Somewhere in the middle Moral Ambition it started to dawn on me. After reading 'the new Bregman' I knew for sure. His appeal to idealists misunderstands what it takes to make real change. Moral ambition, Bregman writes, is like climbing a mountain. Anyone who has quit their pointless job and has reached the top with all their talent in a backpack can finally do the Good: tackling climate change, fighting diseases, preventing a nuclear winter, feeding mouths, curbing AI. Bregman confuses progressive morality with a moral consensus that does not exist and cannot exist.
There may still be some consensus about tackling child mortality and famine. Things are already getting more complicated with nuclear weapons. Let alone AI, poverty, peace, women's rights and climate change. Those challenges are about dividing power. So what is the Good thing to do there is about justice. That makes it more complex than a clear insight that lies on top of a mountain somewhere, waiting for an army of morally ambitious Zuidas accountants to come and get it.
How you view these challenges depends on the answer to a question that has hardly been asked in recent decades. Not even by Bregman. The question has been the basis of all politics for several thousand years: what does a Good, free and just society actually look like?
The many conceivable answers to this question form the essence of a free, pluralistic society. Despite liberal illusions, there is no single rational consensus about what a Good life and a Good society are. Roughly speaking, Andrew Tate also shows moral ambition when he converts his belief in a reactionary social order into a 'cult' (as Bregman advocates) of gullible young men. That this is not the Good that Bregman and I sign up for is exactly the point.
The pillarization and Cold War regulated and organized this ethical and ideological conflict. But God, Marx and Carl Romme are dead, the political parties are deflated and the (neo)liberal dominance sucked the conflict out of politics. What remains are individual suggestions. Bregman's depoliticized ethics, which primarily encourage the individual to do something good, arise from this and it fails to recognize the conflict that idealists have to wage: organized, and for power.
Because there is no one optimal, objectively Good solution for AI or climate change. This is also not the most efficient solution for as many people as possible, a thought with which Bregman flirts. Efficiency is not necessarily fair (and vice versa). Let alone that there is consensus about what is fair.
Idealists are therefore not much interested in mountain climbing. Bregman better start a boxing gym.
Mark Lievisse Adriaanse ([email protected]) replaces Sjoerd de Jong this week
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