Touched by Bloodless Abstraction

The argument about indifference here needs elaborating. The ‘indifference’ – and in one case the advertising of one’s indifference – amounts to saying ‘what does not touch my immediate experience is a matter of little concern to me, or concerns me only as it touches my immediate experience, community, interests.’ Another, slightly more philosophical way of putting it is that I am touched by what happens to those who share the same predicates as me – white, middle-class, American or whatever. Conversely, I am incapable of being touched by - or really grasping - a level of humanity that precedes such predicates. My moral compass is governed by the accident of nearness. Thus, such people are spontaneous Rorty-ite liberals, a position here deftly summarised and defeated by Teagleton:

the American philosopher Richard Rorty, who in an essay entitled "Solidarity" argues that those who helped Jews in the last world war probably did so less because they saw them as fellow human beings but becasue they belonged to the same city, profession, or other social grouping as themselves. He then goes on to ask himself why modern American liberals should help oppressed American blacks. "Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but it is much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans--to insist that it is outrageous that an American should live without hope." Morality, in short, is really just a species of patriotism. Rorty's case, however, strikes me as still too universalist. There are, after all, rather a lot of Americans, of various shapes and sizes, and there is surely something a little abstract in basing one's compassion on such grandiosely general grounds. It is almost as though "American" operates here as some sort of metalanguage or metaphysical essence, collapsing into unity a vast variety of creeds, lifestyles, ethnic groupings, and so on. Would it not be preferable for an authentic critic of universality to base his fellow-feeling on some genuine localism, say the city block? ….. I have not, incidently, yet resigned from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, merely adjusted my reasons for belonging. I now object to nuclear warfare not because it would blow up some metaphysical abstraction known as the human race, but because it would introduce a degree of unpleasantness into the lives of my Oxford neighbors. The benefit of this adjustment is that my membership of the campaign is no longer the bloodless, cerebral affair it once was, but pragmatic, experiential, lived sensuously on the pulses.

For Rorty, contingency – i.e., being born into a certain place and its culture – is Fate: your affections, moral obligations, and your default understanding of ‘how things are’ remain wedded to this accident. Some might see this doctrine as simply a regression to tribalism + resigned irony. It’s not that you think your little tribe is humanity as such, its just that, realistically, and experientially, you know it might as well be.

Eagleton’s précis of Rorty suggests that the philosopher presents his positon as being on the side of that which is ‘… lived sensuously on the pulses’ as opposed to ‘bloodless abstraction. The solidarities of community are identified with the former, the concept of 'human rights' etc with the latter. Rorty relies on a common perception that ‘bloodless abstractions’ are inhuman, whereas spontaneous compassion is the very defining trait of ‘humanity’. This may be the exact reverse of the truth.

While the automatic extension of sympathy to what is familiar and near is doubtless necessary (it would be disturbing if it were absent), neither is it incompatible with inhumanity, as the chronicles of modern times ceaselessly reminds us. Those who love the familiar and hold close their kin, can also of course be much less than kind toward those outside the prison-house of family and familiarity.

To further extend one's moral intelligence, to break through the prison house, relies on a faculty of abstraction. It requires not only affect but conceptual thought and/or thought-experiments, acts of the imagination. The demand to be Universalist and apply to the Other the moral concern we apply to ourselves can be foreign to and opposed to some of our most ingrained pre-rational attachments. Such moral intelligence is frequently counter-intuitive and has to be won through intellectual work.

Thus, in ‘abstracting’ from those merely sensuous common sympathies, those shared cultural traits that are so immediately palpable, so easy on the eye and ear, those shared predicates with which it is all too easy to ‘identify’, one’s sympathy and comprehension are actually enlarged; you pass beyond the immediate to a more generic humanity: the bloodless abstraction is finally the more human.

And we should even be alert to the possibility that a too tenacious attachment to ones ‘folk’ blocks the perception of this generic humanity and results in an ultimately incoherent morality wherein there is one rule for Us and another for Them.