Morality Post Modernism

If nothing matters, how do we agree on what does?

But why? Photo by A A on Unsplash

I remember feeling a frisson of recognition when I was first introduced to critical theory. It was my second year as an undergraduate, after abandoning the pre-med Bachelor’s ship for studio art. (My dad’s response: “You’ll grow out of it.”) It was like the uncertainties in my heart had been given shape and form, a veil pulled from my eyes. The questions raised by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto guided the rest of my time in school, and still influence my preoccupations today. And I have only slightly ironically considered getting Adorno’s “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” cross-stitched as a home decoration.

As a series of frameworks designed to critique systems of power, critical theory became the scaffolding upon which I built my understanding of the modern world—of society and economics and politics, of race and sex and gender. Of “the self” as a social being. (Which is to say that all my friends knew to save “The answer is postmodern” card in Cards Against Humanity for me.)

But though postmodernism gives us the capacity to critique systems of knowledge, that critique itself leans pretty hard into moral relativism, if not outright nihilism. When the most salient ways to define your contemporary moment are pastiche, schizophrenia, and consumption, when the institutions of social reality are erected for the sole purpose of consolidating power, when nothing means anything really…well, what exactly are you supposed to do with that?

Critique is an argument, not an answer. That’s not to say that the ur-texts of critical theory didn’t sometimes propose solutions, but that the process of critique and analysis only does half the job. Critical theory gave me the intellectual frameworks I needed to articulate what was not working in the world, but not the tools for rebuilding what I’d broken down in the analysis. (Judith Butler’s Violence, Mourning, Politics is an exception that proves the rule.)

In the stock image above, we see a riot of colorful graffiti on a brick wall. Stickers obscure most of a grimy window behind bars, and cheap Venetian blinds conceal the rest. While the history of graffiti and its stereotypes are usually associated with poor people, Black communities, masculinity and violence, the bubblegum-sweet colors soften the form and presage the message: the base layer of graffiti is “love,” over and over. A red heart punctuates the text in the bottom right.

Sprayed over this base of palatability is a black outline of what might be a cartoon figure with a bomb for a head, angry blotches of diffused spray, and the painted scrawl of someone else’s tag. The cartoon figure is mostly covered by a wheat-pasted Kraft paper-brown poster with crisp, neon lettering: “JUST BE NICE.” The poster appears to have been pasted purposefully over the black graffiti figure, perhaps in response to it.

Street art is conversational, a palimpsest of meaning, and in this conversation the last word that was captured by the photographer is a claim to kindness. As if to say this appeal to our innate, shared understanding of goodness is enough to cut through class, chaos and the disagreement that makes up most of our noisy reality.

Is it?

We’re so afraid to talk about morality in this modern moment. We can be as precise as surgeons in disassembling social structures, but when it comes to speaking directly to the things that actually motivate us as feeling beings, whose social fabric is entirely built through feeling, we’re left without tools except empty platitudes or appeals to a higher power. To speak of “morals” is to conjure the dark spirit of Christianity and monotheistic religion, and it is unbelievably gauche in mixed company.

All I’m saying is that I want us to make moral philosophy cool again. I don’t just mean for the literati and Sam Harris podcast listeners, I mean the rest of us. I want the same person who can now glibly use “the male gaze” in a sentence to stop leaning on moral relativism as a social position, to stop wearing “culture” as a cloak against approbation. We have the tools to be very precise about our position in the things we say and how we say them, as well as the position of the listener. That means we have the tools for compassion, and to build something better than what we have now. But we need to be brave enough to use them.