Tariq Ali in his Clash of Fundamentalisms raised the idea that the Middle eastern conflict was one between two fundamentalist views of the world - that of radical fundamentalist Islam - the only survivor after a sustained decades long effort by the west to destroy the secular, leftist forces in the middle east, and the market fundamentalism of neo-liberalism. This idea obviously informed Ali's account, but was not the subject in itself of detailed analysis - it was more a matter of rhetoric, a counter-blast to the nonsense of 'clash of civilisations' that so dominated US media.
The concept of market fundamentalism predates Ali's work, Jospeh Stiglitz in his The Roaring Nineties, being the personal experiences of an ex World Bank executive, shows in detailed eyewitness accounts the slavish adherence to theory over everyday reality, the refusal to countenance any local variation based on history, conditions or social strucutres, the rigid and unquestioning belief in the absolute rightness of their view, of WB and IMF officials. John Mihevc in The World Bank and Economic Fundamentalism in Africa explicitly develops the parallels between the conduct and actions of these people and the missionaries and analyses the operations of the WB as a form of fundamentalist theology.
This concatenation of ideas raises two interesting points that inform the critique and thesis of Saul. Firstly, if the dominant ideology of our time is a form of fundamentalism, and therefore irrational, is it surprising that the other institutions of our era are irrational? And secondly and often overlooked, that rationality and logic are not the same things. Indeed irrational and unreasonable arguemnts can still be presented with the tools of logic, scientific language and mathematical precison and be internally logical, coherent, exacting and consistent, and still be irrational in a larger sense. The apparatus and language and techniques of science are no guarantee of rationality. This is an important point to retain.
Francis Wheen's magnificent and hilarious How mumbo-jumbo conquered the world is a marvellous continuation of this argument. Wheen's targets are a range of irrationalities - market fundamentalism, religous fundamentalism, creationism, new ageism, ufology, the craze for emotional authenticity and public display at for example the death of Diana Windsor, alternative medicine and postmodernism. The book is in many ways a splenetic rejection of all contemporary fads and ideas, and is thus narrow, making Wheen appear as a grumpy old man of the left. Wheen has a very strong old fashioned belief in 'science' and sees this as the touchstone of the Enlightenment legacy. He largely blames the left for this triumph of irrationality, because in his view it has abandoned the Enlightenment tradition, under the combined urging of the critiques of the Frankfurt school and French post 1968 theorists.
Where Wheen is good is in his linking af all his percieved irrationalities into a symptom of some wider unity in the contemporaty world. He actually dates the public triumph of irrationality to 1979, with the election in Britian of the market fundamentalist Thatcher and the return to Iran of the religious fundamentalist Khomeini. After reading Ali's thesis on the 'clash of fundamentalisms', the ensuing conflict looks to have been inscribed at the beginning of the neo-liberal era!
However beyond this very interesting suggestion of the unity of the two opposing irrationalities temporally and spatially (and of course anyone familiar with dialectical reasoning will find this sensible) Wheen does not really have any argument as to what this unity is and how it comes about. Partly this is because he is caught in paradigm of 'objective scientifc rationality', which is itself a product of the world-system in which we live. And this perspective is one that notoriously privilieges empiricism, so for a person like Wheen (or Saul for that matter) simply piling up the empiricial data with some superficial comments, seems adequate. But to discern a deeper dynamic, to progress further in understanding the role of irrationality in the modern world-system, we need to recognise that there is no Archimedean point from which we can ''scientifically' criticise and construct the world, but that all our endeavours are within the totality of the system. Our further progress therefore depends on a critique of our critiques. I will turn to this in my next post, with a discussion of Dan Hind's riposte to Francis Wheen.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Irrationality in the Modern World-System
Over the last few years I have read a number of books dealing with irrationality as a political phenomenon. These include: John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards, Tariq Ali's Clash of Fundamentalisms, Francis Wheen's How mumbo-jumbo conquered the world and most recently Dan Hind's The Threat to Reason. Pondering these books has left me with a bigger ponder: the role of reason and unreason in the modern world-system. The next sequence of posts while explore this issue.
Let me try and unpack an evolving sequence of thought.
Saul provided at the empirical level a compelling case that many of the practitioners of reason (public administrators, research scientists, medical institutions, corporations, military strategists, economists) while operating with precise logic and calculation, pursued ultimatley irrational ends. The path of reason had led them to unreasonable objectives, or to plans and procesess that had outrageous and irrational consequences. Now Saul is not strong on theory, and himself prefers to use the highly problematic concept of 'common sense', but clearly his critique represented a watered down and empirical version of the 'critique of the Enlightenment' within contemporary French theory, which may or may not derive from Adorno and Horkheimer's post WWII writings. But what struck me most forcibly in reading Saul was that some of the concepts of dialectical reason were well illustrated by his book, particularly the idea that notions produce their opposites, so reason pursued rigourously produces unreason. But of course categories of thought and logic are not living things and cannot 'do'anything, so it is not really a notion that produces its contradiction, but real people using that notion over time in real social circumstances that transfrom a notion or concept into its opposite. And I would venture to suggest as a principle, that that transformation had more to do with changing social relations, so that the content of the notion (ie. what we mean when we do whatever) comes into contradiction with the form of the notion (ie. what we say we are doing).
Missing from Saul's book was any real sense or account of history, as was the concept of capitalism, and the two concepts need to be put togtether to make sense of the question: how had reason come to be betrayed by its practitioners? Saul's view is grounded in in the form of common sense utilitarianism, in which rationality or reasonableness is grounded in a sense of the common good, and his critique is thus that public institutions, supposedly there to protect, defend, preserve, safeguard or whatever verb you like, the common good, were in fact acting against it. Reason is now being exercised unreasonably. My immediate thought was that a history of reason and unreason within the capitalist system would go some way to answering this question. Tariq Ali's work account of the current middle eastern miasma helped me to tease out some further links in the chain of argument. In my next post I will discuss my readings of Ali's work.
Let me try and unpack an evolving sequence of thought.
Saul provided at the empirical level a compelling case that many of the practitioners of reason (public administrators, research scientists, medical institutions, corporations, military strategists, economists) while operating with precise logic and calculation, pursued ultimatley irrational ends. The path of reason had led them to unreasonable objectives, or to plans and procesess that had outrageous and irrational consequences. Now Saul is not strong on theory, and himself prefers to use the highly problematic concept of 'common sense', but clearly his critique represented a watered down and empirical version of the 'critique of the Enlightenment' within contemporary French theory, which may or may not derive from Adorno and Horkheimer's post WWII writings. But what struck me most forcibly in reading Saul was that some of the concepts of dialectical reason were well illustrated by his book, particularly the idea that notions produce their opposites, so reason pursued rigourously produces unreason. But of course categories of thought and logic are not living things and cannot 'do'anything, so it is not really a notion that produces its contradiction, but real people using that notion over time in real social circumstances that transfrom a notion or concept into its opposite. And I would venture to suggest as a principle, that that transformation had more to do with changing social relations, so that the content of the notion (ie. what we mean when we do whatever) comes into contradiction with the form of the notion (ie. what we say we are doing).
Missing from Saul's book was any real sense or account of history, as was the concept of capitalism, and the two concepts need to be put togtether to make sense of the question: how had reason come to be betrayed by its practitioners? Saul's view is grounded in in the form of common sense utilitarianism, in which rationality or reasonableness is grounded in a sense of the common good, and his critique is thus that public institutions, supposedly there to protect, defend, preserve, safeguard or whatever verb you like, the common good, were in fact acting against it. Reason is now being exercised unreasonably. My immediate thought was that a history of reason and unreason within the capitalist system would go some way to answering this question. Tariq Ali's work account of the current middle eastern miasma helped me to tease out some further links in the chain of argument. In my next post I will discuss my readings of Ali's work.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
A journey starts with the first step
This is my first effort at blogging. So it's like a journey. Mainly what I intend to write about relates to my academic work - my PhD on world-systems analysis, my teaching in history, other research and related reading, my scholar-activism. Cognosceti while recognise the blog title, a paraphrase of Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. I can still recall reading that for the first time, back in - 1978? - and going "Wow! That's it! This solves all undergraduate philosophical conundrums at a stroke!" Obviously it doesn't in any logical sense, but it spoke the unadorned emotional intuituve truth to me, and that has stayed with me ever since.
Much of what I write is going to derive from what I am reading, so I anticipate this blog supplementing my research, sort of like a notebook / journal, in which I develop ideas and arguements. Hopefully, other people will be interested enough to throw in their ideas too. While I haven't blogged before, I have sort of studied the phenomena. It seems to me that this is the ideal platform to implement the concept of intellectual craftsmanship as enunciated by C Wright Mills in the appendix to his 1962 book The Sociological Imagination. So that is the kind of template I have in mind. We shall see how it develops.
Much of what I write is going to derive from what I am reading, so I anticipate this blog supplementing my research, sort of like a notebook / journal, in which I develop ideas and arguements. Hopefully, other people will be interested enough to throw in their ideas too. While I haven't blogged before, I have sort of studied the phenomena. It seems to me that this is the ideal platform to implement the concept of intellectual craftsmanship as enunciated by C Wright Mills in the appendix to his 1962 book The Sociological Imagination. So that is the kind of template I have in mind. We shall see how it develops.
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