Why I don’t dig Trump (USA Elections II)

 

Reading my previous post I realize I have deviated from my usual style of sober and detached analysis and indulged in what amounts to a florid collection of belittling epithets towards the current USA administration and, most pointedly, its nominal leader, the 45^th president. But heaping a lot of adjectives, florid or not, a solid argument does not make, and I owe it to my readers (and, to a certain extent, to myself) to flesh out what may be understood as an outburst, long on emotion but short on sober reasoning. I will develop, then, in this post my arguments for disliking Trump and his clique (which right now seems to comprise the whole of the republican party, although the prospect of electoral defeat seems to be causing the first cracks in what until now has been a rock-solid union), and how my particular misgivings maybe entirely irrelevant for the future direction of American society, as this “most important election ever” probably will decide little, and in the great scheme of things be entirely irrelevant. I will present my objections to the current occupant of the White House under three headings: linguistic, professional and political (regardless of alignment), and devote a fourth one (in a separate post) to how they may play out in the remaining two weeks until Americans vote, and what may happen afterwards.

You may not have noticed it, but I love dearly the English tongue. It’s not the language I grew up learning, but I mastered it soon enough, and since my childhood I’ve revered its richness, the vastness of its seemingly endless vocabulary which gives it the ability to transmit the subtler nuances and develop the most sophisticated arguments, be it from cool reason or passionate emotion. If I had devoted to guitar playing half the time I have devoted to improving my language ability (by reading or writing in English) I may not have reached the level of Jimi Hendrix (blessed by the guitar Gods with a unique amount of natural talent that simply cannot be equaled), but I would be at least at the level of Tom Petty or Bob Dylan (not master players, but competent enough). If I had spent lifting weights a quarter of the time I’ve spent scribbling and reading just XVI and XVII century English poetry and philosophy I wouldn’t be at Dimitry Klokov’s level, but I would have probably qualified for the Spanish national championship in weightlifting. Now, I don’t expect a politician (English-speaking or otherwise) to have the mastery of language of Shakespeare, but I do appreciate a bare minimum of proficiency in its use. And Jesus Christ, is listening to Donald J. Trump a chore for a lover of English! the guy mistreats it every time he opens his mouth, uses a syntax that would seem coarse for a second grader and limits himself to a vocabulary that a deprived bricklayer of a Gujarati village would already consider poor. I recognize for some enthusiasts of the Don that’s a willful, wily conceit, a show of his genius, as he voluntarily controls the sophistication of his speech (he doesn’t seem to write anything longer than his bombastic and absurdly baroque signature) to adapt it to the level of his audience (some praise! that essentially assumes that the average level of the American voter is that of a semi-illiterate moron, which even in my most elitist and hifalutin days I’d consider an unduly harsh slander)… something I would believe if I had seen him in other environments showing his ability to express himself competently and to convey some elaborate thoughts (when addressing the UN general assembly, say). I’m afraid the real reason behind his apparent communicational shortcomings is that there is really nothing behind the façade, but a similarly undeveloped, unsophisticated, inarticulate intelligence (that is, not much intelligence at all).   

Which leads us to the consideration of to what extent we can say he has taken seriously his responsibilities as commander in chief and president of all Americans. We may stop for a moment to reflect what such exalted position requires, other than communicate clearly with the population what direction he wants the country to follow (something we have already settled he is just not very good at). In a presidential system with separation of powers, like the American, the president (who has no legislative or judicial power and delegates to the secretaries of his choice the executive power vested on the government) is supposed to be a representative of the Nation, both internally and externally. Somebody they look up to, that inspires them to be the best possible version of themselves and shows to other dignitaries (or to the public of foreign lands) the greatness and the promise of the whole people. Who embodies the virtues they want to project, assuages allies and appears fearsome to enemies. From that standpoint, as I mentioned, the Trump administration has been an abysmal failure. Not only America’s image is at an all-time low between its traditional allies, but adversaries like Russia, North Korea or China do not seem to have been much impressed by 45^th bluster. As for his ability to inspire the best angels of the inhabitants’ nature… I’d refer to the comments of his former chief of staff, sadly recognizing he had been more a divider than a uniter. We may see what election day brings, but it is difficult to find somebody in modern political history, in the USA or abroad, who has tried less to expand his base and to attract people who did not initially vote for him to his camp (at least as long as we circumscribe our search to nominal democracies, I reckon that Stalin, Pol-Pot and the like where even less gracious than Trump towards possible dissenters and non-sympathizers).

Of course, being perceived by almost everybody with an opinion as a complete failure at his day job is not something that probably would have fazed our man, as the idea of measurable professional competence seem to be as alien to him as feeling sympathy for anybody outside his immediate circle (or even inside it, given how he has treated longtime allies like his erstwhile lawyer/ fixer Michael Cohen) and, furthermore, he seems bone-chillingly convinced of his excellency on that area (as in any other area, really). And it makes me wonder to what extent he may be so self-deluded as to not realize just how incompetent he is. Although, come to think about it, I have had bosses like that (heck, I’ve been like that myself), who could pronounce the most unbelievable, bald-faced lies with total conviction because they had persuaded themselves first of its veracity. In the case of Trump, the first and foremost lie seems to be that he is an able businessman, the inspirational leader of a vast and successful company (Trump Co. yesterday, the US of A today) that underwent multiple bankruptcies and is nowadays deeply in the red with no viable plan to get back to profitability; a visionary strategist that is unable to articulate his strategy; a master dealmaker that is incapable of closing any deal, be it with a foreign leader or with a Congress dominated by his own party in the first half of his mandate; a sly operator and judge of the value of his subordinates that found it supremely difficult to keep in his team anybody with a shred of conscience, that keeps being left by his underlings who unfailingly sign book deals in which they portray him as a bumbling idiot… If “managing” is a science, or at least a craft (or, more humbly, what Alasdair MacIntyre would call a “practice”), and one whose skills and capabilities could be profitably put to use in the highest echelons of political leadership, as conservative parties everywhere tend to argue, Trump has shown to be supremely bad at it. But Alas! he played a successful, accomplished manager in a TV show and that seems to have been enough for his followers to make up their minds and stick with that image through four years of utter chaos.

And he certainly seems to have enough of those followers around him (or in channels where he seems to pick most of his opinions, both about the world and about himself, like Fox News and One America News Network) to stay convinced of his own greatness, and the unalloyed depravity and baselessness of any hint of criticism. Not the kind of balanced, unbiased, poised views you would want a true leader to be able to ponder… Which leads us finally to the last aspect of this sad business that makes me so wary of the whole thing. For those with eyes to see, it was crystal clear since he announced his campaign that Donald J. Trump was doing it for the same reason he had done every single thing in his life: to enrich himself, to gain status, to satisfy his own (apparently insatiable) ego. Of course, getting the vote of enough people required him to at least pretend he would have their best interest in mind, he would “fight” for them (remember his leitmotiv of “American carnage” during his first campaign? of course you remember, he is still campaigning along the same themes as if he hadn’t been the president during the last four years!) but I cannot avoid thinking that you had to be extraordinarily naïve to believe him even for a single millisecond. The interesting question, at this point, of course, is how could so many people fall for it? enough, at least, to give him an electoral college majority (even after losing the popular vote by a historically unprecedented margin).

But before I attempt to answer that question I want to note how paradigmatically Trump exemplifies the process of degeneration of political organizations towards which I already pointed a couple of posts ago (How organizations decay ). When a political organization (like the republican or the democratic party) has exhausted its ability to find innovative solutions that can effectively improve the collective well-being/ recognition/ life-satisfaction of its members (as part of a group with which they self-identify) it stops being able to adequately reward them (remember that belonging to an organization always comes with a cost, in terms of more limited freedom, as it imposes the constrains associated with the role members have to assume within it) and thus it becomes an economic organization ,in which each member is really looking out first and foremost for himself (remember, economic organizations are purely transactional, and people join them just to improve their own individual status, the rest of the group be damned… so they stay as long as the status they derive form it, typically in the form of a salary, compensates the freedom of choice they forgo). Political parties in particular become resource allocation machines that reward exclusively their card-carrying members with benefits and sinecures, while the voters they purport to represent are left in the lurch, to be remembered only when the next electoral cycle comes around and they have to be “milked” again, doesn’t matter what unashamed lies they have to be told (in the American case, things like that Roe vs. Wade will be finally repealed, a bunch of inexistent legislation against gun ownership that the other party is supposedly preparing will be blocked and taxes will not be raised, of which only the latter has any real chance of happening).

The novelty of Trump, then, is how bald-faced the lie has become. Even his frequent direct contacts with his fervent base (those otherwise unexplainable rallies he kept on celebrating in the middle of his presidency when the next election was still years away) are for him a way of maximizing the benefits he extracts from his position (in terms of adulation and unconditional approval of an adoring crowd, something it is obvious he relishes like few other pleasures). As is the chance to go on TV and be able to free-associate in front of the nation for hours on end (something that all autocrats, aspiring or otherwise, seem to love), embarrassing as it may appear to any sober external observer. As is the blatant host of conflicts of interest that have bedeviled his administration (from having foreign dignitaries, and his own secret service, staying in his money-losing properties while the American taxpayers pay for it to nominating his daughter and son-in-law to unspecified positions in his administration, even if that meant forcing the vetting process to allay the suspicions of his own intelligence agency that they may be compromised). Profit maximization through and through, intended just for him (who is, according to his own narrative, already very, very rich, a pretense that rested on shaky ground since day one and has become more difficult to maintain after the publication by the New York Times of his famed tax returns). It is like he keeps on saying “I’m milking you all to get even richer” and his adherents just nod along their approval, assuming that is how it has been all along since the beginning of the world, and any possible alternative leader would do the same, and they don’t mind being fleeced as long as the one doing the fleecing says he is “one of them”.

In a brilliant piece economist Branko Milanovic recently accused Trump of being the most refined embodiment of “neoliberalism” (Trump and neoliberalism ), and that he represents the “invasion of the economic into the political sphere”. I think that, rather than an invasion, what he signals is the complete substitution of one by the other. With Trump, a whole set of the population is in fact throwing the towel, assuming that collective representation is pointless (seen from a racial perspective, because they have been told that collective representation in the end meant that “dark skinned people” got more, and they themselves got less in exchange) and that everybody should be in it just for themselves, should pursue their own egoistic ends without much caring or looking out for others. Which, from the point of view of the elites, the best prepared, the winners of the economic game, is a superb proposition, because all those disenchanted voters that feel ecstatic because Trump, their champion, is “owning the libs” and making them foam at the mouth, would be a terrible threat if aligned with those same liberals against those enjoying the highest incomes and the highest social status (they may ask for anathemas like redistribution through taxation, universal health care and who knows what else!). Sixteen years ago Thomas Frank wondered, in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How it was possible that so many white working-class voters were aligning themselves with political positions deeply inimical with their “economic” interests. The question was wrongly posed. What they were doing was giving up the “political” altogether and following those that encouraged them to pursue their own economic interest (which, what a lucky coincidence! would allow the plutocrats financing that encouragement to benefit nicely through tax reduction and deregulation), something that by definition is done alone, in isolation from the rest of the polity. And it was their gradual defection from the Democratic party what would enable the republicans to cling to power, both at the state and the federal level, for years to come, in spite of the demographic headwinds they were experiencing (decline of the white and rural vote as a percentage of the total), as would be spectacularly manifested in the unexpected outcome of the 2016 election.

As for the implications of such analysis for the current election, they will have to wait until my next post!

The wonder of Trump & Co (USA Elections!)

I once declared myself to be a “political junkie”, only not of the political process of my home country, which I find boring, predictable and uninteresting, but of the USA, which I back then considered a harbinger of what awaited most developed economies, and now consider more and more a warning of what may befall them if they are not cautious and let their inner demons loose (as the Americans have done). However, although I’ve been following the 2020 presidential election (the campaign of which seemed to start somewhere around the 2^nd of January of 2017, right after inauguration) I haven’t felt like blogging about it, as, exciting as it may have appeared on the surface, I have found it actually quite boring. Boring, predictable and uninteresting like my own country’s politics are indeed, unintuitive as it may sound, the adjectives best describing the whole improbable presidency of Donald J. Trump, for reasons I will detail in a moment (just a question of having the right analytical framework, which makes the otherwise unexplainable seem mundane). But a little of history, first.

The mostly unexpected triumph of Trump in 2016 was but an advance of a development I had predicted for the next electoral cycle: the realization by a substantial portion of the white working class that they really didn’t have that many interests in common with the other members of the Democratic coalition (which, simplifying a little bit, we could characterize as feminist women, highly educated and credentialed professionals, racial minorities and non-closeted non-heterosexuals -I just can’t seem to keep track of the amount of capital letters required to identify them properly, so I’ll just define them negatively, no slight or disdain intended).

Not only were their interests different ,and I’m not thinking just in economic terms here… aesthetic preferences have been trending for decades in more and more divergent directions between the mostly rural, nationalist, Nascar-watching, country-music-hearing, gun-toting part of the population and the urban, cosmopolitan, NBA-enjoying, rap-and-hip-hop-listening mostly gun-free part, and it is nigh impossible to consider yourself part of the same community as people that employ their time, idolize public figures and even dress themselves in forms so alien to you, but even their self-image was growingly distinct, one celebrating “traditional” American-ness (as behooves a conservative party: baseball cap, T-shirt and a pair of Levi’s, driving a Lincoln Navigator or a Harley fat boy) and the other more open to “alternative” or simply up-to-date looks (won’t even try to describe them, as my age and quintessential un-coolness would painfully show). The moment you cannot identify with your supposed political co-religionaries even from a purely aesthetic point of view (but remember my distinction between political organizations and religious ones! it is the former we are talking about here, not the latter!) in the sense of feeling “at home” between them, of “seeing” yourself as a member of a single group to which they also belong, it is impossible for you to claim to adhere to the same political party, and to collectively pursue with them a common set of goals.

So it came to be that Trump was elevated to the highest office of the land, probably as much to his surprise as to any political analyst’s, which found it hard to fathom how the nation could have chosen such a buffoonish, evidently unfit individual, as president. But chose him they did (admittedly through the vagaries of the electoral college, but those are the rules of the electoral game there), and for four years the republic had to endure the most bombastic, ludicrous, shambolic, unhinged, splenetic, scurrilous, corrupt, bigoted, uninformed, farcical, preposterous, delusional, discombobulated, deranged and inefficient administration that modern political history has contemplated (modern in the most literal sense: from the French Revolution to our days I don’t think we can easily find a government in any developed country that has shown such amazing level of incompetence, self-dealing, incuriousness and scorn for reality, as told afterwards by its very participants, that joined and were expelled from the corridors of power at an amazing speed, and all tell the same tale of disfunction, cronyism and disdain for the public commonweal). For America’s standing in the world and even the core viability of its political institutions, Trump’s presidency has been an unmitigated, undisputable disaster. A highly revealing one, at that, because for roughly 40% of the population it was his predecessor’s tenure that was a chaotic mess deserving of the long list of epithets I’ve heaped on this one, and it is only the press’ partiality towards Barack Obama (and vicious, vitriolic and wholly unjustified animosity against the bastion of probity that succeeded the mongrel) that has kept a higher percentage of the voting public unaware of all the good things the 45^th president has done for the nation (starting with saving it from the abject forces of socialism, Islamism, unchecked immigration and most likely rampant homosexuality).

The interesting question, of course, is how could that be? how can such a substantial number of citizens of a developed country, that have been subjected to a first class education (nominally) harbor such impressions, plaintively at odds with reality? How can, specifically, the lower strata of the (white) population refuse to see the evident shortcomings of a son of privilege, a spoiled guy that most likely has not worked five minutes in his whole life or produced anything of value (other than a second-rate TV show notionally about putting contestants’ managing abilities to the test in a bogus environment), famous for going through eleven bankruptcies and for stiffing his (working-class) suppliers in the process? not only fail to see such notorious features, but rather the opposite, identify with him and project unto him their hopes, their expectations, their fantasies and their desires of validation and approval? I remember being deeply shocked 24 years ago by the case of Louise Woodward, a 19 years old English nanny that in 1996 killed (accidentally or not) the little baby under her care, eight months old Matthew Eappen, in Boston. What so shocked me is the unmitigated outpouring of sympathy of her countrymen, that never for a single minute seemed to doubt her innocence and generously contributed to the legal defense fund created to ensure she had the best legal counsel money can buy (she was initially condemned for homicide, but had her conviction reduced to involuntary manslaughter, and was freed from jail after less than a year). How, I wondered, could a whole population suspend their moral judgment and rush in defense of a person that, in the best case, had contributed through carelessness and very likely impatience and rashness, to the death of an innocent child? Maybe in part because Louise was lily-white and as English as they come, while the Eappens where foreigners, of Indian origin and thus of a darker complexion. Maybe it was simply because she had a British passport and thus for all Britons she was “one of us”, no matter how ghastly the deeds she was accused of committing, whilst her accusers were clearly “one of them”, whoever those “them” may be…

The fact is, we tend to suspend mightily our impartiality when judging people like us, and even more so when they are somehow from our same tribe, perceived to belong to the same group as us. The same applies to Trump’s followers, obviously. He may be a corrupt plutocrat who is in politics only to enrich himself and his close family, and not give a crap about the rubes that voted for him and about their beliefs, religious or otherwise (this is, after all, the guy that has married thrice, admittedly cheated on at least two of his wives, and had to pay to multiple porn actresses to buy their silence, but that evangelical leaders maintain was for some reason sent by God to righten our wayward ways, go figure…), but they simply can’t see past “he is one of us” and, more important, “is against them”, a vague “them” that each Trumpist can generously detail with the features he despises most of what constitutes their almost mythical “other” (leftists, secularists, abortionist, anti-gun, know-it-all university professors, women who do not conform to traditional stereotypes, city-dwellers, SJWs, blacks who don’t know “their rightful place”, Hispanics in general, gays and whatnot). So he must be a fine person, and all the information about his conflicts of interest, his cavalier decision making style, and the many blatantly wrong decisions and shameful lies he continuously spouts must be a fabrication of the “lamestream” media, engineered by the liberal elite, the “Cathedral”, world Jewry or whatever figment of the fevered imagination of Fox News hosts is carrying the day between the deluded masses of followers that keep on drinking the Kool-Aid (all the while accusing the other side of being the addicted Kool-Aid drinkers for clinging to a worldview opposed to theirs) and consciously or unconsciously filter out any piece of news that may challenge their understanding of how the world works (a world where “the left” -a sinister, secretive and utterly evil cabal- monopolizes every single lever of power and is hellbent on destroying the sacrosanct American way of life through a relentless assault on free markets, gun rights, religion and the belief in American greatness and exceptionalism).

As they say, everybody is entitled to having their own beliefs, but not everybody is entitled to have their own reality, and the beliefs most GOP voters have harbored for the last 12 years (as their flight from “reality-based” information started already with Obama’s inauguration) have been increasingly divorced from anything happening on the real, fact-based world. It may have never happened, or not to such extent, at least, were it not for a media landscape (a TV network -Fox news- and the distinctly American phenomenon of talk radio) that crystalized such (seen from the outside pretty paranoid and unhinged) worldview and catalyzed the perception of belonging to a distinct, differentiated group, easy to segregate from the rest of the country (a rest formed, according to such weltanschaaung, by the dreaded and despised “libtards” that are at the same time all-powerful and unbelievably cunning but, being less than fully human, utterly incapable of true willful action). With this way of describing the American political landscape I don’t want to imply that only republicans (or conservatives of any stripe, which is not exactly the same) are the only deluded ones, or that democrats (or progressives in general) are free of any blame, or have shown in the last decade and a half to be exemplary citizens, acting only with the maximization of the social good as their purest and unalloyed aim and able to the most exacting standards of truth and probity regarding the information they perused.

The latter have their own list of shortcomings and biases, sure, but, seen from the outside, having no dog in that fight, with a hand over my heart… seriously guys (talking to American friends now), don’t be fooled by appeals to false equivalence. There is simply no comparison. What one of your political parties (the republicans), a section of your media (Fox News first and foremost, but in its wake the whole Drudge report, Tiki, Breitbart, all the way down to American Renaissance and Stormfront) and your very own president have been doing is simply so beyond the pale, the stream of bald-faced lies they unashamedly spout comes forth with such frequency, such conviction and such gusto that one is really at a loss of words to see it presented as somehow a “reaction” (measured and reasonable) to the perceived excesses and blatant manipulation of… who or what? The New York Times and the Washington Post? The CNN, MSNBC and CBS? The Daily Kos and the Daily Beast and Huffington Post? You really think that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Dinesh D’Souza, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity are somehow the equivalent of Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Michael Gerson, Catherine Rampell, Dana Millbank, Max Boot (Max Boot! the uber-neocon!) and Gail Collins? that all of them present a similarly skewed, understandably ideological view of what is going on in the world? that both sides may sometimes stretch reality a teeny weeny bit to make it conform slightly better to their previous expectations, nothing distinguishing one side from the other in that respect? If that is the case, I don’t know what I can tell you, because it is not a matter of us talking a different language, but of us inhabiting different universes (and I’m afraid there is a substantial difference between both: the one I see does exist outside my head, and the heads of those that think like me -assuming there is anyone-, whilst the one you see doesn’t).

As of today, it looks like the whole horror show is about to end in less than a month, with Biden leading in both national and state polls comfortably. But the experience of 2016, when Clinton held a similar lead (less consistent and less impressive as it may have been, it left little doubt in most pundits that it would be more than enough to propel her past the finish line) has everybody pretty wary of what may happen in November, 4^th. Specially because if the election is close enough, given the level of incivility prevalent nowadays, and the doubts in the legitimacy of the whole electoral process sowed by 45^th in his enthusiastic base (that has been bombarded with the message that their guy is leading, and only a massive fraud could rob him of a deserved victory, after all the amazing things he has done for the country in his first four years), the rancor and confrontation that may ensue would surely make the 2000 Florida recount look like a beautiful picnic in the park. But the different possible outcomes of the election, and their implications for America and for the wider world surely deserve a post of their own.

On Religion and Politics (II)

 

In my previous post I ended up almost exclusively discussing the presentation of Émile Durkheim’s concept of society, and the role religion played in it, found in Talcott Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action, hinting that I found such discussion highly relevant for my own work, and advancing that I disagreed with some of its implications. To be more precise, Parsons subscribes to Durkheim’s idea that groups require a common set of beliefs that we would today call religious in nature to solve their internal coordination problems and thus gain stability and viability (as both would be almost impossible to achieve under a purely utilitarian/ positivistic/ materialistic/ deterministic framework). If that were the case, self-identified groups would require their own religion (or pseudo-religion), and thus the distinction between political organizations and religious organizations that I posit would be moot. In discussing why I think the distinction is very much valid, I will also clarify some intriguing challenges posed to me by my much admired teacher Amelia Valcárcel.

Let me start by saying that I can understand why Durkheim confuses political and religious organizations, or at least believes that what applies to one (the set of beliefs) is a necessary condition for the stability of the other (the political group). The origin of the modern nation-state with advanced fiscal and organizational capabilities is very much coeval with the Protestant Reformation, and sharing a homogeneous religious faith (along the lines of the famous phrase elevated to the status of law by the Westphalian treaties cuius regio, eius religio) was indeed one of the conditions of a budding national community capable to stand on its feet in an hostile environment, forged very much in the fire of international strife (whose apex was the Thirty years war, to be duly followed by the war of Dutch independence, the Anglo-Dutch wars, the war of the Spanish succession and the Napoleonic wars). If we think of big “political” groups (organized groups made with the explicit purpose of defending themselves and gaining advantage when possible against other groups whose members could be distinguished from one’s own) we find, apart from whole nations, precious few other than families and dynastic alliances. Ghibellines and Guelphs (factions that grouped a number of Italian city states that preferred to be subject to either the Holy Roman emperor or the Pope, and warred viciously giving North Italian politics its distinctive flavor) may be the only stable instance we can find before the XVI century. But we have already enough examples of multi-religious, multi-ethnic polities (imperial enough, and with enough unity of purpose to have dynasties succeeding each other over vast tracts of land)  in India, Persia, to a lesser extent China, the North of Africa and the Middle East (ruled first by Arabs and later on by Ottomans) to know that religiously united (and racially homogeneous) political units are not the only viable social model.

However, after that historical moment when the main political organization (the nation state) had indeed a strong religious component, soon after the Napoleonic wars that settled the supremacy over the European landmass in the hands of the British, a new form of amalgamation appeared on the stage that led to the creation of political parties not along religious lines (except in some residual, peripheral lands like Ireland), but along another possible dimension of self-identifying: class. Before the social upheaval of early Industrial Revolution, I think it is safe to assume that, at least in Europe, only elites belonged to a “political” organization other than the whole nation, as only them had the means to consciously identify with a subset of society (taking extended family as a model, as had been done since time immemorial in dynastic fights, where different “parties” were simply supporters of different lineages aspiring to occupy the throne, and after the accession had been decided and consolidated the followers of the defeated aspirant to the throne either switched their allegiance or went to exile or to prison). Because the only political groupings were formed within the elites, it is unsurprising that Theda Scokpol identified elite disunion as one of the pre-conditions of revolution and Peter Turchin fixated in intra-elite overproduction (and the consequent intra-elite internecine fighting) as one of the driving conditions of overall social instability in his structural-demographic model.  

But such predominance of elite dynamics was, as I just mentioned, shattered with the bourgeois revolutions (American, English and French) caused by early mechanization (that created a “labor reserve army” that could not count on living from the land, and so had to get itself involved in the fight for the societal surplus that increasing productivity was allowing) and by the rise of a commercial capitalist class that could compete with traditional nobility for social primacy (and thus contest the contemporary dominant reason criterion for assigning status and precedence, namely birth). In such changing conditions (that manifested themselves/ caused the change of the dominant reason, superseding “baroque” reason with the newly minted “economic” reason) the majority of the people realized they had to form new associations to defend their interests against those of markedly distinct social actors. Thus classes were born and, with them, the parties representing their distinctive interests (probably, there is no sense in talking about a class as a recognizable collective actor if it is not accompanied by some sort of representatives that purport to talk in its name and guide its action, that is, if there is not a “party” or, in my more general terms, a political organization that fights for its improvement at the expense of other collective actors).

The question that interests me now is to what extent such parties, to be viable, require a shared metaphysical belief between their adherents. Marxism, probably a paradigm of partisanship (that self-identified by advocating for the primacy of the proletarian “class” which embodied all that was good and truly progressive in history, and was finally undone because one of the weakest links of its founder’s theorizing was precisely that he never really concerned himself with defining with any precision what a class was, and thus who could legitimately claim to be a proletarian) had been denounced since its very inception for constituting a “secular religion” (even a “cult”, by those that wanted to present it as even less rational than it actually was) and certainly almost all known Marxist have subscribed to a set of beliefs (not that different from what Parsons identified as the utilitarian compact: materialism, determinism, and adherence to the “scientific method” as the only way to reach the truth of any question whatsoever, however fanciful their understanding of how science works may have been) that are distinctly metaphysical. Should we conclude, then, that all organizations within society (or at least political ones, as we haven’t said anything about economic and educational ones yet) require for their harmonious and stable functioning to share a common faith, a common set of beliefs about “what reality consists of”, and potentially common rituals for shoring them up?

Definitely not, because political organizations can count on a more powerful unifying force than their sharing of metaphysical beliefs: the defense of their perceived identity (and their shared material interests) against a common threat. During the long stretch of human history when the only organizations of this kind were elite families, it was easy enough (and obviously rewarding enough) to know who you had casted your lot with. As long as the sacrifices required by such alignment were compensated by the benefits you derived from it, you kept your allegiance, and the moment they stopped being so you may consider defecting… if you could (not for nothing were defectors highly despised: it was a temptation always present for those not immediately associated by blood with the ruling family). With the French Revolution we see a different kind of political organization taking shape, as a new kind of group with common interests takes consciousness of its distinct status and its potential to act collectively: the “third state” that purported to represent the whole nation except nobles and priests, and that asserted itself precisely against the two latter categories (also, easy enough to identify). Of course, once the third state had achieved its goals and suppressed any privilege from the erstwhile ruling classes, the infighting begun, as different segments within it not only started trying to arrogate additional privileges for themselves, but required the creation of a clearly defined “other” against which to direct their energies, and that would be needed to help define their own qualities, and thus align their individual member’s interests and actions.

What happened after the revolutionary terror and our days can be understood as the distinct crystallizations of the different subsets of the bourgeoisie (co-opting layers of the peasantry and the industrial workers) to constitute themselves as a separate, easily identifiable group, with its own interests clashing with every other group’s ones, and thus pursuing them in a way that would be detrimental to everybody else (as everybody else was assumed to be doing the same). In most countries, the non-nobles (and non-priests and non-nuns and monks, which the Reformation had already reduced substantially in number) split in an upper class of higher incomes (that, soon, monopolized almost all wealth, which as Saez and Piketty have conclusively shown, is distributed much more unequally than income) and a lower class. Such division had little to do with the Marxian differentiation between capitalists, owners of the means of production, and proletarians, who owned nothing and were forced to sell their work, as in the upper classes we could find a good deal of non-means-of-production-owning professionals: lawyers, middle managers, physicians, teachers and university professors, the higher echelons of public servants and bureaucrats…

Although they formed what Marx (and subsequent follower) would call “the bourgeoisie” none of them were in the least interested in “exploiting the proletariat” or in somehow extracting a somewhat metaphysical “surplus” from their work, as said work had little to do with the source of their income (rather the opposite, being forerunners of today’ prevalent “service sector”, they could only benefit from the improvement in the life conditions of the masses, that would then be able to pay even more for their specialized services -see “Baumol disease”). They certainly did not share a monolithic metaphysical outlook, some of them being Catholic, some Protestant, some Freethinkers, some as atheist as they come. What they shared were tastes, a penchant for good clothes and outer signs of distinction (what Bourdieu would call “symbolic capital”), a desire to live in the most expensive quarters of their respective cities, a high valuation for formal education… essentially, external, easy to grasp signals of belonging to the “right” tribe.

That is, they were the natural members of a fully political (in the strictest sense) “conservative” party, that in each country took different forms and expressions, according to their precise historical circumstances, but that in all cases shared a preference for tradition (as tradition was what had brought them to such comfy and enviable position), for stratification and hierarchization (a natural preference for those that occupy the higher strata and the top of the hierarchy) and for excellence and meritocracy (as those born into privilege tend to think it is, somehow, a position they have “earned” and they “deserve”, even when all they have done is “choosing the right parent”, which obviously is the least chosen thing in life). The rest of the population, that could with similar ease identify themselves as not being part of that tribe (as for belonging it was necessary, first and foremost, to reach certain level of income that was by definition not available to the majority) created one or more equally political “progressive” parties whose professed main value was, unsurprisingly, equality, and which showed little respect for tradition, hierarchy and meritocracy.

The genius of the conservatives everywhere was to realize that in a society ruled by the majority (which, by definition, they could never be part of) they would end up stripped of their privilege and their wealth… unless they could either circumvent majority rule (exacerbating potential conflicts with the openly disenfranchised) or fragment the opposing party. And indeed most of the political history of the XIX and XX centuries in the West has to do with the always unstable balance between the centripetal (“proletarians of the world, unite!”) and centrifugal forces (exemplified by the continuous expulsions of groups from the successive internationals, as well as the breakups between social democrats and communists, anarchists and communists, Trotskyites and Stalinists, Maoists and everybody else…) in what should have been the “majority’s party” (or “progressive party”), but because of those internecine divisions it never truly was (even in particular cases, like Russia or China, where it reached power and consolidated it, it did so through a tiny minority of fully devoted cadres that could never legitimately claim to have been chosen or elected explicitly by a majority of the population).

Needless to say, we are still witnessing the challenges, for progressive parties everywhere, to accommodate and adapt to such centrifugal tendencies, today manifesting themselves in the competing claims of “intersectionality”, as they try to claim the representation of heterogeneous groups that, frankly, may have nothing at all in common (historically disadvantaged racial minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, women, unemployed and less skilled workers definitely constitute a vast majority -hell, just women alone would suffice for that - but as the story of the Democratic party of the USA shows, it is difficult to pander to ALL of them simultaneously, and to have them doing the bare minimum of coordination requested to a modicum of coordinated action, namely voting for their darn candidates).

Again, it is easy to see that such groups (let us call them the “non-elite”, representatives of the majority, although because of the previously mentioned intra-elite competition historically they have been able to claim the allegiance of some scions of the elite dissatisfied wit their prospects within their milieu) do not need to share any kind of metaphysical beliefs to coordinate their actions, and that such coordination will be the more effective (exactly as in the case of the conservatives) the more they see the other part of society presenting a united front “against” them and their interests and their claims (remember that for the member of a political organization, by definition their own claims are just and fair and legitimate, which makes opposing claims from other organizations automatically unjust, unfair and illegitimate, and thus those other organizations must be peopled almost exclusively by bigots, fanatics, morally deficient persons, not meriting the benefits of full citizenship and even not fully human… it is easy to see how dangerous such language and such vision can become!)

So I think we can consider sufficiently proved that we don’t need to extend Durkheim’s analysis too far, and that indeed political organizations can show a very high degree of cohesion, unity of purpose and effective collective action without sharing a religion (be it a set of shared metaphysical beliefs or of rituals that help explain such beliefs to themselves and articulate them in their more day-to-day application). Before finishing today’s post, however, I wanted to apply these insights into the comment of my much admired teacher Amelia Valcarcel about the “great narratives” that are still able to innovate ethically, and thus towards which we can still turn to help meet the new challenges our societies (liberal, technologically advanced, globalized, “postmodern” in François Lyotard’s sense, and “postmetaphysic” according to Jürgen Habermas) are facing. Challenges such as global warming, biodiversity loss and who should pay to ameliorate their more deleterious effects. Such as the kind of treatment we owe to other species (starting with eating them or not). Such as what kind of restrictions should we impose to avoid the spread of a new pandemic, and how we should allocate the means to alleviate it (be it a vaccine or an effective treatment). Such as how to reduce the impact of technological change and increasing automation between the most vulnerable (or the worst prepared) citizens. Such as how we react to a shrinking population in the economically advanced countries and a still exploding one in Africa. You get the point: the world is facing new, unprecedented problems (something Amelia, with her vast and keen historical understanding, knows very well is always the case… biological evolution may find once and again the same solution and apply it to different problems, but as for social evolution, that is seldom the case) and we need ethical innovation to propose solution to all those conundrums that can crystallize in a widely shared consensus, and thus become part and parcel of the social fabric (become “institutionalized”, ultimately becoming part of the law or of universally accepted custom and habit, like we have done with so many previous challenges, from forbidding slave trade to recognizing a basic set of rights to every citizen, regardless of gender, class, faith, age or political persuasion).

Unfortunately, modernity and its latest stage (that she prefers to characterize as globalization, rather than postmodernity) has robbed traditional comprehensive discourses of their strength, and made them unable to raise to the challenge and be credible proponents of solutions in any of those areas. The discourses she explicitly consider exhausted are traditional religion (both the “religions of the book”  -Christianity, Judaism and Islam-, oriental traditional faiths or “new age spirituality”, for which she has little patience), Marxism (both its communist-Sovietic and its socialist and social democrat forms), Capitalism (its free-market, traditional version) and even positivism (as last distillation of the Enlightenment’s faith in progress and social amelioration through the application of the scientific method, which ended up as social Darwinism and a convenient tool for totalitarianism). It could be debated to what extent each of those currents, or meta-narratives, are indeed exhausted and incapable of innovation (and I would direct my readers to my post about how organizations develop along time and are, sadly, corrupted and degraded: how organizations are corrupted), but I want to rather focus on the alternatives that are taking shape since the hinge between the XX and the XXI century: ecologism and feminism.

Because, as my classification of organizations should have made clear, both are very different animals, and thus are likely to follow very different trajectories. Not to beat around the bush, ecologism is a religion, it is not a set of ideas to guide political action (understood as actions that benefit an identifiable set of individuals to the detriment of other, excluded ones), but to be believed, professed, preached, proselytized… it is indeed an alternative grand narrative about “what there really is” (there is this distinct reality: “nature”, characterized by its essential non-humanness, and then there are men, an always negative influence, always corrupting, and for some mysterious and never fully explained reason, entirely apart from the posited “natural order”… unless they accept ecologism and its premises and start living “in harmony with nature”) and what our attitude towards that ultimate reality should be (as in most traditional religions, it should be an attitude of utmost respect and non-interference… ultimate reality is the only source of value, so it is to be adored, reverenced, occasionally appeased and even haggled with, but never exploited or debased or manipulated).

Feminism, on the other hand, is the ultimate political organization: formed by very easily identifiable members (women, which creates a serious difficulty for those that were biologically born as men but want to join, no matter what the cost of the required interventions) that consider that they have not been given the portion of the social product (wealth, riches, status, recognition, respect) they deserve, and are willing to fight for it, obviously taking it from the ones that currently hoard them (men). You can’t get more political than that! And, because of their higher life expectancy, women are already a majority of the population in almost all countries, so in any system of purported majority rule, it should be a clinch for them to seize power and enact the institutionalization of all their claims, shouldn’t it? As it happens, although a “feminist sensibility” is now mandatory in certain spaces (progressive politics, academia, mainstream media) and certainly many claims originated in feminism that once seemed radical (right to vote, unrestricted access to contraceptives and abortion, formal banishment of any limitations in access to any kind of position based on sex, even those, like military combat units, where there may have been a strong rationale for keeping them) have been already incorporated in the institutional framework of most advanced countries, there is no mainstream “feminist party” competing regularly in elections in any of them. And the explanation doesn’t seem to be because they have achieved all their goals, and are content with how things stand, as the public figures we could identify more readily with feminism and that tend to consider themselves the representatives of the movement continuously tell us how far from full equality we still are (that is, indeed, an indisputable fact, regardless of who voices it), how strong the iron yoke of “heteropatriarchy” still is and how many more measures should be taken to advance towards a society that can be said to grant a bare minimum of dignity and recognition to its feminine part (something that the current one, according to these spokeswomen, fails miserably to do, which makes it, I guess, an illegitimate cesspool of sexism, bigotry, shortsightedness and misery).

We may disagree with the level of subjugation currently imposed on women and girls (compared with that thrown on men and boys) and with the reality of said construct (heteropatriarchy), and discuss the urgency of addressing them until we are blue in the face, and we could question why organized feminism doesn’t have a more salient role in electoral politics (the answer would be similar to that given about progressive parties, that necessarily represented more people than conservative ones in most polities: “divide and conquer”, and the fact that many, many women do not identify themselves primarily as belonging to a political group that identifies their needs with those of all the rest of their sisters, but have other, more salient collective identities that they prefer to pursue first), but that will have to wait for another post (that may very well never be written, I’m not that attracted to the issue, and it is a veritable minefield nowadays, with many more downsides than potential upsides). I rest contented with the clarifications I’ve made to the need for religion in political groups that I set out to do. There is another level of political grouping that may be more dependent on shared metaphysical beliefs and rituals (the one identified by Durkheim as the main social unit to study, which explains his fixation on it): the nation. That may indeed merit an additional post that I may sometime write…

On Religion and Politics (I)

I’m getting more in the thick of the preparation of my new book, and as part of it I laid out the areas of social research I needed to strengthen, among which there is a deeper understanding of sociological action theory. I had already read Parsons’ The Social System some years ago, and it has heavily influenced my own take on the working of society (my construct of dominant reason is indeed a way of integrating voluntary individual action with the influence of the group, which specifically has to provide the arguments for the eventual justification of said action to others -and to self-, along contractualist lines), but knew I had to delve deeper. Before proceeding with the results of such delving, I have to say that Parsons has been, in my humble opinion, very unjustly neglected by later sociologists (he is not much quoted or acknowledged), and I cannot  avoid sympathizing with what I suspect is the real reason of his (relative) falling out of fashion. It has to do with a dazzling representative of the next generation of his craft, the charismatic Charles Wright Mills, devoting a good deal of one of his most known and influential books (The Sociological Imagination) to savagely criticizing the aforementioned Social System, because of its “unnecessary verbosity”.

Wright Mills presents a number of long, torturous and yes, somewhat convoluted paragraphs of Parsons’ book followed by a “translation” in much more direct and colloquial prose that purportedly contains the same information, thus giving the impression that the original work by Parsons is a pompous and ponderous accumulation of uninspired digressions, apt to be summarized and streamlined in a paper of 10-12 pages without substantial loss of accuracy (rather, what survived the process of pruning and eliminating redundant and uninformative verbiage would be a bunch of self-evident platitudes almost devoid of any scientific value). I may be exaggerating the extent of Wright Mills critique (there was, may be, a tinge of admiration and recognition for who was, after all, one of the giants of American sociology when the Sociological Imagination was published) but not much, as both figures were both characteriologically and ideologically worlds apart (Parsons was a paradigm of the scholarly establishment, and quite conservative and anti-communistic, couldn’t be seen without a flannel suit and tie, and had a staid and cautious personal life, whilst the rambunctious Wright Mills wore jeans and working boots, married four times -but only to three different women!, drove to class in a motorbike -but not an American Harley, but a German BMW, what a wuss!- and spent time in Cuba interviewing Fidel Castro). Unsurprisingly, in the late sixties and seventies students the world over identified with the latter, leaving the former’s theories aside (I myself like to keep my copies of the Sociological Imagination and the Social System side by side in my library as a little private joke). Which is a pity, because sparkling and passionate as Wright Mills’ work may be, Parsons’ is by far more interesting, more illuminating and much deeper…

All this long introduction (and no reader of this blog should be surprised that I sympathize and empathize with an author accused of having a writing style considered by some young gun to be too wordy, and too abundant in long paraphrases and circumlocutions) was just to say I recently finished reading The Structure of Social Action, the other major book by Talcott Parsons (in 2 scrumptious and eminently enjoyable volumes), and that (more specifically, its discussion of previous sociologist Émile Durkheim, which I have also extensively read, of course) got me thinking in some remarks by one of my teachers (Amelia Valcarcel, we will get to her in a subsequent post) in very illuminating ways. Let’s start with Parsons’ understanding of Durkheim first, and see if we can reach to Valcarcel’s considerations in due time…

What we are reminded at the beginning of the section of the Structure of Social Action devoted to the discussion of Durkheim’s ideas is that he was a strict positivist. As this feature will turn out to be of extraordinary importance for my argument, we will need to deviate for a moment from our exposition of Parsons’ considerations of Durkheim, and expound what we understand such position to entail. During the first third of the XX century, positivism (a position championed first and foremost by Auguste Comte, the avowed teacher and inspirator of Durkheim) coincided quite literally with what today we call (a bit deprecatingly) “scientism”, and was an evolution of the (much older) empiricist worldview. For empiricists (the basic psychological and ontological scaffolding was designed and built by Locke, but the real meat and potatoes of the complete and philosophically coherent system were developed by my old friend Davey Hume), only those things that we can directly perceive through our bodily senses can be said to “really” exist. Even what we would call “mental” realities (“abstract” ideas, emotions, feelings, anticipations, memories, complex theories, mathematical systems, flights of fancy in our imagination and whatnot) are, according to empiricists, but a residue (or a re-elaboration of residues) of impressions left by things that we have perceived a number of times through our senses. As science developed in the XIX century the strictly empiricist position became more and more difficult to sustain (Maxwell equations showed quite conclusively the existence of a number of stubbornly physical things, no hocus-pocus or fluffy fairy-dust here!, like electromagnetic fields, charged particles, and subtle interactions, that our feeble senses would never be able to perceive), and was thus replaced by the positivism we are talking about: “Science” (at least the part of it that had to deal with non-conscious elements of nature, also called “natural sciences”, Naturwissenschaften in German) could exhaust the description of what was real and, vice versa, only those elements of reality that could be described by said “science”, that could be measured, that could be shown to conform to universal, parsimonious rules, were deemed to be “really, truly, honest-to-God real”. All the rest (first and foremost religious dogmas, of course, but once you start wielding your positivistic axe, all of metaphysics, doesn’t matter how anticlerical it may turn out to be, has to be discarded too).

I won’t go into the evident self-contradiction that stares you in the face the moment you formulate either empiricism or positivism (the discarding of metaphysics is itself a metaphysical proposition, not empirically demonstrable, and not amenable to being formulated, falsated or verified through anything remotely resembling the scientific method), or dwell in the methodological quicksand it soon found itself mired into (what has been called the demarcation problem: we can all agree that physics is unimpeachably “scientific” and that astrology is not… unfortunately, when we try to isolate the actual ways of doing physics, or chemistry, or biology that should distinguish them and constitute the ultimate explanation of such unimpeachability, so we could replicate them in other disciplines, like psychology, or anthropology, or sociology to make them more “scientific”, we find that the original “hard sciences” share a lot of the quirks and biases and implicit and unfounded assumptions that plague the latter, and we end up accusing the former of not being so scientific after all -see the whole social constructivism line of thought). I’ll just point out that Durkheim thought that the universe was composed only of three types of facts (all of them observable, with the help of specific instruments that may magnify them, if needs be): the “brute” facts of nature, the “mental” facts within the individuals’ brains (which were, needless to say, reducible to the first, no Cartesian whims here!) and the “social” facts, which constituted a third category. Finally, we need to note that for him any proposition, to be true, had to have a referent, to point to some existing fact or another (what after Wittgenstein we would call a “denotative theory of language”).  

The next element that Parsons draws our attention to is that for Durkheim (contra most progressive thinkers of the era and previous eras, like most philosophes, and the German left Hegelians, Marx and Feuerbach first and foremost among them… but not necessarily his teacher Comte!) religious propositions, being a manifestation that could be found in all societies, in his own time and in the past, had to be “true” (or they would have been eliminated). Now, they could not be true in the sense of describing an element of reality not amenable to scientific knowledge (because, remember, for him there could simply NOT be such elements). So they had to describe something really existing, and the question is, what could that be? it could not be facts of inert matter, as most of the contents of religious dogmas were incompatible with what physics teaches of how matter behaves (starting with the creation of the universe out of nothing, or out of a primordial chaos, that is more or less shared by all religions and would contradict either the laws of conservation of matter and energy or the second principle of thermodynamics). It could not be mental facts either, as what we know of human psychology is similarly incompatible with the most salient aspects of most religions, from ancient totemism to more developed “revealed” ones (from magical effects to miracles, prophecy and other types of supernatural knowledge), which presuppose some capabilities at least in some persons (not only founders, which can be assumed to be of a divine origin, but in selected leaders of the church or chosen ones, be them shamans, priests, gurus, etc.) As Parsons summarizes it (in page 413 of Volume I of the Structure of Social Action):

At the outset of the book [Parsons is here discussing Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life] he remarks that so persistent and tenacious an element in human life as religion is inconceivable if the ideas associated with it are pure illusions, that is, do not “reflect any reality”. And so he starts with a critique of the schools of interpretation which have, on the one hand, made religious ideas the primary element of religion and, on the other, have sought to derive these ideas from men’s impressions of the empirical world. This will be recognized as the typical approach of the earlier scheme – the question what , from the point of view of the actor, is the “reality” reflected in the ideas, the “representations” in terms of which he acts.

You probably can already see where this is leading: for Durkheim (in Parsons telling, and I think Parsons got it right here) the propositions of religious dogma, since its earliest manifestations (in totemism, as could be observed between Australian aboriginal tribes as documented by mostly German anthropologists, so kind of a third-hand account, but enough for him to assume that was a valid blueprint for every religious expression and form that came afterwards) really referred to the social reality, a somehow fuzzy concept that he had been championing since his first writings as being a sui generis kind of entity, but with as much claim to real existence as any lump of matter. And, if religious expressions, religious feeling, even actions that could be construed as religious ritual, all made reference to society, which is undeniably real, they could safely be understood as being true, which is what he was really after.

Of course, a believer may see things quite differently. When the Australian aboriginal chooses not to eat his totemic animal, or refrains from having sex with someone from the wrong totem, he is not complying with those prescribed behaviors because he feels an irrational respect (and awe and veneration) for the enhanced powers of the social group. Or not only that (because, if that were all he had in mind, we would lack a non-circular explanation of his behavior, specially the part of it more detrimental to everyday survival). When the Dervish dances and reaches a mystical feeling of unity with the divine that created the universe he does not consider that he is just very attuned to the traditions and myths and (somewhat deluded) worldview of his fellow believers with which he constitutes a collective unit (society!) able to exert much more power over their shared environment than what he alone could. When a Christian of whatever denomination participates in communion he doesn’t think about the holy form as a symbol of the unity of the group (or at least he shouldn’t only think that; in our own very disenchanted age it is a valid question what exactly does an enlightened citizen thinks he is doing by eating the wafer, and I wouldn’t discard in most cases it is something closer to the Durkheimian affirmation of group belonging and respect for the group’s traditions than to the direct access to the numinous, to the “irreducibly, entirely other” in Karl Otto’s terms, that orthodox theology tells him).

Be it as it may, the key aspect that caught my attention in Parsons interpretation of Durkheim is how the former sees the latter as using religion to complement an understanding of human motivation that would make the stability of social groups almost impossible to explain in its absence. Durkheim’s positivism limits him to positing what Weber called “means-ends rationality” when explaining human action: a modern citizen could use his reason only to determine what were the most adequate means to achieve his ends, but those ends themselves could not be subjected to rational validation. Other way of saying the same thing is that reason (understood as the systematic application of the scientific method to root out superstition, bias, fraud and other ways of thinking that are considered by positivist to be non-rational and, what is essentially the same, unscientific) can tell us how to act to achieve certain ends, but not to decide what ends we should set for ourselves (or for others) in the first place. This creates a problem for complex group, as different individuals are wont to choose different ends, some of which are likely to be exclusionary (not amenable to being pursued simultaneously: like if I pursue maximum economic development, ready to sacrifice whatever it takes to reach it, and you aspire to a maximally clean and unpolluted environment… our ends would clash and we would have no way to adjudicate rationally between them). It is a great merit of Parsons to identify that any “merely” utilitarian system of values (and all positivist systems end up being utilitarian, as they are left trying to maximize each individual pleasure -or, alternatively, minimize each individual’s pain, which is the only thing that is empirical, non-metaphysical and, according to their understanding of what reality consist of, the only thing that is “real”, and thus the only valid source of “value”) tends to be unstable, as those “ultimate ends” are, as I’ve said elsewhere, incommensurable.

So far, so good, we already know that for utilitarian (and, in more general terms, for all positivistic) systems there is no place for such thing as “values”, and so it is very difficult to demonstrate there is something that ultimately matters (in a  Parfitian sense). Things are like they are, happen as they happen (Parsons also notes perceptively that the positivistic view entails both value neutrality, obviously enough, and determinism, something with which I also strongly agree), and there is not much we can do about ‘em, other than note dutifully how they proceed and, at most, show a pro or con attitude. On top of determinism such outlook ends up resolving itself in utter relativism: as there is no way to compare my preferred ends with yours, both being equally valid for each of us (which is the same as saying, both being equally invalid in the traditional moral sense, because of its quaint aspiration to universality and unconditionality), the maximum we can aspire to is a deflationary ethics of tolerance where we endure each other as best we can, living and letting live as they say, trying to at least respect a basic set of individual rights in the expectations that our own rights would be similarly respected. Such lack of common values and common sense of “what indeed matters” would make the coordination of social groups very difficult and translate into fragmented, ultra-individualistic societies beset by “anomie” (an original Durkheimian term). If not killing each other is the best we can hope for, better to renounce all possible dreams of making great things together (like ever going to Mars, cheap and plenty fusion energy, or simply maintaining a planet with a semi-stable climate), as we would be forever doomed to the suboptimal equilibria we now endure, because of everybody looking out only for himself, with all the free-riding and externalities we have come to know so well, and which absent an all-encompassing set of  commonly accepted “ultimate ends” we would be unable to overcome.

Which means that, according to Durkheim, religion is a necessary component of social cohesion, or at least to the minimal level of group collaboration required to guarantee a modicum of human flourishing. Because in the absence of religion, of a common set of ultimate values that can bind people together and move them towards sacrificing at least something for the greater good, all we would have is a disparate group of selfish utility maximizers (pursuing in a more or less enlightened way their own incommensurable ends, each not admitting of negotiation or compromising with anybody else’s), Interesting stuff, that contrasts with some other decidedly (and more vocally) antireligious thinkers which may have shared some of Durkheim’s outlook, but didn’t have a problem in denying that religion really needed to have a “real” referent, something really existing to point to (I’m thinking here on Freud, that similarly was inspired by anthropological descriptions of Australian totemism but both in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion didn’t have any problem deciding that, for all its potential uses as social agglutinator religion was, as the first title mentioned clearly implied, an “illusion”, and even worse than that, a symptom of collective neurosis -it has to be noted that Freud was a notoriously dissembling author, and his books on religion are specially heavy in unfounded deductive chains and thinly veiled flights of fancy). Of course, the moment you subtract the element of truth such practices and sets of beliefs may have you are much less inclined to attempt to preserve them, and are much more likely to minimize the losses of getting entirely rid of them.

But what really caught my attention in all this was its import to my theory of the organization (Organization I, Organization II, Organization III, Decadence of organizations, Organizations & DR), which is one of the backbones of the book I already mentioned I’m currently working on. if Durkheim’s understanding of religion (not that different from Freud’s, as I just highlighted) is correct, that would collapse what I was considering two distinct types of organization into one: if religion is but an effective way of identifying members of the group so they can better coordinate with each other, religious organizations (marked by what they believe is really existing out there, and the kind of attitude it calls for) and political organizations (marked by the sense of belonging to a common group, and acting to improve the material lot of that group against others) would ultimately be the same. There could be no viable political organization without a distinct and unique set of beliefs that purported to be about “what there really is” but ultimately were about “who we are and how we distinguish ourselves from others”.

After thinking hard and long about it, I don’t think Durkheim is right, and I still think it makes sense to keep both types separate, but I’ll need to explain why in another post, as this one has grown beyond my very lax standards already. Stay tuned.