Among much other political work I was involved in at the time, I was active in opposing the Gulf War in 1991. As a naïve 20-year-old, I thought the huge crowds that protested the war would be able to force the government to adopt a more peaceful strategy. It turned out that the planners of the war had already factored popular opposition into their strategy. In the aftermath, I felt disillusioned, kind of stupid, and generally defeated. I started to think, “what is the point of all the political work I’m doing if it’s futile?”
Then I read A Feminist Ethic of Risk.
This book, by the theologian and ethicist Sharon Welch has done more to keep me going than anything else I know. In the verdict of one friend who read it, the book “takes away any excuse you can find for not doing something.”
Her argument proceeds by looking at the “ethic of control” that guides the assumptions of white middle-class people, whether on the left or the right side of the political spectrum. In the second section of the book, she examines various works of African-American fiction as a source for a contrasting “ethic of risk” that upholds the worth of struggle in the face of probable defeat. This section is also a great introduction to several African-American authors; I’ve become particularly fond of Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People as a result. In the final section, she spells out the theological implications of the ethic of risk, deepening the rejection of divine omnipotence one finds among many contemporary theologians. According to her radical formulation, it is best to think of God as an adverb, rather than as a noun. Although this final section makes this book a work of theological ethics, I have found that non-religious people have reacted as enthusiastically to it as have those with religious commitments.
One of the most important aspects of Welch’s work is her diagnosis of the “ethic of control – the assumption that effective action is unambiguous, unilateral, and decisive.” Unfortunately, she presented this diagnosis more compellingly in the first edition of her book. In the revised edition, she opens the book on a much more abstract level. She wants to make her points more relevant to the political crises of the 1990s, rather than those of the 1980s, but the revisions end up diluting the force of her argument. In the first edition, Welch analyses the ethical assumptions of the general public as revealed by forty years’ worth of public opinion polls, the policymakers who shaped American nuclear weapons policy, and peace activists. She finds a pervasive ethic of control, rooted in the assumption that action is “the ability to attain, without substantial modification, desired results,” among all these groups. In the case of peace activists, she notes how partial victories, such as the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was a step in the right direction, though it did not eliminate nuclear weapons entirely, were often as demoralizing as outright defeats. Furthermore, the relative privilege afforded white middle-class folks gives them/us the “out” of the ideology of “cultured despair,” in which the impossibility of universal justice becomes a rationale for retreating to building a good life for oneself and one’s family. She cites The New Republic as a particularly good example of the cultured despair that prides itself on the depth of its analysis as much as on the sophistication of its paralysis.
Welch turns to African-American fiction because it embodies a moral tradition in which “action begins where much middle-class thought stops. The horizon of action is recognition that we cannot imagine how we will win.” An important lesson she draws from this is that “responsible action does not mean the certain achievement of desired ends but […] the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes.” It seems to me that this lesson is one that could stand to be relearned as liberals/leftists try to find ways forward in the Obama era.
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