by Matthew Hammond
Ping Pong 43: At the Gates of Rationality
Perhaps Weber’s most lasting idea is that the pressure of modernity will gut both society and humanity. So that in contrast to Marx, for Weber, the task is not to liberate true individuality from the shackles of society; and in contrast to Durkhiem it is not society that itself has a reality beyond all individuality. Rather, Weber suggests it is the case, that the rules of rationality, and the demands of an increasingly bureaucratic social order will overwhelm and then dominate all individuality and all attempts to create different societies. Justice will be defined, he suggested, increasingly by the rule book, and the cold social order.
In making such a depressing claim, Weber is highlighting two very deep facets of modernity. On the one hand there is an increasingly tendency to dissolve individuality into rules, however those rules are conjugated. Weber tended to understand those rules in terms of the law, however his theory works equally well, when it is understood as describing a medical rather than a legal paradigm. Humanity might be free of the bureaucratic book of rules, and yet be constantly defining new medical conditions, new ‘spectrum complaints’ and new ‘treatments’, by which normality (or as near as damn it) can be medicalised and routinised. That is the fierce joy of the bureaucratic to find a principle, a rule for all situations, is now the joy we find in running together ourselves and our biology, with the physical world of chemicals and the electrical world of the microchip. We have simply found a new, and rather different way of becoming as a machine (and so have an owner’s manual).
On the other hand, Weber insists that new technologies create differences in the power of the state and individuality. As a rule he argued, the state will want to use technologies to extend its power over individuality. What is more, given its superior resources and finance, this struggle will be for Weber rather an unequal one. The state will therefore use whatever means it has, to increasingly police individuality, and to seek to intervene earlier and harder on potential trouble makers. Here of course Weber can only be said to be partiality right. The state had until the last twenty years or so been the main beneficiary of technology; however the personal computer and even more the internet actually challenged that power. The result is that the state has to dream up ever new and repressive powers to attempt to keep its own end up, and preserve its reality (if not its rather problematic dominance). Weber was right therefore to conclude that technology put the state and individuality at odds. He was simply rather premature in calling the outcome of such a struggle as early as he did.
To make a rational world, Weber claimed one must attempt to regulate every aspect of existence. Rules are found, and cross-related. Individuality is lost in the need to fill certain places and certain occupations. This drive for unanimity will, Weber suggests, have four quite distinct aspects; Each of which will be considered in the rest of this Rant.
Aspect One: the improbable union. Weber takes very seriously the impact of what he is saying. There is, he suggests a very great divide between the rational world which he forecasts, a world of order and rules, and the world that went before it. And there can be no direct path, he insists, to take you from one world into the other. Traditions cannot be simply up ended and replaced, and rationality allowed in. The only plausible means by which the world of religion as a tradition can become caught up in rationality, Weber suggests, is if there arose a tradition which firstly unified a faith, and created a necessarily rational order for creation; and then secondly demanded this order be demonstrable in the real world. Law would thereby become unified in a godhead, and yet that unity (and the foreknowledge of it) must be seen within the real physical world (which therefore becomes bound by the rules of its absentee law maker).
Weber finds the apostles of this double move in the Protestantism of northern Europe. Here was a faith that in the sixteenth century demands that God be understand in terms of a law, and a fixed series of rational dogmas. God therefore ceased to be a capricious other, and became rather the master of a unified and law abiding cosmos. This law would then be revealed within creation by allowing its adherents special favours, that might be said to necessarily follow from following god’s law. This second move was developed, Weber advocates, in the seventeenth century. In this argument, the doctrine of predestination has a very special role. This doctrine insisted that few are saved and many are damned; and yet also asserts that it is by no means clear in this world which individual falls into which category. It therefore leads to a natural cosmic angst on behalf of its adherents. They do their best, and yet ever wonder if they are the ones that have been saved. The only way, the argument then developed, to relieve this angst is to look to the natural world and human society. Special favour in this world it was advised, reflected the favour of God himself. Individuals therefore had a new purpose for achieving in this world. To achieve and to extend what one could do and the powers that one did have, was to be a part of, and know one was a part of, a greater cosmic order.
Puritanism created on the one hand the vision of an ordered world, and on the other the insistence that these rules were not passive. One only knew one was a true citizen of the world if one experimented with this order, and demonstrated by experimentation, one’s own very special position in the system. Law it was that challenged all individuality (one was always bound up in systems greater than oneself); but also paradoxically, in challenging it, it became the only way that any one person could know they existed and were a part of something greater than themselves. It is this paradox, this profound uncomfortableness, which demands that individuals clutch at the very powers that might appear to unpick their individuality, which Weber thought represented modernity.
- A paradox which is further developed in the next two aspects.
Aspect Two: Ideal types. Weber argues that modernity does not require souls or personalities so much as socially constructed masks. The rational order will therefore present the citizen with a series of ideal types. The idealized types represent the theoretical perfect representative of a profession or occupation or even a personality type. One is a banker, or a politician, or a journalist or on the dole. The types are more than prejudice and less than reality. That is they are not simply xenophobic presentations of the other. They will always be grounded in reality. They will always represent something, some reflection of the truth, some manner in which some individual plays some part in the social fabric. Or perhaps they represent that individual as they are caught in the light of reason, as they are behaving in accordance with what society would demand of them. However this individuality is of course utterly bound up in the social order. It ignores any deeper or simply longer lasting individuality which any one individual might be or have. They become understood through their professions or at least their occupations. There personality becomes dissolved into a series of types.
Such an act of dissolution has profound consequences both for the individual but also for the wider society. On the level of individuality, one’s hard won individuality is necessarily marginalized. One becomes a series of passions linked to a series of ideal types. One becomes at times a banker or a thinker or a mother or daughter. These types are how one’s relationships with others functions in one’s own mind They therefore describe a meta-state, a state suspended between all individuals and uncontained within any one person. It is such states, which reflect wider social needs, which always overwhelm (for good or ill) the pretence of being something other, an ethical individuality. Personal ethics is therefore devoured within a moral order.
On the other hand, society becomes all about the ideal types. It is these types which become the perfect citizens, the ones which the government governs for. This is of course the problem with all government statistics. This or that might be getting better or worse for ideal types (single mothers, the poor etc), and yet each individual, each nexus of circumstances, remains apart from such an ideal, and may well feel alienated by it. Ideal types, masks or fragments which define no one person, but the sense within which any individual is caught up in others (for good or for ill) become to Weber the true citizens of a democracy and the inmates of modernity.
Aspect Three: Bigger than all of us. This last point leads to what is for Weber the true point of the rational order. This order represents the system that is greater than any one of its individual adherents. It is it, that is the sole system which allows for the fact that every one of its elements are interchangeable and peaceable. One is therefore always bound up in a system which could do perfectly well with any other individual taking one’s own role, one’s own place. The inmates to the radical order are therefore ubiquitous even as they perform the necessary functions to serve that order.
This last point then leads to two others. On the one hand the entry criterion for such an order will always be defined by public examinations. If anyone can perform a task or a series of tasks, if they are not to be owned by families or guilds, then it is clearly best to ensure that the ones most appropriate to fulfil such a task, actually do so. The job market is therefore replaced by the need to educate, and one’s ability to function as a worthwhile citizen becomes confused with one’s educational achievements. Education is therefore no longer about anything personal, but rather merely a means to perfect ideal types, and ensure that the correct individuals exist to fill the correct gaps in society.
On the other hand for Weber at least there is nothing soothing about all these moves. Modernity cannot be at ease with itself. It will never reconcile itself to the loss of individuality it purports to value. It will therefore look to other societies or earlier times and (quite erroneously) see what it lacks in such societies. Individuality becomes therefore in a sense a longing for tradition. It wishes always that it could be otherwise, that the lost individual might come once again into society. One’s own personal existence is therefore caught up in an endless nostalgia, as the fact that a society does not care over much for it (on a deep level at least), is made into an open ended regret.
Aspect Four, the modules of nostalgia. This last point will then have the effect that modernity is pockmarked with endless organizations which claim to offer an alternative to it. These organizations can be religious or political or even social. They all claim to value individuality over ideal types, and promise the adherents of their faiths, a gentler way of life. However Weber insists that all these organizations are essentially caught up in the rational world. They cannot escape it. They are themselves bound by the laws of big organizations, and cannot treat their own practitioners any differently (priests are not well paid, and political parties are mere big businesses – Brand Labour, Brand Tory). Nor are such organizations free to make good what they promise. They promise to value each individual, and yet live in a world where the power of a state demands that it is just this individuality that is not valued. They cannot therefore create a ‘successful’ society and fulfil their pledges. The result is of course that endless bright politicians are warped into cynical statesmen, who like Tony Blair desperately assert they were not so.
Weber creates an image of the world to come in which all attempts at individuality are lost under the gaze of the rational order. It is this order, this need to create a world where people are doing certain things and behaving in certain ways, which drives then, the entire process forward, he suggests. So that one might claim that one aspect of humanity, their ability to think is threatening to devour everything else which they are or might become. However at this point a fairly clear problem opens up. It is a cardinal assumption in the Weberian system, that there is only one goal for rationality. Society and science will therefore always move in the same basic direction. The rational becomes at one with a direction and a result: That is, by being rational, society becomes increasingly like the physical world, and winds up with the self same set of principles. It is this unity of result which is clearly so problematic. It makes things far far too easy; both on the level of society, which clearly contains other threads and other directions to that of natural science; but also and even more critically, on the level that it (the theory) naively assumes that the natural can be bought into line with the social. The entire point of the worry about global warming and the limitations of oil production, comes down to a lack of trust in this rather contentious claim. Maybe the world has its own individuality, other than reason, and maybe that individuality is something which we need to concern ourselves with once more. What Weber does with absolute clarity is to trace one path in modernity, the path which it would follow if reason was what it appeared to be; that is, if it was reason that allowed us to navigate a modernity where individuality becomes problematic. So that what matters is less individuals and souls, and more what is endlessly pitched between peoples. The problem is that this ‘between’ need not follow a simple individualistic rationality as Weber ‘hoped’ it would. And of course our problem is, that if it does not follow such an order, what then can we do about it? These are problems which the next Rant will take up.
