I live in Hawaiʻi, where I grow my own pineapples. Never for profit; it’s strictly a hobby. Our family eats maybe a dozen a year, and one little bed gives us all that we need.
Talking about pineapples in Hawaiʻi can be awkward. There’s a history, and it’s not a sweet one.
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Sanford B. Dole was a member of the American-led clique that, in 1893, overthrew the government of Hawaiʻi. That government posed no strategic or economic threat to the United States. The United States already enjoyed free trade with the islands, and it already held exclusive rights to a naval base at Pearl Harbor.
Meanwhile, the government of Hawaiʻi had developed into a constitutional monarchy with uniquely Hawaiian characteristics, some of which remain important in state and international law today. Hawaiʻi deserved much better than it got from Mr. Dole, and he’s rightly reviled out here. Even growing pineapples can still be a bit embarrassing. They aren’t truly Hawaiian, and I know it.
I wonder, though, what King David Kalākaua would have thought of that. Today we usually remember Kalākaua as a cultural hero, which he was. Nicknamed the Merrie Monarch, he re-legalized hula dancing, reviving an indigenous art form that the missionaries had suppressed. But Kalākaua also toured the world to entice contract laborers to Hawaiʻi, where they would suffer for the sake of the pineapple—and for its big-money plantation brother, the sugar cane.
The same dynamics that today put migrant workers at a severe disadvantage in the Middle East were then at work in Hawaiʻi: Your boss is close, and the people who might protect you are far away. Your boss controls not just the means of production, but the means of consumption, too, in the form of the company store. If you can’t pay, he’ll be quick to make you a loan. And he has powers over the legal system that you can’t hope to match. Before the coup, Sanford Dole served on the Supreme Court of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi.
Capitalism can still work in conditions like that, but it can’t work well for you. Plantation life was predictably hard.
It remains a troublesome history for Hawaiian nationalists, among others. Throughout the nineteenth century, the monarchy collaborated with the planters, and there are no clean hands in that story. Some might like to blame the Americans all alone, but they’d be wrong.
The Hawaiian monarchy wasn’t a perfect government, and I’m no romantic about monarchies in general. But the overthrow wasn’t about better governance. It was about sugar, and pineapples, and about how to squeeze ever more money from them, ever more securely. Becoming a U.S. territory stood to benefit Dole and his conspirators, and eventually it did.
Contemporary mainland accounts of the islands were apt to mix blatant, matter-of-course racism with equally blatant, matter-of-course appeals to philanthropy. We may wonder how those sentiments could coexist in a single brain, and they make for some awful reading. Even among the bystanders, we find few to cheer for.
No matter how often we see it, there’s something in our minds that revolts at that ambivalence. Whatever our ideologies may be, we all want heroes and villains. We all want friends and enemies. We all want moral clarity, and not just in some book or seminar paper. We want our moral clarity to live and breathe and walk and talk. Usually it doesn’t.
To repeat: there were no clean hands among the founders of Hawaiʻi’s plantations. But Grover Cleveland—a flawed president, still better than many—happened to be serving in 1893. Cleveland was a proud anti-imperialist, and when the clique petitioned Washington, he told them to pound sand. Hawaiʻi and the United States had a peace treaty; Cleveland informed Congress that he would abide by it, and he did.
In 1898, one of our lesser presidents, William McKinley, made Hawaiʻi a U.S. territory. McKinley was an imperialist; expanding the land under American rule mattered a lot to him, evidently more than peace or good relations with the islands. Granted, the islands would vote overwhelmingly for statehood in 1959, and Hawaiian separatism remains a fringe position today, but it’s hard to find much love out here for President McKinley. I can certainly understand that. He closed a door forever. Behind it are possibilities that still tantalize.
This all raises a host of questions: What if I care about the history, and about how the symbolism seeps into my actions? How should a well-intentioned person act amid all that moral compromise? What if I care about my neighbors, and about their feelings?
The paradoxes only grow when we look to the larger economic forces at play. Suppose I want commercial pineapple harvesters to enjoy good lives today. Most of them aren’t in Hawaiʻi anymore; they’re in Costa Rica. Should I import my pineapples from them? (Import pineapples? To Hawaiʻi? Surely not.) But to avoid eating imported pineapples impoverishes Costa Rican field hands. It might take away the only work they have, such as it is.
When I grow at home, that’s what I’m doing, if only to a tiny degree. Buying from my neighbors, who sell at the farmers’ markets, achieves the same end; the descendants of plantation workers here in Hawaiʻi are usually much wealthier than today’s Costa Rican field hands. Yet if I were to return to the globalized market, I might just fatten some Costa Rican landlords. I want to ask: Where are the limits to any of these intuitions? Immanuel Kant was right that a good life takes a measure of altruism, but that to calculate its proportion is impossible.
The pineapple recapitulates modernity. It’s a symbol of luxury turned mass consumer product. It’s also a tangled moral mess, and beneath it, there’s a crime. My friends to the left sometimes say that there’s no innocent consumption under capitalism. Certainly not, if our memory’s long enough. As my friend Paul Musgrave recently put it:
Nowhere is his observation more apt than in contemporary Hawaiʻi, which is multicultural and pluralist in ways that the mainland can seldom approach. We all drop a little context out here. We’re all a bit of a muddle, and we don’t really need to pick at the symbolism in search of an imagined purity. We can thrive in the productive ambiguity. Not every literal pineapple hides a crime.
Still, it’s hard to go broke recommending tyrannically clean lines and pat political answers. Plenty of people still want those answers, even if, when we follow them long enough, we find a bloodbath.
That’s more or less the trajectory of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt’s thinking. For Schmitt, “the political” is a distinct sociological category, and it arises when some value or cause “is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy,” as he wrote in The Concept of the Political. Friends are determined to cooperate; enemies are determined to kill each other. For Schmitt, drawing the lines between friend and enemy is the distinctive work of politics.
To Schmitt, “the political” isn’t about any specific consideration at all. The political, in his sense, is only about “the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national, economic, or of another kind… The real friend-enemy grouping is existentially so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical antithesis, at precisely the moment at which it becomes political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely religious, purely economic, purely cultural criteria.”
As we online folk might say, discourse eventually becomes politics, and politics is about whom to kill. Killing is awful, but at least it’s strong and decisive. That’s the heart of the Schmittian appeal: To embrace violence is to say goodbye to your agonizing moral ambiguity. You’ll never need to sweat being wrong in the details when you’re wrong in bulk and goose stepping about it.
But this is all a bit overdrawn. Much of ordinary life never approaches the friend-enemy distinction, and it’s best that it doesn’t. A full life isn’t going to be a fully consistent life, with every decision, every accoutrement, both materially and symbolically flawless. Private spaces will hopefully always exist to tolerate the ambiguities of life. Some affordances are worth it; some certainly aren’t, and the lines can be hard to draw. It’s why we set everyone free to make their own mistakes. It’s also why we value forgiveness.
We enter a morally complicated territory whenever we choose not to fight, but to associate, produce, and trade. Yes, the terms of those acts matter. We should talk about them, even when they’re appalling, and I have. We should bargain about them, and we all do. We should critique them, and the work of critique never ends.
It’s not wrong to seek to improve our material conditions—and these exact mechanisms are how we do it: production, specialization, gains from trade, and iterative improvements to each. It can’t be said often enough. Gradually, decade by decade, century by century, the world has grown richer.
That’s a feat Schmitt’s politics could never accomplish, and to which it’s fundamentally corrosive. Nor could the crony capitalism of the planters bring an equitable prosperity to the masses. What’s done it so far? Fighting, working, and contriving to have ever weaker masters, ruling ever fewer realms of life, with ever easier exits. That process is unfinished, and it must continue. (Would you kill all the masters, wherever you find them? That rule tends to strengthen the principle of mastery. It also makes killers our masters.)
There are big, technical questions about how best to free humanity from the curse of one person’s dominion over another, but those are for another essay. The ambiguity of being a consumer in a mixed moral universe is terrifying. We who hope to continue enriching humanity should probably talk about it more often. Markets enrich—yes, they usually even enrich the least well off—but they also put us in constant tension with one another about how to spend all that new income.
To engage in merely self-interested market behavior is to set aside the political, at least for a while. The objection that all things are political is surely wrong as to Schmitt’s idea of the political. And even in ordinary usage, it’s too glib by half: If we went down that road with any consistency, we’d soon find that all things were forbidden to the scrupulous. Dirty hands have inevitably touched them, and we must abstain.
We don’t generally do that. Instead, we compromise. We don’t earn our daily bread by a show of valor, by defeating our hated enemies, whether symbolically or literally, and that fact shames and annoys us. No, we earn our bread through marginal improvements in global efficiency—through the very thing that sent pineapple production to Costa Rica—and who asked for that?
Because markets enrich, we have new resources to devote to sharpening our moral sentiments, to expressing them through wide-ranging economic commitments and economic renunciations, which the modern consumer can a lot more easily afford. Some of those sentiments will be good; others, bad, and it’s often genuinely hard for a well-intentioned person to know how to act morally in a prosperous, consumer-oriented capitalism. The Good Place is a brilliant work of art simply for articulating this fact about the modern condition, and for treating its motley heroes with empathy all the same. The rules are too complicated, and too unknowable, for all of us to emerge unscathed, in everyone else’s eyes.
It’s important to look at this unfathomable situation as squarely as we can manage. I’ve shown you some of the history of Hawaiʻi because it so clearly illustrates the ambiguities of living in a world that’s rapidly but unevenly getting better. Hawaiʻi’s history also makes a good example because, for you, it’s probably new. It doesn’t get slotted into well-worn arguments that you’ve already had with others on social media. It cuts against the left and the right in ways that I think are valuable. It defies the pat narratives.
And yet I hope that much of it will be familiar, in a way. There are pineapples all over the place, if we just learn to see them. They’re the reminders of the uncomfortable past that we all share, and of the work yet to be done. As symbols, they’re never without their problems. Yet we also live in the material, sensuous world—a world of costs, benefits, ledger books, and growing options for one’s unaccountable personal tastes.
We don’t have an idealized capitalism, free from cronies and self-dealing. An idealized traditional or indigenous society isn’t hidden away in some mountain, waiting for the right moment to reemerge. If you can see the folly in either of those, then you should already know that technological accelerationism won’t resolve the tension for us either. We must get better at pluralism, even as it remains uncertain and lonely. Pluralism demands that we make risky, painful, low-payoff private judgments. But it’s not without reward. Do it right and you’ll never have to goose step at all.
As Adam Smith knew, we all eat, “not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker… but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love...” Let’s put a sharper point on that: You and I both eat through the labor of people whose hands we might decline to shake if we just knew a little more about them. Their sentiments are not our own. Maybe they have bad politics. Or they’re kooky about health and wellness. Or they’re racists. In the vast, anonymous network that feeds us all, there are certainly quite a few people like that. If you asked them, they’d have a litany of bad things to say about us, too.
We might not be wrong to decline that handshake. And yet they feed us, even as they despise us. Boycotts? They’re always possible; they only work well, though, when they’re rare, and this is the reason why. Boycotts seek to wall off a part of the extended economic order—an order that’s usually inclined to integrate. Through our anonymized exchanges, we usually choose to feed our nominal enemies.
Market behavior is a blessedly hypocritical conspiracy against our mutual hatreds, in favor of our self-interests, regardless of where they may lie. We flaunt our hatreds online, and we shed them at the grocery store. No, it’s not a circle of friends all caring for one another. It’s not even doux commerce; we won’t necessarily learn to appreciate each other any better than we already do. The system will keep right on enriching nearly all of us. Many will still use that extra wealth to broadcast our hatreds, and, despite those hatreds, our living standards will probably continue to rise.
The process of feeding ourselves in hatred can go on indefinitely, or at least until we find some better use for our surplus resources. Let’s hope that we do. In the meantime, markets are like a clever trick that we’ve all played on the lower parts of our psyches, a trick that keeps the friend-enemy distinction functionally, unobtrusively at bay. The alternatives are stark: We extend, as a rule, some forms of social trust, even to the unworthy, and always to the ambiguous. If not, we starve.
You may have heard it before: Fix your heart or die. But I’d add: If you simply can’t do either, fake it and muddle through. To some degree, just about everyone already does.
