The Brilliance of the American Culture, Economy, and Political Order

What is brilliant about the structure of our government, economic order, and the culture they helped to create, is not that they have properly balanced or harnessed man's natural proclivities. It is that they have zeroed in on a mechanism to help perpetuate themselves and an order that both uses and creates this mechanism. Allow me to explain briefly.

Whatever merit there is to the common notion that people are inherently "self-interested" it is near irrelevant today for the workings of a system that relies on the "self-interested" actions of its subjects (note quickly that you will be hard-pressed to find a sensible theory of the "self" that does not rely on cooperation with other beings). There may be an inherent drive in people which one can fairly characterize as "self-interest," I will not pass on that for now, but the brilliance of our system is that it creates or intensifies the self-interest it relies on. It is like a fire which creates its own oxygen to fuel itself. I am a firm believer in the idea that man, as a conscious-being, has the tools at hand (or more properly, "in her mind," or "on her tongue") to work to construct his "nature" in the process of being. Whatever is natural to man, man has become unnatural. In any case, just to rehash, our system is a web of "checks and balances," "supplies and demands," etc., which rely on self-interested actors to drive the engine of state proper...the brilliance of our system is not that it has harnessed the mechanism of self-interest, but that it perpetuates and intensifies self-interest (it has made self-interest into an inexhaustible resource).

Of course, this also has some rather unseemly consequences. For one, our society contains many features that rely on cooperation, rather than individualized competition, to sustain themselves. A few examples: the family, community, religion, and culture...all these things are not structurally designed to harness self-interest, and the end result is that pure egoism tends to rot these institutions from the inside-out unless they are transformed or cooperation is emphasized as a virtue. Unfortunately, these institutions tend to be conservative and, hence, are not likely to adjust, and cooperation is not emphasized as a virtue in our society. Another problem is that the institutional diffusion of individual egoism and self-interest as a social ethos creates the seeds for the destruction of those very institutions. Remember, our constitution and economy is set-up with a very delicate balance of power that is meant to defend against the evils of self-interest (and use the energy self-interest creates to turn the wheels of the state). The defenses were the ingenious creation of man, they were not handed down by a deity or demanded by the necessity of pure reason. What man can construct man can also destroy, and a self-interested man will work tirelessly to promote himself even if it is at the expense of the very system that created him.

So in conclusion, self-interest as a mechanism for the operation of society is brilliant not because it harnesses man's "nature," but because it creates the conditions required for its operation and then harnesses those conditions. Under this system several problems emerge. One such problem is that our society still contains phenomena that do not work well with, or against, self-interested subjects (remember also, as I suggested earlier, personhood itself and consciousness are likely derivatives of the cooperation among humans). A second problem is that this results in a kind of "cold war" between man and his institutions where "mutual assured destruction" is the delicate balance that governs their relations. The self-interested man will seek to undermine or collapse a system that keeps him from the optimal harvest of his interests, but without this system his very existence is threatened. This is more than just in the sense of a Hobbesian "war of all against all," but, as a construct of the system, his dynamic essence is without any value if not relative to the system that needs it in order to operate...most of our pre-institutional arrangements emphasize cooperation.

The Reverse Dialectic of American Politics (Politicizing Reality=Reifying Ideology)

American politics is sort of an inverted dialectic. Allow me to briefly explain. Step 1: Take reality in its totality and split it in half (de-synthesize). Step 2: Remove the two halves of reality from reality into the realm of the abstract. Step 3: Set these two abstractions against each other to construct a contradiction. Step 4: Depending on which side you are on, perform a reductio ad absurdum on the other side's abstract half. Step 5: Take your abstract half and forcefully reintroduce it to reality in the form of a policy half-measure. Step 6: Set the whole of reality against itself in the process of reifying your abstract half measure and create cultural contradictions. Step 7: Blame the other half of reality for your half measure's failure to provide a solution to the problem.

Unconscious Debate, Part the Third

Initially, you are right to criticize me for taking this into a more esoteric realm. This is a personal weakness of mine that needs to be constantly checked in order for me to be effective (and I admit that on one level I approached this as a purely intellectual task). I will try to clarify my concerns, because they still exist...

I can see what you mean from a pragmatic perspective, we can all agree there is something there, call it "x," that needs to be dealt with. I am never one to intentionally fall into the trap of forgoing action to deal with the niceties of the language (in fact, a few years ago I would be disgusted with my current self!). My concern is that the term "unconscious bias," as a conceptual tool for action, is not as effective as it ought to be. Especially if this fight is to be fought in academic and/or legal circles (or led from these circles as many social revolutions are), the wording at this point is the means to the end.

Insofar as people are "unconscious" of the substance of their thought process, I see the challenge of academics to open the window and shine some light on these shadowy aspects of the conscious mind (maybe we can abuse "The Cave" allegory here). A being without consciousness would be incapable of creating the complex web of debilitating ideologies of alienation that we not only make, but then use to help shape/reinforce our material world. We ought not give people a pass when it comes to the very active role they play in creating discrimination.

I am deeply concerned with moving the discourse out of the range of the average person. You can see how that would prove a complete failure to my task of demonstrating the unstable and unnatural nature of things we assume to be otherwise. The value of a good theory, from my point of view, and borrowing from American pragmatism, is its ability to create real change in accord with its ends. So there has to be a kind of theoretical "sweet-spot" where conceptual precision and real-world applicability can meet to create a kind of "perfect storm" of enlightened activism. Hannah Arendt argued that people would follow bad theory if its inner-consistency creates a "hypnotic effect" and "puts the common sense to sleep" (Arendt "On Violence")...thats what we face, we must awaken the "common sense" of people (I use this term specifically to denote the Kantian idea of the sensus communis, how we, as real people, deal with the particular world...this is where I think the whole reasoning process begins to confuse itself with respect to bias). Any theory here must be embedded with a theory of action, this was part of the brilliance of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's, the marriage of a theory of racial justice with a theory of non-violent resistance (see Martin Luther King's writings on the role of non-violent resistance).

I ask, what is the course of action to be set out upon when dealing with the spectre of "unconscious bias?" It is too nebulous and imprecise to open a route to change in my opinion, and I also think it is open to being co-opted by dominant ideology. There is a phenomenon today, which has almost reached the level of cultural fad, for "passing the buck." I fear that unconscious bias will be received as an excuse to blame our discriminating mothers and fathers and do nothing ourselves. I know this is not what you propose, and I align myself wholly with your intentions, but how can you alleviate my fear that "unconscious bias" will wiggle its way into the fairy-tale land of psycho-babble and away from the world of social activism?

Change in this realm will require a massive, directed and concerted effort by "people"...I think the conceptual framework should fairly characterize the immensity of this task, it should be free of inclinations toward passive response, and it should be a call to action of sort. I want people to know that a lot of discrimination, whatever its subject may be, is the direct result of the way they are "being" in the world. Certainly much of it is institutionalized at this point by past beings, this is a sort of "capitalized bias," but bias is the activity of conscious beings (it is absurd to say that a "thing" is biased with respect to its judgments, "things" do not judge, conscious people make judgments and sometimes they use "things" to enforce or institutionalize their judgments, but "things" are not judges or biased judges). Its almost like saying that "unconscious labor" is producing bad commodities, what can be done?

It should be a two-fold task...first, an assault on what I have called "capitalized bias." This "capitalized bias" is the bias of past generations that has been made into the "means of institutional discrimination" by crystallizing itself in the law, government, and various sectors of civil society; and then attained a kind of "fetishized" transcendent existence. The second front in the war against alienation is what I will call "labouring bias" (to keep my Marxist paradigm). "Labouring bias" is living bias as it operates in conscious beings at a given time who are in the process of crystallizing the next generation's "capital bias" through the exertion of their biased "labour." This second front will be most difficult because it will require making people aware of the contents of their assumed conceptual tools, and then making them aware that this content is not an actual reflection of things in their particularity. Finally, the task of combating "laboring bias" is constantly at risk of being undermined by the existing "capital biases" that try to urge people otherwise (that work to provide "hegemonic leadership"), because bias in both forms act to reinforce one another (its a dialectic of bias production).

This discussion is already going in the right direction I think though...because we are asking the right questions. I was wrong to state unequivocally that the existing theoretic framework should be scrapped, and you were right to challenge me on that. I am guilty of inhabiting a rather insulated academic world and I am always at risk of "academizing" issues and taking them away from the world of action. I will stick to my point here though and say that I am concerned with the practical nature of a theory that identifies one dominant kind of bias and I am wary of the effect of naming, especially in the age we live in where the world is experienced rapidly through commercial images and soundbytes (packaging). When people take to the streets they will adopt whatever word they feel best suits them, currently we are in the laboratory creating possible tools for them.

In Response to Occy's "Slate Article" Post

I would like to attach to one phrase and take it completely out of context, analyze it, because I think its important that it be drawn out more. I am sure nobody will be surprised that I have chosen to parse words, but who can blame me, I am in the process of being trained as a professional sophist. I want to focus my attention on the phrase "unconscious bias."

As Occy knows, because we have shared a classroom where this issue was discussed, one of our classmates took exception with the use of the phrase "unconscious bias," because it tends to remove the burden from the individual into some netherland of the mind. He suggested we refer to it as "subconscious bias." I find myself averse to either denomination, although I feel we may have a sort of sensus communis agreement on the substance. I think we ought to work though to clear up the term to better convey what is meant.

I agree with our former classmate that there are certain problems that inhere when the bias in society is deemed "unconscious." First of all, it suggests that one cannot work on, or with, the tools of the conscious mind to create change, this is a sad kind of fatalism...what would we leave ourselves. I think that a lot of biases are conceptual, hence of the reasoning mind. They have to do with the images that are subsumed under a given concept and the way we then use that concept as part of a logico-linguistic chisel to sculpt the world. They also have to do with the way our ready made conceptual tools work within the current power orderings of a society, which I caution are immensely complex. These biases are not wholly material nor wholly creations of the mind, but they live in the realm of praxis, where theoretical and practical considerations collide to reinforce each other.

I also urge that the root of biases cannot be a located in a single realm of the mind or the world. The biases men have against women and those of one race against another do not originate from the same "prime mover" of bias. Its near inconcievable that the universality of gender subordination is present, with such expansive scope, at birth when many of us men come to associate our very sustenance with our mothers. Gender bias must intensify or arise at some point later in intellectual/social development.

On the other hand, it is wholly possible that we begin to sow the field of our mind for racial bias in the dawn of our infancy. Many of us are raised in families where our experience of others is wholly of one race. As we begin to attach mental images with concepts those images reflect our experience, for some of us "person" is "white person" quite early on. Later in life when we begin to experience other races we have to figure out why this person is so different from the conceptual "person" we have used to crawl our way through experience, its a sort of ready-made conceptual alienation. Unfortunately, at this point there is a mass of media images, biased ideology, and socio-economic interest that are all too ready to mischaracterize this state. How to expand the substance of a concept to make it deal better with particularity, this is a chief task of the reasoning human mind, and it will not get a pass in this instance.

These are just speculations, hypotheticals, and are by no means fact; but the point is that it is possible that our biases come from various directions, vary with respect to each of their different objects, and arise differently in each of the different biased subjects. This does little I think to help with the immensity of the task to alleviate bias in society, but it does bring it out of the deep, dark recesses of the "unconscious" or "subconscious" mind and out into light of the reasoning mind. So what to call this bias? Well, that is to be debated. I only urge that there is much in a name so we ought be very careful when naming a phenomenon because the end result may be the linguistic equivalent of creating an axe to do the work of a hammer.

Some suggestions to guide the discussion. We should keep in mind the psychological/philosophical traditions we are leaning on when we chose to refer to this phenomenon as one thing or another, because we are inadvertantly accepting a wealth of epistemological and metaphysical assumptions. For instance, a discussion of the "unconscious" or "subconscious" cannot ignore Freud and psychoanalytics without being vastly inadequate...many of these debates have already been begun by exceptional minds. Second, I urge that we start all over, work from the ground up. Begin with the phenomenon as it exists and then work toward a conceptualization that is both descriptive and instrumental in achieving our end, which I assume is the elimination of bias in society and particularly in social institutions. Finally, I again caution that this task is not one that will find a paradigmatic solution, one of its very problems may be that it defies easy theoretical conceptualizations, we have to keep our minds open to a near infinite expanse of complexity behind this issue. Bias is very often as varied as the minds that carry it.

Blogs and Pascal

We have to talk, whether we have something to say or not; and the less we want to say and want to hear the more willfully we talk and are subjected to talk. How did Pascal put it? 'All the evil in the world comes from our inability to sit quietly in a room.' To keep still.

--Stanley Cavell

I thought that would be a pretty amusing quote to post to a blog, essentially a forum for speaking into the void.

Romanticism and Nihilism

Here is a lengthy excerpt from Simon Critchley's Very Little...Almost Nothing, a book that has been captivating me for the last week:

The problem for which romanticism attempts to provide a solution is that of how to reconcile the values of the Enlightenment--secularization, humanism, the libertarian and egalitarian values of republicanism, the primacy of reason and the ubiquity of science--with the disenchantment of the world that those values seem to bring about. The post-religious or post-traditional values of the Enlightenment somehow fail to connect with the fabric of moral and social relations, with the stuff of everyday life, and lead instead to the progressive degradation of those relations. Such is, as I have said above, the dialectic of nihilism.

The problem faced by romanticism is what might count as a meaningful life, or as a meaning for life, after one has rejected the founding certainties of religion. To return to the theme with which I began these lectures, philosophy--and this is its unhappy consciousness--asks questions and should ask questions which have the same form as religious questions, but without the possibility of finding a religious response to those questions. This is philosophy's essential disappointment. Philosophy is atheism arising out of the experience of nihilism, but it is an uneasy atheism.

Critchley goes on to document the failure of romanticism as it is popularly perceived, but he finds within romanticism a possible escape route. In any case, the failures of romanticism are of crucial importance because, as Critchley states, romanticism poses the most plausible solution we have to nihilism.