Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Voices From the Archive: Charles Hatfield on Why Maus Is Not Glib

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In a post a while back I claimed that Maus was glib. Charles Hatfield refutes me thus:

Noah, ach, this is more of your tendentious, hammer-blunt, idol-toppling perversity at work.

Your method, from my POV, is to work by comparison/contrast to things you esteem, find fault on the basis of those personal points of reference (as in, Spiegelman isn’t Celan), then point out that, besides the much-idolized comic in question, lots of other artists, in other media, other forms, have engaged in the same things — in this case, self-reflexive and metanarrative feints — so that these are, ho hum, hardly new (even though Spiegelman’s way of doing them was decidedly new to comics). Then you elevate the comic’s use of such common devices to a moral failing, as in, Spiegelman is glib. Then, when confronted, you persist in dissing the comic in question as, here you go again, “tiresome,” old hat, and inferior to works in wholly other forms, works whose agendas and burdens and formal affordances are light years away from the comic in question.

FWIW, you’re entirely wrong about Maus being merely glib. This was the tack I took as a reader initially, back in the mid-80s, due to my own initial resistance to work that exploded or ignored the boundaries of comic book culture as I, an ardent fan, understood it. But when I finally read, years later, the completed Maus, I realized that this was a moving, indeed for me deeply affecting, work that used intellectualized conceits and circuitous method to earn, and make the reader earn, a stunning emotional effect. Maus moves many people for a reason, something your dismissive posturing cannot account for.

In hindsight, there’s nothing glib about Maus at all, and you’re condemning it (condemning is not too strong a word) precisely for its use of the comical, its word/image tensions, its aesthetic effects. You’re condemning it for not rising to the ontological heights, or depths, of Celan, for being something other than what your straw argument insists that it must be. You’re faulting its medium-specific complexities as simplicities. In essence, you’re adding your voice to the chorus of shallow ad hominem criticisms based on a dislike of Spiegelman’s persona, the kind of obtuse, tone-deaf criticism seen in, for example, Harvey’s willful misreading of the book in his The Art of the Comic Book.

Spiegelman will always be subject to arguments that he is “glib.” His refusal to tack away from the comical, his refusal to deliver what others expect of a Holocaust account, and his deeply fraught portrayal of his father are bound to rub a few readers raw. But the charge is itself glib, unearned.

Note that Spiegelman never affirms that his portrayal is “real” in any straightforward, uncomplicated sense. Not even his words do this. Attention to the text, the whole text, verbal and visual, reveals that, as Vol. 2 speeds to its end, Maus unpacks layer after layer of hopeful artifice, and ends on a deliberately deceptive note, whereby father and son together fantastically reconstruct the absent mother who, we know full well from earlier chapters, cannot be restored, indeed is the irrevocable and constitutive absence, or loss, around which the book is built. You haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of this layering.

Again, from my POV your considerable writerly gifts are being sabotaged by your crushingly obvious yen for idol-toppling. The way you swing that truncheon of ideological criticism, in predictable and predictably unsympathetic ways, is a stone cold drag. You’d give us much more if you stopped trying to enrage fans and instead applied your needle-sharp intelligence to actually reading the comics with due attention, without trying to make the alleged limitations of the comics into a warrant for swinging that stick.

 

Tyrannosaurus Stalin

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Dystopias are always also utopias, just as hell always also implies a heaven. A blighted future is a warning, but it’s also a hope that the wrong-doers (if they do not repent) will finally, finally get theirs. Orwell’s 1984 broods luxuriously on the triumph of totalitarianism over all those who do not see as clearly as he. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games revels in the voyeuristic exploitation bloodshed enabled by scolding us all for our voyeuristic exploitation jones. Disaster porn is — adamently, enthusiastically — porn, a sadistic/masochistic wallow in the end times. Grim visions are what we want to see; the rain of fire that scourges injustice — or, sometimes, that just scourges. Because scourging is fun.

Alun Llewellyn’s 1934 sci-fi dystopia, The Strange Invaders presents a particularly complex apocalypse — and, ergo, a particularly complex set of apocalyptic desires. The story is set in a far future earth, where a combination of nuclear holocaust and oncoming ice age have knocked humanity back to the middle ages. The action is centered in a factory town of the former Soviet Union, now a holy city, inhabited by a people called the Rus. The Rus worship a Trinity — Marx, Lenin, Stalin — who they only vaguely understand. Church Fathers rule over a military class of Swords, who keep the peasants in line scraping out a subsistence existence.

This already-quite-grim-thank-you world is plunged into chaos as nomadic Tartars begin fleeing to the Rus’ holy city from the South, seeking shelter. They claim to be pursued by giant, man-eating lizards. The Church Fathers at first don’t believe it (Marx said nothing about giant man-eating lizards!) and so order the Swords and the peasants to massacre the Tartars before they eat too much of the food supply. Soon after the deed is done, though,the saurians show up and set about killing just about everyone they can get their talons on. Finally, in a War-of-the-Worldsish stroke of luck, winter comes in and for some reason the in-all-other-ways evolutionarily perfect lizards are unable to sense the temperature drop soon enough, and go dormant, allowing the few remaining humans to slaughter them. This isn’t exactly a happy ending, though; humans are now trapped between the lizards to the south and advancing glaciers to the north, and while there may be a respite for our particular band of the Rus, humanity’s long-term outlook seems awfully dicey as the book closes.
 

 
In his book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, John Rieder reads The Strange Invaders along a number of allegorical lines. First, he notes that it maps and reverses the traditional lines of imperialism; instead of a vigorous northern European invasion of the decadent Southern periphery, Llewellyn presents a vital South launching an attack on the decadent, etiolated north.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Rieder’s take here…but I think it’s important to take into account the fact that this is not just any north we’re talking about here, but Russia in particular. Obviously, the Cold War was not underway in 1934 — but Llewellyn (according to Brian W. Aldiss’ preface) had actually visited the Soviet Union, and appears to have had a better sense of its problems than many of his contemporaries. In any case, there’s no doubt that the northern weakness here is a particularized Russian weakness. The blind obedience to authority, the inflexibility, and the cruelty of the Rus is linked specifically by Llewellyn to Communism.

It was a tale often told, a moral often preached. They had sinned; all mankind had sinned. Marx from whom the world had received the blessing of the Faith had remade the world in a plan of Five years…. The faith had been wronged and the Destruction was the vengeance enacted. Therefore must the faith be honoured strictly by those that survived, and they must to that end give obedience unquestioning, surrender thought and spirit and body to their rulers who were guardians of that faith.

Rieder of course appreciates the satirical fillip (now perhaps rendered into almost a commonplace of anti-communism) of turning the resolutely materialist Marx into a deity. But he never quite links the Russian context to the discussion of peripheries. If one does so, the novel becomes a parable not so much of reversing center and margin, but rather of wars on the margins — of Russia, perhaps, being devoured by its own atavistic, subservient Orientalist weakness.

From this perspective, then, the saurians and the Russ are not in opposition, but are on a continuum. And in fact, there is a fair bit of textual support for the idea that the giant lizards are not the death of the Rus, but their perfection. The ideal of the Rus is unthinking obedience; direction without will. Adun, the protagonist, is caught between his human desires and his society’s demand that he become merely the tool of the Fathers — a kind of machine, like those left in the factory/church and worshiped. “The Fathers and the men they kept to uphold them were not to be questioned,” Adun thinks to himself. “Mind and body they commanded, as the Faith directed. He was nothing. He dared do nothing.” (18)

If Adun has to convince himself to become an object, the giant lizards have no such problems. As Rieder notes, the creatures “hover on the uncanny border between the organic and the mechanical.” In one of the most striking passages of the novel (which Rieder quotes), the creatures are envisioned as a depersonalized collective; a single coherent unity of force.

The plain, where it came down from the river, was alive with inter-weaving movement. They played together in the sun as though its brightness made them glad, running over and under one another, swiftly and in silence, but with an almost fierce alacrity, eager and unhesitating, unceasing. The eye was not quick enough to catch the motion of their rapid, supple bodies that seemed not to move with the effort of muscles but to quiver and leap with an alert life instinct in every part of them. They were brilliant. As he looked, Karasoin saw the play of colour that ran over those great darting bodies, a changing, flashing iridescence like a jewelled mist. Their bodies were green, enamelled in scales like studs of polished jade. But as they writhed and sprang in their playing, points of bronze and gilt winked along their flanks and their throats and bellies as they leaped showed golden and orange, splashed with scarlet. Now and then one would suddenly pause and stand as if turned to a shape of gleaming metal, and then they could see plainly its long, narrow head and slender tail and the smoothly shining body borne on crouching legs that ended in hands like a man’s with long clawed fingers; five.

This is the awesome fulfillment of Ronald Reagan’s “ant heap of totalitarianism.” Stalinism is here embodied not by the proletariat, but by those even below them, the lizards forged into a remorseless, infinitely flexible machine-state. The blind watchmaker forges the revolution, and thus Marxism for Llewellyn will literally, and beautifully, eat itself.

Again, though, just because the lizards are the ultimate totalitarians doesn’t mean that the humans are somehow battling totalitarianism. In 1984, Big Brother is schematically opposed to the human emotions of love, friendship, warmth, and sex. Llewellyn’s vision is less pat. Adun’s love, not to mention his sexual desire, does in fact inspire his resistance to the regime of the Fathers. But that resistance isn’t exactly idyllic. On the contrary, Adun’s passion for the hardly-characterized Erya is almost inseparable from his own pride and desire for power. At one point he threatens (and it is not an idle threat) to kill her if she chooses the captain of the Swords, Karasoin — a murder-lust echoed by his participation in the genocidal slaughter of the Tartars within the city walls. Eventually, Adun does win Erya…by murdering Karasoin after the Sword almost rapes her. Thus, the alternative to mechanized, unfeeling destruction is not love or peace, but rather the cthonic, feeling bloodshed of jealousy, rage, and rape-revenge.

Llewellyn is willing to suggest other possibilities. Erya, for example, has a vision of independence and freedom — though that’s eventually crushed by the ongoing crisis which requires her to get a man for protection or else. Karasoin, before he actually rapes Erya, is ashamed and decides not to attack her — just in time for Adun to hack him apart. And at the book’s end, Adun’s brother Ivan speaks haltingly of the need for men to stop killing each other…and then, of course, he dies of his wounds.

The novel’s flirtations with peace, then, are all cynically inflected; they are raised to be shot down in a frisson of pathos and irony. Both the lizards and the rape-revenge narrative, on the other hand, have a visceral, awful appeal. The beautiful, terrible new force which will inherit the earth; the beautiful, terrible old force that has held the earth: they rush upon each other, soundless or howling, and from their writhing, bloody struggle there rises genre pleasures, old and new — violence, lust, apocalypse, the cleansed earth and the pleasure of watching its filthy cleansing. The Strange Invaders is a bitter reversal of imperialism, a prayer for a more perfectly genocidal imperialism, and — to the extent that its vision is enacted on and powered by Orientalist tropes — arguably an act of imperialism itself.

The final twist of the novel is, perhaps, that, despite its prescient and honorable anti-Stalinism, its apocalyptic vision is ultimately not apocalyptic enough. The saurians, in all their awesome power, and the humans, for all their ugly narrow-mindedness, can neither compare with the power, the ugliness, or the narrow-mindedness of what can’t really compare with the atrocities Stalin was perpetrating while Llewellyn was writing his book. The gigantic force of the state, wielded by a jealous, paranoid madman, was able to generate a holocaust in the Ukraine, and throughout Russia, that makes Llewellyn’s bleak vision — shot through with beauty and with joy at the bleakness — seem positively naive. That’s not Llewellyn’s fault exactly, though. History, indifferent alike to justice and desire, will always be grimmer than dystopia.
 


“Passers-by no longer pay attention to the corpses of starved peasants
on a street in Kharkiv, 1933.”

 

Jason Dittmer on Captain Nowhere

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Jason Dittmer recently published the book Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics. I wrote a review (titled “Captain Nowhere”) at Reason Magazine. Jason had an interesting reply which was buried at the end of a long comments thread, and which I thought it might be worth highlighting here. Jason kindly agreed — and his response to my review is therefore reprinted below.

Hello all,

I would like to thank Noah Berlatsky for his review, which although critical raises some interesting points. I especially like some of the debate that it has spawned in the comments thread, especially on the relationship between states and markets. However, I do feel like a bit of an injustice has been done to the arguments of my book and I would like the chance to respond.

First, Berlatsky argues that I have ignored the two main reasons for studying popular culture, both of which revolve around the idea of relevance. Either something is worth studying because it is aesthetically important, or because it is ‘sociologically relevant’ (meaning vastly popular). The former is, of course, a matter of taste and therefore inserts an elitism into the analysis (we should only study GOOD popular culture) and the latter relies on the notion that audiences will be shaped by the popular culture in question (hence the importance of the audience size). Berlatsky implicitly adopts the latter perspective in his argument that I should be paying attention to the Captain America movie rather than to comics, which have a relatively small audience. I reject both of these arguments. Or rather, I think that to limit ourselves to them is to misunderstand the reasons it is worthwhile to study popular culture.

Rather than relying on relevance, I have studied comic books because of the way in which they come into the world — month after month, year after year. They provide an archive of insights into how artists and writers try to reconcile past events and (then) present concerns into a continuous narrative (there is, of course, a great concern with ‘continuity’ in superhero universes). In truth, I am interested in popular culture not as a thing which can be ‘relevant’ or not, but as a process — a continual set of interactions between creative teams, editorial staff, fans who write letters in to the creative team, and broader market forces. I am sorry if Berlatsky finds my examples ‘comically banal’ but I think that is because he doesn’t see why they are important. He sees them as ‘long-forgotten'(and therefore fundamentally irrelevant) but I see them as negotiations among people trying to assemble a world of collective meaning. Many of the commenters here, based on Berlatsky’s review, seem to think that what I am offering is a crude cultural analysis straight out of the Frankfurt School. I contend this is not the case, and that my argument is far different from the synopsis given here.

Fundamentally, my book is about two different kinds of geography (a word that never appears in Berlatsky’s review despite its fundamental importance to the book).

First, it is about the geography of the nation-state, and the way in which this is reproduced as a fundamental spatial category in our political life. Berlatsky scores rhetorical points in his review by asserting that I am somehow unaware of the politics that occurs outside or beyond the nation-state framework. I think this shows how fundamentally he misunderstands what I am doing in this book.

The book is, rather, about the way in which the nation-state is continually reproduced as a discourse of the political, and therefore also about the reduction of politics to that which is addressed by the state. My chapters each center on some aspect of this: the narration of a coherent body politic, of territory, of geopolitical orders, and so on. I am not holding up the state as an ideal, rather I am asking why so many people ascribe such meaning to it – a perspective I think Berlatsky would agree with given the conclusion to his review.

The second geography on tap in this book is found in the way the idea of the nationalist superhero genre is changed as it shifts from the U.S. context (in which it was created) to Canada and the UK. Again, this is about studying process rather than finding out how, for example, Canadian nationalist superheroes are different in the sense of cultural analysis. Berlatsky does not really touch on this aspect of my book.

I have gone on long enough and I do not want to wear out my welcome. I also do not want to come across as angry at Berlatsky — perhaps his misconceptions about my book are the result of my poor writing, or indeed maybe it is as laughable as he makes it out to be. But I wanted to a chance to make the case for the book, especially as Reason is such an interesting and important venue for the book to be reviewed. Thank you!

 

Music for Middle-Brow Snobs — Like a Motorway

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Electronica dance pop mix; download Like a Motorway here.

1. Lothario — Fabulous Diamonds
2. Amenamy — Purity Ring
3. Cry When You Get Older — Robyn
4. Far Away — Cut Copy
5. Vanished — Crystal Castles
6. Hercules Theme — Hercules and Love Affair
7. The Village — New Order
8. Silent Shout — The Knife
9. Hot Topic — Le Tigre
10. Like a Motorway — Saint Etienne
11. Dance With Me — The Juan Maclean
 

Utilitarian Review 11/23/12

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On HU

Shortened week due to the holidays this time out.

Featured Archive Post: Ariel Kahn on subversion of authority in Salem Brownstone and Skim.

I expressed skepticism about the supernatural manga Natsume’s Book of Friends.

I talked about race or the lack thereof in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows.

Isaac Butler talks about memory and his father’s illness.

Richard Cook talks about preparing food with his girlfriend.

I talked about morality and other people.

And I compared comics sales to sales of other media.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about Twilight and abortion.

At Reason I review Jason Dittmer’s new book on nationalist superheroes.

At Splice Today I talk about filibuster reform and Democratic revenge fantasies.

 
Other Links

Christopher M. Jones on why worrying about fake geek girls is stupid.

The Republicans were for sensible copyright reform before they were against it.

Sean Michael Robinson interviews David Lasky.
 
This Week’s Reading

I finished Stanley Hauerwas’ “God, Medicine, and Miracles” read Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise,” reread “The Hobbit” and read Alun Llewellyn’s “The Strange Invaders.”
 

Small Fish, Big Pond

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For Black Friday, I thought I’d reprint this piece about comics sales from back in 2009 — it first ran on Comixology.

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Comics are a relatively small part of the media landscape. But how small? Or how large? How does the sale of a popular comic book compare to the sales of, say, a popular book or DVD? I wasn’t sure…so I thought I’d use this column to try and see if I could figure it out.

Caveat and a half: Pretty much all of this stuff starts as guestimates made with inadequate data. By the time a non-expert like me starts talking about it…well, it’s not pretty. I think the following is useful to give some sense of the scale of the comics business compared to other entertainment industries, but any individual number should be taken with a grain of salt roughly the size of New Jersey.

Comics Sales

Marc-Oliver Frisch’s occasional column at the Beat seems like the easiest place to go for information about mainstream comics sales., at least through the direct market According to Frisch, in July of this year, the biggest seller was Marvel’s Reborn #1, which sold about 193,000 units. DC’s Blackest Night was second with sales of around 177,000 units. According to Frisch, these are fairly huge numbers, partially pumped up with variant edition covers and first issue excitement. A less hyped comic in the middle of its run – Action Comics #879 – had sales in July of 38, 324 units. Vertigo and Wildstorm titles are also in the area of 11,000 to 8000 units a month, apparently. Tiny Titans, a book for kids that’s near and dear to my heart, only sold 8, 576 units – but, again, this is through the direct market only, and I assume most of Tiny Titans sales are actually through bookstores (that’s where I get my copies., anyway.)

As far as smaller press numbers, Kim Thompson, co-owner of Fantagraphics wrote me that sales are “really all over the map. A Peanuts will sell 15,000-20,000, other classics and well-known cartoonists in the 4,000-7,000 range, then all the way down to 2,000 and less for more obscure, or unsuccessful, stuff… And of course some long-time continuing books have sold a lot more than that, Ghost World at 150,000+, Palestine at 60,000+, etc.”

Brian Hibbs does his best to figure out the Bookscan numbers at the end of each year, and says for comics sales through bookstores there’s about 8.3 million units sold per year, for somewhere around $100 million in sales for the top 350 books. Watchmen was the highest seller, with over 300,000 copies sold. (Though I saw a NYT article that put Watchmen graphic novel sales at 1 million…perhaps counting Direct Market and online sales as well?) Naruto v. 28 was next with over 100,000 sold. All volumes of Naruto together sold around 971,000 copies, for a total of $7.7 million.

For some other numbers to throw into the mix: Brigid Alverson, who blogs over at mangablog wrote me in an email that “first printings [for manga] seem to be in the 10,000 range for smaller publishers; Yen does 25,000 for titles like Haruhi.” The folks at the Anime News Network say total sales of graphic novels in 2008 were $395 million. Manga sales accounted for $175 million of that, which is the largest single chunk (the rest being divided among super-heroes, humor, adult, etc.) They also point out the huge success of Naruto, which is so overwhelming that it’s comparable to other media products that are not comics. Like for example:

DVD Sales

Sales figures for DVDs seem a whole lot easier to obtain…as in, I googled for about 5 seconds and got actual complete information organized in a handy chart. It’s almost as if our culture cares more about DVDs. Or as if the companies aren’t embarrassed to release the information. Or something.

Anyway…the biggest seller the week ending September 6 was State of Play, which sold 344,745 units. And again I say, that’s in a week. So that means that a successful DVD sells, very unscientifically, more than 6 times as much as a successful floppy comic in a given month.

Watchmen the movie, a bit further down the list, is an obvious point of comparison for comics. It sold 56, 814 units in the week; still higher than any comic has done in a long time, probably, but not necessarily by many orders of magnitude. Of course, this is 7 weeks into the DVD release, and overall it’s sold more than 2 million units in that time. (Again, as best I can figure Watchmen the graphic novel seems to have sold between 300,000 to 1 million units in all of 2008.)

Total DVD sales for 2008 were $14.5 billion. That’s about 36 times greater than graphic novel sales for the year, if my numbers are right.

Music

CD sales are in free fall due to the recession and that wonderful, magical whatsit we call the Internet. People still buy an awful lot of albums, though. According to the ever-erudite Ben Sisario at the NYT, the biggest seller in 2008 was Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter, which sold 2.87 million copies. Again, Watchmen, the biggest comic hit, seems to have sold less than half that, and possibly less than a quarter of that. Total music album sales (including CD, download, and LP) were 428 million. Meanwhile, over a billion songs were downloaded. The same article says that concert ticket sales clocked in at $4.2 billion in 2008.

Books

Sales of books in June were $942.6 million according to the Association of American Publishers. 2008 book sales for the year were 24 billion. I presume graphic novels are included as a part of that; if that’s correct, they’re about 1.6% of the total sales for the year…which is quite a bit smaller than I would have guessed.

Also to my surprise, big-event books appear to actually outsell big-event CDs and DVDs. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold more than 8 million copies on its first day on sale in the U.S., which makes Lil’ Wayne’s 2.8 million albums over a year look pretty puny. And, of course, 8 million copies is just about the total bookstore sales for all graphic novels in all of 2008, according to Brian Hibbs’ figures. Obviously, Harry Potter is exceptional…but Dan Brown’s most recent book was also selling in the hundreds of thousands on its first couple of days. Breaking Dawn, the last Twilight book, sold 1.3 million copies on the first day.

Nothing You Didn’t Know

There’s no really startling revelations here of course. Despite big comic book derived movies and the growth of graphic novels and manga, most people in the U.S. would rather watch a movie or listen to a CD or even read a book than pick up a comic. Perhaps with the recent shake-ups at Marvel and DC that will change, and comics will start selling on a scale with other entertainment options. But, if the figures here are even close to correct, there’s a long way to go before that happens.
 

Morality and Other People

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Is this man an autonomous moral actor?

 
A few days back I had an entertaining discussion with Mori Theil on Twitter about morality, individuals, and the public. Mori’s basic argument, as I understand it (and hopefully he’ll correct me if I’m wrong), is that ethics and morality are based in individual autonomy. Here’s a bit of his twitter discussion:

Moral decisions arise from principles. Other people should not be your morality; that is slapdash. w/others, you’re not dealing with morality at all, just feelings and goodwill – politics. If, say, I should have to justify my morality to you, that is a tool of societal control.

In what was perhaps his clearest statement of principle, he said, “…morality is the application of ideals to reality. You seem to say that we should twist our morality around to serve reality. That’s backwards.

Like I said, I enjoyed this conversation — and part of the reason I enjoyed it is that Mori so clearly and forthrightly states the basic Enlightenment presuppositions and beliefs about moral experience. For Mori, morality involves an almost Cartesian process. You do not listen to others; you do not learn from others. Instead, you turn inward, discovering there pure ideals beyond the reach of a corrupting and confusing society. Once you have found them, you apply those ideals to reality. Morality, then, is an essentially imperial endeavor. Ethics conquers the world. If the world conquers ethics — or even, it sounds like, if the world affects ethics — then you are doing it wrong.

Obviously, Mori’s vision of morality resonates to some extent. Our touchstones for moral worth, I think, are often people who go against social consensus or social norms; who do the right thing despite pressure to do the wrong. So, for example, Galileo’s commitment to truth despite the opposition of the Church is seen as a quintessential moral moment. Conscientious objectors refusing to fight during the Vietnam War despite the coercion of the state might be another example. Or, to cite one of my personal heroes, Khruschev’s decision to expose Stalin’s crimes despite massive opposition within the Soviet bureaucracy, and indeed arguably despite his own Communist ideological commitments, seems like one of the bravest and most moral acts of a world leader in the last 100 years — certainly braver than anything I can think of any American president doing in my lifetime.

The question is, though: are these examples of moral ideals imposed upon the world? Were these people autonomous moral actors? If they weren’t, does that make them less moral?

I would say that the answers in each case I give above are pretty complicated. Galileo, of course, actually renounced his findings; he caved to social pressure. Conscientious objectors, on the other hand, are not in many cases autonomous actors. They certainly are placing themselves against the broader society — but many of them do so because of their communal commitments to peace churches. They certainly have ideals, but those ideals are not autonomous or generated outside of a social context. And as for Khruschev — his indictment of Stalin was done in the name of ideals, certainly — but those ideals were specifically Communist, and therefore by definition communal and social. From the accounts I’ve read, he was most angry at Stalin for his failures of courage and leadership during World War II — for failures to Russia specifically, in other words, rather than for failures to live up to a particular abstract vision.

Mori might say that each of these instances is, in fact, a poor example — that none of them are adequate examples of true morality. None, he might argue, show a moral actor as sufficiently autonomous; none are sufficiently pure. To which I guess my response would be that I can’t think of any moral situations which are not complicated like this. Martin Luther King drew his ideals from his church and his community. So did Gandhi. Matilde de la Sierra‘s activism against torture is based in her own personal experience of torture — but it’s sustained by her relationship with her husband and her work with other activists, not by some isolated commitment.

Moral actions are never autonomous — which makes sense, I think, because morality is mostly about how you treat other creatures. If you’re stranded on a desert island all alone, without even any animals in sight, morality is going to be largely beside the point. Rather than an ideal we impose on the world, morality, then, is an experience that the presence of others imposes on us. Morality doesn’t occur despite society; it occurs only because of society. Which means that, if our moral selves are our truest selves, then in a real sense our truest selves are other people.

That may seem counter-intuitive but, for me, at least, it fits my moral experience much better than Mori’s account does. Morality for me isn’t formulating abstract principles and then following them. Instead, it’s, say, volunteering when my son’s school needs volunteers, or giving a friend a ride when he needs a ride, or even (as happened last week) taking down inappropriate scanlated images when a colleague tells me I should.

At one point Mori asked “do you think the Internet should perch like an angel of conscience on your shoulder?” My response is — sure, why not? The internet is just other people — and, like most folks, I’ve relied on other people to teach me to be a good person since my parents first started telling me to say “please”. Morality isn’t something I was born with. Rather, it’s a gift, granted by those I love, or respect, or live with. And the gift is, precisely, to teach me to love, to respect, and to live. If we are ethical, or human, it’s by each other’s grace — and if we’re unworthy of it, that’s all the more reason to be thankful when it is granted.
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Update: Mori replies here. I understand where he’s coming from much more clearly now, I think. Just quickly I’d say that when I talk about morality coming from communities, I don’t necessarily mean states or the law (I’m not ruling those out, but I wouldn’t see those as the only or best sources in every circumstance.)

I’d also just point out quickly that it wasn’t just society which saw slavery as acceptable for hundreds and hundreds of years (at least) — it was individuals who saw it that way too. Nor was the change against slavery a matter of lone individuals standing up against society; abolitionism was a movement and a community (composed of individuals, of course.)