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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253014764 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2014 |
| Series: | American Philosophy |
| Pages: | 140 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Meddling
On the Virtue of Leaving Others Alone
By John Lachs
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 John LachsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01476-4
CHAPTER 1
APPLES AND PLURALISM
IMAGINE A WORLD in which there is only one sort of fruit, say, apples. There are, of course, several types of apples, including yellow and red delicious, Jonathan, and Granny Smith; occasionally one even encounters a bad apple. The people in this world learn to appreciate apples, eating them raw and baking them, flavoring them, juicing them, turning them into sauce, and making them into filling for wonderful pies. As a result of their cultivation, apples become available in a surprising variety of flavors and as ingredients in a bewildering array of dishes.
What should we say of these apple people? First, that they took advantage of the possibilities of their raw material, creating something fine out of what, left to itself, would be common and boring. Should we feel sorry for them because they were impoverished, never having enjoyed the glory of a pear? Such feelings seem appropriate when we contemplate our good fortune in having a hundred different types of fruit available year round. But if the apple people led impoverished lives, so do we, because we must get by without another hundred fruits whose names we don't know and whose flavors we cannot even imagine. Just as we can say to the apple people that they would be better off if they could get some grapes, so people from a richer planet could lecture us that our lives without their favorite fruit must be sadly hollow.
What we should tell the apple people is that we are impressed with how much they made of what they had. Their attitude is surely right: we must use what is at hand, enhancing it intelligently to make life a little better. Notice that enhancement consists of diversification; humans tend not to be like cats, happy with dry food morning and night. As Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz knew, variety is a great good—so great, in fact, that without a measure of it, life becomes unbearable. Sensory deprivation, solitary confinement, and isolation in the dark of polar winter can drive people berserk.
Variety in the form of diverse experiences can make existence satisfying, perhaps even exciting. People generally agree that a world in which there are many different sorts of cuisines is better than one in which we have only goulash to eat. The reason for this is twofold. Different tastes add to the modalities of our satisfaction, enabling us to experience surprising delights. Further, the spread of alternatives gives play to choice, so we can enjoy the satisfactions not only of savoring unforeseen textures and tastes but also of freely deciding what to eat. In such a world one can still eat goulash every day, but only if one so chooses.
Who could take offense at seeing French, Chinese, and Ethiopian restaurants opening their doors side by side? The more the better, I am inclined to say, even though I cannot imagine ever wanting to visit some of them. Normally we are happy to let such harmless competitions play out and consider ourselves fortunate to have a choice of where to eat. Plurality does not bother us in such contexts, and we show a commendable readiness to leave others alone. We are simply indifferent in these matters, and that indifference serves as the condition of others pursuing their goals in their own ways.
Not only do I fail to be bothered by the variety of restaurants in the neighborhood, but I also have little concern about what they do in their kitchens. The secrets of kitchens are like the secrets of bedrooms: sensible people do not want to know how their strange neighbors prepare food or for love. Such wholesome distance makes for good relations, enabling us to enjoy fine meals and our neighbors' satisfied smiles. The resultant relationships permit people to flourish on the basis of their own efforts and the voluntary cooperation of others.
Distressingly, when it comes to some matters, the distance is difficult to keep. Some people cannot abide seeing young men with long hair or earrings; others call the police to stop lovers kissing in the park. Individuals dressed in a way that is generally deemed tasteless or unkempt earn social censure. Those who voice opinions out of favor or choose unconventional courses of life are viewed with suspicion. Bodies that don't meet prevailing standards are thought to be in need of correction, and people whose religious preferences differ from the norm arouse the sense that they are unreliable.
Xenophobia is a comfortable state; it is vastly comforting if everyone looks the same, feels the same, and expresses common sentiments in a shared language. This enables us to exclude the different as abhorrent, morally flawed, or unnatural. If the different should find its way into our midst, we feel entitled to shun it or to stamp it out; surely, it and it alone must be responsible for whatever misfortune befalls the community. Generosity soon comes to consist of saving people from their awful selves; we spare no effort in criticizing, correcting, and converting them. But conversion may be too kind or impossible; women cannot readily be turned into men, nor blacks into whites. As a result, oppression and obliteration appear from time to time as justifiable ways of dealing with minorities of race, religion, and ethnicity.
We can see an important difference between the apple people and many closed communities: the former work to diversify their meager supply of fruit while the latter do everything in their power to limit diversity to a few acceptable forms of the same general type. One is hard put to think of a society that has promoted a plurality of values among its members. On the contrary, by design or unconsciously, communities shape young people and immigrants in their own image, heaping rewards on those who conform and making deviance a source of pain. Even when the United States was wide open to immigration, it thought of itself as a melting pot in which new arrivals would burn off their foreign trappings and, through education in English and in a new way of life, could soon become indistinguishable from the locals.
Why do we gladly diversify our food but avoid the different when it comes to people, values, and behavior? The reasons are many. The unfamiliar is uncomfortable and the strange makes us feel out of place. Seeing people do what for us is taboo may be threatening or, precisely because of its attraction, a source of resentment. Moreover, the different heralds a possible need for change, and even in a society such as ours, given to the veneration of the new, change is kept within narrow limits. In religion, sexual practices, and family life, differences are disquieting and touch the deepest recesses of our being, evoking visceral responses and sundering the world into "them" and "us."
Historically the most powerful factors in developing an antagonistic attitude toward the different have been a desire and a conviction. The desire is to exert power over others and thereby to put our stamp on at least a small portion of the universe. The justifying conviction consists of the claim that our values and our ways of behaving are natural and right. The desire is familiar to all of us, though rarely acknowledged. The conviction seems innocent and therefore unsuspected, yet it structures much of what we think and do.
Controlling others is actually more than a desire; it is a burning urge. Its source may be evolutionary; in this dangerous world, those who can channel the aggressions of others or can at least enlist them to their aid improve their chances of survival. But the drive is generalized and roils behavior long after ordered social life makes the struggle for physical existence unnecessary. Accordingly, parents want to make their children "behave," the police often exercise overweening power, and bureaucrats take delight in forcing everyone to obey their rules. Salespeople want us to buy their goods, solicitors maneuver donors to give more than they wish, and neighbors often seek to impose arbitrary limits on what their neighbors can do with their land.
The desire to exercise power over others is so great that children find it difficult to escape the domination of parents even after they grow up, politicians resist term limits with all of their might, and individuals who built businesses want never to retire. That people seek others to tell them what to do, paying fortunes to hire interior decorators, personal trainers, and consultants of every sort, may appear as evidence against this view. In fact, however, it is further confirmation: in hiring them, they do our bidding. Although we listen to them, we determine what we want, and thus the last word is always ours. They let us wield power over them for a fee.
The conviction that seems to justify our lording it over others is that what we, and people like us, do is natural and right. The customary defines the natural; the food we ate as children has not only the warmth of familiarity but also an astonishing appropriateness. Some think that goulash is a dish invented by God and that it is only perversity that keeps people from eating it; others believe that the paradigm of food is pasta, lamb kidneys, or the lungs of cows. We tend to feel the same assurance about clothing, table habits, raising children, sexuality, ambition, profit, the treatment of women, the range of acceptable life plans, and religion. We grow into thinking that our tradition articulates the requirements of nature and that we do things exactly as it has ordained. I was raised to believe that God spoke Hungarian, as did everyone else uncorrupted by the misfortune of being born and raised in foreign lands.
I cannot overemphasize the significance and power of this innocent social egocentrism. "Innocent" in this context means the unintentional or unreflective intuitive embrace of a certain way of life, which happens to be the only one offered as a model. Anointing our ways as natural, however, loses its innocence when it begins to serve as the foundation of xenophobia and illusions of grandeur, leading genders, tribes, classes, races, and nations to develop a hierarchy of worthiness, each awarding itself the top spot. That way lies the history of humankind, which has certainly not been an innocent affair, spread out over millennia of injustice and exclusion. The cruelty and the horror of it far exceed what animals do to each other in response to the call of hunger; humans crush one another not as a result of justifiable need, but in the name of establishing the natural order of things.
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer saw as clearly as anyone that will seeks to overpower will and that it takes a relatively high level of moral culture to resist getting one's satisfactions that way. His recommendation of universal sympathy as the antidote to this cruel self-seeking, however, goes too far. We have no business cheering on oppressive wills, and in any case it is too much to ask that we invest ourselves in every failing cause. Something much less strenuous and therefore much more doable is adequate to make the world a better place: we have to learn to leave people alone. Although this sounds like an endorsement of moral isolation, it is not. Letting others be as a pervasive moral disposition is perfectly compatible with living in a community with them, caring for them, and responding to their needs. All it forbids is uninvited interference in their affairs—that is, making them do what we want, even if we think it is justified by being good for them.
Philosophers have not been excellent at acknowledging the importance of leaving others alone and reducing our obligations to a sensible level. Josiah Royce declared, "There is no rest in Zion": the moral person must be engaged in doing the Lord's work without cease. We must right all wrongs, meet every need, and vanquish the evil that surrounds us. We are familiar with the hyperventilation to which this gives rise; it defines the moral tone of the reformer. We would have to be gods to meet such Herculean tasks, and Royce knows that the work is infinite. That is why he avers that God completes what in our finitude we must leave undone, making the gradual perfection of the world the joint venture of the human and the divine.
The introduction of God is at once the recognition that the task is too great for us. Since the task is infinite, without God we face moral despair. But if God picks up the slack, we might as well leave him a little more to do and thereby make our lives a lot more comfortable. Caught between the demand to exhaust ourselves and the temptation to throw in the towel, we face the problem that however much we do, we know we accomplish much less than we should. The magnitude of our duties makes guilt a certainty, and such inevitable failure weakens moral resolve. William James, even though he believed in the importance of what he called "moral holidays," did not do much better. He thought that every conscious need imposes a demand on all the world, and in particular on anyone who can help, to meet it. Here again the resultant obligations are potentially infinite, with only finite resources to discharge them.
The contemporary version of certain moral failure and unavoidable guilt is James Rachels's view that there is no relevant moral difference between failing to aid people in a distant famine and killing them on the spot. If that is true, our duties never end; tithing to Oxfam still leaves us murderers. All the moral marvels for which we are responsible must, of course, be done in accordance with our own ideas of what is in the interest of distant and deeply different others. Our aid to them is wrapped in our values; in availing themselves of it, they see their desires, habits, and traditions beginning to change. Worse, we find ourselves rushing around in the futile attempt to intervene everywhere, attempting to fix what cannot be corrected, or what cannot be corrected by us, or what we have no business trying to correct. The frustration and mischief that arise can be eliminated only if we embrace our finitude, respect the integrity of others, and allow people to conduct their lives as they see fit.
Letting others pursue their goods according to their own lights is a vital condition of autonomy. But even those who value self-determination or liberty tend to think of letting others be as a special duty imposed in certain circumstances rather than as a pervasive moral disposition. The better view is to conceive neutrality with regard to others as the foundational moral attitude of which obligations constitute a temporary suspension. The justification of this attitude and the grounding assumption of freedom is that human beings are self-moving agents who are capable of recognizing, seeking, and attaining their own good. If we deny human intelligence, drive, and competence, we will naturally wish to take over the lives of others to help them along. But this assessment of human ability is scurrilous and flies in the face of facts. If even dogs in heat know what is good for them and often attain it, there is little reason to suppose that humans don't and can't.
Of course, those who speak of the good tend to have high standards in mind, explaining to all why they should seek what, left alone, it would never occur to them to desire. However, this is but another case of imposing values on people who may well want to have no part of them. I do not wish to deny that under special circumstances others may know more about one's good than one knows oneself, but that is exceptional and rare. For the most part, being oneself day and night gives one a privileged view of what satisfies; there is little basis for substituting the judgments of others for our long experience and considered opinions. What appear to some as errors in valuation may in fact express the deep, authentic, and internally justified commitments of different others.
Establishing the disposition to let others be as a fundamental moral attitude is not capitulating to selfishness. Egoists typically maintain the dominance or the sole legitimacy of a single good. People who gladly leave others alone tend to do so, admittedly, to pursue their own projects. Their focus on their plans does not imply, however, that only their own projects are worth pursuing. On the contrary, the attitude makes sense solely on the assumption of the legitimacy of a plurality of goods. This multiplicity of values, each centered in a feeling agent, is what makes the need not to interfere in the lives of others compelling. For each life has a native judge and advocate; individuals are in the best position to determine their own interests and to devote energy to their own pursuits. People who let others work for their own good unimpeded simply do so out of their respect for the self-defining agency of which personhood consists. Claiming to know what is good for others and attempting to make them live up to it look much more like the work of selfishness than does keeping ourselves benignly at a distance.
Distance from people may be motivated by indifference to them. I am perfectly happy to leave the lake alone, because it simply does not matter to me. I don't rush over to tend it when a speedboat slashes its face, and I don't grieve when it freezes in the winter. An attitude of this sort toward human beings, however, strikes me as horrendous; connected to one another from cradle to grave, we cannot be indifferent to one another's fates. The distance I advocate has its source not in cold unconcern, but in caring. Humans tend to do particularly well when they can make their own decisions and enjoy enough operational space to carry them out. If we wish others well, we let them flourish as they will, cheering them on from a distance. Good wrestlers and runners need no help from us; all we need to do is stay out of their way.
The flip side of leaving others alone because we want them to do well is helping them when the need arises. If we wish everyone well, we must be ready to aid them in emergencies or when obstacles are overwhelming. Wise people wait until the desire for help is obvious, if not through overt request, then through crushing circumstance or pleading eyes. To give true help is to become an instrument of the other's will, honoring the integrity of what the needy want instead of telling them what they ought to have. Moral wisdom consists largely in knowing when to leave people alone and when to help them and, when helping them, how not to subvert their aims.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Meddling by John Lachs. Copyright © 2014 John Lachs. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
1. Apples and Pluralism2. Operational Independence3. Leaving Others Alone4. Telling Others What to Do5. Making Others Do What We Want (and They Don't)6. Helping Others7. Independence and the AnthillWhat People are Saying About This
A very refreshing contribution to the field of ethics. Lachs understands how we live our lives in a far richer and [more] authentic way than that presented by texts in ethics, replete with their wooden case studies. The strength of this work is its contribution to the vast audience of intelligent citizens who are weary from being micromanaged, as to health, diet, beliefs, and lifestyle.
What would happen if John Stuart Mill were alive today and he addressed the issue of meddling? It is likely that he would have written a plea for tolerance deeply akin to this one. It is welcome to have a position so clearly staked out and so ably defended.