[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Jul 25 20:47:36 PDT 2009


On Sat, 25 Jul 2009, Michael Smith wrote:


> Presumably we all have the same visceral reactions or we wouldn't be
> here. So far so good.
>
> You seem to be equating the "moral" with the "visceral" -- or what would
> once have been called "moral sentiments." Which is fine, but there's a
> sea of ink that's been spilt on the attempt to justify or ground these
> sentiments somehow in something other than or larger than your and my
> individual viscera. You equate the moral and the visceral, but
> generations of philosophers have worked like stevedores to demonstrate
> -- unconvincingly, I think -- that the moral is something other than
> just the visceral.

You leave out the sociologists. Our visceras are connected. If I change how I feel, I am constrained by the reactions I know it will call up in the groups that define me. Those constraints are internalized into my feelings.

It's thus not an accident that we all have the same visceral feelings -- or that we take seriously when we don't. It's precisely because we are defined by the same collective identity.

Where sociologists went wrong is in assuming there was only one identity per society. Or rather that there was only one hierarchy of identities. They thereafter mostly explicated "norms" as matters of conformity of the indivdiual with the group.

In fact that are always several competing collective identities in every society (esp. in Durkheim's! He wrote during the Dreyfus decade!) Which one comes out on top is indeterminate and the result of stuggle. And which of the several collective identities that define every individual dominates in our feelings is in large part the result of the individual identity we forge out of these conflicts. We do our best to reconcile conflicts between them precisely because they are visceral conflicts.

And then we do our best to convince at least some of the rest of our group because if no one accepts our innovations, we'll be considered "gone over to the other side," and it will trouble us viscerally.

The resulting conflicts are one of the big motors of social and worldview change. Which is why morality matters.

Michael



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