The Ethical Vacuum

not whether it will be filled, but who will fill it

An audio version of this article is now available here on our podcast feed.

Takes on (my) Takes

Now getting back to the title of this post, I wanted to share a recent piece in Vanity Fair that I think is quite important. It is closely tied to a set of issues I explored in the first two essays I posted some months back. So while I work to finish the next full length piece I wanted to add a shorter post [which actually ended up a bit longer than anticipated] building from this thoughtful exploration of the intellectual vanguard guiding reactionary jingoism. Indeed, as the piece highlights, their influence is hardly confined to obscure corners of the web but reaches well into the worldviews of quasi-normies like J.D. Vance.

I know, I know…Having only two essays up and already referring back to them? Some gal!

Be that as it may, this excellent work by James Pogue plumbs the subterranean realms animating the increasingly surreal, if not absurd, political climate in the U.S. Of course, my strong suggestion would be to find the time to read his (admittingly lengthy) article in full. But if you wish to leave that for later, or just don’t care to read it at all, the basic gist is that a group of younger, often poshly educated, political activists (or self-styled philosophers), some being funded by billionaire backers like Peter Thiel, have slowly worked their way from ‘edgy’ web provocateurs towards both mainstream political acceptance and a rising cultural caché.

There are a quite a few potential strains of analysis emanating from the piece but what struck me most was how clearly this movement is built around a yearning for some sort of moral grounding. From their vantage point, the world’s ever-quickening lurch towards an indulgent permissiveness and aimless relativism has slowly erased the ‘traditional’ values that provide people with a sense of rootedness. Though packed with choice quotations and sharp observations, one particular line that stood out to me came from leftist Manhattan socialite turned new right Manhattan socialite, Honor Levy.

The article describes her as:

an It girl in a downtown Manhattan scene—The New Yorker has published her fiction; she is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene—where right-wing politics have become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search for moral grounding. [my emphasis]

Levy noted that she generally avoids politics and is completely unfamiliar with luminaries of the movement such as Ohio senatorial candidate J.D. Vance. As she puts it herself, the moral rectitude she ascribes to her new found affiliations stands as the chief allure. In her case it comes across more as an awakening, as she states that:

Until like a year and a half ago I didn’t believe good and evil existed.

So what?

So how does this intersect with prior essays from The Interesting Times? And, perhaps more importantly, why do these connections matter? To me, these anecdotes and the Vanity Fair piece more generally get to the heart of the malaise suffusing Left politics in the U.S. Malaise may seem an odd descriptor as present day intra-Left debates are riven with a ceaseless stream of cynical barbs, put-downs, and mutual recriminations. But I see it as a malaise all the same because it has come to resemble an anchorless boat buffeted by a storm, being tossed around violently while lacking any discernible course.

To be absolutely clear, I am not at all co-signing onto the dangerous and ultimately incoherent ideas espoused by the self-ordained philosopher kings profiled in the piece. That said, I think they are correct in that a political philosophy built around a deep anguish, or even despair, with the current state of affairs is well-attuned to the moment and therefore attractive to converts like Honor Levy. By contrast, Left politics has been gravitating towards poles of a sanctimonious orthodoxy¹ on one end and an anodyne, technical ‘pragmatism’ on the other. Though this may be a bit of a crude characterization, I would submit it provides a reasonably useful map of the current terrain. Importantly, from what I can gather, both are wholly unsuited for the times and risk having the Left (my political home) implode into a black hole of irrelevance.

Many on the Left see themselves as torchbearers for the Enlightenment, the ‘trust the science’ people. In some ways this is ‘true’, though I’d argue often this is manifested in ways that are detrimental to the advance of Left politics. Of course, the Enlightenment was many things but one of its abiding goals was to pursue scientific precision and employ empirically validated solutions as a means to neutralize political systems rooted in frail human judgements and superstitious beliefs.

As Steffen Mau explains it in his book detailing the quest for a numbers and data driven social order:

The rise of modem statehood and the expansion of markets and capitalist economics brought about a massive surge in the use of numbers in everyday economic, political and social practices. The availability of figures in the form of official statistics made possible techniques of governance which replaced the sacred with objectivity and rationality.

However, as he goes onto explain, upon further consideration we may have simply been swapping one faith for another as:

the advance of quantification is turning us all – to a greater or lesser degree – into adherents of the religion of numbers.

This is not to imply a simple one-to-one comparison between theocracy and our faith in ‘the numbers’, and indeed quite a bit of good has come out of such pursuits. However, as we stand here and survey the landscape some three centuries on, it seems clear that such a perspective is at best highly unsatisfactory, if not downright dangerous, when applied to the social world.

A very brief (and incomplete) sojourn into the messy intersections of politics and ethics

What I mean is that we seem to be adrift amid the persistent unraveling of a particular strain of thought which has endeavored to supplant human subjectivity and sentiment with something concrete, measurable, and ‘rational’. To be fair, there is a good deal more nuance bound up with such approaches and quite a few of them are operating as good faith efforts to address the fundamental problems of the human condition.

Namely, the question at the heart of Plato’s most famous work, The Republic: Can we transcend individual perspectives and biases to arrive at some objective, or universal, conception of Justice? Can we formulate a justice that serves as more than a mere placeholder for some set of dominant beliefs or power itself?² Of course, Plato envisioned an escape from these pressing dilemmas via the mind and the power of thought and reason, a tradition carried on by philosophers like Descartes and Kant.

But a separate thread in this quest, one much more closely aligned with the trend lines of our current epoch, pursues an empirical route to transcendence—or at a minimum, a desire to sharply scale back the influence of human sentimentality in politics and social organization. In short, by gathering troves of data about human behavior and testing them against hypothesized causal connections (i.e. the scientific method) we would be in a position to bring the ironclad laws and axioms of the more ‘rigorous’ physical sciences (or some approximation of them) to bear on human affairs.

This tradition harkens to a highly influential strain of philosophical thought known as logical positivism—commonly associated with the noted Austrian philosopher Karl Popper.³ For the logical positivists any statement that cannot be empirically verified was quite literally useless and therefore resides outside the purview of serious thought. This takes us back to the matter of ethics and morality as they tend to center around questions that do not lend themselves to the sort of scientific verification the logical positivists and their adherents insisted upon. Thus, in this view, questions like ‘What is the good life?’ or ‘What is a just distribution of resources?’ are incapable of being reduced to empirical observations or testable hypotheses and are therefore unable to produce any substantive knowledge.

One way to resolve this impasse has been to put questions of ethics to the side and create mechanisms for ‘impartially’ adjudicating specific policy or legal disputes. Certainly, the ‘market’ has been persistently put forth as some sort of amoral social algorithm that impersonally assigns value and distributes resources in a maximal way—making it Just by implication rather than any biased or sentimental philosophical conclusion.⁴ Beyond this tried and true ‘solution’ to these dilemmas, the last two decades has brought about the emergence of Big Data and the dream that we now have the computational capacity to ‘rationally’ regulate and administer society using data and algorithms.

Indeed, many ethically-tinged decisions profoundly impacting people’s lives are now in the hands of this apparently magisterial amalgam of inconceivable quantities of data and algorithms, whose underlying operations are increasingly opaque to even their designers. Certainly, these notions can be contrasted with the early days of the web when it was heralded as a harbinger of an exciting new age marked by a radical decentralization of knowledge and power—a vision eerily parroted by crypto/NFT/Web3 aficionados. Over three decades on from those heady times I believe it is fair to say that by any measure, this hypothesis positing an inverse relation between information flows and centralized power has been rejected.

This pointed out not simply to lob cheep shots at tech utopians but rather because it offers an opportunity to reflect on how such thoughtful, technically brilliant, and often genuinely progressive folks got it so wrong. My simple answer would be, flawed premises. More specifically, the notion that the core political-ethical dilemmas that humans have faced—albeit in quite different conditions—for time immemorial can be overcome through some alternative means for organizing information in terms of its creation, distribution, and access. Here we can recall Hume’s famous dictum that no ought can ever arise from an is, or even an infinite set of is-es. If we take the big-data-algorithm-complex to be simply a machine churning out analyses of trillions of is-es, we are still left with the fact that what is can never yield definitive, wholly objective, answers to ought questions, i.e. ethics. Rather, the oughts tend to be smuggled in via assumptions such as ‘maximizing efficiency’ (as discussed in Note 4).

Which brings us to one other major approach, and perhaps the ‘dominant’ mechanism in American politics, the Liberal (as political theory) way. The Liberal route around the problem of ethics is persuasive in that it accounts for both the importance of ethical questions and their intractability, or the impossibility of any ultimate resolution. For example, competing notions of the good life should be openly contested in a free society and, to put it somewhat crudely, the cream will rise to the top. Or, at a minimum, the kind of cream that a lot of people in a society want will be served. Again, this probably sounds quite familiar to Americans (and many others) because it serves as a set of bedrock assumptions underpinning our society.

In many ways, this formulation comes across as quite reasonable and accommodating, so what’s not to like? Well, of course there are litany of critiques taking aim at this approach, but I find one of the more penetrating variants to be rooted in a set of observations put forward by Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality. The basic tenor of his argument is captured in the passage, stating:

…the rich man under pressure of necessity conceived in the end the most cunning project that ever entered the human mind: to employ in his favour the very forces of those who attacked him, to make his adversaries his defenders, to inspire them with new maxims and give them new institutions as advantageous to him as natural right was disadvantageous.⁵

Okay, maybe the phrase ‘the most cunning project that ever entered the human mind’ is a touch overwrought but I dare say the willingness to write with such forthright moral indignation helps to explain the enduring allure of his works.

Moreover, I would contend that, in surveying the social landscape of early eighteenth-century Europe, Rousseau sees those atop the emergent bourgeoise-laden social pyramid taking the rising clamor for greater equality lodged against them and reprocessing it in a way that not only protects their position, but enhances it. For Rousseau, the ‘cunning project’ of Liberal equality is to extend the prospects of inclusion and egalitarianism while in fact delivering little more than a mirage of genuine empowerment. All the while, this very maneuver effectively diminishes the potency of any efforts to seek redress as the ‘equal status’ of those in subordinate positions absolves those who dominate of any ethical or practical responsibility for the prevailing state of affairs. In short, if everyone is ‘equal’, then no one is responsible.

To this end, those occupying relatively subordinate social positions come to see the maintenance of legalistic equality as a core interest and hence emerge as ‘defenders’ of the very status quo that sublimates them. Indeed, I would put forward a provisional hypothesis that the somewhat odd phenomenon of the Trump-Bernie voter in 2016 can be seen as partly emanating from a shared disdain of this shallow version of equality articulated by Rousseau centuries prior.

Further, reflecting on the processes Rousseau spells out brings to mind one of my favorite descriptions of the relationship between politics and ethics penned by the Italian political theorist, Benedetto Croce:

…politics, which is pure politics, does not destroy, but produces morality, in which it finds its completion and highest expression. In the world of reality there is no sphere of political or economic activity that can stand by itself, closed and isolated; but there is only the process of spiritual activity, in which process what is useful is continually being transformed into what is ethical. [my emphasis]

In a recent podcast, Ezra Klein offered the prescient observation that (roughly) ‘code cannot solve political problems.’ Indeed, I think Klein is right about this but that he also failed to take the next step in that, when boiled down, ‘political’ problems are essentially ‘ethical’ in nature. To turn back to Hume, as much as empirical knowledge about the social world is indispensable to the process of formulating political outcomes, no amount of knowledge can answer what we should do. Should propositions are inextricably bound up with the ends we wish to pursue, and those ends cannot be decoupled from from ethical judgements about what it good, or right.

Indeed, the assertion of not acting politically is one of the more political moves one can make as it sets them up as the neutral arbitrator while those in opposition are merely biased and self-interested partisans.

Ethics Abhors a Vacuum

Though it may seem seem a strange tangent to go off on after reading the Vanity Fair piece I really do think the very tepid relations between Left politics and ethics is a serious problem. As Croce so well articulated, ethics are the language of politics, democratic or otherwise. Moreover, laissez-faire, liberal notions of respecting and accommodating many different versions of ‘the Good’ is a great personal philosophy to bring to life and your interactions with others, but it really falls short as an approach to politics, where we often face either/or decisions affirming one view ‘the good’ over another.

To be clear, this is not a call for a hardened stridency and the adoption of strict codes for who or what is acceptable. The certitude that emerges from more Marxist-inspired traditions has proven to be similarly ineffective in galvanizing significant public support. What I would contend is that so long as Left politics (in the broadest sense) eschews a direct engagement with ethics in favor of the ‘smart’ or ‘math’ (à la the Yang gang) or the ‘practical’ we are ceding a huge amount of invaluable territory to the ideas of individuals like those profiled in the Vanity Fair article.

This is not to say that Left politics are bereft of morality or ethics but rather they tend to lurk in the background. Given the aforementioned association between progressive views and the Enlightenment, recourse to ethical pleadings or clear enunciations about right and wrong may be a cause of discomfort, if not derision. Note too, the sort of rhetorical and perspectival migration I have in my mind need not in anyway involve religious thought or beliefs, though it also need not dispense with them either. Indeed, I personally find the significant curtailment of coercive religious authority from people’s lives to be one of the most beneficial outcomes of the Enlightenment epoch.

However, we need not look all the way back to the Enlightenment. As Yehouda Shenhav systemically lays out in his exceptional book, the original impetus towards ‘scientific’ or ‘technocratic’ governance in the U.S. was closely linked to the the progressive movement in the early twentieth century. The idea was to apply the strictures of engineering to governance, making it rational and anchored in objectivity. As he puts it:

By redefining industrial conflict as a mechanical problem rather than as a result of political struggles, engineers were able to universalize their particularistic interests, to depoliticize the conflictual nature of their rationality…[such that] [m]anagement ideology has gradually become an inextricable part of established social scientific fields such as sociology, political science, and public policy.

Again, the stated goals of the progressive reformers were far from lacking in merit as they sought to root out corruption and exclusionary patronage in favor of a rationalized merit based order. Nevertheless, as Shenhav captures so eloquently, such claims to objectivity tend to mask significant, and highly impactful, ethical assumptions about the the social world.

An artful articulation of this impulse (that is clearly still deeply imprinted upon our political institutions and ideologies) is captured in a brief verse of Donald Fagan’s sardonic recollection of Cold War life in the song I.G.Y., where he envisions:

A just machine to make big decisions, programmed by fellows with compassion and vision. We’ll be free when their work gets done. We’ll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young.

What I am really angling at here is that as we seem to have hit a wall as a society, increasingly beholden to a system that engineers unhappiness, disenchantment, and isolation and that the language of ethics is central to any genuine effort by Left politics to confront this state of affairs. Of course, this is no simple matter and the abiding impulse in Western social and political thought to transcend the ethical no doubt partly springs from trying to avoid being ensnared in the morass of intractable ethical debates and dilemmas.

I am not looking to unveil some comprehensive ethical system, nor would that be of much use anyways. Rather, I think it is of the utmost importance for the Left to reconsider the very language and rhetorical cadence it brings to the political arena. Ethics and morals speak to people’s imaginations about who they want to be and what kind of world we should create. Too often the very language of the Left implicitly accepts a set of ethical parameters which are part and parcel to our current maladies.

This is a time a growing ambivalence and I would contend that those gravitating towards the folks profiled in the Vanity Fair piece are drawn as much by the ethical nature of the appeals (the substance of which I find fairly repulsive) as any of the specific doctrines on offer. A deeper re-engagement with the ethical realm offers an opportunity for the Left to (re)consider the very ends, or notions of ‘the good’ we have built our society around. Which, by extension, opens the questions of ways in which we can not merely alter, but fundamentally revise, our vision of a good society.

Put more directly, it’s not so much a matter of thinking of how a market-commodity based society can become more accommodating and respectful of minority populations or women but rather reimagining a set of ethics and social ends that comport with those outcomes as a matter of course. Ditto matters tied the near unfathomable extent of the environmental degradation we have wrought. Of course, this entire viewpoint grows out of the perspective that the aforementioned pathologies are not simply especially pernicious mutations of an overall solid system, but instead represent manifestations of its core features.

In the first essay I posted critiquing Anne Applebaum’s anti-woke treatise on similar grounds I quoted a brief line from an essay by Iris Murdoch:

It is dangerous to starve the moral imagination of the youth.

That line has really stuck with me in the years since I first came across it. From my read, the danger is not so much amorality but that that starved imagination will ultimately be filled by something. As such, an aloof disengagement from moral questions does not take them off the field of play but only cedes this vital terrain.

In the same essay Murdoch goes on to speak of our incessant drive for rationality that produces an almost ‘pathological fear of imprecision.’ With out a doubt, ethics are messy and often filled with imprecision and uncertainty, but I would hold that it is far better for the Left to wade into these uncertain waters more forcefully rather than face the far more certain alternative that others will do so in their stead. The article in Vanity Fair makes it clear that they already are.

note: post-image is AI generated

1. Note here that I would tend to place in this category of the sanctimoniously indignant strains of both what has come to be known as ‘woke’ and their critics who fashion themselves as the holy guardians of ‘free-expression’. This point was central to the first essay published here in December.

2. In the first book of The Republic the character of Thrasymachus takes up the mantle of justice as power with his snide dismissal of Socrates’s search for justice, declaring: ‘I say that justice or right is simply what is in the interest of the stronger party.’ This view of justice was given a much fuller expression by the character of Callicles in the Plato’s Gorgias where he expresses the view that: ‘nature itself reveals that it's a just thing for the better man and the more capable man to have a greater share than the worse man and the less capable man. Nature shows that this is so in many places; both among the other animals and in whole cities and races of men, it shows that this is what justice has been decided to be: that the superior rule the inferior and have a greater share than they.’ Note the striking commonalities with contemporary defenses of the meritocracy or Social Darwinism from this work written several thousands years prior.

3. As it may be clear, I am not a very big fan of logical positivism and I think its significant influence is bound tightly with a host of ongoing social maladies. This said, fearing that I may be not be giving them their full due, nor appreciating some of the finer nuances and distinctions within the movement, I have recently purchased a history of the Vienna Circle (a primary locus of logical positivism’s development) by David Edmonds. If nothing else, I will be be able to critique them all the better by diving a bit deeper into their thought and the times that produced them.

4. There is much to say about this ‘solution’ to the the problem of ethics but in short I think a lot is revealed by the centrality of the term ‘efficiency’. Though in standard economics parlance, ‘efficiency’ is repeatedly deployed as a rationale for economics’ status as a neutral, value free social science. But the strange part is that the very term ‘efficiency’ makes zero sense in the absence of ethical content including clear valuations regarding ‘the good’. It is a terms that presumes a purpose or a goal. From the best I can gather the commonplace economics view is that efficiency functions as both the means and the ends. Perhaps the eminent economist Joan Robinson, in her classic work Economic Philosophy, captures the matter best when she calls another stalwart of economics lingo, utility: ‘a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.

5. In terms of framing dominant perspectives on inequality and the relationship between the have’s and the have not’s, contrasting Rousseau’s perspective with Nietzsche’s offers a fairly insightful survey of the terrain. Interestingly both of them see some form of cunning and deceit at the core of the matter. However, whereas Rousseau’s envisions Liberal equality as a trick the rich play upon the poor, Nietzsche sees the inverse process at work whereby the poor mobilize Christian moral tropes to ensnare the rich (or powerful) in their web of moralizing limitations upon their behavior.