Only by Jim Janknegt
The morality of our time could be defined as a morality of complacency.
Contrary to what one might at first think, there is no contradiction in terms here, since complacency does after all have its norms, and even its demands, to which society ultimately submits.
Only by Jim Janknegt
Complacency is an overall penchant, an art de vivre. It could even be considered an ethical system, in the sense that it can eventually become a practice that establishes norms for itself. What interests the contemporary individual is less the accomplishment of a “good,” which he does not know how to define in objective terms, as self-fulfillment in the short term, which has now become the ultimate criterion of the “good.” An act is considered to be good if it allows the individual to fulfill himself. The question of criteria remains unresolved, however, for how is one to define self-fulfillment? In fact, it can be measured only by the standard of satisfaction.
Complacency indicates a predisposition to seek pleasure. Raised to the level of a principle, it supposes the permanent identification of the good with that which pleases. To be complacent means to be easily accommodating, to admit whatever is convenient, or to look kindly on whatever comes one’s way. It indicates an open or easily obtained indulgence, without any judgment attached. It accepts things in advance.1 It can become a sort of selfish servility. All this is true of present morals in general–in the relationships contemporary man has with his work, with money, with authority, and with others.
The ethics of complacency legitimizes and recognizes all thought, all behavior, and all ways of life–on the condition, of course, that they do not oppose complacency itself.
The complacent man is, in a manner of speaking, a slave to what pleases him, in the sense that he has trouble stepping back from what pleases him and examining it with a critical eye. He is therefore just as accepting of the unhappiness associated with what displeases him.
He is complacent in sorrow and discouragement, and readily complains about what has befallen him, for he is unable to distance himself from his own ego, to lift himself above his displeasure.
The ethics of complacency legitimizes and recognizes all thought, all behavior, and all ways of life–on the condition, of course, that they do not oppose complacency itself. In doing so, this ethics constitutes a worldview, for it is not merely the attitude of the smiling sage, or of the fool who takes what comes without regard to its consequences.
The ethics of complacency’s indulgent accommodation of everything corresponds to a refusal to accept any established limits, or to a refusal to refuse, which brings to mind the the catchphrase of the 1968 generation, “It is forbidden to forbid.” The sweeping away of moral taboos during the preceding two decades was probably due less to a fading of the previously dominant religious thinking as to an inability of traditional thought to justify the barriers that, in the end, were being propped up only by the force of habit. Traditional thought had come to live more through its institutions than through its points of reference. We know that institutions, created to embody and perpetuate the certitude of these points of reference, often ended up abusively replacing what they were supposed to protect, and became mere hollow shells in the process. Thus, the ethics of complacency never had to impose itself by arguing for its legitimacy. On the contrary, it was able to impose itself without any argument at all, filling the vacuum left by other ethical systems whose points of reference had been lost along the way.
The ethics of complacency is an openness to all that is possible, which it justifies in advance. It closes no doors. Thus, the highest virtue of our time is open-mindedness. Our contemporary has said it all when he speaks of an open-minded person. We are not dealing here with the humanist who has pointed out errors and misdeeds but, without legitimizing them, is able to see the suffering humanity behind them. Rather, this is the man of accommodation, who has decided in advance that nothing can be called deviant or unnatural because he does not recognize any criteria according to which an idea or a behavior might be considered deviant. Unaware of any criteria of the good apart from that of well-being and pleasantness, he rejects any and all judgment: above all, “do not judge”–this is the obsession of our contemporary.
It is significant that this “open-minded” man is, as a social model, the heir to the Greek kaloskagathos and the honnête homme of a bygone era.2 These men were characterized by their devotion to external, objective points of reference. Our “open-minded” man, in contrast, is characterized by his disowning of any exterior point of reference. This is what makes him historically unique. And it is precisely this absence of reference that makes him a modern model.
His behavior, which is at the same time a way of thinking, corresponds to what his detractors call “easiness,” “indulgence,” and overall weakness. These pejorative appellations, however, are entirely insufficient as critiques of complacency. For why should “easiness” be in itself reprehensible? There is certainly something vain about seeking difficulty for difficulty’s sake.
Complacency might appear worthy of contempt to an ideology of force or virility–to an ideology of the superman. Some might even find a hint of lowness in complacency, which is what we sense in the expression the wink of complacency. But here we are in the realm of sentiments or even passions, not rational argument. It is difficult to see on what basis the rigor or intransigence of established limits is more legitimate than well-being or pleasantness. We find ourselves here in an area of debate where the only exchanges occur at the level of anathema–and no amount of anathema has ever constituted an argument.
The identification of the good with what pleases amounts to an extreme constriction of the imagination’s conception of time. The good, whatever its foundations, generally extends over the long term. How is it possible to seek the good today without wondering if it does not compromise the good of the future? How can one aim for a result without being interested in what are its consequences?
Contrary to what some pessimists might believe, we do not find ourselves in an era without “values,” but rather in an era characterized by the appearance of an unstructured, erratic, and deficient ethics.
The “good,” in the sense of what leads to happiness, encompasses the individual in time, melding the present and the future, and in the space of his human and natural environment. This is why we distinguish it from capriciousness, which we generally associate with children because of the lack of a broader vision it supposes. What is essential about caprice is less its arbitrary nature than its “primal” character. The contemporary individual thinks that well-being is happiness; however, well-being is short-term pleasure, whereas happiness is a “good” anchored in a given time and place.
The ethics of complacency deals only in what immediately seems obvious. And in doing so, it indicates a short-term vision, a narrow conception of time and space. It simultaneously denies the temporal dimension of personal life and of social history. Complacency dismisses all futures. The virtue of what pleases cannot be judged in the present by the measure of a religious or ideological good, but by a good that lasts in time. If the vertical criteria are no longer accessible to our contemporary, the horizontal criteria cannot be avoided.
Contrary to what some pessimists might believe, we do not find ourselves in an era without “values,” but rather in an era characterized by the appearance of an unstructured, erratic, and deficient ethics. Of course whether we are in fact dealing here with an ethics or not remains open to discussion. Nonetheless, contemporary man has not abandoned the idea of the good, even if he talks so much about it that his logorrhea raises suspicions. Of course, he does not actually seek the good, since he is without the necessary criteria to accomplish this quest and in fact rejects any such criteria in advance. He seizes anything at hand that pleases him, anything that moves him or stimulates his emotions, and calls it good. In doing so, he believes he has discovered a new pragmatic outlook, one free from his former prejudices, and a way to provide for his general happiness, which is the purpose of any ethics.
The appearance of the ethics of complacency marks a complete rupture with what we knew before, not only concerning the source of norms, but also concerning the spectrum that the identified “good” covers. As we know, modernity is the era where the determinant of what is good is no longer an authority or doctrine, but the individual himself. But everything is happening as if the rise of subjectivism had conjured up not only a new source of the good, but also, and probably in a related way, a good that serves a different purpose.
The break with the notion of an objective “good,” which specifically characterizes modernity, allows the rise of a “good” defined by each individual within the sovereignty of his own conscience. The “good,” as something objective and given from the exterior, was the product of a religious or ideological worldview and brought with it a hierarchy of norms that rested upon a truth. It proposed, or imposed, not only the meaning of existence–it identified what existence can expect–but the very blueprint of a “good” existence. It brought with it the architecture or model of a respectable human life that was generally esteemed and devoted to happiness. Ancient morality, and later, Christianity–and even modern ideologies–spoke less of a series of piecemeal collection of “goods” as of a “good life.”
The individual who has now been left to himself to determine his own “good” has not only been “liberated,” in the modern sense, from this truth that weighed upon him. He has at the same time lost the overarching rationale by which the idea of the “good life” is made intelligible. We might expect that the sovereign individual would become the creator of his ethics. After all, he is not supposed to receive anything from anyone, and must find within himself everything he needs to exist with dignity, which corresponds here to an idea of the good.
However, if the human subject defines himself by the ability to create norms, each individual cannot really be expected to be able to create his own ethical blueprint. In an earlier time, each individual’s birthright was an ethical blueprint given him along with the first smile of his mother. He could of course later modify it or reject it altogether, but he then had to bear the marginalization that this choice would inevitably bring. In this respect, each individual was blessed at birth with an ethics, and it is uniquely modern to have understood this blessing as a form of slavery, since, for modern man, to have to accept an ethics from someone other than oneself is oppressive. This is why contemporary man is born into a shapeless, soundproof, de-clawed, and innocuous world, and why it is up to him to give it direction. He has to assign a name to his own dynamic impulse in the darkened absence of signs, and he has to do this alone.
Each person is henceforth called upon to choose his own values, or even to invent them. Furthermore, these values are for internal use only; that is, they must not be imposed on others. The ethical project each man invents is valid only for himself, from which follows a twofold difficulty that inevitably serves to confirm the individual’s place within the destructuring ethics of complacency.
The first difficulty is that each individual must in principle be able to discover or invent the alpha and omega on his own, for no one is going to rush to his side to propose an alternative ethical project. On the contrary, such a gift would be understood as a form of alienation. Contemporary man is supposed to find due north without a compass. Or rather, he is expected to use himself as a compass to find his own north. However, we have to have the courage to recognize that no society is made up of millions of theologians, avant-garde moralists, inspiring visionaries, and prophets.
The kind of heroes who bring with them points of reference, or who are able to shine a light on previously unseen points of reference, are few and far between. The vast uninspired mass of people finds its moral blueprint through the mediation of a Moses, Socrates, Saint Paul, Luther, or Solzhenitsyn. No egalitarian theory, however sophisticated, will ever be able to hide the obvious: not all Greeks are Socrates, but the existence of Socrates allows other Greeks to name their own existence, and to assign a reason for it. Our contemporary has rejected prophets, but has great difficulty formulating his own moral blueprint; at the same time he cannot do away with the idea of the good. He therefore contents himself with an erratic good, jumbled norms, and a succession of incoherent “goods,” which are inevitably tied to the immediate present since no moral project binds them together.
The second difficulty our contemporary faces is the following: even if he does possess an ethical project able to structure his existence, taken from himself or from elsewhere, he must keep it to himself. Whoever holds the key to a life-giving hope normally seeks to share his convictions. And anyone would naturally prefer to uphold a universal conviction rather than a uniquely personal value.
But our contemporary distrusts those who defend values, that is, those who want to found values in truth. He suspects that values will transform themselves into absolute truths as soon as they find proponents to defend them. He fears nothing more than the fanatical domination of a moral project. And because of this fear, he circumscribes the defenders of certitude within a perimeter of safety, where he can cautiously watch over them.
So it is that the individual who develops a moral project and decides to equate his destiny with it becomes dangerous. He is suspected of judging others by his decision, and of secretly harboring the desire to force others to imitate him. It is true that every individual choice implicates all of humanity by forging–even unconsciously–a model that becomes a standard, or a sort of unofficial point of reference.
Moreover, any coherent ethical project takes on overblown proportions in the face of the deconstructed nature of contemporary ethics, and immediately threatens it, for chaos is uncomfortable, and nothing is more reassuring than certitude. He who deliberately embarks on a project of this nature–he who chooses meaning–implicates, like it or not, the whole of society, and tends to transform a value into truth, which revolts contemporary man. This is why our contemporary so conscientiously tries to protect himself from the dangerous whisperings of seekers of meaning and strives to conserve a smooth and colorless society peaceful in its indetermination. The only defendable ethics is the ethics of complacency.
Enjoined to invent for himself his own norms, and forbidden to speak about them once he has found them, the contemporary individual is finally reduced to doing without a structured ethics at all, either because he finds that he is not clear-sighted or patient enough to invent one, or because he becomes discouraged by a project that is valid only for himself and derided as soon as it has universal pretensions.
Subjectivism does not in fact engender the end of all striving after the good, nor does it produce cynical men. It engenders the end of a structured good, of projects that lead to the “good life.” The desire for the good, characteristic of man as a moral being, must then express itself in an impulsive way, and so it finds a place for itself in the ethics of complacency. The good can no longer manifest itself through global and long-term visions, rather only through fragmented intuitions.
1 We might say that it is quintessentially “laid back.” Trans.
2 Or the English gentleman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Trans.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 1.2.
