The As If Society

 

                What, in the 21^st century, stands as a public reason in North American societies? This is a harder question than many assume for our notion of what constitutes public reason is currently in flux. A reason is public if it stands as a legitimate ground of explicit or implicit social coercion. A reason is public when it is of such authority and objectivity that persons can legally be compelled to recognize it. This is explicit in relation to vaccines and public heath measures or in the certification of various kinds of professionals. Coercion is implicit in terms of pressure applied not by governments but by the broader society as in Facebook shaming or cancelling of speakers. It can also be implicit in the writing of curricula for schools for children need to be taught something and bureaucrats and administrators determine what this something is. Nor can the diverse wishes of citizens and parents be perfectly accommodated by these determinations. One parent will be upset their child is learning poetry not coding and another parent will be upset for the exact opposite reason. Education will, inherently, be a site of conflict over basic values with all the good will in the world. It is assumed by many that the problem of public knowledge is simply an epistemic one concerned with the objective certification of knowledge claims such that they may be recognized by all rational subjects. As we shall see this is not now the case if it ever was the case. Certification is a social process and an exercise of power before it is anything else. Power shifts and it is shifting now to new modes of certification in existential conflict with the old ones. In the past claims were certified by reference to sacred custom, mythic narratives, theology or even metaphysics. This way of certifying claims has not disappeared but has given way progressively to the notion that religion and metaphysics belong to the private sphere and that only scientific claims stand as truly public and universally accessible (i.e. available as true, in principle, for all rational subjects as such). This figuration of public knowledge is now ceding cultural space to a third. This new figuration of public knowledge is emancipatory and pragmatic. Public knowledge is now, increasingly, certified in relation to projects of liberation and the advancement of hitherto suppressed and excluded peoples. Thus, if all the scientific genius and endeavor in the world were devoted to the study of things like ‘race and IQ’ or ‘gender essentialism’ this would be private not public knowledge. It could not stand as a public reason for discrimination against persons. Such ‘science’ would find itself in the exact same position as homeopathy or creationism found themselves under the ‘scientific’ figuration of public knowledge. In fact, this is just where such people DO find themselves much to their chagrin for the rug has been pulled from under their assumed epistemic privilege. They have been blindsided. So, we are in an interesting place where three figurations of public knowledge struggle in the same cultural and political space. All three are in an agonistic relation.                 

            To consider what is new in this situation requires a bit of a detour. We need to consider the origin and nature of what I have come to call the ‘as if’ society.  The as if society seems to have originated in western Europe though it can be translated into terms coherent, broadly speaking, with non-western cultures. The as if society involves two things. First it involves the notion of a universal moral community that embraces in principle all human beings. Such conceptions existed among the ancient stoics and exist today in the Islamic world though on rather different terms. The second feature is that the unit of moral analysis and the profound object of human concern is the human in its particularity. Its object is humanity as it is in each individual human who thus becomes an object of unreserved concern and unconditional value. In European history this conception existed in profound tension with conceptions of social hierarchy that it has inexorably and perhaps inevitably subverted and overturned. Thus, we have societies whose fundamental ethical challenge and ethical calling is to value the humanity of each individual in its infinity and unconditional goodness. Its calling is to treat each individual AS IF individuality is unconditionally valuable. Thus, we have the various historical iterations of the society that treats all its members AS IF they were of infinite, unconditional significance. The first form in which this society appears is in the form of a theological symbol: the kingdom of God. In the New Testament we are to treat the poor and needy AS IF they were avatars of Christ. After this we have the various radical experiments in monastic communities which overturn the hierarchy of traditional paganism: the abbot of the Benedictine abbey is first by being last. He leads by means of being the slave to the least of the members of his community. He treats the lowest AS IF they were the highest. At the peak of the enlightenment, we have Kant who outlines for us the nature of a kingdom of ends. In the kingdom of ends all subjects are legislators. Humanity in each member is an end in itself and never simply a means. Each member is treated AS IF the autonomous exercise of a good will were the ultimate, final, indeed sole intrinsic value in the universe. We can trace this idea through Hegel’s conception of freedom (geist) as the absolute self determination of reason in history. We can trace it through Marx’s paradise of joyous, unalienated labor. In all these iterations the as if community is a radical attack on any notion of social, natural or racial hierarchy.

            Of course we NOW encounter the as if society in what may be its mature and final form. This fact is deeply ambiguous for things may well reach their mature form just before they begin their decline. The as if society may be reaching its final permanent form or peaking before its inevitable course of decline. Philosophy, if it heeds Hegel’s warning about the owl of Minerva, does not speculate on this point. In its current form, the as if society treats every person universally and a-historically as ends in themselves WITHOUT either theological, philosophical or historical grounding. This ultimate version of the as if society is posited immediately in action without presupposition or grounding of any kind. Indeed, any request for ‘grounding’ or ‘justification’ is an act of violence, a dagger at the heart of the spirit of this community. The free human person is beyond any need to justify or argue over its status. Its dignity, its rights and privileges, are posited directly and AS IF self-evidently. It is important to realize how this differs profoundly from the Kantian or Hegelian conception. It is not historically mediated or grounded in the self-identity of practical reason. It is grounded on nothing outside itself theological, philosophical, scientific or other (except per accidens as when one finds a scientific or scholarly paper or some factoid that gives you a rhetorical edge in the emancipatory struggle) . Moreover, its scope is radically expanded. Kant’s conception of dignity was founded on the autonomous self-legislation of rational agents. In its mature form the as if society is founded on the self’s capacity to generate compelling narratives about its own activities and personal history. What is conserved as good in itself are the STORIES of personal emancipation and self-discovery we tell. The self is now radically and irreducibly a narrative self. We must now treat every narrative of the self AS IF it were an object of unconditional respect IF that narrative can cast itself in an emancipatory form. This has the effect of leaving older narratives of a religious or scientific nature out in the cold for such narratives are private not public. A PUBLIC narrative with PUBLIC authority MUST be emancipatory in form to have inherent significance and dignity. Literally NO ONE IMPORTANT in elite institutions cares about narratives such as ‘how I became a Mormon’. Increasingly fewer care about scientistic narratives about IQ, sociobiology or evolutionary psych or indeed 'scientism' in general (though proponents of these views still occupy niches from which they can propagandize with some effect).  These narratives are out while narratives about gender or race or indigeneity are in. This is shocking for public advocates of 'reason and science' for as they once brought theological claims before the bar of their judgement so now their claims come before the bar of narratives of emancipation. One example here is the controversy over E.O. Wilson's legacy in the life sciences.  

                Herein we encounter the vexing issue of our time. The entire liberatory thrust of western history has come to this moment where we elevate, even venerate, voices previously excluded and suppressed. The last shall be first and the first last as was given in our foundational symbols. NO amount of complaining about ‘wokeness’ can dispel this fundamental moral imperative if we wish to remain ‘enlightened’ and even ‘western’. Yet there is a very real question whether this final avatar of the as if formulation can ever be embodied in history. It is ALWAYS possible to turn way from the as if society towards some more particularistic, regional form of belonging. It is ALWAYS possible to say no to the other in the name of the comfort and familiarity of the same. Indeed, if one is invested in narratives of sameness rather than otherness, if one is invested in the narratives EXCLUDED from the as if society, this is exactly what one will do. One will turn away towards one’s own particularity and away from a society which pushes the relentless privatization and decentering of one’s own chosen identity. One will NEGATE wherever there is a hectoring and indeed self-righteous demand that one AFFIRM. Every passionate affirmation opens a possible space for passionate negation. The as if society generates reaction inherently and dialectically in a way that its proponents cannot understand as anything but perverse stupidity and ill will. This is because there are winners and losers in this process. Somebody will always have to live in a world defined by the public rites and triumphalist narratives of somebody else. The question will then be how we create conditions that allow them to do so gracefully. This is problematic for everyone's freedom is entangled with the freedom of others. The struggle to define the world for myself inevitably impinges on someone else's struggle to do the same. I, for instance, may be laboring to overturn some binary or hierarchy somebody else has unreservedly invested their own identity in. Thus, even in the name of preserving simple private right, I enter the agonistic arena of social struggle. Further, in this struggle final victory is never assured. The excluded will always get its revenge at some point!                   

                The difficulty in containing these sorts of conflicts in  our current context is starkly simple. If it is really the case that my powers of self description have no natural or given constraints, if it is the case that any given self-description is at bottom arbitrary then  it is difficult to see why I should demand that another recognize my story. It is difficult to see why there should be public recognition of my story. If a rights claim is based on nothing but itself, if it is simple violence to ARGUE over a rights claim, then my assertion of such a claim will appear to the other as nothing but a passive aggressive (or indeed agressive agressive) flex, an exercise of power not justice. One solution, I suppose, would be to celebrate the identities of Pentecostals and Mormons, say, as much as the identities of trans or indigenous people. Of course, few proponents of the as if society (in its current form) could stomach such self-abnegation (kenosis not being a thing in this discourse of constant affirmation of self). Even if they could this would not be an effective solution for there is NO society that could EVER accommodate all possible narratives without self-contradiction. I am left to conclude that the as if society may, after all, remain only as a symbol or gesture to a possible freedom never to be realized. Alas, if there is no realization of the as if society in history, then all the work of Feuerbach and Marx is undone, for we now have an ideal beyond and outside history. We now have, in the deep sense, a religious symbol that stubbornly refuses embodiment in history, that stubbornly refuses to pass from the ideal, spiritual realm into the empirical. We are back with Plato and Kant and gasp! God at very least as a symbol.