A Note on the Loss of the Ordinary

We live in extraordinary times.

That is a cliché, to be sure, but it is a pertinent one when we think about the current state of human affairs, with climate change brought about by the carbon economy of late capitalism having an impact on so many dimensions of life: one million animal species predicted to go extinct within the next thirty years, the coming displacement of hundreds of millions of people due to rising sea levels, the impact of drought contributing to current wars in the Middle East and ongoing refugee crises, and a dramatic intensification of economic inequality within advanced capitalist countries contributing to the rise of new authoritarian, anti-liberal, ethno-nationalist, neo-fascist movements, in short, a potential upending of what we might want to call ordinary life in most corners of the Earth. The question we face is whether the very idea of the ordinary as a place of meaning and a resource for life can survive in the face of the catastrophic. The catastrophic refers to those phenomena—as already mentioned, war, extreme weather events, famine, drought, genocide, and economic depression—that tend to erase the signposts that may lead us back to some semblance of continuity, toward a (re)construction of the social, political, and cultural orders that we previously inhabited.

A politics of the ordinary must struggle with this question because the political survival of the ordinary depends upon what Stanley Cavell once called the ongoing “conversation of justice.” In contradistinction to the rules-based order of justice advanced by John Rawls—with consent being founded upon the acceptance of one’s position prior to the lifting of a veil of ignorance—Cavell suggested that consent is something that is ongoing, and moreover, “Consent to society is neither restricted nor unrestricted; its content is part of the conversation of justice.” Those who find themselves unable to consent to the terms of and conditions by which they find themselves within a society, that of being treated unjustly, will try to engage the terms of the social contract by participation in more conversation. If that conversation fails to occur, between those who believe they are being treated unfairly and those who are supposedly doing the treating, then political activism or even revolt, a refusal of further consent, will happen. Or a more passive withdrawal into a quiet discontent may occur, not passivity, but a form of resignation. Cavell suggests this is what Henry David Thoreau is thinking of when he refers to the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. (We certainly may read all sorts of signs of withdrawal of consent throughout contemporary American society in the various activisms of both Trumpian authoritarianism and a newly activated left.)

Cavell was not only interested in the consent from below. He was also concerned with consent from above. He wrote,

Consent from above is an acknowledgement of one’s sense of being compromised by the persistent failures of democracy and shows the persistence of one’s consent to this shameful condition of society by living now in an illustrious monarchy, hence one reachable from here (and for those of us here, only from here); which means living as an example of human partiality, that is to say, whatever Moral Perfectionism knows as the human individual, one who is not everything but is open to the further self, in oneself and in others, which means holding oneself in knowledge of the need for change; which means, being one who lives in promise, as a sign, or representative human, which in turn means expecting oneself to be, making oneself intelligible as an inhabitant now also of a further realm … and to show oneself prepared to recognize others as belonging there; as if we were all teachers or, say, philosophers.

What Cavell was suggesting, in his inimitable voice, is that those who benefit the most in a society—those who are privileged, socially, economically, culturally—have the deepest responsibility to consent through an ongoing reexamination of their privilege and the price that others pay for that privilege, to mitigate...