Thoughts on complicity before reading Complicit by Max Bazerman

I have been thinking regularly about complicity for the last several years. It became a central ethical theme of mine in 2016 and it has occupied my thoughts and ideas since. And yet, it recently occurred to me that I seem to be using it as a folk remedy, a kind of folk science in which I use the concept in my thought and sometimes in my conversations as a kind of prop without careful definition of what I mean when I say it. So I decided to work on that, and came home from last month's Tucson Festival of Books with a stack of treasures that includes Complicit by Max Bazerman.

I haven't started it yet (I'm currently slogging through the Six Myths of Evolution mess by Simon Conway Morris). And this means I have an opportunity to do a little experiment. In the spirit of pre- and post-instruction assessments in education, I thought I'd write about what I think now about complicity. Then after I've read the book, I'll write about what I've learned and what has changed.

First, why 2016? It's not that the concept was new to me then. It's that a particular kind of evil was erupting, coincident with my own reflection as a secular humanist (aka atheist) on my many years as a Christian. It was the year of the public emergence of the hate-based cult of Donald Trump, a cult that relies almost entirely on conservative Christianity. Then, as now, I pointed out that Trump is not the cause of the sickness of the right — he's a symptom. The causes include nationalism, racism, ignorance, dishonesty, and fear-based hate. All of those things have deep roots in American conservative Christianity. And for more than 25 years, I had been a part of American conservative Christianity, which I'll call evangelicalism.

I was haunted by this. I never supported anti-LGBTQ hate, have never been a creationist, never embraced religious nationalism. I have always loved democracy and have defended the right to choose for decades. And yet I had been a part of the core movement of right-wing hate in America. I had been an evangelical. I concluded that I had been complicit in an evil. I further concluded that evangelicals, indeed all Christians, are complicit in the ongoing demolition of American democracy and the broad right-wing assault on science, knowledge, and human rights.

Now actually, most evangelicals are beyond complicit and are explicitly working against democracy and against basic human rights, but this is why I charge all other Christians with complicity.

Why would I do that? Isn't that unfair?

The answer lies in my current understanding of complicity, which seems to rely on two underdeveloped ideas in my head:

1) you are complicit in an evil if you accept membership in a community engaged in that evil; and

2) you are complicit in any evil that you don't try to stop.

An important additional aspect is this: by "evil" I mean actions and not beliefs. People who oppose same-sex marriage are people who hold despicable beliefs, but the evil doesn't happen until they seek to deprive others of this right. In general, I hold Christianity to be a collection of beliefs that are mostly appalling when not downright ridiculous, but I don't talk of evil until (perhaps inevitably) the beliefs turn to damaging action.

I freely grant that both of these standards are problematic at best; my aim here is to unpack my thinking, however poorly developed, and to see how it develops after reading the book. Here are a few comments and clarifications on my two standards.

Accepting membership in a community can take lots of forms, as can the existence or definition of a "community." Registering as a Democrat or Republican is accepting membership in a community. Calling oneself a progressive or a conservative is not. Joining a church (officially or not) is accepting membership in a community. Calling oneself a theist or atheist is not. I think those are examples of easy distinctions. The harder cases involve participation in a community without "joining" it, and the most obvious questions (to me) are about being a customer (of a business) or consumer (of a product or service). Other hard cases include choosing a place to live; that one has been on my mind a lot. In general, it becomes harder to define "membership" and "community" when the "community" becomes large and/or diffuse: examples here are professions (e.g. science or medicine) and states (e.g. Arizona or the United States).

Some might think that my second standard, failing to try to stop an evil, is the most problematic of the two. I don't, because I take it to be obvious that there are vexing and even impossible questions about practical limitations. Any conversation about my complicity in any evil will have to address my capacity to oppose it, in light of my finitude and in light of whatever else I'm doing with my resources. Such calculations might be difficult or even impossible, but the question itself — are you trying to stop evil? — is straightforward. In short, I'm not considering trolley problems in my thoughts about complicity.

It's the first standard — about what it means to "join" a "community" engaged in evil — that raises the hardest questions when I think about my complicity (past and present) and that of others I want to encourage.

I think this post gives me a framework to bring to Complicit. I expect to learn a lot!