The Time When The Left Was Fatally Infected With The Habit of Objectifying Life and Instrumental Reasoning

Going back to the mid-1970s can seem like a trip to another section of the country where brand names, once available but now discontinued where you live, are still on the shelves.  In the following there is an illusion to B. F. Skinner's late behaviorist exposition showing us the true and good and sciency way "Beyond Freedom and Dignity," which was, within a couple of years, to be junked in favor of the flashy, even more sciency, modernistic and wonky Sociobiology, itself to quickly metastasize into "Evolutionary" Psychology, even more effectively infecting the educated class.

Such anachronisms may have that effect on those of us old enough to remember that time, it will likely seem quite a bit more antique to younger people, those who have grown up with evo-psy being the only framing they're likely to have encountered to think about these things.  But what Joseph Weizenbaum warned about in his book has only changed in small ways and, as in the trade in of behaviorism for evo-psy, the tendencies in destructive thinking have combined the mania for genetic determinism with the other trends he discusses.

Even physicians, formerly the culture's very symbol of power, are powerless as they increasingly become the mere conduits between their patients and the major drug manufacturers.  Patients, in turn, are more and more merely passive objects on whom cures are wrought and to whom things are done.  Their own inner healing resources, their capacities for self-reintegration, whether psychic or physical, are more and more regarded as irrelevant in a medicine that can hardly distinguish a human patient from a manufactured object.  The now ascendant biofeedback movement may be the penultimate act in the drama separating man from nature;  man no longer even senses himself, his body, directly, but only through pointer readings, flashing lights, and buzzing sounds produced by instruments attached to him as speedometers are attached to automobiles.  The ultimate act of the drama is, of course, the final holocaust that wipes life out altogether. 

Technological inevitability can thus be seen to be a mere element of a much larger syndrome.  Science promised man power.  But, as so often happens when people are seduced by promises of power, the price exacted in advance and all along the path, and the price actually paid, is servitude and impotence.  Power is nothing if it is not the power to choose.  Instrumental reason can make decisions, but there is all the difference between deciding and choosing.

The people Studs Terkel is talking about [in his book "Working"] make decisions all day long, every day.  But they appear not to make choices.  They are as they themselves testify, like Winograd's robot. One asks it "Why do you do that?" and it answers "Because this or that decision branch in my program happened to come out that way."  And one asks "Why did you get to that branch?"  and it again answers in the same way.  But its final answer is "Because you told me to."  Perhaps every human act involves a chain of calculations at what a systems engineer would call decision nodes.   but the difference between a mechanical act and an authentically human one is that the latter terminates at a node whose decisive parameter is not "Because you told me to," but "Because I choose to."  At that point calculations and explanations are displaced by truth.  Here, too, is revealed the poverty of Simon's hypothesis that 

" The whole man, like the ant, viewed as a behaving system  is quite simple.  The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself." 

For that hypothesis to be true, it would also have to be true that man's capacity for choosing is as limited as is the ant's, that man has no more will or purpose, and, perhaps most importantly, no more a self-transcendent sense of obligation to himself as part of the continuum of nature, than does the ant.  Again, it is a mystery why anyone would want to believe this to be the true condition of man.

But now and then a small light appears to penetrate the murky fog that obscures man's authentic capacities    Recently, for example, a group of eminent biologists urged their colleagues to discontinue certain experiments in which new types of biologically functional bacterial plasmids were created.   They express "serious concern that some of these artificial recombinant DNA molecules could prove biologically hazardous."  Their concern is, so they write, for the possible unfortunate consequences of the indiscriminate application of these techniques."  Theirs is certainly a step in the right direction, and their initiative is to be applauded.  Still, one many ask, why do they feel they have to give a reason for what they recommend at all?  Is not the overriding obligation on men, including men of science, to exempt life itself from the madness of treating everything as an object,  a sufficient reason, and one that does not even have to be spoken?  Why does it hve to be explained?   It wold appear that even the noblest acts of the most well-meaning people are poisoned by the corrosive climate of values of our time. 

An easy explanation of this, and perhaps it contains truth, is that well-meaningness has supplanted nobility altogether.  But there is a more subtle one.  Our time prides itself from having finally achieved the freedom from censorship for which libertarians in all ages have struggled.  Sexual matters can now be discussed more freely than ever before,  women are beginning to find their rightful place in society, and, in general,  ideas that could only be whispered until a decade or so ago may now circulate without restriction.  The credit for these great achievements is claimed by the new spirit of rationalism, a rationalism that, it is argued, has finally been able to tear from man's eyes the shrouds imposed by mystical thought, religion, and such powerful illusions as freedom and dignity.  Science has given us this great victory over ignorance.  But, on closer examination, this victory too can be seen as an Orwellian triumph of an even higher ignorance;  what we have gained is a new conformism, which permits us to say anything that can be said in the functional languages of instrumental reason, but forbids us to allude to what Ionesco called the living truth.  Just as our television screens may show us unbridled violence in "living color" but not scenes of authentic intimate love - the former by itself-obscene reversal of values is said to be "real," whereas the latter is called obscene - so we may discuss the very manufacture of life and its "objective" manipulation, but we may not mention God, grace, or morality.  Perhaps the biologists who urge their colleagues to do the right thing, but for the wrong reasons, are in fact motivated by their own deep reverence for life and by their own authentic humanity, only they dare not say so.  In any case, such arguments would not be "effective," that is to say, instrumental. 

If that is so, then those who censor their own speech do so, to use an outmoded expression, at the peril of their souls. 

As I mentioned, after he left MIT, Weizenbaum moved back to Berlin and the last decades of his life were conducted largely in German, far too little of it translated into English.  I would like to know what he made of the internet and the trends in diseased thinking it seems to have both revealed and, likely, accelerated.  I find everything he mentions in this aging book is quite relevant.

B. F. Skinner's book was influential when this was written, his behaviorism about to be junked in favor of Dawkins' "selfish genes",  showing that, if anything, the insight that Weizenbaum had was spot on.   I think the survival of Weizenbaum's insights prove he identified habits of thought and features of modern culture that are the base on which much if not all of the edifice of current intellectual life is built, the common feature that even officially opposing ideologies and even "sciences" are built.   Even opposing ideas will have those features as a basic assumption, often unconsidered because they are what has been asserted comprises "reality".  Not based in human experience but in the "knowledge given us by science".   I think that is where the dangers are found.

I believe this was the crucial period during which liberalism, in the American sense of that word, the tradition of humane struggle for all people to have a decent, kind, peaceful life based in an equal access to resources and such things as respect, turned to something harder and more in line with the instrumental reasoning of this passage.  If you want to find out where the left went seriously wrong, why, even as Democrats held the legislative and executive branches of government, they couldn't move a truly liberal agenda, this time in the late 60s and early 70s, this book, is a good place to look.  Under the regime of thinking warned about, even people who want to live a decent life will end up producing tragedy.  Instrumental thinking can produce a libertarian-utilitarian system, it can't produce the kind of life that is the only legitimate goal of genuine liberalism.  People don't even realize that's what they want as they are angrily disappointed by the "liberal" politicians who don't seem to understand why what they produce is ineffective and unsatisfying, that it misses the real and forgotten goal.