Assholes (23 page)

When we do take seriously what the world really is like, Stoic
acceptance becomes less appealing. Happy equanimity won’t be appropriate when things become horrible enough to test any faith, when events and deeds cannot be plainly seen as part of any good and intelligent cosmic plan, and cannot clearly be justified by good things that might come from them later on. In a similar moment of existential despair, perhaps while thinking of Hobbes’s “war of all against all,” Kant writes: “If justice goes, there is no longer any value in human beings’ living on the earth.”
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Writing with World War II in mind, Rawls elaborates the same dark thought this way: if a “reasonably just” social order is “not possible, and human beings are largely amoral, if not incurably cynical and self-centered, one might ask, with Kant, whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth.”
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If things get bad enough, because cooperative people have been thwarted at every turn, with no reasonable hope for a better state of affairs, it will be natural and reasonable to simply resign. We rightly won’t settle for a world that falls so miserably short of our standards of how things ought to be or be made, even if that is largely beyond our personal control. The appropriate response is not Stoic “acceptance” but perhaps Masada-style mass suicide
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or playing music as the ship goes down.
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If we have thus arrived at the problem of evil, the problem
of the asshole is not quite so difficult. Even prospects of asshole-induced social decline are nothing like the moral threat to civilization presented by the rise of the Third Reich. Assholes do not usually prompt people to question the existence of a good and all-powerful God. Even so, the problem of the asshole is intractable in a special way. There is a lot to be done about grave evil, from law enforcement to war to reorganizing social relations in light of the great and existential threat. In World War II, the Allied powers were galvanized into action, knowing full well that the costs would be tremendous. After the war, the nations of the world took unprecedented steps to establish a framework for political and economic cooperation in hopes of lasting peace. These grand efforts, which largely succeeded, were facilitated by the salience of great evil and a ready consensus about its unacceptability. The problem of the asshole, by contrast, is marked by obscurity, uncertainty, and lack of easy consensus. As we saw in
chapter 5
, because assholes work in the gray, it is hard to know what to do or how far to go in asshole control. Cooperative people readily find themselves unable to muster the agreement and resources needed for an effective response. And after the well of goodwill has been poisoned, there is no easy way back to cooperative faith. Nor is the problem of the asshole limited to the occasional ruined afternoon or business meeting. It presents a major obstacle to progress and social justice but also threatens the hard-fought and hardwon gains for decency a society has already made. The problem affects whole societies, international relations, and so the entire world.

There is a second problem with Stoic acceptance, beyond the way it obscures the possibility of apt resignation in dire circumstances. It also stands in the way of the cooperative vigilance
needed to prevent circumstances from becoming dire. One can accept that the world will always be imperfect, and that much of social life is not within one’s personal control, and yet cooperate with others from a shared sense of the kind of society or business meeting that
we together ought to uphold
. That is not to deny the contingency of cooperation; fortune may to a large extent decide whether enough people can trust that enough others will not too easily resign. And cooperation will also depend on the vigilance of cooperative people in keeping faith with their fellows and refusing to resign, even against the odds. The abiding question of cooperative faith is what we can do together when each acts from our best common sense of what decency and justice require. But we will not effectively answer that question if we each happily give up on what happens to be beyond our personal powers in the Stoic style.

Fortunately, Stoic acceptance is not the only possible way of making peace with the human condition. As John Rawls develops Hegel’s idea of “reconciliation,” we can be reconciled to our condition, despite its evils, callousness, and unfairness, as long as we can credibly see the possibility of achieving a reasonably just social order. Reasonable hope for that possibility is all it takes for us to resist cynicism and temptations to resign. We can support efforts at reform that could, eventually, usher in a lasting peace.
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As long as we can hold out hope for a significantly
better, more just, and more peaceful world, we can be reconciled to our actual social condition long before a sufficiently improved state is reached and despite the fact that we may never see it in our lifetimes.

It is important that “reasonable hope” does not require
optimism
about the future. One might even be unwilling to bet against decline, because asshole profusion seems as likely as, or more likely than, not. Yet neither is reasonable hope mere wishful thinking. Wishful thinking does not require basic credibility, whereas
reasonable
hope depends on having good enough reason to support efforts toward reform over the longer haul. When reasons for hope aren’t “good enough,” resignation is justified.

While this is appealing, it cannot be the full story. If life were truly terrible, through and through, we could not be reconciled to it simply by virtue of the fact that there is an outside chance of significant eventual improvement, perhaps long after we (and our children, our children’s children, and our children’s children’s children) are all dead. Reasonable but faint hope won’t clearly suffice to stave off resignation in the face of an unacceptable and mostly bleak situation. Moreover, if there really were
nothing
to say in favor of our condition as it actually is, if there weren’t some reasons to believe the given is in some sense a
good given
, then it would rightly be seen as little more than a giant
obstacle
to progress, a largely regrettable predicament. The ugly realities of social life—of moderate scarcity of resources, limited generosity, sharp limitations on understanding one another, and deep differences in outlook—will seem to do little more than make moral progress difficult, limited, halting, and slow.

We find help here in the idea that Cohen sees in Jesus’ acceptance at Gethsemane: the idea that “we must accept some givens, not any and all givens, but plenty of givens …,” that
“certain things are to be taken as they come: they are not to be shaped or controlled.”
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Cohen sees this as true conservatism.
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This is not simply the idea that we are wise for accepting the limits of our powers, as though we would change things if we could, or even expand our powers, potentially without limit, if that were possible. Cohen does suggest that “we court vertigo if we seek to place everything within our control,” but his point is not that, psychologically speaking, we simply can’t handle it. It is that we shouldn’t want to handle it, as a matter of value, even if we psychologically could, because “the attitude of universal mastery over everything is repugnant, and, at the limit, insane.” He illustrates that repugnance with this allegory:

The scenario is ghastly because, so we all believe, “certain things are to be accepted from nature, and that includes aspects of ourselves.”

We might put the idea this way: much of what is given, including our fleshly nature, is, in a certain sense,
to be respected
. It is to be respected for what it just is, and therefore not to be wholly shaped or controlled (at least not without a pretty good justification). The body is not, then, the prison of the soul, as Plato thought, and the flesh is not to be resisted above all else, as for the neoplatonist Saint Augustine. Although the social body is not a fleshly thing, but rather made up of many different fleshly beings, it, too, is to be respected insofar as it is given to us, as are our basic forms of human relationship, human culture, and many of the social relations that assholes exploit: we are to respect those givens for the givens they are.
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That isn’t to say we have to accept the ways we are
unjustly
treated by assholes, or the damage they do to given social relations. There is nothing in injustice or degradation to respect. Nor are we suggesting that respect for many of the givens of social life could reconcile us to the human condition all by itself; it still won’t do if or when life is horrific. We still need reasonable
hope.
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Our suggestion, then, is this: we can be reconciled to our given condition insofar as we have reason to respect it for what it is
and
reasonable hope that it can and will sufficiently improve. That is a good and proper basis for refusing to resign, for keeping faith.

How does our world fare by that test? I leave a final verdict to the reader. But here are some reasons why prospects for reconciliation are fairly good, despite the alarming and apparently increasing number of assholes around.

For starters, there are our reasons to respect the many givens of life, whether our fleshly existence or the basic sociability of the human kind. We can add reasons why life can be beautiful and good, as even the poorest of the poor will agree when they gaze into their child’s bright eyes. To the extent that life can also be horrible, especially for the poorest of the poor, we can call injustice what it is and work toward its rectification. If life for many in our world is pretty good, the moral challenge is to make it pretty good for everyone. We can labor to that end in reasonable hopes of this and other forms of moral progress, if not this week, then not too far down the road.

In the bigger scheme of things, the arc of history does seem bent toward justice, even as progress comes at an agonizingly
slow pace.
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In the twentieth century alone we have the rise of democracy, the likely end to world war, the fortunate avoidance of nuclear holocaust, the rise of human rights discourse, and unprecedented gains in reducing absolute poverty. Here in the early twenty-first century, in the middle of the Great Recession, when this book is being written and when it will mainly be read, the future seems less than rosy. But the darkness was much darker not long ago, during the two world wars and the interwar and Great Depression years. While it may not happen very soon, the fog of crises eventually does lift, and there is room for hope (but perhaps no more than hope) that some lessons about the prudent management of financial markets will have been learned, or at least not forgotten too soon. There is at the moment little chance of immediate action to dramatically reduce the threat of catastrophic global climate change. Yet we can at least
hope
for a thaw in frozen political will. (Even as that may not happen in time to prevent collective doom, we can hope it happens in time.) Grounds for reasonable hope don’t have to be conclusive or decisive. Reasonable hope, again, isn’t predictive confidence.

All of this will look like wishful thinking, like “utopianism” of the bad kind, on bleaker views of human nature. We said in
chapter 6
that Hobbes was right and Marx wrong about the fragility of cooperation and its progress. But Hobbes’s explanation of the instability of society goes to the very impossibility of human beings
ever
being brought very far beyond assholish motives, given, as he puts it, a “generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.”
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People inherently seek to do well for themselves by doing better than others. Fragile peace among people locked in a relentless competition for relative standing—for “vaine-glory,” in Hobbes’s term—is possible, if at all, only with threats of sharp punishment meted out by a heavy, authoritarian hand. If human nature is that bad, that fallen or sinful in the religious idiom, then hope for progress is unreasonable: it just doesn’t square with what we already know about what people are like.

But are assholes really born and not made? Are they not made by the society that deeply shapes them, as we have suggested? Rousseau, our hero in
chapter 1
, argued, against Hobbes, that our obsessive concern with relative standing over others is not natural. Inflamed amour propre, as he called it, is created by
society’s
failure to recognize each as a full moral and political equal. It forces people moved by their good and natural sense of self-worth to seek recognition in established
marks of relative standing—in being richer or smarter or hotter than their perceived peers. When society instead meets that need, people can be satisfied without having to be seen as
better
than others. They can sign on to cooperation with others, on fair terms that reflect the true moral equality of each and all.

In that case, even if a world without assholes isn’t very likely, it is still fully consistent with the human social condition and so something we can reasonably hope for and work toward. Indeed, although Rousseau was content with speculative conjecture, which could be refuted by historical experience, history does seem to be working out as he hoped. As we have suggested, the rise of democracy, founded on the equality of each, has indeed coincided with a reduction in war.
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