A new addition to my list of things I wish I had written. This time from Sam Delaney’s Dhalgren.
She looked at him. “It was years ago.” Her face was greyed in the grey dawn. “It was.” She turned away, and continued. “But I realized something. About art. About philosophy. And psychiatry. They’re both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get in a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They’re all in a rather uneasy truce with on e another in what’s actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man’s ideals, so therefore a religious experience becomes just a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his protraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as the promote the good life. At worst, they try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn’t want to get all wound up in any systems any more.”
So who should arbitrate? Is that the role of ethics? Ethics as the arbiter between competing self-reinforcing ideologies. (Not sure ideology is the word.) Of course, there’s always genealogy, but it only traces the development of power-relations; it doesn’t explicitly critique them, much less offer plans for action. If not ethics, what, then? The self? But perhaps the self is the break, the rupture, between these competitors. Or at least we can locate the self there. If so, then ethics would need to provide some sort of “program” for the self as it navigates between these competitors. Perhaps MacIntyre’s understanding of virtue as a chosen value-practice comes in. But perhaps the old virtues are insufficient. Perhaps we need new virtues. And new vices.
And we might note some other competitors in the fray. Technoscience, to be sure. And, in the US at least, Medicine is so powerful as to merit its own role in the battle. And always, always, the Market. Perhaps Bureacracy too.
