The Summer 2009 issue of The New Atlantis is now hot off the press and I have a article entitled “Technocracy and Populism” among the mix. The New Atlantis really is one of my favortite journals, always has lots of interesting and cutting edge studies exploring the intersection of science, policy, and political philosophy, and now boasts our own Peter Lawler as a contributing editor. Below is a short excerpt from my piece:
The basic political premise of techno-politics is that the classic question regarding competing claims to rule has been decisively answered. Instead of Plato’s philosopher king we get his emasculated modern descendant: the rational bureaucrat. The ascendancy of techno-politics also assumes that human behavior has been rendered docile—the victory of administrative science over practical statesmanship is based on an exaggerated version of Montesquieu’s prediction that a turn to commercial pursuits would usher in a general “softening of mores.” The turn to benign interests is a turn away from the messier and more obviously political questions that involve the identification of a controversial good and the contest among citizens vying for honor. The incoherence within the technocratic view of political life is that it simultaneously denies a politics based on the love of honor and showers honor upon those who claim a greater share of reason. In contradistinction to honor politics, the rule of management science presupposes men that are easily manageable, subject to domestication, and satisfied by the appropriate calculus of interests. If politics is nothing but the deliberative regulation of benign interest, then the simple rule of administrative competence might actually suffice.
However, there are also men who are driven by more than merely interest—they also want honor and a recognition of their individual importance, and ironically enough, this includes the technocrat. It would be impossible, for example, to describe the debate regarding abortion as a mere clash of interests—that would not account for the fierce, sometimes violent defense each side offers of its position and corresponding worldview. Human beings are spirited, or have what the ancient Greeks called thumos, that inclination to angrily demand the honor that is owed them and recognized in the political theater. Prudence and genuine public debate are politically necessary because politics is more than the pedestrian management of competing interests—it is the dangerous juggling of angry claims to be praised and blamed.
The sum result of the technocratic presumption that politics is nothing other than hyper-rational game theory is the stark de-politicization of human desire—the crucial importance of the ancient distinction between thumos and more pedestrian desire (epithumia) is discarded for the indiscriminately homogeneous “passions of the soul,” as Descartes articulates it. From the perspective of classical philosophy, the satisfaction of human desire was always understood to be an inherently political enterprise, not only because of our natural sociability and mutual dependence, but also because human desire itself stubbornly, even angrily, resists being decisively tamed by any soothing, bureaucratic lullaby. If the whole human person is always and necessarily a mix of logos and eros, and sometimes a volatile one, then any attempt to assimilate desire into logos will necessarily fail. The hallmark of modern science when applied to political life is the tyranny of technological reason over those aspects of human experience that defy it; in this way, Descartes flipped Cicero’s famous dictum that it is “often the nature of politics to defeat reason” on its head. The dream of modern science is the absolute victory of human reason over an incomprehensible and indifferent cosmos, of which the chaos of human political life is an exemplary microcosm.
June 17th, 2009 | 12:29 pm
Might it be better to say that the dream of “modernism” is the absolute victory of human reason? Surely science and technology are essential aspects of “overcoming” a confusing and mysterious cosmos, but is the pursuit of science itself inherently hubristic?
June 17th, 2009 | 1:18 pm
Jonathan: Two issues there: one is that it’s not so easy to discretely sequester the aims of science from the core of modernism–both seems intermingled in an essential manner. Two, the pursuit of science is not necessarily hubristic but hubris has been in fact woven into the fabric of science’s original intentions. In fact, I spend some of the article arguing that science isn’t any more morally neutral than it is ontologically neutral–it articulates a certain view of nature, of man, and therefore of man’s relation to nature, that not only has profound moral implications but was specifically designed to chart a new moral course, not merely a new technological one.
June 17th, 2009 | 1:23 pm
“It would be impossible, for example, to describe the debate regarding abortion as a mere clash of interests—that would not account for the fierce, sometimes violent defense each side offers of its position and corresponding worldview.”
The abortion debate describes those who participate based on their recognition of the sanctity of human life, where the “divine gift of self is recongized as self,” where being is co-existent with the divine reality, parousia, and thereby developing toward order and justice, and by those who are derailed. Is it not, in this instance, that thumos is overshadowed by the recognition of parousia in the fetus?
June 17th, 2009 | 2:46 pm
Bob: I’m not making the claim that debates like the abortion one reduce to thymos or honor but rather that the very real prescence of both contradict the attempt to make them solely about a clash of interests or a scientific misunderstanding. One of the reasons pro-choice/pro-life folks have such a hard time debating civilly with each other is because they both view the stakes as high AND because the divide between them morally/ontologically/spiritually etc is so deep and wide.
June 17th, 2009 | 6:09 pm
I wonder if casting the debate as reason vs. honor downplays the desire of our contemporary individuals to limit the reach of science even while granting it absolute rule within its wide latitudes. I also wonder whether Plato’s philosopher-king was all that masculine to begin with. Sorry to take two potshots and run but it’s that kind of evening! You’re definitely right, Ivan, that the evacuation of desire from politics has the creepy consequence of making our beastly desires increasingly ‘political’.
June 18th, 2009 | 8:49 am
Modern politics, insofar as it is principled, is too abstract to be EROTIC. That’s why the particularly erotic or personal issues should be decided by the people through legislative compromise and government as a whole should be as limited as possible. Both technocracy and honor are basically manly, although of course with different emphases. Great article.
June 20th, 2009 | 9:02 am
Is the word “thumos” or “thymos”?
A typo, or two different concepts?
As I recall from Fukuyama it was thymos.
June 20th, 2009 | 9:06 am
Science is actually anti-hubristic. Unlike religion, it assumes we don’t know. It also assumes all scientific results are subject to revision due to future discoveries. Most obvious example: Einstein upgrading Newton.
My guess is the people you’re talking about are engaging in scientism, not science.
June 21st, 2009 | 12:43 pm
Sally — the ‘y’ in this Greek word makes an ‘ooo’ sound.
June 21st, 2009 | 10:51 pm
Ian,
David Brooks, in a NYT column last week, argued that Obama’s long term strategy in regards to health care is to hand the issue over to MedPac, a group of technocratic experts. It will be another instance where he can say he has moved “beyond politics” and “put science in its rightful place.”
June 22nd, 2009 | 3:07 pm
With all due respect Sally, that’s not an adequate description of science or religion. It’s hard to square the anti-hubristic depiction of science with the valorization of autonomous reason or the “relief of man’s estate”–in many ways, modern science is born out of a defense of willful human pride versus Biblical humility–Descartes’ rehabiliatation of pride in the Discourse on Method is clearly directed towards Christian humility. Peter, thanks for the high praise and Jason, thanks for directing me to that article.
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