And all astonishments blow up the world

Ray (who is necessary in all possible worlds) has left comments to various imaginative resistance posts. His criticisms merit a lengthy response (well, if you think long posts about imaginative resistance are a good thing. If not, you know what to do.)

Ray is incredulous that anyone can seriously think there is any obstacle whatsoever to the production of morally deviant fictional worlds. This is close to the reaction I myself had at first, then I decided – to my own considerable surprise – there is a bit more to it. (And I must say that I find it very odd that Walton & co. have not worked harder to anticipate and answer Ray’s complaint, because it seems to me a very obvious and apparently pertinent one. So Ray doesn’t understand them, and they don’t seem to see Ray coming either.)

For purposes of this post let me focus on Walton’s strong version of the imaginative resistance thesis. We can’t imagine morally deviant fictional worlds, i.e. worlds in which moral truths are different than (we take them to be) in the actual world. (Gendler and Weatherson are on the fence between ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’, so I’ll leave them out of it.)

The Walton essay originally appeared together with a critical response by Michael Tanner. Tanner, like Ray, is amazed Walton can be so naive. Tanner opens with a take-no-prisoners Nietzschean blast – the well-known passage from Twilight of the Idols which attacks George Eliot for slack faith in ‘moral intuitions’. (Basically, Nietzsche thinks moral intuitions are maggots in the rotting flesh of the dead God. Draw your own conclusions about whether he thinks having your head and mouth full of them is a good or a bad thing.) Tanner then picks on Walton’s choice of Hume as an effective spokesman for imaginative resistance. (You can read an earlier post in which I quote the original Hume passage and make trouble about its interpretation, and strict applicability, which I won’t rehearse today.) Tanner summarizes:

“Hume’s view is that, in general, we are, or should be, tolerant of factual errors or (in Walton’s expansion) even of at least certain logical impossibilities in a work of art … But we should not, or maybe cannot, tolerate ‘ideas of morality and decency which we find repugnant.”

The verdict:

“Hume’s position, in many obvious ways, was very different from ours. Hume took it that there was a set of civilized values which everyone whom one could take seriously, not regarding them as barbarians or monkish, hare-brained fanatics, shares. And this set of values concerned not only the most basic matters, the ones which Walton mentions passim (though there is room for speculation on what Hume would have thought about interracial marriages), but also the overall way in which educated, rational, polite and elegant gentlemen would conduct themselves.”

Thus:

“Hume strikes me, in his moral attitudes, as being quaint; Walton of living in a time-warp. Walton writes as if we share a set of moral views in the way we share, more or less, a view of what the world consists of, at least in respect of what philosophers used to refer to as medium-sized specimens of dry goods. So fiction – although Walton doesn’t go so far as to mention a single title – either expresses our moral views or else those that we find repugnant, to the point of being unwilling to imagine ourselves holding them.”

Tanner accuses Walton of assuming ‘we’ think a certain way, which is doubtfully pertinent, and doubtfully true by sheer nose-count. (That sound you hear is Ray clapping.) And:

“Our relationship to art is not, I have suggested, the same as Hume’s, partly because so many moral questions have entered, or re-entered, the area of contention since he wrote.”

Let me not delve further into Tanner’s presentation. I would have put the anti-Walton point a little differently. I would not have gone the whole Nietzschean hog, for example. I would have said, more mildly, that the weird thing about Walton is that he seems … innocent of romanticism. Not that there is anything wrong with a little considered hostility to counter-Enlightenment, if you feel you must. Classicism a timeless affair, and anti-romanticism very respectable. But it’s strange to write (about literature, of all things) as though this sea change in sensibilities never occurred, leaving many things irreversibly rich and strange. It is strange to be a-romantic. But by casting his lot with Hume, without duly noting and adjusting for the fact that Hume is an Enlightenment thinker and thoroughly pre-romantic (yes, despite his skepticism about the power of reason) … Well, let me just quote Isaiah Berlin, from The Roots of Romanticism, since he is so clever and I happen to have these roots on tap .

What is romanticism? No definition possible, you silly. But here Berlin describes the shift from Enlightenment to counter-Enlightenment in terms of two profoundly contrastive treatments of a more or less incidentally chosen subject matter.

“Take Voltaire’s play on Muhammad. Voltaire was not particularly interested in Muhammad, and the play was really intended, no doubt, as an attack upon the Church. Nevertheless Muhammad emerges as a superstitious, cruel and fanatic monster, who crushes all efforts at freedom, at justice, at reason, and is therefore to be denounced as an enemy of all that Voltaire held most important: toleration, justice, truth, civilisation. Then consider what, very much later, Carlyle has to say. Muhammad is described by Carlyle – who is a highly characteristic, if somewhat exaggerated, representative of the romantic movement – in a book called On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, in the course of which a great many heroes are enumerated and analysed. Muhammad is described as ‘a fiery mass of Life cast up from the great bosom of Nature herself’. He is a man of blazing sincerity and power, and therefore to be admired; what he is compared to, what is not like, is the eighteenth century, which is withered and useless, which to Carlyle, as he puts it, is a warped and second-rate century. Carlyle is not in the least interested in the truths of the Koran, he does not begin to suppose that the Koran contains anything which he, Carlyle, could be expected to believe. What he admires Muhammad for is that he is an elemental force, that he lives an intense life, that he has a great many followers with him; that someone elemental occurred, a tremendous phenomenon, that there was a great and moving episode in the life of mankind, which Muhammad instantiates.

The importance of Muhammad is his character and not his beliefs. The question of whether what Muhammad believed was true or false would have appeared to Carlyle perfectly irrelevant. He says, in the course of the same essays, ‘Dante’s sublime Catholicism …. has to be torn asunder by a Luther; Shakespeare’s noble feudalism … has to end in a French Revolution.’ Why do they have to do this? Because it does not matter whether Dante’s sublime Catholicism is or is not true. The point is that it is a great movement, it has lasted its time, and now something equally earnest, equally sincere, equally deep, equally earth-shaking must take its place. The importance of the French Revolution is that it made a great dent upon the consciences of mankind; that the men who made the French Revolution were deeply in earnest, and not simply smiling hypocrites, as he thought Voltaire to be. This is an attitude which is, I will not say brand new, because it is too dangerous to say that, but at any rate sufficiently new to be worthy of attention.”

Voltaire can stand in as Hume's stunt-double: they are the same size and shape. Now we can say that the funny thing about Walton is that he seems hopelessly oblivious to Carlyle and his ilk. I quote Berlin again:

“The importance of romanticism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world. It seems to me to be the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred, and all the other shifts which have occurred in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear to me in comparison less important, and at any rate deeply influenced by it.”

I would probably try to confine this thought more narrowly to the world of art, but maybe Berlin is right. And damn sure he is right about art. We see the importance of romanticism everywhere – e.g. in the fact that when people write thoughtless blurbs to books they make sure to be thoughtlessly romantic. ‘A hero who makes you question everything it means to be a hero.’ Not: ‘This novel powerfully reinforces everything you already think about ethics, making you comfortably sure your received notions are valid.’

What Ray is thinking is that the likes of Carlyle know and show that the very essence of literature – if not life – is moral deviance. Literature is primarily valuable because it means new worlds, worlds in which the old rules are melted down and forged anew. To quote from Tiptree’s “Love is the plan the plan is death”, which Ray suggests as a candidate counter-example: “And all astonishments blow up the world.”

Sigh. (Say the philosophers, who ask only for a tidy little earner of an account of the semantics of fictional discourse; and suspect the world blows up less often than certain excitable persons seem to pretend to think.)

I could really get into it at this point, but I’d never get out. But the thing to note is that the question of whether morally deviant worlds can be conjure/imagined can be raised just as sharply for Carlyle as for Voltaire (or Hume, Walton, et. al.) It just needs slightly different form and formulation. (Why Walton and co. haven’t emphasized this, given the centrality of romanticism to literary culture, I have no idea.)

To explain: for Carlyle what is truly valuable is sincerity and authenticity … and a few other things besides. There is distrust or disbelief in the value of truth, except in the sense of ‘true to’. Groan. (Say the philosophers, who wish people wouldn’t bad-mouth truth as if it were a metaphysical bugbear, when it is a placid and modest creature that would not hurt a fly.) There are, of course, competing short-lists of the essential features of romanticism. You may emphasize commitment, as Carlyle does, or you may emphasize avoidance of commitment – e.g. getting in touch with the primordial soup that is the plurality of possible values (like the old man in the parable I quoted at the tail end of my grotesquely long post.)

The question is: can Carlyle imagine a fictonal world in which sincerity and authenticity are NOT primary values, from which other values derive their value? (Never mind whether these are moral values. We may have to rename our problem if they are not, but the problem will retain its basic character.) Can Carlyle imagine a world in which, say, it is most valuable to be a callow and smiling hypocrite like Voltaire? The irony is: from a romantic point of view, a morally deviant world would be one in which Hume's and Voltaire’s values are true. Hence the fact that you can’t stage Voltaire’s play, i.e. a play of which Hume would have strongly approved, without offending against people’s essentially pluralistic and relativistic and romantic sensibilities.

Berlin writes:

"The history not only of thought, but of consciousness, opinion, action too, of morals, politics, aesthetics, is to a large degree a history of dominant models … Consider, for instance, Greek philosophy or Greek literature of the classical age. If you read, say, the philosophy of Plato, you will find that he is dominated by a geometrical or mathematical model. It is clear that his thought operates on lines which are conditioned by the idea that there are certain axiomatic truths, adamantine, unbreakable, from which it is possible by severe logic to deduce certain absolutely infallible conclusions … we can organise our lives in terms this knowledge, in terms of these truths, once and for all, in a static manner, needing no further change."

If you think of morality in a broadly Platonistic sort of way – as some set of marvellously rigid adamantine hoops around the world (and all possible worlds) – then it is easy to imagine possible worlds of moral deviants, but perhaps not morally deviant worlds. (This is Walton’s view, perhaps.)

If you think of morality in a broadly romantic sort of way – as some infinitely flexible fuse, burning through the world (and all possible worlds; and periodically exploding them) – then it is again hard to imagine morally deviant worlds because all possible values are already true in the actual world; so none of the alternatives you propose are technically deviant. (Except for worlds in which that stuck-up sticky-beak, Voltaire, truly rules the moral roost.)

Not that I buy this whole imaginative resistance thing, mind you. It’s a pseudo-problem. There are lots of counter-examples (yes, including The Young Visiters, even if Brian isn’t buying. He should.) But the counter-examples aren’t the ones you might think they are. The ones Ray cites are all, I think, technically unsuitable cases in which it turns out that romanticism is true in the fictional worlds – just like it’s true in our world, according to romanticism. In which case the fictional worlds aren’t deviant after all. Or maybe there are some fictional worlds in which romanticism is true, containing seriously morally deviant romantics. (I think the essay I just linked to is absolutely brilliant, by the by.)

The reason all this is interesting is that it is tricky to come up with cases in which people are willing to admit that fictonal worlds they regard as truly morally deviant are artistically successful. This is as true for Voltaire and Hume as it is for Carlyle and (I suspect) Ray. (Ray? You enjoyed "Hell is the Absence of God". Do you think you would enjoy Left Behind? I realize that the fact that the writing is crappy doesn't exactly help. But perhaps you see the point.)

Make sense?

Comments

[Matthew]

I wonder if the Ferengi of Star Trek wouldn't come from a morally deviant world. The Ferengi are a race of unfettered capitalists. Physically very small, they are ugly, greedy and sexist. They live to buy and sell anything that is not nailed down. They have their own moral code, codified as the Rules of Acquisition. Here are a few choice gems:

• Once you have their money, you never give it back.
  
• Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.
  
• Greed is eternal.
  
• Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
  
• A deal is a deal ...until a better one comes along.
  
• Never place friendship before profit.
  
• There's nothing more dangerous than an honest businessman.
  
• War is good for business.
  
• Profit is its own reward.
  
• Never ask when you can take.
  
• There is no substitute for success.
  
• Keep your lies consistent.
  
• Trust is the biggest liability of all.
  
• Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack. "Rivals"
  
• Everything is for sale, even friendship.
  
• Not even dishonesty can tarnish the shine of profit.
  
• A wealthy man can afford anything except a conscience.
  
• When in doubt, lie.
  
• No good deed ever goes unpunished.
  
• Deep down, everyone's a Ferengi.
  

[Ray]

I don't watch "Star Trek", but my brother does. I remember him telling me he especially liked the Ferengi: "They're kind of a take-off of the Jews, I guess."

[More extended response tomorrow, I hope!]

[Marcus Stanley]

This is giving me a headache. I am with Ray in just not being able to see that there is a true problem here. Moral philosophers are precisely the sort of people who would have a hard time appreciating that the human aesthetic and emotional imagination is *much* more powerful than that old contradiction in terms "moral reasoning", and in fact regularly bends moral reasoning to its own purposes.

BTW, is it relevant here that people have no imaginative resistance at all to fanciful stories that justify their own tribe murdering little children of the opposing tribe in wars? Murdering little children is definitely immoral, but we eagerly seek out reasons why it might be justified. For us.

[jholbo]

Matthew, the quick response to the Ferengi proposal is this: we respond to them just as we would to their style of extreme, commercial amorality in real life - namely, with some mix of hostility, disdain, disagreement, distaste and grudging amusement and affection. So by imagining a world of Ferengi, we don't imagine a deviant moral world, i.e. a world in which moral rules are truly different. We imagine a world of moral deviants. (Of course you may respond that morality is what people make of it. If they all think so-and-so, then that is right on their world. But if so, then this is just because you are applying your moral rule - i.e. morality is what people say it is - so, once again: not a morally deviant world, by your relativist lights.)

Marcus, I do think that (certain) heroic war stories are likely candidates, but it's complicated. I think what you are actually complaining about (in effect) is moral inconsistency and cognitive dissonance in the actual world, which is common enough, and strictly a separate issue.

Another part of your point is that (to put it crudely) literature (and art generally) can trick anyone into thinking anything. You can use propaganda to 'prove' whatever you like. This is true, and - to give Walton and co. their due - they know this perfectly well. What we are looking for, more narrowly, is a case in which the believing is about morality, and is confined to the alternative world.

Put it simply: you read Tolkien and, for a time, you 'believe' in hobbits and elves and the rest. You get caught up. But when you come home you don't seriously believe in hobbits any more. You stop believing when you leave the fictional world. If you read Nazi propaganda, you might start reading a lot of stories about how Jews are inherently evil and all the rest. But if you do come to believe that, from reading the story, you aren't likely to believe in it the way you believe in hobbits - i.e. only for the time you are reading. You are likely to export your moral conclusions to the real world. More generally, either you won't accept what you are reading, and it will wreck the aesthetic experience; or you will export the morality of the work to the real world, i.e. you will conclude that all this stuff is really true in the actual world. All this, which I think is true, is evidence that Walton and co. have at least half a point. What we want, by way of counter-examples, are cases of moralities that are like hobbits - totally unlike anything in the actual world, and only believed true in the fictional world. ("Kiss of the Spider Woman" is actually a work of literature predicated on this difficulty. The one prisoner likes all these Nazi propaganda films for the love stories and just ignores the toxic political morality, which he doesn't care about. The other prisoner does not understand how someone could appreciate Nazi propaganda as pleasant fiction. Note how, in order to accept the deviant morality of the work, the prisoner has to simply ignore it. All this tends to support Walton and co.)

I think a good case of how heroic fiction warps morality might be something like: the action hero endangers 500 civilians in the course of his insane car chase after the villain who killed his partner. We cheer (if we enjoy this kind of thing.) In the movie it is the 'right' thing to do. Force of genre. But out in the real world, if we read about a cop who endangered 500 innocent people because someone killed his partner, we'd want to see him behind bars. Because in real life we don't think there is a hero and a villian and just a bunch of supernumeraries screaming and getting out of the way. Cop movies don't change our views of morality, even though the morality of cop movies is often quite deviant, and may greatly enjoy cop movies.

Of course, in a deeper (not so deep as all that, I realize) sense, we are giving our id free rein to enjoy this car chase. And we are (as Marcus complains) morally susceptible to the temptation to regard actual people as supernumeraries. We are, as Plato and Freud and lots of other smart people would say, complicated inside. There's a part of us that is small and voiceless in real life, that gets to shout with glee when we feed it with car chases in the movies. Being the complicated creatures we are, we believe lots and lots of complicated, contradictory stuff about morality in real life. Literature does not really allow us to come up with anything that does not resonate with us independently. This is, I think, a plausible hypothesis about literary phenomenology. We don't LIKE anything that is as morally weird as a hobbit is physically weird - i.e. just never seen anything like it. But we DO like to see the raw and contradictory stuff of actual morality mixed and matched in somewhat deviant proportions. This is why I think that Walton and co. are interesting and half right.

Make sense?

[Ray]

Thank you for the kind mention of "Delany's Dirt." Title excepted, it kept me in my go-to-meeting clothes, always an awkward fit. But I tried to write honestly despite the creep and pinch, and I would still list the same "benefits of fiction": "analysis of the workings of the world; disabusal of solipsism; laughter, horror, surprise; those excessive intrinsic pleasures which we call aesthetic."

"But if you do come to believe that, from reading the story, you aren't likely to believe in it the way you believe in hobbits - i.e. only for the time you are reading. You are likely to export your moral conclusions to the real world."

Yes, I am. No, I'm not. I guess I'm sorry to disagree; I guess I'm not.

"Do you think you would enjoy _Left Behind_?"

Yes. (If it was well-written.) And I'd be grateful. (If it was well-written.) Most of my relatives and early friends, and possibly even a lover or two, are due to be lost in the Rapture; I wish them pleasure in the sight of my interminable immolation and it would be nice to share that pleasure with them, if only for a few thousand pages. As it is, I have to get by on gospel and country music. But if I'm able to enjoy Edmund Spenser, I should be able to enjoy anything.

In fact, I'm not an 18th-century rationalist or a 19th-century romantic. I'm a 20th-century populist: I prefer Leslie Gore to the Fugs, Don Siegel to Dennis Hopper, and Elmore Leonard to Mark Amerika. For that matter, I prefer Hume and Voltaire to Carlyle, although I admire all three, and I'd prefer that the world not get blown up, thank you anyway, it's been done and it was very interesting the first few times but I think really we've had enough now.

Trusting you, I absolutely believe it when you say you spied the glimmer of a distant worthwhile argument while mulling over Walton, Gendler, and Weatherson. Still, I have to wonder if your prey would be captured more easily after freeing yourself from the encumbrance of those starting points. The defense has already devolved to "It's not speculative morality unless it's *completely different*." (Viz., "It's not art unless it's *completely lacks representational value*," "It's not food unless it's *completely digested*," "It's not sex unless you're *in orgasm*.") "Hobbits = totally unlike anything in the actual world" vs. "hobbit morality = mix and match of known elements"? Don't hobbits qua hobbits remind you at least a little bit of a glamorized childlike peasantry, with stature determined by breed rather than malnutrition?

In fact, the creatures of Tolkien, the plots of Tolkien, and the moralities of Tolkien are all clearly enough baked from existing ingredients, and they all clearly enough mismatch my own experience. The elements of art require both familiarity and difference to be recognizable at all. Some of us prefer to stretch; some of us prefer to retreat. Anyone who opens "The Sentimental Education" or "Ulysses" or "Pierre" will be plunged into worlds pretty much as alien as Tiptree's or Wolfe's. That was as true in the authors' times as it is in our own, which I presume is why the literary establishments of those times greeted the publications with such embarrassment and I presume is why I loved them all on first bewildered plunge.

My earlier point, too covertly made, was that the Ferengi threatened your argument not because they exemplify a fully-imagined alternative morality but because they depend on a fully-existing alternative morality: that of anti-Semitism. Not only are clashing moralities possible: they're unavoidable. We're all more or less surrounded by moralities alien to us, given more or less opportunity to pretend otherwise, being also more or less surrounded by advertisers competing for the chance to reassure us at a reasonable price. But if for some reason we're unable to disregard those differences, we (being human beings) will at least want to be allowed to fool around with them.

And of course you can always find some overlap. Like I said, we're human beings. It can't help but improve the odds when some of us speak the same language and have lived for some decades on the same continent. Such facts of similarity don't drown the fact of difference -- at least not in the eyes of the sanctified.

[jholbo]

Come to think of it - Ray, you're absolutely right about "Left Behind". If it were well-written, it would be good. (Seriously, I think the bad writing of the thing just addled my brain for a moment there. Not a good argument after all. Disproves my own point rather potently.)

I realize you are not a 19th century romantic - let alone a follower of Carlyle. Well, anyway ...

Let me clarify the hobbit/alien morality point just a tad. it isn't that the thing has to be comletely unlike anything we know (obviously hobbits don't fit the bill); it's that it has to be hermetically sealed into the fictional world, which hobbits most certainly are. Morality tends to break that seal, and it's interesting to consider what consequences this has for fiction.

I think you are probably right that my own interests should lead me to move away from my starting point - Walton, et. al. I am frankly most interested in cataloguing literary techniques for generating odd fictional moral perspectives. I haven't even really gotten started on that because I've bogged down in all this stuff that I find rather interesting but (we agree about this much) ultimately misguided. So probably I should at least temporarily set it aside and just try to write some interesting stuff about the history of pastoral and mock-pastoral, and what I think this has to do with some interesting literary productions, from Homer through Shakespeare through comic books and popular films. That should keep me busy for a while.

[Marcus Stanley]

I think I have some imaginative resistance to this particular kind of philosophical "problem". But I sort of get the point, I think...if hobbits don't exist in this world, it has no implications for whether they exist in other possible worlds, and so we can construct entire internally coherent possible worlds where they do. But if killing little babies is wrong in this world, it must also be wrong in all other possible worlds, hence I am resistant to an author trying to construct a world where what is actually immoral is moral.

Well, OK, but morality is a species of valuation, and we value what we value. It is difficult to get us not to value it. That holds for all kinds of valuation, not just moral -- a physically repulsive woman, provided her appearance does not change, will be physically repulsive in all imaginable possible worlds. Note the proviso that her appearance does not change -- the witch cannot enchant herself to appear a beautiful young maiden. I can credit a character who will believe her appearance beautiful, but I can also credit a Nazi character.

In fact, compared to our other forms of valuation imaginative resistance seems particularly weak in the case of morality. It is much easier to get someone to imagine that a repulsive doctrine is moral than a repulsive woman is beautiful. Which makes sense when one thinks of morality as a rather second-order species of valuation, forever trying to catch a ride on more deeply rooted notions of familial love, aesthetic disgust, and so forth.

A further note: you want to call our capacity to get fooled about morality "strictly a separate issue", about our foolishness, and clear a space for talking about resistance to properly understood immorality. But is it so separable? We *want* to be fooled, we enjoy it and colloborate in it, so how resistant are we? Well, maybe we secretly aren't very moral, but within the sphere of being moral we are resistant to accepting immorality in possible worlds. So we can separate the issue of our internal complexity from questions of morality. After all, morality is an objectively separable from the fallible human capacity for moral judgement. I must stop here to ask how you, a Nietzsche fan, can think it makes sense to separate human psychological complexity from morality, to accept morality as an objective logic separable from human psychological needs and projections. It says something about morality that we are simultaneously so vehement in affirming it and so eager to escape from it. I think what annoyed me about the original "imaginative resistance" argument is that is seems so self-congratulatory about morality.

[Vance Maverick]

Maybe Carlyle couldn't have admired Voltaire and Hume for being so very much of their own century and unlike him. But I think Strachey's project (in Eminent Victorians and the miscellaneous historical essays) can definitely be read as an attempt to appreciate everything, including such un-Romantics as Gibbon, in a Romantic way.

[Dee Lacey]

The question morphs from "can a book create a morality different from the author's/reader's" to "can a book create a morality that doesn't seep out of its edges". I've read more books that do the former than the latter, but I can think of at least one book whose central theme was the latter: Courtship Rites by Donald Kingsbury. He set it in a world whose morality was innate to the setting, or attempting to be. I found it a pretty good example of this genre: it was fine for the characters to kill and eat human infants, in their morality, and it didn't make them seem evil as individuals, but it didn't even slightly make it sound fine to do in real life.