An objection to the view that advanced liberalism is simply an expression of the technological outlook is that technology can be turned to any purpose. The Nazis had a technology of war and oppression, Islamic terrorists have a technology of terror, and televangelists (it is said) have a technology of making money while spreading the Word. One might even claim that advanced liberalism is a reaction against some applications of technology, in particular the Holocaust, and is motivated in large part by concern for technology’s victims.
The basic question, then, is whether technology can create its own standards, or whether you have to bring in something else, like Islam or horror at the Holocaust, to give it standards to apply. A second question, if it does give rise to its own standards, is what those standards are.
It seems to me technology as a social institution is a comprehensive expression of the modern outlook, so it doesn’t need to import standards from somewhere else. It can make up its own. Specifically, “technological standards” are standards that treat means-ends reasoning (and formal logic) as the whole of rationality. Such standards treat everything as either (1) an arbitrarily desired goal, that is valuable only because somebody happens to want it, or (2) a resource to be employed to bring about such goals in accordance with some overall technically rational system.
To deal with human life solely in accordance with such standards is to treat as valuable the achievement of whatever goals people happen to have, as long as those goals can be fully integrated into the overall system (for, example, as long as they avoid “intolerance” that creates friction with other goals), and otherwise to treat people in accordance with their character as resources suitable to the system—that is, in accordance with their value as employees and consumers. The more that character can be treated as something created and certified by the system itself, for example as the outcome of training, and the less subject it is to quirks that have nothing to do with the system’s efficient operation, for example family ties, sex roles, notions of honor, or cultural peculiarities and non-economic standards, the better.
The machine’s the thing, so non-mechanical things like sex and culture have to be abolished except as interchangeable consumption goods corresponding to merely personal tastes. The abolition of such things is so important to the purity and sole legitimacy of the system that its adherents feel compelled to deny their possible relevance to any legitimate decision. Hence claims that the only possible explanation for lesser representation of women in the hard sciences is “discrimination.” The well-being of science simply as science is said to depend on making more use of woman and underrepresented minorities. People actually seem to believe that. I suppose another influence that points in the same direction is that a hard science professorship is a consumption as well as production good, so the ultimate goal of a technological society (maximizing equal satisfaction of preferences) tends to favor dividing such things up evenly.
While advanced liberalism seems to me the political view that is most consistent with the technological outlook, the connection is not a matter of immediate logical entailment. For that reason Naziism has some relevance to advanced liberalism, but the relevance is symbolic rather than factual. Naziism is important because it’s the polar opposite possibility for technological society. A society based on means-ends rationality can say that everyone’s goals are equally goals, so they have equal value. In that case it’s liberal. That approach seems quite rational but it leads to fuzziness because individual goals are hard to determine, compare, reconcile and aggregate. In the alternative, technological society might choose concreteness, and say that its own goals are what confer value, with “its own goals” defined for maximum clarity and forcefulness as the goals of the unified group constituting the society, concretized through identification with the goals of the leader, and made as vivid as possible by emphasis on victory over conflicting goals of other groups. Such an approach gives you Naziism.
I don’t think the Holocaust as an actual event really explains anything. It’s important as a symbol, and its importance has grown as it’s become more distant because the institutions and attitudes that use it as a symbol have become more dominant. Advanced liberalism causes our recollection of the Holocaust rather than the reverse. If horror at evil were the issue people would be more worried about things associated with communism but nobody cares about them. The Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews was a one-off, while the communists engaged in very large-scale killings repeatedly in more than one part of the world. It seems to follow that communism is more of a danger than Naziism. Those killings don’t fit the preferred story, though, so they’re ignored. It’s the overarching story that matters.
To my mind the basic point is this: moral blackmail based on victim status is only possible if established concepts of justice say you’re a victim. So to explain inclusiveness you have to explain why excluding someone because she’s a woman is colossally evil (and also “ignorant” and “irrational”) while excluding someone because he’s not a Harvard graduate is OK. It seems to me that to explain that you have to appeal to notions of rational social functioning, which thus turn out to be fundamental in the matter.
Now you sound like a Marxist historian!
This is a long reply to Mr. Kalb; it could bear some more editing, but if I don’t send it now, I don’t know when. Apologies.
It seems to me technology as a social institution is a comprehensive expression of the modern outlook, so it doesn’t need to import standards from somewhere else. It can make up its own.
-well, this strikes me as tautological, especially if we are comprehensive in our understanding of the “social institution”. The statement may be true enough but what does it really explain? (in any case, I must say it’s a bit jolting to see a traditionalist seeming to write off technocratic modernity in its public entirety as a hermetically closed system devoid of any standards or ethical revelations from beyond itself.) It still seems to me that standards are an ethical issue and I fail to see how ethics can simply be reduced to technology, unless all forms of ethical debate are “technological”. For example, technological and liberal Japan has a very different attitude towards immigration than does America. Ultimately, the difference must surely be located in the different ethical histories of the countries.
Specifically, “technological standards” are standards that treat means-ends reasoning (and formal logic) as the whole of rationality. Such standards treat everything as either (1) an arbitrarily desired goal, that is valuable only because somebody happens to want it, or (2) a resource to be employed to bring about such goals in accordance with some overall technically rational system.
-religious arguments (e.g. for keeping faith; for justifying sacraments) also use means-ends reasoning, with the ends often justifying the means; it’s not clear to me what exactly is being argued here with respect to technological rationality. As for the two sub points, you make it sound as if the economic servicing of desire is largely unproblematic though (being tautological again) only if the desire is not at odds with the overall technical rationality of the system. But how useful is it to reduce our analysis of an economic system, that in encouraging, but less-than-fully servicing, a massive array of desires, creates, and thus must find ways to recycle, historically unprecedented levels of resentment, simply to questions of technical rationality? There is a whole arena of politics and ethical debate that comes into play.
Admittedly, in this arena, there is frequent recourse today to what you call technological reasoning. So, for example, the legalization of prostitution or polygamy is often successfully opposed in terms of p or p being an assault on women’s rights and equality, instead of the question invoking more fundamental concerns about the relationship of the nuclear family to Western civilization. But it seems to me that if you want to make “technology” the fundamental answer for everything, you can’t really explain why keeping prostitution illegal is more or less “technological” than legalizing it and treating sex or wives as just another market commodity (after all, prostitutes and polygamous women will invoke their equality rights to do what they do, too) The “technological” answer seems less elegantly minimal than question begging. Surely we must come out for or opposed to such issues as legalizing p or p on account of how we import ethics into our technologies, or vice versa. Which is not to say that over time we don’t try to make ethics and technologies work together, so that they might give off the appearance of being seamlessly interwoven.
Again, it explains little to say a human system works simply by servicing unproblematic desires and rejecting those that are “intolerant”. The question of how desires are created, and which are more or less successfully received and serviced, remains. A human desire is not an animal appetite. To have a desire is to postpone, be it briefly or for a lifetime, appetitive satisfaction by mentally substituting a representation of the desirable thing for the thing itself. In other words, desire has an ascetic quality however much it dreams of consumption. A culture or society is always some kind of shared “technology” for creating and deferring desires, deferral (and the social organization that the time of productive deferral, before consumption, permits) being the heart of ethics.
But the technologies for creating or deferring desires vary over time; in some sense they evolve. And if there is a key to understanding this evolution it must lie in recognizing the ethical or organizational limits of any technology and the means by which such limits may or may not be transcended in the struggles of societies to survive both themselves (their internal agon of competing desires) and the other societies with whom they compete for the earth’s resources. These limits inevitably turn the more socially and historically conscious members of a society to fundamental religious and/or anthropological questions. An awareness of one’s social technology develops that cannot itself be simply reduced to this historically specific technology of one’s time. Man is not a machine, even when he worships one.
It seems to me, that if you want to understand what “inclusion” is today, you cannot simply attend to its current bureaucratic logics, but need also ask why the previous ethic, or frequent preference, for signs of exclusivity, for a certain sacramental solidarity, locally and nationally, was transcended. For example, you need to be able to explain how it was that people came to think that “the machine” works better by encouraging affirmative action and not, say, by stopping the march of liberalism at the elimination of all legal discriminations (segregation) and at insuring support for some objective forms of meritocracy.
I don’t think the Holocaust as an actual event really explains anything.
But do you generally hold up particular historical events as key to understanding social systems or do you think, something more or less like system x would have evolved, at some point in time, regardless of the particular shape events have taken? If you want to argue that something like modern liberalism was bound to have evolved among human beings, sooner or later, for reasons having to do with our fundamental nature, ok. It’s impossible to know, but it seems plausible. But if you are interested in particulars, in timing, you need to attend to events, and the Holocaust is one of the most important.
It surely explains, for starters, the timing and rhetorics of the postwar decolonization movement, the civil rights struggle in the US, anti-apartheid movement, the present situation of Israel and the ME, the rhetorics that prove so powerful and consequential among leftists who profess, e.g., to be physically sickened (i.e. physically, existentially, threatened) when the Harvard president merely raises the question of statistically-measurable differences in the overall range of men’s and women’s cognitive abilities. Without the Holocaust, how can we explain the fact that only in the post war era can one be discriminated against simply because one is not any kind of recognizable victim? More on the Holocaust as a historically central event, below.
It’s important as a symbol, and its importance has grown as it’s become more distant because the institutions and attitudes that use it as a symbol have become more dominant. Advanced liberalism causes our recollection of the Holocaust rather than the reverse.
You’re trying to split the atom here. If something is important as a symbol to us, it has causal power. Symbols are not mere epiphenomenal superstructure as the Marxists had it; they have ethical, organizational, consequences as is evident to those who shape symbols as they first emerge, by shaping the events in which they emerge in order to shape historical memory. It is not possible for something like “advanced liberalism” to emerge other than simultaneously with the symbols by which it will be known; there can be no ethical system without first its symbols.
But it is certainly fair to ask why some symbols (or the events from which they arise) prove memorable and others don’t. For example, will 9/11 turn out to have an irreversibly transformative impact on American culture? It remains unknown. There is still a party in America, maybe half the population, that wants to find a way to act and think as if it didn’t happen (and they have the conspiracy theories to prove it). But maybe the party that wants to transform liberalism to duly recognize the terrorist danger from the Islamic world will win out. In any case, if the symbol 9/11 is or isn’t memorable in future, for someone in future to reduce the question of why to the logic of his then current ethical system, is to deny the human freedom we have at the moment to change, or not, the present logic of liberalism in recognition of the reality of Islamic resentment of the West.
Now, returning to the Holocaust, we do indeed have to explain why it has a much more profound effect on Western culture in the last thirty or so years than have the horrors of communism. Obviously it is not a simple question of horror of mass murder, or so many kids today wouldn’t be wearing commie nostalgia t-shirts; and of course it is about which stories prove powerful. But why? Why is it that there remain today so many people, clinging to utopian fantasies, keen to deny that communism and national socialism weren’t essentially the same kind of totalitarian phenomena? The short answer is that the Nazis serve as the scapegoat to allow the commie fantasies to survive because many people cannot live without some such Gnostic utopian fantasy (of which liberalism is itself a variety and hence inherently unstable).
In the evolution of free market society, the Holocaust plays a fundamental revelatory role. Up until then, and still in ways today, the hope was that some kind of “exclusivist”, compact, national identity, or some form of international solidarity, to counter the alienating and individualizing forces of market society would be possible. What the Nazis taught us (and the commies less successfully) were some of the consequences of attempting to realize such an identity in opposition to a personification of the market, “the Jew”. Long story short, we had to learn that to fully transcend the market’s individuating and alienating power in a certain kind of secular-national sacramental solidarity, one eventually has to dive into an endless war. The occasional Kristallnacht was not a satisfactory response to the obsessive antisemitism that distinguished the Judeophobia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from those less continuously intense varieties that came before. Only by engaging a war against “the Jew” (and his Bolshevik and Anglo-American allies) could the modern state both utilize the full power of a modern economy AND create the sacramentally-charged social solidarity that was desired as an alternative to the anomie of market society. Lacking such a war, the mature economy, given its inherent logic, would continue to serve the many forces of an individuating, decentralizing, “Jewish” desire.
The kind of social solidarity and modern state and economic power that the Nazis sought can only be combined in a way that is likely to leave your nation a pile of rubble because the solidarity requires endless and irrational war of the kind Hitler pursued. That’s the lesson and its consequence has been to create a great postmodern phobia of anything that looks remotely like a modern state trying to build social solidarity against an Other – something George Bush is continually accused of. If all the massive resentment that the market system creates is well focussed on any particular group, then the market system can only continue to work by aiming to destroy that group. This revelation has a profound result in allowing anyone who seems remotely to be a victim or a target of exclusionary resentments to say that their persecution not only threatens, of course, their own existence, but also the very health of the entire social system. Inclusiveness becomes the mark of social health. This has had all kinds of political and ethical consequences, some of which I noted above. Thus many will take seriously the rhetoric of a representative “woman” whom Larry Summers has made physically ill by a few words that, in many another historical context, would be taken as in honest service of our need to develop new and better technology.
Many took the lesson of the Holocaust to mean that only a certain kind of nationalism had to be abandoned and not the entire vein of socialist-Gnostic thought. But if it took the Communists longer to collapse in a cold war, the lesson was basically the same: focusing your people and their desired solidarity on the resented agent of the marketplace – America – means you will eventually be destroyed by the adaptation of modern economic forces to military purposes. In the Soviet case, you simply won’t be able to compete for long with that freer form of market civilization which you scapegoat, along with the millions you murder.
To my mind the basic point is this: moral blackmail based on victim status is only possible if established concepts of justice say you’re a victim. So to explain inclusiveness you have to explain why excluding someone because she’s a woman is colossally evil (and also “ignorant” and “irrational”) while excluding someone because he’s not a Harvard graduate is OK. It seems to me that to explain that you have to appeal to notions of rational social functioning, which thus turn out to be fundamental in the matter.
-I don’t disagree with any of this; it’s just that invoking our present ethical technology doesn’t explain how present notions of rational social functioning have emerged or hold power (not that I think they will for much longer).
Leftist historians treat everything as if it were leftism
Our ways of dealing with these issues seem to differ quite basically. Laying out a few basic aspects of my approach might help more than attempting a point-by-point response. Or maybe not—online discussions have their limitations.
A key point about advanced liberalism is that its adherents, many of whom are quite intelligent, experienced and well-informed, find it impossible to deal with arguments or even facts that run counter to their understanding of how the world just has to be. They can’t take any other approach seriously and genuinely find them incomprehensible except as expressions of ignorance, irrationality or malice. Also, nothing can be done about liberal claims and demands no matter how batty they get. Complain about “diversity” as the supreme value all you want, you’re just going to get more of it.
All those things tell me that present-day liberalism rests quite directly on fundamental metaphysical concepts that are now quite generally accepted among educated people. It’s not a matter of this event or that influencing things in some direction. If it were then conservative predictions that “when X happens people will see how silly it all is” would come true. They don’t though.
So how does this come about? At bottom I view liberalism as a sort of disorder caused by the attempt to reduce social life to a few simple principles. As such it can be described and explained much more simply than the healthy state of a society, just as drunkenness or cancer can be described and explained much more simply than the healthy state of a man.
The question for me then is where this attempt to remake all society on simple abstract principles comes from, and why people are convinced beyond all doubt of its necessity, justice, inevitability, sole rationality, etc. The discussions of technocracy etc. are my attempt to answer that question.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Unconstrained Vision
“The question for me then is where this attempt to remake all society on simple abstract principles comes from, and why people are convinced beyond all doubt of its necessity, justice, inevitability, sole rationality, etc”
According to Thomas Sowell’s analysis (see “A Conflict of Visions”), this attempt to remake society on abstract principles is associated with the “unconstrained vision” or sense of causation in which human nature is perceived as ductile and perfectible.
Ultimately, a vision, whether “constrained” or “unconstrained” – i.e. conservative or liberal – seems to arise from inherent propensity or disposition. It has been described as a “pre-analytic cognition”, or in Sowell’s words, “It is what we sense or feel before we have constructed any systematic reasoning that can be called a theory, much less deduced any specific consequences as hypotheses to be tested against evidence”.
What is metaphysics?
All those things tell me that present-day liberalism rests quite directly on fundamental metaphysical concepts that are now quite generally accepted among educated people. It’s not a matter of this event or that influencing things in some direction.
This is true enough. But what is metaphysics? In the (Generative) anthropology I follow metaphysics (which is not religion in the sense of rituals or consciousness of revelatory events) is seen to be founded on the forgetting of the events or scenes, real or imagined, from which our intellectual formulae abstract. Metaphysics is the rule of decontextualized declarative sentences over the ostensive and imperative consciousness of particular scenes/events.
Might I appeal to your own consciousness of the centrality of things sacramental, i.e. of the event, in this discussion? With liberalism you are concerned with abstractions, but abstractions from what? What, originally, is the source of human consciousness if not the revelatory scene/event?
My point, ultimately, is not that one event among the countless millions of events that constitute the basis of our present historical consciousness is of singular causal importance. History is a very dense iteration of events and scenes. It would be impossible satisfactorily to account for the entire chain of historical events to explain how we got to this point in time. So we rely on (metaphysical) abstractions (and, differently, on great works of art that capture in some way an era) and we are often appealed to by historical theories that denigrate the supposedly epiphenomenal event in favor of explanations that supposedly dig deeper into some hidden forces that supposedly explain the course of events – a lot of supposedly respectable historical analysis (like liberalism) is, in my opinion, just a fancy form of conspiracy theory or magical thinking.
So, in addition to relying (unfortunately) on metaphysical abstractions to simplify the densely iterated chain of events, big and small, that have built the world in which we live, we also rely on highlighting certain great events as somehow illustrative of who we are. We return to them, again and again, because they somehow sum up a range of phenomena that are central to our (historical) consciousness of who we are. This is done through the scenes of art as well as through other forms of historical memory, like rhetorical figures (Bushitler).
This is not to say that the highlighted event, alone, fully explains who we are – history, again, is a great iteration of scenes and events that we cannot grasp as a whole. But some events are indeed more revelatory than others – like a great story they have a way of summing things (events) up. For example, whatever you think of the Holocaust in historical memory, I don’t think you would deny, on some level, that World War II has had a great effect on contemporary American consciousness, as the great many cultural products that refer back to it would suggest.
If it were then conservative predictions that “when X happens people will see how silly it all is” would come true. They don’t though.
-I see this as a case of conservatives wishing the rule of metaphysical abstractions would end and a proper deference to concrete events, and their rendering in symbols, would ensue. It’s basically a wish for a great paradigm shift in anthropological consciousness and as such it can’t happen overnight. We yet have more work to do in showing the limits of metaphysics, a theme that is already widely discussed in philosophy, e.g. the interest in Derrida’s paradox of his (metaphysical) deconstruction of metaphysics.
I view liberalism as a sort of disorder caused by the attempt to reduce social life to a few simple principles. As such it can be described and explained much more simply than the healthy state of a society, just as drunkenness or cancer can be described and explained much more simply than the healthy state of a man.
-I think this is right and consistent with how I look at history. In fact, I have more than once favorably quoted you in blogs.
That elegant intelligent metaphysical rag
It’s difficult to give a final answer to these questions. What is the relation between the One and the Many? Between essence and particular existence? My impression from what you say is that I take essences more seriously than you do. So far as I’m concerned you can’t reduce either side of the polarity to the other.
It seems to me that current antimetaphysical tendencies are an event within modernity. The traditional view is that metaphysics is a description of things that exceed our grasp. When you say that God is the most real being you aren’t claiming to have summed up all reality in a formula. There is always something that lies beyond us, and what lies beyond us is more important than what we possess.
Moderns in contrast tend to deny that it makes sense to talk about things that exceed our grasp so for them metaphysics becomes a collection of self-contained abstract propositions that supposedly explain everything. As such it is soon seen to be unsatisfactory and people try to ditch it. You can’t ditch it though. You can’t just talk about particulars or believe coherently that everything beyond particulars is simply something we, or the powerful, or somebody, construct for our own purposes.
Putting aside the validity of metaphysics as a description of the world, it seems clear to me that metaphysics exists and has effects as a social institution. The view that means/ends reasoning and formal logic embrace the whole of rationality does exist as a social institution just as grammar exists as a social institution, and as such has an enormous effect on what people believe makes sense. I would add that such views are integrated with other social institutions like academic and government institutions as well as with metaphysical views relating to what is real, what we can know, and what sorts of things we should do. All those things have pervasive effects.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Indeed
Yes, I agree with all this. I’ll just add that the polarities you mention that are not reducible to either term, as well as the traditional view of metaphysics, reflect the singular nature of an event.
Events come together around a particular configuration of the sacred – that thing/sign/place which centers the scene, the shared attention of the participants. But once the historical, physical, constituents of the scene are consumed in time, only the (still socially powerful) memory and sign remain. Given this contrast between sacred but consumable things, and free-floating significance, one becomes aware that there is a Being that empowers and survives the scene and guarantees the shared significance that flows from and survives the sacred thing (say a sacrificial beast that the participants distribute and eat, and who is later only remembered by the still-powerful sign that first made the beast sacred, untouchable for a time).
Reflection on the differences among the sacred, the significant, and the divine Being who is invoked by the name given to the sacred thing, flows from our experience of the event and give us the metaphysical paradoxes you mention.
By the way, to give this kind of anthropological accounting of metaphysics and of the sacred event which distinguishes the human from the animal pecking order, is not to make a commitment either to the camp of believers or non—believers. Both have members using the Generative Anthropology to which I refer.