The per-capita income of Senegal in the year The Pirogue was made (2012) was 1,700 euros, and trips across the sea on a fishing skiff can cost up to 2,600 euros.
A Reuters story posted on April 25, 2015 reported that the brother of the ship’s captain claimed that the latter was forced by a greedy gang to take the dangerous job: “My brother was recruited by Libyans to work in a cafe in Libya a few weeks ago, but afterwards he was forced under threat by smugglers to pilot the voyage because he knows a little about the sea and worked with our father fishing” →
Jonah 4, King James Bible.
Here is a crucial scene from the excellent Italian film Terraferma: Three Italian fishermen spot a large number of black Africans stranded on a flimsy lifeboat in the open sea. The black Africans wave and yell for help. The owner of the fishing boat, Ernesto (Mimmo Cuticchio), radios the coast guard and gives them information about the situation. The coast guard orders the fisherman not to go near the Africans but also not to leave the area until their patrol boat arrives. Suddenly, one by one, some of the desperate Africans jump into the sea and attempt to swim toward the fishing boat. Ernesto then decides to move closer to the Africans and help them out of the dangerous sea. But another fisherman reminds him that it is against the law to help illegal immigrants. (This is the rational thing to do.) But the owner of the boat responds: “I’ve never left people on the sea.” (This is not the rational thing to do.) It is that moral code, however, that moral certainty, that is at the heart of Terraferma: these are not Africans, stateless illegals, or whatever; these are humans. The Pirogue, of course, has the exact same situation: sea-stranded black Africans calling for help from a passing boat. But this time the captain of the passing boat is a black African who is transporting black Africans to Europe. This captain does not make the same decision as Ernesto, and so empties his entire trip and trade of all moral substance. (I use “substance” here in a Spinozistic sense—the moral is the all of our species being.)
Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Reality Poem”: Dis is di age af science an teknalagy / but some a wi a deal wid mitalagy / dis is di age af science an’ teknalagy / dis is di age af reality / but some a wi a deal wid mitalagy / dis is di age af science an’ teknalagy / but some a wi check fi antiquity.
I must turn to Wikipedia because I do not have the time or energy to write about this and related nonsense about morality: “The Moral Majority was a prominent American political organization associated with the Christian right and Republican Party. It was founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell and associates, and dissolved in the late 1980s. It played a key role in the mobilization of conservative Christians as a political force and particularly in Republican presidential victories throughout the 1980s” →
The path to this conclusion begins with Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes.
In his book The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark indeed links the expansion of Christianity in the Roman Empire with the success of the social services the community provided during devastating plagues: “The second (reason for the rise of Christianity) is to be found in an Easter letter by Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria. Christian values of love and charity had, from the beginning, been translated into norms of social service and community solidarity. When disasters struck, the Christians were better able to cope, and this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival. This meant that in the aftermath of each epidemic, Christians made up a larger percentage of the population even without new converts. Moreover, their noticeably better survival rate would have seemed a ‘miracle’ to Christians and pagans alive, and this ought to have influenced conversion.”
When I saw the first Star Wars movie in 1977 at the age of eight, I entered the theater a Christian but walked out an atheist. Before seeing the movie, I understood the war of good against evil to be an entirely Christian one: God vs. Satan. Imagine my shock when I saw on the screen a whole different order, a whole different war between the forces of good and the forces of evil—a war, furthermore, that made no mention of Jesus, or Lucifer, or the Last Supper. Yet, in the absence of any Christian codes of goodness, I still sided with that faraway galaxy’s own codes of goodness. As I walked out of the theater, I realized that God was limited, and what was infinite was the good itself, and that the good could take on many different shapes (Obi-Wan Kenobi, John the Baptist, Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Princess Leia, Mary).
What else is the first section of Spinoza’s Ethics but an effort to provide an anthropological account for morality? He wants to liberate God from human morality, recognizing how limited it is. What is good or bad according to us is not what is good or bad according to the universe. Indeed, the universe is cold to such anthropocentric values. The universe is just the universe.
It’s almost impossible for a human female to safely give birth without assistance, a fact that the sociobiolgist Sarah Hrdy places at the center of human sociality in her book Mothers and Others. According to this view, the absence of, say, extensive and moral elaboration in gorilla sociality, can be explained by the absence of helpers during the birth of a gorilla. Human sociality is bonded at and by this crucial moment, by the help that’s needed to birth and raise new humans. And why do human females need help? Because human bodies are weak and human babies have huge heads. As Jared Diamond points out in his short book Why Is Sex Fun: “A one-hundred-pound woman typically gives birth to a six-pound infant, while a female gorilla twice that size (two hundred pounds) gives birth to an infant only half as large (three pounds). As a result, human mothers often died in childbirth before the advent of modern medical care, and women are still attended at birth by helpers (obstetricians and nurses in modern first-world societies, midwives or older women in traditional societies), whereas female gorillas give birth unattended and have never been recorded as dying in childbirth.”
The work of cultural theorist Nancy Fraser and historian Linda Gordon convincingly shows that until the emergence of seventeenth-century European individualism, which also marked the emergence of modern capitalism, the concept of dependency was not negative. Among other things, it structured feudal society: the king depended on God, landlords on the king, peasants on landlords. With neoliberalism, the negative interpretation of dependency has gained ascendance.
Spinoza, Ethics, IVP18S.
My favorite passage in Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy: “I will speak briefly about the most general conditions of life, dwelling on one crucially important fact: Solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any return. The sun gives without ever receiving. Men were conscious of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and they associated its splendor with the act of someone who gives.” This, in essence, is sun worship.
As Spinoza knew all too well, the God in the scriptures, the God who created the universe, was essentially human, the moral animal. But this misconception is to be expected. It’s as natural as the wind. “If a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God.”