Thoughts, Prayers, and Other Useless Things: What Good is the Moral High Ground, Anyway?
“Drunk reptiles are in charge and fear is for breakfast. Loathing is an aperitif.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
The 21st century has witnessed a boom in virtue signaling, from corporate social responsibility pledges to the viral ‘thoughts and prayers’ posts that flood our social media feeds in the aftermath of every tragedy. But is this influx of supposed moral posturing a genuine call to action, or merely a hollow echo bouncing off the walls of our digital echo chambers?
I have to begin with a caveat. The exploration of ethics and morals is notably complex, too vast to encapsulate within a single thesis or novel, let alone a short essay. The endless debates only underscore the futility of a human crusade for an all-encompassing ethical formula, a pursuit as relentless as it is fruitless. That is, of course, assuming that a final answer is in fact the objective. I’m not aiming to propose any specific explanatory theory but rather to challenge a few “common sense” assertions about ethics and morality, which are often taken at face value.
In retrospect, this may have been one of the puzzles that drove me to studying philosophy in the first place. Like many gifted children / neurodivergent weirdos, the discontinuity between what people said and what I saw around me was a constant source of confusion and frustration.
At first, what the “sages” had to say wasn’t particularly edifying either. Among the ever-green philosophical questions of existence, metaphysics, etc., I found the proposed answers regarding ethics the most dissatisfying. The frameworks presented and questions asked often seemed bizarre to me, as if they assumed that there was some indelible Platonic form of goodness or badness that lives within us all. If X=15, you’re good. If X=5, you’re the devil.
Thanks, Aristotle. And then what happens? Nothing. It’s like all the noise delivered by comedians who can’t stop talking about how they’ve been “canceled.” If you’ve still got a special on Netflix, clearly you haven’t.
“All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails is a function of power and not truth.”
—Nietzsche
That is, until I encountered Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense. My interest wasn’t rooted in a love-hate-love relationship with Christianity, as Nietzsche’s was, but I found his perspective aligning more closely with my intuitive sense of what the problem actually was, even if I found very little resonance in his proposals (“slave morality,” etc.). His works shed some light on the dichotomy between proclaimed beliefs and actual behaviors, something that hasn’t changed much despite the progression of time. However, this post won’t delve into Nietzsche’s philosophy, except to acknowledge his attempt to confront reality rather than resorting to metaphysical obfuscation.
I have often found myself questioning the virtue of ethical stances that do not connect with a course of action. Is it for its own sake? If so, why publicize it? If we all signal “goodness” merely for show, it’s akin to a cargo cult—a collective performance, an instance of social mimicry. If it’s genuinely for oneself, the highest virtue lies in adherence to these principles without attempting to assert our moral superiority over others. As the saying goes, “watch the hands, not the mouth.” Gestures show themselves empty and proclamations hollow, if that’s all they amount to.
In essence, if a boundary is non-negotiable, it automatically factors into our decision-making. It becomes a principle of sine qua non—“without which, not”.
For example, if you believe that eating meat is ethically unacceptable in all circumstances, and yet you continue to eat meat, what does this “belief” amount to? If you don’t believe it is wrong, but simply can’t bring yourself to do it, you might claim to be the “more ethical,” except the truth is it just doesn’t agree with your digestion.
If we fail to uphold our own standards, we might feel the sting of guilt, prompting change. If even that doesn’t move the dial, perhaps it wasn’t our own boundary to start with. We may label such a boundary as an ethical imperative, but it resides within us, or it doesn’t. In either event, it is not derived from some natural law. Transcendental imperatives don’t amount to much. Maybe it’s no surprise that Kant was pretty racist, though perhaps not unusually so for the “standards of his time,” in which there was still an active Atlantic slave trade. In truth, we merely rationalize these imperatives post-hoc.
But maybe, let’s imagine in the psychiatric parlance, that you’re a sociopath. Then what? I’d suggest that term is used pejoratively in part precisely because we’re terrified of the reality we’re already immersed in—a world devoid of universal or consistent right or wrong, enforced primarily through a combination of pantomime, guilt, and the brute force of the law. Which is to say, a world in which a sociopath can wield power, and our beliefs of what is right, good, or correct are unable to do a thing about it.
As for all the things we condemn but aren’t so objectionable that we’d restructure our lives or risk them—it’s all just “Thoughts and Prayers,” isn’t it? Our ethics, in a sense, shield us from the stark irrelevance of human society when placed in the context of the natural world, and they console us when things individually don’t go our way. There is only one “right,” after all—clearly it’s only coincidence that it’s so often on our side.
A distinction probably needs to be made for those who didn’t mainline Judith Butler in college. Performance and performativity, while interconnected in many respects, also present a dichotomy. In the realm of semiotics and socio-linguistics, performativity is primarily concerned with the idea that language performances—be they speech or written text—are not merely communicative tools but function by reification, as acts that can solidify and reiterate social relations and structures. They can serve to entrench and reinforce power dynamics, creating a sense of permanence and ‘reality’ to abstract concepts.
In this sense, performativity implies that a discourse, whether it be a casual conversation or a grand political speech, is a substantive act. This perspective extends beyond the realm of linguistics, as we can consider a film, for instance, to also be a form of performance that conveys and solidifies social constructs and relations. As I say at the beginning of MASKS: Bowie & Artists of Artifice, “Art is an act. This has two contradictory meanings, but in this case, they are unified. ‘An action, in the world, real’ and ‘a performance’. Real and a performance, particularly when we are under its spell.”
This might be seen as a path through which ethics can be materialized—even if just through the act of speaking or writing about them. There is a danger, however, in misunderstanding the function of performativity. It is not a process that lends inherent truth to the concepts it conveys, but rather, it creates a semblance of reality, often masking their inherently subjective and contingent nature.
This is critical, and so often overlooked. Ironically, rather than grounding ethics in a tangible reality, performativity tends to generate a theatrical layer, a pantomime that engulfs discourse. Under this veneer, our perceptions can become distorted, and we start operating within a convoluted reality where the natural order of things seems to be reversed: the earth spins backward, and up appears as down. It is within this reality—this performative space—that we often mistake the act of talking about ethics as equivalent to practicing them.
Our ethics are not purely performative, however. They lie within the impulses that precede our actions and decisions, not in the eloquence of our discourse after the fact. But there is no final arbiter to judge, Anubis is not waiting to weigh our heart after all is said and done. I believe a great deal of psychological defense and moral projection is often invested in keeping this out of view.
In this sense, we can begin to consider the performativity of morality, that is, a code that seems to originate outside ourselves. We perform to convince ourselves and each other that these imperatives exist as a natural state of the world, to simulate a world with this inherent value system. Like a cartoon, we seem to believe that so long as we don’t look down to recognize that we aren’t walking on solid ground, we cannot fall. This charade suggests a disconnection between what should be and what is. (Also, “Is/Ought”).
Externally imposed morals, in this regard, are signaled for display and contingent upon power. If we already comply with these morals, their imposition is redundant; if we don’t, they are futile, especially without enforcement. The arbitrariness of these rules becomes more apparent when adherence relies on enforcement or punishment.
If we need rules to guide us towards virtue, then that virtue itself becomes performative. It’s a façade upheld by power, as demonstrated by a peace-promoting moral code enforced at sword point. This leads to the irony where those upholding the law or preaching morality are often more likely to deviate from these morals.
I’m not arguing that morals have no bearing on behavior, or that rituals are always empty. I’ll address that shortly. Prioritizing our beliefs about what is right and wrong as the load-bearing mechanism is a classic case of “putting the cart before the horse.” (If you’ll forgive the mixed metaphors.)
In MASKS, I argued that our hyper-mediated state as a society is characterized by ethics which have become inextricable from aesthetics. We would do well to recognize that our sense of the “ugly” or our class evaluations, such as what constitutes a “good upstanding citizen,” are aesthetic valuations posing as the ethical, and when this is not recognized, it can be used to do great harm. The appeal of beauty is by definition undeniable, and yet that fascination can also be wielded in destructive ways. What is the virtue of beauty, or the risk of social nudging that seeks to present a single “correct” model? Again we see the risk in ethical equations that seek to “solve for X.” One moral frame to rule them all can look a great deal like Totalitarianism.
Externally imposed moral rules can form a social compact that facilitates collective living, so clearly they are not without function, but within the context of society, this can all too frequently be reduced to power dynamics by another name. Over time, people are coerced into adopting behaviors contrary to their natural inclinations through sufficient enforcement, highlighting the role of power, and gradually changing their held ethical boundaries in the process. Can we know our “ethics” independent of the systems we have lived on? What about ourselves?
From this we might infer that moral laws aim for external restriction, while ethics codify the rules we follow—or believe we follow—for our actions. A natural law outlines the feasible within a specific systemic context, without a judgment of right or wrong. If it is possible, then it is natural. Perhaps, in this context, the rest is simply ‘Human All Too Human.’
“If each us had a different kind of sense perception—if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound—then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature—which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence.”
―Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
A less abstract example can be found in the realm of fiction. We can observe an increasing trend towards ascribing morality to imaginary characters, despite this notion being fundamentally incoherent. An alarmingly popular idea seems to follow from this, that merely engaging with a work of fiction in which the characters are “bad” will somehow, through some ethical transitive property, make us “bad” as well. “If the performance is in fact reality, then we mustn’t risk replicating it!”
Indeed, the shadows on Plato’s cave wall might lead us all to moral decline. It can be misleading to ascribe the lunatic ravings of people on Twitter X for what actual people in the world think and do, however, I can’t help but observe that it has becoming increasingly common to encounter arguments that directly associate a reader’s morality with the fictional worlds they engage with. Yet suggestions that enjoying a particular book or movie is an immoral act are so prevalent lately as to seem a natural part of engaging with fiction.
I would instead suggest that those making such claims reveal more about their own perspectives than offering anything resembling a legitimate critique. Indeed, it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the functions of critique in the first place. Fictional characters and the stories they appear in can be used to critique aspects of social and lived realities, but they do not themselves act in the world. They cannot themselves be moral or immoral.
It is also true that the self is a story we tell ourselves and one another, and so an element of the fictive always cohabitates with the so-called real. But we nevertheless act in the world and are beholden to it in a way that a fictional character can never be.
We should enjoy the fictional villains we can. It can save us the trouble of having to become them.
(I realize I’m letting “power” do a lot of heavy lifting in what I’ve said here. One might rightly ask “what is ‘power’, and upon what does it depend?” It is a good question that’ll have to wait for another day, or lifetime).
This essay previously appeared in Modern Mythology.
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