De La Torre is absolutely correct that powerlessness is the
only possible starting point for a new ethics, since, as De La Torre has
already established in the first chapter, an ethics of power can only lead to
devastating essentialisms and “complicity with empire” (31). That chapter,
titled “The Need to Move Beyond Eurocentric Ethics,” will be the focus of my
discussion for the rest of this review, and I will argue that it contains
several valuable insights into the concealed operations of regulation and
control in academic and political discourse.
Eurocentric ethics could be defined as any mode of moral
discourse that is produced by the dominant culture and, concomitantly,
privileges that culture—whether this privileging is intentional or not does not
affect the exclusionary consequences and is therefore irrelevant for De La
Torre’s investigation. De La Torre identifies such ideological bias in three
figures: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Stanley Hauerwas. If
anything is surprising about De La Torre’s reading of these authors, it is how
little “digging” he had to do to locate the instances of ethnic elitism and
reactionary politics in their work. De La Torre argues that Eurocentric ethics
is characterized by covert rationalizations of the normalizing function of
state and law, which is expressed in these three authors in various ways. Thus,
despite his progressive, socialist leanings, the only way Rauschenbusch could
imagine the betterment of minority communities is as a result of their
uncritical, wholesale adoption of “white” attitudes, customs, and culture. Similarly,
Niebuhr’s “realism” signifies a sort of defeatist pragmatism that
systematically excluded from its consideration the reality of the oppressed.
On this evidence, one must conclude that it would be
ethically and intellectually indefensible to employ uncritically the paradigms
of these thinkers. In fact, the only problem with De La Torre’s critique of
such figures as Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr is that few if any serious ethicists
in the academy today would build on the ground laid by these thinkers, for whom
ethics, after all, was merely a channel for them to transmit their theological
concerns. However, even though De La Torre’s discussion would be much more
incisive and relevant if he could find examples from contemporary ethics—for
instance, in human rights discourse one often finds both a rationalization of
state power and the totalization of cultural or ethnic particularities—De La
Torre’s critique of Eurocentric ethics is not dulled by his perhaps inappropriate
selection of these three twentieth century thinkers.
This chapter of De La Torre’s book has its most immediate and
important implications for the classroom. The public school system largely
ignores the significant contributions to ethics, to science, to history that
minority groups and non-European cultures have made—this is perhaps especially true
when it comes to contributions made by Latina/os, despite the rapid growth of
the Hispanic population in the United States. And not only the public school
system, but in the university, too, the historical discipline, which is itself
a construct of the modern West, implicitly asks students to identify with “the
winners,” while engagement with contemporary issues constantly seeks a
normative position from which other positions can be judged. Such
rhetorical gestures aim at “cleaning up” the messy playing field of
epistemological ethics, and any approach to ethics that seeks order is complicit
with the state and therefore anathema to De La Torre’s “vulgar, earthy way of
doing ethics” (122). Education, therefore, must engage with marginalized voices
by asking the students to read history from the perspective of “the losers,” and
it must also resist the perennial temptation to simplify, to reduce, to
categorize. Our future and our liberation depend on the messiness that will
result from an ethics and a pedagogy para
joder.
De La Torre’s ethics
carries within it the radical capacity to overturn the established order. It is
fitting, then, that an instrument used to deprive marginalized people of a
voice will now be used exclusively as a means to force those in power to hear the
powerless speak. Even so, De La Torre does not dispense with the ethical
paradigms of the modern West, nor does he attempt to wipe away the residue of
the Enlightenment, inasmuch as such a project, as Foucault too has shown, is
impossible. Most significantly, this book succeeds instead at redrawing the boundaries and
re-centering the discursive space in which ethics are constructed and practiced. It is therefore a welcome contribution to the collaborative
construction of a multicultural resistance to the injustices of state
power and world capitalism.
