According to historian James Schmidt, at the center of Kant’s discussion was a similar matter, that of whether clergymen (or the church) should have a place on what started to be seen—then as much as now—as a purely civic matter—that is, the signing of a marriage contract. Should a Clergyman preside at wedding ceremonies? That was the question that incited Kant’s response. As one of his contemporary laid it out, the problem of clergymen presiding at wedding was due to the fact that “unenlightened citizens” usually felt compelled to give a greater weight to marriage contracts—since they were “made with God himself”—than to other types of contracts—merely “made by men.” For Kant and many of his fellow thinkers, it was assumed that “enlightened citizens” shouldn’t behave that way; that they should do without all kinds of ceremonies and prejudices, and therefore that they should judge the quality of contracts not based on “dogmas and formulas”—like that of religiously presided matrimonies—but on reason. For them, civil life was synonymous of one’s public life and, in that realm, one should be entitled to freely “make public use of one’s reason in all matters,” including marriage and religious cult. So, having a clergymen presiding what should be a civic act—the signing of a contract—was problematic in two counts. First, it promoted an unhealthy reliance of civic acts on “dogmas and formulas” that prevented people from using their own understanding and natural endowments. Second, such a reliance kept people away from freedom—that is, from the free exercise of their public reason [1].

Recently, I was reminded of this old controversy as I read the case of Jessica Ahlquist, a Rhode Island teenager who has been battling some of her town’s authorities on the issue of a religious banner that has been on display in her school’s gymnasium for almost half a century. Jessica, a self-proclaimed atheist, believes that such types of religious displays shouldn’t be allowed in public schools. Basically, she considered the banner offensive since it is an intromission on her own civic or public life. And I guess that Kant—as many other “enlightened men”—would have agreed with her.

The separation between religion and the state is not—as many modern-day American conservatives seem to believe—a matter of opinions. In fact, it is one of the fundamental premises on which the project of Enlightenment was founded—the same project that inspired American republicanism two centuries ago. And it is something that Roger Williams, the liberal theologian who founded the state of Rhode Island—Jessica’s  own home state—understood very well (as writer John M. Barry reminded us on a recent op-ed on Jessica’s case).

In 1636, Williams left the intolerant Massachusetts—whose Puritans were particularly bigoted, as the Salem’s witch trials would later demonstrate—to establish the Providence Plantation, what later would become modern-day Rhode Island. There, he established a settlement in which a “wall of separation” was setup between religion dogma and the business of the state. As Barry explains, Williams understood early on that “any government-sponsored prayer required a public official to pass judgment on something to do with God,” something he considered “a sacrilegious presumption.” In his little essay, Kant argues similarly:

“It indeed detracts from [a ruler’s majesty] if he interferes in [his subjects’ religious affairs] by subjecting the writings in which his subjects attempt to clarify their religious ideas to governmental supervision. This holds whether he acts from his own highest insight—whereby he calls upon himself the reproach, Caesar non eat supra grammaticos [Caesar is not above the grammarians] —as  well as, indeed even more, when he demeans his highest authority by supporting the spiritual despotism of some tyrants in his state over his other subjects.”

I guess that Kant would have agreed with Williams’ assertion that “when one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics.” In other words, religion always looses. That is why whenever the state gets involved in religion, the latter ended up serving to the interests of the “tyrants” who use it to their own political (and economic) profit. At the end, it is always a zero-sum game for religious integrity and freedom—politicians win and religion loses.

By the way, in 1984, Michel Foucault published a comment on Kant’s essay, returning to the original question addressed by Kant’s essay: What is enlightenment? There, he argues that what the Enlightenment really means is certain ethos or philosophical attitude “in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.” I suspect that Jessica may agree with him, since she—despite her age—embodies such an enlightened attitude very well.

Notes

[1] Kant introduces here a distinction between what he calls the public and private uses of reason:

The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among mankind; the private use of reason may, however, often be very narrowly restricted, without otherwise hindering the progress of enlightenment. By the public use of one’s own reason I understand the use that anyone as a scholar makes of reason before the entire literate world. I call the private use of reason that which a person may make in a civic post or office that has been entrusted to him. Now in many affairs conducted in the interests of a community, a certain mechanism is required by means of which some of its members must conduct themselves in an entirely passive manner so that through an artificial unanimity the government may guide them toward public ends, or at least prevent them from destroying such ends. Here one certainly must not argue, instead one must obey. However, insofar as this part of the machine also regards himself as a member of the community as a whole, or even of the world community, and as a consequence addresses the public in the role of a scholar, in the proper sense of that term, he can most certainly argue, without thereby harming the affairs for which as a passive member he is partly responsible. Thus it would be disastrous if an officer on duty who was given a command by his superior were to question the appropriateness or utility of the order. He must obey.

What Jessica is asking for is nothing but her right to exercise her public reason on a matter that—although belongs to a different realm (be it a particular church or a household)—has been imposed on her publicly. Within the Enlightened liberal-democratic tradition, the reason why church and state should be kept apart has to do precisely with that—with protecting one’s right to dissent on things that are addressed to the public, while, at the time same time, protecting the rights of religious organizations (or private institutions or communities, etc.) to privately impose obedience on their members.

What is going on here is just a symptom—one among many others—of a deeper problem and maybe America’s democracy’s biggest challenge ever. It uncovers a profound gap between formal democracy and actual democracy—though Tocqueville may have foreseen it. As Žižek explains in his book Violence, American democratic habits are becoming less and less democratic, and they constitute an undercurrent, a dark unconscious that threatens the whole system. And, since the gap between formal democracy—which is what many interest groups, both conservative and liberal, pretend to defend—and actual democracy—the totally fragmented and dysfunctional hotchpotch of contradictory interests involved in actual politics and social life—is becoming abysmal, closing such a gap may end up being almost an impossible task. As Žižek rightly argues,”These obscene underground, the unconscious terrain of habits, is what is really difficult to change.” And that is why I claim that this may constitute America’s biggest challenge.

Today, we celebrate Dickens’ Bicentenary. A good time to remember the man who, as Orwell understood well, was smart enough to comprehend that happiness can never be convincingly portrayed as permanent.

The film is about the events leading to the demise of an American investment bank during the financial crisis of 2007-2008. It’s modeled on the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the investment bank that filed for bankruptcy in late 2008 after big losses due to the subprime mortgage crisis. In summary, it tells the story of a group of executives who discover, with the help of junior analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), a flaw in the software the company uses to calculate risk. Due to this flaw, the company is now exposed to monumental losses should the value of its mortgage-based securities decreases, as it is believed most likely to happen. The discovery initiates a chain of events that mobilizes the upper echelon of the company, including its CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons). In order to save their own financial interests, Tuld and his head of security Jared Cohen (Simon Baker) made the decision of selling off all the company’s toxic assets before the market realizes the truth about those same assets’ real value. A decision that is opposed by Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), the company’s head of sales, who understands that in doing so Tuld is threatening the future of the company — no one will ever trust the company once they have realized what is about to heppen — as well as spreading the risk throughout the whole financial system. At the end, Rogers agrees to help Tuld, after the latter offers him a substantial compensation.

Despite the apparent simplicity of its plot, Margin Call is a brilliant exploration of the ethos of modern day capitalist society. The word ethos refers to the set of beliefs and values that guide the behavior of the different members of a community. This ethos configures our particular Zeitgeist — say, our particular cultural and moral climate. Two words summarize this ethos: money and, ultimately, greed.

It’s all about money… isn’t it?

At first sight, money seems to be at the chore of all Margin Call‘s characters. For them, money seems to be everything. It is the fundamental unit they use to measure up every aspect of their lives — from success, to happiness, loyalty, and so on. For instance, when Sam learned that his dog has cancer and is going to die, he complains about the thousand dollars a week he is spending to keep his pet alive. It is as if this amount truly represents the sincerity of his feelings towards his dog.

A similar thing happens with Tuld. He knows he cannot demand loyalty from his subalterns. I suspect he wouldn’t accept it anyway — at least not for free. Loyalty for him should be translated into money. So, he buys it. He pays Eric Dale (just a few hours after he’s been laid off from the same firm) to come back to the company and sit there for a few hours doing nothing, so to prevent the former employee from leaking what is about to happen. He pays him well, since that’s the only way he can guarantee Dale’s faithfulness. The same happens with head of risk Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore). Tuld decides that she is the head that must roll after the storm — although she reminds him that she was the one who warned both him and his protegee (Jared Cohen) about the coming collapse. He pays her as well, to buy her silence, at least for one day. At the end, Tuld buys Sam also, despite the fact that the latter will do whatever he can to serve the firm’s best interest — and it seems likely he would do it for free. However, Tuld doesn’t understand about loyalty unless it’s expressed in terms of money. So, he gives Sam a generous check.

There is this sequence in which Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), Sam’s senior salesman, is outside watching New York city from the building’s roof. He is there along with Peter and Seth Bregman (Penn Bradgley), another junior analyst. One of the analysts asked Will about what is going on, about what he thinks will happen. He replies: “they don’t loose money, no matter if everybody else does.” With “they” he means Tuld, Cohen, and all the top executives. They never loose money, no matter if by doing so they take their own company down — as they actually ended up doing — or take the whole financial system down, as it will probably happen at the end. The survival of the fit, of the job-creators, is the only rule in place. Every one is on his/her own. No one cares about what could happen to anyone else but oneself. The job-creators must survive even if it is a the price of millions of other people’s jobs. That’s the logic of it all.

In the closing scene, Sam is on his ex-wife’s yard digging a hole to bury his dead dog. When she comes out and warns him that the police was on its way, all he can say is that he couldn’t think of any other place to bury their pet but its former home. His ex-wife sees him in all his misery and decides to go back inside, asking him to take care of himself. The movie closes with a sudden black screen. However, although we can’t see anything, we still are able to listen to the sound of the shovel scratching against the solid ground. We can’t help to think about the metaphor of this last scene — a hidden shovel digging the hole we all will soon be buried in. We are left wondering who or what the dog itself is a metaphor of.

The banality of greed

Hannah Arendt once described Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann — indicted and executed in Israel for crimes during the Holocaust — this way:

[He] was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothings would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his own personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. [...] He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminal of that period. And if this is “banal” and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from [him], that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these “lofty words” should completely becloud the reality – of his own death. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.

According to Žižek, violence may come in many forms. There is the subjective type of violence we see in assaults, torture, war, and all other physical violent acts. It is the type of violence Eichmann was indicted for. Also, there is objective violence. This last kind of violence may come in two different forms: a symbolic form and a systemic form. Symbolic violence is the type of violence embodied in “language and its different forms” — modern-day political campaign are usually full of this kind of violence. Systemic violence is the “often catastrophic consequences of the functioning of our economic and political systems.” The Latin American Debt Crisis of the 1980s; the Great Depression; all these are examples of systemic violence. The same applies to the events depicted in Chandor’s movie.

In the latter case, there were neither concentration camps nor gas chambers. The number of corpses were not as many as in Auschwitz, although the number of virtual casualties have been almost the same… so far. A parallel argument to the one Arendt made on Eichmann could be made of the people who participated in the 2007-2008 financial crisis. A similar depiction of the Nazi criminal could be given of those involved in this systemic act of violence. It was the same “remoteness from reality,” the same “thoughtlessness” that could “wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together.”

The scene on the roof is a clear evidence of how Eichmannian these characters are. Will Emerson hangs on the edge of the building, risking a long fall, only for the thrill of it. There is no motives, no thoughts, no sympathy towards the others (Peter and Seth) who witness the stunt in panic… only a sense of power, the power of control, of having the last word. Tuld, at the end, admits that the whole thing is not really about money… it is power. But it isn’t power either; it is the hunger for more, the same drive towards the void that led Will on the edge of the roof. Money is just a vehicle, a fetish used to reach for what really moves them: greed.

If Eichmann was guilty of one form of banality, the banality of evil, the Tulds of the world are guilty of another, the banality of greed. The biggest achievement of Margin Call resides in having made such banality visible that it seems almost a caricature. However, fantasy here is the real thing, and the alleged real is just a fantasy.