Knowing Knowledge VIII: Making It Politically Explicit, Dialogues, 17/04/2015

Since Steve Fuller and I began our dialogue about his book Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History, the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective has been running previous episodes on their own site. Today, we discuss the last full chapter, about the power of counterfactual knowledge, understanding what could have been and what could be.
• • •

Dear Steve;

One element I want to focus on in my questions for you about the last full chapter of Knowledge is the political aspects of public knowledge and scientific institutions and inquiries. Speaking as a Canadian, one of the disheartening developments of my country's politics was seeing our Conservative government's assaults on state scientific institutions. 

Whenever I mention the more unfortunate recent
developments of Canadian politics on the blog, I do my
best to include an extremely unflattering, and I also
hope creepy, picture of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
I hope it contributes in some small way to overall
disgust for him in my country that will force him from
office this year. The tradition continues.

Statistics Canada's long-form census was made voluntary, meaning that all the detailed data it could collect in its last census period in 2011 incompletely represented the country's population, making it useless. State scientists in all agencies have had their autonomy to speak officially to the public hobbled, as any investigations which discover facts that would contradict or criticize government policy are effectively silenced.

All of this lies in the modern right-wing opposition to scientific institutions and scientists. The fundamental reason for this is that modern conservatives, driven by the core principles of new liberal philosophy, believe that scientists are hostile to democracy and individual liberty. Much of this had to do with the prominence of scientists and scientific societies in advocating for mass-scale social planning policies. 

Now, of course, scientists in our countries (Canada for me, your home of Britain, and your birthplace of the United States) are democrats. They're raised in democratic, socially liberal cultures where maintaining a population's freedom is a paramount political value. But our scientific institutions, societies, and cultures should face up to a danger in their origins.

The progenitors of Western science, as a social institution and tradition, were not raised in such thoroughly democratic environments, but in places where authoritarian politics was a live political alternative. You discuss how Francis Bacon and Auguste Comte often conceived of scientific laws as esoteric notions arrived in secret laboratories by societies of initiated specialists. These laws would be used by a society's ruling elite to legislate over a citizenry. The goal of discovering scientific laws was to control the citizenry of a country, just as knowledge of mechanics lets us control physical bodies. 

But the neoliberal hostility to institutionalized science doesn't engage with the primary virtue ethicist of science, Karl Popper. To Popper, the most socially important power of knowledge is emancipation. And scientific attitudes and discoveries have this potential at the largest level of the social order: knowledge is the power to upend your entire social order.

Auguste Comte, one of the founders of sociology.

I think the most brilliant and important idea in the entirety of Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History is that scientific knowledge is a force for progressive social, political, economic, and ecological change. Knowledge gives birth to revolution.

The dynamic of counterfactual reasoning, imagination, and investigation that you lay out in this chapter is itself a logic and metaphysics of revolutionary transformation: we can build an alternative world and understand the conditions and histories that would make it real. 

Such alternatives can become real because of the way you conceive of time. This is where your project actually converges with my next long-form project, Utopias. The academically acceptable way to treat the scientific epochs of the past has become, following Kuhn, as a strongly incommensurable mode of thinking, utterly alien and alienated from ourselves. We can only describe such epochs, never truly judge them. To judge them would be to port our own values into the past era, which, because our own values never manifested in that era, are illegitimate as grounds for judgement.

You and I agree that this epistemic incommensurability is false. From the perspective of ontology, it's false because history is continuous. The knowledge and cultural models of the past eventually developed into ours. Not with a sense of telos, of course, but simply out of contingency. We are products of the past, but not culminations. Likewise, the events of the present will produce the knowledge and cultural models of the future. 

My own take on your example from chapter six will illustrate where our ideas converge and diverge here. You argue that there is enough overlap in our cultural norms and concepts between North America in 2015 and North America in 1950 that, were we to travel back in time and explain the modern concept of sexual harassment to a young Roger Sterling, he'd be able to understand it. 

I should commend Matthew Weiner for making Mad
Men, for supplying us with so many examples of the
most theatrically egregious sexism imaginable.

Not only do I agree, I can take it even further. Even if there isn't enough overlap in the framework concepts of the present with some particular past era to create a single cultural conversation at once, we can still create a common cultural framework by understanding the continuity in historical development that physically bridges our eras. 

Take the ancient Greeks, a civilization that we all accept as culturally contiguous with our own, but which is radically different in many obvious and profound ways that make straightforward conversations about moral principles impossible. We can still create a common space between Aeschylus and ourselves if we all sit down and trace how his history and culture eventually developed into ours. 

From the perspective of epistemology, we don't even need to trace our histories to create this common ground. We need only understand the core principles of each of our eras, how we live them out in our technological and ecological environments, and explain them to each other in an abstract sense. This way, we can at least understand intellectually the morals, customs, religious frameworks, and epistemic presumptions of both our societies. 

It even works for conversations among truly alien peoples (which, if the most optimistic futures for the human race pan out, will happen in a genuine sense when we begin to travel to new solar systems and encounter organisms that evolved in alien biospheres). All we need to understand any way of life is understanding its epistemic framework principles and contexts of daily life.

The same would go for different scientific paradigms, their being different ways to approach the wider world. The larger question, which we'll continue to answer as we wrap up next week, is precisely whether we need a universally unified mission for science to be successful in these conversations across continuous history.

• • • 

Dear Adam, 

First, let me say that over the past few weeks I have looked forward to your posts – and have even prioritized responding to them in the face of other obligations. You have a good feel for the spirit of the book, so that even when we disagree, the differences open up to wider issues that can bring more people into the discussion.

As Stanley Kubrick has described, the Cold War not
only had its proxies in the space race, but more
suggestive suggestions as well.

I appreciate the credit you give me for arguing that science is a progressive force. And maybe I deserve it in this day and age. However, that just shows how much the world has changed since I was first a student in the late 1970s. In fact, this view of science was one of the few things on which the capitalists and the socialists in the Cold War could agree. It’s what made the ‘space race’ such an effective proxy for military engagement between the US and the USSR.

There was also a propaganda war over which sort of society enabled people to live the longest, healthiest, most productive lives. And all of this happened before ‘transhumanism’ became the name of a political movement – and before the latest round of technological promises and fixes had been unleashed in the names of ‘biotechnology,’ ‘nanotechnology,’ ‘information technology,’ etc.

I’m writing this piece in Glasgow, where a few hours ago I commented on papers by some younger historically and philosophically minded sociologists who are beginning to discover the science progressivism that was widely held by cosmopolitan, interdisciplinary public intellectuals such as Julian Huxley, whose achievements are now largely forgotten – despite only having died in the 1970s. 

For example, Huxley gave the ‘modern evolutionary synthesis’ its name and its canonical British formulation, was the principal author of the UNESCO “Statement on Race,” which depicted race as a social construct, and the coiner of ‘transhumanism’ for the prospect that humanity might transcend its evolutionary heritage.

Like so many other science progressivists, Huxley came to be portrayed as ‘eccentric’ because he took it upon himself to leverage his scientific credentials to affect the course of politics and even religion* under the rubric of ‘evolutionary humanism’ as an emerging ideology capable of unifying humanity’s differences – a Comtean Positivism 2.0 for more scientifically sophisticated and democratic times. 

Julian Huxley, an image of the progressive
scientist as the eccentric.

* He was partly responsible for getting the heretical Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin published in English.

To get a sense of how easy it could be to portray Huxley et al. as oddballs, consider a complicating factor about the Cold War, the legacy of which we still live with – and some of your other comments bring out. The Cold War was also the time when the so-called ‘linear model’ of the relationship between science and technology became commonplace on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In other words, scientists do their thing (relatively unimpeded) and then policymakers and other practical types do their thing (again, relatively unimpeded).

This led to the image of the scientist as a heads-down ‘organization man,’ which came under severe criticism – again on both sides of the Iron Curtain – in the 1960s. (The name Andrei Sakharov conjures up the Moscow version of the likes of Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg in the US.) The underlying assumption of this model is that science must reach a level of maturity before it can be applied effectively, no matter your ends – and that people other than the scientists are the ones to do it. This viewpoint is also presupposed by Kuhn, though he is only interested in the science side of the model.

From this standpoint, today’s Silicon Valley’s billionaire ‘visioneers’ such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are nostalgic for the lost world represented by guys like Huxley and the general Cold War valorization of science as the vanguard of human progress. They agree with Huxley – as opposed to the official Cold War line – that we can’t intelligently do science policy if we don’t already have a vision of the sort of being we wish to become. 

This is ultimately a hermeneutical point: You can’t say how science should develop without also saying where we want to go – even if both, at any given time, can only be understood imperfectly. My endorsement of the proactionary principle aims to reactivate this point, which leads me to agree with Huxley and the visioneers in rejecting the strong means/ends distinction of the Cold War’s linear model of science policy.

Elon Musk has built his reputation through his work,
but also through his evocation of a tradition of
creative innovation in science.

Nevertheless, the linear model still operates in science policy today, often as a flag of convenience to absolve both scientists and policymakers of full responsibility for their actions. Suppose a science-based policy goes wrong. On the one hand, the scientists can say that they’re not responsible for the policy, while highlighting the underdetermined and otherwise inconclusive character of their data. On the other hand, the policymakers can say that they’re working with the best science available, which always has room for error, which means that ‘hard decisions’ need to be taken. Thus, in the division of labour implied by the linear model, everyone ends up looking honest and professional.

I think what you describe as the ‘conservative’ (i.e. neo-liberal) political attitude towards science sums up this situation. After all, in many circumstances, the scientists themselves would be the first to admit the potential weaknesses in any practical inferences that might be drawn from their research. This even includes the fallibility of models used to forecast long-term global warming. Of course, scientists would not then use such fallibility as an excuse to kill climate change legislation. 

But remember, if politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ then there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with policymakers trying to take advantage of the uncertainty, even though it carries significant risk. To be against such moves is simply to be against politics.

What this means is that scientists need to be more explicit about their own politics and hence contest policymakers on political grounds. This will involve revealing the sorts of risks that they believe are acceptable and unacceptable to take. This point has special relevance to science and technology studies (STS), which in the post-Cold War period has been invoked to cut or otherwise politically realign the public science agenda. Because STS tends to deconstruct scientists’ legitimizing discourses and practices, it is not such a stretch for enterprising budget-conscious legislators to appeal to STS to justify cuts to areas of science that display significant long-term uncertainties.

Beyond climate change, humanity also produces
enough waste to drown many ecosystems in, well,
you can guess what. I explore the character of our
collective madness, with a little help from
photographer Edward Burtynsky, in my forthcoming
Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

Against this backdrop, Bruno Latour – quite remarkably – said that STS needs to row back from its deconstructive ways so as not to unwittingly legitimize the ‘bad guys’ like your conservative politicians. This is like saying that we need to stop genetics research on humans (but continue to allow it on animals) in order to prevent Hitler’s second coming. Indeed, such calls were being issued after the Second World War, and Julian Huxley helped save the future of genetics as UNESCO’s first scientific director by strategically detaching the science from the politics of genetics, as in the ‘race’ statement.

On the use of counterfactual historiography to forge common values to drive humanity forward: I put considerable stress on this because I actually don’t think that you can know the values of people from the past (or other cultures) without appreciating their decision-space. Your invocation of ‘common ground’ and ‘core principles’ (all of which reminds me of Alasdair MacIntyre) strikes me as reading the history too much on its face: i.e. focusing too much on what people said/did to the exclusion of what they didn’t say/do – but could have. From Social Epistemology onward, this has been a continual preoccupation of mine in terms of defining one’s normative horizons, typically discussed in the context of the role of silence in translation.

In other words, people in the past may have behaved radically differently from us because (a) they saw no alternative that would have allowed them to agree with us; (b) they really operated with radically different values. There is also the flipside of this problem, which normally leads us to create a lot of ‘false positives’ with the past, perhaps especially with the ancient Greeks. 

In other words, the reason why, say, the Greeks seem so much like us is that they weren’t presented with options that would have demonstrated just how different they really were – or perhaps we have forgotten the alternatives that they refused, which would have brought them still closer to our way of thinking. An obvious example here is the restricted scope of the ancient Greek conception of ‘humanity’, which is what made Christianity such an intellectual revolution in the ancient world.

Bruno Latour, the most regretful face of STS.

There is so much more that could be said on this topic, which gets to why I originally thought that history, philosophy, sociology (and psychology and economics) of science should become a composite field of ‘science and technology studies’. But alas, things didn’t turn out that way, but the ideas are worth pursuing, perhaps flying under a new flag of convenience…

Finally, on a minor point. Here and earlier you have referred to Karl Popper as a ‘virtue theorist’ of science. I don’t think that Popper was sufficiently ‘naturalistic’ in his approach to normativity to want to associate the falsifiability with a virtue of individual scientists, which they realize when they’re on their best behaviour, etc. 

Rather falsifiability is more an emergent property of self-interested, overweening scientists who nevertheless are forced to negotiate their differences with each other in order to move forward collectively. In other words, if falsifiability is a ‘virtue’ of anything, it is of a specifically organized scientific community but not of its component individuals. Scientists as individuals are motivated to overstate their own claims and cut down those of their fellows. But like the invisible hand, falsifiability is the overall result of this process. This is why institutional design in science is much more important than improving the mindset of individual scientists.

Those Sad Believers in the Religion of Science, Jamming, 04/03/2014

For most people, science is a big truth-producing black
box that has as much content as this T-shirt.

Yesterday, my girlfriend and I were discussing a meme that she finds frustrating and I find sad. No, not that one. I’m talking about Science: It Just Works. One of her friends posted it on Facebook, and they got into a conversation about why he posted it. He said he would always defend science against those who would push pseudo-sciences like crystal energies, homeopathy, and climate change denial. And that’s good.

But that kind of rhetoric obscures an important truth about the practice of science that isn’t really known to people outside the scientific industries and that people have to understand if they want to make sense of our world. Science is actually a very messy, difficult process, and conclusions only come with the accumulation of massive amounts of data. Even then, the conclusions are often inconclusive. What’s more, those data can be very difficult to acquire if the investments of large amounts of money are involved in the necessary experimentation. Sometimes, there simply isn’t enough cash to prove a hypothesis.

Bruno Latour’s early work was part of the wave of publications that opened these operations to the public eye. Anyone can pick up a copy of Laboratory Life or Science in Action, or any subsequent ethnography of scientific practices and communities to learn about the messy reality of scientific research. A lot of the theoretical groundwork had already been done in the historical studies of Thomas Kuhn and the philosophical work of David Bloor and the Edinburgh School of sociological philosophy of science. But for the past ten years, he has regretted doing this, first expressing his frustrations in his 2004 article, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” His basic point is that the tradition of science studies that he helped start has, far from helping people understand the practice of science, has only enabled skepticism and the loss of faith in it.

The irony of Boyle is that he created an image of an
apolitical science as a political act to defend the scientific
community from partisan conflict. Oh, damn, the picture is
the wrong Robert this time.

The problem Latour identified was that his critical movement had been too successful. But I think it had actually not been successful in the right way. The answer lies in the historical research Latour himself laid out in We Have Never Been Modern. The modern experimental paradigm of scientific research was developed by Robert Boyle and the Royal Society in Britain in the mid-1600s, just as England was getting out a civil war that shattered the island’s society. The Royal Society was a community of scholars and researchers, all broadly devoted to developing human knowledge, and Boyle was one of their most prominent figures. In the social instability after the civil war, he was most concerned with protecting himself and his compatriots from the political turmoil of the country. After all, a century later, Antoine Lavoisier, France’s greatest chemist at the time, would be beheaded in that country’s Revolutionary Terror. Scientists constitute a threat to the rule of established authority: a scientific conclusion can correct a king. And kings are very hostile to being corrected.

So Boyle developed his most successful invention, more successful than the machines he built for his experiments: the image of science as an apolitical practice. Scientists were a new kind of monks, whose devotions were experiments to discover the previously mysterious workings of the world. They were a spiritual practice who aimed to enlighten humanity with knowledge of the world they lived in. The method of a scientist was to be trusted. Science was above religion and politics, because when a scientific truth was established, it could not be disputed.

Bill Nye has become our most famous proselytizer of belief
in science. But he pushes it as a faith, especially when he
debates Ken Ham in a high-profile event that helped the
founder of the Creationist Museum resurrect funding for
his amusement park based on Noah's Ark.

We’re still taught this today. In grade school, we learn about the sanctity of The Scientific Method. But none of us could ever say what The Scientific Method is because there isn’t one, perhaps other than ‘Collect as much reliable data as possible and analyze it hoping to discover something you hadn’t noticed before.’* Yet huge amounts of philosophical ink has been spilled on articles trying to isolate precisely what The Scientific Method is. Unless you’re a scientific practitioner yourself, you probably believe that The Scientific Method is a thing. That’s what we learned on PBS from Bill Nye and on the private networks from Beakman’s World. If you stopped doing science classes in grade ten because the math was hard, you believe in The Scientific Method as if it was a matter of faith.

* This is a personal bugbear of mine. Part of the research for my Ecophilosophy manuscript involved analysis of traditional medicine among indigenous groups, bodies of immense knowledge about the properties of local plants and fungi. Discussing this research with a friend, he mocked such knowledge because they didn’t use The Scientific Method. But just the because the shamans don’t wear labcoats, their useful biological databanks have been ignored. But they’re at the tail end of thousands of years of data collection and analysis. Smart pharmaceutical companies send teams to consult with indigenous leaders about their medicines because they'll be able to mass produce the chemicals that the shamanic tribes use locally without as much processing.

You start to look defeated when you're old and tired.

So now, when you see books like Latour’s and those that have followed him, you’re like a man who has lost his faith. You’ve grown up believing that science had a perfect method, The Scientific Method, and that its use resulted in absolutely true knowledge. That’s why Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens could talk about the superiority of science over religion: scientific knowledge was above the petty political provincialism of religion. This is just Boyle’s defensive thesis, formulated as a desperate gamble to protect his community from violence at the hand of post-war partisans. But part of the success of that gamble was that they succeeded in covering up why they convinced us all of that. So today, shrill writers like Dawkins repeat it as dogma.

Read those books that describe scientific practice in all its messiness: the vulnerability of funding to corporate or political whims, the jockeying of scientists across universities and research institutes, the fact that you’ll always find some study with data contra-indicating the conclusions of 95% of all other studies in that area. If you believed in the perfection of scientific knowledge as a dogma, as too many of us still do, you won’t see a book that educates you about the practice of an important human institution.

You’ll have your faith broken.

Latour shouldn’t be upset because the sociology and ethnography (and related philosophy) of science were too successful. If anything, they failed to root out the true rot: the conception of science in too many people’s minds as a subject of dogma. 

Deleuze in Disguise, Research Time, 03/03/2014

From the first time I heard about the basic concept of what the sociologists call actor-network theory, I have had a sneaky suspicion about it. Reading a late passage of Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern has convinced me that I was right. Latour’s actor-network theory is basically the exact structure of the assemblage theory developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, articulating the same ontology, but in a different context, one whose frameworks of thinking are structured by the conclusions of his ethnographies of scientific practitioners and the social dynamics of laboratories.

Let me give you a quote from Latour just to put the matter in context. Anyone who has read Deleuze will see how evocative this is.

“[The moderns] thought themselves revolutionary because they invented the universality of sciences that were torn out of local peculiarities for all time, and because they invented gigantic rationalized organizations that broke with all the local loyalties of the past. In so doing, they missed the originality of their own inventions twice over: a new topology that makes it possible to go almost everywhere, yet without occupying anything except narrow lines of force and a continuous hybridization between socialized objects and societies rendered more durable through the proliferation of nonhumans.” We Have Never Been Modern §4.11.

Latour describes our frameworks for understanding the connections among bodies in the world as topologies, maps of spaces that can themselves bend in a variety of shapes within a restricted locus of possibility. His problematically-named quasi-objects* are the building blocks of complex bodies that are hybrids of assemblages that have existed before. Every new network, every new mode of relating, is a mutation of what has come before. The present is the raw material of the future, even though the future may change the present so much as to make the new arrangement appear as if ex nihilo. But all novelty is mutation, merely radical mutation.

* Problematic because his vocabulary remains rooted in the dualist-implying language that the entirety of We Have Never Been Modern strives to overcome. I think one of the main reason people have misunderstood Latour’s ideas in this regard is because he keeps talking in terms that evoke subjects and objects, the two pure poles of the Modern conception of being that he pitches his own philosophy as trying to overcome. If he’d just admit that he’s basically a process philosopher, and use terms of that cobbled-together pseudo-tradition, he wouldn’t have sparked nearly the confusion that I’ve seen from younger students experiencing the trouble they do to understand the fine line Latour’s thinking walks.

I can definitely understand not wanting to appear influenced
by Deleuze and Guattari in one's hairstyles, but their
philosophical work is immensely valuable.

As for how networks relate to each other, that is a matter for fields and currents of force. The distinction of human and nonhuman, artificial and nature, disappears, ontologically speaking. All the differences are preserved, but none of their separateness, the cleanness of the categories no longer applies to the world. Maintaining the cleanliness of our traditional conceptual categories only prevents us from understand what are practically becoming the most important material relationships in our world. All these ideas are central to the ontology that Deleuze and Guattari develop in their collaborative writings.

All of these ideas are central to the works of Deleuze and Guattari, yet Latour never really explains his influences throughout this book, and cites them only three times in the entire book. A mediocre professor once told me that I should discount sources that are cited very rarely and in very general ways. These are just gestures, he said, that amount to nothing but provocation and evocations of vague associations. I have since concluded that these vague associations are more often hints of a wider, more pervasive influence than a writer is willing to make explicit.

In this case, I think they are a sign of Latour’s wanting to hedge his bets. I think his hesitation to cite his Deleuzian influence (or at least accidental heritage) lies in the social situation of intellectual life in France in the 1980s and 1990s, and as well today. Here in North America, we identify (especially in cultural studies and literary theory programs) French philosophy as the psychoanalytic and post-structuralist waves of experimental theorizing, the difficult, strange texts of authors (quite a few of them communist or otherwise leftist) who tried to conceive existence in a new way.

Their response to the so-called failure of modernity, or at least the increasing tendency toward totalizing the state and corporate control of individual life and the inability of our old rationalist motivations to deal with our growing ecological crises, was not to give in to despair or double down on the old destructive attitudes. Their response was to develop a new way of thinking about existence.

By the 1980s, all these people were being discredited. There was a new generation of thinkers (the infamous Bernard Henri-Lévy among them) who was literally doubling down on the old habits of total rationalism and uncritical faith in the ability of Western culture to emancipate people. They were intellectuals who hid their heads in the sands about the destructive acts and absurdities of cultural colonialism and globalized corporate capitalism. One could not admit being a follower of Deleuze and Guattari’s insights without ruining one’s academic career.

So Latour did the obvious good thing: he got devious, and smuggled all these motivating ideas into a career based on the ethnography of science. Latour essentially used the tools of anthropology and ethnography to trace the shape of the networks that we live in, and that build the machines and processes which create our world. If Deleuze and Guattari lacked anything, it could be said that they lacked a method. In this way, a universal ethnography overcomes the ivory-tower universalism of philosophy and science. If everything can be analyzed, then every universal that pitches itself as transparent can be revealed for what it really is: not a lie, but a posit for the sake of the smooth operation of some other social machine. 

Truth Comes in Degrees, Research Time, 28/02/2014

It’s very common in philosophical writing to discuss the nature of an epoch, which is usually framed in terms of what kinds of thoughts were possible. Heidegger continually refers to the modern era as incapable of understanding existence as anything but a resource. Hegel, in his writings on history, described Indians and Africans as having no history because they had no institutions or style of discourse like the Western history book. 

Yesterday’s post ended with Bruno Latour caught in the same situation. He wrote in 1991 that Modernity was dead, a framework of understanding the world whose premises had been shattered. Then in 1992, a book drops from another leading French intellectual with nerdly glasses and wavy black hair defending humanist Modernity in its purest form, and denouncing all critics as anti-democratic fascists, communists, and religious fundamentalists. This situation shows how plural humanity really is. We’re so accustomed, especially in philosophy, to demarcating what was conceptually possible for a culture according to the chronology of its great philosophical works. But the presence of these works doesn’t simply cause a blanket social change even within the discipline of philosophy, let alone the wider culture.

Likewise, the entire fourth chapter of We Have Never Been Modern is all about dealing with accusations of relativism that would fly against Latour’s central thesis that social and political factors always play a role in the construction of scientific institutions, investigations, and discoveries. Despite the presence of books like Latour’s, and others from sectors of philosophy of science like Science and Technology Studies or the affiliated and slightly diverging acronyms, I haven’t seen an introductory philosophy class where introducing ideas like Latour’s don’t result in accusations of relativism from the audience.

In other words, Latour can write all he wants about how sensible it is for us to drop our cultural presumptions that contingency results in pure relativism, and that involvement in human processes for its generation results in pure relativism. I can too, because I haven’t believed in this facile separation of necessary, certain knowledge from contingent, relative opinion in nearly a decade. I can be criticized for making the separation in such blunt terms. But my point is that most people still believe this way.

A frequent reason given for why atheists are mistrusted in wider society (aside from the shrill anger of Dawkins and Hitchens, and Sam Harris’ denunciations of Muslims in Britain that border on outright racism), is that they’re held to be moral relativists. Many people still genuinely believe that you can’t be a good person without having a religion: without having a set of moral rules in whose correctness you believe absolutely, and without believing that a god will punish you for your sins. The discussion of scientific enterprises in these contingent terms often results in the same dichotomy. If you don’t believe in the certainty of scientific knowledge, then you permit the validity of beliefs we now know to be hogwash: racialized eugenics, phrenology, phlogistonic chemistry, Galenic medicine. If there is no God, everything is permitted. If there is no Science, everything is true.

However many times we defend ourselves, I think atheists
like me will always face pressure from people who believe
that you need to believe in a God delivering you
absolute truths to understand moral right and wrong.

The problem with these statements is that people’s moral systems converge, but differ, and if you consider the history of science, there is no straight progress of enlightenment over time. Good projects may flounder, worse ideas may come to prominence: enlightenment is no more inevitable than decay. Latour offers a much more sensible and politically productive way of dealing with this impasse. After all, decay is no more inevitable than enlightenment.

One conservative (and frequently still popular) idea about science is that what we call science is wholly right and true, and what we call pseudo-science, or what gets relegated to the dustbin of science’s history, is wholly wrong. All my intellectual colleagues will describe how crude and over-simplified this idea is. They all hear it from their first-year students — it’s still widely believed. It’s the kind of faith in science that New Atheists have been peddling for decades.

It’s far more accurate, when talking about the history of science, to treat some models of thought as being more true or more false than others. In other words, with complex systems of numbers, truth comes in degrees. Here’s an example. If you think about the history of evolution, the standard hardline evolutionist line is that Charles Darwin was right and more creationist perspectives wrong. But now contrast Darwin with other evolutionists. Denis Diderot postulated an evolutionary account of how life arose (according to some definitions, so did Aristotle). But because they had no empirical research backing up their claims, Darwin was more right than they were. But you can’t throw Diderot on the trash-heap of history, because at least he got it basically correct that life developed through evolutionary processes.

For example, Led Zeppelin's early
records synthesized musical influences
that had never come together before,
but their modern albums sound retro
because— Sorry, wrong Robert.

Now contrast Darwin with empirically-minded theorists of evolution who postulated methods other than natural selection, like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His vision of the inheritance of acquired traits turned out to be untrue, but he no creationist, and certainly not of the idiotic Biblical literalist stripe with the highest influence today, which even frustrate theologians. But Darwin also wasn’t right either.

Darwin never had a solid idea about the mechanism of carrying the inherited traits. Gregor Mendel’s experiments that systematized how inheritance worked were popularized only after Darwin’s death. The discovery of DNA as the cellular carrier of traits made Darwin’s theory obsolete. Nonetheless, we don’t denounce Darwin as wrong. He was just less right than evolutionary theory that was able to account for inheritance through DNA. And the first theorists of DNA were less right than most evolutionary biologists today. DNA was first conceived as carrying traits simply: that there would be ‘a gene’ ‘for’ big ears, eye colour, or proclivity to heart disease. We have since discovered that our genetic code operates in a complex relationship with protein folding in developmental processes that unfold in terms of contingencies and tendencies. Nonetheless, Watson and Crick’s generation of biologists isn’t wrong; they just held hypotheses that never worked out, because the world turned out to be more complicated.

When it comes to science, the law of the excluded middle doesn’t hold. This is true for morality, history, and all of existence. Either/or is so outdated. I like to keep my logic fuzzy.

This Is Progress? Research Time, 27/02/2014

The core of the Utopias project lies in the human relationship with time. It’s not about a categorical statement of the relationship itself, but how we conceive of our temporality. In this, Bruno Latour actually provides a central thesis, because We Have Never Been Modern considers a central element of so-called Modernity as an era of human history to be a conception of temporality that is bound up with progress.

Bruno Latour makes an argument. I do not know if he
succeeded.

Progress is an essential part of the rhetoric of modernity as a human epoch. This isn’t a result of a conceptual argument about modernity, but begins from simply looking at what people wrote and believed in Europe and America’s secular intellectual communities. Human history itself was conceived as a progressive drive, which Latour cites the poet Charles Péguy describing with the metaphor of time itself as a savings bank. The future will always be better than the past, goes this vision, as human science and technology improves the condition of our species and world. Any attempt to return to the past fetishizes archaism on this conception of temporality, because the march of time is a continual march of improvement. So goes the philosophical analysis of the rhetoric of progress that developed from the European Enlightenment period.

If you look back at the writings of intellectuals and influential people from the 18th to the 20th century, this rhetoric of progress appears everywhere. Latour gives a fascinating analysis of the concept of progress: it implies that every moment, or at least every point in time where a present can be divided from a past, where you can make even the most minor epochal distinction, contains a revolution. Latour, I think as part of his own rhetorical tendency, describes this as the creation of the past. 

Of course, this is not in a literal ontological sense of creating the past, but creating a particular relationship of present humanity with its history. Every technological shift brings about an improvement in the human condition, such that a return to the previous era would be a categorical loss. Before the Scientific Revolution, we lived in the Dark Ages; before the French Revolution,* we lived in chains. This was a place to which we should not return. This is the concept of time and human temporality that Latour says is the essence of Western secular Modernity, and it’s a concept that would make a fantastic framework of analysis (one of many) for the Utopias project.

* Or the American Revolution, or the Communist Revolution, or any other of your preference.

Although Latour writes of Western society as if it had made uniform social growth regarding these problems, such cultural uniformity is always an illusion. Any diagnosis of a particular problem of thought will never apply without exception to a society. Let me give you an example. Latour writes as if this conception of progressive time no longer applies to our society. He argues for this, in part, by briefly constructing a narrative of major streams of philosophy in France over the 20th century that illustrates a growing critique of the traditional value of progress from within the conceptual conditions of Modernity: he includes phenomenology, Heidegger’s mourning of Being, semiotics, Habermas’ theory of communicative discourse, and the despairing nihilism of the paradigm postmodernists Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Beaudrillard.

Latour’s book itself, coming out in France in 1991, would have begun an epoch of positive critique of the structure of Modernity that could achieve creative steps to think without the narrative of inevitable progress or the irredeemable collapse of progress. But in 1992, Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order was released. This book amounts to a culturally conservative critique of the ideas Latour would pursue in The Politics of Nature a decade early. 

"Your Honour, I call the plaintiffs to the stand."

In 1999, the original French-language version of this latter book described a model of politics that included nonhuman creatures as a means of approaching our global ecological crises. But Ferry had already argued in his own book that any attempt to include nonhumans in political procedures would destroy human freedom by subordinating our concerns to those of animals and plants. He introduced his book with reference to a Medieval canon law by which human farmers would sometimes have to pay restitution to rats, allowing them to eat some of their crops as compromises over territory disputes in their fields. Yes, it was pure rhetoric, but it was rhetoric that Latour had already said in 1991 would no longer be believable: referring back to a time before a particular democratic revolution, in this case against the legal power of the Church in daily life, as a Dark Age to which we would be horrified to return. Just a year after Latour declared it impossible, a major intellectual of his own country argued against environmentalist principles in the name of preserving a rationalist vision of progress.

I think it’s always a danger in philosophy of losing your arguments simply because we trade in universal statements. Whenever someone argues that society had reached a particular point that makes some particular perspective impossible to think, such a supposedly impossible thought will appear to criticize you.

A Parliament of Beings, A History Boy, 26/02/2014

The work of Bruno Latour fascinates me in many ways. I wouldn’t write about him here if he didn’t. The ideas of his book, The Politics of Nature, were originally going to play a minor role in the dissertation version of my Ecophilosophy manuscript, but my advisor told me that my brief account passed over the complexity of his ideas too quickly, and I cut that small section.

He was right, but I’m still skeptical of Latour’s development of his ideas in that 2004 book about a parliament of nonhuman, and even non-organic, creatures. Here’s my problem in a cursory format. The Politics of Nature is an attempt at a solution of the modern ecological crisis, which in that book, Latour interprets as a problem of inclusion in the political process. In other words, our politics today focus on the concerns of humans alone, but this anthropocentric focus has blinded us to the destructive aspects of actions for the benefit of humanity (industrial technological development, the physically violent extraction of resources from the land) because nonhuman bodies, those we relegate to the sphere of nature, bear the brunt of such destruction.

Latour strikes me as a philosopher who
develops very complex ideas that have very
simple problems.

His proposal in The Politics of Nature was to open human politics to creatures and bodies normally considered natural, and my initial problem with his account was that he anthropomorphized nonhumans too much. He analyzed the possible dynamics of political problems that would arise when animals, plants, fungi, and ecosystems were given a place in a parliament that would let their voices be heard. Quite literally, this is impossible, because only humans have language, and it is difficult to discern whether nonhumans of various kinds can even be said to have interests. Animals have desires, plants have circumstances of flourishing, ecosystems have tendencies and conditions for their stable development, but only humans can be said to have self-conscious interests in the sense that they can be politically activated. We’re self-conscious social creatures who regulate ourselves on macroscopic scales by creating systems of morality and political institutions about and through which we communicate linguistically. Articulating political interests require self-consciousness and language. Humans seem to be the only creatures on Earth who have these abilities. 

The suggestion in The Politics of Nature was that scientific instruments can be developed that can translate the actions of nonhumans into specific statements of interests.* From one perspective, my Ecophilosophical perspective agrees with this idea: if we take the health and flourishing of nonhuman creatures and systems seriously, we will learn more about them, and so be better able to deal with them, and ensure that our environmental negotiations no longer work by destruction and pure exploitation, but through compromise. My real problem is that I hate the way Latour anthropomorphizes his language about nonhumans so much.

* My second, less serious, problem with Latour’s vision in that book is that he relies so heavily on the institution of science to develop magical ways to translate the activity of nonhumans into the language of interests, so that we can conceive of them as actors. His early books on the sociology of scientific communities, institutions, and practice showed how difficult it is to get any coherent, unified model from the complicated fumbling of the contemporary scientific establishment. The politics and economics of laboratories, universities, corporations, and research institutions prevent the practical unity of science at all, let alone the development of their communities along the virtuous paths of emancipating our environmental politics through including all creatures in a parliament. 

But his basic idea of reintroducing science to its political dimensions results in these anthropomorphic conceptual frameworks. The first major chapter of his 1991 We Have Never Been Modern describes the historical conflict that resulted in our current separation of the political for the realm of humans alone and nature for the realm of nonhumans. Thomas Hobbes developed a political philosophy that was immensely influential in conceiving, for the first time in the West, politics as the exclusive domain of humans. 

Progenitor of modern experimental science
Robert Boyle, who, despite the hair, is not
to be confused with Robert Plant.

Robert Boyle simultaneously developed experimental science as a means of using special instruments, controlled by an elite group of experts, to reveal and create new truths about nature. After all, laboratories do technically create new truths. Experimental science creates situations that can never happen in nature precisely because its practitioners control more variables than ever stay constant in natural events. So we create scenarios that can never occur naturally to discover facts about bodies that have indirect and pivotal affects on their ordinary behaviour, which are never directly visible in that behaviour.

Latour’s analysis is basically that Boyle had to develop a new concept for the experimental science practitioner so that they could practice without political interference, so that a king and his army could never interpret the activities of scientists and philosophers as a threat to royal authority. Even though such people are, at their best, threats to established authority, we have an interest in keeping this secret from those authorities so that we can remain alive to make our threats. So Boyle developed the notion that matters of politics were separate from matters of natural science. In the modern era, this is biting us in the ass, as the industrial technology scientific research has developed has resulted in our current ecological crisis.

This is the first of several points on Latour’s ideas that will come in the next week or so as I dive back through We Have Never Been Modern with an eye to adapting some of its ideas to Ecophilosophy manuscript revisions and Utopias project concepts. The relevant aspects of environmental philosophy are obvious. For the Utopias project, the book touches on ideas of how inclusion and political boundaries can shape political ideals. More to come.