16 Sep Morality (?) and Power
Posted at 18:00h
in
Uncategorized
by maoquai
We saw a preview for The Debt last night. It struck a nerve in me – one associated with our notions of morality. Had the Nazi’s won, had Western Europe or even the U.S. decided they weren’t so wrong, after all, their own morality would have been vindicated. What we call their horrific campaign, they called their moral compunction.
Last year, i attended a lecture given by Asuncion Lera St. Clair at the UW. She pointed to the moral conviction of those who ascribe to a neoliberal economic system. It had never occurred to me that there was a moral compunction behind what i find to be a wholly amoral view of people. Is it the morality that gives particular worldviews their power, or is it the power that gives them morality?
While watching this story of the Mossad agents hunting down and killing who they thought to be the Surgeon of Birkenau unfold, the conviction of their moral right made an impact. At what point do we accept violence and murder as morally correct? Morality is the underpinning of most American military interventions – but whose morality? Is it simply that this country has such an overwhelming military might that it is able to usurp notions of sovereignty in the name of a manufactured and unclear doctrine backed by an invisible (and apparently very vengeful) god? Even without the insertion of some fictitious character, the use of “human rights” as a grounding force works as a rather powerful stand-in. Choose your moral flavour-of-the-month, but choose it, do!
The American military, the Mossad, neoliberal ideologies – they have the power of moral-correctness at their back. But what about those who fight power? Are there only correct ways of fighting power? What are they?
It crossed my mind last night that in 1000 years, inner-city gangs may be seen as revolutionaries. Gangs operate within their own moral code – one of familial tendencies that work beyond traditional patrilineal nuclear family constructs. Theirs is a family built of community – the kind the rest of us only wish we had. Theirs exists without permission, outside the confines of the law. We point to the violence and the drug peddling – but because it isn’t state-sanctioned, it becomes a-moral. Since when did our political and economic structures determine what is or is not moral? Our government draws us into community through violence. We’re kept nullified and complacent with drugs.
So i was brought to thinking of issues of power and morality. Those with power decide what is moral. Eduardo Galleano captured it best, i think, in his book Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World:
The upside-down world rewards in reverse: it scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples, and feeds cannibalism. Its professor slander nature: injustice, they way, is a law of nature. Milton Friedman teaches us about the “natural rate of unemployment.” Studying Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, we learn that blacks remain on the lowest rungs of the social ladder by “natural” law. From John D. Rockefellar’s lectures, we know his success was due to the fact the “nature” rewards the fittest and punishes the useless: more than a century later, the owners of the world continue to believe Charles Darwin wrote his books in their honor.
Survival of the fittest? The “killer instinct” is an essential ingredient for getting ahead, a human virtue when it helps large companies digest small and strong countries devour weak but proof of bestiality when some jobless guy goes around with a knife in his fist. Those stricken with “antisocial pathology,” the dangerous insanity afflicting all poor people, find inspiration in the models of good health exhibited by those who succeed. Lowlifes learn their skills by setting their sights on the summits. They study the examples of the winners and, for better or worse, do their best to live up to them. But “the damned will always be damned,” as Don Emilio Azcarraga, once lord and master of Mexican television, like to say. The chances that a banker who loots a bank can enjoy the fuits of his labor in peace are directly proportional to the chances that a crook who robs a bank will land in jail or the cemetery.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.