How to be less moral

People sometimes ask me for writing and publishing advice. My main advice would be to find something else to do. This is a terrible way to make a living. The average book sells less than 500 copies, and authors typically make 10% of the price of each book sold, so at 50p a copy you’ll probably make £250 for your precious work. Might as well just give blood, it’s a quicker way to make money, and probably helps more people. But people still feel drawn to write, as I do. And sometimes they come to me for advice, like addicts to addicts anonymous.

This week, I was doing a workshop with a client, who is writing about his experience of being homeless in the past. He has some incredible, vivid memories of his time on the streets. And he has a strong sense of mission — he wants to show the world what it’s like, change people’s mind. I suggested to him that, while a strong moral mission is an important part of writing, it’s not the whole story. There is also an amoral, aesthetic aspect to it. Art for art’s sake, as the aesthetes of the 19th century put it.

There was a moment my client described, when he was on the streets, and he was so hungry he picked up a half-eaten hot-dog from a rubbish bin. Then he realized someone he used to know was on the other side of the street, watching him and laughing at him. I thought that was such a powerful, vivid and beautiful image. And you don’t have to moralize it, it is what it is. It’s what James Joyce called an epiphany, a moment of clarity in a situation. Such moments stand on their own, they have their own value, they don’t need to be justified morally. Walter Pater, the father of Aestheticism, wrote:

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end . . . For art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

Now, I don’t agree entirely with that quote. But it can be helpful to consider Pater’s attitude, when you’re writing. How can you describe a moment, an experience, or an idea, as clearly as possible, without leaping to label it as Morally Good or Morally Bad, without lining it up as an Ally or a Villain in your particular Mission to Save the World.

We are in such a moralistic and dogmatizing moment, when people are dug into moral trenches, lobbing hand-grenades of outrage at the other side. But there is a place for other goals — art for art’s sake, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, humour for humour’s sake.

I greatly admire the anthropologist Nicholas Langlitz, who wrote perhaps the best book on psychedelics I’ve read — Neuropsychedelia. Langlitz has recently written on making the humanities less moral. He writes that his discipline, anthropology, increasingly sees itself as an arm of social justice activism with a Mission to rescue the Victimized against Oppression:

As witnesses of the world’s most arresting ills, anthropologists must call out whoever or whatever is to blame. Of course, these knights in shining armor will repentantly recognize their own complicity with the structures of oppression, demand that we move beyond these structures, and come out morally elevated.

As an anthropologist of science, however, I can’t help wondering how telling good from bad has become such a pervasive practice. Shouldn’t anthropologists be primarily concerned with telling true from false? I am looking for ways of writing about human beings that do not mobilize the readers’ empathy with one group at the expense of their empathy with another group. Is it really necessary for anthropologists to regularly tempt readers already struggling to abstain from self-righteousness? Why dangle in front of them identification with an author who denounces, and thereby elevates his readers above, racists, sexists, capitalists, neoliberals, imperialists, neocolonialists, and scientists whose naturalist worldviews cement an unjust status quo? Even the devil needs an advocate, especially in increasingly polarized societies all too ready to frame people of different persuasions as immoral.

Brave words! His name no doubt is now in a file for Suspect Persons, whose allyship with Right Thinking is in doubt. Where does he stand on pronouns?? Has anyone gone through his tweets??

Strangely enough, this is how I feel in writing about eugenics. When I started exploring the relationship between spirituality and eugenics two years ago, I was genuinely shocked and dismayed by all the connections I found. My earlier pieces probably expressed this sense of moral shock: ‘My god, New Age culture is riddled with eugenic thinking!’ I felt like a surveyor discovering my house was riddled with dry rot.

But gradually my attitude shifted to scholarly curiosity. Why were so many spiritual figures attracted to eugenics? What were the varieties of spiritual eugenics? The social activist perspective collapses all examples of eugenics into white supremacy, patriarchy and fascism. But this misreads the landscape — yes, eugenics sometimes overlaps with white supremacy, patriarchy and fascism, but there were also examples of feminist eugenics, socialist eugenics, anti-imperialist eugenics, and so on. Our culture is still very eugenic, in ways we don’t always perceive.

I read Alison Bashford, perhaps the leading historian of eugenics, and appreciated the lack of strident moralizing in her work (for example, her book on Global Population). She is motivated principally by trying to understand why eugenics was so popular and how it overlapped with other ideas, like Malthusianism and cosmopolitanism. Bashford’s work is, I would suggest, more interesting than the work of Angela Saini, author of Superior, a book on the history of scientific racism, and presenter of a BBC series on eugenics. Saini’s work is far more from the ‘oh my god, how could they?’ school of history. Therefore it’s more popular on social and mainstream media (‘an urgent, important book’, says the Guardian), but actually less interesting. Because what is popular on social media is what easily conforms to people’s pre-existent moral prejudices, what can be easily converted into weaponry for the culture war.

To take one example, in Superior, Saini points to UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race as a critical moment in the rejection of scientific racism. What she doesn’t explore is that this statement was pushed by the then-president of UNESCO, Julian Huxley, as part of his defence of eugenics. Huxley wanted to separate his beloved eugenics from Nazi-era scientific racism. But this fact complicates a simple moral narrative of Good Guys and Bad Guys.

I recently read Jason Stanley’s best-seller How Fascism Works. He’s a Yale professor with a Big Ego, who is Big On Twitter, and his book was a Big Hit (‘an urgent, vital read for a nation under Trump’, said the Guardian). The book is so bad. Stanley doesn’t try to understand Fascism, or tease out its varieties and contradictions. He doesn’t help us understand how it arose and the forms it took. Instead, it’s a sort of angry Twitter rant of a book, which takes all the betes noires of the contemporary left and calls them Fascism. And the book is so light — just 200 pages or so. It is not scholarship in any sense of the word. It’s a wheelbarrow of bricks for the culture war.

Of course, I still do have a moral aspect to my work. Especially when one comes to write about Nazi Germany, where you see how ideas lead to the deaths of millions of innocent people, and the crimes are so awful it’s difficult to write about them. I hope those of you who read my recent articles on Nazism felt I handled that material in an appropriate way, and found the right balance between scholarly exploration and human indignation.

But a lot of the time, I am trying to understand the cultures of eugenics first, before I denounce those cultures. I am trying to be a historian, not a prosecutor in a show trial. And that involves trying to understand the mindset of eugenicists like Francis Galton or Julian Huxley. It’s called ‘steel manning’ — you need to be able to explain a person’s perspective in a way that would satisfy them, before you criticize that perspective.

Morality is an important part of writing, but it’s not all of it. Things can just be funny, or interesting, or weird, or tragic, or beautiful, or ugly-beautiful — like that moment with the hot-dog. It doesn’t have to be immediately converted into a moral hot take.