INFINITELY REGRESSIVE UTILITARIANISM

One of the CBR threads informed me of this VOX article discussing the interactions of utilitarian philosophy and "deonotological philosophy" in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.

Frankly, I've yet to find any MCU movies, except possibly the original IRON MAN, which articulate a coherent philosophical stance. In any case, I responded to the essay twice in the CBR thread. First:

In the essay the writer associated "the greater good" with pure, unfettered utilitarianism. I think that's an overstatement, and the writer himself brings up an extreme case of real-world utilitarianism, as well as pointing out that sooner or later Thanos will just have to start killing again. It's pretty hard to regard either example as being truly "for the greater good," particularly since the result is a total acceptance of brutality as a means to an end. 

BTW, if there's one intellectually dishonest aspect of INFINITY, it's that it doesn't really specify why Thanos thinks that galactic overpopulation is a given. At least when Ra's Al Ghul excoriates the ecological chaos of Earth, it's something readers can see for themselves.

The "no-kill" policy is often framed as a preventive to unfettered utilitarianism. Sometimes the arguments in its defense are clever; sometimes not.  But the policy isn't quite as divorced from real-world consequences as the Kantian model suggests.

Second:

 I'm not convinced that utilitarianism applies to INFINITY WAR. I think it's a big weakness of the script that the heroes have access to two stones, the destruction of which will prevent Thanos from the specific goal of destroying half the people in the universe. But OK: say that in some alternate world, the heroes succeed in destroying one or both stones, whether it costs Vision his life or not. What happens then? Thanos just shrugs his shoulders and goes home? Hah, we're talking about someone who's already wiped out multiple worlds with his space-army. No, thwarted of his goal, Thanos takes revenge and obliterates Earth.

On another thread I saw someone complain that the Wakandans were being needlessly sacrificed to protect the Vision's life. I wasn't particularly fond of the "ticking clock" trope involving the Vision. But the Wakandans are not being used as cannon-fodder. It's their bloody world too, and they've just as much reason as anyone to defeat Thanos.  Suppose the movie starts out with a pure endorsement of utilitarianism: some hero who doesn't mind "trading lives" kills Vision right off, defeating his larger goal. The menace doesn't go away; Thanos just goes after the whole world, and Wakanda's isolationism doesn't help it one damn bit. So here's another case where, in contrast to the thrust of the online essay, pure utilitarianism leaves those involved no better off than they were before.

I didn't bother pointing it out on the thread, but this 1980 issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA, written by Mike Barr, plays Captain America and the Punisher off one another as representatives of what might be called "enlightened vigilantism" vs. "unenlightened vigilantism," or what I called "unfettered utilitarianism."

Morally, Barr's story does set up its oppositions better than INFINITY WAR does. In this scene, the Punisher takes the utilitarian POV, referring to his ethic of treating the war on crime in terms of real war, while Captain America holds to a vision of moral compass, stating that there's a moral code that the "good guys" should advocate.

The upshot of the story is clearly in Cap's favor, particularly when it's revealed that one of the Punisher's "hits" on a big mob-meeting would have killed  not only real criminals, but also an undercover police agent. The Punisher escapes Cap and, to the best of my knowledge, rarely encounters such challenges to his utilitarian POV in his own title-- much as, in my own experience, the critics of the HOODED UTILITARIAN website rarely responded well to having their regressive ethics challenged.

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT

                    

 In my 2013 essay AFFECTIVITY, MEET EFFICACY, I focused upon Ernst Cassirer distinction between “causality” and “efficacy.” Causality, the philosopher said, represented humanity’s ability to think about cause and effect in a rational, discursive manner, and from this we get the first stirrings of early philosophy, and later, the developments of science. Efficacy, however, belonged to the language of myth: it depends on a blurring of the distinctions between the objective and subjective worlds.

…the world of mythical ideas… appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical worldview… which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.

One mythical idea to which Cassirer refers occasionally is myth’s view of the origins of the world. Some mythical tales hold the world comes into being only because some giant being—Ymir in Norse stories, Purusha in Hindu stories—is torn apart, so that the different parts of the giant’s body become the earth, the seas, the moon, etc. Within the scope of these narratives, there is no attempt to provide a rationale as to why the world had to made from the flesh and bones of a giant. It is true purely because it confers the aura of human associations upon the whole of creation, even those aspects of creation that may seem entirely alien to human experience. This is what I’ve called “affective freedom,” humankind’s ability to imagine almost anything, whether it accords with experience or not.

Rational conceptions of causal relations, of course, could not care less about the aura of subjective emotions and drives: the desire is to extrapolate a closed system of relations that depend entirely on physical force: CAUSE A exerts FORCE B upon OBJECT C, resulting in RESULT Z. This tendency to rely exclusively upon material experience is one that I’m now terming “cognitive restraint.” Just as in psychology “the affective” and “the cognitive” describe complementary aspects of human mentality, “cognitive restraint” exists in a complementary relationship with “affective freedom.” In other words, human beings are entirely defined by neither: we need both the ability to imagine what seems impossible and to discourse about what we believe to be immediately possible.

I’ve written a lot on my blog about the concept of freedom, and it’s a major reason as to why I’ve devoted so much blog-space to such obscure concepts as “the combative mode” and the various forms of phenomenality, sublimity, and so on. But freedom without a complementary form of internal restraint is, as Janis Joplin sang, “just another word for nothing left to lose.”  Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

Human beings, we may fairly deduce, relate to the world in different ways than other animals. We cannot know what goes on in the head of a lion when it stalks a bird, and then fails to catch the bird because the latter flaps its wings and flies away, We can fairly guess that the lion is frustrated, and possibly with its limited mentality it might entertain the wish to continue chasing the bird into the air. But that would seem to be as far as a lion’s imagination could go.

We also cannot really know what thoughts may have passed through the mind of a Neanderthal hunter in the same situation. Maybe our caveman stalker had no thoughts at all when his prey escaped. Yet we can at least reasonably suspect that the primitive fellow may have entertained the idea of what it would like to be a bird: to sprout wings and chase the bird into its own territory. And once he had this thought—say, for argument’s sake, that no one had entertained the thought before him—he might not be limited to thinking only about filling his belly with bird-flesh. He nay have started to think about what it would feel like to fly, to be a bird; to soar above the limits of other cavemen. At this point he probably doesn’t  think about imitating the bird by designing his own pair of wings, but he may decide to translate this vagrant imaginings into a mythic form. The caves at Lascaux attest to some sort of mental alchemy that combined man and bird, even if today we can only look at drawings of bird-man hybrids and label them “portraits of shamans.”  They may have been just that, but their original context may matter less than their role in determining humankind’s affective freedom.

In one conversation I mentioned that humankind’s advancements in powered flight would have been impossible without this sort of internal, subjective appreciation for the possible thrill of flying. My opponent simply said something along the lines, “Yeah, but powered flight wouldn’t have been possible without science and logical thinking.”  Quite true; as far as achieving an effect in the physical world, wishing never makes it so. But my opponent in my opinion missed the point: the wish makes everything else thinkable. To the earthbound human who can only run and jump and swim, the idea of flying cannot be imagined as having some practical applications—not even just that of catching birds—until *after * it has been re-imagined as something that the earthbound human can imagine bringing into his own “sensuous, objective experience.” 

One of the greatest “myths” propounded by empiricist-types has been that of the “caveman-engineer:” the primitive who instantly sees some practical advantage in making a new type of spear or a rooftop, because he’s so much more attuned to the scientific principles in the physical world, even if he doesn’t have a scientific system as such. This very selective conception of the early scientist was of course an anachronism: an imagining of some 18^th-century scientist born before his time; one who would be in no way influenced by the myths and religion of his time. This was one of many verbal strategies used by empiricists to tout the supreme importance of cognitive restraint, of valuing only practical cause and effect, and to consign myth to the dust-bin of “failed science.”

The mistake of utilitarianism—that the only things that matter are those which have a defined use—is one that depends upon the formulations of cognitive restraint. A utilitarian might allow some niggling truth to my “flying caveman” example, but he would view the caveman’s “fancy of flight” to be relevant to the human condition only because it did lead to a useful development. In contrast, the utilitarian would not be impressed by, say, Tolkien’s example of “arresting strangeness:” of imaging a world with a green sun. Even in the world of fiction, the world of the green sun would have no relevance unless it illustrated the restraints on physical life expressed through scientific fact. Thus, if autrhor Hal Clement devoted a book to explaining the makeup of a fictional world that happened to have a green sun for some scientific reason, then that, and that alone, would have relevance to utilitarianism.

What I’ve repeatedly emphasized that the world of affective freedom is a whole package: that the ability to imagine impossible things is crucial to human nature, whether it leads to specific inventions or not. Depicting a shaman as a bird-human hybrid may not have led directly to any fantasies of personal flight, and thus the shaman-dream might have no relevance at all to the development of powered flight. I argue, rather, that whether the subjective outpourings of myth and fiction do or don't lead to useful developments, all of them are equally important in determining the meaning of human freedom.

CONJUNCTION JUNCTION, MEET VIOLATION STATION PART II

I read USES [OF ENCHANTMENT] many years ago and thought it was a fair premise, albeit marked by a certain utilitarianism. While I would never deny that readers may internalize the subject matter of fiction so as to give the subject some personally-proactive theme, it's certainly not the principal quality of fiction, nor do I think most readers, children or adults, are thinking to themselves, even unconsciously, "How can I 'use' this?" Much of the charm of fiction, be it 'fantastic' or 'realistic,' resides in the way those elements most similar to everyday experience can be inverted, transvalued, or reinterpreted in assorted ways.-- me, BETTLEHEIM, BETTELHEIM, BETTELHEIM!

Mark Millar's remarks about rape, superficial though they were, stirred up what amounted to a pretty small hornet's nest, given that the swarm already seems to be settling down, to judge from the one or two comics news-sites I visit. 

Regarding Millar's original remarks, the only thing I had to add is that while he was correct to say that the act of rape could be used in fiction simply to denote "badness," he was incorrect to say that the act had no difference from (to use his example) a bad guy's decapitating a victim.  Various online critics, such as the one I cited in Part One, attacked Millar for not privileging the use of rape to connote the need for social and cultural reform.  This misses the point as to the universal-- i.e., non-political-- ways in which sex and violence overlap and yet remain distinct.  My own view, not reducible to pure utilitarian terms yet not irrelevant to those concerns, was expressed in the essays entitled VIOLENCE *AIN'T* NUTHIN' BUT SEX MISSPELLED:

While there are ways in which sexual partners can attempt to "assault" one another-- ways which include, but are not confined to, rape-- sex is dominantly isothymic, in that sex usually requires some modicum of cooperation. Violence, then, dominantly conforms to Fukuyma's megalothymic mode insofar as it usually involves a struggle of at least two opponents in which one will prove superior to the other, though in rare cases fighters may simply spar with no intent of proving thymotic superiority.

I want to make clear, too, that my objections to a utilitarian reading of violence are not confined to the arguments of those who don't like violence in certain contexts.  My quotation re: Bettleheim  shows that I'm equally opposed to the views of an author who saw violence in a positive light, because he too professed a narrow utilitarianism that overlooked the broader context of fiction: 

Much of the charm of fiction, be it 'fantastic' or 'realistic,' resides in the way those elements most similar to everyday experience can be inverted, transvalued, or reinterpreted in assorted ways.

The battle of these two equally utilitarian viewpoints is highlighted in THE BEAT's new cause celebre, two posts-- one closed to comments, one designed to exclude them from the first-- on the subject of Avatar Comics' use of torture-porn comic book covers.

Here's the first, in which author Heidi McDonald vents her spleen against Avatar for marketing "torture porn."  From her opening remarks she's apparently not the first to do so, but her politicized views are made clear at the conclusion of what is a pretty civil thread overall, replete with many thoughtful remarks about the nature of the horror genre:

...I’ll leave you with this: why does so much “horror” involve sadistic misogyny against women? And are you okay with that?

I've already refuted similar McDonald views here, so I'll confine myself to mentioning that she never responds to one poster's claim that Avatar tortures quite a few male characters as well.  Heidi then offers a summation of the controversy on her newsblog and elsewhere, with a pertinent link to an essay by Warren Ellis.

Ellis' defense of violent stories frames its argument in equally utilitarian principles, not unlike Bruno Bettelheim's defense of violent fairy tales. 

The function of fiction is being lost in the conversation on violence. My book editor, Sean McDonald, thinks of it as “radical empathy.” Fiction, like any other form of art, is there to consider aspects of the real world in the ways that simple objective views can’t — from the inside. We cannot Other characters when we are seeing the world from the inside of their skulls. This is the great success of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, both in print and as so richly embodied by Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal television series: For every three scary, strange things we discover about him, there is one thing that we can relate to. The Other is revealed as a damaged or alienated human, and we learn something about the roots of violence and the traps of horror.

I don't disagree that violence in fiction CAN be used for this "conversation on violence."  My objection is that Ellis-- and the book editor he quotes-- are extending this potential use of violence further than it deserves to be extended.  Basically, Ellis simply attempts to turn the "desensitization" view of violence on its head: instead of making readers/viewers less sensitive to violence, violent fiction makes them more empathetic.


The truth is that violence can have either effect, and that the effect on the audience can be totally at odds with respect to the intent of the author.   In the terminology of Hume, the only "is" one can state with certainty is that most if not all human cultures are fascinated with fictional violence.  To impose any "ought" upon it, as Ellis does above, is mere wishful thinking, as is his claim toward the essay's conclusion that "fiction is how we both study and de-fang our monsters."  Camille Paglia is more forthright in this famous quote from SEXUAL PERSONAE, which grounds human behavior as a ongoing struggle between a fantasy principle and a reality principle:

We may have to accept an ethical cleavage between art and reality, tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in art that we would not tolerate in society. For art is our message from the beyond, telling us what nature is up to.

BACK TO BATAILLE PT. 2

In Part 1 I extrapolated from George Bataille's formula, in which he described two types of economic consumption, a pair of opposed desires that appear with particular clarity in literary endeavor: "the desire to conserve and the desire to expend."  Bataille expressly considers that the reality-oriented aspect of consumption, "production and acquisition," to be of "secondary character" in relation to expenditure, the desire to pointlessly but satisfyingly expend one's energies. I agree with Bataille that what I call "the desire to expend" is at the heart of art, though I'll reserve my opinion regarding all the other "sumptuary" activities he describes in "The Notion of Expenditure." 

In contrast, many critics, and possibly most if not all teachers in the U.S. secondary education racket, often harp on art as being superior when it serves some utilititarian purpose.  Said purpose may be a very specific call-to-arms against social injustice, as with Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE.  In some cases the "purpose" can be extended into a looser program of socialization, as I noted in this essay on the work of Bruno Bettleheim vis-a-vis the alleged purposefulness of fairy tales.  Where secondary educators are concerned, the "usefulness" criterion is perhaps inevitable.  How else can teachers sell kids on the social datum that MACBETH will possess some long-term value for their lives that simply can't compare with TWILIGHT?

Another way of expressing the antinomy between the "desire to conserve and the desire to expend" might be seen in my opposition of two themes-- or more properly, supra-themes-- that govern art as a whole: "realism" and "escapism," which I introduced back in THEMATIC REALISM PART I: 

Of "thematic escapism" I wrote:

Coleridge's example of the Arabian Nights tale is, like the JUSTICE LEAGUE story I critiqued, not especially concerned with morals as such-- or at least, not to the extent that the ANCIENT MARINER is. Both tales are, in a formal sense, "escapist," though I note that I use the word non-pejoratively. Neither Gardner Fox nor the Arabian Nights scribe existed in a time before fiction had been used for didactic moral purposes, of course, but both stories can be fairly regarded as "vacations from morals." It is not that the protagonists of the tales do not perform actions that the reader considers "good" rather than "bad,"but that there is not a true moral dialectic as such.

Then of "thematic realism:"

By contrast, a tale like Coleridge's MARINER, or (to give a superheroic parallel to the JLA tale) WATCHMEN, are clearly tales that are much concerned with analyzing the ways mortal men deal with the moral elements in life, no matter how fantastic their situations... there is in comics-fandom a considerable prejudice toward a belief opposite to the one Coleridge expresses: that a narrative is *always* superior because it addresses specific dialectical moral issues

Morality, it should be obvious, serves as a conservative force.  Even if one lives in a community that encourages the young to steal from each other and eat their dead, that species of morality is promulgated with a perceived utilitarian end of promoting societal advantage in some way.  In contrast, a "vacation from morals" serves no purpose except that of pure recreation, of expending one's energies, no matter how actively or passively one may choose to do so.

The most prominent problem with emphasizing only the moral orientation of art is that it too usually winds up serving the ends of a particular group rather than of humanity as a whole.  In DEFININING PSEUDOFEMINISM PART 1 I demonstrates how two individuals, Dave Sim and Evie Nagy, evinced utterly polarized opinions on the value of a particular type of female-oriented fantasy, and yet backed up their respective opinions by caviling against images they found non-responsive to "reality" as each perceived it.

Any number of other examples are possible.  One might consider that William Faulkner, to the extent that he described the degradation of black people in the United States, attempted to show the reality behind racial myths.  Yet a racist writer like Thomas Dixon (author of the book adapted as BIRTH OF A NATION) surely thought that he too was representing reality in expressing his horror at mixed-race unisons.  Even many of the aforementioned Shakespeare's works-- MERCHANT OF VERNICE, MEASURE FOR MEASURE, and MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (just to stick with the "m's")-- are muddy in terms of their morality.

Perhaps the reason that even the Bard's morals can be suspect lies in the fact that art is never purely about moral compass; that it always incorporates aspects of escapism alongside the grimmest realism, a sense of play even in the dullest workaday art-worlds.  In THE BURNING FOUNTAIN Philip Wheelwright advances this fascinating analysis:

In expressive language... statements vary in respect to the manner and degree to which they are susceptible to affirmation and denial, ranging all the way from heavy assertorial tone, which characterizes the literal statement, the proposition, to light assertorial tone, which consists in an association or semi-affirmed tension between two or more images or other expressive units. 

I'm impressed enough by Wheelwright's discernment of these differing tones that I'm tempted to quasi-steal his insight: to say that my "works of thematic realism" are characterized by a greater degree of *assertorial gravity* than the opposing kind, while "works of thematic escapism" are characterized by a greater degree of *assertorial levity.*  Thus, one might say that while Shakespeare approached the sin of killing kings in MACBETH with a great deal of "assertorial gravity," he has less gravity (or knew that his customers would have less) regarding the right of Jews like Shylock to keep their religious persuasions.

But in standard moralistic criticism, there can be no separate principle of "assertorial levity," and so such a critic can only accuse Shakespeare, writer of the "Hath not a Jew" speech, of either being an anti-Semite or playing to anti-Semitism-- a dubious and over-ideological reading at best.

Returning to Bataille: if we start out from the presumption that Bataillean "expenditure"/recreation is the basis of the arts-- perhaps given some finessing via Cassirerean "expressivity" and Wheelwright's thoughts on different aspects of language-- then the tendency of human beings to desire "vacations from morals" can be better understood as the primary phenomenon that gives rise to art, with the use of art for rhetorical purposes coming in a close second, at least in a historical sense.