Bringing into being an ethics of motion — A meditation on John Ford’s 1950 western, “Wagon Master”
Last week I offered you a short thought for the day called, “It’s always possible to embody truth, even when, technically, we’re not able to tell it” in which drew upon a story told about Shakyamuni Buddha. I wrote it to suggest how we might respond well and honestly to the fact that we are now increasingly living in a world where lying, rather than truth-telling, threatens to become, not just our politicians’, but our whole culture’s basic way of operating. I concluded by saying to you that I would continue this week with a related thought drawing upon John Ford’s poetic 1950 western, “Wagon Master,” which is currently available [to those in the UK] on BBC iPlayer.
But, for a few days, I couldn’t see how best to weave the two pieces together. However, during the week, Celia wrote to me with a comment that made it clear how to proceed. So, thank you, Celia.
Celia pointed out that our current government’s “Rwanda” (asylum and immigration) bill was currently going through the Lords, the second clause of which unilaterally declares that, “every decision-maker must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country.” As one crossbench peer, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, said:
“We are invited to adopt a fiction, to wrap it in the cloak of parliamentary sovereignty and to grant it permanent immunity from challenge. To tell an untruth and call it truth. Why would we go along with that?”
And Celia summed up her note to me by saying that this basically means, “no matter what the evidence before our eyes tells us, it states that law-makers and judges must all go along with the delusion.”
All of which prompted me to reply to Celia more or less as follows . . .
Greetings. Yes, absolutely. It’s there in plain sight now. But, and this is important to note, because it’s now so much in plain sight, and because people feel so powerless to do anything about it, this feeling then serves to make more and more people turn away from looking and so, lo, it ceases to be in plain sight yet again! Indeed, I had two conversations following Sunday’s address in which people admitted to no longer watching or reading the news, at least on a regular basis. It’s all part of the dynamic that Surkov et al. have brought so effectively into play to create utter confusion about what is true and what is false.
This dynamic is what has come to be called “hypernormalization,” something that I wrote about back in February last year. The relevant quote from that piece is from Brandon Harris’s introduction to this word in the New Yorker magazine on November 3rd, 2016:
“The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, in his 2005 book, ‘Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation,’ argues that, during the final days of Russian communism, the Soviet system had been so successful at propagandizing itself, at restricting the consideration of possible alternatives, that no one within Russian society, be they politicians or journalists, academics or citizens, could conceive of anything but the status quo until it was far too late to avoid the collapse of the old order. The system was unsustainable; this was obvious to anyone waiting in line for bread or gasoline, to anyone fighting in Afghanistan or working in the halls of the Kremlin. But in official, public life, such thoughts went unexpressed. The end of the Soviet Union was, among Russians, both unsurprising and unforeseen. Yurchak coined the term “hypernormalization” to describe this process — an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it.”
Our situation is, I remain convinced, analogous. We, too, have developed a society that now daily expresses “an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it.” This also means that, for so many people, our polity’s collapse — of course, if and when it happens — will also be, almost paradoxically, unsurprising and unforeseen.
It’s a miserable analysis, I know, and I genuinely hope I’m wrong. However, that’s why I’m trying to find things (mostly mythopoetic things) to focus upon like John Ford’s film, “Wagon Master” because they show us possible healthy and hopeful ways to live well when the former orders or laws are no longer in play.
In the film you need to recall that the wagon train is in the wilderness, beyond the formal law found in Crystal City, Montana, and yet this disparate bunch of outsiders (horse traders, Mormons, the Medicine Show — with its quack doctor and two women entertainers, one of whom it is implied was also a prostitute — and the Navajo Indians), together somehow manage to create a new, peaceable, ethical community on their long journey west. Even the Cleggs, the lying and violent outlaw gang whom they meet along the way, are given the chance to find their place in this community. However, when Uncle Shiloh Clegg shoots one of the Mormons whilst threatening to steal the seed wagon with its cargo that is “more valuable” to the settlers “than gold itself,” the Cleggs reveal that they utterly refuse this offer. But notice that the new community’s own use of self-defensive violence to kill the Clegg gang doesn’t then lead to the glorification of violence, or to the fetishization of the gun, but instead to its basic rejection of them as acceptable instruments of the new ethical order they are seeking to bring into being. It’s telling that following the gunfight between the two horse traders, Travis and Sandy (the Wagon Masters in the story), and the Cleggs — which takes up only 45 seconds of the film’s entire 1 hour and 22 minutes — a disgusted Travis throws his pistol away into the desert.
Anyway, aside from simply being a beautiful and poetic piece of film-making, it’s long been one of my own basic models to think through how we might be able to go on well following any “unsurprising and unforeseen” journey into the wilderness where the old laws and orders no longer apply.
[It also reminds me of a wonderful line from “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a song that appeared on Bob Dylan’s 1966 album “Blonde on Blonde,” a line which says “To live outside the law you must be honest.” And I think this film is an encapsulation of what that might look like.]
Glad you liked the film.
As ever,
A
Of course, like all cultural artefacts, the film reveals many aspects of the society out of which it was born — 1950s America — which, today, we find problematic — but no cultural artefact can escape this fate. But this does not mean we should it away as fatally flawed, or to seek to overcome its shortcomings by retelling it in some revisionist, reimagined and purer way. As Heidegger memorably, and I think correctly, said, “Overcoming is worthy only when we think about incorporation” (Martin Heidegger: “Overcoming Metaphysics” in the “End of Philosophy”, trans J. Stambaugh, Harpur and Row, New York 1973, p. 91).
And isn’t precisely just such a process of incorporation visible in this film where, without ceasing to be uniquely who they are, horse traders, Mormons, a quack doctor, show people, a prostitute and Navajo Indians also overcome their differences by incorporating themselves into a new, creative mixture and expression of order that isn’t based upon ideas of fixed and final purity but upon creative, fluid conceptions of in what consists honesty, compassion and tolerance of, and sometimes respect of, difference.
Now, as many of you know, I am persuaded by what is called a “philosophy of motion” in which what it is for anything to be the kind of thing it is, it is to be something in motion. And, as the philosopher of movement, Thomas Nail points out, an “ethics of motion” may be summed up as “an ethics of living and dying well together” (Lucretius II, p. 112). Again, this is precisely what is happening in Wagon Master — a story all about migration, mixing and movement of people’s bodies, ideas and emotions, of horses and wagons, dogs, rivers, sand, sky, and so on. Everything is in motion, omnia migrant.
It’s greatest philosophical flaw — in my opinion that is — is that it remains wedded to the idea that there is some perfect end, law or land to which they, and by implication we the viewers, are assuredly heading. But, a gentle process of re-story-ation can be employed to suggest that the images of the promised land, the kingdom of heaven or the pure-land in the west that John Ford depicts, and which all the characters in the film desire (including even the Cleggs in their own way) and which is, quite literally, moves them — all these images should be interpreted, not as pictures of a final, static, imperturbable, future state, but as a com-forting — in the etymological sense of giving strength to — a comforting refrain to sing together around the campfire along the never-ending trail of life’s journey. A refrain that encourages us to keep moving, to keep mixing, to keep creating new ways of moving together well in our living and dying.
Be assured, in the coming years, we will be in great need of such songs, such refrains to sing, to help us move forward, together, into a better and way of being in the world than the one we are displaying at the moment.
“Wagons west!”
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