To Build a Road

Man As An End: A Defense of Humanism by Alberto Moravia

The only truly rational means is violence.

                                                                                Alberto Moravia

Now, more than ever before in my lifetime, it is money that is the nation’s Holy Writ, the people who manipulate it—the CEOs and CFOs, the brokers and accountants—our sages and savants. Indeed for many their reach, their vision, is oracular. Yet one needn’t be a prophet to understand that our adherence to this faith, this cult, has proven catastrophic in its impact on the environment, on our civic life, on our very understanding of what it means to be human.

While the base, reductive thinking of Wall Street was once restricted to the financial sector itself, to the hawking of stocks and bonds, to the humdrum vernacular of saving accounts and IRAs, it now has permeated every aspect of life in this country. Not only has this mercenary dogma redefined and subverted democratic governance, healthcare, publishing, sports, news, fashion, entertainment, policing, urban planning, public transportation, food systems, social services, national security, the military, water and land management, social media, the criminal justice system, and international relations, but it has even permeated the Arts and education, traditionally the bastions of civil, humanistic discourse.

The result is that now virtually every significant decision in the country is made (or at least highly influenced) by some man or woman with an MBA. Time and again their decisions are sold to us (for now everything is sold) as logical, rational (meaning tested, scientific, objective), as justly, even supremely, pragmatic. Just ask these ‘experts’, these mystagogues; they will show you the numbers on the page.

Of course to treat something—anything—‘objectively’, is to abstract it, deform it, to exempt it from the messy realm of human affairs, so as to make it manipulable, so as to make it useful, profitable. Look around you: nearly everything these days has been reduced to a ‘science’, a technique, a method to be mastered and exploited by rational means. A scam, a pyramid scheme, this ubiquitous corporate gospel is the ultimate realpolitik.  

If neo-capitalism (or anti-humanism) was a concern to Moravia in 1963, when he compiled this book, it (like the state of the environment today) is now a matter of despair. His warning is plain:

So we must have no illusions. We shall have an ever larger number of cheap, well-made consumer goods; our life will become more and more comfortable; and out arts, even the most demanding and difficult ones, indeed those especially, will become more and more accessible to the masses; and at the same time we shall feel more and more that at the heart of this prosperity lies nothingness or a fetishism which, like all fetishisms, is an end in itself and cannot be put to the service of man.

In his first essay, “Man As An End”, he goes further to say:

Since then [in Bismark’s Germany] the strides made by Machiavellianism have been triumphant, like a headlong, irresistible river that swells and increases in power thanks to the very obstacles it overcomes on its way. Machiavellianism now seems inevitable, it is taken for granted and seems to have no alternative. In the field of pure thought it appears invincible, and it is the ineluctable center towards which all roads in politics seem to lead… The only result of the universal and indiscriminate practice of Machiavellianism in modern times has been to provoke the two biggest wars in history and to bring infinite suffering and immense destruction on mankind.

Arguably the most powerful part of this book for me appears in his first and aforementioned essay, “Man As An End”, an essay and introduction in which Moravia, by way of an example, describes two approaches to building a road. The first, a method employed since the beginning of time, involves nothing less than an exhaustive study of the land and peoples through which the new road would pass. As the road is meant to serve them, such an approach makes sense. It follows that central to this approach must be the careful consideration of the landscape itself, the hills and mountains, the streams and rivers, the fishes and mammals and plants. What’s more, the planners must get to know the people who reside there, their farms and villages, their hunting and fishing grounds, their churches and temples and shrines. They must devote months, even years, to familiarizing themselves with the local customs and traditions, living closely with the locals, as one of their own. Only in this way will the planners know if the construction of the road makes sense, if it will enrich rather than impoverish the locals’ lives. 

Of course you know the other way. Trump and his kind have made of virtue of it. Writes Moravia:

The second way is just the opposite and consists in building the road without bothering about the obstacles. In this case my road will cut across the farm land, span the river at its widest point, flatten the homesteads. I shall hack down mills, oil presses, chapels and workshops, fill in the wells, eliminate the sports ground. Furthermore I shall dynamite hundreds of thousands of cubic rock and dry up hundreds of thousands of square yards of marshland.

Nothing binds me to build the road in one way or the other. The law is on my side. There is a decree of my government whose execution is guaranteed by force. I can do whatever I want: I can even kill the inhabitants down to the last man and destroy all the farms and farmland… It is enough to say that I want to build a road.

In the first scenario the people and the environment are considered the end itself, the very reason for the road, if the road is to be built at all, while in the second the people and the environment are resources, tools, things, but the means to an end that has little or nothing do with them. 

Peter Adam Nash