Ed. Tom Bentley & Daniel Stedman Jones

Contributors include: Amartya Sen, Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Cooper, Joan Smith, Mary Midgley and Jonathan Glover. The introduction to The Moral Universe is available online, please visit: http://www.demos.co.uk/

"Morality demands justice and justice is in the eye of the beholder."

-from the Introduction

Review #1

by Zaid Hassan

The Moral Universe is a welcome foray into wider, deeper and darker waters than is usual for think-tanks who otherwise tend to focus on content that can apply directly to political policy decisions. This unfortunately means they must fit into the reality of the policy framework, and that they consequently often become characterised by timidity and lack of radical systemic critique.

The Moral Universe is a collection of essays prompted by September 11. In particular, by the Bush-Blair response, which the editors characterise as framed in "moral" terms as opposed to "political" terms. Following the lead of the hijackers, the duo have declared a war of good against evil - which finds us in the frightening spiral that we are in today: the prospect of an open ended war in the Islamic world coupled with ever diminishing freedoms in the West.

In the introduction the editors raise the need for the West to question its own actions and go through some sort of reflection to recognise its own paradoxical behaviours. They write: "If our real goal in the Afghan war is to enforce a new Pax Americana upon those parts of the world capable of disturbing the West's well-being, these objectives should be frankly acknowledged as a form of self-interest whose level of moral enlightenment is not best judged by the West itself."

It is disturbing to think that the very act of honest reflection on the West's actions in Afghanistan is something that should be demanded in publications such as this one - is this not an obvious point? It is disturbing because when a civilisation has stopped questioning its acts of war, it has successfully managed to brainwash itself, to believe in its own propaganda. A trend this publication tries to combat.

The fact is that the non-Western world has constantly judged the objectives and actions of the West and found them wanting by most measures of moral enlightenment. Gandhi in Hind Swaraj (1938) bluntly stated that (Western) Civilisation was a disease and that India would be doomed if she attemped to imitate the English in their style of governance or democracy. The Moral Universe makes an (unsuccessful) attempt to reflect such non-Western attitudes through, for example, the inclusion of essays by Amartya Sen and Francisco J Varela, who provide two of the most interesting essays in this collection. Sen in an essay entitled "East and West: The Reach of Reason" recalls the Moghal Empreror Akbar's approach to creating a just, multi-cultural community.

Sen uses Akbar's approach ("the pursuit of reason") to demonstrate the superiority of secularism and the separation of religion from matters of the State - a classic Enlightenment position. He calls for the use of reason in the cultivation of a moral imagination. In his defense of Enlightenment thinking (against, for example, the charge of influencing dictators such as Stalin and Pol Pot) Sen states that it is a little unfair to blame Enlightenment thinkers since so many of them insisted that "reasoned choice was better than blind belief." This is however a rather simplistic defense. Fourteen hundred years of Islamic thinkers insisting that the task of Muslims is to create a just and equitable society have not stopped the oil rich Arab states from becoming the most stratified societies on the planet.

In turn, it would be easy to argue that the blame for all that is done in the name of Islam should not be laid down to Islam, since so many Islamic thinkers have insisted on the exact opposite. In his defense of Enlightenment thinking, Sen betrays his own lack of understanding of the role that politics plays in Islam. For a Muslim, directed by their religion to create a just and equitable society, "state affairs were not a distraction from spirituality but the stuff of religion itself" and thus the affairs of the state cannot be separated from the inner life of a practicing Muslim. Sen's call for the use of reason in creating a new moral imagination seems to indicate that reason is the only tool available to the West in considering its problems.

Fracisco J Valera's essay "Ethical Know How: Listening to the Voice of Reason" calls for a new understanding of self. Behind the rational language, behind the discussions on cognition and the virtual self, Varela is making a good old-fasioned plea for spiritual practices, for the need for individuals to know themselves and most critically for community participation. It is amusing on the one hand to read Varela pointing out that "An ethical expert is therefore nothing more nor less than a full participant in a community" and on the other hand contrast this with the Western notion of separating "religious" practices from the practice of politics.

While this collection makes a welcome attempt to broaden the dialogue, the approach remains somewhat provincial. The usual suspects providing somewhat more than the usual defenses. For example Sen's attempt to use the Emperor Akbar in order to make the Eastern case for Enlightenment thinking is interesting but ultimately this collection fails to deeply question this new Western attempt to erect "a moral universe." As the editors remind us at the end of their introduction : "Morality demands justice and justice is in the eye of the beholder."

More from the beholders please.

Review #2

by Mille Bojer

"When the reasoning mind no longer clings and grasps... one awakens into the wisdom with which one was born, and compassionate energy arises without pretence."

-a Tibetan teacher quoted by Francisco Varela in "The Moral Universe"

I opened up the Moral Universe on the plane from London to Istanbul landing on the first page of Francisco Varela's article "Ethical Know-how". I must admit I had to read it twice to understand it (!) but it is short and worth it.

The next day I was walking on Sultanahmet Square with Zeki, one of the stewards of Pioneers of Change in Turkey. Somehow our conversations flowed to a piece of advice one of my mentors gave me once: "What you feel is scarce in your life, give some of that same stuff away." Zeki then quoted Krishnamurti saying "what you value you can create", and we discussed how this idea - this thought that if you give of it, it will come back to you - applies to a certain order of things, not to everything. If it is an energy, a circumstance, like peace, love, perhaps wealth, it is possible. But the trick is this: it can't be calculated rationally, it has to be unconditional.

It is this unconditional, uncalculated empathy which Varela also speaks of in his article, as "crazy wisdom", and this further inspired our conversation. He compares ethical know-how to the virtuosity with which we walk, speak, drive, etc as human beings without self-consciousness, without thinking about it. It is when we become one with our ethical action that we become "experts", and this can only be achieved from a connection with the texture of a situation, its local context, not from a knowledge of theories of right and wrong.

Varela explains that there is a paradigm shift taking place in cognitive science towards knowledge as concrete, embodied and lived. "An ethical expert is therefore nothing more nor less than a full participant in a community." Embodying ethics is about being our action, and letting go of being overly self-conscious. Being able to act from "right" dispositions one has at the very moment of action is a process that takes cultivation and practice, and so the invitation to us is, what are those practices that will help nurture such empathy, those disciplines that facilitate letting go of egocentred habits? They may be different for each of us, but we must share what we discover.

I think this sharing and collaborative learning is what Pioneers of Change is largely about, even though we may never reach perfection!

The Varela article falls in Part 2 of "The Moral Universe" under Ethics and the Self: Beyond Individualism.

Back to Book Reviews!