Arnon Grunberg

Question

Teeth

On good and evil – Charles Foster in TLS:

‘Why are we good? Why are we bad? What do those questions mean? Do they mean anything at all? Even if meaningless, these questions matter. They deserve a big book with a broad reach, written by an adroit, confident author, happy in many disciplines. They have it in The Invention of Good and Evil, a brilliant, acute, infuriating, uneven survey of the last five million years of history, courtesy of the German philosopher Hanno Sauer, sparklingly translated by Jo Heinrich.
Sauer’s structure is neat. Rather too neat. The book is in seven parts, though history (as he well knows) is not: five million years ago (when, he writes, we became collaborative animals); 500,000 years ago (when we learnt to use – and, he says, to enjoy using – punishment to regulate our communities); 50,000 years ago (when we developed shared values indicating whom we should believe and trust); 5,000 years ago (when inequalities started to be an obvious part of human life); 500 years ago (the rise of the individual); fifty years ago (when equality became a moral and political passion, and a new language was fashioned, with its own power to generate ethical obligations and political imperatives); and five years ago (when insulting those with whom one disagrees began to supplant serious moral reflection and obligation).’ (…)

‘ If one of our East African ancestors kept a look-out, the others could eat and mate without becoming a leopard’s dinner. But, Sauer points out, co-operation with our special friends tended to make us hostile to those outside our group. “Once we learned how to say ‘us’, we also needed to be able to say ‘them’.”’

(…)

‘Great apes have irises that are almost black, making it hard to see what they are looking at. But we have white irises, which make it easier to follow our gaze, and so read our minds, which therefore promotes relationality. Homicide and schooling joined with cunning biological innovation to lay the ground for the sedentary societies of the Neolithic and later.
Agriculture, said Jared Diamond, was “the worst mistake in human history”. It is hard for anyone concerned about human thriving (however that is measured) or human morality (whatever that is) to disagree cogently. It made us more vulnerable than ever before to the exigencies of climate; it bred rats, infectious disease, chauvinism and war; made us subject to the hegemony of supply and demand; rotted our teeth, corroded our joints, furred our arteries; strengthened “us”, denigrated “them” and injected hierarchy into communities and the human heart. We made a Faustian bargain with grain and sedentism. The enduring question for us all is whether we can renegotiate the contract.’ (…)

‘The Stoics declared that all humans were capable of behaving in a divinely dignified way, and had a corresponding duty to do so. And on the other side of the Mediterranean there was a far more repercussive declaration. Genesis 1 announced that all humans, however lowly their birth or meagre their possessions, were made in the image of God. Since God was the quintessence of dignity, even a slave made in his image had dignity. The imago dei made dignity an inalienable human characteristic and urged humans to live up to their divine origins. Stoicism announced that dignity was accessible, and urged access.’

(…)

‘We should be suspicious of any history of morality that has a low view of dignity, and thinks that it was spawned by a theological spasm in medieval Europe.’

(…)

‘“We don’t disagree”, Sauer writes, “we just hate each other.” Even the hatred seems hotter and more ubiquitous than it really is. The really unpleasant stuff comes from professional nasties who are at, or off, the far ends of their respective spectrums, and who are always less reflective, wise and reasonable than the tribe members they purport to represent.’ (…)

‘The Invention of Good and Evil is an invigorating cocktail of doom and hope. Our morality, Sauer argues, was designed by natural selection to allow us to cope with the social co-operation problems of small groups. The sheer number of humans on the planet means that natural selection’s strategy is creaking. “How can social co-operation come about on a scale that encompasses all of humanity, and includes generations living far into the future?”, he asks. “This is the first time we have faced this task: we do not know if we are capable of doing it, or if we have created a world where we can never feel at home again.” Political disagreements, though, as we have seen, tend to be superficial, and there is profound agreement about moral values. There is, according to Sauer, “an underestimated potential for reconciliation that is hard for us to see and is worth returning to: between the extremes of ‘being on time is white supremacy’ and ‘we must revitalise Western Christianity’s hegemony’, there is a silent majority of reasonable people”.’ (…)

‘We need to obey the law. But the demands of the taxman and the legislature are not, for most of us, in most western democracies, demands that interfere – or need to interfere – with the small communities in which we do all our true living. The nation state? What’s that? A more or less fictional beast that sometimes mends our roads, wages wars we don’t want and eats a share of our crops.’

Read the article here.

Yes, yes, yes and no.

The nation state a more or less fictional beast? A fictional beast that sometimes kills its own citizens with a vengeance. A more civilized fictional beast just kills citizens in other nation states.
The nation state may be obsolete, and the basis of the nation state may be feeble, for whom is our beautiful state with its beautiful laws, and who should stay outside? – but the nation state remains fairly real.

My taxes are rather real and yes, the returns, highways and in some countries education are real too. The military and police not to forget. That’s the basis. I pay taxes so that I can call the police if the burglar rings the bell, instead of killing the burglar with my kitchen knife. That’s the raison d’être of the state.

The state is not yet interfering with our small communities, but as I just read today and many other days, democracies die in darkness, in daylight, during sunset, in the fall, and in the spring, they can die any moment. And yes yes yes, they are not dead yet.
And even then…

Dignity is another interesting concept. Stoicism teaches us not detachment but dignity.

I would say: dignity by way of detachment.

Pretend to be almost dead, that’s dignity.

Fair enough. Where is life? Live a little, maybe, without less dignity?

(Imagine: let’s have dignified sex. Fuck me, but please don’t lose your dignity. The whole purpose of sex is I would say to get rid of that fucking beast called dignity.)

As to the silent, decent, rational, majority – absolutely. But sometimes these basically decent people get the wrong politicians elected, and in some cases, they end up killing people. See Christopher Browning and his book Ordinary Men.

Well, I read Sauer’s book and can recommend it.

Here’s an article I wrote about it.

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