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A Note on Moral Conditioning by Ronen Shamir
The United States is gearing up for war. So far, the American response to the disaster
that befell upon it has been conditioned by the knowledge that there is a perpetrator
somewhere out there. Yet this knowledge may blur the vision and invite a blind response.
The knowledge that there is a perpetrator provides a specific moralscope which conditions
the technologies of intervention that follow. And the more this moralscope is focused on
the evil, the narrower the moral landscape becomes. The perpetrator provides the victims
with a moral shield, rattling with self-centered righteousness. And as the sound of
violence stirs the air, America inflicts pain and misery upon numerous innocent people.
Millions of already hungry people in Afghanistan face a desperate situation as food
supplies run out, but Americans seem not to be able to see that hunger is a form of
violence. They seem not to understand that in the aftermath of the catastrophe they have a
greater responsibility than ever not to add to the world's misery. Yet all signs indicate
that America is to learn little from the disaster it experienced. The response is marked
by screeching aggression and, in particular, by all too familiar morally mindless
sentiments. As harsh as it sounds, the falling tower only provides the United States - and
we the privileged world-classes that sprout in its image - with a taste of the devastation
that goes on from Sarajevo to Grozny or from Rwanda to the Palestinian occupied
territories [see Slavoj Zizek "Welcome to The Desert of the Real"
www.nettime.org]. And yet the response does not seem to echo the understanding that the
falling towers, and the tragedy they brought to thousands of lives, are speaking to us.
Falling towers have been speaking to humanity for thousands of years. From Babylon to
ancient Tarot cards, from Goliath to the most dramatic Hollywood movies, falling towers
projected stories of horror and might, of warnings and hopes. Moral stories.
We should ask: What difference does it make that we associate a disaster with a crime
rather than with the hand of God, with the force of nature, or with a human error? What is
the effect of this knowledge upon our technologies of intervention and policies of
non-intervention? What is the effect of this knowledge upon our moral sensibilities and
hence upon our bases for action? The answers to these questions are certainly complicated.
However the mere positing of the questions seems impossible once the effort to capture the
perpetrator is transformed by policy-makers into a moral panic. Still it is time to ask
whether it really matters that there had been an intention behind the disaster. The
immediate effect of this latest horror, for grieving real human beings, has been over 6000
tragedies. Over 6000 people whose daily routine had been turned into their children's,
parents' and friends' nightmare. The immediate effect is a disaster which adds up to the
plight of millions suffering violent horrors around the world. We all know the routine:
Earthquakes, mud floods, ethnic strife, crime, hunger and disease. Yes, there are no
natural disasters in our world anymore. The so-called natural disaster, psychologically
easy to understand as the hand of God, is always compounded by the vulnerability of weak
communities, the negligence of greedy merchants, the inefficiency of governments, and by
sheer moral insensitivity. Likewise in human-made disasters. No matter how we crave for
the ultimate causes, there is no single cause for pain that can be compiled, identified
and targeted. Not when it comes to so-called natural causes and not when it comes to human
violence. There is no hand of God and there is no Usama Bin-Laden. Both, when pain
strikes, are anaesthetic myths. The former because 'there is nothing we can do' but
provide some compassionate relief. The latter because there is only one thing that can be
done: war, bringing the culprit dead or alive, compassion for collateral damage aside. In
both cases, the search for root-causes, the painful analysis that requires a broad
understanding of the distribution of responsibility, of the human conditions that
facilitate disasters, of the technology from within which disasters explode, is too often
muted by cries of vengeance and horror. In both cases, what is lost is the realization
that our moral sensibilities are not - as we sometimes want to believe - based upon a
genuine concern with victims. Rather, we approach different disasters according to the
solutions that are most readily available to us. Moreover, we approach different disasters
according to the solutions that we are willing to offer. Our very morality is conditioned
but what we are willing to offer.
But let us pause for a moment Let us try to listen to the falling towers, suspending,
momentarily at least, our so well-founded moral conviction that we are 'in the right'.
Perhaps we should begin with the notion that a fantasy, nay a projection, is finally being
realized. The fleeing crowds, back-staged by the falling towers, reenact in utmost
precision Hollywood's end-of-the-world classics. Usama Bib-Laden, posed in isolated
Afghanistan, plays Bond's evil Blofeld plotting destruction while patting his cat. A
colossal spectacle of blurred boundaries between the virtual and the actual. But then
Blofeld is not 'on the other side', is not the 'barbarian out there', is not the evil
voice of another civilization. Blofeld rides the technological platform and turns it
against itself . 'Bin-Laden' as an icon of technological availability, an incarnation of
its internal contradictions, a creature of its explosive potential, a realization of its
implosive vulnerability. And the impact. The impact that turned a high-density location in
New York into a wasteland. This shattering impact, that suddenly and mercilessly brought
the wasteland that lies around and underneath the hubs and highways of global capitalism
into its midst.
As an object of desire, globalization stands for the idea of de-centering, a fantasy of a
world in which actual space becomes as irrelevant as the virtual space which we admire. A
space of networks rather than hierarchies, a future world whose center and periphery
structure is obliterated. Peripheries, as the fantasy goes, are the Chinese walls that
world capitalism has to batter down. In fact, if we follow the logic to its extreme [and
this extremity already plays its part in Hollywood], a future world where only virtual
space counts, where actual space is insignificant. But the falling tower speaks of another
globalization. It asks us to reconsider the overcoming of space and to forget about the
irrelevance of place. Rather than de-centering, globalization is about unprecedented
concentration of material and symbolic power at high-density energy-points. The global
city is a reality where high density wealth and prosperity meets low density but all too
real poverty and despair. The periphery, so to speak, had paid a visit to the center. The
periphery pays visits to the center more often than we would like to think, although most
often our moral sensibilities are deaf to the cries it brings along. The periphery visits
in the forms of draughts, earthquakes, wars, and epidemics that drive millions to the
high-density places of wealth. The periphery visits in the form of huge financial debts
under which countries are doomed to greater misery and pain. The periphery visits us daily
with cries for help and fairness and equal distribution. The periphery pays us visits that
are only too often fail to awaken the very same moral sensibilities without which the
globalization fantasy is unmasked as cynical cruelty.
As a symbolic and real agent of globalization, the falling tower speaks a language of new
moral responsibilities.
Technology is the platform which allows commodities and capital and labor to travel back
and forth between trade centers and hard-labor sites, between low-wages and
digitalized-stocks. It allows the traffic that brings the wasteland to our doorstep,
sometimes in devastating forms. It will be a tragic mistake to surround ourselves with new
electronic walls, with new forms of xenophobia, with new technologies of surveillance,
with new armies that would try to push the wasteland back out there. The falling tower
invites us to ride the technological platform for trafficking relief to the wasteland. It
invites us to bombard Afghanistan with food rather than bombs [Martin Amis "Fear and
Loathing", The Guardian 18/9/01]. It asks us to traffic 40 billion dollars for debt
relief as naturally as when such funds are assigned to lower Manhattan. It would be a
tragic mistake to fall prey to the God of War. It is the expansion of moral sensibilities,
rather than their contraction, that we are challenged with. It is our notions of violence
and misery that we are ushered to expand. On Spetember 11, as Saskia Sassen aptly observed
["A Message From The Global South" The Guardian 12/9/01] , the visitors spoke a
language that we could not but hear. The question, however, is whether we are still able
to listen.
Dr. Ronen Shamir
Dept. of Sociology
Tel-Aviv University
Tel-Aviv 69978
Israel
19/09/01
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