| My purpose here is to sketch out a plausible meta-model, a way of thinking about how the varying different ideological models relate to one another--and where we stand today. I want to begin with a discussion of Kuhn and his ideas, since science presents us with a relatively simple example, constrained as it is by a set of shared norms and purposes that cannot be assumed when dealing with questions of how human society as a whole should be organized.
Kuhn
Kuhn's basic insight was derived from his own personal shock and perplexity, as a physics grad student teaching history of physics. Instead of the relatively linear march of progress that he had assumed, he was dumbfounded to discover that the history of physics was much more akin to a drunkard's walk--or at best the back-and-forth tacking of a sailboat against a strong headwind. Rather than straightforward progress in a single direction, he found that the very terms in which progress was defined underwent fundamental changes. This troubled Kuhn so deeply that it lead him to abandon physics itself in a quest to understand the thinking that went into it, as well as other sciences.
For Kuhn, this lead to a focus on the central role of models and the systems of implicit assumptions and ways of seeing things that came along with them. He adopted the word "paradigm" to describe what he was talking about, and the term quickly became a staple of popular discourse, at the same time that establishment philosophers of science pounced on it, and virtually squelched any sort of healthy intellectual debate.
That establishment revolved around philosopher Karl Popper, and it was driven by an irrational fear that sprang from Kuhn's claims that paradigms were incommensurable with one another. If this were true, Popper's crowd concluded, that meant a retreat to pre-modern irrationalism, an abandonment of all reason. This could not be tolerated, and thus Kuhn had to be wrong, regardless of how much his work was based on an empirical study of scientific history.
There was, of course, another alternative that Popper's crowd missed, and that Kuhn himself was none to clear on, either: and that is simply that model-specific rationality is not the be all and end all of human reason. Model comparison matters, too, even if it can't necessarily be rendered into neutral terms. Indeed, the history of science--and mathematics, too--turns out to be full of examples in which battles fought out in one generation come to be seen very differently in another generation. What appear to be incommensurable approaches at one point in time are not always so, and even if they are, this need not be the end of the world.
The reason for this is simple: when paradigms first clash, each model comes with its own set of assumptions, which do not share a common frame of reference. However, with time, new people enter the field, and for at least some of them, the rival paradigms are not all-encompassing worldviews. Rather, they are simply seen as different ways of solving different sorts of problems. Kuhn's attention wasn't drawn to such situations, because they weren't so dramatically contrary to his earlier intuition that saw physics in terms of an unproblematic forward march.
Yet, it's rather striking that physics today involves at least three technically "incommensurate" paradigms: classical "Newtonian" physics, relativistic "Einsteinian" physics, and probabilistic quantum-mechanical physics. No one believes that Newtonian physics is "true" in the sense of being an accurate and complete description of the physical laws of the universe. And yet, it remains so elegantly simple, and powerful that it adequately describes a wide range of phenomena, and even reveals new intellectual challenges. This is quite different from other theories, such as geocentric theories about the organization of the cosmos, whose fruitfulness in generating new questions and new insights simply dies away.
The Kuhnian Conclusion--And Beyond To Political Ideology
The point here is that both Kuhn and his establishment critics were far too narrowly focused on trying to model and understand rational processes on a very short time-frame--at least compared to the longer sweep of human history. It is as if they were hell-bent on comparing things within a time-frame--or quotient space, if you will--of a single day, when the natural time-frame for processes involved to complete themselves required a full year. It was not just premature for one side or the other to make claims about commensurability or intelligibility. The time-frame was too cramped to even assess if those terms were properly understood within the framework of a more extended quotient space.
If this sort of profound confusion was possible in the relatively rigorous world of scientific reasoning, then how much more true might it be in the wider world of ideological struggles? The proof of whether different ideologies must clash, or may co-exist cannot be found in their initial encounters, such a perspective informs us. It takes time to see how things will unfold. One must take a longer and a broader view.
Indeed, the very essence of modern liberalism can be conceived as a means of dealing with this insight. This was accomplished via two major lines of reasoning, both articulated in mature forms by British philosopher John Locke. First was the principle of religious tolerance, separating civil and religious realms of authority. The embrace of tolerance was initially almost entirely pragmatic, a response to religious warfare on a scale dwarfing what we've seen in Iraq since the US invasion, going on for decades. Over time, however, it came to be seen not only as a positive value, but a principled one: no coerced conversion could possibly save ones soul, it was argued, so even forced conversion to the true faith--whatever that might be--was utterly futile. Second, was the shift in legitimizing government, from a top-down religious argument that the state was ordained by God to a bottom-up secular argument that the state was an agreement of those governed.
Together, these principles allowed for a wide range of personal beliefs--religious at first, but over time ideological as well--treating all them on an equal footing. By recasting them as matters of personal belief, without legitimate claim to any form of transcendent power, Lockean liberalism--at least in theory--created the conditions for otherwise incommensurable beliefs to nonetheless coexist with one another, much like Newtonian, Einsteinian and quantum physics. The foundation for doing was individual conscience (the seeds, at least of Robert Kegan's Level 4 "self-authorship," see previous diary, and below).
But, of course, that "in theory" part is crucial, since it didn't always--or ever, really--work out that way. And yet, it remained as an ideal that people returned to, in different ways, again and again and again.
The Early 20th Century Era of Ideological Struggle
The period that Chris alluded to in his post saw tremendous ideological struggle in large part because liberalism as I have described it had both obviously failed in some places, and never taken hold in others. The obvious failure could be seen in Britain, where its economicc promise in a bastardized form of Adam Smith's philosophy did not produce broad wealth, but Dickensian suffering instead. (The result, by the late 19th Century, was the birth of New Liberalism, the British pre-cursor of American New Deal liberalism.) Elsewhere, even the imperfect British model was an impossible dream. That being the case, other dreams competed with it for allegiance of hearts and minds. Some looking back into funhouse mirror landscapes of an imaginary past, others looking forward with equally uncertain vision. This was the period Chris wrote about, in which each ideology had its own incommensurable set of assumptions to fall back on.
The Welfare State Consensus
When the smoke cleared at the end of WWII, there was a consensus of sorts in the Western world, which basically revolved around the welfare state. I say, "of sorts," because there were clearly different sorts of welfare state. But generally there was an agreement on a framework of individual social, political and civil rights--and even, outside the US, economic rights as well. This was reflected in the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document deeply indebted to the advocacy of Eleanor Roosevelt. Guarantees of political rights alone came to be seen as insufficient to ensure the autonomy of individuals necessary for self-government--and, in the end, for the general well-being of all humanity. Rather, social, economic, civil and political rights were all seen as complexly interrelated with one another.
This consensus was driven by at least three main factors. First was the historical struggles for human freedom and dignity that radicals and liberals had been waging for centuries in various different forms. Second was the catastrophic history of the previous few decades, highlighted by the two world wars, the Great Depression and the Holocaust. Third was the political challenge of the Soviet Union, with its powerful appeal to downtrodden workers, bolstered by the fact that socialists and communists had universally been in the vanguard of those fighting against fascism, before as well as during WWII.
As Western welfare states flourished, internal freedoms grew, and Soviet Union grew increasingly stodgy, bureaucratic and self-evidently repressive, the power of this third factor began to recede. So long as America was wracked with internal struggles--particularly over racism and the Vietnam War--the increasing feebleness of the Soviet example was largely obscured. However, rather ironically, once the conservative establishment lost those battles, and America no longer appeared as repressive as it had been, Soviet contradictions loomed larger than ever. While Western progressive social movements inspired a generation of like-minded Eastern Europeans, eventually leading to the collapse of the Soviet block, Western elites began growing increasingly conservative.
Yet, the paths taken were Byzantine in their complexity. Ronald Reagan, for example, entered office amidst talk about "fighting and winning a nuclear war," which sparked a massive anti-nuclear weapons movement so threatening that Reagan was forced to out-flank it with his "Star Wars" missile-defense fantasy. The exposure of his arms-for-hostages dealing with Iran to support the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua furthered weakened him, and he moved dramatically to the left to embrace Gorbachov, even coming close to the abolition of nuclear weapons. Still, once it was all said and done, a fantastically simplified--and utterly false--history was constructed, in which free market capitalism (which never existed) defeated Soviet communism (which also never existed). Under this false narrative capitalism, "free markets" and democracy were all conflated as one.
Post-Cold War Shake-Up: Jihad vs. McWorld w/ Democracy M.I.A.
Thus, while the Cold War era began with a broadly conceived single ideology in place--welfare state liberalism that allowed for enormous national and cultural variations--it ended with the dominance of a sort of funhouse mirror reflection, the narrowly conceived single ideology dubbed "neoliberalism" in Latin America, which subsummed everything to the values of the market, a drastically impoverished vision compared to the one enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This dominance was not absolute, however. Indeed, political philosopher Benjamin Barber captured the essence of a more complex dynamic in a series of books, most fully articulated in Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World, originally published in 1995. In an Atlantic Monthly article of the same name, three years earlier, he laid out his basic argument:
The two axial principles of our age--tribalism and globalism--clash at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy
by Benjamin R. Barber
Jihad vs. McWorld
Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures--both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe--a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food--with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.
These two tendencies are sometimes visible in the same countries at the same instant: thus Yugoslavia, clamoring just recently to join the New Europe, is exploding into fragments; India is trying to live up to its reputation as the world's largest integral democracy while powerful new fundamentalist parties like the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, along with nationalist assassins, are imperiling its hard-won unity. States are breaking up or joining up: the Soviet Union has disappeared almost overnight, its parts forming new unions with one another or with like-minded nationalities in neighboring states. The old interwar national state based on territory and political sovereignty looks to be a mere transitional development.
The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be democratic--or so I will argue.
Right now, Barber's three-way template captures the essence of our options. There are many different ethno-religious factions whose ideologies vie with one another, but they are all variants on the same basic ideological mapping. Likewise, there are different globalizing visions--every would-be Fortune 500 company has one of its very own. And, of course, there are a plethora of different political parties, movements, organizations, and what-have-you trying to organize in the space of democratic civil societies. But Barber has, I would argue, captured the essence of the three main options we face, the three main types of quotient space for mapping the world, and gluing it together. And what has happened now, with the purported financial emergency we are now dealing with, is that we have witnessed the inherent fragility of McWorld, just as 9/11 showed us the inherent violence of Jihad. Both were just small tastes of the destruction they can bring about.
It's up to us to realize that a much more robust model of democracy--opposed to both Jihad and McWorld--is our only road to salvation. It does not mean rejecting religion, ethnic identity or roots in the past on the one hand or business, technology or progress on the other. But it does mean rejecting an authoritarian submission to claims about (or in the name of) the inexorable logic of either alternative. We must, individually and collectively, debate, discern, and negotiate our futures. Democracy is not merely our birthright, it is our obligation, our salvation and the only means of doing what each generation must: passing down to our children a livable world that they, in turn, can make their own.
Kuhn and Barber
So how do the options described by Barber relate to what I wrote earlier about Kuhn? And how does the call to democracy relate?
The answer to the first question is perhaps best grasped through another book Barber wrote, a slim volume, A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong. In it, Barber describes three different models of civil society. One, corresponding to Jihad, is basically a social conservative's vision, composed of a traditional organizations like the church, in which individuals are embedded with little personal agency. A second, corresponding to McWorld, is basically a libertarian's vision, composed of discrete individuals and private enterprises. A third, corresponding to Barber's own concept of "strong democracy" is primarily composed of voluntary associations, organizations created by people to do things that they cannot do alone, yet which they do not wish to have government do for them. There is room in this third alternative for traditional organizations like the church, as well as for unaffiliated individuals. It does not demand the conformity of social conservatives or libertarians. They can have their spaces as well--but they cannot force all the rest of us to live in their worlds.
How does this relate to Kuhn? Simple: each of these three models of civil society relates to a basic model of the self, at different developmental stages, as described by Robert Kegan in the following chart (briefly explained below):
| Kegan's Subject/Object Schema of Cognitive Development | | Stage | We Are:
Subject
(structure of knowing) | We Have:
Object
(content of knowing) | Underlying Structure | | 1 | Perceptions
SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS
Impulses | Movement
Sensation |  | | 2 | Concrete
POINT OF VIEW
Enduring Dispositions | Perceptions
SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS
Impulses |  | 3
Traditionalism | Abstractions
MUTUALITY/
INTERPERSONALISM
Relationship
Inner states | Concrete
POINT OF VIEW
Enduring Dispositions
Needs, Peferences |  | 4
Modernism | Abstract Systems
INSTITUTION
Relationship-Regulating Forms
Self-authorship | Abstractions
MUTUALITY/
INTERPERSONALISM
Relationship
Inner states
Subjectivity
Self-consciousness |  | 5
Post-
Modernism | Dialectical
INTER-
INSTITUTIONAL
Self-transformation | Abstract Systems
Ideology
INSTITUTION
Relationship-Regulating Forms
Self-authorship
Self-regulation
Self-formation |  |
At each stage, the background/subject/context of consciousness of the earlier stage shifts to become the foreground/object/content of consciousness. And thus, the implicit model of the how the world is structured--along with everything in it, including people--changes as well. The libertarian/McWorld model corresponds with level 2, the social conservative/Jihad model corresponds with level 3, and the strong democracy model corresponds with level 4... or even level 5.
Operating at levels 2 or 3, we are unable to stand outside the structures we take for granted as defining our world for us. This is still true at levels 4 and 5, of course, because it is always true--we are always embedded in something larger than us that we cannot grasp, cannot see from outside--and these will continue to inform and shape our ideologies. But at levels 4 and above, these limitations are far less constraining on us. Indeed, that is precisely the problem for those functioning at levels 2 and 3, the world as seen from levels 4 and 5 is utterly bewildering. This is reflected in the title of Kegan's book where he develops his ideas: Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life.
This leads back to the second question I began this section with: How does the call to democracy relate to all this? The answer, for me, is that we need a much deeper engagement in the nature of democracy than we have previously had. We absolutely need prophylactics against the deleterious effects of Jihad and McWorld, but we also need a much deeper understanding and appreciation of how to enrich the democratic process, how to make it more responsive, more efficacious, more inclusive, more pragmatic, and at the same time, more visionary. Not to mention, more fun.
This revolves around what Kegan refers to as "self-authorship" as a defining characteristic of Level 4. It is self-authorship that conveys the power for joining together to create new voluntary organizations and institutions that can meet our collective needs in ways that individuals cannot do directly on their own, and that governments should not do, because agency for them properly should be kept in the civic realm. The much more fluid nature of Level 4's quotient space--its way of gluing the world together--allows far more give and take so that ideological struggle need not be violent, much less deadly. Indeed, it could ultimately come to be seen as our species collective struggle to enter into true adulthood. |
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