Howard Richards, Peace and Global Studies

Professor, Peace and Global Studies Department, Earlham College

Modernity: Its Cause and Cure

A Series of Articles by Howard Richards
Parts 21 through 30

:: Part 1 :: Part 2:: Part 3:: Part 4:: Part 5 :: Part 6 :: Part 7:: Part 8:: Part 9:: Part 10
:: Part 11 :: Part 12:: Part 13:: Part 14:: Part 15:: Part 16 :: Part 17:: Part 18:: Part 19:: Part 20
:: Part 21 :: Part 22:: Part 23:: Part 24:: Part 25:: Part 26 :: Part 27:: Part 28:: Part 29 :: Part 30
:: Part 31 :: Part 32:: Part 33:: Part 34:: Part 35:: Part 36 ::

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure, Part 21

I find great comfort in what I take to be an empirical finding of research in
the psychology of moral development. The thinking and behavior of most
adults in most societies follows conventional norms. This finding is consistent
with the orientations of anthropologists who focus on the customs of the people
they study. It is not inconsistent with the orientations of those
anthropologists who choose to speak of cultural "performances" or "practices" not
reducible to rule-following, since the customary norms provide the settings and
often the tools for the performances and practices. My viewpoint joins the
sociologists who talk about "norms" and "roles."

My philosophy leads to a logical program for improving society: do it by
improving the norms that govern society.

Such a logical program seems obvious to me as a lawyer. It seems obvious to
me that the framework (the "paradigm") that governs the global economy is
civil law. It is the private law of property and contracts whose precursors were
Justinian's Institutes and Blackstone's Laws of England. It became the
framework for modern commerce in great revisions and updatings such as the Code
Napoleon and the Field Codes enacted in the American states in the late 19th
century. Certain rules of law give force to the systemic imperative of profit
accumulation. Therefore: to realize the better world expressed in the
slogan "another world is possible" what you do is change the paradigm. You move
beyond the minimal morality prescribed by private civil law.

I call my philosophy "ethical" and I think it is close to common sense, and
close to the orientation of most research in psychology, anthropology, and
sociology. People are creatures of social convention. In the course of moral
development they (we) learn in the school of hard knocks to abide by the
conventional norms of society. Development is furthered in ordinary human
development by dialogue about moral issues--indeed it is characteristic of the human
species to discuss endlessly questions of right and wrong, to criticize other
people's conduct, and to reflect on one's own. This naturalistic account of
ethics in society has very little to do with the idealism attributed to Plato
that Derrida, Nietzsche, and Foucault think it so important to refute.

Nor does it have much in common with any of the myriad of other views that
Foucault argues against in his extensive writings. Michel Foucault did not
refute my philosophy because he did not consider it. His focus and priorities
were different He wrote, "...the political, ethical, social, philosophical
problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and
from the state's institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and
from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to
promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of
individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. " And: "...at the
heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is
an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the
principles of freedom...."

Foucault celebrates resistance, refusal, a certain essential obstinacy. His
career (and Marcuse's) seems to me to be an artifact of the first world in
the Age of Keynes, when liberal social democratic governments advised by social
scientists seemed to be on their way to solving the basic physical problems
of life, at the cost of building grey bureaucracies that alienated everybody
and especially youth. Promoting new forms of subjectivity seemed to many to be
humanity's highest priority.

That the context and judge of culture is ecology; that culture is made of
norms; that our task is to improve the norms that govern society both in the
sense of regulating better what Marx called the metabolism of human life, the
exchange of matter and energy with the environment, and in the sense of
nurturing the human spirit and making life more beautiful--these are propositions
that slipped through Foucault's conceptual net without ever being considered
or evaluated. Or so I claim.

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure, Part 22

I am making a case for the thesis that markets cause modernity and
ethics cures its defects.

[Elsewhere I defend a methodology which assigns a pragmatic value to
sweeping generalizations that summarize and interpret innumerable facts, such as
"markets cause, ethics cures." In Letters from Quebec, e.g. in Letter
Eleven, I argue that such "metaphysical" generalizations are sometimes justified.
The sense of "cause" used in the phrase "markets cause" is developed in my
book Understanding the Global Economy.]

But not just any ethics. To solve the intractable problems of a world
governed by markets, ethical reform must be directed specifically to include
the excluded. A minimal morality suited to govern commerce among strangers
is not strong enough to establish social justice. It does not glue together
the culture of solidarity without which capital flight, capital strikes, and
the race to the bottom are incurable impediments to building a society that
works for 100% of the people without ecological damage. The universal secular
liberal ethical philosophies of early modern Europe evolved historically to
legitimate and ameliorate a world where the acquisition of the necessities of
life depended on commodity exchange fueled by profit accumulation. Today
their principles of individual freedom and mutual respect constitute a precious
acquisition of modernity which must be preserved, but which also must be
supplemented.

I am not saying that every word of the pioneers of secular liberalism
–Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant et al -- was causally determined in advance by the
growth of markets. Like all human beings, the early modern philosophers were
creators of culture. I am saying that the great social function of their work
was to make the cultural structures of Europe (and later the world) thinner
and more reliable. That was what was needed to make a market economy work.
By "thinner" I mean that medieval fealty and love (caritas) ceased to be obliga-
tory. There were fewer strict obligations requiring humans to serve and care
for others without pay. By "more reliable" I mean that property and
contract rights and duties were more strictly defined and enforced. The new secular
ethical philosophy paralleled and supported not religion but the secular laws
governing commerce that had been inherited mostly from the Roman Empire.

Prior to the work of the early modern philosophers, for example in
the peasant revolts in 16th century Germany, everybody talked God-talk.
Rebels like Thomas Muenzer and anti-rebels like Martin Luther talked theology to
justify their causes. They had to. There was no purely secular public
language they could use to claim legitimacy for their actions.

16th century Europe was not alone in this respect. Comparative
jurisprudence shows that for Islamic Law, for Hindu Law, for Judaic Law, for the
traditional conflict resolution practices of Africa, for the Buddhist nations,
for the Confucian and Taoist legal orders, and in general for most people
throughout most of history, the public discourses used to legitimate human action
have been alloys compounded with piety. [Roman Law was unusual in that it was
secular even in antiquity.]

Early modern philosophy deliberately challenged religion’s near
monopoly of the power to legitimate action. As Richard Rorty showed in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a general objective of the early modern
philosophers was to create a secular worldview that would make it possible to discuss
nature and society without God-talk. This common general objective explains
why early in the 19th century Percy Bysshe Shelley could praise all the leading
modern philosophers indiscriminately in spite of their many disagreements
with each other. For the poet the philosophers were all on the same team. It
was the team that built the intellectual foundations for secular science and
secular human rights. The philosophers’ ideas were liberating Europe from
superstition and tyranny.

Their early advocates did not anticipate the intractable problems
of poverty, violence, environmental degradation, and emotional alienation
that modern institutions later proved themselves unable to solve. Today the
search for cures for modernity’s chronic ills is urgent.

One plausible route toward a cure, followed by many, is to move
"backwards in time" by recovering valuable ancient concepts that the moderns rejected,
such as:

1. "Soul." (Greek psuche, Latin anima). This word with many meanings
names, among other things, the animating principle that makes choices, initiates
actions, and is responsible for choices and acts.

2. "Final cause." A belief in final causes affirms that things have a
purpose, and that life has a purpose.

3. "God is watching us." This traditional concept implies that human
actions, seen and unseen, visible and invisible, have meaning in the mind of a
transcendent judge.

Looking backward in time to establish continuity with ancient wisdom
is one way to thicken ethics. It is one way to lay foundations for including
the excluded in the benefits promised but not delivered by modern applied
science and modern human rights.

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure Part 23

Both Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault think they have a decisive
argument against Karl Marx based on the sequence of historical events. The
political technologies of modernity came before capitalism (e.g. Foucault's
Discipline and Punish, p. 221; Giddens' Contemporary Critique of Historical
Materialism, passim). If the root cause of modernity were economic, then capitalism
would have come first. What Foucault calls "normalization" and the
construction of the modern subject by "bio-power" would have come second. Instead,
Foucault suggests, capitalism was made possible by the deployment of
disciplinary power in factories in ways previously developed in the military, in
prisons, and in hospitals. Therefore, Marx was wrong.

This argument may work against Marx, but it does not work against
Immanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel, Karl Polanyi, Louis Dumont or me. To
speak only for myself, but without claiming to say anything not already said by
these four, I am not claiming that the cause of modernity was capitalism as
Marx defined it. I say it was the expansion of commerce, of markets. If
circulation, i.e. commodity exchange in markets (and the normative structures that
govern and facilitate it) is taken to be more key to understanding the origins
of modernity than relations of production, then the sequence of events
confirms the hypothesis.

The expansion of markets, and the growth of cultural forms suitable
for a world where people's basic needs were met by the exchange of commodities,
came first. The disciplinary technologies of prisons, barracks, schools,
hospitals, government bureaucracies, and factories came second.

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure, Part 24

Another group of writers, who also analyze intractable problems
plaguing modernity’s market-driven way of life, draws no inspiration from the
past. Nor do they find useful ideas in non-western civilizations. The
anti-capitalist philosophers of the Frankfort School are secular critics of modernity,
who borrow nothing from any of the historically existing alternatives to it.

Writing mostly as West European academics in the middle of the
twentieth century, they mostly conceded that Keynesian economics would enable
enlightened capitalism or social democracy to solve the physical problems of material
poverty. They mounted devastating critiques of modernity’s mental and
emotional poverty –its mindless consumerism, its alienation, its unnecessary
libidinal repression, its irrational rationality.

Jurgen Habermas is explicitly Kantian. He indicts modernity for
its failure to realize its own ideals of respect for the autonomy of the person.
"Treat humanity … always as an end, never as means only." Habermas holds
those ideals to be also the universal ideals of any community of
language-users. His proposals to cure modernity by appealing to the best that is in it
can be compared to the proposals of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to extend
democracy. Laclau and Mouffe propose "chains of equivalence" through which
political democracy, which is already officially accepted, is to be extended
to economic democracy, democracy in the family, and democracy throughout
society. A better future is projected by advocating levels of participation in the
control of resources and in the organization of cooperative labor which have
never existed in the past and which do not exist in the present.

Possibility, as distinct from experience, is explicitly made the
basis of a New Left political project by Herbert Marcuse. In principle,
Marcuse wrote, empirical social science cannot provide the premises needed for
social transformation. Empiricism makes the possible a subset of what exists,
but the reverse is true. What exists is a subset of the possible. The endless
quantitative study of what is, which characterizes mainstream social science,
can only condemn humanity to continue to suffer what is. Marcuse called for
a social philosophy that would employ what he called the power of the
negative. The negative, as a logical operation of the mind, has the power to deny in
thought the principal institutions of modernity, and in that way to envision
a world in which modernity’s failures would not exist. Envision a world in
which people did not have to sell their labor-power in order to earn money in
order to pay rent in order to acquire the right to have a physical space in
which they are allowed to sleep. Envision a world in which conditions
favorable for the accumulation or profit were not the prerequisites for job creation….

As John Lennon wrote, "Imagine."

The Social Gospel and the New Left propose cures for modernity’s ills.
The first, looking backwards in time, asserts the continuing relevance of
certain positive pre-modern values. It suffers from the handicap that it must
disentangle those positive values from the evils in which they have been and are
entangled. The second, looking forwards in time, suffers from the handicap
that it proposes a future which is at this point in time imaginary. The
choice these two options pose is not hard: Looking at their handicaps, we could
conclude, "neither/nor." Looking at their strengths we could conclude:
"both/and." A no-brainer.

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure, Part 25

Michel Foucault helps me make my case that the cure for modernity’s
defects is to be found in ethical reforms. He writes, for example, "What is
called psychiatric practice is a certain moral tactic … overlaid with the myths
of positivism." (Histoire de la Folie, p. 528). Psychiatry is not the
only practice that is a moral tactic. The same can be said of psychology,
criminology, the sciences of education, sociology, and all the human sciences.
They are all social practices, which deploy ethical norms. I do not need to
prove this. Foucault has already proved it, in painstaking detail.

In the 1960s and 1970s; while thousands of American graduate students
were collecting quantitative data about their objects of study, and running their
datasets through statistical tests, in order to produce dissertations; Michel
Foucault was ransacking the libraries of Paris writing archaeologies and
genealogies of their academic disciplines. He demonstrated that their objects of
study were not objects. They were customary practices. The discourses of
the human sciences did not discover their objects; they defined them. As
Foucault wrote of psychology, "Psychology can never tell the truth about
madness, because it is madness that holds the truth of psychology." (Mental Illness
and Psychology, p. 74) There was no pre-existing mental illness waiting for
someone to invent the science of psychology in order to have the conceptual
tools needed to discover it. Madness and psychology were born together, as
part of the same matrix of discourses inseparable from practices. And so it
was with the birth of the socially constructed realities studied by the other
human sciences.

(I do not think it hurts my case, or undermines my claim that
Foucault’s findings support it, to emphasize the word "practices," which is more
characteristic of Bourdieu than of Foucault. It helps my case, rather than
hurts it, to point out that customary norms governing practices are constantly
being renegotiated and reinvented by active subjects.)

I claim that it follows that the way to improve society is to modify its
normative customary practices, its prevailing moral tactics, in order to make
society work better. In Antonio Gramsci’s words: the task of the organic
intellectual is to contribute to adjusting culture to physical function, to
contribute to moral and intellectual reform. Property, profits, contracts,
commodity exchange, money, corporations, taxation, non-profits, schools,….. and so
on and on …should be modified and improved to make them less dysfunctional and
more functional. Ethics can cure.

But Foucault rejects the claim I have just made. Having supplied
my premise, he denies my conclusion. Conversely, the conclusions I draw
from his facts are not his conclusions. I think I am like most readers of
Foucault’s genealogies in conceiving of the facts he recounts about the treatment
of the insane and the treatment of criminals from the 18th century onward as
chapters in humanity’s centuries-long groping toward more humane practices which
are less dysfunctional and more functional. But the author of the
genealogies does not read the story he writes the same way we do.

In an early work, Les Mots et les Choses, Foucault asserts, in the
course of an argument whose tendency is to question the scientific standing of
the social sciences, that the ideas of "function" and "norm" are constitutive
for some of them. However, he is far from drawing the conclusion that over
time norms should and do improve in order to serve functions better. His views
are, on the contrary, in accord with the critique of the use of the idea of
"function" that Ernest Nagel makes in his philosophy of science. To suppose
that a social institution or practice has a function is to suppose that it has a
purpose, like meeting people’s needs, or making people happy, or assuring
good nutrition for all, or one of the more general purposes postulated by Talcott
Parsons when he writes of social functions. But if one supposes that an
object of scientific study has a purpose, one regresses intellectually back to the
ancient idea of final cause. One supposes that life naturally tends toward
some desirable predetermined end.

For Foucault to think in terms of purposes, and to evaluate changes
of prevailing norms as ethical progress when they lead to purposes being better
served, is intellectually dishonest. It is to smuggle into the human
sciences some version of Plato’s Good, or some God who created humanity deliberately
for a reason.

I believe in resuscitating the ancient idea of final causes. I
think it is resuscitated in contemporary agreements to pursue common purposes.
I rest my case on consent. Whatever one may think of Plato, or whatever one
may think of God, today the authorized representatives of the world’s peoples,
assembled in the United Nations, in official documents ratified by all or
nearly all of the world’s nations, have agreed on goals for humanity. They
include preserving the biosphere for future generations, eradicating poverty,
establishing a just and lasting peace, respecting the rights of children, and many
other purposes. Practices can be modified and improved to make institutions
less dysfunctional and more functional, as measured by these purposes.
Back to Top

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure Part 26

For many centuries the word "soul" has come into play wherever the
systematic formation of good character is relied upon to turn the human animal into
a responsible member of society. In this respect Foucault’s use of the term
"soul" (especially in Discipline and Punish) coincides with mainstream
traditional usage (for example, in Plato, in Aquinas). Martin Luther King Jr. was
broadly within the same mainstream of western intellectual history when he
held, following his seminary mentor George Washington Davis, that God acted in
history by building the inner discipline that made it possible for a people to
be both free and well-behaved. King distinguished between the natural
"individual" and the social "person." (Unpublished grad school notes in Boston
University archives). Similarly too, Confucius, in the text called The Center of
Harmony advocated an education that would make people sincere in virtue,
careful when they were unseen.

Erving Goffman’s microsociological studies of the island people of the
Hebrides showed how hard it is to keep one’s soul secret in a small community.
In accord with many other studies, Goffman showed how sincerity in following
social norms pays off for the individual where the same people see each other
day after day, because of the inherent advantages the observers have over the
observed.

But con artists, secret sinners, sociopaths, liars, and thieves cannot
easily be controlled by such old-fashioned means in a teeming market economy.
Strangers meet each other to buy and sell, and then go their separate ways,
remaining strangers. Modernity glories in freedom and suffers from betrayal.
As markets grow, kinship declines. The calculating mentality of homo
economicus undermines family and religion. Rational calculation leads to
disenchantment. (Weber’s Entzauberung). The dispossessed, no longer tied to the
land as serfs or slaves or smallholders, flock to the cities, where they eke out
a living by hook or by crook. Confucius’ problem, which is humanity’s
problem, how to educate people to be sincere, so that people will be good when
nobody is watching, becomes harder to solve.

In the early 19th century Jeremy Bentham designed a straightforward
solution to Confucius’ problem called the Panopticon. It was a prison
designed so that the warder could see all the prisoners all the time. It would be
impossible for a prisoner ever to do anything without somebody watching. Even
though no Panopticon was ever built, Foucault seizes upon Bentham’s plan as a
forerunner and model of the disciplinary power that reorganized modern life.
Following the basic idea of the Panopticon, i.e. keep everybody under
constant surveillance, the 19th century saw not just prisons, but also schools,
asylums, barracks, hospitals, factories, and other modern institutions
systematically organized to keep watch over human bodies and keep records of their
movements.

A person like myself who believes that social institutions evolve
to serve functions would suppose that the new systematic disciplinary power
that shaped human souls to make them more obedient came about, (1) partly
because in large market economies the old methods were inadequate, and (2) partly
because the machinery of modern commerce could not function without reliable
cogs. Foucault admits as much. He cites, for example, contemporary texts
which complained that something had to be done to discipline the populace
because so much of the merchandise brought to the docks of London was stolen before
it could be sold.

But that expanded markets led to a world where increased surveillance of
the population became necessary is not Foucault’s official conclusion. Nor is
it his unofficial conclusion. Officially, Foucault’s genealogies do not
explain, interpret, or evaluate. To be sure, Foucault tells a certain sort of
story about subjectivisation (the creation of the subject) and individu
alization. It is a story about power. "According to Foucault the task of the
genealogist is to destroy the primacy of origins, of unchanging truths. He seeks
to destroy the doctrines of development and progress. Having destroyed ideal
significations and original truths, he looks to the play of wills.
Subjection, domination, and combat are to be found everywhere he looks. Whenever he
hears talk of meaning and value, of virtue and goodness, he looks for strategies
of domination." (Dreyfus and Rabinow, pp. 108-9) But when Foucault chose to
make power the theme of his stories, he did not, on his own account, offer
an interpretation which discovered a true reality hidden among appearances, nor
an explanation which could be falsified by Popperian tests, nor a value
judgment.

Unofficially, Foucault’s conclusion is that modernity sucks. It
sucks because it regiments people. It compels them to act normal. As his
critics have noted, on the surface and officially his genealogies and archae
ologies are placid, patient, gray, meticulous perusals of old documents, while
under the surface their seethes a turbulent current of passionate rebellion
against authority. In the occasional passages and interviews where the
unofficial Foucault bubbles to the surface it turns out that "…only the reality of
bodies and the intensity of their pleasures count." (Le Vrai Sexe, p. 617)
"The soul is the prison of the body." (Discipline and Punish, p. 30)
Unofficially, Foucault could have written the screenplay for Pink Floyd’s The Wall or
for American Beauty. Nevertheless, the official Foucault can calmly reply to
Jurgen Habermas, when Habermas charges that Foucault’s philosophy makes no
sense without a normative framework, that it needs no normative framework
because genealogy does not evaluate.

Richard Rorty, overlooking the unofficial Foucault, counts it
as a merit of Foucault’s philosophy that it "…does nothing to show that there
is something wrong with whatever networks of power are required to shape
people into individuals with a sense of moral responsibility." (in Michel
Foucault, Philosopher) True. At the same time that Foucault appeals to the gut
instincts of those of us who resist normalization, he gives no logical reason
whatever why normalization is wrong. Nevertheless I think I speak for many
when I say that the surveillance and coercion to which modernity has resorted,
which Foucault has masterfully documented and highlighted, are wrongs that cry
out to be righted; and that there ought to be continuous research and
experimentation, and continuous study of the positive contributions of pre-modern and
non-western societies; in order to learn how to nurture the health of souls
in better ways ; and that the world-wide resistance to the mindless and
mind-numbing disciplinary power of modern institutions which Foucault (unofficially)
celebrates, is a sign that better ways of doing things are not only
desirable, but also deeply desired.

The historical evidence collected by Foucault can be read as
supporting the thesis that the expansion of markets was the cause of modernity in
general, and in particular the cause of the shaping of souls by modern
disciplinary power. It can also be read as showing the need to cure modernity’s
defects through moral and intellectual reform.

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure Part 27

Foucault does not deny that modern thought is a feature of what Immanuel
Wallerstein calls "the modern world-system," i.e. of the global society that
emerged as markets first centered in Europe expanded. Rather, Foucault’s
anti-Marxism is so extreme that he rules out questions about economic causes of
ideologies on methodological grounds, as questions his method does not allow
him even to ask. (e.g. MC 213-14, OT 200) Instead Foucault investigates what
he frequently calls "the conditions of possibility" of modernity. Modernity
was made possible by a sea-change in the pattern of scientific thought, a
sea-change that engulfed economics, biology, and the study of language alike.
Foucault called it a change of episteme.

The modern episteme has a startling consequence: "For modern thought no
morality is possible." (OT p. 328) Its distance from common sense measures
the profundity of this consequence.

Overhearing people chatting on a bus, or in a café, one cannot fail to hear
modern people, who are presumably thinkers, or at least not non-thinkers,
making moral judgments. What is right and what is wrong is a constant theme.
Neither English nor any other natural language could play the roles a language
plays in social life if it were purified of value judgments. Anthropologists
study the norms of cultures. Psychologists study the moral development of
children. Jurists study the interaction and partial overlap of moral and legal
rules. Economists as diverse as John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig von Mises
pronounce economics to be a moral subject. Political scientists study the
legitimacy or lack of legitimacy of public institutions. Moralistic aggression
(anger at the violation of social norms) is found not only in humans but also in
near-human primates such as chimpanzees. All of this happens in a world where,
according to Foucault, for modern thought no morality is possible. It is
evident, then, that whatever Foucault may mean by "morality," he does not mean
the really existing moralities that are part and parcel of the everyday life of
homo sapiens sapiens on planet earth. It must be something else whose
nonexistence can be deduced from the modern episteme.

The profundity of Foucault’s thought is further deepened by his dating of
the beginning of modernity at the time of Kant in the last years of the 18th
century. Unlike Max Weber and many others, Foucault does not contrast modern
society with traditional society (a genus of which medieval society is the
West European species). For Foucault there were two other ages, the 15th and
16th century Renaissance, and the Classical Age of the 17th and 18th centuries,
which were post-medieval but pre-modern. The Other, the non-modern, which
forms the background canvas on which modernity takes form by contrast, was the
episteme that governed intellectual life in Western Europe, especially France,
in the Classical Age. But if modernity began at the time of Kant, and if
Kant was its characteristic spokesperson, then modern thought certainly began
with a spokesperson who thought morality was possible.

Foucault knows this. He attributes to Kant the "…discovery that the
subject, insofar as he is rational, gives to himself his own law, which is the
universal law."

(MC p. 339)

Foucault’s point, however, is that Kant was mistaken. Although Kant
marks a watershed in the revolution in science that produced the modern episteme,
his account of morality is not one that modern thought can regard as
possible. The rational subject is not a universal essence. It is the product of
shifting epistemes (In subsequent works Foucault will argue that the rational
subject is a product of shifting patterns of power.)

The bottom line is that insofar as "morality" by definition consists of
universal rules deduced from a supposed universal essence of human nature,
morality is impossible.

Meanwhile, those of us who believe in common sense and in a critical
scientific realism can take comfort in observing that ethics exist as certainly as
rocks or birds exist. Morality is not only possible, but also actual.
There is not just one morality but a profusion of moralities, constantly
reinvented and renegotiated by the diverse members of the human species.

P.S. A reader of # 26 observed that while it is true that benign older forms
of socialization, such as the path of true sincerity advocated by Confucius,
do not work well in large market societies, it is also true that cruel older
forms of socialization, such as the 18th century public torture described by
Foucault in Discipline and Punish, do not work well in large market societies
either. Thus compared to some older customs, modernity looks bad, while
compared to others modernity looks good.

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure Part 28

Bentham's panopticon (a prison designed so that each individual prisoner

can always be seen by the warden, but cannot see or speak to the warden) is analyzed

by Foucault as an example of architecture that serves disciplinary technology.

Disciplinary technology has constructed both prisons and other modern institutions:

schools, factories, barracks, hospitals …. Modernity makes everyone similar to the

prisoner in the panopticon: "He is the object of information, never the subject in

communication." (Discipline and Punish, p. 200)

For Paulo Freire this pervasive tendency to treat humans as if they were objects,

analyzed and documented by Foucault, defines a challenge of a methodology of hope.

If modern institutions strip humans of their humanity, treating them as objects, then

the path to the constructive transformation of modern institutions lies by way of

humanization. Communicating subjects are creators of culture. They can participate

in making collective decisions and in reinventing social institutions.

Freire's emphasis on humanizing interpersonal relationships might seem to place him

in the camp of those who eloquently protest evil and urge people to be good, but who

decline to propose or endorse any program for transforming social structures -people

like Elie Weisel, Immanuel Levinas, and Albert Camus. It doesn't.

For Freire treating people as communicating subjects leads to consciousness-raising,

which leads to seeing that social reality is not natural but cultural, which leads to

recreating social structures. With apologies to Freire, dialogue leads to "empowerment."

(The apologies are due because Freire complained that Americans often talked about

"empowerment" without knowing what they meant by it.)

For some critics (e.g. Peter Berger) Freire's philosophy is naïve and dangerous for

reasons that echo arguments found in Foucault's works. Freire's philosophy might be

taken as an example of what Foucault called the profound foolishness

("niaserie profonde" in French) of asserting that there was a universal human essence,

which was oppressed by modern social structures, which ought to be liberated by

revolutionary action led by prophetic leftist intellectuals. The very concept of

humanizing, regarded as an attempt by people who have embraced a philosophical

anthropology to impose their view of what it means to be human on others, makes more

holocausts and Gulags possible. Holocausts are made possible, Foucault remarked in

an aside as if no proof were needed (or perhaps because Camus in The Rebel had

already supplied the proof) by totalizing philosophies which claim to distinguish the

human from the non-human on transcendental ahistorical grounds. Foucault was an

anti-humanist partly because he thought humanism justified mass violence to defend
humanity against inhumanity.

Instead of defending Freire's version of humanism against such charges, which I believe

will be judged to be groundless by any readers who take the trouble to read Freire

for themselves; I will respond to what I regard as a more plausible Foucauldian

challenge to a Freirian methodology of hope.

The more plausible challenge to Freire is that in most of his works

(all except the first and the last) Foucault elaborates a concept of power

which makes it hard to believe that a participatory democracy of communicating

subjects could transform social structures. Power seems to create social reality

in its own ways, not in the ways human beings intend. The communicating subject,

subjectivity in general, the modern soul, the individual, and humanity are all

said to be effects produced by power. For Foucault, "Power is a general matrix of

force relations at a given time, in a given society." (Dreyfus & Rabinow p. 186)

Power is, "… the name that one attributes to a complex strategical relationship

in a particular society." (HS 93) The word "power" in Foucault's writings is

so ubiquitous and so protean that it is not like a name for one thing as distinct

from other things (even though Foucault does sometimes distinguish productive

relationships, communicating relationships, and power relationships, as three distinct

kinds of relationship.) "Power" functions as a central component of a proposed lens

for viewing everything.

There is, however, at least one clear binary opposition in which Foucault contrasts

power with something else. It is the contrast of power with law. The historical

transition to modernity was on his account in important ways a transition from thinking

in terms of law to thinking in terms of power. The older view of the human being as

juridical subject was gradually replaced by a view of the human being as object of

disciplinary technology. (Simultaneously, as part of the same historical process,

the human being became the object of social science, which Foucault calls human science.)

Legal ideologies about contracts between free subjects continued to receive lip service

long after bio-power had created a world of docile bodies. To be sure,

Foucault finds that today laws, rules, and moralities are, like everything else,

effects produced by power. Nonetheless law is, or was, power's other, since it was

law that power overcame, overwhelmed, and absorbed in the process of creating modernity.

These considerations suggest that even taking Foucault's own ideas as a point of

departure, a worldview less centered on "power" is possible. Indeed it existed,

prior to modernity, or prior to Foucault's account of modernity; and it can still

exist in the minds of people who choose to view the world through lenses in which

the tasks assigned to the multi-purpose word "power" are fewer. Such a possible

worldview holds that juridical norms are cultural constructions that organize human

behavior. They constitute markets. Markets cause modernity. Better norms

(ethical reform) can cure modernity's defects.

Using the idea of "law" as a point of entry for bringing in other normative concepts,

such as "rule," "norm," "principle," "ethics," "customs," "human rights," "health,"

"human needs," "pro-social practices," "functional," and "dysfunctional," suggests

a constructive way to think about history. In Freire's terms, history can be thought

of as a story that is about oppression and also about cultural action. One might think

about a participatory democracy of communicating subjects transforming social structures

taking as one's conceptual point of departure ideas found in Foucault, such as

"resistance." But it would seem to be easier to think about transforming the

structures of the global economy starting with the older view that law provides the

framework for commerce while culture provides the framework for law.

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure Part 29

In his genealogies Foucault does not pretend to understand the past as the past understood itself.
He consciously writes what he calls "...the history of the present." (Discipline and Punish, p. 31)
When Foucault discovers a forgotten police manual from the 17th century, which treats every aspect
of human life as an opportunity to increase the power of the state, he does not try to prove that
the manual was considered an important book in its own time. As in the case of Bentham´s unbuilt
Panopticon, its importance is established by the disciplinary power Foucault observes in the present,
of which it was a precursor.

But Foucault´s present is not our present. His present was the western world, especially France,
in the 1960s and 1970s. Of his present he wrote, "...power relations have come more and more under
state control (although this state control has not taken the same form in pedagogical, judicial,
economic or family systems). In referring here to the restricted sense of the word government
one could say that power relations have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say,
elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of,
state institutions." (D & R, p. 224)

Foucault´s present was the western world of creeping socialism, of the persistently expanding welfare state,
of social science and government allied in the pursuit of 18th century ideals, of positivistic research
methodologies, of church attendance nearing zero, of religious ideologies fading away, of an educated
upper middle class fascinated by seeking authenticity through psychotherapy.

In 2004 many nation-states are virtually powerless in the face of the power of the global economy.
In all nation-states the welfare state is in retreat as the global market advances. Ideologically,
our world is heavily influenced by an unholy alliance of free market fundamentalism and religious
fundamentalism. Foucault had nothing to say about runaway markets escaping management through the
policy instruments available to the governments of states. He provides no genealogy of the mentality
of George W. Bush and his supporters.

A writer who does provide a genealogy of that mentality, and who in general has a great deal to say
about modernity, militarism, and the religious right, is Walter Wink.

Modernity, Its Cause and Cure Part 30

Modernity, viewed as an intellectual sea-change, is almost defined by a shift
from "spirit" to "power" as the leading principle of causal explanation. For
Saint Thomas Aquinas, a traditional thinker, "cause" was primarily final
cause, i.e. purpose. The explanation of a thing was the purpose for which a
Spirit, God, had created it. For Sir Isaac Newton, a modern thinker, "cause" was
primarily efficient cause, i.e. the impact of the power that pushed or pulled
it. Cause was vis, force. For Newtonian modernity functional relationships
among dependent quantities (the stuff of which differential equations are made)
epitomized scientific knowledge.

By explaining with equations that tracked forces, modernity made spirit
superfluous. It was obvious to Tycho Brahe, for example, that although people had
previously believed that the planets, and the tides, were moved by spirits,
advancing knowledge had shown such beliefs to be false. Why ? Because their
movements could be explained by mathematical calculations.

The founders of the social sciences could not have been more explicit in
stating their intention to replace religious explanation with secular explanation.
Secular explanations typically relied on "power." "Power" was sufficiently
similar to force, to vis, and to the impact of one quantity on another in a
mathematical function, that it served to keep social science securely on the
secular side of the spiritual/secular dichotomy.

Today it is not just the mainstream social scientists who find power-talk
indispensable. When radical social critics speak of "liberation" or
"emancipation" or "oppression" or "social structure" we speak of power. Without "power"
radicals cannot mount modern critiques of modernity.

Walter Wink is a Bible scholar. His intellectual project is ambitious. He
does not just claim that the interpretation of ancient sacred texts continues
to be a legitimate scholarly activity in the modern world. He claims much
more. Wink claims that humanity's capacity to solve its social problems, indeed
the very survival of the species and the biosphere, requires the understanding
of what modernity has left out, what modernity does not understand, what
modernity deliberately refuses to understand and in principle cannot understand.
Namely: spirit. Spirits, malevolent and benevolent, really are causes,
according to Wink, perhaps not quite as they were conceived by Saint Thomas, but
certainly as they acted in humanity's ancient myths.

Wink makes his case in a three volume study of "the powers." As Karl Marx
made his case for socialism using premises deduced from the classical capitalist
economics of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, somewhat similarly Wink makes his case
for a nonviolent spiritual politics with a study of just what modernity
believes in -- "power."

Wink painstakingly dissects exactly what the ancient sacred texts say and do.
He aims to dissolve the power/spirit dichotomy. Power is mythic, and
therefore spiritual. Criticizing attempts to read ancient texts through the lenses
of modern political science, Wink writes, "The gods are not a fictive masking
of the power of the human state--they are its actual spirituality." (Engaging
the Powers, p. 26) "...the mythic is not the residue left over and
discardable after everything meaningful has been explained. It is the very framework of
the entire notion of the Powers, the means by which they have been brought to
language. For that reason a simply reductionistic explanation of the Powers
is closed to us. They cannot be treated as `nothing but’ the personification
of human institutional and cultural arrangements, since these institutions and
cultural arrangements are as much the creation of the Powers as their
Creators. Reductionistic explanations are inadequate because they omit the one
essential most unique to the New Testament understanding of power: its spiritual
dimension." (Naming the Powers, p. 103)

A certain ancient myth, a malevolent one, has outlived its ancient gods. "In
every age, the myth of redemptive violence reappears in one form or another
as a religion dedicated to the support of the powerful and privileged through
violence." (EP p. 25) Wink cites Richard Slotkin, "...the myth of redemptive
violence is the structuring metaphor of the American experience."(EP p. 30)

Wink stresses that institutions have a life of their own above and beyond the
individuals who participate in them. He quotes a Pentagon officer,
"Sometimes it feels like it’s just a massive system that got going and no one knows how
it happened or how to stop it." (EP p. 81)

It follows from Wink's premises that modern critiques of modernity
underestimate and misconstrue the paradigm shift that is needed. Wink writes, "Social
entities can be changed, but they can only be fundamentally changed by
strategies that address the socio-spiritual nature of institutions." (EP p. 84)

"Change is possible, but only if the spirit as well as the forms of Power are
touched. And the spirit can only be spiritually discerned and spiritually
encountered. That is what made Martin Luther King Jr. a figure of
world-historic proportions. With only the powerless at his side, he formulated actions
that exposed the legalized system as immoral, stripped it of its legitimacy,
and forced unprecedented numbers of people to choose between their racism and
their Christianity. He resolutely refused to treat racism as a political issue
only; he insisted that it be seen as a moral and spiritual sickness." (NP p.
129)
Back to Top

:: Part 1 :: Part 2:: Part 3:: Part 4:: Part 5 :: Part 6 :: Part 7:: Part 8:: Part 9:: Part 10
:: Part 11 :: Part 12:: Part 13:: Part 14:: Part 15:: Part 16 :: Part 17:: Part 18:: Part 19:: Part 20
:: Part 21 :: Part 22:: Part 23:: Part 24:: Part 25:: Part 26 :: Part 27:: Part 28:: Part 29:: Part 30
:: Part 31 :: Part 32:: Part 33:: Part 34:: Part 35:: Part 36 ::