Individual moral agency resists being dissolved into larger social movements

Evidence

The political effi of these movements is, I would suggest, a function of the work they perform in the ethical realm-those strategies of cultivation through which embodied attachments to historically specifi forms of truth come to be forged. Their political project, therefore, can only be understood through an exploration of their ethical practices. This requires that we rethink not only our conventional understanding of what constitutes the political but also what is the substance of ethics. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 256 (#complicates, via linked claim)

All social organization consists therefore in neutralizing the disruptive and deregulating impact or moral behaviour. This effect is achieved through a number of complementary arrangements: (1) stretching the distance between action and its consequences beyond the reach of moral impulse; (2) exempting some ‘others’ from the class of potential objects of moral conduct, of potential ‘faces’; (3) dissembling other human objects of action into aggregates of functionally specific traits, held separate so that the occasion for re-assembling the face does not arise, and the task set for each action can be free from moral evaluation. Through these arrangements, organization does not promote immoral behaviour; it does not sponsor evil, as some detractors would hasten to charge, yet it does not promote good either, despite its own self-promotion. It simply renders social action adiaphoric (originally, adiaphoron meant a thing declared indifferent by the Church) – neither good nor evil, measurable against technical (purpose-oriented or procedural) but not moral values. By the same token, it renders moral responsibility for the Other ineffective in its original role of the limit imposed on ‘the effort to exist’. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613 (#complicates, via linked claim)

If we examine the material I have presented in this book about the character of the piety movement, it is quite apparent that this particular strand of the Islamist movement is only marginally organized around questions of rights, recognition, and political representation. Indeed, as I have shown, the mosque participants are quite ambivalent about the question of identity and are, in fact, emphatically critical of those Muslims who understand their religious practices as an expression of their Muslim or Arab identity rather than as a means of realizing a certain kind of virtuous life (see chapters 2 and 4). In this sense, it is not toward recogn that the activities of the mosque or the piety movement are oriented but rather toward the retraining of ethical sensibilities so as to create a new social and moral order. In light of this, it would therefore be a mistake to assume that all contemporary social movements fi their genesis in a politics of identity and should be analyzed as responses to the juridical language of rights, recognition, and distributive justice. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1283 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Individual salvation attempts mystify freedom while only social action authenticates it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1916; Political movements fail without unachievable one-on-one ethical encounters — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2178; Burroughs prioritized internal moral reform over the physical alley conditions — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 926 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Movements’ political force depends on their ethical cultivation practices #complicates (0.90) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 256
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil #complicates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613
• Some social movements aim at ethical self-formation rather than rights and recognition politics #complicates (0.85) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1283
• Collective moral disengagement arises from members mutually exonerating each role in a shared system #complicates (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 685
• Group moral disengagement exceeds the sum of individual members’ mind-sets #complicates (0.84)
• Dispersed systems of many participants make moral self-exoneration nearly boundless #complicates (0.83)