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Staying Human in the 21st Century Is Harder Than You Might Think, Steve Fuller

SERRC — December 20, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Steve Fuller, University of Warwick, s.w.fuller@warwick.ac.uk.

Fuller, Steve. “Staying Human in the 21^st Century Is Harder Than You Might Think.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 12 (2018): 39-42.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-44W

The Main Street Bridge in Columbus, Ohio, the largest major city near Ashland University.
Image by Bill Koontz via Flickr / Creative Commons

Let me start by saying that it’s a great honour to address you today.[1] It turns out that nearly forty years ago, I was the ‘salutatorian’ of the Class of 1979 at Columbia College in New York. That means I was the number two guy in terms of overall grade point average across all subjects. And that guy gives the introductory speech, whereas the number one guy gives the closing speech, the so-called ‘valedictory’ address, which literally means saying goodbye.

It seems that once again I am the ‘warm up act’ for a graduation ceremony in that once I finish speaking, you’ll actually get your degrees! And that’s exactly was how it worked in the old days.

I am someone who thinks that if I have anything interesting to say, it will be to those who are more oriented to the future than to the past – or even the present. In any case, this is how I would wish you to interpret me.

There are many challenges to our sense of humanity today. I want to start with a long term challenge that you will increasingly face in the coming years. That has to do with privileging ‘humanity’ understood as a kind of upright ape who has consolidated its place on Earth by monopolizing control over the planet’s resources. This is what geologists are beginning to call the ‘Anthropocene’, and it probably began with the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century – and it marks the first time a single species has dictated the terms of engagement on Earth.

This has led to considerable metaphysical soul-searching about the human condition. And put bluntly, much of this soul-searching has resulted in self-loathing for humanity as a species. We are to blame for the unprecedented levels of mass extinctions and climate change over the past two or more centuries.

All the while, our species has come to range over the entire planet in a manner that reminds some of these scientifically informed misanthropes of cockroaches. However, the difference between us and cockroaches is that cockroaches don’t seem to exhibit the strong sense of inequality among its members that we have historically insisted among ourselves.

So given our evolutionary track record, in what sense are humans are worth promoting, let alone all of us – as Thomas Jefferson said, as ‘created equal’? Of course, it’s been long recognized that there is an enormous spread in the capacity of human beings. Modern biological science has given this informal observation an empirical basis.

Originally it was presented as a demonstration of natural inequality, and the phrase ‘scientific racism’ remains a legacy of that line of thought. However, nowadays biologists prefer to speak of the diversity of life-forms, which together constitute ecologies, the Earth itself being the ultimate ecosystem.

But against this general current of thought, egalitarianism has been advanced by the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – simply on the grounds that we are all children of the same God in some broadly ‘privileged’ sense.

In the modern era, this fundamental intuition was given focus by the classical idea of republicanism, namely, that a society should be constituted only by those who regard each other as equals. And what makes and keeps people equal are the standards by which they are judged – and this is determined by the people themselves. And that was what was meant by the res publica – the ‘public thing’, in Latin.

It’s worth recalling that prior to the US Constitution, republics had been small enclaves of the few who regarded each other as equals. Think about Athens, Rome, Venice and the Netherlands in their republican phases. Basically, they were places for rich migrants.

So What Happens If The Migrants Aren’t Rich?

In law, there are two general ways in which people can become citizens. One is called jus soli, and refers to the land in which you yourself were born, and the other is called jus sanguinis, and refers to the birth of your parents. If you look at a map of the world today, you’ll see that jus soli dominates the Western hemisphere and jus sanguinis dominates the Eastern hemisphere. And that’s because the Western hemisphere – this hemisphere of North and South America – has been seen as a natural place for migrants.

However, candidates for citizenship in a republic typically have to demonstrate their fitness to be treated as equal with regard to the res publica. And then once accepted, they would be obliged to participate in public life. Providing evidence of wealth was historically crucial because it showed both management skills and a desire to pool one’s resources with an alien society. The duty to vote in elections – in which each vote counts as one — is simply a remnant of what had been a much stronger civic expectation to engage in society.

Many philosophers have believed that republicanism cannot be scaled up because they thought it was unreasonable to expect that people with quite diverse backgrounds and interests could treat each other as ‘equals’ in some politically sustainable sense. It’s quite clear that even the American Founding Fathers had their doubts, since they counted slaves as only 3/5 of a person for purposes of Congressional representation.

Notice that I haven’t yet mentioned ‘democracy’. That’s because democracy has historically meant ‘majority rule’, on whatever terms it’s established. For example, 51% could license the execution of the remaining 49% in a democracy. Indeed, people may start equal in a democracy but that equality could soon evaporate after the first collective decision is taken. Think Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies, two classic mid-20^th century English novels.

Here one can begin to appreciate the abiding importance of the Abrahamic religions in upholding a metaphysical conception of human equality that cuts against what had been traditionally seen as the eventual descent of democracy into ‘mob rule’.

That metaphysical idea – the fundamental equality of all humans — was first made incarnate in the practice of debt forgiveness among the Jews on each sabbatical year. To cut a long story short, since I don’t want to bore you with religious history, the fundamental equality of people was ritualistically demonstrated by the redistribution of wealth from the ‘winners’ to the ‘losers’ in society, which in turn provided an opportunity for everyone to be ‘born again’: The rich as somewhat poorer and the poor as somewhat richer. Thus, society is periodically remade as a level playing field.

Until the losers are regarded as always the equals of the winners of society, democracy is not an especially egalitarian political movement. This helps to explain why such great defenders of liberalism as John Stuart Mill regarded democracy with considerable suspicion. He believed that given the chance, the great unwashed might permanently silence the enlightened few, who throughout history have often been on the losing side of many of society’s great arguments – especially on matters concerning the future.

In What Sense, Then, Are All People ‘Created Equal’?

I would like to propose that our equality is ultimately about possessing a wide degree of freedom. And I mean a freedom that gives you the right to be wrong and the right to fail. This is only possible if you’re allowed to express yourself in the first place — and be allowed a second chance. This is to do with the range of opportunities available to you.

It’s easy to see that someone with a track record of managing their own wealth successfully would already be in the business of allowing themselves second chances – say, when an investment sours – and so would be fit for republican citizenship. However, the ancient Jewish practice of debt atonement was the original policy to allow everyone to acquire that enviable status. It was always in the back of minds of those who designed the welfare state.

Every human is entitled to be free in how they dispose of their lives, regardless of their likelihood of success. Freedom is the capacity to take risks, and universities are for the development of that capacity. There is nothing natural about how people come to want what they want. It is all a matter of training, and the only question is where and how it happens. And you have come to Ashland for that.

If you graduate from Ashland with a clearer sense of purpose than when you entered, then this university will have done its job and you will be able to go forward as an exemplary human being. I say this as a matter of principle – regardless of what you take your purpose to be, and even if your sense of clarity arises from revolting what you have encountered here.

The bottom line is that if you can’t have a sense of purpose unless you have faced serious alternatives – that is to say, ‘opportunity costs’, as the economists like to put it.

You’re not free unless you have had the opportunity to reject alternatives presented to you. And in that respect, the value of your education amounts to increasing your capacity for rejection – you can afford to let go. And that means more than simply saying no because of what you have been taught, but rather saying yes because you can identify with a certain way of being in the world.

We live in a time when those of you before me can self-identify in a wider range of ways than ever before. When I was your age, all we had was class and national mobility at our disposal, but now you also have gender and even race mobility added on to it – at both a social and a biological level, in case one is worried by pedigree.

I am by no means suggesting that you need to think about any of these sorts of migrations, but they are there for the asking, and if you have been trained properly here, you will at least have heard of them and have adopted a reasoned response to them.

Whatever else one can say about humanity in the future, it is bound to be a moveable feast. And you will be among the movers and shakers!

Contact details: S.W.Fuller@warwick.ac.uk

[1] What follows is the commencement address to the Winter 2018 graduating class of Ashland University, Ohio. It was delivered on 15 December.

Humanity’s Halting Problem, Adam Riggio

SERRC — September 18, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Adam Riggio, Royal Crown College, serrc.digital@gmail.com.

Riggio, Adam. “Humanity’s Halting Problem.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 9 (2018): 45-52.

The pdf of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-40X

Image by Cade Roster via Flickr / Creative Commons

Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger have written Re-Engineering Humanity as a sustained and multifaceted critique of how contemporary trends in internet technology are slowly but surely shrinking the territory of human autonomy. Their work is a warning, as well as a description, of how internet technologies that ostensibly make our lives easier do so by taking control of our lives away from our self-conscious decision-making.

The second major part of four in Re-Engineering Humanity describes the core elements of these control mechanisms: the engineering of our social and physical surroundings through the internet of things and smart environments, the extension of our thinking processes into smartphone technology, the monitoring and feedback of our behaviour through surveillance and data mining, and reducing our legal obligations to corporate internet monopolies by reducing legal contracts to an unthinking step in activating computer applications.

Frischmann and Selinger discuss many topics in Re-Engineering Humanity, which a reasonably concise review cannot include. I will focus on what I think are the most important elements of the book which illustrate its shortcomings and revolutionary potential. I will address their core theme that contemporary trends in internet technology’s development constitute social engineering in the interests of oligarchic corporate elites, the insights and missed opportunities of their complex critique of click-to-contract legal obligations, and the problems in how they conceive of the creeping omnipresence of social engineering technology.

Mass Social Engineering in Private Interests

Frischmann and Selinger address an important problem for our contemporary society in Re-Engineering Humanity: how the corporate priorities and unquestioned presumptions of Silicon Valley business culture are subtly and profoundly transforming human habits and intuitions. Their position is far from the techno-phobia that is often a sadly common knee-jerk reaction to the omnipresence of internet technology in our lives.

They instead offer a more nuanced and complex attitude of skepticism to the current tendencies of internet technology. One of the earliest promises of the internet was that it offered a communication infrastructure that was free of corporate control. Most media in the twentieth century was corporate-controlled in all meaningful aspects. Major corporations created the content (television shows, films, mass-market magazines), and owned the physical networks that distributed that content (broadcast, cable and satellite television; printing facilities).

Where corporations did not control media infrastructure and content creation, governments did. Ostensibly, government ownership was the same as public ownership, but any reasonable research on the history and politics of state communications media will show how they were most often deployed against the liberation and freedom of the public. Even when government-owned media such as Britain’s BBC and Canada’s CBC are institutionally held at arm’s length from partisan control, pressure to enforce cultural conservatism and maintain a status quo oppressive for many groups such as the working classes or Indigenous peoples remain.

The decentralized nature of internet communication originally held great promise as a revolutionary medium, able to disrupt monopolistic corporate or government control of media. However, the contemporary giants of online media have since betrayed this promise in more thorough and chilling ways than any merely propagandist state broadcaster could ever manage.

Efficiency: A Dangerous Morality

The problem lies in the culture of Silicon Valley, whose morality centres efficiency as the highest good. If a technology increases the efficiency of some activity, then that technology is good. This moral orientation fails to account or even conceive of whether some inefficiency actually improves the quality of a particular process, or whether the means to achieve greater efficiency erodes a person’s autonomy or control over the direction of her life.

An everyday example they cite is the growing ubiquity of GPS as a means to navigate. GPS is useful in reaching a destination efficiently, particularly if you are in an unfamiliar environment, like a foreign city you are visiting for the first time, or even a neighbourhood of your own home with which you are unfamiliar.

But its ubiquity causes declines in personal knowledge responsibility for one’s actions. Reliance on GPS navigation degrades a person’s ability to develop intuitive knowledge of local landmarks or routes; you listen for GPS directions instead of paying attention to local geography and traffic patterns. Yet Silicon Valley culture of efficiency as the highest good prefers reliance on GPS because it avoids the errors of learning through experience.

Moreover, the danger of efficiency-centric morality grows when GPS reliance in navigation is combined with other technologies such as self-driving vehicles. You become no longer a driver, but a passenger. This can be a good thing in some circumstances: consider my own relaxing journeys by subway from my home to my workplace, where I read most of Re-Engineering Humanity.

But the morality of efficiency also pressures people to devote more and more of their lives to work for corporate employers or clients. Consider what the workaholic culture of companies like Amazon would do to a workforce of commuters by self-driving cars. Instead of my relaxing rides to work by public transit (where I can read the news, Re-Engineering Humanity, or more recently Toni Morrison’s Paradise), workers would be writing code, troubleshooting new app designs, or in stressful Slack meetings. The morality of efficiency seeks to find new technologies that enable people to devote more and more hours of their lives to the service of their corporate employers instead of the cultivation of their own lives, families, and personalities.

When Agreement Sidelines Knowledge

The union of GPS navigation and the ubiquity of self-driving vehicles remains in a potential future, which social political movements may still avert. Consider now an already-ubiquitous means of corporate control over our lives and personalities: the electronic contract. This is an ordinary moment in contemporary experience. You download a new application, and as you are installing it, an end-user licence agreement appears. The only way you can continue using the application that you just downloaded (and for which you possibly even paid) is by selecting the “Agree” option.

As you all know, no one ever reads these contracts. They are long, often displayed in small font (an additional impediment for elderly or visually-impaired humans), and composed in dense legalistic language and style. It is such a popular joke to speculate on what ridiculous promises we have made without our knowledge over even the most innocuous applications that it has been a storyline on South Park.

It is now common sense among the reasonably tech-savvy public that the connection between our knowledge of our legal obligations with our actual legal obligations has grown very tenuous. Parker and Stone’s “Human CentiPad” takes that grim joke to a remarkable absurdity and grotesquerie. But the truth underlying its premise is common knowledge, making Frischmann and Selinger’s analyses feel redundant; at least to me or someone with a similar profile.

Re-Engineering Humanity offers a brilliant phenomenological account of how the click-to-contract mechanism works. It is drawn from psychological studies of human behaviour, autonomic action, and thought during our perception of the click-to-contract event. Their analysis also draws on techniques from the phenomenological imaginative description, developed in the discipline of philosophy.

What Makes a Solution Fall Short?

Yet this comprehensive study of the contemporary actions and knowledge that click-to-contract encourages and suppresses does not teach us enough about it to develop antidotes. Reading their conclusion, I find their suggested solutions to the problems of click-to-contract remain inadequate.

Not that more mainstream suggested solutions are close to adequate for the problem themselves. The most notable critique is simply finding, in the interactions of a person with their applications, ways to force them to read the whole thing. The problem with that, of course, is that annoyed people will figure out how to skip it anyway, and this knowledge will proliferate quickly enough through society to beat the kludge.

They discuss another mainstream solution that consists in uploading all the terms of standard click-to-contract forms to legislation. Problems here are numerous as well. One clear issue is that moving the terms of contract to the law of the land also moves those terms and obligations out of the immediate consciousness of the people using the applications.

Another likely fatal hurdle here is that the land on which such law would apply is limited. There would likely be well over 100 different legal standards for click-to-contract obligations for nearly every legislative body on Earth. The technology industry’s leaders themselves would never allow such legal diversity to impede their business so.

Frischmann and Selinger’s three suggestions to develop solutions for click-to-contract problems improve upon these inadequate solutions, but not enough in my view. Their first idea, adding speed bumps to the click-to-contract process, merely differs in degree from the restoration of tedium in the mainstream recommendation of forcing all users to read all contracts in full. Contemporary users of technology – that is, pretty much everyone with access to computer technology of any kind – will resist any attempt to impede their speedy use of programs for their own purposes.

Recognizing the Genuinely Radical

Frischmann and Selinger’s last two proposals I think can be extremely effective in restoring autonomy to many of us. However, I take issue with their treatment of these suggestions: they are deeply radical, require totally reorienting the architecture and economy of the internet. Yet because the book largely focusses on critiques and analyses of existing structures and tendencies of human interactions with internet technology, these remarkable ideas receive a mere few pages of treatment in their conclusion. They deserve a book of their own, which would be an ambitious work of creative political economy for the internet.

Am I criticizing Re-Engineering Humanity because it falls short of the scope and ambition of Marx’s Capital? Yes, in fact, I am. But I see no reason why any thinker should not seek to write with such scope and ambition, since I can think of nothing significant one would lose in doing so.

These two proposals, enacted together, would explode the entire economic model of the internet as it exists today. Begin with their suggestion to replace our fragmentary app-by-app contracting interactions with a general agreement of reciprocal obligations between individuals and the major internet corporations. The ethics and morality of our mutual obligations with these corporate giants would then be at the forefront of our thoughts in using their products and platforms. As such, popular attitudes to the corporations that control our online spaces would be less likely to become as complacent as they are today.

I do not think Frischmann and Selinger fully understand just how radical their third proposal to replace the click-to-contract procedure is. They propose to end third-party benefits to click-to-contract agreements. This would outlaw data mining. Doing so would make the business models of such epoch-defining monopoly firms as Facebook, Google, and Palantir[1] effectively illegal. Data mining – the mass collection, analysis, and use of information regarding every online interaction we make – is the most lucrative engine of the online economy.

Working to enact such a proposal would make an enemy of the most powerful people and organizations on Earth today. Combined with the anti-trust efforts underway among activists, as well as social democratic and liberal parties in Europe and North America against the internet giants, such a proposal would constitute a revolution against global oligarchy that would rank in significance with the beginning of the trade union movement.

Missing the Conceptual History

For all the genuine philosophical illumination that Frischmann and Selinger bring to the phenomenon of click-to-contract, there remains an important aspect of this new approach to contractual obligations that their analysis misses. This is why the contract itself is seen as having power despite its never being read. The contract has become a means of binding through agreement alone, despite agreement having been divorced from your knowledge of what is agreed upon.

In the book’s focus on how Silicon Valley’s customer consent processes have taken advantage of our presumptions about what permissions and freedoms contracts grant a company over its clients, Re-Engineering Humanity does not focus on how those presumptions arose in the first place. This requires a historical view of how the event of agreement to a contract among two or more parties became the definitive standard of economic legitimacy.

Such a historical and philosophical view would require grappling with an enormous body of contemporary work, as well as works from previous eras of the modern Western epoch whose meanings have been subject to debate for centuries. The major theorists in the West of what the grounding legitimacy of our political institutions and networks are, have centred that genesis in the contract itself. The weight of contracting as a procedure to legitimate institutions and social relations includes the contributions of such major thinkers as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, John Rawls, and all the theorists and commentators who have followed and expanded their ideas.

This intellectual tradition does not appear in the analyses of Re-Engineering Humanity, and I admit that asking a single book to include a definitive breakdown of one of the central concepts of the last four centuries of Western political philosophy is utterly ridiculous. A complete historical analysis is far from necessary for Frischmann and Selinger’s purposes. Nonetheless, their analysis falls short of understanding why the contract itself is taken to be significant when all its epistemic components have been stripped away. The click-to-contract procedure carries the force of law, but none of the knowledge of obligations that justifies enforcement through the law. The phenomenology alone of click-to-contract leaves the reasons for its absurdity up solely to a reader’s intuitions.

An Entire Industry’s Foundational Absurdity

I hope this perversion of our cultural presumptions about the power of contracts strikes you, as a reader, as being very strange, possibly self-contradictory, and quite definitely absurd. Understanding the absurdity of our situation is a powerful realization in equipping us as people, members of a society, and internet users to think adequately about the data-driven technologies that engineer more and more of our daily lives and activities in the interests of corporate leaders and shareholders.

Frischmann and Selinger are very insightful in many of their analyses, but fall short on this matter of our absurdity, because they take it for granted so intuitively that they don’t analyze it. At one point, for example, they describe an actual product development proposal from a Silicon Valley company to embed sensors in people’s legs so that a GPS system can navigate customers’ own bodies so that they can respond to work-related emails and phone calls while jogging or getting other outdoor exercise. If Terry Gilliam were to read of this, he would envy that young startup executive for having thought of such a deranged idea before he did.

But what precisely is so deranged about our willing surrender of our freedom? The desire for your own slavery has recurred as an explicit topic of political philosophy since the writing of Spinoza. One field of philosophy that has picked up Spinoza’s question is the political analysis of desire developed in the works of such writers as Gilles Deleuze, Ernesto Laclau, Félix Guattari, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, and Franco Berardi. The primary arc of their political critique analyzed the social, institutional, and psychological vectors of the development of fascistic communal violence and the subsumption of personality in a universalizing group identity.

Silicon Valley’s business models of how to condition social and psychological desire do not offer such a unifying identity of mass mobilization. Their methods to manage desire are more subtle, omnipresent, and even more effective. Their primary focus is to use tools to make the everyday tasks of life increasingly effortless, and develop as many means as possible to generate income from those tools (through, for example, app sales, advertising, and data analysis client services). The most effective Silicon Valley business models develop new paths of least resistance in the daily lives of their potential customers.

Slippery Slope: A Speechless Image

The greatest success of Re-Engineering Humanity is its detailed explanation of the data-driven business model of Silicon Valley. That business model’s process can be summarized in three steps: 1) Using social and psychological engineering to build new paths of least resistance for the daily lives of customers; 2) expanding that customer base to an entire population through corporate partnerships with governments and schools where consent to data monitoring is often ill-informed; and 3) monetizing as much as possible of those new social processes for the profit of Silicon Valley’s corporate oligarchy.

While the authors intend it to be a foundation for creative resistance to social-psychological engineering in our lives, they primarily conceive of this technological development as, “this slippery slope that we are on.” Frischmann and Selinger repeat this exact phrase at least four times in the book’s conclusion, and refer frequently throughout to techno-social engineering as constituting a “slippery slope” to the mechanization of human subjectivity and society.

The phrase “slippery slope” comes with many problems. One of those is that it is a textbook logical fallacy, one of the easiest to understand in any elementary textbook on philosophical logic: it conflates distinct actions into a single action. This is an inadequate way of understanding processes, as it does not account for practically important internal distinctions.

But the most important problem with the term “slippery slope” as a way to understand contemporary technological social-psychological engineering Silicon Valley goes beyond its logical issues. The term does not inform readers about the actual process of such engineering. “Slippery slope,” the image connotes a falling-forward, a problem where the terrain itself of our action is always already of a nature that leaves you stumbling toward an inevitable conclusion.

The Power of Inertia

The term “slippery slope” erases our capacity to resist processes that could harm us, as well as the intentions of the business oligarchs who are building those techno-social-psychological engineering processes. Frischmann and Selinger would do well to learn from a simple concept, the path of least resistance, that better describes the character of how Silicon Valley engineers our online environment. I have been using the concept throughout this essay, in a sense described in the turn-of-the-century work of ecological and media theorist Paul Virilio.

I conclude with a brief sketch of this concept, in a few sentences that can constitute a far better understanding of technological social engineering creep. There is a natural inertia to human psychology for planned action, where we do our best to avoid unnecessary complication or stress in the everyday activities of our lives. The major business model of Silicon Valley today is to build applications or tools that use internet connectivity, user behaviour feedback on massive scales, and the related data analytics to simplify our activities or improve productivity and physical or mental health.

The new path of least resistance for our daily activities opens, thanks to Silicon Valley social-psychological engineering, through applications, machines, and tools that satisfy the powerful need of our tech industry’s oligarchical class to enrich itself. What’s more, those tools may improve a person’s life in some aspects, while degrading it in others.

I will give two examples: 1) efficiency through data mining requires mass surveillance that erodes people’s privacy while opening our lives to interventions from hostile powers such as government secret police; and 2) while an autonomous vehicle may save you the trouble of driving, it would open your commute to stressful workplace mandates like web conferences or sales calls instead of relaxing activity like gaming or reading while on public transit to a workplace.

There is no slippery slope, but a business model that manipulates our most personal desires to find the least stressful route to achieve our goals. The goal of that manipulation is the further enrichment of a business elite that would control populations of ordinary working people to satisfy their bottomless greed. When we foreground who acts and who benefits in a new technological system of social relationships, we have a better foundation for resistance and victory than the pacifying imagery on which Frischmann and Selinger unfortunately rely throughout Re-Engineering Humanity.

Contact details: serrc.digital@gmail.com

References

Frischmann, Brett; and Evan Selinger. Re-Engineering Humanity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Heath, Joseph. Enlightenment 2.0. New York: Harper Collins, 2014.

Parker, Trey; Matt Stone. “Human CentiPad.” South Park. Los Angeles: Comedy Central / Parker-Stone Studios, 2011.

Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Translated by Julie Rose. New York: Verso, 1997.

[1] It may seem strange to include corporate security and espionage firm Palantir among the more famously epochal companies of the internet age. But I think of the matter this way: Google and Facebook have shaped the era of the internet that we currently live in, and Palantir appears set to shape the era that is now dawning.

The True Shape of a Society of Friends, Adam Riggio

SERRC — July 26, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Adam Riggio, Royal Crown College, Social Epistemology Digital Editor, serrc.digital@gmail.com

Riggio, Adam. “The True Shape of a Society of Friends.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 7 (2018): 40-45.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Zv

From the March for Justice for Police Violence in December 2014.
Sassower’s book does not directly touch on themes of institutional corruption, like the racialization of police forces as they act with undue violence and exploitation toward minority populations. But the communitarian moralities he thinks can overcome capitalism also has the potential to build progress here. More material for that sequel.
Image by All-Nite Images via Flickr / Creative Commons

As a work of philosophy, of political economy, of institutional analysis, Raphael Sassower’s The Quest for Prosperity has only one shortcoming. It makes for a tantalizing setup for his next work, and gives a reader the distinct impression that we are in store for a stunning sequel. Its title would be something like The Nature of Prosperity, or Remaking Prosperity. To the detriment of the actually existing book, reading The Quest for Prosperity makes you want desperately to read Remaking Prosperity, which unfortunately does not exist.

The Quest for Prosperity itself is a brilliant book, synthesizing many different concepts and images from several disciplines and traditions in the history of Western thought. It is a thoroughly researched and beautifully composed groundwork for a groundbreaking new philosophical approach to political economy.

The book drags a little in part three, which catalogues several hilariously inadequate new visions of prosperity that are unfortunately popular today. It would be news to someone who has only heard the hype of Silicon Valley and other ideologies similarly twisted to make working people desire their own slavery. But the average Washington Post, Manchester Guardian, or even Bloomberg News reader or fan of HBO’s Silicon Valley should already understand the toxic lifestyle PR of these moneyed industries.

As for that groundwork for the groundbreaking, the final two chapters offer a tantalizing glimpse of a work that explores the existence and revolutionary potential of the communitarian values underlying several disparate existing institutions. Unfortunately, it remains only a glimpse.

Economies of Scale

Sassower’s book revolves around an important ethical critique of contemporary capitalism and the culture of business and entrepreneurship that has grown so popular this century. In uncritically capitalist ways of thinking, there is only one set of terms in which people, social networks, technology, building and city architecture, institutions, organizations, ecologies, territories, and ideas are valued: their monetary potential. Such a morality of valuation reduces all that exists, including human identity itself, to a single dimension of ethical worth, and a petty-minded one at that.

The typical narratives to validate and venerate the contemporary economic order often appeal to images and concepts from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Smith is a touchstone for Sassower as well, but he is wise not to linger on the image of the “invisible hand” that haunts the populist imagery of harmony through competition. Sassower instead focusses on how Smith describes the molecular connections of market exchanges – vendors and tradespeople buying and selling from each other in a town marketplace.

In the marketplaces where capitalist exchange begins, the individuals making money from each other are not themselves competitors. Their relationships are collegial friendships among professionals, and Smith describes their interaction as “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” So when a community’s prosperity flows from its markets and commercial exchanges, that prosperity is not a product of competition, but of friendliness. (Sassower 60-61)

In such a social atmosphere, a community of people constitutes itself easily from the everyday interactions of the marketplace, where people develop feelings of love at a low intensity for the neighbours who sustain their lives. Relationships of everyday economic exchange occur at such a personal level that the mutual benefit of such exchange is a straightforward fact, discovered through quotidian observation. They are, as Sassower describes them, “sympathetic neighbours.” (Sassower 90-91)

The rapaciousness and greed typical of contemporary business cultures could not arise from such relationship networks of friendly truck and barter. The network’s members connect by dynamics of mutual sympathy. Such a network would not be able to sustain business practices characterized by the greed and hostility into which many young professionals are socialized in the 21st century’s most intense economic hubs. Greed and cheating would result in your immediate expulsion from the marketplace, having betrayed the friendships of the others in the network.

Such sympathetic neighbourliness could most easily be overcome with an outside disturbance. For our case, that disturbance was the flow of massive economic income to those small marketplaces. This was the income of industrialization and colonialism. Speaking more descriptively, it was the income of exponential energy growth in domestic manufacturing, and a huge influx of many kinds of wealth from distant continents (raw materials, currency metals like gold and silver, agricultural goods, slaves).

These enormous flows of capital are too large for truck and barter, too massive to engage instinctual human sympathy. As the stakes of economic activity grow hugely higher, this depersonalization of economic activity leaves a person adrift in commercial exchange. Unable to form the same intimate connections as in the far less intense marketplace exchange, the alienated, angry approach to business as a zero-sum game. No longer sympathy and friendliness, but fear and aggression characterize the psychology of someone engaging with this sort of economic system in daily life. (Sassower 105)

Art by Shepard Fairey. Image by Wally Gobetz via Flickr / Creative Commons

What Would a Virtuous Oligarch Be?

In an economic system where capital flows massively overpower the capacity for everyday personal relationship networks to manage them, business life tends to condition people psychologically and morally into sociopaths. This problem of the depersonalized economy remains a wall in The Quest for Prosperity that, on its own terms, is insoluble. On its own terms, it likely is impossible to restore the virtue of sympathy to the psychological tendencies of people growing up in a high-intensity industrial capitalist economy. Sassower therefore forges an alternative image of the economic leader.

If capitalism can only express justice when the mega-rich are generally benevolent, community-minded people who care about their neighbours regardless of wealth, breeding, or class, then Sassower can at least describe how an oligarch could become kind. He identifies one economic principle, the recognition of which begins to transform an oligarch from a greedy sociopath to a personal ethic of rationally-justified sympathy. That principle is demand-centric economics.

This is a simple economic principle, fairly well-known in popular culture. If too many people in a society are in poverty, then the economy will stagnate from cratering demand; too few people will have enough money to spend, even for basic necessities. When a very wealthy person accepts this principle, he consents to submit a healthy portion of his income to taxation so that government services can close these poverty gaps. A business owner who accepts the principle of demand-centric economics will pay the workers in his business more, so that their spending can continue to drive economic development (Sassower 123-124).

Demand-centric thinking in economics has not been a major principle in how government policy on incomes and wealth inequality has developed over the last 40 years. The Reagan-Thatcher era of Western governance took the opposite principle, supply-side or trickle-down economics, as gospel. This is the notion that as the wealthy’s tax burden becomes lower and lower, they will spend more of that money in capital investment, backing new business ventures, and expanding private-sector employment.

Although the policy was widely mocked in popular culture from its first emergence, it has become the foundation of tax policy for all the largest political parties in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and among almost all conservative or centrist parties in Europe. Despite its success as legislature, the material consequences have been disastrous, as supply-side tax policies have decimated social democratic institutions throughout the West, intensifying economic precarity for millions across Europe and the Americas.

Why supply-side economics succeeded in becoming, until recently, uncontested common sense in popular culture and state-level politics is its intuitiveness in particular contexts. If an ordinary person’s annual income rises from $40,000 to $50,000, she will spend more money. The supply-side propagandist then derives a universal principle: If you have more money, you will spend more money. With that generality in hand, a principle that applies at middle-class incomes will be taken to hold at oligarchical incomes.

This is, of course, false, for three reasons that Sassower describes. One, personal consumption cannot proceed at an intensity of millions or billions of dollars each year. Two, most of that massive personal income never returns to their domestic economies anyway, and is instead burrowed in tax havens. Three, the capital investment industry no longer focusses on supplying startup funding for businesses. (Sassower 116)

Instead, global finance investment concentrates on the day-to-day trading of stocks in already existing companies, securities bundles, and speculation on the future value of stocks, securities, and currencies. High-frequency trading is a blatant sign that these investments are not for reinvestment into the productive economy. In this practice, a firm’s single algorithm will make millions of trades each day, based on its analyses of minute-to-minute market fluctuations. (Sassower 117)

Turning these massive fortunes away from the communities of non-rich people in their surroundings and around the world is a subtle but harrowing moral failure, considering the many hundreds of billions of dollars are wrapped entirely in these trading concerns.

A Fantastic Book That Falls Short of Its Potential

An economy of oligarchial inequality produces an elite for whom the purpose of living is cartoonishly grotesque personal self-enrichment. Such an economy as the one we live in today on Earth also deranges those who have virtually no wealth at all compared to these titans of mass ownership and securities gambling.

Anxiety over a precarious life of low pay and debt maintenance consumes all personal energy to help others. That anxiety encourages hatred of others as desperation and stress pervert any reflective capacity for long-term judgment into a paranoid social reflexivity. Reduced to egotistic, short-term thinking and habituated into distrust and hostility toward others, the poor become easy prey for financial fraud. The payday loan industry is built on this principle. Poverty does not breed virtue, but fear and rage.

This ties to what I think is the only notable flaw in The Quest for Prosperity. Stylistically, the book suffers from a common issue for many new research books in the humanities and social sciences. Its argument loses some momentum as it approaches the conclusion, and ends up in a more modest, self-restrained place than its opening chapters promised. How he does so reveals the far more profound shortcoming of Sassower’s book.

Sassower is admirable and innovative in his call to regenerate communitarian philosophy as a politically engaged popular intervention. His method is a philosophical examination of how four quite disparate civic institutions express effective communitarian ethics in their habitual structure and behavioural norms. The Catholic and some other Christian Churches socialize its dedicated members as “of one heart and soul” (Acts 4:32), whose primary economic concern is safeguarding people from the indignity of poverty. (Sassower 242-247)

The Israeli kibbutz movement governs distribution of goods and the financial results of their community’s work literally according to Marx’s principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Countercultural communes in North America operated according to similar rules of management as kibbutzim, but with quite different moral orientation. Kibbutz political philosophy is a secularized agrarian marxism organized around a utopian purpose of building a communal Zion where all oppressed people of the world can live in a Jewish homeland.

American counterculture communes sought to create a living alternative to the immanent political problem of rapacious capitalism’s continuation of genocidal imperialism. Sassower also offers a phenomenological exploration of how military training builds strong interpersonal bonds of solidarity, a communitarianism among soldiers.

All these templates for communitarian alternatives to the increasingly brutal culture of contemporary capitalism share an important common feature that is very dangerous for Sassower’s project. They are each rooted in civic institutions, material social structures for education and socialization. Contrary to how Sassower speaks of these four inspirations, civil rights and civic institutions alone are not enough to build and sustain a community each member of whom holds a communitarian ethical philosophy and moral sense deep in her heart.

The Impotence of Civil Rights

You may consider it a bit excessive that a book review would include a brief argument that civic institutions are not on their own adequate to ensure and maintain the freedom and dignity of the people who live in their domain. Nonetheless, Sassower wrote The Quest for Prosperity with an ambition of a similar scope, critiquing fundamental concepts of contemporary ideology and economic morality as part of an argument for communitarian alternatives. So I will maintain my own intensity of ambition with his.

There are two reasons why civic institutions alone, while needed, are not sufficient to overcome with communitarian values the ambitions of people to become oligarchs. Each of the two reasons is a different philosophical approach to the same empirical fact about human social capacities and institutions.

I first want to mention a logical reason. This is the simple fact that, conceptually speaking, law is not itself a material power. There is nothing about the law, as law, that compels your conformity to itself. There may be a moral motive to obey the law, whether that moral reason is a universal imperative or the injunction of social pressure. There may be a coercive motive to obey the law, as when you are under threat of police violence such as arrest, imprisonment, torture, or summary execution. Most often, people obey the law for practical reasons, as when a government’s legislation and regulations structure institutions we need to manage our techno-industrial society. But law alone is not justice, and so compels no obedience.

Law having no power to compel obedience, the existence of laws prohibiting violence against human rights does nothing to prevent such violence. If recognition of the law were all that was needed for obedience, then laws would never be violated. Only some material power, existing in addition to those laws, can ensure their application in managing the actions of a population.

The ultimate material power in the application of the law are state institutions, and any related institutions they support. Raising money through taxation, investment in industrial developments, and central bank mechanisms, states fund law enforcement institutions like courts, rehabilitation centres, prosecutors, and police. But even in institutions whose laws promise equal and fair treatment, individuals operating within those institutions can still use material power to give themselves unfair advantage over the less powerful.

Consider a civil suit whose defendant must make do with the cheapest legal representation in Albuquerque, but whose plaintiff walks into court with Alan Dershowitz at his side. Consider also the many instances where the power of institutions and institutionally-reinforced morality of solidarity encourages police abuse of citizens.

An individual officer may coerce sex from women under threat of arrest, or shoot a civilian with little or no cause; fellow officers or police unions will cover for him. An entire police department will prey on citizens as a matter of policy, as in many cities in the United States whose municipal police departments require a minimum (and growing) number of misdemeanor and bylaw violation fines for budgetary purposes. One of those such cities, incidentally, is Ferguson, Missouri.

The Impossibility of Prosperity?

I give these illustrations to emphasize the ethical importance of the fundamental purpose driving The Quest for Prosperity. Most of the book is taken up by Sassower’s clear and insightful argument for why contemporary capitalism is a moral and ethical disaster. The Quest for Prosperity is a stellar addition to this tradition of critical thought that has accompanied industrial development since its beginning.

Sassower takes a more noble stand than a critique, however, in proposing an alternative to capitalist practice for the domain most essential to resisting and overcoming industrial and economic injustice: public morality and personal ethics. His analysis of existing institutions and societies that foster communitarian moralities and ethics is detailed enough to show promise, but unfortunately so brief as to leave us without guidance or strategy to fulfill that promise.

My illustrations – deep pockets undermining a court’s fairness, police predation and corruption – describe real injustices rooted in the greed and hatred facilitated through capitalism and the racism that turns the exploited against each other. They are here to remind thinkers who are likewise against such injustice of the urgency of our challenges.

Sassower has offered communitarian approaches to morality and ethics as solutions to those challenges of injustice. I think his direction is very promising. But The Quest for Prosperity offers only a sign. If his next book is to fulfill the promise of this one, he must explore the possibilities opened up by the following questions.

Can communitarian values overcome the allure of greed? What kind of social, political, and economic structures would we need to achieve that utopian goal?

Contact details: serrc.digital@gmail.com

References

Sassower, Raphael. The Quest for Prosperity. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

Our Weimar Moment, Part Three, Bernard Wills

SERRC — March 27, 2018 — 2 Comments

Author Information: Bernard Wills, Memorial University, bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

Wills, Bernard. “Our Weimar Moment, Part Three.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 3 (2018): 32-37.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3VO

Please refer to:

Wills, Bernard. “Conservatism: The End of An Idea.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 12 (2017): 7-16.
Wills, Bernard. “Our Weimar Moment: Part One.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 2 (2018): 70-75.
Wills, Bernard. “Our Weimar Moment, Part Two.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 3 (2018): 27-31.

These considerations seem to argue for some type of social-democratic ideal perhaps along Scandinavian lines. This, of course, is not a sure bet. Capital of its very nature will seek to subvert and destroy mixed economies of the social democratic type because it cannot internalize the notion of limit. As such regimes cannot exist without capital they will always be forced to accede to its demands, particularly in a globalized context. Given this a rapprochement between Capital and xenophobic nationalism, Fascism in other words, seems like a strangely logical if, finally, contradictory choice.[1]

A poster from 2012 of Barack Obama as a fascist dictator in the model of Hitler, doubling as an ad for the extremist website Infowars. Image by Madame LaZonga via Flickr / Creative Commons

For those who receive none of the benefits of globalism but bear most of its burdens it may well be a compelling choice. I should point out that in the context of declining public trust in institutions Fascist style myths of national redemption are fatally tempting. Of course neo-liberalism has laid the groundwork for this with its mania for privatizing public assets, often at low cost. These measures, along with ‘austerity’ budgets reduce the efficacy of institutions which can then be portrayed as inept and beyond reform by those who want to profit from their sale.

In this the neo-liberals make strange bedfellows with many radicals who also call for the dismantling of state institutions like the police and military: essentially, both groups take as their target the modern state which one sees as oppressive of economic enterprise and the other sees as oppressive of racial, class and gender difference. Battered from all sides of the political spectrum it is little wonder the state is now an object of general suspicion and contempt. It is little wonder people seek solutions that are radical though radical need not always (or indeed ever) equal progressive.[2]

Here, however, let me address something I think is a crucial error. We are hearing more and more of the ‘weakness of liberalism’ with the disturbing implication that we need something less rather than more liberal to deal with our current crisis. This argument, as it always has, runs like this. Liberalism is committed to the notion of pure tolerance and is thus incapable of opposing the rising tide of extremism. A commitment to pure liberalism will thus destroy liberalism altogether as extremists will use the cover of bourgeois civil rights to subvert the state. This is backed, again as always, with the argument ad Hitleram.

Exactly as the Weimar Republic was ‘too free’ so we are ‘too free’. If only, the argument goes, the Weimar state had been less tolerant and liberal force could have been used to stop the spread of Nazi ideology.[3] Thus, we too, if we are too ‘liberal’, will meet the same fate. This argument is surely balderdash. Firstly, what was it that rendered Nazi ideology a fringe phenomenon for the second half of the 20^th century? Why was it that for so many decades, fascism was the preserve of isolated cranks, street thugs and lunatics? Clearly because the post war liberal consensus I have referred to above had widespread support. When did Fascism re-emerge as an option? Precisely when pro-market ideology succeeded in destroying that consensus.

It is simply wrong that Fascism has re-emerged because of excessive liberalism: Fascism re-emerged when liberalism was subverted, when liberals themselves sold out their principles to the emerging class of financiers, speculators and media barons. What is more, this is yet another argument curiously appropriated from the far right: it has been the insistent claim of right wing Islamophobes that ‘Liberalism’ is unsustainable because it entails the tolerance of “Islamists” and those feckless voices on the ‘left’ who undermine the West’s will to fight with their constant critiques of colonial oppression and craven apologies for acts of terror.

Indeed, I find it odd that a rhetorical ploy used so often on the right has now been picked up by the left apparently without anyone noticing. How many times have we been told by Bushes, Blairs and others that opposition to some foreign intervention was ‘appeasement’ because some foreign leader was the next ‘Hitler’? I certainly do think Trump represents a form of Fascism (as I explained above) but it is well to remember that Trump is NOT Hilter. For one thing his movement has nothing like the ideological coherence of the Nazi Party (as noted above) nor has he anything like the shrewdness or determination or even basic competence of its leader. He also leads a country that has a long tradition of anti-authoritarian politics and (for now at least) some functioning checks and balances.

This is important for two reasons. Firstly, the Hitler comparison creates the perception of an emergency to which any response is in principle justified: what would one not do to stop the next holocaust? Secondly, this response closes off an important discussion. If the problem with Trump is that he is Hitler then it follows that his supporters are the new Nazis: this dehumanizes them and renders their concerns moot. Politically this is disastrous for many (though not all) Trump supporters are legitimately upset about the failures of the neo-Liberal order. Fascism does not flourish in a vacuum and Trumpism is not reducible to slow witted people deciding to be jerks. Identifying and allaying these underlying anxieties and tensions is the real work of anti-fascists though it involves less than exhilarating things like humility and listening to others.[4]

A memorial statue of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in eastern Berlin. Image by Joan Sorolla via Flickr / Creative Commons

Getting this balance right is crucial for the stakes are high. I believe what is at stake is a crucial component of the modern project. I believe that there is more to the idea of globalism than the ghastly parody of the Washington Consensus. I believe the ideal of a catholic and universal human society is a necessary moral challenge and a marvelous opportunity for human growth. Are we really better off retreating into the parochialism of pre-modern societies? Are we better off fearing and scapegoating the other? Are we better off with the old national rivalries and their attendant violence?

I say this in full awareness that supra-national institutions in the past have taken oppressive and imperial forms (such as the Romans and Ottomans or the modern imperialisms of the Americans and British). If there is something to be saved from the ideologies that drove those societies, it is the idea of universality: not of a universal military or commercial hegemony as in the past but of a moral society of all humans. To use Kant’s phrase there is a Kingdom of Ends that is unlimited in scope and illimitable in principle. We now know, due the simple fact of global communications, that the other is not a monster or if he is a monster, is no more a monster than we are capable of being. We have no need to engage in speculation like a Medieval person would have to concerning distant folk such as the Moors.

Given modern technology the other is among us whether we will it or no. The universal society is a simple fact however much we try to deny the moral implications of it. It is a fact that confronts us every day in the form of the world wide web. To use the language of Marx the material conditions of society already point to the necessity of a universal community!

This is reflected even in demographics: no western society currently has any future that does not involve an infusion of workers and consumers from other societies. Moreover, the many people in the west who do benefit from our current economic system will not easily forego new opportunities for consumption: having tried sushi they will not go back to meat and potatoes grown locally.

Lest both my right and left leaning colleagues sniff at the superficiality of the dining classes with their pumpkin lattes and craft beers let me say that there are many who enjoy the liberty of cultural contacts with other parts of the globe who will not give this up either. In other words, every western society contains a cosmopolitan impulse which will have at least some say in any proposed future and these people wish no return to the pristine purity of square dancing and tractor pulls. I do not mean to be flippant here: in small ways as well as in large we are coming to the understanding of Terence that nothing human is alien. This is the ideal that was once embodied in the old notion of Romanitas and persists though the imperial days of Rome are long gone.

It is well to remember that the first wave of political innovation in the West was the revived imperium of Charlemagne, a distant ancestor of our current European Union. Western culture at its best (as opposed to its worst) has never been about elevating the parochial for its own sake. Almost from the beginning (in spite of its wonderful and lively vernacular literatures) it employed the lingua franca of Latin as the universal norm of cultural discourse. This idea of universalism always has and always will meet resistance for openness entails risk and universalist ideals noble in conception have often disgraced themselves in practice. The temptation to turn our backs on this tradition are thus ever present. Yet those on the far right who trumpet ‘European identity’ while betraying everything good that Europe has ever accomplished not only deny the evident social facts of our world but its deepest moral potential as well.

Practically this means working to strengthen such international institutions as now exist and create new ones that can exercise some control over the flow of capital and enforce common labor and environmental standards. This means, and my right leaning readers will not like this, that I am indeed a globalist. As the ravages of unrestrained capitalism and environmental degradation are a global problem they call forth a global solution.

Similarly, my anarchist readers will also be displeased for I do not envisage the dissolution of the nation state but rather international agreements that will strengthen it as there is little way to enforce common international standards that bypasses national sovereignty. What, for instance, if trade deals between nations were used to buttress labor and environmental standards rather than subvert them? What if corporations that roam the globe looking for the weakest regulations and most immiserated workers were simply shut out of their own markets by newly empowered national governments?[5]

Both right and left envisage a world of spontaneously self-organizing social systems. The first group tell us that these are markets which if left to their own devices will slowly but surely solve all problems. The second group envisage workers organizing into guild like social collectives which can meet all basic needs on a purely local level. Both of these notions belong in the realm of utopian fiction. As Plato long ago pointed out classes emerge from any complex social order: antagonism and difference are grounded in the ineradicable particularity of human experience.

The individual does not merge directly with the collective but must be disciplined by the mediating power of civic institutions to regard the freedom of the other as her own. In other words, evil will always emerge as individuals absolutize their differences and the state (in whatever form it takes) is required to contain and harness these conflicts for good.[6] This banal fact of human experience has long been enshrined in religious and mythic conceptions such as the fall from paradise.

To put it bluntly, the communes envisaged by the anarchists and syndicalists (or any other form of social organization that assumes a direct harmony of interests between human beings) will last as long as it takes for the first love triangle to emerge: for the first individual to oppose absolutely h is subjectivity to another (as in the story of Cain and Abel). On this point at least the existentialist tradition (think of Dostoevsky’s underground man) has a much firmer grasp on reality than the Marxist as it recognizes the necessity of evil and conflict for the emergence of freedom.[7]

Contact details: bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

References

“”We Made a Devil’s Bargain”: Fmr. President Clinton Apologizes for Trade Policies that Destroyed Haitian Rice Farming” (https://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/1/)

Aeschylus, The Suppliants trans. Phillip Vellacott (Penguin Classics, London 1961)

Barzun, Jacques. Darwin, Marx, Wagner (Doubleday Books, New York, 1958)

Baudrillard, Jean, The Mirror of Production trans. Mark Poster (Telos Press, St. Louis, 1975)

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell from The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics, London, 1978)

Blum, George P. The Rise of Fascism in Europe (Greenwood Press, Westport, 1998)

Danticat, Edwige “Sweet Micky and the Sad DeJa Vu of Haiti’s Presidential Elections” (New Yorker, Dec.3, 2015)

Eagleton, Terry. Marx (Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London 1997)

Edmonds, Ennis B. Rastafari, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012)

Frank, Dana. “The Thugocracy Next Door” Politico. Retrieved from http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02.

Hegel, GWF. The Phenomenology of Mind (Harper Torchbook, New York, 1967)

Heilbroner, Robert. Twenty First Century Capitalism (Anansi Press, Concord, 1992)

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1986)

Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The German Ideology (International Publishers, New York, 1970)

Russell Hochschild, Arlie: “The Ecstatic Edge of Politics: Sociology and Donald Trump (http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/nov16csfeature_0.pdf)

Pulver, Matthew. “Bill and Hillary’s Hyper-Capitalist Disaster: How the Clintons Can Apologize for a Decade of Deadly Policies”

Spielvogel, Jackson J. Hitler and Nazi Germany (Pearson Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2005)

[1] In Nazi Germany this contradiction was only resolved by the personality cult of Adolf Hitler to whom, finally, the German nation and all the institutions it contained became expendable. The interests of Capital, the Army and so on were sacrificed to a war of national suicide of which the charisma and will of the fuehrer was the only binding principle. That this will was fundamentally nihilistic is shown by the fanatical orders of Hitler’s last days, orders only subverted by the intervention of Albert Speer.

[2] The easy convergence of these two positions should give us pause. That extremists of the alt-right and anti- fascist radicals on the left closely resemble each other is something readily discerned by anyone not an alt-right extremist and anti-fascist radical leftist. I do not simply refer to their unbending dogmatism or their penchant for reflexive verbal aggression and ad hominem attacks. I refer to the deeper truth that both groups are fundamentally Gnostic/Manichean in outlook. They are the lone voices of reason and integrity in an utterly corrupt world where public institutions need to be smashed instead of reformed and armies and police replaced with private militias culled from the remnant of the saints. In other words, to use a theological vocabulary, their outlook is sectarian not catholic (political errors are often secular transcriptions of theological ones). Indeed, one is reminded of Hegel’s claim that ‘absolute freedom’ finds its logical fulfilment in murderous acts of political terror: “Universal freedom can thus produce neither a positive achievement nor a deed, there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the rage and fury of destruction.” (The Phenomenology of Mind, 604).

[3] The ‘liberal’ character of the Weimar Republic should not be exaggerated, at least in this respect. As the Munich putsch illustrates attempts were made to suppress Nazism both by direct force and the banning of Nazi publications. These ultimately failed because a divided judiciary and army (many of whom were sympathetic to nationalism) were unable or unwilling to back up the fledgling Republic. (see Spielvogel, 36-39) Even so, as George Blum notes: “As economic conditions improved after the mid-1920’s, following a currency reform and the infusion of foreign credits, the prospects of parliamentary democracy were much enhanced. It is quite likely that it would have survived in Germany and Nazism would have remained a boisterous fringe movement if the chaos of the Great Depression had not cut short economic prosperity and social stability.” (8) Perhaps it is not free speech we should avoid but depressions.

[4] Exemplary in this respect is Arlie Russell Hochschild: “The Ecstatic Edge of Politics: Sociology and Donald Trump “ (http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/nov16csfeature_0.pdf). Changing the narrative of Trump voters requires understanding the narrative of Trump voters. Russell Hochschild points out that this narrative is theological at base and very deeply embedded in the thought forms of American Protestantism (688). Appeals to reason will not affect it. Immiserated whites who abandon myth for reason will live in the exact same devastated communities as before and their view of them will only be that much bleaker. If Trump’s base is to be cracked by a progressive political party, incentives will need to be offered to his supporters to trade their despairing ‘deep story’ for a more hopeful narrative. Clinton lost to Trump because she did not offer such an incentive in material, moral or indeed any other form. No doubt she could not make such an offer loudly and publicly without offending the corporate donor class, which is most likely why she did not even campaign in the rust belt states that cost her the election.

[5] Is it inherently irrational to suggest that countries which try undercut other countries by slashing worker’s rights and throwing out health and safety regulations should simply be excluded from trading blocs that agree to enforce common standards in such matters? Corporations, of course, can impose no discipline on themselves in such matters but might they become so worried about the prospects of global capitalism that, like addicts, they agree to have their hands tied by the state?

[6] It is difficult to know why anyone would assume otherwise. The impression Marx leaves is that in a society without class conflict the individuality of each will fall into immediate harmony with the individuality of all which might, for all one knows, be true if it were not that class conflict is just one subset of conflict in general. People on the same side in the class war are quite capable of utter viciousness to each other as anyone can confirm by hanging around Socialists (or workers for that matter) for any length of time. I have spoken elsewhere of the grave loss to self-knowledge that comes from the occlusion of the theological tradition. This is a case in point: without the myth of the fall people have lost a powerful skeptical check on their motives and can, with fatal ease, identify their basest impulses with their highest and most noble aspirations. It is noteworthy that original sin is probably the least popular Christian doctrine though it is the only one capable of %100 empirical confirmation.

[7] And here I must register my fundamental criticism of Marx (at least the utopian Marx) and the point on which he has failed to heed his teacher Hegel. Total freedom can only take the form of absolute tyranny. Thus it is not in fact an accident that Marx, who gives us a wonderful vision of the possibilities of human freedom (see Eagleton, 19-23), has given us also a formula for abject tyranny. Marx of course recognizes dialectical opposition as central to history. This is what the history of class struggle is all about. However, the notion that these tensions will directly resolve themselves once the capitalist state is overthrown is both forlorn and dangerous. Forlorn because it cannot happen (differentiation will inevitably occur) and dangerous because once the ‘individual’ has been reconciled to the ‘collective’ any further assertion of personal will or individuality will simply be a falling off from the good and an object of immediate suppression. The final state can allow no real opposition or difference to emerge as the historical problem will be, supposedly, solved. This is Blake’s warning about the ‘religious’ who seek to dissolve the tensions of history into a bland unity. (MHH 16, 10) This is also the price paid for historicizing a religious symbol (the millennium and the kingdom of God) and attempting to make of it a literal reality. Thus, the utopian strain in in Marx should at very least be an object of reserve and skepticism: it is no longer possible to separate the hope of Utopian thinking from the specter of mass murder.

Conservatism: The End of An Idea, Bernard Wills

SERRC — December 7, 2017 — 3 Comments

Author Information: Bernard Wills, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

Wills, Bernard. “Conservatism: The End of An Idea.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 12 (2017): 7-16.

The pdf of the article refers to specific page numbers. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3R9

Image from Carnaval.com Studios via Flickr / Creative Commons

I recently noticed that conservatism as a political stance is definitively dead. Truth is it has been on life support for decades. This has not stopped all sorts of people from using the term both positively and negatively. All sorts of people proudly proclaim themselves to be conservatives while others angrily denounce people as conservatives. The death of conservatism means, for starters, that neither group fully grasps of the term they are using. The word has become utterly detached from the thing. Another thing it means is that an individual may have conservative opinions but only in the sense that an individual may worship the goddess Artemis in her back yard or live like a 17^th Century Puritan. It is a private eccentricity with no public institutional reality. The death of conservatism is then something like the death of God.

A New Classification of Politics: Three Ideologies

There is no significance to taking any public stand as a conservative. This is for one basic reason. This reason is that the victory of ideology in contemporary politics is now total and that conservatism is not an ideology.[1] Our political discourse is now divided between three ideological stances: the progressive, the neo-liberal and ethno-nationalist stances. So called social conservatives used to exist but they have utterly disappeared into the third stance as is plain with the rise of Trump in the United States and the rise of similar populists elsewhere.[2] There are now no social conservatives of any note who are not also ethno-nationalists and indeed primarily ethno-nationalists.

This is absolutely evident from their obsession with a purported clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. By and large Muslims share the values of social conservatives when it comes to things like family, modesty, the centrality of religion and so on. Yet social conservatives despise and fear Muslims all the same making it plain that by family values they mean white Anglo-Saxon family values and by piety they mean white Anglo-Saxon piety. That is the core of the ethno-nationalist position: that western Christian values are cherished not for their supposed universality but as the foundation of a tribal identity. From time to time the neo-Liberal stance is classified as ‘conservative’ though for no reason I can fathom: as Marx pointed out predatory capitalism rips the veil form all traditional pieties by reducing everything to a cash value. The proposition that limitless accumulation is the aim of life and indeed the primary duty of a citizen is consistent with no ancient wisdom I know of religious or otherwise.

Conservatism then is no more. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It is hardly my place to say: conservatism itself advises us that like all human constructions it is finite and imperfect. However, at this point the reader may well be waiting, impatiently, for a definition of conservatism. What is it that I say has died?

I will proceed to offer if not a definition then an account of what conservatism is in the root sense of the word: an attitude to the world which seeks to conserve or protect those principles, values or institutions on which genuine human flourishing has always and will always rest. It will then be evident that people who use the term most loudly haven’t the faintest interest in conservatism or conservative values and perhaps never have. Of course, I run the risk of baffling people (both boosters and knockers) who will not recognize their version of conservatism in anything I say. I ask such people to be patient until I finish my exposition.

How Were We Able to Drink Up the Sea?

I said above that conservatism is not an ideology: from writers labelled ‘conservative’ it would be difficult to cull a doctrinal statement. This means that it has no definition in the sense of a core statement of doctrine or set of prescriptive demands: it is, if like, the position which is not a position but rather an attitude and a practice. However, I can give you a living example of it from a much despised source.

I find an excellent description of conservatism as a life stance expressed in the five pillars of the Islamic faith.[3] Soi-disant ‘conservatives’ who are shocked and angered by this should ask themselves why as these values seem to me core to any conservative stance towards the world. The first of these pillars is the shahada or profession of faith: There is no god but god and Mohammed is his prophet. Now conservatism does not inherently care about the latter part of this assertion: it is happy to recognize a multitude of other prophets who have taught in other parts of the world such as Siddartha, Jesus, or Confucius.

The first however is essential: conservatism is theocratic in orientation. Humans are first and foremost unconditionally responsible to a divine order: to the standards which are ultimate because they are founded in the unchanging nature of God. No human being is to place any finite value, such as family, clan, party in the place of God. The regard the finite as infinite in value and as an absolute end is to commit the arch-error of shirk. On this basis conservatism attaches only a qualified value to the goods of this world: it does not absolutize the relative. No movement, no passion, no interest which is merely human or temporary can trump our duty to god and his sovereign will. Order is prior absolutely to freedom and in fact it is true freedom to recognize this.

Of course this whole position is pointless if we do not know God’s will. Fortunately, it is of the nature of god to reveal himself in scriptures, historical events, the exemplary deeds of prophets and saints and so on. God is present and active in the world. His will is manifest in the sacred teachings and philosophies (the philosophia perennialis) of the world as in the depths of our own conscience.[4] Indeed, his will is present even in those conscious non-believers who nonetheless enshrine the eternal verities (the good, the beautiful and the true) within their hearts.

For this reason, the second pillar enjoins us to prayer. Humans must remember and acknowledge both internally and externally the absoluteness of God. This is important because it cuts against the grain. Our tendency is to lose focus in the midst of the world’s distractions. We wander away from our final end and our ultimate good. We put wealth, or lust, or power or anger at the center of our lives instead of the union with god we all intrinsically long for. We miss our happiness by seeking it in things that cannot, of their very metaphysical nature, supply it.

This is why prayer, both personal and liturgical is central to a well lived life for in prayer we re-collect our ultimate aim, the peace that comes of divine union. This peace is the aim of all prayer even when expressed in its lowest manifestation which is petitionary prayer. Conservatism calls us to recollect those spiritual values that make for true fulfillment against everything faddish and temporary. It calls to put the eternal always before the merely modish and to this extent prayer is one of its liveliest manifestations as it a call to remember god in the midst of this world.

A Union of Materialism and Faith

Yet our lives are in this world too. Conservatism rejects the pessimism of the millenarian and gnostic. It does not long for an immanent millennium to destroy the present world order but waits patiently for the fulfillment of things in the fullness of time. Thus, when faced with the worldly Gnosticism of the secular revolutionary or the religious despair of those who simply wish to be raptured into eternity as the world burns it counsels skepticism. Thus, as our status in the next world is determined by how we live in this one our duty to god is also our duty to community. Almsgiving is then a conservative value. Wealth exists to be shared. It is not an idol and not an end. It is a means to community and those who are blessed with it in turn bless others. Wealth selfishly hoarded is not wealth at all and thus zakat is enjoined on all believers.

This is especially important as we tend to the selfish and misguided view that our wealth is the deserved result of our special virtue whereas in truth all good things come from god and god alone. As it comes from god it is given back to god as god is present in the neediness of our neighbors and the needs of our community. How vulgar then is the so called ‘prosperity gospel’ preached by certain Christians who claim to have Jesus in their hearts when they do not even have Mohammed! There are many displays of vulgar wealth in the Islamic world as in ours. People in the East and the West need constant reminding that the needs of the community outweigh the wants of the individual.

This is part of our human fallibility, our tendency to forget our ultimate end for merely proximate ones. The principle of almsgiving is, however, particularly salutary for those of us living in the Christian west as our societies have made the endless accumulation of personal wealth their over-riding principle even at the expense of the very soil we live on and the air we breathe. I should note though entirely in line with conservatism zakat assumes that differences between people entail differences in wealth and that this will not be abolished but equalized through giving.

The fourth pillar counsels fasting on the sound conservative principle that we do not live for the gratification of the senses but for the fulfillment of the spirit. Fasting reminds us that the primary struggle in life is with ourselves and that the demands of the moral and communal life are at odds (often) with the gratification of the senses. Indeed, there is no substitute for the feeling of hunger as those who never feel it have no conception of the suffering of those who do. This is why great wealth so often goes with poverty of the spirit and why it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

Yet fasting is only one letter away from feasting. As there is a time to curb the senses there is a time to release them particularly in the context of communal celebration. As Aristotle said long ago, proper self-control involves not just self-denial, knowing when to say no to our desires, but also knowing when to indulge them: one does not gorge at a funeral or fast at a wedding. Still, as giving free rein to our desires must be choice and not compulsion our moral training will tend to focus on self-denial so that our indulgence may be unconstrained by evil habit.

Finally, the fifth pillar enjoins on us pilgrimage to Mecca and why not as life itself is a pilgrimage? T. S. Eliot prays: “help us to care and not to care” and this is the core of the notion that we are pilgrims in this world. The world of time and space we inhabit is both affirmed and transcended. We give ourselves over to finite ends yet leave the fruit of our action in the hands of providence. The finite passes over to the infinite as we give over our worldly projects and passions, releasing them into the eternal will of God.

On practical level this is a powerful inoculation against despair as the world does not bear all the weight of our expectations (which of its creaturely nature it can never bear). Consider as an example the old expression “better dead than red”. Those who uttered this expression meant that the Western Bourgeois form of freedom was freedom absolute and that its potential loss justified the nuclear annihilation of the planet. Of course, Western Bourgeois freedom (though admirable in many ways) is a provincial form of freedom. It does not exhaust every possibility of human good. Only a whig-history-on-steroids view of western institutions as the inevitable and only culmination of human history could justify such nihilism.

Conservatism will have no truck with this sentiment. History is an arena of struggle subject to advances and retreats. Yet possibilities for good remain in the darkest of times and the insanity of history can never destroy or even affect in the slightest the eternal essence of God source and ground of all good. In a godless universe, where this world is the only locus of good, history becomes a battleground in which the stakes are absolute and compromise unthinkable: hence the vicious ideological battles of those who think they have solved the riddle of history and claim to be bringing about the final human good.

When Opposition to the Radical Falls Away

Of course it can be objected that conservatism as I have described it here has no more been tried than Christianity or communism. Conservativism, one might say, has never really existed outside the elegant, wistful prose of conservatives. There is much truth to this charge yet it is, of course, true of all moral stances that their instantiations are very far indeed from their archetypal forms. Hence we get the characteristic vice of the conservative: the tendency to forget fundamental values for external privileges and the inability to identify what it is that ought, in fact, to be conserved.

Still, on the plus side of the ledger, the conservative might well ask whether his or her own view is comprehensive of all its rivals. Conservatives share with progressives a concern for justice and equity especially for the poor and marginalized. Conservatives share with ethno-nationalism a concern for the particularities of language and culture over against the homogenizing tendencies of globalism and technocracy. Conservatives even share with neo-liberals a suspicion of totalitarian power, planning and control.

However, conservatism, in the west at least, may well be dead for a more fundamental reason. This is because there is a powerful alternative to the conservative tradition and that is the radical tradition. All three of our contemporary ideologies have their roots in radicalism and are closer to each other than they can readily imagine given their current conflict. For the radical tradition the constraints imposed by tradition are in almost all cases artificial. What the conservative tradition would constrain the radical tradition would release. Radicalism envisages a flowering of human diversity, a host of new avenues in which self-hood can be explored beyond the stale platitudes of convention. This radical principle has routed conservatism (much of which expressed itself as cheap nostalgia anyway) and is the default position of all North Americans.[5]

This spirit can express itself as radical egalitarianism or its opposite. For instance, among ethno-nationalists it is assumed that the will of the demos embodies the wisdom and good sense of the people. This wisdom would readily express itself were it not for the constraints imposed by various ‘elites’ whose abstract intellectualism has lost touch with the community and indeed with reality. These elites constantly invoke the authority of science, or education or expertise or data against what ‘simple folk’ can see with their own eyes. When the demos seeks to express its will this is declared ‘unconstitutional’ or ‘against the rule of law’ by lawyers or advocacy groups or other ‘elite’ institutions.

The demos however, holds all such institutions in contempt and seeks to impose its will through a ‘great leader’ who is willing to flout them and indeed is willing to flout moral convention altogether (even moral conventions like marital fidelity to which the demos remain sentimentally attached). Thus, we have a kind of direct democracy outside of constitutional and legal constraints such as conservatism has forever warned against. That these radicals sometimes espouse ‘conservative’ seeming policies or points of view is irrelevant as they espouse them lawlessly and in a manner contemptuous of the very traditions they claim to value.

Why, for instance, is it conservative to despise the opinions of the educated and even pour contempt on the intellect itself? Such things are an expression of a rebellious and anti-authoritarian spirit. The demos trusts only in its collective judgment and not only rejects but actively despises any other principle. That this attitude is over-determined by socio-economic factors is plain but that does not make it any easier to deal with on a day to day basis especially as the scapegoating of immigrants, prisoners and others is high on the populist wish-list and the populace resents institutional constraints on its will to revenge especially.[6]

There is of course the other side of this coin and that is the populism of progressive movements such as the occupy movement, black-bloc radicals and so on.[7] These movements, it must be said, have aims that seem overall nobler and better than the beefs and resentments of populists. However, this is a weakness as much as a strength: as I said above every stance struggles with its shadow. Noble ideals are a proven danger when not accompanied by political and moral pragmatism and relentless self-examination. Moral crusaders have a distressing tendency to fumble badly when actually called upon to run things: this is because sweeping moral denunciations are a form of cheap grace while actual governance (self-governance included) is slow, patient work.

Return to Innocence Lost (or Imagined)

There is also a false innocence that can maintained simply by never facing the temptations of power. William Blake (a far deeper radical) was a persistent critic of any form of abstract moralism. For him no political or theological order could be the basis of freedom that did not overcome the problem of self-righteousness: our tendency to identify ourselves with an abstract principle of goodness and others (inevitably) with an abstract principle of evil. In a powerful image he tells us that blood sacrifice and war are the culmination of the moral law, the categories of good and evil unrelieved by charity, solidarity, or forgiveness.[8]

Moralism is for Blake a form of violence. (see for instance plates 47-51 of Jerusalem) Our care must embrace the ‘minute particulars’ of humanity: no ‘humanism’ can be liberating that puts an abstraction like ‘Humanity’ before flesh and blood human beings. We all have encountered people who virtue signal on every conceivable ‘issue’ but have little but venom in their hearts: one danger of the progressive stance lies, then, in the monsters of self-righteous zeal that it breeds.

At any rate, such people envisage (after some difficult to specify revolutionary event) a world in which a host of sexualities, ethnicities, personalities and identities flourish without constraint and (though this is surely impossible) without mutual contradiction.[9] As the economic discipline of Capitalism lies behind all other forms of oppression the current economic order must be overthrown. The suggested alternative is often some form of anarchism.

Like the populists, anarchists distrust and despise constitutionalism which after all only serves to protect the oppressors. Indeed, the anarchists despise traditional civil liberties as a form of constraint and mock those who espouse them as ‘liberals’. In particular, they resent the fact that such liberties prevent them from waging all-out war against their eternal adversary the populists. The populists heartily agree. Both sides fantasize about epic street confrontations or cyber battles that will issue in a final rout of the forces of evil. In other words, they are secular (and indeed religious) millenarians.

Each believes in a great battle, an apocalyptic convulsion that will only happen if liberals and other idiots get out of the way. A significant minority of each group considers this not just as a ‘culture war’ but as a ‘war’ war with brickbats, fires and vandalism of property. At any rate both agree on the Manichean position: the world and everything in it is hopelessly vitiated and corrupt and must be purged by fire whether this be the literal fire of Armageddon or the flames of secular revolution.

Finally, we have the technological dreamers. They do not dream of an unconstrained populist will or an unconstrained flowering of genders and sexualities but of the unconstrained power of technical and economic innovation. The enemy is, again the state and its institutions. Regulation of industry and common sense controls over heedless technological advancement are as bizarre and repellent to them as constraints on abortion or sexuality are to progressives. They, after all, represent the creative energy behind all forms of human advancement, all growth and prosperity. Technological or business imperatives cannot be questioned without questioning prosperity and progress themselves: the two things which for this ideology are non-negotiable. Such people see nothing ironic or odd in the fact the demands of progress and the spread of prosperity never conflict with their own self-interest.

The self- interest of the entrepreneur or innovator is the interest of the community. In a seeming parody of the Marxist utopia where the freedom of each is the freedom of all the neo-liberals and libertarians do not see the economic freedom of the individual as ever conflicting with the good of the community. This is, of course, the dream of anarchists as well: that individual wills can exist in immediate and natural harmony once the power of the state is gone. The technophiles go even further however: for them this harmony can be achieved and maintained in the midst of unrestrained competition.

The magic of the market will smooth out all inequities and bring prosperity and balance to all (or, if the libertarian leans also to vengeful populism, to the deserving). At any rate the neo-liberals have one ace in the hole that it is difficult to imagine anyone overcoming: this is the fact that almost all acts of rebellion can be appropriated and monetized. This is particularly true of physical vandalism. Capitalism does not fetishize physical property the way some anarchists think it does: burn a bank to the ground and you will find only that stock in private security companies has gone up.

Liberation as Consuming Fire

For all three groups the enemy is clear as is the goal: the repressed must be liberated. The demos must be free to enact its vengeful fantasies on immigrants, prisoners or gays. The libertarian must be free to innovate and make more money than anyone can find a use for. Sexual and ethnic minorities must be free to express their forms of life to whatever limit logic implies. All must be free and all must be free especially of the enemy of freedom, the state and its laws and institutions.[10] This is the core of each position quite apart from the fact that within each there may be many demands reasonable in themselves.

This indicates that the radical stance is the stance where our politics is concerned. Everything must be liberated though conservatives may warn again and again that liberation may mean the freedom of everything awful as easily as the freedom of everything good. Lamentation however is pointless (with apologies to Canada’s lamenter-in-chief George Parkin Grant!). This is because the radical principle is our principle and is, indeed, along with conservatism, a fundamental human option. Moreover, it has great achievements to its credit even as conservatism has many disgraces.

At the same time radicalism imposes its own constraints: most of us would rejoice if anti-vaxxers stopped being such fools yet they are acting on an impeccable radical principle, that of personal autonomy, as well as a suspicion of institutionalized medicine that many of us share. In fact, this example raises a vexing problem: vaccination can only be carried out on a population, all must buy into it for it to work. How would an anarchist society founded on a principle of radical freedom (whether anarcho-communist or right wing patriot) handle a question of this sort? Will radical stances license such appalling disorder that conservatism will become a living option? Are Clinton and Trudeau after all the best we can hope for?

Blake certainly painted a dark vision of the hellish cycle of rebellion and reaction: the perpetual alteration between sanguinary radicalism and stultifying conservatism. Is this our future? Philosophy, alas, does not deal with the future. It counsels only that we temper hope as well as fear and judge all things sub-specie-aeternitatis. It is with this stoic sentiment, as boring as it is true, that I will conclude. We seem at an impasse though the author would certainly be happy to learn from others that he is unduly pessimistic about the world.

Contact details: bwills@grenfell.mun.ca

References

Aristophanes. The Clouds trans. C.D.C. Reeve, from The Trials of Socrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002)

Blake, William. Complete Poems ed. Alicia Ostriker. London: Penguin Classics, 1978.

Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning trans. J.G. Williams. (Ottawa: Novalis, 2001)

Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind. trans. J.B. Baillie. (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1967.

Reno, Robert “Why I Am anti-anti-Trump” First Things. Retrieved from https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/05/why-im-anti-anti-trump.

Smith, John Huston. The World’s Religions New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

[1] A fundamental problem with conservatism is that as soon as it defines itself vis a vis its ideological rivals it itself becomes an ideological construct rather than an assumed form of life. At that point conservatism turns into reaction. This problem was noted as long ago as Aristophanes the Clouds. One ace in the hole of the radical tradition is that as soon as traditional norms are questioned and have to be self-consciously defended the conservative standpoint is lost. At that point conservatism becomes a position duking it out with the other positions scoring the odd victory here and suffering the odd reverse there.

[2] The fatal weakness of social conservatism as a political movement was that it never articulated a positive vision of society leaving this work first to neo-liberals and now to ethno-nationalists. Its politics was simply oppositional: devoted to blocking actions against abortion or homosexuality or other things deemed decadent, conflicts that were and are unwinnable. On this basis it forged its foolish alliance first with corporate kleptocracy and then with strident populism culminating in ludicrous defenses of Trumpism from previously reputable conservative publications like First Things. (e.g Robert Reno https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/05/why-im-anti-anti-trump)

[3] For a rich introduction to Islam and indeed to other major faiths see The World’s Religions by John Huston Smith.

[4] This notion of a ‘perennial philosophy’ is central to writers we might place on the conservative spectrum from traditionalist writers like Rene Guenon to more eclectic figures like Aldous Huxley or Simone Weil who, while influential in some conservative circles, defy easy categorization. These metaphysically inclined thinkers contrast with the more pragmatic strain of conservatism stemming from the tradition of Burke and Swift. The American Russel Kirk may be taken as one of the last influential exponents of this view. One can add to this list the disciples of Leo Strauss (a far deeper thinker than Kirk), Canadians like George Grant as well as pure reactionaries in the tradition of Joseph de Maistre. What any of these figures would have thought of Donald J. Trump, a wealthy vulgarian straight from the pages of the Satyricon, one can only guess. Ironies abound here however: Guenon, a western convert to Islam, seems to have influenced the volcanic anti-Islamic rage of Steve Bannon. The paleo-conservatism of the genteel Russel Kirk also spawned the nativism of Pat Buchanan. Every stance has its shadow, the embodiment of its darker tendencies and ethno-nationalism seems to stand in this relation to conservatism.

[5] Any defense of a conservative principle in politics and society in the west can only be a highly qualified one for the reason that there are (in my view at least) a plurality of moral languages with claims on our attention and one of these is indeed that of the radical tradition. For Westerners this problem is acute for, as far as I able to determine, the roots of radicalism are in the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. These are not Conservative documents in my reading of them precisely for their doctrine of radical solidarity with the poor which undermines the binaries on which traditional human societies are built (and sometimes subverts those texts themselves). It was not for nothing that the Emperors of Rome thought Christianity a fundamental threat to civilized standards. In the West, then, the radical principle is already present in its primary theological constitution (however much it tries to ignore or forget that fact).

[6] Indeed, conservative Christianity is, with some honorable exceptions, becoming a pharisaical revenge cult. Behind all the rhetoric around ‘security’ (Canada remains one of the securest societies on planet Earth where terrorism is concerned) and the ‘Muslim threat’ one will find the simple will to retaliate in kind against anyone who represents the hated ‘other’ no matter how guilty or how innocent.

[7] I have before me the online Anarchist Library compiled by the Green Mountain Collective. (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anti-racist-action-the-green-mountain-anarchist-collective-black-bloc-tactics-communique). These sources give the inescapable impression of an abstract ideological rage consuming itself in an intellectual and historical vacuum: pretty much as Hegel saw the French revolutionaries. (The Phenomenology of Mind, 604) Talking to proponents of these views online (if talking is quite the word for it) only deepens this impression. Perhaps I am being harsh however: if the reader is curious, she may peruse Hegel’s chapter ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ and judge for herself if the comparison is apt. Those curious as to why the revolution always eats itself and why revolutionaries must at last turn on themselves may find Hegel’s analysis helpful.

[8] That ‘progressives’ will verbally disembowel each other over ideological differences barely discernible to outsiders shows that they are far from immune to the mimetic violence described by René Girard (2001; 24-31) Just as Blake said, moral abstraction enacts ritual violence. Progressivism is far from alone in this of course and indeed the ethno-nationalist stance is even more Manichean and violent. Still, the fact that it is over all the most humane of the current stances only makes the trap deeper: without what theologians once called a sense of sin it is difficult to imagine any politics escaping the scapegoating impulse and the self-righteous violence it manifests. Considering the ridicule and anger one provokes from many progressives by defending a stance of non-violence things do not seem hopeful.

[9] This is a deeper problem than many realize. The total liberation of one standpoint is the suppression of another: unconditional solidarity with ALL standpoints at once seems a chimerical notion. This is why in practice progressives (for instance) must always favor some oppressed people over others: aboriginal people in Guatemala, say, over outlandish folk like the Copts in Egypt. This why the radical stance may, for all protestations to the contrary, be implicitly totalitarian. Consider the following problem: A adopts the deep narrative about himself that he is the one true prophet of God. A desires not only the liberty to adopt this self-description but demands the universal recognition of this deep description by others. It is, to him, a fundamental denial of his personhood should anyone question his foundational narrative as, in his mind, he IS this narrative. However, trouble arises if B also adopts the deep story that SHE is the one true prophet of God as others cannot offer unconditional affirmation of both narratives. Here is where the currently much maligned standpoint of liberalism steps in. The liberal defers the eschaton by imposing articles of peace on A and B while each prosecutes their claim to be the one true prophet. With this peace imposed A and B come to the realization that, whatever differences divide them, they share a common nature as rational agents. They can now differ on each other’s deep story, neither one need be forced to accept the other because neither party is reducible to their narrative. With that they can go about their affairs. The alternative is playing the zero sum game of establishing my narrative as the dominant one through the suppression of the other contrary narrative. A simply destroys B. This is the totalitarian stance. Its dangers are evident yet the liberal stance costs as well. By entering that stance, we forgo universal recognition for the sake of peace and subordinate our deep story to the common good, at which point we cease to be simply our story, we assume a common public narrative as our own somewhat as we give up our private religious perceptions to join a church. I tend to think that is a cost worth paying though others may differ.

[10] This is why the most embattled principle of all is the centrism espoused by the Democratic party in the U.S. and the Liberal Party in Canada. As in the thirties it seems “the center cannot hold” (to quote W.B. Yeats). The basic problem seems to me that no centrist government can impose discipline on the fossil fuel-industry. Nor can it impose any discipline on the speculators and financiers who hoard badly needed funds offshore: a miserly activity contrary to the very nature of the capitalism they are said to espouse. That said, if there is anything which can be said to be ‘conservative’ in the current context it is belief in a social democratic state with traditional civil liberties protected by a strong constitutional framework. This, if I would hazard a guess, would be the best polity currently on offer. I have given short shrift to the phenomenon of political centrism in this piece, a deficiency I hope to make up in a subsequent essay.

The Epistemic Ideal of Reason-Giving in Deliberative Democracy, A Reply to Landemore, Simone Chambers

SERRC — October 31, 2017 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Simone Chambers, University of California – Irvine, sechambe@uci.edu

Chambers, Simone. “The Epistemic Ideal of Reason-Giving in Deliberative Democracy.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 6, no. 10 (2017): 59-64.

The pdf of the article includes specific page numbers. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3PY

Please refer to:

Landemore, Helene. “Beyond the Fact of Disagreement? The Epistemic Turn in Deliberative Democracy.” Social Epistemology 31, no. 3 (2017): 277–295.

Image by Thierry Ehrman, via Flickr

As interest in deliberative democracy continues to grow, the term is becoming more umbrella-like encompassing different strands, orientations, and methodological proclivities. Helen Landemore in her essay “Beyond the Fact of Disagreement? The Epistemic Turn in Deliberative Democracy” traces one such strand. This strand has been influenced by John Rawls and begins from the fact of pluralism. Navigating deep disagreements in a way that recognizes each person’s freedom and equality becomes the prime motivation in developing theories of deliberative democracy.

This in turn has led some to embrace a Rawlsian epistemological position of agnosticism with respect to the truth-value of moral and political claims. Epistemic abstinence then characterizes this strand of deliberative democracy. I have no quarrel with Landemore’s description and criticism of epistemic abstinence. I have a quarrel with her claim that epistemic abstinence describes “most deliberative democrats” and such abstinence is part of the “mainstream version deliberative democracy.”[1] In my essay I would like to trace a different strand of deliberative democracy one influenced by Jürgen Habermas’s work and which has in many ways been much more influential than Rawls.

The Heft of Deliberation

In this alternative origin story, deliberative democracy grows as a response to and criticism of two interconnected strands of democratic theory that had come to dominate certainly the empirical study of democracy but also many basic theories of democracy. The first strand sees democracy as about the fair competition between fixed interests. Here voting is the central mechanism through which competing interests are mediated in a fair way that recognizes the equality of all citizens.

Deliberative democrats found this picture deeply inadequate on the twin grounds that it rested on an impoverished and indeed implausible view of legitimacy and two it presupposed a black box of fixed interests. Deliberative democracy shifts the focus from preference aggregation to the processes of opinion formation that precedes the vote. Aggregation often in the form of voting (and sometimes governed by majority rule) does not necessarily disappear. Whether we are talking about a citizen’s assembly, an informal public debate, a jury, everyday talk about a public issue, or a process of participatory budgeting, decision procedures are required in order to have an outcome.

But the question that motivated many deliberative democrats was how deliberation could carry the burden of democratic legitimacy in a way that aggregation could not).[2] For many theorists inspired by this alternative vision of democracy, Habermas offered a rich source of helpful theoretic insights to develop this talk centered view of democracy. Theorists drew primarily from two sources. First from his work on the public sphere which suggested that the essential relationship between the public and the state should be understood in terms of rational justification and discursive accountability. And second his work in communicative action and discourse ethics that offered a procedural ideal for the conditions of justification.

Landemore suggests that until recently this endorsement of deliberative democracy did not rely on an epistemic claim about outcomes but rather on a procedural claim about equality, respect and freedom of participants. Because deliberation (ideally anyway) requires that participants take on attitudes of respect and open mindedness towards each other’s claims and grievances it is seen as a more satisfying instantiation of equal citizenship than one person one vote. This argument according to Landemore has dominated deliberative democracy (I agree) and it has no epistemic dimension (I disagree).

Here I come to the second strand in democratic theory and research against which deliberative democracy grew. That is the elitist view of democracy that is deeply suspect of ordinary citizen’s competency. Deliberative democracy has for the most part been a champion of the epistemic competency of citizens if given the chance to deliberative with each other under positive conditions. Even deliberative democrats who focus on middle democracy rather than mass democracy claim the deliberation is valued because it enhances epistemic competency of the participants. This epistemic competency is often discussed under the ubiquitous phrase (i.e. every deliberative democrat uses this formation almost without exception) reason-giving. Before I elaborate the epistemic import of reason-giving I want to take a small detour into epistemic democracy and what it has come to mean in contemporary debates.

What Is Epistemic Democracy?

Epistemic democracy is the view that democracy is to be valued not simply for normative reasons but also (or sometimes exclusively) because it arrives at or can arrive at the right answers. Some (but not all) theories of epistemic democracy are also theories of deliberative democracy because they identify deliberation as the mechanism through which right outcomes are produced (Estlund 2008; Landemore 2013; Mizak 2008). Are all theories of deliberative democracy also theories of epistemic democracy? I want to say that almost all theories of deliberative democracy recognize and value an epistemic function of deliberation but not all of them have focused on developing a clear procedurally-independent standard of correct outcome.

If, as Landemore appears to imply, such a procedurally-independent standard is the defining feature of an epistemic theory of democracy then perhaps it is true that David Estlund has really inaugurated a new era of deliberative theory. But if, as I would like to argue, deliberative democracy has always had a robust procedurally-dependent epistemological view of deliberation then deliberative democracy has always been a form of epistemic democracy or if one insists that that term must be reserved for theories that have procedurally-independent standards of right outcomes, then I would say that deliberative democracy has always valued democracy on epistemic as well as normative grounds.

The sine qua non of deliberation is reason-giving. Now Landemore suggest that in early deliberative democracy reason-giving was tied to treating co-citizens with respect. We each deserve justification for coercion or claims we make on each other. But there was always more to reason-giving than equal respect. Certainly its agonist and postmodern critics have always thought of deliberative democracy as containing over blown claims to rationality and reason. But what is the epistemic status of the ubiquitous reason-giving?

Landemore suggests that there are two minimum requirements in order to be able to talk about epistemic democracy. The first is to accept that political and normative questions are open to rational adjudication. She does not insist on a very high bar here. Accepting that there are “better or worse answers to at least some political questions” (290) is enough. The second is to accept that democratic procedures are a good way to generate that adjudication.

Both of these dimensions are explicitly present in Habermas’s work and both are explicitly or implicitly present in deliberative democracy theories that have been influenced by Habermas ideal of discourse. But, as I argue below, these dimensions can be present without a procedurally-independent standard of correct outcome. How do we know if the answers are better or worse? For public disputes that are predominantly normative, the Habermasian answer is to look to see to what extent the conditions of justification have been met in democratic procedures.

Its Roots in Habermas

People often note that Habermas’s discourse theory insists on a strong analogy between truth claims and normative claims of rightness. When reading Habermas as containing strong epistemic claims (as Landemore does) it is sometimes common to mistake analogy with identity. Landemore for example says that the distinction between truth and rightness is “purely semantic.” (285). But this is not entirely correct. In respect to truth Habermas makes a distinction between what the truth is (say correspondence) and how we arrive at the truth (discourse). No such distinction is possible with regard to normative questions. Therefore for Habermas there are procedurally-independent standards of truth but no procedurally-independent standards of rightness even though both truth and rightness are ‘established’ through discourse and as such open to rational adjudication. Decisions facing a democratic polity will contain both elements.

The more a policy dispute centers on facts or established knowledge, the more it is truth apt. Thus when Habermas talks about democracy’s truth-tracking potential he has procedurally-independent standards in mind which is why he appeals to empirical evidence to assess whether citizens have basic knowledge, are likely to get the science right, or make basic errors in judgements (2006 414). But here too Rawls is not agnostic nor does he advocate abstinence. Rawls suggests that public reason rely on established truth of science and common sense for example (2005 223-227). Rawls’s abstinence enters when we turn to deep moral and normative questions. Here Rawls insists that, on the one hand, participants in debate exercise self-restraint and refrain from claiming truth or objective status for their normative positions and, on the other hand, no strong truth claim should be made regarding the outcomes of public justification.

Habermas makes neither of these claims. Citizens can bring up any and all claims certainly in the broad public sphere.[3] Furthermore, Habermas thinks that properly structured democracies will be able to claim a rational status, fallible and corrigible to be sure, for outcomes. But the epistemic claim tied to normative rightness is a procedural not a procedurally-independent claim. Now Landemore might say that any claim that outcomes are better is a procedurally-independent standard even if the assessment is exclusively tied to whether the procedures are good. Outcomes are not procedures; to value outcomes is to value something more than mere procedure.

But if this is what she means then she is operating with a very narrow view of procedural theory in which democracy is valued for entirely outcome-independent reasons. On this reading of proceduralism then democracy might very well fair poorly on all epistemic measures but that is not why one endorses democracy; one endorses it because it treats people equally not because it arrives at better outcomes. But ‘procedurally-independent standard of correct outcome” implies that there is a standard that is independent of the procedure not just that we value outcome and not just procedure. It is this idea of independent standard that Habermas has explicitly questioned in his procedural theory of democracy and which as a result was never been a focus of the epistemic claims inherent in deliberative democracy from the beginning.

There are two reasons why Habermas’s strong epistemic claims about discourse are procedural claims. The first is that Habermas’s epistemology is parasitic on his linguistic theory that reconstructs the conditions of justification. Rational outcomes are the outcomes that would be justified in a discourse of all those affected. But no thought experiment can produce this outcome independently. So we are thrown back on trying to approximate the procedural conditions of justification: “The unity of a completely proceduralized reason then retreats into the discursive structure of public communication” (1996, 186). But there is a second and I think more interesting reason why procedures and not outcomes are the focus of epistemic assessment.

Habermas is fully committed to the idea that democracy if properly structured results in better, more epistemically sound, and more rational outcomes than other regime types. But he often sees epistemic gains in the long term using the language of “learning” for example. Whereas Rawls thought we should exercise self-restraint for the sake of getting along under conditions of pluralism, Habermas sees unrestrained pluralism under democratic rules as the condition for epistemic advancement. The wild and anarchic nature of the informal public sphere allows for new claims to emerge, hidden injustices to be unmasked, received truth to be questioned, and new forms of political participation to be tested. This lack of Rawlsian restraint plays an important discursive and epistemic function by holding out the possibility of learning, revision, correction, and change through criticism of and opposition to stands taken and claims made especially by those who rule. This is a Kantian/pragmatist view of the way reason works: epistemic gains come through public criticism and demands for rational justification.

A Tradition of Reason

Few deliberative democrats have adopted the full Habermasian discourse theoretic edifice of his political theory. But many have embraced the Habermasian intuition that giving each other reasons, listening to each other’s claims, and being committed to collective problem solving, leads to improved epistemic competence and better outcomes. Not just better in the sense that the outcomes are more legitimate but also better because outcomes are more in line with reason.

Here we see the Kantian idea that reason arrives at the right answers through criticism, argument and persuasion. In a very famous passage from The Critique of Pure Reason Kant says: “Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition…The very existence of reason depends upon this freedom, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even veto, without holding back” (Kant 1998, p. 643 [A738/B767]).

This view is echoed in Mill as well as Dewey and has been, I would argue, a central aspirational ideal of deliberative democracy from its inception. But it is an ideal that resides in the process of reason-giving and in maintaining the procedural conditions conducive to that reason-giving. Thus the evaluation of the epistemic value of the outcome will be invested in how well the procedures approximate good procedures.

I have tried to make two arguments. The first is that because reason-giving has been at the center of deliberative democracy from the start and because many theorists of deliberative democracy have been influenced by Habermas in thinking about how reason-giving works, there has always been an epistemic dimension to deliberative democracy. The second argument I have made is that criterion of procedurally-independent standard of correct outcome is not the best way to conceptualize that epistemic dimension of much of deliberative democracy because so much of that dimension is invested in good procedures.

Contact details: sechambe@uci.edu

References

Bohman, J. “Survey Article: The Coming Age of Deliberative Democracy”. The Journal of Political Philosophy: 6, no. 4 (1998): 400-25.

Chambers, S. “Deliberative Democracy Theory.” Annual Review of Politics 6 (2003): 307-26.

Estlund, D. Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Elstub, Stephen and McLaverty. Deliberative Democracy: Issues and Cases. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Habermas, J. Between Facts and Norms. Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, translated by William Rheg, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Habermas, J. “Political communication in media society: does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research.” Communication Theory 16 (2006): 411-426.

Habermas, J. Between Naturalism and Religion, translated by Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, eds. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Landemore, H. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence and the Rule of the Many. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Manin, B. “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation.” The Journal of Political Philosophy 15, no. 3 (2016): 338-368.

Mizak, C.J. “A Culture of Justification: The Pragmatist’s Epistemic Argument for Democracy.” Episteme (2008): 94-105

Rawls, J. Political Liberalism. Expanded Edition. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005.

[1] Gutmann and Thompson, a central exemplar for Landemore, are indeed very mainstream and do follow Rawls in some form of abstinence. But I would not call Jeremy Waldron, a second example appealed to by Landemore, a deliberative democrat at all precisely because he objects to some epistemic assumptions of most deliberative democracy theory and also because he has more faith in majority voting than deliberation.

[2] See Bernard Manin (1987) for an early articulation of this view. But the contrast with aggregative pictures of democracy can be found in almost all the “narratives” of deliberative democracy. (Bohman 19989; Chambers 2003; Elstub and McLaverty 2014).

[3] While it is true that Habermas insists that religious claims should be excluded from debates in Parliament, this is not a form epistemic abstinence. On the contrary, religious claims are excluded because Habermas wants to make a strong epistemic claim about the discursive process and such a claims would be undermined, he thinks, if religious claims were allowed to enter the debate (Habermas 2008).

In Critical Replies deliberative democracy, democracy, democratic theory, epistemic community, epistemic politics, Habermas, Helene Landemore, Jürgen Habermas, Kant, normativity, political theory, reason, Simone Chambers

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