critical theory in the nudging era

I added a mildly bad-tempered comment to this post on the RSA blog yesterday, which had posed the question of whether 'socially excluded' individuals can have their bad habits broken by policy-makers, as a way of helping them improve their lives. No doubt the author is well-intentioned, and shows better sociological insight than some by at least recognising that there are 'structural' and macro-economic factors that lie beyond the limits of the nudge-ocracy. But my ill-temper was generated by this binary split between the 'structural' and the 'behavioural', which left no account of individual agency or meaningful action (NB all animals behave; only humans act).

This has got me musing on something: in the age of behaviour change and capitalist realism ('there is no alternative'), might it fall to critical theorists to take up the formerly liberal task, of re-asserting the agency and intentionality of human beings? (That's liberal-as-in-JSMill, not liberal-as-in-LBJohnson). Given that critical theory could almost be defined as a 150-year programme of disabusing liberals of their concept of individual freedom, this would certainly be contrarian.

Existentialists and phenomenologists have experienced freedom as something which is almost too much to bear. It carries weighty responsibilities, with an ethic of potential arbitrariness, the threat of nihilism hovering in the background, and heteronomy as a failure to be truly alive. The 'socially excluded' existentialist would be in little doubt of where the nudgers could stick their 'choice architectures', indeed 'social exclusion' might register as something of an achievement for those of a more Nietzschean bent.  Camus' Outsider would certainly represent a challenge to David Cameron's behaviour change unit.

But it is precisely the macho, asocial nature of existentialist ethics that makes it so unattractive. Existentialists valorise a Robinson Crusoe ideal that isn't so far from what neo-classical economics assumes as a methodological principle. Nudging arises from the recognition that consumers are not existentialists, and do not take full responsibility for their lives and finitude - and good for them, I say. By the same token, it now appears obvious that the temples of neo-classical rationality - the banks - have been packed full of Nietzschean hedonists, who have taken responsibility for their own lives only. Bob Diamond's refusal to express gratitude or guilt is not unlike the Outsider's refusal to feel grief for his mother's death.

Critical theory, on the other hand, has been suspicious of claims made for freedom and agency. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno gives the weakest hint that some people may experience occasional glimpses of real freedom:

If a stroke of undeserved luck has kept the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms - a stroke of luck they have often enough to pay for in their relations with their environment - it is up to these individuals to make the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most of those for whom they say it cannot see or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see. Direct communicability to everyone is not a criterion of truth.

This is, in many ways, a more snobbish version of the Marxist idea of 'false consciousness'. I can't help reading the Adorno quote above and seeing it as a euphemism for "if, like me, you've been reading Kant and playing Beethoven since you were five". 'False consciousness', meanwhile, may not have quite the patronising implications that liberals accuse it of, or that vulgar Marxists lend it. Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice includes a defence of the idea, on the basis that a false consciousness may be 'objectively' correct, in terms of the knowledge and theories that are available to an individual in a given time and place.

Adorno would be very pessimistic regarding the possibility of expanding the privileged few to include the many. Unfortunately the chavs are never going to quite 'get' Kant and Beethoven (on an unrelated note, maybe Jeff Jarvis is a bastardised Frankfurt Scholar - "nobody except me and Google GETS IT!"). However, the optimistic reading of Marx, as offered by Sen, would suggest that economic education could improve people's objective understanding of their circumstances. The nudge-ocracy recognise this to an extent, but seem intent on educating people about their own behaviour, minds and even brains. Richard Layard recommends cognitive behavioural therapy, which is a quick way of telling people that their lives are actually better than they appear (which then wears off within a year).

And what of Foucault? His entire oeuvre can be read as a Nietzschean dismantling of the liberal idea of agency and reason. Nikolas Rose's Powers of Freedom develops this into an explicit critique of the liberal notion of freedom, showing the ways in which it produces, constructs and governs. The nudgers are already, bizarre as it may sound, crypto-Foucauldians, to the extent that they now recognise the ways in which individuals need external assistance to be rational, atomised subjects. What was previously tacit about the production of liberal subjectivity (buried inside schools, prisons, hospitals, welfare departments) has now become an explicit government programme of altering and improving our decisions and desires.

Which I guess is why the nudgeocracy makes me want to drop my Foucauldian suspicion of individual agency, and reassert freedom. Yes people do know what they're doing. Yes, they do want to carry on doing it. Yes, they could have chosen alternative paths in life. The problem with these claims is that they resonate with a conservative 'on-yer-bike' ethos which then blames individuals for their situation. This can best be avoided by keeping two things in mind. Firstly, the all-important Marx quote, "men make their own history, but they do not do so under circumstances of their own choosing". Freedom is real, but it is not unlimited, as the existentialists and the neo-liberals believe. It is historically located and conditioned.

Secondly, and this would be my main rebuke to the nudgeocracy, individuals do already make sense of their lives and do already know what they're doing, but they do not do so with interpretive apparatuses of their own choosing. As Weber, and more recently Boltanski and Thevenot, would argue, there are a limited number of moral and cultural resources available to people, which they use in order to create order, meaning and stability in lives that might otherwise feel chaotic and meaningless.

People are not entirely constituted or governed by norms and cultural codes (as Peter Wagner argues, such a world, as described by Foucault, would not be liveable), but nor can they simply abandon them at the drop of a hat. They have certain 'critical capacities', without which they are lost. In this respect, the socially excluded are not ethically, behaviourally or neurologically inferior to anybody else, but often stuck with the paradox that the very things that make their lives meaningful are sometimes the same things that prevent them from improving their lives. But isn't that the same for all of us? Don't people often remain in marriages, for example, despite knowing (or believing) that they are hampered by them in some way?

The final irony of the nudgers is that they may be about to repeat the very mistakes that neo-liberal ideologues made in the 1980s, by failing to see 'intangible assets' that are actually of real value. The rise of 'social capital' as a policy concern in the late 1990s was a belated recognition that neo-classical economics ignored certain informal, non-market resources which actually perform an important function in people's lives. When policies destroy these invisible assets, it often falls to the state to pick up the pieces again later. Might the same occur with cultural capital? Might policy-makers only belatedly recognise how important it is for people to have their own rituals, codes and tastes? Seeking to improve someone's way of life (or call it 'behaviour' if you insist) may have various unintended consequences for cultural capital, just as seeking to improve cities did for social capital.

Comments

[Pradselvan]

until institutions help individuals face the void of freedom (i.e. early education) are not "nudges" our best post-hoc solution?

[Ian C]

Excellent post - thanks.
It's not often I agree with the Institute of Ideas, but Claire Fox's dislike of Nudgery seems to me well-founded, in a rejection of the concept's sneaky paternalism and reluctance to treat people as citizens in a communal conversation as opposed to immature economic agents subject to Foucauldian warped consciousness, who can't be trusted ever to be persuadable in open debate to do what could be defined as the 'right thing', or at least a better one in some sense.
I can admire some of Foucault's critique of capital and governmentality but you are right that he just cannot provide an account of liberating change or of the persistence of hope. Habermas was right - Foucault et al are de facto accepters of the status quo of power, having no analysis of the real degrees of freedom that exist in which resistance, liberation and genuine progress can happen, and seeing no value in the constraints that people may seek out and welcome. There are 'limits for growth' in the emotional and spiritual sense, as monks and mystics have long realised, and many of us choose such limits rather than having them imposed on us.
At my University we're about to embark on a 3-year study of households at important transition points (first child / retirement), focusing on attitudes, values, hopes, dreams, constraints, choices and norms in relation to more environmentally sustainable living. One theme in this project is people's self-understanding of the implications of their choices, and another issue to be examined is how far Nudge is needed or likely to 'work'. Your point about Nudge and cultural capital is very well made and well taken.

[Rob]

"Bob Diamond's refusal to express gratitude or guilt is not unlike the Outsider's refusal to feel grief for his mother's death."

Today having seen Tony Blair back before Chilcot, I wonder which is preferable: Diamond's lack of sentiment, or Blair's constant invocation of it?

It has become fashionable of late to complain about the appeals to personal feelings and emotion of which Blair was the prime example, and to call for a return to a more professional way of conducting public affairs. I haven't read enough of Richard Sennett to quote chapter and verse, but he has written several books which explore this theme. If we follow Sennett et al., should we not praise Bob Diamond for refusing to emote on stage? Or should we condemn him for choosing the most advantageous moment to recover the professional demeanour that has been somewhat lacking in the banking sector for the last decade?

[Dick Pountain]

The Left has never valued traditional institutions like the family and religion, has seen them as devices for maintaining economic inequality. But reason they persist is because their power is emotional than economic - the glue that keeps both individual psyches and whole societies from falling apart. Certainly they thereby preserve existing property relations, but in recent decades advanced capitalism itself has become the great destroyer of traditional institutions, through iuts imperative to spread market values into every niche of life. So both ends of the political spectrum are intent on dissolving the social glue with little idea about what to replace it with. As Tony Judt put it, the wrecking ball is the only tool left in our the social engineering toolkit.

[DarkLochnagar]

Yesterday in a piece published in 'Open Democracy', you used the phrase, "For the first time since the collapse of socialism". Can you tell me when this happy event occurred. The current coalition is more Socialist than Labour! Still cowtowing to the EU, LGBT lessons for schoolkids and further restrictions for motorists. These are not actions of a right of centre Government.

[Bentoombs]

Hi Will. As the author of the RSA post you mention, I have to say I feel a little misrepresented by your piece, but on reflection I can see why you (and others) have interpreted my thoughts in the way you have. I’ve got two important points to clarify.

My post posed some initial thoughts on the condition of social exclusion, and set up the binary split you refer to as a framework for considering practical ways in which that condition might be improved. I fully agree that there is territory between structural causes of exclusion and the day-to-day behaviour of the excluded, in which people order their lives to make the best of the situations they find themselves in. This is in fact the very space that I am proposing offers an opportunity for change.

As you say: “the socially excluded are not ethically, behaviourally or neurologically inferior to anybody else, but often stuck with the paradox that the very things that make their lives meaningful are sometimes the same things that prevent them from improving their lives.” That is pretty much exactly what I mean by habit in this case – a routine that has developed in response to the exclusion caused by the structural challenges people face, but which in time itself serves to perpetuate the very exclusion it was adopted to alleviate. The problem I raised is that, being a habit, this routine itself becomes very difficult to change. The solution to that is something I’m still pondering; but my thoughts on it so far are the second aspect of the post to have been misunderstood.

I don’t think for a minute that government or anyone else should try to change people’s environments and nudge them out of exclusion. That would be futile, not least because the structural challenges people face vary considerably. It would also be insulting to suggest that such a ‘simple’ solution could address so complex a problem, and it would deny people the very autonomy and self-recognition that they need to change their routines.

Rather, my suggestion (to be made in the next post on this topic) is that people could be shown how their habits perpetuate their exclusion, and shown that they can break their own habits by a combination of altering their own environments and making conscious decisions to change their routines. This combination is important – as I noted, both angles of attack are needed for a habit to be broken – as is empowering people to take control of their own situations. As I said in a reply to a comment on my post, the state’s role in this would be educational and inspirational, not interventionist.

I suspect readers of my post have jumped the gun and assumed I am arguing for the state to have an active role in changing people’s environments or behaviour because discussion of this type of intervention has become so familiar of late. But I don’t think it’s appropriate here. As I said in my post: “there is potential for a behavioural approach to be effective – but it’s not as simple as Nudge”. Perhaps I should have explained what it is, rather than what it is not – but that would have resulted in a very long post indeed.

Sorry to go on, but I think it’s important that these thoughts are aired properly. And thanks for taking the time to respond to the post in the first place!

[Will Davies]

Thanks, Ben. To be clear, my post above was inspired by your's, but kind of goes off in its own direction. It should not all be taken as a direct critique of your own argument.

It seems like we agree on quite a bit, then. Though this is quite a surprising statement, given your initial post: "I don’t think for a minute that government or anyone else should try to change people’s environments and nudge them out of exclusion". Really? I guess the question then is where 'nudges' end and 'education' begins. It seems that a lot of nudging (and social marketing) arises from the recognition that providing people with information doesn't work. But maybe education would imply something more sympathetic and patient than moralistic or expert information-provision.

[Bentoombs]

Hi Will. Don't worry - I found your post really interesting, and realise that only parts of it directly relate to mine. I think we do agree on a lot, but perhaps have different ways of expressing it.

I'd say the difference between nudging and education is key. Nudging is done to you (even if you don't realise it) and the idea is that everyone responds to a nudge in a similar way. Whereas education would allow you to make your own changes to your environment, which is important because a) it means you can decide which changes are likely to have the greatest effect in your particular situation and b) it allows you to understand your situation and take the fullest control of it.

So it's not a nudge that I'm calling for at all, but rather the ability to recognise the influence of your environment on your routine so that you can change it, and thus have a chance of altering your routine as well. Having re-read my post, perhaps the use of 'nudge' in the third para from the end gives a slightly different impression; it wasn't meant to.

I think that this kind of education would indeed involve sympathy, patience and deliberation, rather than didactic communication. And that's where the practical questions come it - how would this work in real life, and on a grand scale?

[Dennis Tuchler]

Limied freedom? Twaddle. The critical faculties we have are part of our conditioning in the context of a particular level of intellectual development and physical ability. They function as providing a way for those who have them to find the path set for them.

On the other hand, the determined person is constantly being buffeted by reaction to phenomena -- even those that were not to be noticed according to previous conditioning, if they are sufficiently persistent.

Marx, then was right (this small time), but so was Aristotle. We cannot choose what we are, but the idea of liberty is really an idea about conditions for flourishing. Maybe nudges, properly chosen, help that flourishing.

[Caroline Pearce]

Great post.

I wholeheartedly agree that the rise of 'nudges' and the emphasis on well-being will follow the same pattern as social capital by becoming a token that merely provides an appealing gloss to a hideous and deteriorating situation.

We are inescapably shaped, restrained and transformed by the environment in which we live - as you clearly stated in your post. And because of this it is not possible to defend peoples' rituals and habits against being nudged for these habits are no more ours than they are the government's or anyone else's.

Instead of tackling the source of the problem - social inequalities - individuals are blamed and nudged into action, a quick-fix, that leaves the structural inequalities of society untouched.

http://politicsofthehap.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/the-new-autonomy/