The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 140, Oct/Nov 2020) has Hegel as its theme. I confess that really the only thing I knew about Hegel was his ‘dialectic’ and that he influenced Marx, though, from memory, Marx claimed to have turned Hegel’s dialectic ‘on its head’. Hegel’s dialectic has relevance to politics and history, because, basically, he claimed that if someone proposes a ‘thesis’ someone else will propose its ‘antithesis’ and we end up with a ‘synthesis’ of the two. Some people claim that this is how history has progressed, but I’m not so sure.
However, I do agree that if someone promotes an ideology or a social agenda, you will invariably get opposition to it, and the stronger the promotion, the stronger the opposition. We see this in politics a lot, but a good example is religion. Militant atheism only tends to occur in societies where you have militant fundamentalist religion, which is usually Christian, but could be Muslim. In societies where no one really cares about religion, no one cares too much about atheism either.
I know this, because I live in a culture where no one cares and I’ve visited one where people do, which is America (at the dawn of the 21st Century). Mind you, I grew up in 1950s Australia when there was a division between Catholic and protestant that even affected the small rural town where I lived and was educated in. That division evaporated in the 1960s pretty much, with a zeitgeist that swept the Western world. It was largely driven by post war liberalism, the introduction of the contraceptive pill and a cultural phenomenon called rock and roll. But what I remember growing up in the 60’s, leaving school, going to university and entering the workforce in a major city, was that we males grew our hair long and everyone, including women, questioned everything. We were rebellious: there were marches against our involvement in the Vietnam war and an Australian academic by the name of Germaine Greer published a book called The Female Eunuch.
And all of this is relevant to the theme of my thesis, which is that morality is really about social norms, which is why morality evolves, and whether it evolves for the better or worse is dependent on a lot of factors, not least political forces and individuals’ perceptions of their own worth and sense of security within a social context.
But getting back to Hegel, many saw the rebellious attitude in the 1960s as a backlash against conservative forces, especially religious based ones, that had arisen in the 1950s. And this in turn, was a reaction to the forces of fascism that had ignited the most widespread and devastating conflict in the whole of human history. There was almost no one who had not been affected by that in Europe or Asia or North America. Even, in far-flung Australia and New Zealand, it seemed that every family had a member or knew someone who had been directly involved in that war. My family was no exception, as I’ve written about elsewhere.
In the same issue of Philosophy Now, there is an article by Terrence Thomson (a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in Kingston University, London) titled, Kant, Conflict & Universal History. I’ve written about Kant elsewhere, but not in this context. He’s more famously known for his epistemology, discussed in some detail in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which was the subject of my essay. But, according to Thomson, 3 years later (1784), he published an article in a ‘prominent intellectual newspaper, titled: Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective.’ Without going into too much detail, Kant coined a term, ‘unsociable sociability’, which he contended is ‘a feature of human social interaction’, and which he defined as the human “tendency to enter into society, a tendency that continually threatens to break up this society”. Quoting Thomson (interpreting Kant): ‘...it is a natural human inclination to connect with people and to be part of a larger whole; yet it is also part of our natural inclination to destroy these social bonds through isolationism and divisiveness.’ One has to look no further than the just-held, US presidential election and its immediate aftermath to see this in action. But one could also see this as an example of Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ in action.
As I explained in my introduction, Hegel argued that a ‘synthesis’ arises out of an opposition between a ‘thesis’ and its ‘antithesis’, but then the synthesis becomes a new ‘thesis’, which creates a new ‘antithesis’, and so the dialectic never stops. This could also be seen as similar to, if not the same as, the dynamic that Thomson attributes to Kant: the human inclination to ‘belong’ followed by an opposing inclination to ‘break those social bonds’.
I take a much simpler view, which is that humans are inherently tribal. And tribalism is a double-edged sword. It creates the division that Kant alludes to in his ‘unsociable sociability’, and it creates the antithesis of Hegel’s dialectic. We see this in the division created by religion throughout history, and not just the petty example I witnessed in my childhood. And now, in the current age, we have a new tribalism in the form of political parties, exemplified by the deep divisions in the US, even before Donald Trump exploited them to the full in his recently eclipsed, 4 year term.
And this brings me back, by a very convoluted route, to the subject of this essay: morality and social norms. Trump did his best to change social norms, and, by so doing, change his society’s moral landscape, whether intentionally or not. He made it socially acceptable to be disrespectful to ‘others’, which included women, ‘grab them by the pussy’, immigrants, Muslims, the former President, anyone in the Democratic party, anyone in the GOP who didn’t support him and his own Intelligence community and Defence personnel. He also made white supremacy and fringe conspiracy theorist groups feel legitimised. But, most significantly, beyond everything else, he propagated a social norm whereby you could dismiss any report by any authority whatsoever that didn’t fit in with your worldview – you could simply create your own ‘facts’.
In most societies, especially Western democratic societies, we expect social norms to evolve that make people feel more inclusive and that constructively build collaborative relationships, because we know from experience, that that is how we get things done. As a retired naval admiral and self-ascribed conservative (in a TV interview prior to the election) pointed out, Trump did the exact opposite, both at home and abroad: he broke off relations and fomented division wherever and whenever he could. I’ve argued in previous posts that leaders bring out the best in the people they lead, which is how they are ultimately judged; contrarily, Trump brought out the worst in people.
In one of my better posts, I discussed at length how a young woman, raped and fatally tortured on a bus in India, exposed the generational divide in social norms in that country at that time, and how it directly affected one’s perception of the morality of that specific incident.
From a Western perspective, especially given the recent ‘me-too’ movement, this is perverse. However, in the late 60s, early 70s, when I was entering adulthood, there was a double-standard when it came to sexual behaviour. It was okay for men to have sex with as many partners as they could find, but it was not alright for women to indulge in the same activity. This led to men behaving more predatory and it was considered normal for women to be ‘seduced’, even if it was against their better-intentions. The double-standard of the day really didn’t encourage much alternative. The introduction of the contraceptive pill, I believe, was the game-changer. Because, theoretically, women could have the same sexual freedom as men without the constant fear of becoming pregnant, which was still a stigma at that time. Now, some of my generation may have a different rear-vision view of this, but I give it as an example of changing social norms occurring concordantly with changing moral perceptions.
I write science fiction, as a hobby or pastime, rather than professionally. But what attracted me to sci-fi as a genre, was not so much the futuristic technologies one could conjure up, but the what-if societies that might exist on worlds isolated by astronomical distances. In a recent work, I explored a society that included clones (genetically engineered humans, so not copies per se). In this society, female clones are exploited because they have no family. Instead, they have guardianships that can be sold onto someone else, and this becomes a social norm that’s tacitly accepted. Logically, this leads to sexual exploitation. I admit to being influenced by Blade Runner 2049, though I go in a completely different direction, and my story is more of a psychological thriller than an action thriller. There is sexual exploitation on both sides: I have a man in authority having a sexual relationship with a character by blackmail; and I have a woman sexually exploiting a character so she can manipulate him into committing a crime. Neither of these scenarios were part of my original plot; they evolved in the way that stories do, and became core elements. In fact, it could be argued that the woman is even more evil than the man.
Both characters come undone in the end, but, more importantly to me was that the characters should be realistic and not paper cut-outs. I asked someone who’d read it what they thought of the man in power, and they said, ‘Oh, people like him exist, even now.’
