Bloodless abstraction

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 + a soupcon of resigned irony. It’s not that you think your little tribe is humanity as such, its just that, realistically, and experientially, you act as if it is.

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.

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.

[A version of this was originally posted at Long Sunday. I thought it worth repeating (with a difference) after observing how 'universal' values are frequently invoked- polemically and rhetorically - only in order to prosecute a particular case. In such cases the true rigour of the universal is lost sight of. One passes off a particular and 'pathological' gripe as pure fidelity to the universal. Would like to return to this another time. For now, this]