If there are any readers in Canberra, I will be giving a lecture on the evening of Tuesday 25 February entitled, ‘The Great Disorientation’. It is based on a chapter from the book manuscript I am working on. The event is in-person only, but I can try to record and post it if there is interest. The content of the lecture is shifting as the world shifts, but the abstract reads:
Despite a deepening awareness of the ways the climate is changing for the worse, along with a keen appreciation of the negative consequences of excessive production and consumption, the collective response has been to push harder, further and higher. Placed over much greater timescales, the ‘Great Acceleration’ stands out for the relatively short-time frame in which there has been a remarkable increase in the size and scope of humans and their impact on the planet. The next stage in this process might be ‘The Great Disorientation’, reflecting conditions in which socio-economic change and technological development greatly outpaces the capacities of individuals and societies to adjust.
Moving onto this note, it is taking a step back from the immediacy of geopolitical reordering and ruptures, returning to a topic that presently looks rather quaint: ethics. A key theme underlying much of my thought is a concern with moral agency. The challenge is enduring, as Pythagoras stated: ‘this is the divine law of life: that only virtue stands firm. All the rest is nothing.’ The below builds on some notes from 2021 that were not widely read at the time.
Rarely do we determine the conditions in which we act, but this does not absolve us. The circumstances may be more or less extenuating, more or less extreme, but agency is rarely completely extinguished. Recognising and accepting our agency, however limited it might be, as well as the responsibility that flows with it, is a necessary part of being in the world.
Such sentiments were present in Hannah Arendt’s work. Arendt tried to understand how conditions arose in which ‘nothing is true and everything is possible.’ From Origins of Totalitarianism:
… an atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated … made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously.
These days Arendt is perhaps best known for her ‘banality of evil’ argument that has become … banalised. With it she did point to the way structures can create conditions that allow individuals not to see / think about what they are doing and what consequences flow from the systems they are part of. In The Structure of Evil, Ernest Becker puts it in these terms:
… when modern people set in motion vast social institutions but do not take critical control of them, the institutions assume their own momentum; the people who run the institutions become like ants mechanically doing their duty, and no one dares to question the routine to which the institutions conform.
The result is that there is no way of breaking through the uncritical fictions that control society and that are embodied in vast and powerful, faceless organizations. Responsibility is nowhere; grinding power everywhere.
One of the distinguishing features of the contemporary is the remarkably uneven distribution of agency. Between hyper agents and nano agents, it is still possible to think of the macro being made up of the micro. The choices we individually make collectively add up, somewhat, somehow, they do, they must. What we each decide is both inconsequential and of significance.
Another thinker who engaged with these themes was the poet Czeslaw Milosz. The Captive Mind is a remarkable set of reflections on the way Polish people dealt with their country being ripped apart first by the Nazis and then the Communists. Considering the experience of the Second World War, he wrote, ‘for five and a half years we lived in a dimension completely different from that which any literature or experience could have led us to know. What we beheld surpassed the most daring and the most macabre imagination.’ This was a time in which the bounds of the possible were reshaped in the most terrible of fashion. He further observed:
Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than products of human hands. … He behaves a little like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, bustling about in a shack poised precariously on the edge of a cliff.
His first stroll along a street littered with glass from bomb-shattered windows shakes his faith in the ‘naturalness’ of his world.
Milosz powerfully captured how people’s values and perspectives were reordered by the reality of war, in which experience repeatedly outstripped imagination. What is remarkable is how people can adapt to the most extreme and unlikely of settings, with this malleability being both a source of strength and weakness.
Which world is ‘natural’? That which existed before, or the world of war? Both are natural, if both are within the realm of one’s experience. All the concepts men live by are a product of the historic formation in which they find themselves. Fluidity and constant change are the characteristics of phenomena. And man is so plastic a being that one can even conceive of the day when a thoroughly self-respecting citizen will crawl about on all fours, sporting a tail of brightly colored feathers as a sign of conformity to the order he lives in.
The war revealed people and the orders they construct as being far more unstable and open to change than we generally assume. Nicola Chiaromonte made a similar observation after World War One, judging that following such an event, ‘everything becomes questionable’. This, in turn, directly impacts what is socially possible: ‘confidence and beliefs – the fabric of the natural ties that make of everyday life a familiar place – cannot be reconstructed the way a railway network is reconstructed.’
At certain times, these fragilities are revealed in drastic fashion. A ‘new normal’ suddenly appears, as the old one is blown up or quickly sinks without a trace. Yet such transitions can also occur more gradually. Indeed, this is what Milosz explored in much of his book: the way people lost their footing as sands shifted, beliefs crumbled, and expectations exceeded. At least with a sudden shift, the choice is presented unambiguously. Would that lead to a different answer? Perhaps for a few, probably not for most. Still, it is all the more challenging when the decisive moment never arrives. ‘Not too much pressure was exerted no great demands were made on anyone’, he noted. And yet, with each step, one moves in a direction, one choice leads to another, and to another, and so on, and soon enough, it creates a momentum that leads somewhere once unexpected. A slippery, nasty kind of path dependency. The frog boils, with one’s morality as the soup base.
Milosz had a deep appreciation and sympathy for the conditions in which people found themselves, one in which History and the devil appeared to be offering a better deal. He understood how ‘fear paralyzes individuality and make people adjust themselves as much as possible’. He considered the various compromises others made with the communist regime as it came to power in Poland. Milosz did not suggest that they had simply sold out, he identified a more complicated dynamic in which they had been ensnared, determining they were ‘more or less consciously, victims of a historic situation.’ He observed that ‘an appeal to ambition and enforced by pressure’ was sufficient for many to cooperate.
What Milosz highlighted was not the thoughtlessness that Hannah Arendt identified and warned against, it was force of circumstance working like a chokehold on individuals as they made choices. Yet where the two overlap is in their willingness to pass judgment. People make choices, those choices have consequences. In the case of Milosz, the choice he made was exile, and in doing so, he determined:
there must be, after all, some standard one dare not destroy lest the fruits of tomorrow prove to be rotten.