Moderation and the Ethical Event

Yesterday I ventured that the request to "agree to disagree" can in certain contexts foster an unjust status quo. A plea for moderation, in other words, isn't always as innocent as it would seem. For example, in my dissertation research into the women's suffrage movement (specifically, the 1913 Suffrage March in Washington, DC), I ran into the surprising fact that the Washington Post, now generally considered a fairly liberal newspaper, published editorials that were--well--less than the all-for-women's-right-to-vote one would expect or hope. Some of the editorials from that period attempted to stake out a "middle ground" between what they portrayed as two sides that had gone too far: the anti-suffragists and the suffragists.

Now, it should be remembered that the suffragist movement had its share of militants. Indeed, a few British suffragists engaged in a bit of property destruction to advance their cause. And although no US suffragists engaged in such activities, many of them made no secret of the fact that they trained with British activists. And certainly, by the standards of the time, the very fact that women were marching in public in spectacular display of their own agency had more than a tinge of scandal about it.

Nevertheless, it's difficult from our perspective to extend much sympathy to the Post for its waffling, sort-of support for an issue we consider a basic and uncomplicated matter of justice. How can anyone be not for women's right to vote? How, moreover, can anyone be less than adamant that women must be allowed to vote? As I've written about previously, the suffrage issue at present so basic to our conceptions of democracy that it isn't even political--that is, it's not a contestable issue. Debates about whether or not women should or shouldn't vote are ipso facto invalid. From this present perspective, then, to look back and see someone asserting their even-handedness as the most moral stance highlights just how immoral even-handedness can be.

Of course, that judgment I just leveled at the Post of a century ago is historiographically self-serving. I prove my democratic bona fides by castigating those who would question the present's dominant configuration of democracy. In other words, hindsight is 20/20. The real question is how I would feel were I a 30-something male citizen of Washington, DC, in 1913, having lived all my life without the benefit of a hegemonic ideology that defines women's suffrage as integral to US democratic practice.

I would like to think that I would, like many "liberals" of the day (who were often, it should be mentioned, socialists) support suffrage. But I don't know. Like I said, I dislike conflict and disagreement. I have a low patience threshold for spectacular mass political actions that fail to meet my rather high standards for thoughtfulness and efficacy. Those who would dispense with or disrupt social order casually or "just because," in my view, have little moral authority to tell others how to create a better social order. Disruptions and attention-getting spectacle, in other words, need to be very well-considered before I support them.

The problem is that most in-the-moment activist decisions happen without the hindsight necessary to judge them as well-considered and efficacious. The turn-of-the-century social theorist Georges Sorel argued that authentic revolutions can be distinguished from temporary or abortive uprisings only by historians who look back at the events from a future date.

Similarly, in the present, political philosopher Alain Badiou bases his ethical philosophy around the idea of the Event--a transformative occurrence that alters forever the standards of existence, rendering everything that came before the Event moot. Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, constitutes an Event in that it utterly invalidated whole swaths of scientific thought that had gone on before. It's impossible to subscribe to Newtonian physics as absolute truth after the Event of Einstein. Badiou suggests that various kinds of Events exist. Falling in love, for example, is an Event on a personal level; nothing after the fall is the same as before. Authentic revolutions can be Events, transforming forever political realities that had been known and stable prior to them. Ethics, for Badiou, consists of fidelity to the Event. It is unethical, he argues, to shut one's ears and eyes to the transformation wrought by Events on personal or social levels.

The problem I've had with Badiou is that he offers very little by way of guidance about how to distinguish authentic Events from inauthentic or false Events. The Nazi movement, he asserts, based itself on a false Event--the advent of the new Aryan ascendancy, etc. But surely this is also a case of historiographic 20/20 vision, no? Surely--as repugnant as it seems to us--Hitler's dream of a new Germany struck many Germans, at least, as an Event that reformatted the world. What besides a process called "ethics" helps one in determining the authenticity of an Event? Like my time-traveling hypothetical about the Suffrage Parade, how would I recognize an authentic Event surely enough to justify investing fidelity to it?

Badiou, for his part, largely ignores the authenticity question in favor of a focus on fidelity. Strikingly for Christians, one of Badiou's main works describing his theory focuses on Saint Paul, whom Badiou (an atheist) sees as creating Christianity though his assertion of fidelity to the Event of Christ. Not for Paul endless debates about whether Christ actually died and rose--Paul is on this point utterly convinced. The only question Paul poses is this: how will you respond to the Christ Event? Will you be faithful to it or will you live as if its authenticity were in doubt?

I must say this example gives me pause, revealing as it does the "faith" aspect of the word fidelity. I am reminded of the old adage about how absolute proof of God would invalidate faith since faith is precisely investment of commitment and effort in the absence of absolute compulsion or assurance. "You believe because you have seen me," the risen Christ told Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen yet still believe." Blessed are those who are faithful to the Event without certainty of its Event-ness?

I don't know. I'm not yet ready to dispense with deliberation and analysis prior to action; indeed, I would resist a vision of ethics that implies fully committed action based on every hunch of Event-ness one has.

But Badiou does give a new perspective on the "agree to disagree" impulse. It is possible to be unethical by not acting, by stubbornly hesitating to act when the situation (the Event) calls for it. The impulse to moderate, to not make trouble, to agree to disagree--there are times when living by this impulse would be the ultimate betrayal. Ethics for Badiou--and I think for Christians--necessarily involves a degree of risk.

More tomorrow,

JF