Tractatus

Desert

Ocean

Transfiguration

Jody - BinHeX

Schubert - How To Use A Theme

Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, D537 (Op. Posth) - II Allegretto Quasi Andantino
Sonata No.20 in A major, D.959 - IV. Rondo. Allegretto

Social Power and Truth

Power displays itself in modern society mainly through political and economical institutions. It is clear that they reinforce each other. Laws are introduced, in many cases, to preserve the economic power elite, and vice versa economic programs are implemented in order to support a political narrative. Power, in both cases, requires a consensus – among the elite itself and among the lower classes – on the narrative proposed and controlled by the elite. The question, at this point, is: once that consensus is reached, is there anything else that matters? If consensus is equivalent to social truth – a correspondence between claims and reality that is accepted by the group – that consensus either becomes foundational (i.e. like truth in the common sense, the claim from which one can derive all properties of reality) or derivative (just a property). Since in both cases it reinforces the power narrative, why should that difference or anything else matter?

Here is where power meets culture, or critical thinking, or where narratives undergo a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ – see Leiter. And here is where social truth could be confronted by other types of truth – epistemic, ontological, etc. Proceeding in broad strokes, we can say that the relationship between power and culture is based on the issues that exist between the realist and anti-realist philosophical positions. A simplified description of truth can be as follows: someone is said to be holding the truth when his or her claim corresponds with reality. Two are the critical variables here: reality AND correspondence, or agreement. If reality were one and unchangeable then we just had to work on the meaning of correspondence, or how to define agreement of a claim with that unchangeable and unique reality. The realist position believes that reality is independent of us and that our claims have a correspondence with that reality. However, it is not clear whether the reality is one and unchangeable and if any correspondence can be foundational or genetic, i.e. can then allow us to deduct all properties of that reality. The anti-realists instead support the opinion that reality is dependent on the correspondence we establish between claims and reality. Since the correspondence is also based on reality, both reality and correspondence are defined reciprocally. It seems quite difficult to conciliate this position with any concept of genetic truth.

If anyone were holding the truth, he or she could say whether reality is one or many, unchangeable or changeable, and whether the correspondence were foundational / genetic or not. However, in order to believe him or her, we would need to reach an agreement with him or her. In the history of culture, we have relied on either religion or science (or both depending on what the issue was about) to guide us toward an agreement. Typically, religion is founded on revelation, science on rationality. Both have confirmation methods. For religion, it is based on the charisma of a book or a prophet. For science it is based on the experiment. It must be noticed that revelation comes from the outside of nature (the supernatural) while reason comes from the inside of nature. However it would come from the inside of what reality is for both since for religion God is reality while for science nature is reality.

Of the two, religion seems the closest to a pure realist position, that is the reality is one and unchangeable and claims can be foundation and genetic. In one word, God is where reality and truth meet. However, it is true that the nominalist position put this realist position under discussion – and in fact, it may have facilitated the development of science in the Western world. Although science tended, almost wanted, to reach the same pure realist position that religion held, it never reached a similar foundational or genetic truth, and it can be argued that it never will, by definition of science itself, since its method are based on rationality and experiment instead of on revelation and prophetic charisma.

The fact that there is no agreement may just mean that there is no need for one. One of the proposed criteria for reaching an agreement on truth has been pragmatic, i.e. which truth methodology would provide society with a better life. If a better life can be conducted having a stable conception of reality and truth then religion seems unbeatable since it bases itself on a pure realist position. However, belonging to religion do not eliminate doubt – as the nominalist controversy shows. Both science and religion have their own methods to handle doubt. If religion traditionally handled doubt in a more physically way – punishment and death – science, belonging to modern society, handled doubt in more socio-economical ways – exclusion from the academic environment, for instance.

If a person sacrifices cohesion for truth, likely that person is not what we would call a ‘social’ person, and would be rejected or adored by the community – both not being disruptive to the social cohesion of the community. But whether the search for truth originates on an individual effort – going to the desert or theorizing through mathematics or else – once whatever truth is communicated to society, isn’t group cohesion and agreement, hence a pragmatic goal, the ultimate goal in all cases? Isn’t hence the anti-realist stance a general stance at which point the anti-realist suspends judgment and instead the realist affirms a further correspondence? Why do the realists need to go further? If the realist cares essentially about social cohesion there would be no need to go further unless that cohesion is not satisfying or that cohesion is felt under threat. Are the realists, i.e. the people that are not satisfied by a pragmatic approach to truth, concerned about cohesion in a different way than the anti-realists? In a sense the belief seems to be that ultimate truth may provide the ultimate cohesion. In its essence, the question can be formulated as follows: is truth always a matter of agreement? Is hence truth always a matter of power? Is it possible or does it make any sense to hold the truth and be alone?

Power: the establishment of a relationship that reaches out to a vast extent (territorial, economical, conceptual, etc.) and allows commanding. By definition, commanding means getting a wanted outcome, i.e. an expected response – you want something hence you build an expectation for what the result of executing a command should be, you command, and what you wanted is executed and you get what you wanted. An unstable relationship can not hence allow power to function since it would not respond to command in a repeatable way. In order for the reach of power to be of a vast extent a solid and stable common ground must be found among the elements that constitute what is commanded. The relationship must satisfy the difference or go beyond the difference of the elements. Agreement: a stable relationship and structure that allows for the establishment of a difference, of something a name can be given to. It is almost using a common ground to establish a difference. If the difference is small then the agreement can take an existing name. Let’s assume now that the most valuable agreement supports growth, and growth requires differentiation (enough to require a new name). That agreement will then be challenging the authority of the power since will be not reinforcing the common ground but looking at the differences that can support the new. It is searching for weakening the grab of the power upon the single elements of the structure, constantly looking at deserving a new name. It will hence make any agreement unstable. That agreement is fighting power, any power. That (most valuable) agreement will be resisted. That (most valuable) agreement will not be reassuring. What if reality is what results from the tension between power and the truth (defined as the most valuable agreement) that seeks to fight that power in order to find a new level of power?

Social power will support whatever systems of belief reinforce its narrative and allow the elite to pursue their goals. Different institutional set-ups will facilitate the emergence of different systems of belief, and will certainly be changed by that emergence, in some cases quite radically. In a secularized society, rationality is certainly kept in good standing. However, religion can also provide support and is hence kept in good standing as needed. The social elite pursue consensus for maintaining their power. Historically, the Western elite favored rationality and revelation alternatively – from Classic Greece to Christianity to Modernity. Various attempts at some ‘secular religions’ have been tried and, in many aspects, Catholicism is perhaps trying more than other Western religions to cohabitate with science. The introduction and adoption of Eastern religions in the West can also be interpreted as attempts to conciliate revelation and rationality. However, the difficulties of these attempts are clear and, in fact, it can argued that there is no way to conciliate the two and that the struggle the Islamic world is facing is perhaps less deceptive than the conciliatory terms church and state are cohabitating in the Western world. At the end, society falls back to some kind of pragmatic agreement, and that determines the introduction of different types of morality supporting any related truth-methods.

Is there anything else beyond revelation and reason? Is poetic philosophy an alternative? Has philosophy ever reached its maturity or is it, like art, a prototypical game that precedes the power game? Is there anything else other than power relationships that allow for a choice of a truth-method? When we start talking about truth, are we there collapsing into a struggle for power? Can society be without power relationships and a method of justifying and reinforcing cohesion? Is it possible to agree on being different when power is the ontology of society and perhaps of reality? Is parametric universalism possible if implies a balanced power among the parameters?

Accumulation and Disquietude

“The desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future… It operates, so to speak, at a deeper level of our motivation. It takes charge at the moments when the higher, more precarious conventions have weakened. The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium which we require to make us part with money is the measure of the degree of our disquietude.”

John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Unemployment, Collected Writing, Vol. 14, p. 116.

The Exchange

As a practice, the modern economy reflects centuries of assumptions and collective experience, and heavily relies on the increased accuracy that writing and then printing brought to regulating exchange. These assumptions, experience and technologies converged, at the dawn of industrialization and the introduction of massive mechanization, in the social theories of the Enlightenment and the general secularization of society.

Modern economy can be construed as the rationalization of exchange through accurate records – contracts (among these, money itself and all other time-shifted forms of money, i.e. finance) and accounts mainly. Although I’m focusing on rationalization, I don’t mean to imply that human aspects other than reasons were eliminated. In fact, it is increasingly accepted that economic choices are essentially driven by emotional or irrational components. However, the fact remains that the economic institutional set-up reflects the belief that rational choice leads to a prefixed outcome in the more effective way available. Reason allows humans to forecast the future accurately and hence allows humans to act upon it and determine their destiny.

Generalizing even more, modern economy is quantifying, through money as the unit of measurement, the power within the exchange, or what is exchanged. Economical value is a measure of power. We can evaluate the power of objects (commodities, etc.) and people by the disruption that is introduced by their absence. If power is the ability to move or lead people and / or objects, then the more the impact, the higher the value. The economy is a game of power, and hence consensus-forming, emotional attachment forming, and the manipulation of groups’ drives are the goals, and anything beyond that – like evaluating whether what is done has any further value, is good or bad (high or low ranking) under a certain perspective – is not essential, essentially it is a waste of time and energies. The economy institutional set up ought to reflect the goal (intentional or un-intentional) of controlling people behavior and passions, and this fact is just a reaffirmation of the fact that the economy is one of the major regulating systems of modern society. No one doubts the strong interrelation between political and economical power, one helping the other in leading people toward a specific outcome. Political leadership is complementary, and sometimes even a substitute, of economical leadership, and vice versa. Both are performing leadership functions either in the front or in the back stage. The rationalization of exchange imposes a structure, a regulation to power. When political power needs to change the status quo then the economy is one of the most powerful tools to drive that change.

The establishment of a rational trading and economic market changed the nature of the exchange from a social to a technical practice. Modern contracts make the relationship between the giver and taker as limited in time as possible – although the law can prolong specific responsibilities of the parties, when the giver is compensated fairly by the taker, the relationship is extinguished. The relationship between the given and the taker is also made impersonal, i.e. there is no need to know the other party because responsibilities are defined and captured by the contract. The modern economy has allowed society to trade both objects and people without regard for whom the trade is entertained with and without any regard for the effects and affects that the trade raises. And the same time, this neutralization of the relationship between the giver and taker allows for a fast and high volume of exchange.

Is an economy centered in relationship-building instead of relationship-neutralization (in the sense above introduced) possible? To be more specific: is it possible to entertain economic activities with contracts that capture a different type of relationship, i.e. a relationship that does not extinguish with time and that presuppose a level of trust that almost makes the contract itself superfluous? Does that require the absence of law, i.e. the absence of a way to establish common principles of agreement? Just because law and writing came about together with trading does not necessarily means that trading is not possible without them – in fact, we know that writing, for instance, grew out of its original function as an accounting device, and certainly there has been plenty of trading and economies run beyond the law in the world history. It all depends on the perceived risk, and if a relationship is in place, risk should be reduced to a minimum. When risks are taken, so should responsibilities that do not need to be diluted and shared by the community unless the reward is also shared. A specific contract, relationship-based instead of law-based, should suffice.

Relationship is a game of power and deception is an ingredient of it. In fact, I’m not posing questions having a vision of a paradisiacal world where a trustful relationship cures forms of nihilism. However, I believe that the exploration of the differences and of the effects on society and its environment of an economical practice that is not based on neutralizing the most essential characteristic of humans and life in general could bring to light interesting opportunities for redirecting those practices and our history.

It can certainly appear counter-intuitive that trade and economy in general should have relationship-building (to the point of not needing a written contract) as a prerequisite. It would certainly require a slow down of all activities and hence of the volume of present-day economy, at least in terms of quantity. In fact, if the emphasis of the economy is moved from quantity to quality then the benefits of a relationship-based economy may become evident.

I said above that economic value is a measure of power. And power requires a well established connection with its subjects if it wants to be effective. If this connection is neutralized by the rationalization of exchange, what is the effect on power and hence on economic value? I would suggest that we need to make an addition to the traditional categories of use-value and exchange-value. In fact, I believe that value is attributed to objects and people also by how their functionality is detached from the environment they reside in. Paradigmatic examples are luxury items and management executives, for instance, the functionality of both being very much detached from the environments that support them and at the same time having enormous power over those environments. I would interpret under this light the felt necessity by most management executive of being reimbursed to the level that we all know in case of demise: their superfluity needs to be balanced, needs to acquire ‘meaning’ through monetary value. Like luxury items, their superfluity is valuable.

What if the function of luxury items and management executives were based on an established relationship with the environment they reside or operate in? What would the value of extremely valuable things and people be in a relationship-based economy? How would in a relationship-based economy value be acquired? Contrary to modern economy, it would be acquired by the permanence and the strength of the bond (between the giver and the taker) over time. Growth would be based on the long-term permanence of the effect of an exchange. Since that would presuppose quality, growth would absolutely be centered on quality instead than volume and speed. Value would be given to executives which function is to represent and lead an organization and produce long lasting and respectful objects, instead of being front-stage actors of shareholders.

Specialization of labor is perhaps another aspect of the rationalization of exchange. Nobody would trust a specialist whose discipline is beyond one’s ability (and / or education) to comprehend. A way to establish responsibilities is hence needed because without knowing the specialist, trust is absent. Specialization of labor is the commoditization of expertise – even when that labor is very expensive. Human personality makes every two engineers dissimilar but that is about behavior, not expertise since the educational system tend to make both equally prepared. And commodities exchange does not form bonds, commodities do not have qualitative difference across the market, hence there is no difference between any givers. Same applies to finance, and what happens based on trust in risk-managing contracts instead of relationship is under the view of the world right now.

In the last decade there has been the coming to the fore of the gift economy. That is mainly due to the success of initiatives like Wikipedia, the open-source movement in software engineering, feminist studies, and in general because there is a search for an alternative to the mass-driven and consumerist capitalism. However, the gift economy still sounds either an anthropologic subject of debate or an utopian or childish subject. However, we need to remember that the basic unit of society, the family, is based on the principles of the gift economy. Authority and prestige, long-term emotional bonds (debt / borrower) based on giving without a quid pro quo or contractual agreement, fundamental trust, no immediate apparent utility of the given, sharing, and no interest-based exchange. Fundamental in all this is the blurring between the giver and the taker, being both part of an extended and comprehending community. Giving is giving to a part of oneself.

Interest and profit are the other fundamental concepts of modern economy that rarely are under discussion. Why, it is said, should anybody entertain a business if the gain is not higher than the cost? The simple answer would be: because the goal is not to gain – but perhaps to exchange and establish a permanent relationship by doing that? Fundamentally: why should anything be exchanged with a gain? Is perhaps gain and the focus on it needed to allow a better control of people’s passions as Hirschman has sustained? Is that a powerful way to build a basis of consensus? Is that a way to push aside the search for correctness if not truth?

Interest and profit, like contracts and the rationalization of exchange are the institutions that allowed the industrial revolution to bring its fruits to society. However, it seems pretty clear now that those institutions can bring havoc too, and hence further developments are needed. Can we go beyond rationalization in economy – as in politics? Can we introduce a counterpoint of reasons and passions, of truth and power, and redefine who the giver is and who the taker is, and replace interest as the main driver of the economy? As it is clear, the redefinition of giver and taker – hence of personhood in an economical sense – requires a discussion about property, intellectual and physical. When you think that intellectual achievements are due more to any specific ability of one’s own body and brain, or any specific character of one’s person instead of the interaction that bodies and brains had before and during the course of one’s life, when one needs to secure under contract one’s achievements in order to be reimbursed for the hard work instead of considering that hard work itself as something to be thankful for, we are then in a the culture of reaction, a culture of rigidifying life, a culture of fear and anxiety, and hence a culture where control and conservation of the status quo prevails.

Intersections and Interactions

Morton Feldman - Rothko Chapel

The Authority

A set of evocative statements. The taking over or the founding of institutions that enough people would respect and support (judiciary, legislative, executive, etc.), enough for the indifferents to go along. And then a mechanism of reinforcement of that specific set-up, i.e. a constantly reframing narrative coupled with means of enforcement of that narrative and those institutions. In many cases, a dramatic break added to give force to the narrative, and establish the new.

Legitimate authority and de facto authority, and the mix is political power. In contemporary society the mean to establish the narrative, i.e. to build and reinforce consensus on it, is media. For the institutions, we have surveillance and isolation (physical and / or mental). Overall, authority maintains the stability of the new set of values, the metric that has been introduced in order to provide readability to the running events.

The narrative is about the origin, or the foundation – or foundations. The narrative is the creative act that is forgetting the fiction that is within that origin. Both mythology and religion provides that. The narrative links the current with the atemporal. The metric, and hence the hierarchy (who is following whom and why) definition, is then justified to be acted upon. Every societal structure is self-justified, but only in modern democracy that circularity comes well in evidence, and hence becomes disturbing. Why? Modern democracy is based on reason but reason, by definition, does not have the ability to point to an origin, and hence a break with the causal chain needs to be established as an exception – the exception(al), the founding fathers, the character of the nation, the us vs. them, etc.

How do the people accept that disturbing circularity, that evident self-justification? How do people accept a narrative and the consequent hierarchy, the institutions that maintain that, and its use of means of enforcement? How is legitimacy given to the authority in modern democracy?

The rational answer that is given is that modern democracy gets its legitimacy through elections. People evaluate pros and cons of the candidates and make a choice. But this is an internal mechanism that does not impact the circularity of how modern democracy is founded. That is one of the reasons why elections are becoming more and more media events. And perhaps the amount of support an election require – and we can have a quantitative measure of that with the cost of the elections – is related to the perceived lack of legitimacy that a political system has.

Limiting the identity of a people has been a powerful mean to give force to the narrative. Modern democracy is based on a spatial and cultural delimitation of the nation – people need to have a geographic and cultural place they feel they belong to. A specific land is defined by a common history, tradition and values. We define what is us and what is them. A larger narrative is created and a character attributed to the people born in that land. The story must be fascinating. It must establish respect. Awe and respect – and those are essential components underlying all religions, and reinforced by rituals and celebrative gatherings.

We go back to the original narrative, or to a narrative that support that origin and hence to the legitimacy of the political system. The combination of charismatic and traditional (including religious) factors that need to be added to the narrative enter into the scene through the campaigns the lead to the elections. It must confirm the hierarchy, hence the elite, and the institutions. It must be of popular appeal.

It is a mix of physical, psychological, and cultural coercion (de facto authority vs. morally legitimate authority) that allows the maintenance of the established hierarchy. There is no substantial difference with more traditional societies. However, our modern narrative and technologies allow the coercion to be unforced through consensus manufacturing – through education, health system, criminal justice, commerce and economical system, etc. It is self-justification where the people actively participate in the self-reinforcing circle.

Is the extraordinary narrative support that modern democracy needs a sign of the weakness of it? Or just a sign of the nature of structured power in a secular society? Although there has been quite a lot of hype about the renaissance of religious beliefs during the last decades, I believe that religion in contemporary society is one of the many complementary narratives we have access to in order to fill the space left open by the unrewarding application of reason. Instead of searching for how to overcome the ontological and epistemological limitations of reason, it is certainly easier to fall back to the old known.

It is a quite accepted fact that reason alone can not bring to normative consensus – i.e. to a pure secularization of society and to a pure moral and political realism. The issue is both with reason and its limitation and with the fact that people are not naturally or culturally drawn to either reason or any disciplined approach to probing reality unless a clear reward is on sight. Why should people go through the discipline, the pain and the anxieties that alone can guide through the unknown and the likely unsuccessful journey to new views of reality, especially coming from a society where contentment and comfort is the ultimate goal?

We hence have the democratic set-up of powers and the limitation of reason on legitimatizing that set-up. This basically describes the impasse we are currently living through. And I want to propose that the issue is not reason vs. unreason but it is instead the way reason is presented and used. Reason allowed humans to expand their horizons and to see the common through the differences. But reality can not be homogenized by reason. Myth / tradition / religious factors will always be present, and push towards a limited temporal and spatial tribalism / community based consensus – the limit of this tendency being (perhaps Stirnerian) individualism. We now need to work beyond the Bronze and the Iron Age approaches to politics, and towards a world that is capable to handle a counterpoint of perspectives and of shifting harmonies – including dissonances.

We don’t need to shift away from rational justification and return to more traditional consensus-building means like myth and religion – patterns that are sometimes showed within the climate change narrative. We certainly need to deal with the fact that humans have reached a population level and a technological power that can alter the course of the planet at a faster pace than ever before. Whether we want it or not, this will give direction to the future. Dramatic events, even wars, may certainly delay the process of integration of the planet, as those in the last century did, but will not stop it. Modern democracy needs a major revision. And this revision needs a new approach to the structuring of a legitimate power. Is it time for a dynamic meta-constitution?