if we hope to weather this passage together. We must model for our children, our nieces and nephews, our neighbors, our friends, and even our enemies—in how we live and speak—the moral work of creating something that lasts, something just and convivial, that can withstand the biting waves of anomie that are our gravest foe.
If we are to do more than gain the world and lose our soul—if we are to be more than right, more than winners—the difficult work of moral development is what we must be about. For even in failure moral work seeds a better future through its sedimentation in the subtle motivation of those explicitly exercising their moral compass and courage. Even moral courage that does not reach its goal has impact on those around the one through whom it manifests and in this more difficult way goes viral.
It was the more difficult thing for George Zimmerman to see Trayvon Martin and ask if he was OK or if he needed a ride (or to simply watch and question his own first instincts!). That is moral work. It is work that builds the moral subject and the social fabric at the same time.
It was the more difficult thing for Frederick Douglass to risk learning to read and write, even when his owner forbade it. In the face of the structural “No!” to his own project of literacy, it was the more difficult thing for Douglass to begin teaching all of the other slaves to also read and write under the cover of Sunday School. That is moral work. It is the work that strikes back to build lasting achievements through oneself into the surrounding world. It was this moral courage that built up in Douglass the motivation to risk more in his failed attempts to escape enslavement and his fighting back against the the slave breaker Edward Covey in a physical conflagration that lasted over two hours, but resulted in Douglass never being beaten again. That is moral work. Douglass went on to finally escape slavery through a sophisticated impersonation of a black seaman and because of his indefatigable moral work he was able to make precise demands through his life and words that would not be subjected to the current moral state of society.
It was the more difficult thing for Abraham Lincoln to face down the economic powers of the enslaved American South through policy, war, executive order, and finally the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That is moral work. It is work that risked the critiques coming from those benefiting most from the current conditions. It is the courage that did not refuse the dirty, technocratic work of legislation, war, and politics—work that is anything but convivial in the midst of its unfolding, but is carried out in the name of something greater than personal gain, greater than any good that has yet been collectively attained. It is putting to work our collective goods and personal gains in service to a world yet to come: sacrificing something of the secured present to achieve the same for those still bearing the structural carelessness harboring the beneficiaries of the current state of things.
Whether in daily life or in multi-generational civilizational projects, moral work is a struggle. It is a wrestling with the conditions that exist by a people with the will and imagination to make precise demands by bringing them about in themselves, and in this way, bringing them into the world. By creating a better world to come seeded now through courageous lives of moral work.
Had Zimmerman been able to see, and had he chosen to live, any of the infinite moral possibility on that rainy night last February his acquittal last night would never have been necessary and Trayvon would be with his family today (with the chance to come into his own moral work). George Zimmerman failed his neighbors. His image of what it meant to be an adult member of his community was morally infantile. He is responsible for the death of a young man who was his neighbor. A minor who would have used his key to unlock his front door if George had simply watched a little more.
George Zimmerman is also legally not guilty of the charges of 2nd degree murder and manslaughter. This is a settled legal judgement. Given the current laws in Florida, the narrow questions posed, the relative performance of the respective legal counsel, and the jury of Zimmerman’s peers: The law has spoken.
Zimmerman failed at his moral work. Zimmerman’s defense succeeded at their legal work. And the race to the bottom continues. What is your work? This is your chance. Face the hard things. Find and do your moral work. Let it transform your subtle motivations that your life may bloom into more than you can ask for or imagine. As Abigail Adams reminded her children constantly: “Be good and do good.”
You cannot have the latter without the former.
Happy Sunday.
“Anomie and Moral Struggle” was written on July 14th, 2013—the day after the jury returned the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin. The piece was first published here on Sunday, August 4th.
