In his book, The Malaise of Modernity, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor said:
Once society no longer has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are no longer grounded in the order of things or the will of God, they are in a sense up for grabs. They can be redesigned with their consequences for the happiness and well-being of individuals as our goal. The yardstick that henceforth applies is that of instrumental reason.
Which is the most optimistic thing that can be said about it. In reality, when society has lost a sense of the sacred, of God, the imperative of individuals with more power and greater abilities will devise methods of finding optimal gratification for themselves and to set up structures which will bend other individuals to their purpose. And some of those whose evil is, though less dramatic, no less apart of the greater evil protect far lesser levels of power and affluence, including that attainable through an academic career. It can even be true of institutions that officially stand against the very acts they end up supporting. You can see that in a very developed form in the British class system, which incorporated the nominally Christian established church within its aristocracy and so bent what most people experience as "the will of God" to its entirely Mammonist ends.*
How otherwise good people come to do bad things has to be understood if there is any hope of doing better. Especially important is for them to understand what their real motives are and that they don't tell themselves lies of convenience about those and what they do. A lot of evil is done with the doer playing the role of passive observer, even as they act in real life.
One of the things that isn't talked about anywhere often enough is the destructive force of instrumental reasoning, the default habit of thought that pervades modern culture, thinking that is derived from the methods of science and which, in the disasters that result from it, show how dangerous that can be when applied generally. This is among the most forbidden, criminal of all thoughts in the thinking class, today. It has been criminal thinking for a long, long time, especially among The English Speaking People.
I will start with a passage from the greatly neglected book, Computer Power And Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum.
It is hard, when one sees a particularly offensive television commercial, to imagine that adult human beings sometime and somewhere sat around a table and decided to construct exactly that commercial and to have it broadcast hundreds of times. But that is what happens. These things are not products of anonymous forces. They are the products of groups of men who have agreed among themselves that this pollution of the consciousness of the people serves their purposes.
But, as has been true since the beginning of recorded history, decisions having the most evil consequences are often made in the service of some overriding good. For example, in the summer of 1966 there was considerable agitation in the United States over America's intensive bombing of North Viet Nam. (The destruction rained on South Viet Nam by American bombers was less of an issue in the public debate, because the public was still persuaded that America was "helping" that unfortunate land.) Approximately forty American scientists who were high in the scientific estate decided to help stop the bombing by convening a summer study group under the auspices of the Institute of Defense Analyses, a prestigious consulting firm for the Department of Defense. They intended to demonstrate that the bombing was in fact ineffective.
They made their demonstration using the best scientific tools, operations research and systems analysis and all that. But they felt they would not be heard by the Secretary of Defense unless they suggested an alternative to the bombing. They proposed that an "electronic fence" be placed in the so-called demilitarized zone separating South from North Viet Nam. This barrier was supposed to stop infiltrators from the North. It was to consist of, among other devices, small mines seeded into the earth, and specifically designed to blow off porters' feet but to be insensitive to truck passing over them. Other devices were to interdict truck traffic. The various electronic sensors, their monitors, and so on, eventually became part of the so-called McNamara line. This was the beginning of what has since developed into the concept of the electronic battlefield.
The intention of most of these men was not to invent or recommend a new technology that would make warfare more terrible and, by the way, less costly to highly industrialized nations at the expense of "undeveloped" ones. Their intention was to stop the bombing. In this they were wholly on the side of the peace groups and of well-meaning citizens generally. And they actually accomplished their objective; the bombing of North Viet Nam was stopped for a time and the McNamara fence was installed. However, these enormously visible and influential people could have instead simply announced that they believed the bombing, indeed the whole American Viet Nam adventure, to be wrong, and that they would no longer "help." I know that at least some of the participants believes that the war was wrong; perhaps all of them did. But, as some of them explained to me later, they felt that if they made such an announcement, they would not be listened to, then or ever again. Yet, who can tell what effect it would have had if forty of America's leading scientists had, in the summer of 1966, joined the peace groups in coming out flatly against the war on moral grounds? Apart form the positive effect such a move might have had on world events, what negative effect did their compromise have on themselves and on their colleagues and students for whom they served as examples?
There are several lessons to be learned from this episode. The first is that it was not technological inevitability that invented the electronic battlefield, nor was it a set of anonymous forces. men just like the ones who design television commercials sat around a table and chose. Yet the outcome of the debates of the 1966 Summer Study were in a sense foreordained. The range of answers one gets is determined by the domain of questions one asks. As soon as it was settled that the Summer Study was to concern itself with only technical questions, the solution to the problem of stopping the bombing of the North became essentially a matter of calculation. When the side condition was added that the group must at all costs maintain its credibility with its sponsors, that it must not imperil the participants' "insider" status, then all degrees of freedom that its members might have had initially were effectively lost. Many of the participants have, I know, defended academic freedom, their own as well as that of of colleagues whose careers were in jeopardy for political reasons. These men did not perceive themselves to be risking their scholarly or academic freedoms when they engaged in the kind of consulting characterized by the Summer Study. But the sacrifice of the degrees of freedom they might have had if they had not so thoroughly abandoned themselves to their sponsors, whether they made that sacrifice unwittingly or not, was a more potent form of censorship than any that could possibly have been imposed by officials of the state. This kind of intellectual self-mutilation, precisely because it is largely unconscious, is a principal source of the feeling of powerlessness experienced by so many people who appear, superficially at least, to occupy seats of power.
I will continue with his text, tomorrow.
It is appropriate that Weizenbaum began with an example from the media, which the advertising industry is. I would argue that since all media, even the alleged "public" media and even those like the BBC, Deutsche Welle and others is first interested in the perpetuation and expansion of the institution, its funding source is the real determining force in how things are said, what is said and which determines the objective of its message. The participants in the summer study group allowed their considerations and conclusions to be determined by their desire to protect their status with their funders and sponsors, their vehicle to attain status as "insiders" and the entire media, especially that based in Washington DC, New York city and other centers of establishment power, have that as their real, first imperative. You can safely conclude what the perceived boundaries of permitted thought are by seeing what is said in the most prestigious media organizations and how it is said.
As Weizenbaum continued with the work of scientists, applying scientific methods and thinking - the embodiment of instrumental reasoning at its most intentional and in its most embodied form - can be at service to evil and the virtue that scientific method and thinking is reputed to be can blind even the most intelligent people to what they are really doing. Their chosen method carries an imperative force that they feel must be "allowed" to reach its end, allowing them to pretend that they aren't the authors of whatever that is, shielding them from the reality that any evil results of it are the product of their choices and their actions. The pretense that the acts of choice they make are the results of atavistic forces outside of their control is enabled by the scientific trappings in which they dress them. This shows how they, with the best of intentions, allow the prestige of science and academia to mask what they are really doing from themselves. They postpone the moment of moral choice into some never to come future in order to serve other ends that they don't admit to.
The role that science has played in almost all of the greatest acts of evil in the modern period is not much different in motive from that which is attributable to religious establishments. Even the accurate history of religion in the world - as opposed to that promoted by atheists, which is frequently about as accurate as the National Enquirer - is a record of far too many evil acts that violate the official moral stands of those religions. Only, as the real religion of the political and economic (and so academic and media) establishment today, second only to money in its pious regard, the buffer between what is supposed to be and what actually is, remains in place. That is especially dangerous when it is science that is the method of permitting evil because of the physical efficacy that science can have. Science, from its beginnings and its first glimmerings in revered figures such as Archimedes made itself of use to worldy powers in their military manifestation. To deny that is even more dangerous than it is to lie about the results of religious figures setting up kingdoms of this world. The evil that a TV preacher can do is seldom more than contained in a small sphere of influence. At worst, science can unleash physical forces that could kill us all. It is one of the most telling facts about today's intellectual climate that the fact that science, existing only in the minds of scientists, has, knowingly put us all at risk of annihilation from nuclear weapons at each and every hour since they weaponized missiles, with the full knowledge of what those can do. The scientists who did that knew exactly what they were doing, they even calculated the number of people that any one bomb could be expected to kill. They made themselves part of the military machine of mass death with the full knowledge of what they were doing, they are the ones who told the generals and politicians what they could build them. Understanding how they did what they did, how they chose to become the engine that could drive us to planetary murder -suicide is one of the most important questions to ask. It can be asked of the science that ends in environmental disasters such as BP created in the Gulf of Mexico and so many others. Bringing that up is a crime of thought in our general culture, it is heresy to point these things out. It is especially forbidden to suggest that science and its methods, themselves, are what dictated the acts of science which is, by choice, removed from the moral choices that separate decent people from evil ones.
* Which might account for why, especially in Britain, religion has been so thoroughly discredited and why in the - formerly less class bound - United States religion retains more credibility. I think it also has something to do with the class based campaigning by those who want to discredit religion, making it declasse, literally. It is one of their most typical methods, to associate all of religion with lower class people in rural areas.
I would never say that there that there are not and have never been even members of the Anglican clergy who have tried to actually follow the teachings of Jesus and the prophets, though, as with some of the various Orthodox traditions, having a church established in such close connection to the government and ruling class of a country has proved to be a notable hindrance to avoiding the evil that is intrinsic to kingdoms of this world and, on some occasions, participating in its creation. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has never been more discredited than when it has either done the same thing or acted as a worldly kingdom in violation of the words of the man it holds is divine.
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