On contrary categories

Drawing on the trope of ‘cultural autism’ as an indicator of cross-cohort incommunicability (Melucci Reference Melucci1996), this paper unpacks a run-of-the-mill gerontological set of presumptions, including notions of moral accountability, meaningfulness and modes of adaptability, which are used as templates for the understanding of the category of advanced ‘old age’ by communicating with its designated representatives. Their capacity to serve as heuristic hermeneutical devices by which to construe interaction with and comprehension of old age as a cultural terrain is questioned. In other words, the article is an exercise in testing the limits of the symbolic space charted by gerontology and anthropology to contain and process their subjects.

Ideals of leading a moral life, worthy of living, followed by slipping into a culturally accomplished good and proper death, permeate Western thinking (Marris Reference Marris, Weiss and Bass2002). Morality and mortality become fused by virtue of this quest for meaning; a pursuit that inevitably invokes the human phenonenological faculties of constituting a life-world experience through retention, intentionality and vision, story telling and script designing, remembering and anticipating, forgiving and promising; in short, by devising a coherent life project or story (Rogers Reference Rogers1983). Such enterprises exist between self and society and are enacted accordingly as interlocked systems of accountability. They act, then, as a practical commitment to account for morally charged decisions and actions. Accountability is, in this sense, embedded in behaviour and, as such, throws into relief a praxis of morality based on memory. Memory is taken to include precedent and prospective longitudinal considerations. Loyalty to kith and kin, faithfulness to friends, sacrifice to real and imagined communities, privileged positions granted by birth rights or sanctified by a collectivity, devotion to an idea or creed or the search for the assumed integrity of the self, are but a few examples of taken-for-granted modes of accountability as fashioned in everyday experience.

For the distilled notion of accountability to take shape and form, however, a process of negotiated cultural engagement between selves has to take place. Terms of accountability are mutually determined with resulting dialogical moments, albeit fragile and fleeting, of moral commitment from one person to another (Gurevitch Reference Gurevitch1988). Such encounters amount to an implicit recognition of the humanity of all participants, either as individuals in their own right or in their capacity as members of a given category. A relinquishment or suspension of this unstated tacit assumption of morally dependent humanity creates an assigned category which could be considered inhuman. The removal of such a foundational common ground of humanity might reflect, among other things, the cessation of shared memory. It could cripple the power to execute accountability directed at those whose social selfhood is no longer deemed morally sustainable, thus symbolically and at times physically annihilating them (Agamben Reference Agamben1998). Culturally speaking, therefore, this could be seen as being tantamount to a state attributed as one of an ‘absent self’.

Autism constitutes a particular case, in which connection to others and of shared meaning are put to the test (Melucci Reference Melucci1996). Rather than giving short shrift to the issue of humanity and being human, the cultural treatment of the syndrome of autism, as construed by philosopher Ian Hacking (Reference Hacking2009), distinguishes that category from other forms of existence. Drawing on neurologist Oliver Sacks's (Reference Sacks1995) account of the vagaries of autism as an unaccountable experience from the perspectives of both the afflicted and onlookers, Hacking resorts to the image employed by an autistic woman describing her sense of the condition as being, ‘an anthropologist on Mars’; that is, an alien in the land of humans. Hacking elaborates on this self-image with:

This bold and honest admission of the baffling standing of the cultural enigma of autism as a case of a different kind of humanity is diametrically opposed to the staunch social resistance to views that uphold such a distinction. Indeed, global ethics seem to be intolerant to irreversible and untranslatable phenomena because these are seen as incommensurate with deep-seated assumptions about the value of change, conversion and transmutation; all within a globally acknowledged humanity that assumes trans-cultural transience, translation and exchangeability (Bauman Reference Bauman2000; Ritzer Reference Ritzer2007). In order to cope with this contradiction, an autistic spectrum has been proposed (Newschaffer et al. Reference Newschaffer, Crohen, Daniels, Giarelli, Grether, Levy, Mandell, Miller, Pinto-Martin, Reaven and Reynolds2007); a social construction that privileges the idea of autism as constituting a continuum of experience over an image of the disorder as a indivisible discrete condition that separates those with it from the rest of humanity, thus rendering it patently inhuman. The ominous perils instilled in this standpoint of refuted humanity are that it might spell a denial of personhood and consequently of morality, possibly with ensuing horrifying consequences. Autism then becomes a state which could be presented as being at the limits of the cultural and that encroaches on the realm of ‘bare life’ or ‘life in the raw’ usually associated with animals. Anthropologist Tim Ingold's exposition of this problematic juxtaposition of humanity and animality is as follows:

Indeed, while animals, machines and virtual imagery could be considered non-human categories, as anthropologists Bruno Latour (Reference Latour1993) and Donna Haraway (Reference Haraway1991) have observed, they can be incorporated into ostensibly human-like domains such as the worlds of pets, robots, laboratory animals and cinematic figures – all vested with suggestions of moral accountability as emotional, instrumental or pedagogical cultural actors. In this way the principle of sustaining a logic of morality blurs categorical boundaries, by according something of a human quality to the manifestly inhuman. The resulting hybrids are potent, viable forces in moulding interactions, it is claimed, and for forging engagements, thus defying Ingold's (Reference Ingold and Ingold2002) conception of a species-dependent morality while dovetailing Midgley's (Reference Midgley1978) and Singer's (Reference Singer1994) ethical continuum that embraces animality and humanity. We are bound, therefore, to revert to Hacking's species-free outlook, which hinges on seemingly unbridgeable metaphorical distinctions between human and non-human in the social imagination. Placing autism in an inter-planetary space curtails the possibility of intelligible communication with members of that category, to the extent of conjuring them up as another species, despite their unquestionable membership of humanity. It acts to divorce the morally accountable denizens of Planet Earth from the morally unaccountable dwellers of Mars, who appear to occupy a separate terrain of lived experience and a distinct mode of existence.

On extra-cultural categories

The metaphorical Mars I wish to elucidate does not float in the planetary orbits of the outer space of discourse. It is present in our midst and embedded within our space, although it is often convenient to turn our gaze away from what occurs there and to block out its sounds. One way of gaining initial entry to that muted space would be through the artistic imagination, in which no holds are barred. To take this further, consider how the following three iridescent moments of literary imagination might be related to each other. First, the famous monologue delivered by Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice places the accused Jew on non-human turf as he bemoans his fate as an excommunicated non-person:

Second, an excerpt from a poem by the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin (translated from the Hebrew):

Third, I juxtapose Sophocles's rendering in Oedipus Rex of the prophet Tiresias's declaration as he appears before the fate-stricken king. Thus spoke the prophet:

The inter-textual connection between these three excerpts, that are so removed from one another culturally, historically and aesthetically, echoes a voice crying in a cultural wilderness that offers no prospect of social engagement and accountability. This trope of unmitigated alienation acts as a catalyst for the ensuing discussion, which is propounded as an invitation to reflect on the state of the end-of-life in extreme old age as an amoral de-personalised category both from without and from within. To do this, I identify an academic communication failure and link it with the existential logic of remembrance and forgetting that ultimately sketches out the contours of culturally excluded categories of discarded humans. Unlike the condition of autism, however, age-related final demise is not deemed reversible, nor is it positioned on a graded scale of intensity and totality such as the autistic spectrum. Rather it is imagined as an irrevocable distinct unit of an all-embracing essential alterity that signifies nothing more than the unmitigated termination of life. In that respect, the condition of autism, subjected as it is to the prospect and promise of healing, is the obverse image of deep old age, which lies beyond the corrective power of therapy. This is a desirable yet redundant category, hailed and spurned by culture and its constructionist devices, as coined by sociologist Jules Henry (1963: 391–477) in Culture Against Man: Human Obsolescence. In other words, it is a socially deemed extra-cultural category at the brink of humanity.

Recognising the extra-cultural

What are these construction-resistant extra-cultural realities? Can they be recognised and monitored? Are we dealing with a kind of exclusion which cannot be subject to inclusion by any means, an anthropological blind-spot that obscures the unknown by rendering it unknowable? Anthropologically speaking, this conundrum could be phrased in terms of the discourse of the boundaries of otherness: the contemplation of which categories are acceptable and which are rejected? Whose voice is heard, and whose voice must be elicited and made to be audible? The prevailing winds of post-colonialism, feminism, cosmopolitanism and globalisation have greatly expanded the range of sounds emanating from the recognised and authorised regions of otherness (Spivak Reference Spivak1987; Taussig Reference Taussig1993). Illegitimate otherness is that whose voice is mute, not necessarily due to repression and silencing, but rather because the frequencies of its audio-transmissions are not tuned to the receptors of the listeners.

Before inquiring into some of the seemingly extra-cultural characteristics embedded in certain manifestations of old age as a prime example of otherness, an epistemological note is in order: I treat advanced old age as category composed of cultural objects (Knorr-Cetina Reference Knorr-Cetina1999), a cluster of symbols, myths, meanings, and signs, and in this respect advanced old age does not correspond to the population assigned as ‘the elderly’ (Hazan Reference Hazan1994). Those in advanced old age, according to this approach, are people conceived of as the carriers of the cultural idioms of old age; and particularly as embodying in their very presence the universal of death (Bauman Reference Bauman1992). In a secular society, where no solace of an after-life is offered, the end-of-life becomes a dead end with its denizens turning into an object of avoidance, renunciation and moral panic. To demonstrate this we can invoke the testimony of what is called ‘The Third Age' – the category whose reluctant occupants reject every distinctive sign of old age that might have touched and contaminated their public appearance, by adopting a youthful-appearing lifestyle and leisure consumption patterns, as well as niche-brands suited for middle age; this while turning to medical technologies which are supposed to stop the gears of biological time from spinning (Katz Reference Katz, Biggs, Lowenstein and Hendricks2003). The Third Age, refusing to wear the death mask of old age, is a space of mimicry, of masquerading, and of inter-age hybridism (Biggs Reference Biggs2004).

These are all strategies purported to ward off the jeopardised self from being relentlessly eroded by the ravages of time such as losing control, of becoming an unbridled savage, of crossing the boundaries of culture and of being denuded of its social defences. It is sufficient to glance at newspaper advertisements to be impressed by the abundance and variety of anti-ageing products offered by late-capitalism to a society terrified of being consigned to that extra-cultural zone of an absent self. Subordination to the resulting tension involved in the proximity to old age while resisting it has been recognised by philosopher Jean Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death as similar to colonialist oppression:

Or as Biggs (2004: 44) put it, the Third Age represents ‘the colonisation of the goals, aims, priorities and agendas of one age-group by another. … This may be consciously done for reasons of political and economic expediency, or unknowingly as if these priorities are simply commonsense’. Unlike the Third World, however, which might become a First or Second, the Third Age is irreversible, and as Baudrillard (1993: 163) added, ‘it lies on the scorched path of death that has no meaning’. Thus, contemporary old age, is related both by Baudrillard and Bauman (2004) to a modernity that leads the pilgrim of progress to an undesirable destination robbed of meaning or justification – and indeed Baudrillard dubbed older people as ‘cultural residuals’ (1993).

On the incomprehensibility of the category of the Fourth Age

The fear of a metamorphosis into a disposable cultural residue is what defines the stark demarcation between the Third Age and the Fourth Age, namely deep, incapacitated end-of-life. It is, for example, how the residents of an Israeli old-age home dehumanised their non-functioning fellow inmates, who were designated as ready for removal to a geriatric home by calling them vegetables and animals (Hazan Reference Hazan1992); and it explains why active and lucid retirees, members of the University of the Third Age in Cambridge, England, refused to visit or even to study those whom they regarded, in distinction from themselves, as Fourth Agers – damaged old people whose infirm bodies or minds are confined to old-age homes and hospitals (Hazan Reference Hazan1996). The undesirability of their presence has been described by Gubrium (Reference Gubrium1993) as a threatening encroachment on personal space, which can be taken as a trespass on the fragile security of constructing a horizon of meaning in old age.

An interesting example of this communicational impasse is a text that describes a series of attempts at dialogue between a middle-aged anthropologist, anxious about her impending old age, and an 80-year-old doctor, an articulate and competent person of high social status and fair health (Shield and Aronson Reference Shield and Aronson2003). Throughout their conversation, the physician reiterated that an outsider to the uniqueness of old age, including the anthropologist who specialises in studying strangeness, would be incapable of understanding the experience and the language of that universe. This is how the elderly doctor described the narrowing horizon of this timeless space:

Ostensibly such an articulation of the anthropological other's temporality (Fabian Reference Fabian1983) is a standard ethnographic problem of representation, translation and understanding. In practice, the breach in communication is an abyss, an epistemological vacuum between a consciousness oriented toward cumulative time, which sanctifies memory and is sanctified by it, and a consciousness that is geared toward space, whose organising principle is existence in and of itself, the here and now of culturally unmediated and immediate living. The retired doctor's metaphoric depiction of a present-bound experience reflects the properties of a category whose socially disavowed position forfeits its right to be built into a temporal construction based on the meaningfulness of past and future. Or, put differently, a structural configuration reflects an extra-cultural state, which seems to match the subjective world reported by its inhabitants. If this is the case, then a breakdown in dialogue with such persons is expected, and it lends itself to be problematised in terms of a self-ascribed state of inhumanity, rather than by deficiencies caused by pathological deprivations.

Self-excommunication

The research reported below examined a dialogical impasse in which the very old could be seen as an offshoot of the respondent's self-ascribed ex-communication. It draws on a series of interviews with 164 elderly people with a mean age of 93 years that were conducted by the Herczeg Institute on Aging in Tel Aviv University. The sample of respondents represented the population of Jewish older people in Israel, and the interviewers were asked to elicit life stories through unstructured narrative renditions. All of the interviewees were psychologically tested to affirm sound cognitive functioning. My interest in analysing these data was vested in looking for commonalities and similarities that evince expressions of bare existence and cues of apparent deconstructed meanings and memories. The challenge of lending an ear to such language, and moreover of transferring it into narrative writing, has been recognised by several scholars of old age, among them Baltes and Smith (Reference Baltes and Smith2003) in their longitudinal and multi-variable study of ageing in Germany. The final years of the research led them into ‘the planet’ of extreme old age, which in contrast to their expectations was revealed as disconnected and different from what had preceded it. They found themselves facing it disarmed of a conceptual arsenal to decipher it. The hermeneutical threat to the standard discourse about ageing – a discourse of memory, of continuity of identity and meaning, they formulated as follows:

The question then arises: what sort of interpretive frame can be offered to settle this paradigmatic breach? And especially: is it possible, and how is it possible to confront this challenge in an attempt to propose a credible argument regarding the reality of extreme old age? And how can this be done without becoming trapped in the iron cage of concepts and methods customarily employed to comprehend ageing. The key issue, as Baltes and Smith (Reference Baltes and Smith2003) identified, is the question of the psycho-social uniqueness of this stage of life: can we bear witness to a language, culture, perception and worldview that are fundamentally indistinct from those that usually guide and direct the course of research? Do the maps that represent this peculiar research territory allow for a reasonable orientation within them?

On abortive dialogues with the Fourth Age

The texts gleaned in the above-mentioned Israeli study were strewn with question marks, silences, truncations, splinters of speech, and fragments of sentences. Faltering dialogues, imprisoned in the superimposed narrated life-story perspective of which they were supposed to be a practised example, failed to deliver adequately intelligible research findings. They were more enigmatic than revealing, and included more hushed intervals than flows of conversation. Nevertheless, six conclusions as to the inner space of the Fourth Age could be drawn from the garbled linguistic mass.

First, extreme old age seems to signify a quantum leap in the lifecourse of a person. This is to say: the implicitly embedded developmental approach that assumes life-long continuity of selfhood does not apply to the existential reality of the old-old. Rather, that peculiar language involves a radical break with whatever preceded it. As argued by Baudrillard (1993: 163), the oldest old are indecipherable because they are ‘a-social culture residuals' – beyond and outside of culture's symbolic systems; or, as Sankar (Reference Sankar and Silverman1987) put it, ‘living dead’ deemed to occupy a present contingent state of dependent neediness. Here is a quote from one of the research subjects:

Second, the Fourth Age is indeed an extra-cultural condition but not one singular to old age. All states that qualify as existence rather than survival, such as extreme old age (Johnson and Barer Reference Johnson and Barer1997), are in the category called in the sociological literature ‘civil deaths’, which implies in both Erving Goffman's (Reference Goffman1961) terms that the individuals are disenfranchised of their rights and privileges as social beings, and in philosopher Giorgio Agamben's (Reference Agamben1998) terminology, a ‘bare life’ or no more than biological existence – the implications being that the groups are excluded from society and that their right to a culturally protected life is denied. Denied of any cultural value, categories of people such as slaves, refugees or vagabonds can be killed, but not sacrificed, since sacrifice signifies symbolic importance. Such groups can be sinlessly condemned and their non-negotiable end is predestined. In the case of extreme old age – interpreted as those whose inevitable biological-cum-social death is proximate – are perceived in secular societies as at a point beyond which there is no cultural salvation. Such attitudes are held by some sick and frail older people, as evident in the following ‘dialogue of the deaf’ between an interviewer (I) and an interviewee or respondent (R):

Third, despite the personal and cultural differences among the subjects, there was a common denominator, one that transcended their interpersonal and inter-cultural differences. It placed the body at the core. What emerged from all the interviews is that bodily experience represents a major preoccupation with somatic concerns. This constitutes what sociologists Gubrium and Holstein (Reference Gubrium, Holstein and Andersson2002) call a ‘discursive anchor’, although contrary to their view, the reference to the body in our case does not serve as a source for constituting self-image and self-identity. This Fourth Age body is the concrete body – a merely mundane, literal essence, total and monistic, devoid of communicable meaning and depleted of selfhood or sublimations. To illustrate, I quote a typical, almost clichéd exchange, one that was fatalistic and apparently selfless:

Fifth, the gap between the metaphorical-narrative perspective of the I and the lack of such a standpoint among the interviewees led to epistemological blankness, to parallel lines of consciousness that did not meet or intersect, to separate discourses that created eventual silence. Indeed, the linear-narrative approach soliciting life stories and reported comparisons of ‘before’ and ‘after’ life events, traumatic turns and subjective over-time evaluation, that dominates the qualitative study of old age averts encounters of patchy, disjointed exchanges. This observation is supported by ample testimonies that the reported lived experience of older people might become atomistic and fragmented, sliced into singular temporal units that are not articulated into a plotted story. In the absence of a future, the past disappears too, and the present converges in on itself, becoming the be-all and end-all, and thus contravening the researcher's goal of weaving a yarn of a mutually acknowledged coherent meaning. One interviewee expressed such nihilism when asked to tell her life story:

Sixth, the cultural autism ascribed by social psychologist Alberto Melucci (Reference Melucci1996) to any generation gap acquires special markers when applied to communicating with a Fourth Age person who favours adhering to the lowest common denominator of being human, verging on the inhuman, namely the unadulterated satisfaction of momentary exigencies. To get to grips with such a mode of consciousness, it behoves the interlocutor to abandon the principles of the ‘sciences of memory’, as Hacking (Reference Hacking1998) labelled psychology, sociology and anthropology, which are founded on the assumption of the quest for continuous identities, the integration of the self, and first and foremost the recognition of the hegemony of memory as the agent of constituting meaning. Only when these stipulations are met, can the following failure of dialogue be prevented:

The paradigmatic change needed to remedy such cultural autism is none other than a radical conceptual move. Thus, for example, instead of the terms story, narrative and memory, one might borrow from Hayden White (Reference White1987) the concept of ‘annals’, which are supposed to indicate an a-historical, a-temporal outlook on the course of events. According to this perspective, people dispassionately report archives of events as if there is no emotional, logical, ethical, aesthetic, teleological or causal connection between them. This discontinuity between accounts and accountability, in fact, phases out the status of the subject as narrator, a master of cumulative memory juggling snippets of past, present and future to display a façade of a lifespan. The following exchange is an example of the opposite, a dismembered body of unconnected occurrences:

On meaning and memory in the Fourth Age

What appears as a lack of meaning seems rather to be the grist of the meaning of existence in the unattainable and non-conceptualised reaches of extreme old age. The enactment of this inscrutable core is a refusal of speech, and it is this that must be seized upon in order to say something of the unspoken. The speaking interviewee releases herself of the narrative obligation forced upon her, and declares, perhaps unconsciously or perhaps with full cognisance, the death of the author, i.e. her own death as an accountable self while rethinking her position as active agency (Tulle Reference Tulle and Tulle2004). She in fact indifferently lets listeners expropriate ownership of the meaning of her life, and to do with it what they please. This of course is apostasy – the rejection of the anthropological doxy that sanctifies authentic witnessing, the voice of the other, her right to speak and be heard, and thus serves as a proof-text for the interpretation of her world. But do we have the justification and authority to convert Shylock into Christianity, to force an encounter between the Prince of Wales and the Rabbi of Belz, or to foist unwanted memories and bits of lore on the prophet Tiresias? What appears as a rhetorical question is not such in the anthropological discourse that is based on the feasibility and necessity of the dialogic moment that connects elements of memory, and on tying past and present to the future by way of metaphorical binding, thus unremittingly stringing cultures and contexts to one another.

In Imaginative Horizons, anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano invokes the Sufi concept of barzakh, which designates the point of convergence of oceans and is used as a key metaphor for his argument that the main project of anthropology should be focused on the time and space of in-betweenness:

Paraphrasing Crapanzano inversely, one may ask, how would a theory of memory look without the barzakh – the impact of the interface, the power of the between, as anthropologist Paul Stoller (Reference Stoller2009) lauds it – the cradle of metaphor and the spring of morality? As modern anthropology is preoccupied with social interstices, luminal states, transitional processes and cultural contact zones, one might very well ask: could a discipline founded on the sanctification of the ‘betweenness’ offer an alternative epistemology predicated on a recognition of the possibility of impermeable boundaries and thick lines? A beginning of an answer to this question might arise out of the space of the Fourth Age, a space that in contrast to that occupied by the Third Age contains no hybridity forged by the between; it has no acculturation, nor can it have any translation or mimesis, nor does it even contain forgetting, because memory has no place in it as a generator of meaning. This is a space that the outside observer senses but cannot experience, an unknowable, apparently extra-cultural landscape. Like the invisible elephant in the room, that everyone knows about, but whose presence no-one would explicitly acknowledge (Zerubavel Reference Zerubavel2006), this portentous otherness is the invisible-but-present hand, which draws the cultural contours that are meant to obscure and conceal it.

The amoral journey towards the Fourth Age

The notions of the elephant in the room or the king's new clothes are indeed a first step on our path into the realm of mute Fourth Age. The second phase is heterotopic, to borrow a Foucaudian term for a space that excludes others (Foucault Reference Foucault1986: 22). Here the elephant is removed from the room and exiled to an enclosure of things forbidden and unseen, or tabooed: old-age homes, geriatric wards and sheltered enclaves for the aged. Here too the conspiracy of silence is unravelled and turns into euphemistic speech, and therapeutic, self-righteous care-giving.

The more corporeal and mental infirmities augment among the cultural carriers of old age, so the need to renew contact increases with ‘those nominated as others’ in order to indulge in the solace of societal moral order. This unilateral relationship reproduces the vanished elephant and demands that its needs and the room it takes up are recognised. Here, too, is where the third phase on the road to the Fourth Age might begin – the phase of defilement and transgression, or as anthropologist Michael Taussig (Reference Taussig1999) called it ‘defacement’, vilification, victimisation – an act of cultural shaming that magnifies the public weight of the disclosed secret at the same time that it tries to make it disappear. Thus, any harm inflicted on the object of the secret instigates a motion that turns the old person from a victim of a social calamity into a sacrifice, to whose care lip service is paid in order to absolve cultural scruples.

Social supervisory mechanisms of medicalisation, infantalisation and guardianship are often practised in this performance of perfunctory accountability. The entirety of an elderly person is thus imploded into a disciplined, docile body expropriated from its embodied self, and imply that time is now up. Such practices gravitate into the hub of a bio-political and managerial, moralistically coated, discourse that ushers deep old age towards an extra-cultural no man's land. This is a space that might be populated with autists – the entrenched homeless, refugees and other ilk of untranslatable humanity; those whose existence is often perceived as irreversible, and therefore cannot serve as common currency in a world premised on the presumption of exchange and conversion. In the absence of moral engagement between Martians and scouting anthropologists, no system of mutual accountability based on common humanity could be ascertained, and no tenable dialogical intercourse is likely to be sustained.

In conclusion, the recondite, much maligned, strong version of the theory of disengagement between older people and the rest of society (Cumming and Henry Reference Cumming and Henry1961) is not only cogent but also an invitation to drive a wedge between two separate types of morality and outlooks on the preferred properties of a life worth living. It argues the case for an imagery of bifurcated humanity, but the shadow cast by political correctness and liberal ethics curbs any further discussion along this vein, which exposes the relativistic visage of morality beyond the presumption of a universally acknowledged humanity (Brown Reference Brown2008).