lead unethical lives

Wallace Shawn is a playwright, actor, and essayist, as well as the son of William Shawn, a long-time editor of The New Yorker magazine. In a radio interview with Doug Henwood prompted by his latest book, Shawn said the following:

Henwood: You have an essay on morality in this collection. . . . You grew up with a sense that you’re supposed to be moral, but then you’re thrown into this world that is very immoral, and you’re supposed to somehow separate your morality from the immorality of the world that you’re living in. How do you do it? I mean, is there a way to lead a moral life in a world that is so corrupt and violent?

Shawn: Well, very strictly speaking, I mean if you’re gonna put it so bluntly, not really. Because simply by living a bourgeois life, you’re consuming more than your fair share of the world’s resources, and you’re benefiting from a status quo that oppresses people all over the world. And that’s not even getting into the fact that it’s very hard to make a bourgeois living in a corrupt society without being mired in corruption. That’s very hard to do. People, you know, most people are doing things that are reinforcing the ugly realities of the world.

I think there’s a lot of hypocrisy involved in, for instance, people like myself denouncing, let’s say, the crimes of people like Dick Cheney and the crimes of the Bush administration. Yes, we’re right to denounce them, but when they say, “Hey, we’re doing it for your benefit! Don’t you want the oil that makes your home, you know, warm in the winter and cool in the summer? You do want the oil. Well, we're getting it for you, so shut up!”

And they’re right in that demand that you should admit that you like it, and admit that they’re doing it for you. You know, this is where there’s hypocrisy involved in the life of somebody like myself. So the true answer, if we’re being bluntly honest, is that it’s not very likely that you can live a bourgeois life, and consider yourself someone who follows ethical principles. . .


In a recent blog post entitled "God Shed His Grace Ennui," Dennis Perrin posted the following images and captions:

To demonstrate his determination to win the Afghan war,
President Obama began eating his hand --

Delighting his liberal supporters.

Despite suffering massive burns from a US air strike on her Afghan village,
nine-year-old Nadia Sahar urged American liberals
to not protest President Obama's war,
as it might hurt his re-election chances.

Heeding Nadia's plea, liberals immediately showed their solidarity.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the author of several inspiring books. In Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity, Jensen writes of his encounters with two students several months after the events of 9/11:

One young woman came to my office the day after we had watched a documentary in class about the 1991 Gulf War and its devastatingly brutal effects -- immediate and lingering -- on the people of Iraq. The student is also active in the movement to support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, and the day she came to see me was during a period in which Israeli attacks on Palestinians were intensifying.

We talked for some time about a number of political topics, but the conversation kept coming back to one main point: She hurt. As she was learning more about the suffering of others around the world, she felt pain. What does one do about such a feeling, knowing that one’s own government is either responsible for, or complicit in, so much of it? How does one stop feeling that pain, she asked.

I asked her whether she really wanted to wipe that feeling out of her life. Surely you know people, perhaps fellow students, who don’t seem to feel that pain, who ignore all that suffering, I told her. Do you want to become like them? No matter how much it hurts, would you rather not feel at all? Would you rather be willfully ignorant about what is happening?

I could see tears welling in her eyes and feel them in my own; it was an emotional moment for both of us. She left my office, not feeling better in any simplistic sense. But I hope that she left at least with a sense that she was not alone and did not have to feel like a freak for feeling so much, so deeply.

A couple of hours later another student came by. After dealing with the classroom issue she wanted to discuss, we talked more generally about her interests in scientific research and the politics of funding research. I made the obvious point that profit-potential had a lot to do with what kind of research gets done.

Certainly the comparative levels of research-and-development money that went, for example, to Viagra compared with money for drugs to combat new strains of TB tells us something about the values of our society, I suggested. The student agreed, but raised another issue. Given the overpopulation problem, she said, would it really be a good thing to spend lots of resources on developing those drugs?

About halfway through her sentence I knew where she was heading, though I didn’t want to believe it. This very bright student wanted to discuss whether it made sense to put resources into life-saving drugs for poor people in the Third World, given that there are arguably too many people on the planet already, or at least too many poor people in the Third World.

I contained my anger somewhat, and told the student that when she was ready to sacrifice members of her own family to help solve the global population problem, then I would listen to her argument. In fact, given the outrageous levels of consumption of the middle and upper classes in the United States, I said, one could argue that large-scale death in the American suburbs would be far more beneficial in solving the population problem; a single U.S. family is more of a burden ecologically on the planet than a hundred Indian peasants.

“If you would be willing to let an epidemic sweep though your hometown and kill large numbers of people without trying to stop it, for the good of the planet, then I’ll listen to that argument,” I said.

The student left shortly after that. Based on her reaction, I suspect I made her feel bad. I am glad for that. I wanted her to see that the assumption behind her comment -- that the lives of people who look like her are more valuable than the lives of the poor and vulnerable in other parts of the world -- was ethnocentric, racist, and barbaric. That assumption is the product of an arrogant and inhumane society.

I wanted her to think about why she lived in a world in which the pain of others is so routinely ignored. I wanted her to feel what, for most of her life, she has been able to turn away from. I wanted her to begin to empathize with people who aren’t white like her and not comfortable like her, people whose suffering is far away from her.

I do not want to overestimate the power of empathy to change the world. But without empathy, without the ability to move outside our own experience, there is no hope of changing the world.

Andrea Dworkin, one of the most important feminist thinkers of our time, has written, “The victims of any systematized brutality are discounted because others cannot bear to see, identify, or articulate the pain.”

It is long past the time for all of us to start to see, to identify, to articulate the pain of systematized brutality. It is time to recognize that much of the pain is the result of a system designed to ensure our pleasures.