November 7, 2009

Ethics and Pirates

There an exhilaration which is consistently and quietly murdered by mere satisfaction. One can be satisfied that one has enough money; one can be satisfied that one's career is going swimmingly; one can be satisfied that one's spouse is inoffensive--even pleasant. But this is not enough and the soul knows it, and so finds this sort of satisfaction scandalous. Adding insult to scandal is the realization that one has not only accepted, but is now accepting, this spiritually apalling arrangement. One breaks for a moment and knows that some awful deal is being made--a deal by oneself for ones self. And yet one stays and stays and stays... as in a merger-like marriage... because it is stable, it shuffles, is safe.
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Yet every soul has a breaking point. And it may be that a soul can only take so much safety. With respect to social safety this is certainly true. For this sudden commission ('YOU CAN NO LONGER BE HERE! YOU CAN NO LONGER BE THIS!') often appears as a gag reflex, where what is gagged on is respectability.
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats".
This, of course, is not quite right; at its best the call is not a call away from ethics, but a call to it--(a call to which I must shout out 'Here I am!' immediately or all is lost). But there seems something right in the thought here expressed. Of course, it affirms our opening point--that, however paradoxical it sounds--it is normal to be suddenly and overwhelmingly repulsed by normalcy. But then, a repulsion of normalcy does not obviously produce an admiration of piracy--much less a temptation to it. So why piracy? Slitting throats is obviously not what calls to most of us in the pirate's vocation. What does? A decent answer would seem to be this: it is the privilege of the pirate to be in a position to criticize us--to suggest just how sleepy and slow both respect and regularity have made us. The young muscular buccaneer, his body slathered in tatoos raging against the very possibility of assimilation, incarnates an unequivocal renunciation of respectability; and the sheer audacity of this renunciation plays upon private suspicions that our satisfactions and respectable routines have made us lesser, made us soft--have not so much dignified as degraded us. We have become civilized, and in consequence lost the razor-edge senses of the sea-going savage. So the value of this element of savagery sensed by otherwise ethical persons need have nothing to do with throat-slitting. Rather, what the temptation towards piracy reveals to the ethical is how they are perpetually betrayed by the very stability of ethics. Lulled by it. For a fine thing, isn't it, to be a non-pirate--to be ethical?--to be on dry land, where down is always down, up is up! None of that dreadful rocking and rolling! We even pride ourselves on living lives on ground that stays sensibly flat. On such a footing, how respectable we are--accountants who trundle off to offices, smiling thinly past narrow glasses, nodding to all on the way ("Greetings, sir." "Fine weather we're having", "Tomorrow at luncheon--of course"). Now, though, see our citizen against his criminal counterpart. To begin, what a different creature must thrive who rides the sea, where the very base of one's world may leap up and throw you at any moment; where an untimely wind or a careless word means death; where clashes are not the work of lawyers; and where one whole-heartedly hails or hates, and refuses to mix the two. Yes, today, perhaps, our accountant has had his luncheon; perhaps he has even gotten the contract which has worried him for weeks. Ah--but meanwhile-- what a different soul is produced by leaping to the deck of an enemy ship in the face of a blunderbuss blast--or taking port, daring a town and its constable by your swagger, rolling and roaring drunk in a street whose name you can't pronounce and will never see again, shutters snapping shut as you pass! Snapping shutters! What fun! The sound of respectability in full retreat! Back! all of you! to your clean, well-lit places--to the ever-narrowing quarantine of the careful! A toast, brothers! And another! Is this not outrageous and grand? And so is it not the sinner, here, who enjoys the larger soul? From thoughts like these we get our worry: being lulled into respectability for so long, we have lost the ability--or rather, the agility--to be free-wheeling, devil-may-care, aggressively, unselfconsciously--and even savagely ethical. Our ethic grows larger while our souls grow smaller. And so the familiar picture of the ethical, neatly seated, all in one corner, hands folded, behaving themselves, while the others have all the fun--while the pirates really live.
**
What is happening to me? I'm doing all the right things...
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Rightness, then, taken as regularity, appears to strike the sensitive ethical soul both as somehow caught up with ethics, and yet also a kind of enemy. And this is why the ethical admire some feature most often possessed by the enemies of ethics. Discord may not, strictly speaking, be ethical, but by God it keeps me awake--and, given the ethical urgency of life, it may seem unhealthy--even unethical-- to continue to sleepily shuffle through it. So ethics seeks stability, then comes to be unsatisfied with it, and on seemingly reasonable grounds. In this way the uninhibited criminal calls to us by his very uninhibitedness--his committedness to risk-- and we see him receiving as the enviable wages of his sin a resulting alertness which we suspect we cannot match. This alertness, (which we elsewhere called the ethics of insomnia), is thus usually found in turmoil, not safety--in places where disorder, not Order, have the upper hand. So the paradox: that stability engendered by ethic evinces a kind of sleepiness which undermines the attractiveness of the ethical. The ethical seems less alert than its opposite. Thus this alertness, though decidedly shady in its associations, becomes, even to the ethical, a value of its own. And it is this value which attracts the ethical to the limits of the ethical-- draws the ethical to the very edge of ethics--and of everything else. It then becomes natural to seek out the edges of things, where one is startled into wakefulness by the prospect of being slashed by them--perhaps literally. Lermontov's Pechorin, an amoral character almost entirely animated by this separate value--the value of wakefulness--muses in just this way after rejecting the love of two women of quality in favor of a lonely life and endless war in the Caucuses:
"I often scan the past and ask...why had I not wanted to tread that path...where quiet joys and peace of mind awaited me? No. I would not have gotten used to such an existence! I am like a sailor born and bred on the deck of a pirate brig. His soul is used to storms and battles, and, when cast out on the shore, he feels bored and oppressed, no matter how the shady groves lure him! no matter the peaceful sun!... "
How does the ethical soul achieve the wakefulness of Pechorin? No obvious answer here, but that does seem the right question. How might it be answered? It seems the ethicist must figure out, and incorporate, what the pirate gets right--must distill out the alertness engendered by the pirate's roguery without the awful chopping, hacking, and ruthless theft executed by those who seem most alert. So how, one wonders, does one do this 'distilling'? How does one 'go rogue', ethically speaking? For if the above is at all correct, it is ethically essential for keeping a certain sort of soul from drifting away from ethics--a drift resulting not from a straightforward appeal by evil, but in order to avoid something genuinely bad--in order to avoid the ethical evil of sheer boredom, which soon becomes a boredom with ethics, ultimately inspired by this honorable fear of sleep. Shall we appeal to social support? This seems counterproductive, since clashes, not comity, keep the soul awake. Conformity appears to such a person as a sort of chloroform; social support begats smugness, complacency--and renouncing this, we said, is just what the pirate gets right. So the social dominance of ethics works against any vivid commitment to it, by making it ubiquitous. Ubiquitous and thus risk free--and for the soul sick of safety, the absence of risk is great danger. So is the problem that ethics is dominant? Is winning? Is that what makes it secure, and so unsatisfying? Perhaps this is the beginning of an answer: Ethics should be the underdog. Ethics triumphant, perhaps, is a mistake--and so, therefore, are those stories which present it as all-conquering on a Throne. Ethics must dissassociate from Power-- needs the aesthetic of an insurgency. Ethics, above all, cannot be safe.
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This thought, in tension with ethical triumphalism of every stripe, is scattered in various places--perhaps most prominently in the American Western, where the ideal ethical character is always rough, savage, marginal, alienated, and the Law is always best defended by some form of outlaw, as if ethics itself recognizes it needs a bit of lawlessness in its defense. The Nameless Drifter in the town more often than not must be lured and cajoled into saving it as if it were important to play up the fact that his loyalties are by no means certain--that his very ethicality is a close-run thing. In its own strange way, Christianity certainly started here--Jesus, up and through Good Friday, is presented as the God Who Fought the Law and Lost, and famously closed out His career as Criminal. His early followers began nobly enough, as wild, hunted conspirators, communicating by signs in the sand and whispered signals, taking to the catacombs to chant in flickering light the unfathomable Mystery that men should love one another. Yet now, few seem to be giving thought to the great slander Christ's church brings upon itself by selling itself as something strong and civilizing, something respectable, triumphant, tame.
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Chesterton, to his credit, was one Christian who understood that the true orthodoxy is not portrayed--or at least, had best not be portrayed--as some safely frozen Form--as stability--but as a spirit of constant alteration, improvisation, velocity. Thus his famous description of an orthodoxy which could still exhilarate: "In my vision, the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild Truth reeling but erect."
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If we need one, let us make this our point: that ethics--Faith--best stays erect precisely by being wild and reeling; its stability in the soul depends, not on its careful, but rather, its careening quality. Ethics is not the balance one has on land--that is the land's balance, not ours; rather, ethics is stability, not as status secured, but as tenuous and moment-by-moment achievement. Yet if this is so--if ethics is this skill of balance--it is best learned not in stability but in instability--not on land but on a ship. The urge to freeze everything in ethical poses--in rules, in routines, in institutions--even to force ethics itself to freeze and pose--is what takes from us our ethical sea legs and savage spirit, whose sensed departure is precisely what tempts us to 'spit in our hands and raise the black flag' to get them back. So no stable ethic for us! It is not up to us to keep it safe. Like the ark of old, a chest full of inestimable treasures, ethics tilts and wobbles in its way; but we only undermine it--and evince a lack of faith-- when we seek to steady it with our own well-meaning hands.