The Ethics of Humility

__________________________________________________ The Ethics of Humility: William T. Vollmann’s Ethical Methodology and the Post-Liberal Perspective __________________________________________________ Phillip W. Sroka III Anti-Liberalisms Seminar Professor Elizabeth Anker Fall 2023 Cornell University ABSTRACT: In Agee and Evans' seminal work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee attempts to portray the life of the impoverished 'Other.' This is done, however, through a Marxist lens and as such presupposes an ideological methodology with its own foregone conclusions about who such people 'are' (or rather who Agee thinks they should be, or maybe even how they appear to Agee). This is indicative of much 'leftist' conceptions of alterity, for in their attempt to empower the working class, they project a paternalistic, almost missionary, identity onto the subject - thus making them an 'it' rather than a 'thou' in Martin Buber's terminology. This distorts our view of the subject since it is not allowed to express its own values, interpretations, and predictions of and for itself. William T. Vollmann replicates Agee's subject but approaches it from a radically different method in his book Poor People. Rather than approaching the subject through an idealized lens, Vollmann commissions the subjects' time, allows them to express how they feel about their lives, and privileges the subjects' own image of themselves with the simple question: "Why are you poor?" This paper will argue that this method of ethical humility when approaching a subject may point us towards what I will term a "post-liberal" perspective. Rather than engaging in 'identity politics' (which has captivated much of contemporary liberalism's attention for the past decade or so, which itself is being co-opted by the new right and, as I will argue, is victim to the same ideological flaw of Agee's methodology by homogenizing whole swaths of unique and often conflicting perspectives into a physical trait that can be lobbied for), we should be privileging the subject, not as an idealized and responsibilized individual, but in the closest approximation to their full subjectivity wherein responsibility is transparently shared between actors to negotiate political ends. In other words: we need an ethical methodology. By incorporating Vollmann's deceptively simple method of allowing others to speak, we can better choose how and when we engage as political subjects. We participate as a choice. And that choice cannot effectively be made under false pretenses. Keywords: Liberalism, Alterity, Marxism, Methodology, Ethics, Politics, Neoliberalism “The stranger’s legs may be approachable, but the stranger himself in his immensity stands too tall and far off in poverty to be ascertained in the easy way that our observers can see each other.” – Vollmann; Poor People Introduction: If we truly wish to combat the new right on the political landscape of neoliberalism, we need a new perspective by which to relate to each other as political subjects. The left, after having forged the methods of the new right, is now lagging behind them in its methodological approach in that it has been married to a romantic notion of who the political subject ultimately is. The right, by contrast, has seized upon the organizational and political strategies of the left but in a cynical way that seizes upon the utility of these methods in a tongue-and-cheek way with little concern about their original intent and goals. In other words, they have inverted the values of the left while forging ahead with their strategies of political efficacy. By asking such questions on deciding how we best move forward under neoliberalism, liberalism needs to look past its prior notions of individuality to develop an affective movement of people that will finally do justice to its values. Questions about neoliberalism have become a common trend in the contemporary political arena as the reverberations from the post-Trump era continue to ripple across American culture. Neoliberalism, broadly defined as an ideology in this paper, will stand for the lens through which conservative and progressive subjects navigate the ideals of liberalism in a post-modern climate. The answer to this aporia between post-modern methods of critique while preserving the core liberal values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will therefore lie in developing this post-liberal perspective. In this ecosystem, on the left of the political spectrum, ‘leftists’ have had a bad habit of projecting a paternalistic conception of the impoverished ‘Other’ through a working class, proletarian lens loaded with over a century of dogma and distortion of who the working class should be as opposed to how it really is. I call this leftism’s ‘evangelical tendency:’ sending Marxist missionaries to convert the poor of a nation into a bona fide “proletariat.” On the right of the political spectrum, we have a seemingly ever strengthening resurgent new right who have adopted leftist methods of organizing and direct action which has been succeeding far better than the left could ever dream in terms of organizational size and strength. From the Federalist Society and its hold on the Supreme Court to the January 6th insurrection by populist grass-roots organizations, the right has surpassed the left’s abilities at achieving its goals; be they revolutionary of reformist. The critiques presented in this paper therefore apply equally to the right’s conception of the individual for it has been inherited by this new trend of utilizing critical theory and post critique within the new right’s intelligentsia. How the left decides to engage with this ‘Other’ will therefore be the determining factor for who will win out, as it is only by capturing the hearts of people that we build a lasting force. Moreover, this is an urgent task for the left, for as long as we continue to play the same game, the right will continue to out resource, out position, and ultimately defeat any possible resistance to the perpetuation of neoliberalism. To illustrate this perspective, I will contrast Agee and Evan’s journalistic portrait of the working poor in 1930s America, entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with William T. Vollmann’s comparable but contemporary project to capture the same subject, Poor People. James Agee and Walker Evans attempt a novel feat of journalism for their time: to portray the impoverished American in the Dust Bowl through reportage and photography. Originally an assignment for New York Magazine, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men began in 1936 as a project to record the daily life and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers visually and textually. However, Agee and Evans, as I will argue, err in their ideological method of depicting this ‘Other’ through an already presupposed identity. As the inscription to the work opening the text lays out: “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en Too little care of this! Take physick, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou may’st shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just.  Workers of the world, unite and fight. You have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win.” (xii-xiii) Furthermore, Agee appends this inscription with an endnote that cautions the reader that these words are intended to “mislead those who will be misled by them” (538). The first theme is poverty, but this second, assumed theme, which is not dealt with directly, concerns the progressive ideals of liberalism which guide Agee’s interpretation of his subject. However, these opening words are qualified with the further disclaimer that “neither these words nor the authors are the property of any political party, faith, or faction” (ibid). As one can see, this effort to ‘objectively’ portray the working poor is with an implicit faith in its ability to approach its subject without prejudice; whereas the reality is that Agee’s ideological preconception reduces the subject to being an object, an “it” or “thing,” and therefore misses having an authentic representation of itself. William T. Vollmann responds to Agee’s national project in his much more contemporary and international work, Poor People (2007). Vollmann attempts to replicate the subject, but radically alters the method from Agee’s ideological and paternalistic analysis of white tenant farmers. Rather, Vollmann uses what I will call ‘an ethics of humility’ through his deceptively simple method of asking his subjects the question: “Why are you poor?” This effort is done consciously and with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in mind. As Vollman goes on to say about that work in his own preface: “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is an elitist expression of egalitarian longings. The tragic tension between its goal and its means contributes substantially to its greatness…Despite its fierce intellectualism it is essentially an outcry of childlike love, the love which impels a child to embrace a stranger’s legs. What can the stranger do, but smilingly stroke the child’s head? Few of its subjects could have read, let alone written it. James Agee sought to know them, to experience, however modestly, what they did; his heart went out to them, and he fought with all his crafty, hopelessly unrequitable passion to make our hearts do the same.” (9) And as Vollmann goes on to say, “their project falls repeatedly on its sword. It is a success because it fails. It fails because it consists of two rich men observing the lives of the poor”  (ibid). This failure has the effect of dragging Agee down into self-castigation, “despising him-self and us that it must be so, apologizing to the families in an abstruse gorgeousness of abasement that only the rich will have time to understand – and of these, how many possess the desire? For to read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is to be slapped in the face” (9-10). To remedy this injury that is just as much an insult within Agee’s method, Vollmann engages with his subjects through an ethical relation, not of objectivity, but non-judgement, wherein the subject is allowed to speak for itself in determining its value as an ethical subject. This approach of an ethical methodology will be used to predict what a post-liberal perspective might look like. Methodology: When a friend comes to me for advice, I first try to understand what it is they want. I do not judge what they want. I judge how they get what they want. But neoliberalism doesn't tell you what it wants explicitly. This results in a negative heuristic of the ‘Other’ in comparison to the ideal they have of the perfect subject, which can only realistically speaking come up short, like with a Platonic representation of an Ideal Form, and since neoliberalism is distinguished through the obfuscation of its values, what we need is to utilize an ethical methodology for measuring this life of the ‘Other.’ Neoliberalism subjectifies liberal ideals but responsibilizes the individual, thus making one feel bad about themselves and doubting their abilities or even experiences (what is popularly called "gaslighting" today) rather than blaming the larger structures at play. And since all the responsibility is placed on the individual within the neoliberal paradigm, the question of ethics never even comes up since ethics only exists insofar as there is another to relate to. We shouldn't just see ethics as a field to be studied on its own divorced from other subjects and only serving its own interests. We need to bring ethics into our methodology, and transparently so, for otherwise the precepts that motivate an individual, organization, or government will be esoteric and unapproachable. We can only hold such entities accountable when we know the values by which they operate. We cannot truly participate in interpersonal relationships, join social or political groups and organizations, or even be effective citizens if we do not properly understand, and to a degree agree with, the principles that direct the decisions which effect so many lives. We can only appreciate something in so far as we are able to share experiences without covert intentions. And if we do not know the underlying values that motivate such an actor, we cannot properly act ourselves as subjects with faith in our best interest since the very purpose of obfuscating the premises is to trick us into serving an ulterior motive but with the added spectacle of self-service. It's like an enthymeme where the missing premise is the key to measuring the very validity of the argument in the first place. A methodology has validity only in so far as it is transparent and discoverable. Hidden and covert intentions only serve to shroud the subject in shadows, thus distorting the analysis with presuppositions of what the answer should be. It presumes a given outcome, and so forces the preconditions onto what was once a subject but has in effect been forced into an object, and a distorted one at best. But that is only to address the appearance. We have yet to get down to the substance of the problem because we have yet to treat the problem in its own subjectivity. I do not 'owe' institutions or things anything a priori, but I do owe other people. However much love may forgive, I owe my parents the fact I am alive. I owe the people who saw through my development and safety. I owe my peers who aid me as I aid them. And I owe society for the collected knowledge of others like me who have had to rely on this shared experience of accumulated knowledge for doing all these things. Liberalism holds that it is compatible with all this, and (to exemplify Vollmann’s method of humility) far be it from me to disagree. But I will argue that it can only achieve this ‘what’ by correcting its ‘how’ with an ethical foundation (ethics as first philosophy, as Levinas would have it Or, as I like to say, ‘The Other is Bae (before all else).’) rather than from an idealized one. In the most basic way possible, we need an ethics of humility as our methodology. What is Liberalism? To ensure that I’m not punching at shadows, I will use the prototypical account of what is meant by the term ‘liberalism’ as it is presented by John Dewey in his book Liberalism and Social Action (1935), published a year before Agee and Evans began their work. At its most basic, liberalism is the ideal of an individual’s self-interested pursuit of its own good. Conservatives and progressives both presume the ideal of a citizen’s individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while approaching these goals with contrasting methods (and often with differing conceptions of what those three terms would be). The ‘conservative’ or right-wing view traditionally holds that by lessening government interference we increase the amount of freedom shared by the people to realize these values. The ‘progressive’ (I will try to avoid the popular vernacular of calling a progressive person ‘a liberal’ to disambiguate that from ‘liberalism’ as an ideology) or left-wing view would have it that it is the role of government institutions to preserve these freedoms for the people. Dewey maps the history of liberalism as a formalized ideal to the start of the 19th century, but he goes on to argue that liberal values can be traced back to the Greeks. "The use of the words liberal and liberalism to denote a particular social philosophy does not appear to occur earlier than the first decade of the nineteenth century. But the thing to which the words are applied is older. It might be traced back to Greek thought; some of its ideas, especially as to the importance of the free play of intelligence, may be found notably expressed in the funeral oration attributed to Pericles.” (3) According to Dewey, liberal ideals were premised on the natural rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For this to be achieved politically, one had to engage with others and pull from the store of accumulated collective knowledge. Dewey goes on to consequently diagnose what he calls liberalism’s “Achilles heel” – and what would eventually develop into the contemporary neoliberal ideology of austerity, deregulation, and hyper-individualism: the tendency to take credit (i.e., ownership) for such knowledge as a self-contained and independent individual. In Dewey’s progressive liberalism, one needed to acknowledge the collective achievement that is education and knowledge by working collectively towards shared ends, having decided what the means would be through enlightened discourse. Progressive liberalism sees the individual as naturally good. Conservative liberalism, on the other hand, views humankind as naturally selfish. This is, according to Dewey, what condemns what would become neoliberalism because it envisions the motor of politics to be centered solely on the individual’s own pursuit of selfish ends. As Dewey goes on to say: "The only form of enduring social organization that is now possible is one in which the new forces of productivity are cooperatively controlled and used in the interest of the effective liberty and the cultural development of the individuals that constitute society. Such a social order cannot be established by an unplanned and external convergence of the actions of separate individuals, each of whom is bent on personal private advantage. This idea is the Achilles heel of early liberalism. …Organized social planning, put into effect for the creation of an order in which industry and finance are socially directed [o]n behalf of institutions that provide the material basis for the cultural liberation and growth of individuals, is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims." (54-55) As such, for liberalism to work, it requires the active and renewed efforts of the right people. But, just as significantly and as contemporary political decisions have demonstrated, those same institutions occupied by the wrong people are just as effective at eroding liberal values as it is at preserving them. This ideal of natural rights is also normative. “In an ideal society political organization will be modelled upon the economic pattern set by nature. Ex natura, jus,” (9) Dewey proclaims while outlining the difference between natural laws and man-made laws where the former becomes the essence and foregrounding of liberal values. Dewey references Adam Smith when discussing these natural rights, wherein Smith depends on the human tendency towards sympathy as the natural basis for his morals (10-11). Consequently for Dewey, these liberal ideals he holds so dear are grounded in the natural constitution, or essence, of the liberal subject. As for how this impacts governance: “But government cannot appeal to sympathy. The only measures it can employ affect the motive of self-interest;” (ibid) implying that governments, as abstract and impersonal subjects, assert themselves through coercion and violence in contrast to individual citizens who alone can actively and intellectually engage in civic discourse for political change. Yet neoliberalism, as with the Citizens United decision, proclaims that literally all is of equal value, such as in the case of free speech, therefore ambiguating the very differences that make us unique as human beings. This lack of ethical consideration in making such decisions is obscured by applying neoliberal ideology to jurisprudence, which itself is an ideology of such hyper-individualism that the question of ethics rarely if ever even comes up. Dewey closes the passage with this progressive call to action: “It [government] makes this appeal most effectively when it acts so as to protect individuals in the exercise of their natural self-interest" (11). In the end, according to Dewey, the only way forward to save liberalism is in vigilantly electing the right people to make the responsible choices for our collective future, and as recent history has shown us, this is hardly a guarantee. To diagnose what is wrong with this liberal ideology, we first need to put into question some fundamental values of liberalism: equality, fraternity, and liberty. By questioning these values, I do not mean to question what they are, but how liberalism achieves them. Liberalism conceives of these values as adhering naturally to the human constitution and are conceived of idealistically. They are what the individual is. But this places the individual into a confrontational ‘us vs. them’ relationship with society. It conceives of the individual as an object with a presupposed essence. Equality requires that we approach the Other from a position of mutuality. But one cannot achieve this ideal reciprocity with another if we do not share the same experiences as well as material conditions and backgrounds. Even more importantly, an object cannot be compared to a subject, thus creating a false equivalence in this idealized conception of equality. Likewise, being fraternal requires that we extend the same consideration and care to others no matter how different they are from ourselves. But we can only approach the other through, not just recognition of the other's humanity, but the privileging of the other's point-of-view, even and especially when at the expense of my own. Fraternity requires that we put another before ourselves, and that is an ethical dilemma. Lastly, liberalism’s ideal of liberty can only properly exist as an ethic of relation rather than an ideal. For only by denying the liberty of the Other can we then achieve true liberty for ourselves in this ideal sense. This ideal of liberty as it is popularly conceived would be, ultimately, the freedom to exist alone in a void. To be free of restriction - free from consequences – would have to be just such an existence. But when we rather think of liberty as a relation, an ethic, we are better able to measure liberty by the extent to which I am willing to sacrifice that liberty for the sake of another's. Otherwise, we are trapped behind the veil of Maya, the principium individuationis (to borrow a term from Schopenhauer) which only serves to further alienate each other from ourselves. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee and Evans: To better understand this liberal perspective regarding the objectification of the subject, let us take a closer look at what Agee had to say about these white tenant farmers in the South. For starters, Agee positions himself as “a spy traveling as a journalist” with his photographer, Evans, painted as “a counter-spy traveling as a photographer.” The remaining characters, the supposed subject of the exposé itself, are all pre-emptively judged to be “unpaid agitators” in his story (xvi). Agee goes further in his characterization of both the role of his subjects and the co-spies: “The immediate instruments are two: the motionless camera, and the printed word. The governing instrument – which is also one of the centers of the subject – is individual, anti-authoritative human consciousness. Ultimately, it is intended that this record and analysis be exhaustive, with no detail, however trivial it may seem, left untouched, no relevancy avoided, which lies within the power of remembrance to maintain, of the intelligence to perceive, and of the spirit to persist in” (viii). The “governing instrument” in question here, one of the “centers of the subject,” is already ideologically apparent: a self-conceived ‘authentic’ reportage of the “anti-authoritative human consciousness.” And what of the purpose to this method? “This is a book only by necessity. More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality, in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell” (x). Again, Agee has pre-determined that his method is free of distortion despite layers of ideological presuppositions concerning the nature of who he is investigating and, moreover, presupposes the outcome with a ready-made conclusion, consequent from the values inherent to its ideological methodology before he even sets foot in the small dusty town. This can be illustrated in Agee’s own words regarding the difficulty he had building trust with his subjects; forever stuck on the outside looking in at them as objects. “I walked somewhat faster now, but I was overtaking them a little slowly for my patience; the light would be right by now or very soon; I had no doubt Walker would do what he wanted whether he had ‘permission’ or not, but I wanted to be on hand, and broke into a trot” (cite). Agee is situated, willfully or not, as an outsider to his subjects despite his attempts to portray them in all but the smallest of details: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement” (cite). Which, of itself, is not a bad thing. One is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s method of bricolage in the Arcades Project. But that is not what Agee is doing. Benjamin refrains from editorializing on the Paris Arcades. And let us not forget the most important differences between the way Agee, and later Vollmann, address the issue of consent. As previously quoted, Agee and Evans are not particularly concerned with intruding on these peoples’ personal privacy. Because Agee approaches from an idealistic, arguably anti-ethical method, we find ourselves with disconcerting ruminations like, “and so, smiling and so distressed that I wanted only that they should be restored, and should I know I was their friend, and that I might melt from existence: I’m very sorry! I’m very sorry if I scared you! I didn’t mean to scare you at all. I wouldn’t have done any such thing for anything” (cite). And yet, Agee has done just that. Agee comes at his subject full of presuppositions about who they are and how they should be. This is characteristic of most liberal conceptions of poverty, since when people talk about the working class, they are typically doing so from a bourgeois perspective looking down. This turns into a romanticization of such people which negates their very ability to judge for themselves the value of their lives. Moreover, Agee is almost aware of this limitation. He cannot see outside his method, but in his accompanying discourse he hints at the difficulty of truly capturing his subjects in their full particularity: “…how, looking thus into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not quite like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other and whose existence is all measured upon a still mad and incurable time; how am I to speak of you as ‘tenant’ ‘farmers,’ as ‘representatives of your ‘class,’ as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends and as I ‘know’ you? Granted – more, insisted upon – that it is in all these particularities that each of you is that which he is; that particularities, and matters ordinary and obvious, are exactly themselves beyond designation of words, are the members of your sum total most obligatory to human searching of perception: nevertheless to name these things and fail to yield their stature, meaning, power of hurt, seems impious, seems criminal, seems impudent, seems traitorous in the deepest: and to do less badly seems impossible: yet in withholdings of specification I could betray you still worse.” (172-173) This fundamental inaccessibility of Agee’s subject is therefore assumed to be the natural state of those individuals under investigation: his goal, and what Agee sees as the best he can do not just about these subjects, but on behalf of them as well, is to “leave to you [the reader] much of the burden of realizing in each of them what I have wanted to make clear of them as a whole: how each is itself; and how each is sharpener” (cite). Agee believes that if he can just adequately and accurately record the details of his subjects that he will be able to relate poverty to a non-pauper. At the end of the day, Agee doesn’t so much depict the life of a poor tenant farmer from their own perspective and outlook as he tries to shape and overlay his template of an idealized proletarian subject. Agee could have just as easily portrayed anyone else, regardless of class, with as much fidelity to their nature as he does these poor white tenant farmers. Poor People, Vollman: In contrast to this ideologically distortion-ridden attempt at portraying poverty to their readers, William T. Vollmann will transform the subject from an object by investing his subjects with their own interpretative agency. Vollmann, for those who aren’t familiar, is notoriously known for being a writer who is not afraid of the unsavory and often unconventional or uncomfortable subject. For Vollmann, he doesn’t want to ask a hundred subjects what it feels like to smoke crack. He is going to smoke crack with his subject. Vollmann is very aware of the ethical difficulties of his method, but that is exactly why it is so significant. Vollmann is aiming for honesty, both from his subjects and himself, often with problematic results. An inversion of Camus’ motto might apply to Vollmann. Instead of “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion,” we say, “The only way to deal with an unethical world is to be so absolutely ethical that your very existence is an act of rectification.” As I previously mentioned, what makes Vollmann’s method so significant in relation to Agee and Evans is that, by allowing his subjects to speak for themselves rather than projecting onto them a foregone identity (or reality), we get a much more affective and authentic picture of who that person sees themself to be in relation to the larger structures Vollmann is exploring. As was discussed in a previous section, Agee viewed himself as exploring two subjects: one overt and the other covert – poverty through the lens of progressive ideals. Vollmann also wishes to explore poverty, but rather than veiling his subjects behind a lens of ideology, Vollmann asks his subjects the deceptively simple question: “Why are you poor?” By allowing the subject to make their own value judgement, Vollmann can see more clearly the structures that weigh on his subjects because the answer to his question allows the view of the subject to come into stark relief; we get a much clearer picture of their world because Vollmann does not superimpose his own judgements on who they are. Vollmann is very self-conscious of the levels of authenticity he is receiving from his subjects, an authenticity which is in a constant dialectical dance of trust, and one way he goes about mitigating the deleterious effects of reportage is by actually paying his subjects for their time. This is in stark contrast to how Agee and Evans approached their subjects. For Agee, the question of consent never even arises and so we are left wondering whether his subjects are even (or ever) being honest with him. As an outsider, Agee never gains the trust, let alone respect, of who he is reporting on. For Vollmann, this trust is the key to his method. As Vollmann goes on to explain in the opening of his work: “This essay about poor people was written in a different spirit – neither to explicate poverty according to some system, nor to erect a companion monument to Das Kapital in the cemetery of hollowed-out thoughts. I certainly felt inadequate to sustain a meditation on any specific incarnation of poverty, as was so passionately attempted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I say ‘attempted,’ for even that masterpiece repeatedly expresses its own insufficiency, and above all and therefore, its guilt. I can fairly state that I have studied, witnessed and occasionally been a victim of violence. I cannot claim to have been poor. My emotion concerning this is not guilt at all, but simple gratitude.” (8) And a little later on, “Needless to say, my own interpretation of how this book’s heroes and heroines see themselves is damaged by the brevity of our acquaintance, which in most cases endured a week or less. I know how little I know. All the same, these snapshots of the ways in which certain poor people experienced their poverty at random moments bear meaning of inexpressible value to me; I’ve been able to pore over them long after my interviewees forgot me and spent the money I gave them. The impossibility of my gaining any dynamic understanding of these lives over time, my very lack of relevance to them, may enhance the truth of this presentation – for what do I have to prove? How could I be fatuous enough to hope to ‘make a difference?’ I’m left with nothing to honorably attempt, but to show and compare to the best of my ability. (12) Consequently, Vollmann obtains a far more faithful picture of his subjects than Agee and Evans could ever hope to achieve. The primary difference between Agee and Vollmann’s analyses of their subjects can be reduced to an interrogation of the Marxist question of “false consciousness.” While laying out his own definitions, Vollmann defines false consciousness as, “a charge leveled against the perceptions and experiences of others whenever we wish to assert that we know their good better than they do” (18). When talking with one of his subjects, a Thai prostitute named Sunee, Vollmann meditates on this theme in relation to Sunnee’s perception of her own poverty, describing her belief that people experience in life what they are owed through karma: “Why are some people so doomed? I got the eternal answer from a broken-toothed, quarter-demented hotel maid laundress: destiny! (but she promptly amended this to: half destiny and half character). She’d paid one thousand baht to a marriage service, because she hoped to marry a rich farang (foreigner), from Australia maybe. But she couldn’t get over her terror of being photographed, lest she or her daughter might end up naked on the Internet. So she wouldn’t permit the marriage bureau to take her portrait, and no foreign millionaire ever wrote her. Why charge her with false consciousness? A single life must have been her destiny.” (42-43) According to Vollmann, who are we to say we know better for people like Sunee or better understand what her life means? Moreover, Vollmann allows himself to feel for his subjects as an equal participant in their ethical relationship. As Vollmann goes on to consider the consequences of allowing his subjects their own evaluation: “I say I consider their replies exemplary, but when diseased and listless Wan whispered: I think I am rich, I’d simply pitied her. What is the difference between I think I am rich and Allah does the right thing for us? Tautology: The possibility of false consciousness diminishes as consciousness grows truer – which is to say, as its acceptance of a situation expresses knowledge of that situation. I think I am rich. But what could she have been rich in? Her poverty was ghastly, her awareness maimed. It remains possible that my own understanding was of the mutilated sort; and one could suppose that many a rich man, spying Buddha sitting beneath the Tree of Enlightenment, pitied him; but Buddha’s silence was not confusion, his stillness not weakness, his propertylessness not pauperdom. Buddha had flowered; Wan had decayed. I do pity her with all my heart.” (cite) His method of mutuality, what I call his “ethics of humility,” is what allows Vollmann to inject the affective aspects of observation, therefore learning (through applying) the lesson that there is no such thing as objective or neutral reporting. And this can only affectively be done when we are in full possession of our interlocutor’s values as that is the only authentic way by which to judge subjectively. In contrast to the new right, which has taken on affective rhetorical strategies to great effect, Vollmann here indicates a way that progressives can incorporate affect into a genuine way that is authentic to those involved and free of the cynical posturing that has come to define the proponents of neoliberalism. Vollmann, in his methodological ethics of humility, is able to center the subject as the judge of and for themselves. Rather than paternalistically telling Sunee or Wan whether they are poor and exploited, he allows them to speak for themselves in the closest approximation to their full subjectivity. Vollmann refrains from judging their answers, and in so doing we get a better understanding of who they are and what they want. Once we have established what this person wants for themself, we can begin to better start interrogating how they achieve their goals. What is Neoliberalism? At this point it might be worth diverging for a bit to discuss what neoliberalism is in relation to the topic of Agee’s method of liberal idealism and Vollmann’s counter-method of ethical humility. Agee is coming from a traditional liberal perspective by which he views the individual through an idealistic and modernist lens which determines from the outset what the subject is in itself. Today, for better or worse, and particularly in the USA, we find ourselves immersed in a neoliberal, post-modern-esque culture where such ideals of liberalism have seemingly exhausted their ability to secure the very values it proclaims. Neoliberalism, as a contemporary ideology, will therefore be defined by the mixing of methods consequent to the influence of critical theory and post-critique, predominately appropriated by the right-wing after decades of leftist development of such ideas and methods (in fields like, to use just two examples, feminist and queer studies) for the furtherment of the goals of a post-modern liberal ideology of economic growth and prosperity with covert, often illiberal methods. Neoliberalism is unique because it distances itself from the essentializing aspects of the modernist liberal subject by infusing itself with cynicism. It no longer matters to the conservative liberal whether their methods are in line with their ideals. Rather, they have adopted and co-opted left-wing strategies of taking over institutions and utilizing them towards preserving conservative ends. They have traded the negative rights of traditional conservatism with reducing government interference for the positive rights of utilizing the established institutions, only this time geared towards a conservative counter-revolution. Take, for example, community organizing. The left has a long history of organizing social and political groups to spread their message and agitate towards achieving those goals, now commonly referred to as "antifa." But very few people can point to an existing organization of known leftists like Sawgrass Community Defense Group (formerly known as Redneck Revolt) or the United Panther Movement (UPM). Most people only know "BLM," which is not a homogeneous organization but rather a collection of grass roots activists organizing around a single cause. But almost everyone now knows who the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers are. The right took on the methods of the left and succeeded well beyond in their mission as an organization than anyone on the left has experienced since the Black Panther Party. What is so seductive about this new ideology? For starters, in our capitalist culture, by objectifying the ‘Other’ we can more easily consume them by distilling the individual into a collection of identities with pre-determined judgements. This makes the challenge of evaluating the person much easier, and with less indigestion or discomfort, because I no longer need to investigate and interrogate the subject’s position. I can simply determine that x person is a conservative, or a health care worker, or a childhood friend, and so proceed with my interactions of them based off how I already feel regarding those roles. For someone who is chronically ill, knowing that someone is a doctor allows them to decide how they feel about them based on their prior experience receiving such help. Whether that is a negative or positive evaluation will have little to do with who that person is or how capable they are, but rather with how they have previously decided such people are based on that previous experience. In this way, we judge by association, and consequently often as a caricature. Why do we do this? I would argue it is a question of economy. We need to quickly decide whether the people we interact with are going to be beneficial or deleterious. By economizing our social interactions, we can optimize our tasks and, more broadly, how we navigate the world. It is a shorthand ‘common sensical’ way of pre-packaging judgements. This is a result of neoliberalism infusing the social realm, for in our efforts to succeed in our society, we are forced to choose the most efficient (i.e., most productive and less time or resource consuming) method. Neoliberalism has so completely infused the contemporary political landscape that we can hardly see past our own presumed prejudices because those prejudices become the very yardstick by which we navigate our social lives as atomized and responsibilized individuals under neoliberalism. As can be seen, neoliberalism functions as a heuristic. The liberal values of equality, fraternity, and liberty have been hypostasized and amplified while also diluted through the proliferation of post-structural theories that deconstruct the nature of essences with its consequent blurring of concepts. These ideals of liberalism are therefore degraded to such a degree as to be disorienting to the average citizen. Since ethics is precluded through the centering of the individual as the supreme measure of all that is good, the question of ethics becomes an academic rather than civic question. To remedy this predicament, what we need is a new way of privileging the individual, not as an essence, but as a relationship. I call this perspective post-liberalism. The Post-Liberal Perspective: How do we bridge the notorious gap between theory and practice? By transparently bringing our values into the methods by which we employ our ideas. In other words, by having an ethical methodology. Post-liberalism is the method indicated here by which to realize progressive, traditionally ‘liberal,’ values into the way we achieve our social and political goals. In ordinary political discourse, goals are refracted through an ideological lens. We are guided by the abstract notions that justify our beliefs. However, when we use that ideological bludgeon to transform the world, we treat the ‘Other’ as an object of our ideology, thus denying their autonomy which distorts the reality of who this ‘Other’ is in its subjectivity. Post-liberalism, on the other hand, re-orients how we apply our ideas by placing the subject in an ethical relationship that allows them to realize their own subjective desires, judgements, and preferences; by allowing the subjects to speak for themselves, we privilege the individual as its own unit of value rather than projecting an alien value on to them. Agee, in his attempt to portray poverty, essentializes his subjects with ready-made valuations through his Marxist beliefs. This is done politically today all the time with identity politics. People look at the material conditions of a person and project onto them their conception of that type of person. The development of identity politics within neoliberalism can be seen as an attempt to refine into smaller and smaller atoms or characteristics the types of persons, all of them presumed based off usually a physical trait that can be lobbied for despite consisting of unique individuals with often conflicting persepctives, and just as usually pre-loaded with value judgements. But in that, we still attempt to identify something, or object, about that person and extrapolate from there. John is a liberal. Mary is black. Joe is a disabled veteran. Megan is a blind neuro-divergent lesbian. A post-liberal perspective would value John not because of who he votes for, but for what matters to John as an individual. Instead, in our neoliberal culture, we focus on those qualities of a person and then treat them how we already feel about what ever adjectives said person has been granted. In this framework, politics is often viewed as a binary, with conservative and progressive forces in a constant tug of war in a zero-sum game. And for most of the 20th century that had more or less worked. But in this effort to play a winner take all strategy, we lose out on the benefits of both. Rather than choosing all blue or all red, we should rather start from a position of values and then ask if a conservative or progressive solution is most appropriate for a given problem. In politics, this method might look like: “should I support a conservative option or progressive option for this problem?” Not, “should I be a liberal or conservative?” In this way, post-liberalism takes the lessons of post-structuralism regarding “essences” and, rather than cynically inverting their own values, instead pivots their methodology to better come up with productive solutions that can effectively be discussed and negotiated for political change in the sense that Dewey envisioned for the preservation of liberal values. The difference with Dewey, however, is a greater democratization of public discourse. It takes politics from the sole responsibility of representatives who quantitatively measure their constituents’ desires into a calculus of political self-interest and reshapes it so that those same constituents share in the decision-making process and power by privileging their own judgements on a case-by-case basis. Politics becomes a discussion rather than being reified into a monolith of ideology. Conclusion: The goal of post-liberalism is not merely to defeat the neoliberal new right. It is to envision a politics wherein everyone has an equal say in the decisions we make as a society, including conservative policies when such a course of action is deemed appropriate, or marginalized demographics that have yet to fully speak for themselves. In this way, we can not only realize the ideals of equality, fraternity, and liberty for all, but are better positioned to have a renewed discussion of what those terms should look like. If this paper has succeeded in its objective of developing an ethical methodology, I hope to encourage others to try out such a strategy. William Vollmann’s extensive oeuvre offers fertile ground for exploring such a method of humility, not the least of which is his seven-volume opus on the use of violence entitled Rising Up and Rising Down. How does one employ the post-liberal perspective? By wearing one’s values on their sleave; by not disguising or dissimulating their intentions in a soulless attempt to coerce ‘Others’ into supporting policies that go against their own best interest; and by having open and honest discussions about what our personal values are so as to better assert ourselves as political subjects for a better future. I do not believe we can ‘go back’ historically. We are, for better or worse, fully immersed in neoliberalism. However, rather than following either the radical and populist right or left with their visions of a romanticized and ephemeral past ideal (or lost utopia) we can actually begin to open up our society by incorporating the lessons of post-critique into our method of engaging with each other. For that method to succeed, it will need to be based on a foundation of ethics. Bibliography Agee, J. and Evans, W. (1941). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Houghton Mifflin company.     Dewey, j. (1963). Liberalism and social action. Capricorn Books.    Vollmann, W. T. (2007). Poor People. Ecco.