Ping Pong 44: Allsorts of Reasons
The deep assumption of Weber was that Reason tended to proceed in the same basic direction. Modernity would go somewhere because it was caught up in the same basic story – the advent of Reason. But what if, his near contemporary Bergson asked, Reason is not a monolithic entity, what if there are many different perfectly legitimate ways to reason? How would that affect our understanding of modernity? This question clearly has two quite distinct aspects. Firstly one must understand why reason might have differences in kind, and secondly what then follows from this difference.
Central to Bergson’s hypothesis is the idea that time does not differ in a way that reason finds easy to grasp. Reason, wants to reckon up in units, each of which are distinct from one another, and understandable as objects, while time understands this in terms of singularities, or agglomerations of difference. An action, be it a walk or the dissolving of sugar in a glass, is defined within a single span of time. At each point in that span, an action is happening, something is being done, something is being differed from what it was, and yet all those differences are held within the single action. Many changes happen, but all those changes lie within the same basic action, the same basic walk or dissolution of sugar. Moreover any one action not only contains smaller actions, but is also a part within a far wider orbit of acting. To be on a walk is to be a part of a day, or a part of a life, of a member within a society. Every action is therefore caught up in myriad different kinds of difference.
Difference becomes not about simple answers, and the simple arranging of one element within a series of other elements. On the contrary, at each and every point, strong connections, and unpredictable connections are being opened out between all kinds of levels and all sorts of actions. A problem that lies at the heart of modern government. Government tends to act always with one sphere in mind. It acts in the context of a certain series or set of circumstances. The problem is however that this action is then taken up into other series (of actions). Laws drafted against dangerous dogs, or against the fabled stranger danger or the terrorist, immediately become taken up and twisted in other contexts, and across other durations. Terrorist laws become used to police rubbish dumping, while laws about child molesting plug into a general malaise about the position of children.
Reason lacks the ability to produce unities because the very stuff of reality, differs in kind from itself at its inception. All Reason can do is then reckon up existing actions, one against the other, and hope in very limited circumstances, to balance them off against each other (and so produce spatial patterns). But this process is complicated because one cannot predict exactly how this pattern which one so very carefully discovers will behave across time. That is, one cannot easily grasp what other things they might lead to, or how they might be twisted into something very different. Ideas therefore such as a planned economy (or job creation schemes) come up against the hard reality, that the actual effects of these policies is very different from announcing them. Whether they work (or not), and what overall effect they have, is no exact science: At best it is a calculated gamble and at worst, the mere mouthing of actions without any merit or value.
Our world is therefore simply too diverse to plan or predict in any prolonged way. However, Bergson says that does not mean that one ought to conclude that one cannot reason at all. On the contrary he suggests, the problem is always to understand how Reason fits into the bigger picture of how each of its differences differ from one another. Here what are critical are two very basic tendencies within thought. On the one hand one might understand each action in terms of its immediate effects. When I drive a car, I think about the journey I make (and its cost), and nothing more. Reality becomes therefore understood in terms of a sequence of individual actions, with each action distinct and apparently unconnected with one another. However this distinction is of course false. The effects of driving mount up in a wider duration, and are a part of another story (the history of carbon on a planet). At one extreme, there are therefore only actions, and their deep and always unforeseeable consequences. On the other hand there is the opposite pole, of global history. Each change, has the same basic tendency Bergson suggests, of appearing predestined after it has occurred. History is the science of the ‘I could have told you so’. And yet at the same time, before the change has occurred, it is in itself utterly unforeseen and incalculable. History, and knowing exact where one is, is caught up in the game of delay. One waits, and in waiting, one’s world is resolved. Elements which appeared at odds or incompatible with one another, resolve into established and apparently natural forms.
Left to themselves these two tendencies form a dilemma. On the one hand humans might be active, and yet in acting they lack the power to reflect; when on the other they might reflect, and yet then cease to be active. Bergson formulated this dilemma by suggesting that human freedom exists within the gap which one can install within action. The physical world exists as a mere action and reaction, with no delay. It is then the role of the human brain to insert a degree of delay between these immediacies. A brain occupies this delay, this duration, and within it, reckons up different possibilities, and different apparent approaches, before acting. - From which formula two things immediately follow. Firstly it is clear that in a sense this basic division highlights what is at stake in global warming. A warmed planet is so worrying because warmth, in increasing the overall engineering within a system, tends (and it is only a tendency) to reduce the scope that one has to insert a delay into the entire system. One tends therefore to have to act quicker and sooner. In warming the planet we are therefore removing the very landscape of delay upon which future understandings could be based. The world, and our ability to understand it is forced into a single orbit or axis as it becomes very difficult to keep actions at bay.
On the other hand it is clear that the pure tendencies which render humanity either creative and passive or active and immediate are just tendencies. No human is therefore purely active or purely passive. They are on the contrary merely arranged across an axis of action or passion, at parts one, and at parts the other. Every circumstance is therefore the agglomeration of actions and passions. Perhaps here one might dissolve three basic alternatives or types. One might understand actions as the perpetual result of a duration which remains in itself more or less the same (it merely has endless consequences). Alternatively one might understand a duration as it is composed within actual actions, and comes to be what it is through them and across them. Finally one might attempt to understand the world through an exchange of the two differing elements. Each of these options will then be considered in turn.
The tragic modern example of the first of these actions is found in the creation and support of the Nation State of Israel. Here is a state which was really created because of three distinct histories. Firstly there is a three thousand year old land claim (which is for the West Bank really). This land claim happens to be supported by three world religions, and therefore is allowed a degree of sanctity which most early Iron Age land claims are not usually permitted. Secondly there is a totally different stream of events which saw during the last three hundred years or so, the triumph of the nation state over all other forms or possibilities of government. One people or host culture, one nation, one state or something like that (one might compromise to expand the people element) has become our political mantra. The Iron Age myths suddenly become what they had never been, -they become a manifesto for a nation and a people, the manifesto that would allow them a state of their own, at whatever consequence (and makes it in itself a tragedy that they have not). Finally there is the totally different history of oppression of a minority of people within Europe over a long span of time. For whatever reason in the West (but not the Middle East), the Jews have been persecuted, a persecution which of course came to a head in the Second World War. These three separate strands or durations became then blended together in the creation of Israel. No matter that this creation discriminated against those people who has not been so bad to the Jews, namely the Moslems, while it indirectly benefited those who had been, the Christian West: In a sense indeed it moved what the oppression was. The guilty party became the Moslems because due to an accident of history they occupied the land that the Iron Age land claim related to. This ‘occupation’ became the cause for the oppression and not the small minded bigotry of the West. No matter also that the creation led to large-scale movements of people, and very deep social and political upheaval. No matter that the state so created can only be maintained if one America uses its military and diplomatic muscle to support it come what may. All that mattered was the past that dictated the necessity of such a state.
Moreover is it then this very past which dictates how Israel at least (and its allies) understand the present. The actual world of crushing military supremacy, and absolute oppression and misery, is lost within an Iron Age xenophobia, and a perpetual feeling of oppression. The past is thereby seen to dictate the policies and actions of the present to an amazing degree. Realities of other’s weakness and other’s desperation, disappear within a story of one people’s oppression (and liberation). The result of course is that a past is allowed to erupt into a present, and endlessly disrupt and destabilize it.
The second option considered above, centred around the manner in which the immediate can be taken up and fractured into history. We all know the scenario. Any and every new invention is heralded as the panacea, which will cure all (or at least a number) of he world’s ills. A particular action is therefore abstracted from its particular circumstance, and becomes a general principle within which we all now must live. This is very much the political problem which technology imposed. A good Weberian technocrat such as Gordon Brown would always like to create a reasoned society, which effectively is the one which uses the best available technology. The problem is though, that this technology is endlessly shifting. He is endlessly caught therefore in a cycle of perpetual hope. A technology comes along (for example LPG fuel, clean diesel, or the battery car), and he heralds it as the solution to a problem (in this case of transport). However this solution then fails to be as readily universalizable as he hoped, and anyway becomes replaced by the next latest thing, and so a new policy is created, and the old preferences swept aside. To be a technocrat in the current world becomes therefore a very frustrating experience for oneself (and even more for one’s people). One can never be sure what is around the corner, or where invention will lead. One can never simply trust the technology to improve, but will rather be forever lurching around, and finding new things to do.
This last problem is made all the worse, because it is of course rather difficult to spot which technologies are going to succeed and which are not. The technocrat is therefore caught up in a perpetual battle. There is always a risk (or even a likelihood) that the solutions which they have adopted will by the time they are imposed, not be the best ones for the job. A fact that might have consequences of its own (the system might be overwhelmed or become moribund or unpopular or ridiculed). Government ends up always either playing catch up with technology (as it takes time for a contract to be enforced) or else caught up in a perpetual gamble about what will be important ‘five years down the line’. A gamble which they are then very unable to get right.
The final option mentioned above, sought to set up an exchange between actions and passions. Such exchanges in a sense are the domain of our everyday life. Take as an example a brand product. This product is at once the creation of advertising, which spins a story and a whirl of what might be if one only buys this product. It therefore creates or perhaps populates our minds with apparent options. Individuals then buy the product based on these options, and evaluate it according to very different criteria. These criteria judge it according to whether it is useful, and how it actually performs. There is then nothing to stop this second axis reflecting the first (the adverts might not lie), but then there is nothing to keep the two worlds in concord either. Many products (Coca-Cola) are defined by their adverts alone, while other products are good enough to do with minimal advertising (or use word of mouth alone). Our world is thereby composed of a world of rumour, and a world of action, and the two endlessly cross relate with one another.
However the last two points, which centre on the power of technology to change the way that we understand reason but also how society operates, themselves create new issues. If technology itself can change the way in which we are forced to understand the world, and break the Weberian unity of reasons, as Bergson appears to suggest, then it will be worth investigating in detail how this change effects us, and what might follow on from this second ‘industrial or technological revolution’. A topic I will look at in the next of these Rants.
