Migrant narratives are, in many ways, allegories of human existence, in which the hope that our lives may be made more abundant, for ourselves and those we love, constantly comes up against the limits of what we may achieve and the despair into which we may be plunged when we find ourselves unable to achieve that state of well-being and flourishing that Aristotle called eudaimonia.
Spinoza’s ethics also touches on the relation between a particular form of life—human, animal, or plant life, or different human lives—and life itself. Accordingly, ethics concerns the ways species life or individual lives are struggled for and sustained, especially under conditions of insecurity, scarcity, danger, and loss, as well as the ways in which life itself flows through all things, connecting all forms of life in a common web.
This brings us to the relation among ethics, morality, and law. Paul Ricoeur observes, “Before the morality of norms, there is an ethics of the wish to live well.” So, he says, “I encounter the word ‘life’ at the most basic level of ethics.” He then adds, “This is also the level on which memory is constituted, beneath discourses, before the stage of predication.”23 Emmanuel Levinas writes of ethics in a similar vein, eschewing the moralistic question “What ought I to do?” and focusing on the concerns of ancient ethics—“How best can we live?”24 The ethical quest for existential fulfillment therefore entails the question of whether and to what extent we are justified in moving across class, cultural, national, and discursive borders in our quest for life itself, even though we may infringe moral and legal norms in doing so.
This tension between an ethics embedded in the changing exigencies of life and an abstract discourse of custom, morality, and law preoccupied thinkers as diverse as Socrates, Marx, and Gandhi, all of whom saw that customs and laws tend to favor a select few at the expense of the many, while meting out justice, well-being, wealth, and care in unequal portions. Insofar as migrants cross international borders, becoming global nomads and assuming multiple identities, their ethical concerns often echo those of critical theory, for in seeking an amelioration of their lot, migrants must often turn a blind eye to the values of their natal lifeworlds, as well as to the mores of the countries to which they gravitate in the belief that they are entitled to a better life simply by virtue of being human.
On what basis, for instance, does a migrant assume the right to seek his fortune in a place where, strictly speaking, he has no place? What kind of human right is it that leads him to ignore the fact that he may have no legal or constitutional right to live and work in the country on which he has pinned his hopes for a better life? What sense of ethics justifies his claim to a share of the good life in a country where many aver that they owe the migrant nothing and demand to know what gives him the right to come there, take jobs from locals, and benefit from social services that are paid for by the taxes of hardworking citizens?
If migrants often transgress moral norms and act outside the law, then we who seek to understand the migrant must reorient our own thinking and acknowledge the extent to which life interrupts, unsettles, and resists the moral assumptions and logocentric modes of discourse we tend to privilege in our desire to govern the world or render it intelligible.25 We must go with the broken flow of migrant narratives and migrant imaginaries, working out ways of doing justice to the often paratactic, contradictory, opportunistic, and improvisatory character of transitional experience.
For Heidegger, our being-in-the-world is a “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). We are “thrown” (geworfen) into a world that has been made by others at other times and which will outlast us. We choose neither the time nor place of our birth, and our origins are not of our making. Yet we strive to live this givenness as if it were chosen, and the tension between our ethical struggle for well-being and the moral or legal limits on our freedom generates existential dramas that characterize fiction and reality alike. It is not the arbitrariness of our birth, therefore, that concerns us most, but the contingency of existence itself, in which we are thrown continually off balance, obliged to rethink and reconsider the relationship between what we can and cannot change, comprehend, or endure.26
ETHICS AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY
The existential situation of the migrant recalls the situation of the stranger, who, as Simmel observed, suggests a paradoxical mix of mobility and stasis. Unlike the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, the stranger “comes today and stays tomorrow,” his ambiguous social position determined by the fact that he has not belonged to the group “from the beginning [and therefore] imports qualities into it which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.”27 In my view, the unsettling quality that the migrant imports into the group is actually a question—the vexed ethical question of whether we see ourselves and others as united by our common humanity or differentiated by our social identities. The migrant brings into sharp relief a discrepancy that is felt, to some degree, by all human beings—between their membership in a specific society and their membership in a single species. The tragedy of the migrant is the tragedy of every marginalized individual, for insofar as his human worth is made a function of his degraded status, he is treated as a nonentity, having no claims on the society to which he has gravitated. In sum, his humanity is wholly determined by his place in a social hierarchy.
Social hierarchies are reinforced by law, morality, and custom. Fortunately, however, though any human life is largely shaped by moral, political, social, and religious regimes, every human life unfolds in ways that only partially realize, replicate, or reinforce these regimes. Indeed, the conversations and stories in this book have persuaded me that it may not be a bad thing that the good cannot be legislated or universalized, for in its surprising randomness we are perennially reminded that our very humanity can never be entirely determined by social orders and their moral rationales, and that this very indeterminacy redeems us.
This sense that virtue cannot be totally prescribed or predetermined means that much ethical activity is best understood as a function of the relationship between unpredictable situations and extant moral norms.28 Because the good, the right, or the true cannot be systematically derived from any one external measure—be it a social rule, a religious law, or a moral norm—we cannot preemptively declare that any human action is in its very nature absolutely right or wrong, good or bad, true or false. Rather, its worth lies in what we achieve within the limits of what is possible. Accordingly, ethics becomes practically synonymous with freedom, which Sartre understood as a question of what we make of what we are made—“the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him.”29
In what sense, is this struggle for life a social rather than merely personal struggle? And how might we conceptualize the social?
Just as Aristotle observed that “men create the gods after their own image,” so Durkheim claimed that “God is only a figurative expression of . . . society.”30 This view that religion and ethics are socially derived was shared by Weber and Marx, and it also informed Geertz’s view that religious beliefs are a way in which a social group renders its ethos “intellectually reasonable.”31 The problem with these approaches is that they are at once too abstract and too general. The social is identified with groups and institutions, ethics is confused with moral norms, and religion is made synonymous with belief and meaning.
In many societies—including those in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, where I have done extensive fieldwork—“religion” and “ethics” are not identified linguistically or conceptually as discrete domains, leading one to ask, as Paul Ricoeur does, whether we would do well to focus neither on a neo-Aristotelian ethics based on the idea of a good life nor on a Kantian approach based on duty and obligation, but rather on questions of “practical wisdom” (phronesis) in everyday life, when unprecedented situations arise, problems don’t admit of any solution, perfection remains beyond our grasp, and virtue may reside less in achieving the good than in striving for it.32
My first suggestion is that we dissolve our conventional concepts of the social and the cultural into the more immediate and dynamic life of intersubjectivity—the everyday interplay of human subjects, coming together and moving apart, giving and taking, communicating