It is as if the notion “criminal” were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten…
This word “ought,” having become a word of mere mesmeric force, could not, in the character of having that force, be inferred from anything whatever.
–G.E.M Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy”
We live in a world of ersatz realities. People socialize with one another through avatars that represent them not as they are but as they’d like to be perceived, which means that one never really knows whom one is dealing with. The perilous times we find ourselves in are characterized as “the worst timeline,” as if lives are like video games that can be paused, rewound, and replayed in order to get better outcomes. “Landing sick burns” and related performances have replaced trying to win elections. Political podcasters and commentators pronounce myriad villainies “embarrassing” or “humiliating” and those committing them as “panicking” or having been “destroyed,” when there is no indication that the people involved feel any fear or embarrassment or have been damaged in any tangible way. And we are overrun with galloping “oughts” and “shoulds,” as if the words themselves had some kind of intrinsic force and simply shouting them into the virtual ether will get people in the real world to stop doing terrible things.
There is nothing quite so sad and impotent as declaring something “impermissible” even as it’s happening all around you. Much like a guy smoking while standing in front of a “No-Smoking” sign, the relevant interdictory gestures are empty and performative, absent some realistic prospect of a penalty the offender actually cares about. Fine the guy fifty cents per violation, and he’ll cheerfully smoke away and pay the vice-tax. Fine him fifty-thousand dollars per violation and his enthusiasm for civil law breaking will likely evaporate. One would have thought that people understood this — and especially, sitting governors, mayors, and state and local attorneys general — in light of American history and Andrew Jackson’s infamous (and possibly apocryphal) quip, “John Marshall has made his ruling; now let him enforce it,” which led directly to the Trail of Tears. Yet, the Executives in state after state and city after city permit federal agents to commit felonies in their jurisdictions with impunity — assault and battery, kidnapping, illegal rendition, etc. — rather than directing their own law enforcement agencies to enforce the relevant statutes. They seem to think that looking mournful, rending their garments, and shouting “Illegal!” and “Unconstitutional!” over and over again is enough, for they too have been entranced by the mesmeric force of gestures and words and no longer can tell the difference between a pantomime of governing and the real thing.
Academic philosophers have long been spellbound in this way by our own writing and speech, which is why we are so ill-suited for leadership, Plato’s fantasies in the Republic notwithstanding. So much of philosophers’ time is devoted to developing and invoking principles that we forget that someone has to implement them. So much effort has been spent determining what’s “justified” and “warranted” and “permissible” that we fail to notice that actual people need to be persuaded (or sometimes coerced) in order for any of it to matter. And when agreement is not secured — because the arguments are shaky, the premises disputable, or the interlocutors stubborn — we find ourselves at a loss as to what to do, other than repeat the arguments again or simply stamp our feet and insist upon the conclusions. Heavily influenced by Plato, the discipline has semi-officially eschewed rhetoric and non-rational forms of persuasion (with a few notable exceptions), deeming them dirty pool, and the consequence has been that we have become mostly irrelevant in the sphere of public affairs, despite the fact that so many of the principles we’ve spent so much time developing are directed towards it. Sometimes, you’ll hear philosophers gush over the “huge impact” that those like Peter Singer or John Rawls are supposed to have had on the world, but when I look around and see that 95+% of people happily continue to eat meat, entire continents remain mired in poverty and violence, climate mitigation efforts are being speedily abandoned, and liberal democracies are sliding into autocracy left and right, the thing is revealed for the self-congratulatory nonsense that it is.
The truth is that the most important principles concerning the good life and civil society have already been developed and argued for in the best ways we are likely to find. We’re not going to discover better proofs for why people shouldn’t be starved to death or enslaved or why we should allow every adult to vote without interference or why it’s a bad idea to allow the planet’s climate to warm until the place is uninhabitable. Those who are rationally persuadable have already been persuaded, and those who are not likely will never be. In short, the philosopher’s job — doing the R & D for ethics and civics — has been mostly completed. Now is the time for governance.
What is so dangerous about the current moment is that those tasked with governing have adopted the posture of the philosophers, by which I mean that they are treating their task as essentially discursive. How else to explain the constant, repeated refrains of “Unconstitutional!” “Illegal!” “Impermissible!” etc., while failing to follow up any of these judgments with actual policing? Why the persistent appeal to courts, whose judgments simply pile up on top of one another in the absence of enforcement? Why the pretense that something has been accomplished when some judge has “struck down” this, that, or the other, when the administration has made it quite clear it has no intention of obeying court rulings?
That academic philosophers routinely fall prey to the mesmeric force of a discourse that has neither end nor consequence is unsurprising and harmless. Our job is to think and write and talk, and that’s about it, whatever other silly pretensions we might have. But when those charged with governing become mesmerized in this way, we are all put in tremendous danger; especially given that the bad actors we face are quite clear on the difference between material power and conceptual juggling and have swiftly seized the former while the so-called “opposition” remains bewitched by the latter. They smoke whenever and wherever they like, and we just keep on putting up more No-Smoking signs.
