Community over Chaos: An Ecological Perspective on Communication Ethics

By James A. Mackin

This ecology of ethics seeks to balance the needs of the individual and those of the various levels of community.

As James A. Mackin, Jr., shows, both modernism and postmodernism have undermined the traditional foundations for ethics. Using an ecological model, however, Community over Chaos develops a common ground for ethical judgments about communication, thus countering the current theoretical climate of pessimistic cynicism toward the very possibility of ethics.

This theoretical pessimism is not merely an academic problem. The general public is becoming more and more disillusioned about the possibility of ethical communication. We are unable to teach principles of communicative ethics in our primary and secondary schools because we cannot agree on a common ground for those principles. Instead, we teach a narrow form of competence that is concerned primarily with short-term, individual success. Because our communities are built on our communicative practices, our inability to justify communicative ethics must ultimately lead to the disintegration of our communities.

Mackin's ecological model assumes that each of us is a communicative system operating within larger communicative systems that together form our communicative ecosystem. Virtues of the ecological approach are practical wisdom, based in fuzzy logic, and communicative openness and honesty.

Mackin recognizes the importance of both chaos and community in our communicative ecosystems. Chaos, as the source of originality and creativity, can contribute to growth and development; community provides the source of regularity and nurture that makes chaos endurable.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817388447

Book preview

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1

Our Postmodern Ethical Quandary

Are we in an era of ethical decline? In recent years we have seen high-ranking officials in the executive branch of government admit without remorse that they lied to Congress. A major network’s news department confessed under pressure that it had rigged a demonstration of an automotive fuel tank explosion for dramatic effect. The story was supposed to be a fair investigation of the likelihood of such an explosion in an accident. We also are caught up in a national debate about political correctness in our communication. Is politically correct discourse ethically correct? Does ethical correctness mean anything anymore? Does anyone care?

I think ethical correctness does mean something, and I think most people still care about being ethical in their communication. We are, however, caught up in a period of ethical questioning. Such questioning is, at bottom, theoretical; and it indicates the importance of theory in our practical life. Theory tells us why and how things happen or should happen. Most of us still believe it is wrong to lie, but we are no longer certain why it is wrong or how exceptions might occur. Are our ethical judgments merely a result of our feelings—our sentiments, as Hume put it? Or are they based in something beyond the normal appearances of nature, in a transcendent human nature that leads us to follow general laws out of duty, as Kant would have it? Could our ethical judgments even be reasonable assessments of situations and outcomes, and if so, what principle distinguishes a good outcome from a bad one? The principle I recommend in this book is the principle of ecological reciprocity, our obligation to support the ecosystem that supports us. Most of us recognize that pollution of our physical ecosystem is wrong. We should also recognize that our social systems are communicative ecosystems, which are also vulnerable to pollution. An ecological perspective on ethical theory can restore confidence in the possibility of ethical behavior in practice.

Our current theoretical quandaries reflect our lack of ethical roots. Back in the age of modernism, we cut our links to the past in order to see what they were made of. Those links did not survive such destructive testing. In the 1930s, Kenneth Burke observed that modernism had set society adrift by its critique of the past:

In contrast with modern enlightenment, all previous schemes of adjustment looked like mere superstition. Modern mankind was detached: as regards its relationship with the continent of previous thought, it was insular. . . . The race distrusted its parentage, and children distrusted their parents. In this respect the era was one long record of symbolic parricide: no wonder many came to consider the Oedipus complex as the basis of human motivation.¹

Since Burke first wrote these words, we have turned our parricidal tendencies loose upon modernism itself in what we call the postmodern age. Having undermined the traditions of the past, modernism constructed new foundations. Those foundations are today under deconstruction.

Modernism and postmodernism may seem to be arcane academic topics. The consequences of our inability to justify communicative ethics, however, reach far beyond the ivory tower. The quality of our communication affects the quality of our communities. We cannot act together with common purpose unless we can communicate with each other. The much maligned term rhetoric referred in ancient times to an art of community leadership—an art that through the years has been abused by unethical practitioners. Our failure to recover or reinvent a concept of rhetoric as the process of communal deliberation allows unethical rhetors to continue to pollute what Farrell calls our rhetorical culture.² The fact that unethical rhetors abound does not mean that an ethical rhetoric is impossible. What stance should we take toward the claim everyone is doing it? This book takes the position that the community must protect its communicative ecosystem in order to continue to support all of its members. What everybody is doing may be polluting that communicative system, just as what everyone does often pollutes our biological ecosystems. In both cases, such pollution is unethical. Audiences and speakers are moral agents, responsible for the results of their communicative actions on the larger ecosystem.

I intend to show that a critical use of common sense and a reconsideration of some classical concepts in light of the modern and postmodern critique will provide us with a common ground for ethical judgment. Because postmodernism raises questions about both the concept of community and the concept of sense-making that are crucial to my project, in this first chapter I will consider the arguments of several significant proponents of the postmodern perspective—Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault. Each of them is clearly motivated by ethical concerns, but none of them is yet able to offer a way of sharing those concerns with others that doesn’t draw upon the very edifice he has undermined. This inability to maintain a consistent ethical stance at the theoretical level has consequences at the practical level. Before addressing the theoretical questions, let’s consider an example of these practical consequences at the mundane level of a comic book.

Ethical Aporia in Animal Man

Animal Man is a comic book that has taken to pamphleteering on behalf of animal rights. Discourse that attempts to influence community action is rhetoric in the classical tradition, although the style and medium would seem unusual to a classicist. Nevertheless, as rhetoric it carries with it certain ethical responsibilities derived from its nature as political discourse. Neither Aristotle nor Cicero would have much difficulty grounding the ethics of such rhetoric in the needs of the community. For Grant Morrison, the postmodern writer of Animal Man, however, no such grounding is available. Burned out in his attempt to create an ethical rhetoric, Morrison resigns as writer; but he does so in an unusual manner in the comic book itself, in an episode titled Deus ex Machina.³ In this episode, Morrison writes himself into the story and introduces himself to Animal Man, the superhero of the book. The Morrison character explains to Animal Man that he as writer is a demiurgic power that doesn’t create anything but uses and spoils the purity of what is there. Unable to justify his power, he refuses to continue in that role.

The poststructural semiotic influence manifests itself in a confusion of levels of symbolism that allows the real author to enter into the symbolic creation. At the same time, the author confesses that he is not an auctoritas—an originating subject—but a transmitter of previously existing symbols. You existed long before I wrote about you and, if you’re lucky, you’ll still be young when I’m old or dead, the Morrison character tells Animal Man. Morrison also employs Baudrillard’s concept of hyperrealism by making the cartoon characters colorful while representing his own world in gray and sepia tones. Animal Man comments on the dullness: Your world must be terrible. It seems so . . . gray and bleak. On the other hand, the hyperreal world of the superhero also has an excess of violent action. In an earlier episode, Animal Man’s wife and children were murdered. It added drama. All stories need drama and it’s easy to get a cheap emotional shock by killing popular characters, Morrison explains. When Animal Man asks whether Morrison would bring his family back, Morrison responds in true Baudrillardian fashion: Sorry, it wouldn’t be realistic. Pointless violence and death is ‘realistic.’ Comic books are ‘realistic’ now.

Morrison’s cynicism seems to be based in postmodern antiphilosophy and antihumanism. He denies that any metanarrative really structures life:

Morrison also denies any special rational or moral qualities to human beings:

. . . in the end it all boils down to three words. Might makes right.

Man is able to abuse and slaughter and experiment on animals simply because he’s stronger than they are. Other than that, there’s no moral ground on which to justify any animal exploitation.

A child with leukemia has no more intrinsic right to life than does a white lab rat. Anyone who believes that man’s intelligence makes him special has only to look at the way we continue to destroy our environment.

Man is not an intelligent species.

As readers, we suspect that Morrison’s postmodern cynicism is born out of a disappointed idealism. The closing of the episode suggests that the problem is indeed the loss of his childhood narrative. As author, Morrison restores Animal Man to his family, which is unharmed. Morrison as character, on the other hand, returns to his childhood home in a final, futile attempt to restore his metaphysical narrative: When I was young, I had an imaginary friend called Foxy. He lived in a vast underground kingdom. A Utopia ruled over by peaceful and intelligent foxes. I used to signal to him. My parents bought me a torch so that I could signal to him. Not a flashlight. We call them torches over here. I used to stand at the top of Angus Oval and shine my torch out towards the hills. Foxy always signalled back. The character Morrison climbs up Angus Oval and sends his signal out into the dark. Foxy, I came back. I didn’t forget. I came back. The line of the hills stays dark. There is no answering light. No light at all. Clouds pile up in the darkness, weighted with snow. Curtains are drawn. Windows blink and go dark. Wind whines in the power lines. Stars go out. Streets are empty. Goodbye. In the second bleak frame after Morrison exits from the scene, a light signal flashes from the distant hills. The metaphysical origin, as always, is deferred and unreachable.

Morrison’s Deus ex Machina is not, of course, a good example of postmodern theorizing. It is, rather, an example of the demoralizing effects of postmodern thinking on communicative action. The reception and interpretation of postmodern thought in popular culture leads to a paralyzing cynicism about the possibility of effective and ethical rhetorical action. A young man who hoped to improve his world through communication yields to this cynicism and publicly resigns. Even as Morrison the character surrenders to his postmodern malaise, however, Morrison the author gives his readers a ray of hope in the returned signal from the hills. He will not deprive his readers of faith in some kind of Kantian thing-in-itself that is unknowable yet still grounds our morality. This remnant of optimism in Morrison the author is insufficient to motivate him to continue, but it reveals the anguish in his resignation.

The anguish of Morrison reflects the anguish of our age. We are inheritors of the initial optimism of modernism, but we cannot sustain this optimism in the shadows cast by Auschwitz, the Gulag, and, more recently, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Postmodern theorizing has, for the most part, focused on showing why our earlier optimism was unjustified. A new, corrected ground for optimism is not forthcoming, although writers like Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault seem sincerely to wish for one. Without some cause for optimism, a workable theory of ethics is impossible. Ethics is the art of practical action, and practical action requires the motivating belief that action can improve a situation in some way, even if it be simply by improving the subject of that action. Postmodernism continues to undercut that motivating belief.

Lyotard and the Fragmentation of Community

French theorists have led the postmodern critique of modernism. Prominent among these theorists is Lyotard, who characterizes postmodernism as the crisis of narratives. Although science criticizes narratives as fables, when it seeks to legitimize itself, it also relies on grand narratives to support its discourse of legitimation, which is philosophy. The term modern in Lyotard’s usage designates any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. In contrast, the postmodern is simply incredulity toward metanarratives.⁴

Lyotard describes two major versions of the modern metanarratives that were used to legitimize the claims of scientific knowledge to universality. The different versions have constructed different subjects for their stories. One version is practical and emancipatory, humanity as the hero of liberty.⁵ The other version is speculative: The subject of knowledge is not the people, but the speculative spirit.⁶ The speculative spirit is the subject of a totalizing narrative that must construct a unity to the various discourses, combining positive empirical statements with moral statements. The epitome of the speculative version is the Hegelian system based on a universal history of Spirit. The narrator must be a metasubject in the process of formulating both the legitimacy of the discourses of the empirical sciences and that of the direct institutions of popular cultures.⁷ This metasubject cannot be a historical community, not even a community of scientists, but must transcend its historical instantiations.

The practical metanarrative is supposedly more concrete. It is the story of the emancipation of the autonomous subject from external constraints. The subject rules itself with just laws because the legislators are the citizens. The autonomous subject has a right to science in order to govern itself well. In this Kantian model, moral self-governing is the end and science is the means. Knowledge is no longer the subject, but in the service of the subject: its only legitimacy (though it is formidable) is the fact that it allows morality to become reality.⁸ This Kantian model is critically dependent on Kant’s essentialist humanism. Because for Kant the essence of the human being is rational, the human will can give general laws. Rational human beings are autonomous because they are subject to their own general laws. The categorical imperative and the autonomy of human beings both depend upon this essential rationalism that transcends empirical circumstances.⁹

Modernism, according to Lyotard, also developed two different models of society: either society forms a functional whole, or it is divided in two.¹⁰ Both models are derived from nineteenth century theories. The idea of society as a functional whole began as an organic model of society; after modification by cybernetic theory, the organic model became the self-regulating system of Talcott Parsons. Contemporary system theories of society are technocratic. The true goal of the system, the reason it programs itself like a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output—in other words, performativity.¹¹ The alternative model is the Marxist model of inherent division and opposition within society, the model of class struggle. This model, according to Lyotard, barely survives in the academic traditions of critical theory.

The different models of knowledge and of society result in different concepts of communication and information in society. Various ethical principles can be derived from different combinations of these models and metanarratives. Stalinism, for example, combined the totalizing narrative of universal history with the social model of class struggle to define an ethic of conformity with the Communist party. The party leadership stood for the proletariat and its historical destiny. Propaganda that coincided with this destiny was ethical by definition. On the other hand, in capitalistic states, the news industry could portray itself as the functional representative of the people’s right to know, derived from the people’s autonomy as human beings. Information could then be marketed as a commodity or used to deliver an audience to an advertiser. An ethic of objectivity assured larger markets for the commodity and fit in with the technocratic systems model of society by portraying mass media as serving the function of surveillance of the environment.¹²

We could imagine the comic-book writer Morrison effectively justifying his rhetoric under either of these metanarratives. He might see the animal rights movement as the inevitable next step in the history of civil rights. The few but dedicated members of the movement could be viewed as the vanguard of history. His communicative ethic would compel him to show the essential historical truth regardless of its offensiveness. Taking offense would be a sign of a kind of bourgeois morality. Art would be subordinated to a higher purpose. On the other hand, Morrison could have decided that his function in our society was simply to produce a commodity that people used for their own purposes as free citizens. He could then focus on production values to ensure that his readers received the highest-quality comic book he could produce. In the process, he could take special satisfaction if he were able to include information about how animals were treated or the state of the environment in general. His ethical problems would be limited to balancing the surveillance and entertainment functions of his work.

In either case, a supporting metanarrative could have protected Morrison from his dark night of the soul. As Lyotard points out, however, under postmodernism the grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.¹³ Neither narrative is able to unify the underlying disparate discourses. In postmodernism, the underlying differences are taken to be irreconcilable.

To account for what has happened, Lyotard relies on Wittgenstein’s conception of language games. Different discourses operate in the same way a game of chess operates, by a set of rules determining the properties of each of the pieces, in other words, the proper way to move them. For Lyotard’s purposes, the concept of language games leads to three observations and two principles. The observations are that (1) the players invent the rules; (2) if there are no rules, there is no game; and (3) every utterance should be thought of as a ‘move’ in a game. The principles that he sees as underlying his method as a whole are: (1) to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics; and (2) the observable social bond is composed of language ‘moves.’¹⁴ Lyotard’s approach breaks with the modern tradition’s metanarratives and its alternative social models.

Under Lyotard’s prodding, the speculative model falls apart into a collection of different language games. There is erosion at work inside the speculative game, and by loosening the weave of the encyclopedic net in which each science was to find its place, it eventually sets them free. . . . The speculative hierarchy of learning gives way to an immanent and, as it were, ‘flat’ network of areas of inquiry, the respective frontiers of which are in constant flux.¹⁵ The meanings within one game do not relate to other games; no secret depth, no common spirit inheres in them all. The rules are made within each game and apply only to that game. Little narratives may justify the individual games to their players, but no metanarrative can justify them all.

The deconstruction of the Kantian discourse of emancipation is more complex. Kant recognized the separate domains of speculative reason, practical reason, and judgment. Lyotard treats these as separate and incommensurable language games that should not be combined. Instead, he advocates an aesthetics of the sublime because the sublime to Kant exceeds the limits of representation. As Kant expressed it, the sublime concerns rational ideas, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does not admit of presentation through the senses.¹⁶ For Kant, the sublime is the experience of the imagination turning inward and finding the unpresentable idea of the supersensible. It is this indeterminate idea of the supersensible within us that provides "the point of union of all our faculties a priori: for we are left with no other expedient to bring reason into harmony with itself."¹⁷

Lyotard’s translation of the faculties into language games explicitly drops out the Kantian allusion to noumenal unity of the faculties. The loss is significant because Kant also based the possibility of moral autonomy in the realm of the noumenal. Lyotard is not being quite true to the Kantian text when he uses Kant in support of his fragmented postmodern aesthetics of the sublime:

Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. And it is not to be expected that this task will effect the last reconciliation between language games (which, under the name of faculties, Kant knew to be separated by a chasm), and that only the transcendental illusion (that of Hegel) can hope to totalize them into a real unity. But Kant also knew that the price to pay for such an illusion is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.¹⁸

Kant did, indeed, recognize a chasm between the phenomenal world that is the domain of the intellect and the noumenal world that is the domain of practical reason. For Kant, however, the faculty of judgment provided a mediating link between the concepts of nature (intellect) and the concepts of freedom (reason).¹⁹ Kant further insists on a universality inherent in the judgment of taste, a validity for everyone, that is dependent upon the supersensible substratum of humanity.²⁰ Kant’s critique of judgment assumes a universal sensus communis based in the unknowable essence of humanity. This bridge between language games is missing in Lyotard’s version of Kant. In fact, Lyotard argues the contrary, that such universality can be achieved only through terror.

Lyotard’s misreading of Kant seems to be the result of considering Kant’s emancipatory idealism from the viewpoint of postmodern pessimism. The presumed sensus communis of Kant becomes for Lyotard the promise of a community that is never realized. The mark of its failure is Auschwitz. As Pefanis summarizes Lyotard’s argument, "‘Reason’ in the service of the idea of humanity, in the service of its achievable end through history, stands crossed and double-crossed at the threshold of post-history by the signs of its historical failure."²¹ Lyotard’s disgust with totalizing narratives is not a result of reading Kant but a result of seeing Kant’s idealism double-crossed by history. Having been double-crossed, Lyotard rejects the possibility of communality in favor of nihilistic fragmentation: Here is a course of action: harden, worsen and accelerate decadence. Adopt the perspective of active nihilism, exceed the mere recognition—be it depressive or admiring—of the destruction of all values. Become more and more incredulous. Push decadence further still and accept, for instance, to destroy the belief in truth under all its forms.²²

While wishing to destroy the belief in truth, Lyotard still wishes to preserve a meaning for justice. At times he expects to have his cake and deconstruct it, too. His counterpoint to Kant’s suprasensible source for the autonomous will is the libido, an indeterminate source of random impulses.²³ The randomness of the libido may account for the diversity of language games, but Lyotard is unable to derive an ethical principle like justice from it. He tells us:

Consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value. But justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus.

A recognition of the heteromorphous nature of language games is a first step in that direction. This obviously implies a renunciation of terror, which assumes that they are isomorphic and tries to make them so. The second step is the principle that any consensus on the rules defining a game and the moves playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation.²⁴

Unfortunately, nothing in Lyotard’s theory of language games makes a renunciation of terror obligatory. Language games are forms of fighting, he tells us, although the fighting is play. Sometimes, however, the play leads to real violence. Just recently, in a Little League baseball game in California, a seventeen-year-old spectator died as the result of violence after the game. During the game, taunting and racial slurs had raised tension between the teams and between their partisan fans. After the death and another serious injury occurred, the umpire, in classic understatement, called it a breakdown in civility and attributed it to the example of professional players that the teenagers emulated.²⁵ The Balkans are a more terrifying example of how diverse language games may escalate from play fighting to real fighting. The various ethnic groups each have their own local rules governing how they shall operate within their own game, but no common rules govern how the different groups shall treat each other. Such common rules would require a consensus that Lyotard has eliminated as a possibility. As long as their libidos urge them on, we would expect these members of various language games to go on killing each other.

This chaos is clearly not what Lyotard has in mind in his celebration of diversity. His vision includes an opening up of information sources to the public so that groups determining their own rules would have access to information to help them in their decisions. Despite his opposition to consensus, Lyotard cannot avoid envisioning diversity against the horizon of community. He simply fails to notice that horizon, which itself makes possible his concept of justice. Lyotard’s intention was to sketch the outline of a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown. His sketch of diversity is not yet a politics, however, because politics is about community, the polis. Diversity without community can be achieved through tribal warfare. Diversity within community is, in fact, the problem of justice, as Aristotle long ago recognized.²⁶ Lyotard’s vision requires the larger community to distribute its resources more fairly, a traditional question of distributive justice. Lyotard takes for granted a concept of justice that is rooted in a discourse tradition, or language game. Yet his own argument does not allow him to privilege any particular language game. He gives us no reason to prefer the language game of Aristotelian justice to the language game of violence, unless justice is somehow inscribed on our libidos.

In the Aristotelian tradition, justice is a basic principle of community. Communication is the condition of possibility of community.²⁷ So it is also in Kenneth Burke. Burke recognizes that division is a basic operating principle of rhetoric:

We need never deny the presence of strife, enmity, faction as a characteristic motive of rhetorical expression. We need not close our eyes to their almost tyrannous ubiquity in human relations; we can be on the alert always to see how such temptations to strife are implicit in the institutions that condition human relationships; yet we can at the same time always look beyond this order, to the principle of identification in general, a terministic choice justified by the fact that the identifications in the order of love are also characteristic of rhetorical