Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

36. Morals

36 Morals Dismissing religious objects as empty or flat leaves religion weak. Without objects, religious practices and instruments lose their power to save. In an object-oriented theology, however, this loss has consequences not only for humans but nonhumans. Humans are not alone in their need for grace. ‘‘Everything happens as if, the farther forward you move in time, the more the Churches have resigned themselves to save only humans, and in humans, only their disembodied souls’’ (WS 463). But grace lies in the opposite direction. When it comes to objects, our salvation is intertwined . Neither can we be saved without them, nor they without us. Religion involves our being saved by nonhuman objects and religion depends on our being the salvation of nonhuman objects. ‘‘What use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world?’’ (WS 463). Latour sees this spreading interdependence as both the beginning and end of morality. Unsettled by this 140 interdependence, morality cultivates doubt about the reduction of objects to means. Religion, geared into morality, must actively cultivate doubt. ‘‘We can define morality as uncertainty about the proper relation between means and ends’’ (PN 155). Latour is willing to see this approach as an extension of ‘‘Kant’s famous definition of the obligation ‘not to treat human beings simply as means but always also as ends’—provided that we extend it to nonhumans as well’’ (PN 155). If nonhumans are recognized as agents rather than puppets, this extension is difficult to avoid. To be an object—human or nonhuman—is to always be both means and end. Objects are ecologies of mutual imposition. On Latour’s account, this is why ecological crises ‘‘present themselves as generalized revolts of the means: no entity— whale, river, climate, earthworm, tree, calf, cow, pig, brood —agrees any longer to be treated ‘simply as a means’ but insists on being treated ‘always also as an end’ ’’ (PN 155–156). For Latour, morality is essentially procedural. The world does not come preformatted and, as a result, it is impossible to more than provisionally reconcile the competing, overlapping , and not entirely compatible claims of the multitude . In the absence of definitive resolutions, morality is the business of preventing any settlement from being treated as final. Or, morality is the business of always adding to the latest concatenated chain one more object. ‘‘To every ‘we want’ of politics, the moralist will add, ‘Yes, but what do they want?’’’ (PN 158). Morality is the principled addition of this doubt to every multilateral settlement. ‘‘Thanks to the moralists, every set has its complementary counterpart that comes to haunt it, every collective has its worry, every interior has its reminder of the artifice by means of which it was designed’’ (PN 160). Whether the objects most directly involved found the settlement to be locally agreeable or not, Morals 141 morality demands that the whole thing be added up again. Morality is ‘‘the obstinate, ceaseless, overwhelming, exhausting resumption of the task of representation’’ (WL 153). Morality is this ‘‘Again!’’ that the principle of irreduction itself imposes. In this sense, ‘‘morality is from the beginning inscribed in the things which, thanks to it, oblige us to oblige them’’ (MT 258). Stemming directly from the ceaseless, ordinary give and take of objects, these moral obligations can’t be dispensed with or refused. Nonhumans can’t be excluded from moral consideration because morality is not itself a specifically human thing. ‘‘Morality is no more human than technology, in the sense that it would originate from an already constituted human who would be master of itself as well as the universe. Let us say that it traverses the world and, like technology, that it engenders in its wake forms of humanity, choices of subjectivity, modes of objecti fication, various types of attachment’’ (MT 254). Morals, as provisional settlements, may only be conventional agreements but the conventions they depend on always admit both humans and nonhumans. Morals, like facts, are just posturing if they can’t get both human and nonhuman objects to line-up behind them. As with any other kind of object , the strength and durability of a moral settlement is directly proportional to the quantity and diversity of the objects aligned with it. ‘‘Every time the debate over values appears, the number of parties involved, the range of stakeholders in the discussion, is always extended’’ (PN 106). The mantra...