‘Ethics cannot afford to be nation-blind’: Saul Bellow and the Problem of the Victim

Abstract

In this short chapter I wish to point out a problem and pose a question rather than reach for a conclusion. In his credo, ‘What I Believe’, written in 1939, E. M. Forster made a characteristically blunt, neat and straightforward separation between the moral duties one owes to individuals and those one owes to wider communities and abstract ideas: ‘I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country…. Love and loyalty can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do — down with the State, say I, which means that the State would down me.’¹ Strong words, especially in 1939, but they conflate and confuse a number of issues in order to create the illusion of a simple choice which casts the author as a courageous moral hero standing up to the encroaching tyranny of state power, not least, in equating the notion of a ‘cause’ with the bullying intrusion of the nation. Reviewing David Miller’s recent book On Nationality, a defence of the need to preserve national identity from the Scylla and Charybdis of ‘virulent ethno-nationalism’ and ‘sanitised globalism’, Charles King pointed out the problems of Forster’s position: ‘Ethics … cannot afford to be nation-blind, for national boundaries play a special role in structuring morality.’²