potlatch

Richard Dawkins versus the Enlightenment

James Wood has written one of the most elegant and intelligent critiques of the 'new atheism' of Richard Dawkins et al, initially given as a lecture and then published in Saturday's Guardian. He argues that the 'new atheism':

parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a "personal God", so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The God of the New Atheism and the God of religious fundamentalism turn out to be remarkably similar entities. This God, the God worth fighting against, is the God we grew up with as children (and soon grew out of, or stopped believing in): this God created the world, controls our destinies, sits up somewhere in heaven, loves us, sometimes punishes us, and is ready to intervene to perform miracles. He promises goodies in heaven for the devout, and horrors for the damned. Since militant atheism interprets religious faith, again on the evangelical or Islamist model, as blind – a blind leap of faith that hurls the believer into an infinite idiocy – so no understanding or even interest can be extended to why or how people believe the religious narratives they follow, and how often those narratives are invaded by doubt, reversal, interruption and banality.

There is a venn diagram connecting the 'new atheism' with the 'new biologism', with Dawkins himself sitting proudly in the middle. The combined movement does for The Enlightenment what neo-conservatism does for democracy: defends and extends it so vigorously as to destroy most of its residual value. Paul Wolfowitz values democracy so highly, that he cannot leave it to the demos; Dawkins values Enlightenment so highly, that he no longer trusts the deliberative public sphere, which Kant saw as its animating force, to secure it. For a brilliant tour of the 'new biologism' and its errors, see this NYRB review of David Brooks's strange new book.

The great virtue of the original Enlightenment, over this post-modern, pastiched version, was its discovery of two things, which the 'new atheism' and the 'new biologism' appear to have forgotten. Firstly, that even if history appears to be moving in a certain direction, it doesn't stop moving altogether. This motion and contingency engulfs science as much as politics or culture. Secondly, that there is a distinction between knowledge and truth. If one wanted to combine these two insights in one, it would be that human civilisation is evolutionary. Dawkins is apparently entirely blind to the non-biological forms of evolution, which would surely have to include the 'meta-evolution' of evolutionary theory itself (I am not aware whether Darwin himself was interested in the broader implications of evolutionary theory, though Marx, Nietzsche and the American pragmatists certainly saw such implications in Darwin's work).

My question to Dawkins, Brooks and much of the neuro-brigade would be the following one. If human beings have existed for several hundred thousand years, and evolved from other species over millions of years, and if they could feasibly remain in existence for another hundred thousand years (potentially to evolve to a higher species over millions of years!), why should 2011 be the point at which we hold the truth of this process, and the truth of who we are? Why indeed should it be the 21st century, or the 19th century or the last 400 years of modernity? Why, if you believe that 'truth' about humans is possible, would it not appear in 3011? Or perhaps in the year 45627?

Do you think that the craniologists of the late 19th century went around saying "this is only an approximation of the truth; to get to the real truth, we'd have to know which parts of the brain 'lit up' when a child was hugged, which probably won't be possible for at least another 100 years"? Do you honestly think that scientists in 2100 will be citing neuroscientific or primate research from 2011, regarding the 'truth' of who we are? Does David Brooks honestly think that scientists in 2011 cite believe that we have discovered the 'truth' of who we are?!

A silly version of postmodernism would suggest that contemporary scientific claims are identically as valid as those made in the dark ages, whereas really they are valid in different ways. Whereas a smart critique of rationalism (and of the Dawkinsesque pastiche of Enlightenment) is one which recognises the evolutionary nature of science, capitalism, culture, such that we cannot throw off our current mindset, culture or language, but nor are we imprisoned in it. We recognise the present as constitutive of who we are, but also as a single moment in an unfolding drama with no apparent conclusion.

This was the approach to modernity that enabled Nietzsche to take biology seriously, as contributing to the death of god, but also as undermining the capacity for certainty (for if we are part of nature after all, then we lose any privileged perspective upon that nature). It is also exhibited in Foucault's engagement with Kant, in his own 'What is Enlightenment?'. From these post-Enlightenment perspectives, the central characteristic of Enlightenment that needs reviving is the great new uncertainty that it unleashed. Dawkins, by this account, is an anti-Enlightenment thinker, as James Wood's article implies.

This same challenge needs posing to economic policy-makers and intellectuals today. Paul Mason recently chaired a BBC radio debate between Keynesians and Hayekians, to discover which thinker had the most convincing analysis of the current crisis, or the best policy advice. But one wonders whether either thinker would have been happy being turned into a rationalist totem in this way (which isn't to devalue the great work that Mason is doing in furthering public understanding of this crisis). Marx famously said that he was not a 'Marxist'. Would Keynes today be a 'Keynesian'? Would Hayek be a 'Hayekian'? Surely thinkers with such an acute awareness of uncertainty as the central problem of human existence (and not only of capitalist institutions) would have been loathe to have their ideas packaged up and offered as potions for the sick patient, 80 years after they were formulated.

Regulationists, pragmatists and post-Keynesians would argue that we are currently operating without any rational basis on which to resolve the current crisis, because the old ones contributed to it. Only when a new paradigm has emerged will the crisis begin to subside - but we have to appreciate the fact that the new paradigm may look nothing like the old one, in fact it may not even be recognisable as a stable paradigm at all, as I wondered as the banks were collapsing. Surely that is the most important insight of the evolutionary perspective.

Nietzsche had a particular notion of the 'hero', as the figure who provides an example, but not an instruction. For him, modest fellow that he was, this included Socrates and Jesus Christ. The 'new atheism' and the 'new biologism' offer instructions, but few heroes (which makes Christopher Hitchens' alliance with Dawkins all the more unfortunate). Equally, its protagonists look to the 18th and 19th century in search of instructions, just as the Left currently turns to Keynes's General Theory in search of instructions. From a Nietzschean perspective, Kant, Darwin, Marx and Keynes can be heroes, inasmuch as they recognised the incomplete nature of human progress and the uncertain nature of human knowledge, yet charged on regardless. By comparison, their particular instructions are somewhat less helpful several hundred years later, except as articles of faith and comfort blankets.

re-enchanting the social world

I remember being invited to a think tank seminar a few years ago on the topic of how to help "children at risk of becoming criminals". There is a lot immediately wrong with this idea, and the Minority Report-style hint of pre-crime that it carries. As Michael Power argues in Organized Uncertainty, there was an explosion of risk analysis and management in the mid-1990s, that seems to have been especially seductive and widespread in Britain. Every eventuality is to be conceived in advance, then statistically analysed for its probability, and factored into a model. But when this is applied to the moral intentions of mentally healthy human beings, then some sort of line has been crossed. Economic modelling becomes a more important tool of government than law. So the question has to be asked - who lost respect for the sovereignty of law first, was it the hoodies, or was it the wonks?

Power's identification of the mid-1990s as the critical period is interesting. It coincides with the panic that followed the 1993 killing of James Bulger, which led quite directly to Britain investing billions of pounds in CCTV, making us the most watched people in the world. The tabloids insisted that Bulger's ten-year-old murderers were 'evil', as 'criminality' didn't seem an adequate category, nor prison an adequate penalty. Against such biblical ravings, political elites offered a radically secular alternative, namely to treat the event as something that could have been foreseen and managed, through better audit, surveillance and risk assessment. When children behave in a seemingly nihilistic fashion, the stark policy choice becomes between theocracy and technocracy. Liberals have to opt for the latter.

Philosophically, however, this involves a complete fissure between 'political metaphysics' (ideas of justice, the good, debt to society) and 'political physics' (measures of risk, behaviour, deviance, discipline). In a sense, the function of law is to marry the two together, by seeming both transcendent and tangible at the same time. Law has both a sacred element (it is the law, not just a rule) and a technical element, lending itself to expert analysis and implementation. But when children behave violently and anarchically, somehow this seems to break in two. Because we don't really know how to hold children accountable for their actions, we either want to see the devil at work, or some manifestation of risk. There is no fully formed moral self available to regulate, and so the social world splits in two.

Many of the most exciting developments in economic sociology at the moment are those which follow Boltanski and Thevenot's ground-breaking 1991 book On Justification (a new special issue and edited collection both expand on this) and they relate directly to this question of how to re-unite scientific and moral approaches to society. The objective of this field, following Durkheim (and to a lesser extent, Weber), is to uncover the moral and sacred concepts that have been buried within our secularised, rationalised society. Every split that social scientists (especially economists) are taught, between 'efficiency' and 'equity', 'value' and 'values', objectivity and ethics, is treated with suspicion. Fully secular, rationalised and 'objective' views of society seek to eliminate more romantic or metaphysical ideas of institutions and rules, but never fully succeed. 'Political metaphysics' leaves its trace.

Hence Boltanski and Thevenot follow Hirschman's analysis of market liberalism, as dependent on a particular moral view of market actors, reuniting Smith's Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments in the process. Alain Desrosieres asks why certain forms of behaviour (such as suicide or unemployment) became objects of statistical analysis, and not others. Durkheim analyses secular legal contract as derivative of religious oaths. David Stark and Jens Beckert focus on what things are worth and how they are judged, as constitutive elements in how they become priced. From these perspectives, we are all constantly exercising intrinsic forms of judgement and moral evaluation, in the way we apply apparently secular, amoral techniques. Even concepts of risk and efficiency have moral assumptions buried within them somewhere. We just forget this and deny this, and insist that society can run like a giant econometric model.

The effort to empty social and economic institutions of their moral and metaphysical dimensions is often seen as a hallmark of modernity. The alternative is viewed as mysticism, romanticism or postmodernism. But once this emptying out succeeds, then we realise we're in very serious trouble indeed. When market prices become merely technical figures on a screen, and no longer representative of something that is valued, then markets blow up. When a market exchange becomes a game to be won, rather than something founded on mutual respect (as Adam Smith insisted) then it becomes a tool of exploitation. And when law becomes just another technique with which to 'intervene' in behaviour, to tweak incentives, and reduce risk, then it is no surprise if it becomes broken without any sense of shame. The law then possesses no more metaphysical or ethical authority than a speed-camera, though is far less effective than a speed camera at actually constraining choices, seeing as law exists partly as an idea. I discuss this economistic view of law in this journal article.

There is a common intellectual and political challenge today, of trying to re-combine the technical and the ethical, as a unity (see The Romantic Economist for a fascinating example of this). The problem with communitarianism, like 'corporate social responsibility', was that it only achieved political influence once the hard political business of technocracy had been taken care of. Once markets were efficient, risks had been managed, security been achieved, then religious faith and warm beer were ushered in, as ways of softening the harsher corners of managerial capitalism. What about morality in the market, in corporate governance, in the exercise of surveillance and policing?

Institutions, as pragmatists recognise, are basically bundles of rituals. Their value lies not only in their efficiency (often, not even in their efficiency), but in the fact that they endure over time, make life meaningful, by making it faintly predictable. Even the "hooded masses yearning to be free", as they shall henceforth be known, inhabit institutions, with rituals and authorities, just fiercely localised, private ones, with very little overlap with 'public' institutions. A youth worker or anthropologist would discover that they have their taboos and sacred objects, but operating in highly encrypted codes, designed to exclude. 'Society' can scarcely allow such rituals to remain a law unto themselves, but nor can it be run as if rituals are entirely irrational and unncessary. Law itself is a ritual.

The problem is, that if their 'behaviour' becomes just another risk to be managed, and law just another scientific technique with which to do so, can we really be all that surprised if they start to view theft as an economic preference, with a small and calculable risk of punishment attached to it. Our government now calculates the risk of a given child becoming involved in crime, but if the child also calculates the risk to themselves, and where the crime is repeated, low level and insurable, then they may conclude that it is not prohibitively high.

London riots: the limits of Left and Right

One of the strangest platitudes that all political leaders seem compelled to utter this week is that there is "no excuse for looting" and that smashing up shops, setting fire to cars and hurling scaffold poles at policemen is "completely without justification". I'm glad to have this confirmed, or else I'd wonder if there were an entire avenue of legitimate self-expression that I'd been ignoring all these years. No, quite right. Nihilism is nihilistic. Don't touch it, kids.

The platitude seems to arise thanks to the following repeated media set-piece:

Interviewer: "Leftwing Pundit, do you have any idea why this is happening?"

Leftwing Pundit: "well I guess it may have something to do with the lack of hope, aspiration and firm parenting in Britain's cities"

Interviewer: "Rightwing Pundit, do you agree?"

Rightwing Pundit: "Absolutely not! There can be no excuse for looting. Destroying property and burning houses is completely without justification!"

In this set-piece, Rightwing Pundit certainly looks slightly more stupid, because he or she has firstly mistaken an explanation for a justification, and secondly failed to spot that Leftwing Pundit was simply answering the question that was put to him. But plus ca change.

However, I'm also troubled by how weak the sociological, socialist and structuralist analyses of these events have been over the last few days. Attempts by Ken Livingstone and Polly Toynbee to peg these events to the Coalition's economic policies look very flimsy, seeing as the cuts are only just beginning. Even if 15% of the public sector had been axed in May of last year, I think it would be crudely economistic to assume that people might therefore divert their energies from community drama projects to smashing up JD Sports within the space of 15 months. And while global capitalism may be in meltdown, this is not (yet) represented in the unemployment figures, which are not as bleak as many have expected.

The dilemma for the Left, and for sociologists, is the following: whether or not to trust people's own understanding of what they're doing. And if a young looter says nothing about politics or inequality, and displays no class consciousness, to what extent can a culturally sensitive democratic socialist disagree with them? For sure, the Old Left would have no problem re-framing the behaviour of an egomaniac teenager burning down his neighbour's shop in terms of class. That's what crude Marxist 'critical realism' meant. But the New Left, along with the 'cultural turn' in sociology, was meant to be slightly more capable of listening.

Anecdotes do more work than structural analysis, at least for the time being. This piece by Paul Lewis and James Harkin is interesting. Then watch this video from 14'30" onwards and listen to this interview with two female rioters, for more evidence on the rise of the 'criminal consumer'.

Many Londoners are less than flabbergasted by these riots. For one friend of mine, it reminded him of an incident in 1992 when 40 young teenagers emerged with weapons from an estate on Essex Road to hold him hostage in a shop, because he had accidentally knocked into one of them on the way in. When the police arrived, they drove him away, but that was it. I suffered something similar in a kebab shop on Mile End Road in 2000, leaving me hiding behind a deep fat fryer for three hours waiting for police who never arrived at all (in both cases, shopkeepers stood in the way of grave violence, while also fearing the repercussions for their businesses of doing so). The more astute middle classes of Hackney have recognised that their own gentrifying activities have been creating quite surreal forms of cultural apartheid for a while, as Iain Sinclair argued on Radio 4 yesterday, and this piece well describes. 

The symptoms are familiar: fierce inarticulate aggression bordering on sadism, destruction as a form of creativity, sufficient boredom that an entire evening can be dedicated to hounding a single innocent individual, terrifying group norms whereby a 16-year-old is leading a pack of 14-year-olds. American friends of mine laugh when I've told them of experiences on London's streets in the past - "those kids'd totally get their asses kicked over here!" - but they may not appreciate the vacuum of public etiquette that a child can sense, and then flood with their own hatred for everything around them. Dating back to the first time I was mugged as a 16-year-old, by children my own age in a daylit Dalston street, I have never feared any adult as much as I've feared children on London's streets. New Labour deserves some credit for at least sensing this phenomenon, via its MPs' constituencies circa the 2001 election, leading to the ill-fated 'Respect' agenda and ASBOs. Due to the geography of Britain's electoral map, I doubt many Conservatives could have had a clue such behaviour was even possible.

Do these anecdotes and qualitative impressions mean that it isn't about class, that it isn't about capitalism? Not quite. But Marxists need to remember the Hegelian distinction between 'in itself' and 'for itself'. In themselves, these riots may indeed be about inequality: the concentration of wealth and power may simply have become too unwieldy, regardless of what the rioters think is going on. But for themselves, they are about power, hedonism, consumption and sovereignty of the ego. Anyone who disagrees with that is simply not crediting the participants with being able to make sense of what they're doing. And if there's one thing likely to incite even more rioting, it's treating the participants as lacking independence of thought. In many ways, blame is what they each individually deserve, because recognition of their own individual agency is what they most desire.

Sociologists and socialists are wary of blaming individuals, for events that they are not entirely in control of, and structures that they didn't design. But surely a nuanced understanding of contemporary individualism recognises that it is no less real for having been politically constructed. Political and economic ideas and concepts can become more truthful over time, if there is enough power behind them. The neoliberal vision of the individual ego, choosing, desiring and consuming, independent of social norms or institutions, has grown more plausible over the past thirty years. Once it becomes adopted by people to understand and criticise their own lives and actions, then it attains a type of 'performative' and interpretive reality that class may have done in the past, but no longer does.

As David Harvey argues in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, combine neo-classical economics with the 1960s rhetoric of emancipation, and you have a heady ideological cocktail, that draws people into conceiving of themselves as autonomous sovereign selves. Ask today's rioter what he is doing, and he will reply using the language of self, pleasure, economic freedom and individual recognition. This borders on the concerns of the Left, when it enters into identity politics, but for the most part it is entirely neoliberal. He didn't write this script, but he did choose to read from it.

As any student of the philosophy of social science knows, there is some interplay between the concepts used to explain another's action, and how that actor understands what they are doing. Often explanatory frameworks become adopted by the actors being analysed. This has a political dimension too. The Brixton and Toxteth riots of the 1980s were quite manifestly political. They had political spokespersons, grievances and shared demands, lending themselves to sociological analysis. In themselves and for themselves, they were about police brutality, racism and the devastation of urban economies. And for all these reasons, it became all the more important for Conservative politicians to describe them using the language of individual morality, self-control, blame and criminality. The more collectivist the phenomenon (both in itself and for itself), the more urgently the Right will mobilise its individualist explanatory frameworks.

Strangely, other than the repeated mantra that there is "no excuse" for looting, I've been surprised by how guarded the political classes have been on this occasion. I assumed that moralistic rhetoric would be raining down by now, focused on absent fathers, bringing back the birch, national service and banning computer games. But no. Could it be that the absence of politics, of sociological rationale, and of socialist ambition in these events means that they are, from a Rightwing perspective, comparatively safe? While they are, at least 'for themselves', acts of egoistic, hedonistic, moral transgressions, there is no need for Tory MPs to take to the airwaves and describe them as such. By acting as if there is 'no such thing as society', the rioters are already doing this for them.

the rise of the 'criminal-consumer'

Like the rest of the media, potlatch is on summer hiatus right now, occasionally stirring to wonder whether public life is really such a trivial thing that it makes sense for all of its key protagonists and main analysts to holiday simultaneously. Say what you like about the bond markets, but you can at least rely on them to still be steam-rollering national sovereignty, even in mid-August.

The police are also all in Tuscany at the moment, which is why there are so many televisions going cheap in Tottenham this week. Some of the media's remaining members have picked up a social media angle to all of this: were the riots all a brilliantly coordinated ruse, based on innovations such as #meetoutsidedixonsat3am ? How long before the whole problem becomes framed in the rationalist, maximising terms of game-theory, and we discover that the modern state doesn't actually work? I've wondered about this before, on hearing that Hackney has 900 policemen to cope with 350,000 residents.

New Labour gave us the 'citizen-consumer' as a new model of the individual public service user. This is a participating member of 'the community', who nevertheless holds preferences which they act upon rationally and self-interestedly. They operate on the border between public and private interest. Could we witness the rise of the 'criminal-consumer', who employs lawlessness as a strategy for their own consumer goals? This was ultimately what Gary Becker proposed over 50 years ago, when he applied neo-classical price theory to understand crime and other non-market activities. Michel Foucault described Becker's version of neo-liberalism as follows:

Law enforcement is the set of instruments of action which, on the market for crime, opposes a negative demand to the supply of crime.

This is very close to what Jeremy Bentham had proposed in the late 18th century. Richard Posner has subsequently developed this approach, based on the notion that law's sole function is to alter incentives. Some activities such as illegal downloading, where obedience to the law is simply not efficient enough, make such a perspective faintly plausible.

Should one adopt this rationalist account of crime and deviance, then throw in social media, things start to appear very scary indeed. The 'criminal-consumer' acquires the capacity for widespread, mass co-operation (as allegedly was facilitated by twitter during the Arab Spring), in a way that is compatible with individual preferences for more consumer goods.

This is a kind of post-Thatcherite, neo-classical variant of what Marxists have hoped for, namely that bringing the proletariat together in the factory and the city will eventually lead to the emergence of a reflexive class consciousness, in which individuals discover that co-operation is more rational than competition. Revolution would follow. Neo-classical economics famously lacks any theory of production, and so when homo economicus assembles en masse in the city, with the new capacity of social media, the only form of co-operation that can emerge is riotous consumption, otherwise known as looting. If socialism promised to democratise the means of production, social media might be democratising the means of consumption, with both omelettes requiring a few eggs to be broken along the way.

Under these circumstances, the role of the state becomes like that of the anti-trust authority. Crime, in the age of twitter, comes to appear as a form of cartel, that needs busting. Above all else, the state must prevent co-operation, and maintain homo economicus in the state of mutually suspicious individualism. In a bizarre new form of neo-classical performativity, the prisoners dilemma travels from the realm of scholarly game theory, to being a strategy for policing the city.

Naturally all of the above is a nonsense. Co-operation happens for reasons other than strategy and shared preference, and strategy and share preference are seldom enough to generate co-operation. The law remains tinged with a metaphysical authority, that is not reducible to its effects on incentives. In any case, behavioural 'nudges', brains and 'choice architectures' have knocked the Benthamites and neo-classical dogmatists out of the policy limelight. But perhaps that's just as well. If the lessons of Becker, Bentham et al were learnt too closely, attaining law and order on the streets of the digitally-enabled city might soon come to appear tougher than a Nash equilibrium.