Creative Friction: Holmes Rolston III on the Role of Struggle and Resistance in the Moral Life

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, “The smooth is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, iPhones and Brazilian waxing. Why do we today find what is smooth beautiful? Beyond its aesthetic effect, it reflects a general social imperative. It embodies today’s society of positivity. What is smooth does not injure. Nor does it offer any resistance… Any form of negativity is removed.” The social imperative to reduce resistance and struggle in human life is so ubiquitous as to be nearly imperceptible. As Han notes, it is embodied in everyday artifacts like the iPhone, but also in Amazon Prime, automated active parallel park assist, and, a personal favorite, the newest feature of Google’s phone, which automatically replaces frowns with smiles to achieve the “Best Take.” 

Such examples are perhaps trivial, but there are more substantial examples rapidly approaching on the horizon. Consider two in particular: first, the rapid rush to embrace large-language AI generative-predictive text (GPT) technologies, especially in the context of education. When such technologies are used to generate academic writing, they effectively reduce the experience of struggle–so productive in the process of intellectual development–to zero. Because the end-product of better-than-adequate writing is achieved with greater speed and less struggle (and because students will use it anyway), it is argued, we should no longer waste time teaching students to write without the tools. Much better to teach them to use the tools. Make them “prompt engineers,” not “writers.” A second example is the prospect of “biomedical moral enhancement.” Here the goal is a traditional one: we desire for people to act more virtuously, promoting altruistic ends, rather than in ways that are vicious, criminal, or “anti-social.” The means, however, are novel. We can achieve this goal, so it is argued, much more effectively through biotechnological means (a microchip inserted into the brain, a pharmacological agent, a genetic intervention), than by old-fashioned moral formation (repetition of good habits and practices, observation of moral exemplars, education in virtue literacy). Why go through the struggle (and waste the time), when you can achieve the same results more quickly, more easily… more smoothly? 

Any answer to this problem will require, it seems, a positive account of the place of struggle, resistance, and friction in the intellectual and moral life of human beings. Enter the prolific environmental philosopher and theologian, Holmes Rolston III. Rolston’s work has been influential in the fields of environmental ethics and religion and science. In this paper, I hope to draw on his work for a broader conversation about ethics and aesthetics. For Rolston provides a fruitful starting point for considering the constitutive role of struggle in human life, and he also provides an alternative ethico-aesthetic paradigm for our age.

Rolston is a unique scholar. A son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, and himself a Presbyterian minister for some time, he is also trained in academic theology (under T.F. Torrance) and philosophy of science. His work draws on Dawinian theories of evolutionary biology in order to explore the sources and possibilities of non-anthropocentric accounts of intrinsic value in the natural world. According to Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa, “Rolston’s stratagem consists in deploying for its own sake, with quite an abundance of detail, the evolutionary history of life on earth as it was made intelligible through neo-Darwinism, while drawing attention to the formidable creativity which drives it so that it commands respect and admiration.”

Central to this story, for Rolston, is a dialectical relationship between conflict and resolution, which ensures that order comes from disorder, the fitness of the species comes from the failure of particular organisms, life comes from death, beauty comes from ashes. We should not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing evolution: it is not as if the process is seeking such ends. There is also no logical argument for why it must be the case that “disvalues are regularly transmuted into values.” But the fact remains that an fairminded observation of the history of evolution tells us that this is how it has happened. “Earth slays her children, a seeming great disvalue, but bears an annual crop in their stead. This pro-life, generative impulse is the most startling and valuable miracle of all.” Indeed, from a theological point of view, we can say that “Nature is cruciform. Every life is chastened and christened, straitened and baptized in struggle. Everywhere there is vicarious suffering, one creature dying that another may live on.”

Rolston is clear that he does not mean this in a Panglossian way. There is tragedy in nature, too. But the appearance of tragedy does not negate the positive role of “dialectical stress” in the creation of ever more complex and beautiful forms of life. “Take away the friction, and would the structures stand? Would they move? Muscles, teeth, eyes, ears, noses, fins, legs, wings, scales, hair, hands, brains—all these and almost everything else comes out of the need to make a way through a world that mixes environmental resistance with environmental conductance. Half the beauty of life comes out of endurance through struggle.” On the flip side, according to Rolston, there is a sense in which “the domesticated is the degraded.” Domestic sheep may be more useful to us humans, but they do not compare with wild sheep in terms of graceful movement, strength, and liveliness. 

In addition to value theory and ethics, Rolston also offers an aesthetic corrective to Han’s account. For far from the easy, glossy images with which we are increasingly bombarded, Rolston uncovers the somber beauty of the swamp and of the arctic, where extremely harsh conditions bring about a subtler, slower environment that confirms an implicit reverence for life. If Rolston is right, then we have a prima facie reason to question forms of life that remove all friction, resistance and struggle from the human experience–in short, which overly-domesticate us. This is not to glorify suffering, but it is to resist the social imperative of smoothness. “Let winters come, life will flower on as long as Earth shall last.”