Arthur Miller said once in an interview that what distinguished the great playwrights through time was a “fierce moral sensibility”. He said that that sensibility was “unquenchable”.
I find that interesting. It would imply that the not-so-great playwrights, like me, have at least the ambition of a “moral sensibility”. I would not have thought so.
In the 1990s, one could still speak of morality without blushing. Miller himself had survived one of the great moral reckonings of the American polity, the postwar Communist scare. While sorting the new world order – the one Trump is so busy disassembling, – some Americans had nothing better to do than inventing conspiracies involving Russian spies and saboteurs lurking around every corner.
Morality has lost some of its stature. It’s unfashionable. On the right, American primacy is amoral. America is good just because it’s America, a kind of circular, sola fide argument from modern nationalism. Connoisseurs on the left have found morality too distastefully bourgeois to entertain. Artists have used morality as a whipping boy for generations. At a time when dusty, old-time morality could come in handy, we struggle with it, like with a bulky sweater from the bottom of the drawer.
When I was young, I might have followed those trends. Morality was for simple minds. But life grinds slowly and patiently on, and the precious intellectual spaces we create end up under its wheel some time. Every choice becomes a moral one. To the extent that I am a philosopher at all, I realise that I am a moral philosopher. Metaphysics have come to bore me. The human project seems the valid one. And morality unfolds with increasing complexity. Aesthetics and rhetoric become moral sciences, our choices and our connections with others.
Doesn’t metaphysics follow moral thought, anyway? Physicists have established that observation shapes reality. And we have found ourselves stuck on the wave-vs-particle conundrum for a half-century or more: what is the nature of a photon or a subatomic unit? It seems it can be both, or either. If it’s a particle, it’s a thing; if it’s a wave, it’s an event.
For most of its history (the time we have been aware of it), the atom has been a thing. We are materialists, and I suppose it took a materialistic society to analyse things, to want to break them down into their composite parts. We discovered nothing moral down there, in the depths of the atomic and sub-atomic … until we discovered that things might be (quantum) events. In the shift, there is a challenge. Inside an event is an action, and inside action is a decision. Plato might disagree that there is no decision in things, but we have lost any sensitivity to that.
Is there a decision inside quantum events? Who knows, but there might be an opportunity in thinking so.