Category: Hannah Arendt

AI and Humanism

Henry Farrell remains my go-to guy in trying to wrap my head around AI.  His latest post on that topic can be found here:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/henry+farrell/FMfcgzQdzcrgnzCDNhCcmXHCZTzKqBrP

Two caveats.  First is that Farrell has zeroed in on large language models in his various posts about AI.  So what he has to say may not be relevant if there are other modes of AI functioning.  The second caveat follows from the first.  I think that I understand LLMs.  But not only may I be deluded on that score, but I may also totally miss the reality of AI because assimilating it to LLMs.

That said, the issue that I find myself most fixated on comes down to the word “generative.”  Hannah Arendt appropriated the term “natality” from Augustine.  She used the term to refer 1) to the way each birth of a human being brought something new into the world (thus increasing the world’s plurality).  We can certainly say that Arendt was too humanist; there are other births besides human ones and they, too, add to the world’s plurality.  (Recall that “plurality” is a fundamental concept—and value—for Arendt.) 

However, 2) “natality” also indexes the way in which action is creative.  Action initiates and serves as a base cause of the arrival of the “new.”  Novelty and action go hand-in-hand for Arendt; it is the way in which action is unpredictable that is precious to her—and cements the connection between action and freedom in her work.  Action is not totally unconstrained, but its constant ability to surprise us, and the ways in which we value creative and innovative responses to given situations, marks a special (and it seems for Arendt unique) human talent.

I have written before about the collapsing distinction between instinctual and deliberate (consciously chosen) behavior.  The line between human and animal behavior gets fuzzier and fuzzier with everything we learn about animals and about consciousness.  And there’s more evidence all the time that trees are much more active and conscious than was previously thought.  In short, humanism as a theory of an unbridgeable, qualitative difference between humans and other living beings has become less and less tenable. 

Of course, “humanism” is a term with many meanings.  I am using it here to designate the belief that humans are unique among the furniture of the world.  That belief often goes hand-in-hand with the additional beliefs that humans are superior to everything else that exists and that humans are entitled to “dominion” over everything else that exists.  (The notion of “dominion” has one vastly influential articulation in Genesis.  I don’t think the humanist claim to uniqueness necessarily entails assertions of superiority and/or dominion.)

In our current moment, the desire to distinguish between the human and the non-human has focused more intensely on machines, not animals.  If I am reading Farrell correctly, he has focused in on what might seem to be a notable lacunae in Arendt’s theory of action: desire.  What motivates action?  What does the agent strive to accomplish?  In Farrell’s post, this question brings him to the concept of “intentionality.”  Agents—whether human, animal, or plant—act in order to accomplish something.  In the strictest Darwinian terms, they act to accommodate themselves to their environment (which itself is in constant flux) or act to alter the environment to better suit their needs.  (That environment includes other beings as well as less intentional forces such as the weather.) I am connecting that concern to the question of what being “generative” means.

Can a machine want anything?  Can it initiate something out of its own needs/desires?  Just how “generative” is AI going to prove to be?  Think of a rock at the top of a hill.  It sits there until some external force pushes it.  Once pushed, it will, on its own momentum, roll down hill and (perhaps) do some surprising, unpredictable things.  But it needs the initial push. Yes, it generates consequences, but only after something external to it begins (natality) the process.

Isn’t AI the same?  Doesn’t it just sit there until it is given the starting prompt?  I read somewhere the claim from a tech guy that “I haven’t met a program or computer yet that wanted to tell me something.”  The machine doesn’t have anything it wants or needs to communicate.  It will, of course, have lots to say if prompted to do so.  But it will remain silent in the absence of that prompt. 

And when it does speak, it will not be trying to accomplish any particular thing.  It is indifferent to what it produces—and will alter its product in relation to further prompts and to the desires of the prompter.  It is that indifference to (or, put more drastically, its ignorance of) the possible consequences of what it generates that underlies (it seems to me) the most prevalent fears expressed about AI.  It is not that AI will develop its own desires and act upon them that is the threat.  It is that AI will mindlessly follow a program out to its logical (?) conclusions without any sense of how destructive it will be to go down that path.  Mindlessness vs mindfulness.  The machine doesn’t intend anything; it just processes its data into new combinations in response to a prompt and the algorithms used to do the processing work.

I may very well have the wrong end of the stick here.  It does seem to me that those who believe the distinction between man and machine is fated to go the direction of the now collapsed distinction between humans and animals argue in Cartesian fashion. Descartes said that animals are machines—and he made humans an exception to that rule.  The neo-Cartesians deny the exception.  They make humans another of the animals that are best understood as machines. Thus, in thinking through the categories of human and machines, they do not try to claim that the machine will develop desires and intentionality.  Instead, they argue that humans are already (and always) machines, that our folk psychology of desires and intentions and consciousness are just mistakes.  The human mind is simply a data processing entity, following its own algorithms.  And as a data processing machine, the human mind is vastly inferior to what our computers can do.  Match human intelligence against AI—and AI will win most times right now, and every time in the near future.

The machine will achieve “super-intelligence,” something humans are incapable of.

Perhaps, then, talk of desire and intentions, of wanting to communicate something, is only the last refuge of a desperate humanism, trying to hold on to a dubious distinction between humans and other beings in the world.  We can allow for differences (how humans organize their relations to one another is different from how swans do), but not for some hierarchy of beings, nor for some qualitative distinction between human cognition functions and those functions in other beings.  I have been convinced by the arguments (and the new empirical discoveries on which they are based) that collapse any such distinction between humans and animals.  Humans are not superior to the other animals and are certainly not radically different from them as cognitive processors.  Humans are as rational—and as irrational—as all the other animals.  It is simply not true that the animals are instinctual beings and humans are conscious, reasoning ones.  Both humans and animals (in my view, but this is not universally agreed on) rely on both instinctual and more conscious bases for action.

Since I believe consciousness is not epiphenomenal, but actually exists as a function that enables deliberate choice and strategic action aiming toward the satisfaction of desire, the question does (it seems to me) become how to think about non-conscious intelligence.  Despite cinematic representations of computers that anthropomorphize them, I take it that no one is claiming the machines are conscious.  As I have already said, the arguments (as far as I can tell) go in the opposite direction: that is, humans don’t have consciousness, not that machines do have it.

In sum, it seems that consciousness is where humanism is making its stand.  Maybe its last stand.  Which returns me to what I have gleaned from all the work on consciousness that I have read in the past two years.  The function of consciousness is primarily one of evaluation.  What consciousness provides is an ability to assess a situation and 1) to consider options in how to respond to and proceed within that situation and 2) to do an internal evaluation of one’s various desires, to see which one (or ones) to prioritize in this moment.  I think machines follow an utterly, noncomparable, path toward what they produce.  The distinction between human and machine seems firm to me.  Which is not to say that humans are superior in every way to machines. Obviously that is not the case.  There are many things machines can do that humans cannot.  But those things are things humans want done—and devise their machines to accomplish.  I don’t think the machines want anything at all. 

One final complication.  The Farrell post I have cited does ponder a case where human and LLM processing do seem not just comparable, but fairly similar.  Farrell is looking toward the famous work of Alfred Lord and Milton Parry on the bards who perform long epic poems in what appear to be mind-boggling feats of improvisation.  Farrell sees this bardic practice as shuffling through large, pre-existing bits of language to produce in the moment a coherent, comprehensible utterance.  The analogy to LLMs seems clear.  What, of course, still remains mysterious (but may become less so in the future) is the algorithm (if that is even the right term) the bards deploy.  Like the chess master, the bard has a storage bank of remembered moves/phrases and is able to pick out one element from that bank very quickly.  How the feat is accomplished remains unexplained right now, but it could be more similar than not to how a LLM performs its similar feat.  But Farrell does not think this particular breakdown in the distinction between human and machine undermines the objection that machines do not have intentions and (my addition) do not have autonomous desires.  Does the machine want to learn?  Does the machine want to correct its mistakes?  Only if humans tell it to.

LINKS

Blogging has been pretty much non-existent for me over the past year.  I won’t make any promises about the future.  If my silence goes on much longer, I will very likely just close down this site altogether.

But I have written a few things over the past months, and here at the links for anyone who might be interested.

First, a review of John Guillory’s recent short book on “close reading.”

https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/37/3/919/8259478

Second, a review of Alexandre LeFebevre’s book, Liberalism as a Way of Life.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/liberalism-as-a-way-of-life-by-alexandre-lefebvre-princeton-nj-princeton-university-press-2024-285p/8A0FBBBFBD5842764650B966930B9EEF

Third, an essay on Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment that considers its deficiencies as a solution to the failure to construct a “common world” within a political and/or social community.

https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.58.1.0040

This last link is only to an abstract of the essay.  Contact me at mcgowanjohn74@gmail.com if you would like me to send you a copy of the whole essay.  I also have a pdf of the entire special issue of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric in which the essay appears.  Happy to send that along to anyone who is interested.

The Perplexities of Violence

I have been gnawing at this issue for some forty years now and am no nearer to a formulation that satisfies me.  I think it’s because there are no generalizations about violence and its effects that stand up to even the most cursory encounter with historical examples.  I would love to believe that violence is always (in the long run) counter-productive.  Certainly in any utilitarian calculus that measures whether people (in the aggregate) are better off as a result of violence, the answer most usually will be a clear-cut NO.  Apart from its immediate (in the moment) victims, violence breeds violence. The definition of violence from which I work is “physical harm done to a person by another person.”  To perpetuate violence is to insure that physical harm will be done—either to others or to oneself.

But before I even try to consider how violence leads to more violence, let me dwell a moment on my definition.  I do not intend to deny the extended use of the term “violence” to denote psychological or material (destruction of a person’s goods or livelihood) harm done to people. And destruction of non-human entities (whether human built, like cities, or non-human built, like forests) could also be covered by the word violence.  It is also the case that physical harm is done by earthquakes and the like. But, for simplicity’s sake, I want to stick with direct physical harm done by some human to another human in trying to come to grips with how violence is deployed in various cases, and what that violence causes or does not cause to happen.  In other words, what motivates the action of inflicting physical harm on others?  What benefits does the perpetrator of violence believe the violence will give him?  What are the actual consequences of acts of violence? (This question indicates my belief that perpetrators of violence are routinely mistaken about violence’s effects.) And, finally, how does violence either underwrite or undermine power?  (The relation of violence to power is an ongoing puzzle.)

Again, let’s be simple about it for starters.  People deploy violence either 1) to force others to do things they would, if left to themselves, not do and 2) to eliminate people who are actual (or are perceived to be) obstacles to what the agent of violence desires.  Violence as intimidation and/or coercion (1) or violence as the means to winning a competition that is understood as either/or (2).  Either I win or you do—therefore, I will use whatever means necessary to assure that I win.  And violence appears the most compelling strategy to assure victory.  There can be no compromise.  It is, as we say, a fight to the death.  As long as you still are present in the field, I am threatened.  You must be eliminated for me to be at peace (the term “peace” used ironically here to indicate a sense of security that is impossible as long as my opponent lives). 

In short, violence is, one, the great persuader (in the coercion case) or, two, the surest means for victory in a competition.  The argument against claiming violence is always counter-productive is that it can secure submissive obedience and the absence of competitors over very long stretches of time.  Terror deployed by either state or non-state actors can subdue whole populations. (Definition of terror:  the use of sporadic violence against one’s opponents. Many opponents can be left unharmed, but the key is that they know themselves subject to violence at all times and that acts of violence are unpredictable.  When and where violence will be inflicted cannot be calculated; thus, violence is ever present as a threat that is then actuated sometimes.)   Historical examples abound, including the killing and corralling of native American populations as an instance of the “elimination” path, with the reign of Jim Crow in the American South offers a case of terror’s effectiveness when deployed over a one hundred year span. 

The reductionist view of the relation of violence to power is that power is, at bottom, just violence.  Or, to put it differently, power’s ultimate recourse is always violence (the ability of the state—or of other actors—to physically harm with impunity).  The knowledge that the powerful can harm you is what keeps those who would resist power in line.  Power can inflict harms short of physical destruction to keep resistors in line (including economic destitution and incarceration), but it remains the fact that harm done to bodies is the ultimate threat—and power remains dependent on that threat. Inevitably, power will act upon that threat at times. 

The problem is that the reductionist view does not work—or, at least, not in all cases.  When power resorts to violence to secure obedience is precisely when it is weakest, Arendt argued.  Her generalization is as false as the reductionist generalization.  But she was on to something.  Any law (or other device to govern behavior) is only effective if the vast majority obey it voluntarily.  The power of the law resides (in this analysis) in the governed’s acceptance that the law as binding.  One classic case is the American experiment with prohibition of alcohol.  And history offers many examples of seemingly powerful regimes that simply collapsed without much in the way of a battle.  The French and Russian revolutions are cases in point; the governments in both instances were “taken over” very quickly and with very little bloodshed.  It was only after the revolution had occurred that reactionary forces gathered themselves together and instigated civil wars. 

So, it would seem, power based solely on violence follows the Hemingway description of bankruptcy: the power seeps away slowly until it suddenly collapses.  Again, to be clear: the seeping away period can be very long indeed, and collapse (if we take the very long view) in inevitable and multi-caused since nothing human lasts forever. 

What interests me in thinking about the relation between power and violence is the extent to which power’s resorting to violence is delegitimizing.  When and where power relies on violence, it admits that its edicts are not acceptable to those who can only be compelled by violence.  On the one hand, that admission necessitates the creation of the category “criminal.”  Power must insist that there are deviants who simply (for whatever perverse or self-interested reasons) will not obey the law.  On the other hand, extensive reliance on violence will indicate the law’s unreasonableness, its inability to win voluntary consent.  Violence may cow many, but it will not win their respect.  (Exceptions to this assertion, of course.  There will always be those who are impressed by violence, who aspire to be enlisted in the ranks of its foot soldiers.  I will get back to my thoughts on this sub-section of any population.)

The “on the one hand and on the other hand” of the previous paragraph reveals how completely acts of violence are entangled in speech acts.  The act of violence itself is a speech act.  It can only have its effect if the act is publicly known and the message it is meant to convey is somewhat unambiguous.  Thus, a Mafia killing must clearly indicate this is the result of encroaching on our territory.  Revenge killings must make the fact that this “was for revenge” obvious.  State violence must say “this kind of behavior/disobedience” will not be tolerated.  And, in a secondary speech act, the state creates the category “criminal” to justify its violence against those who disobey.  An exception to violence being public (as it must be if it is to send a message) are private murders where the perpetrator hopes to get away with the act never being ascribed to him.  Such murders only make sense if there is one victim, without any future intention to deploy violence—and hence no audience to whom a message needs to be sent.  Even serial killers, it seems to me, are message senders.  They get off on the terror they inspire among a certain population.

Because violence is embedded in message sending, the meaning of any act of violence inevitably becomes a contested field.  Violence is rhetoric.  Acts of violence are intended to persuade.  The regime (Romans against Christians; South Africa against black dissenters) that creates martyrs aims to dissuade others from acting as the martyr did; the martyr’s peers hold up his death as an inspiration to further acts of resistance.  War aims to persuade another country to bend to my country’s will just as violence against the “criminal” aims to persuade others to follow the law.  But just as violence often inspires violent resistance, the meanings attached to any act of violence will also generate resistance.  There will be competing interpretations.

I think that all of this means that acts of violence always need to be justified.  That is, every act of violence will be accompanied by a set of speech acts that strive to justify that act.  This is hardly to say that such justifications are equally plausible.  Some will be downright risible, but I daresay few acts of violence go unspoken.  This, admittedly, is tricky.  There are black holes, and people who are simply “disappeared.”  And regimes (or the Mafia) are rarely explicit about the kinds of torture they deploy.  Similarly, the Nazi concentration camps were (sort of) secret, while what was going on in those camps was even more secret.  Still, in all these cases it was generally known that “enemies” (of the state, of the people, of our clan) were targets, even if the details were left to the imagination or only whispered in various quarters. And leaving things to the imagination might even be a more effective way to instigate terror.

If I am right that all acts of violence need to be justified, that suggests there is a prima facie assumption that violence is wrong.  It can only be justifiable if compelling reasons as to its necessity are offered.  Violence is “moralized” (made moral) when it is claimed that only its deployment can insure the health of morality against the threats posed by the immoral.  Wherever an attempt to justify violence is made, the term “necessary” will almost invariably appear.  The perpetrator of violence will almost always express regret that violence had to be resorted to.  But his victim left him no choice.  It was a species of self-defense; without the recourse to violence, some horrible consequence would have unfolded.

To appeal to self-defense is always an attractive option because self-defense is almost universally accepted as the one obvious, incontrovertible, justification for violence.  No one currently thinks the Ukrainians are engaging in unjustified violence against the Russian invaders—unless they buy Russian propaganda in all its absurdity.  But even here matters are not simple.  Firstly, because self-defense gets entangled with questions of revenge, which may explain why the desire for revenge is so powerful.  But revenge notoriously generates cycles of violence and, thus, is not (in many cases) a successful remedy to inflicted violence.  It just keeps violence going.

Secondly, self-defense gets tangled up in notions of “proportionate violence.”  There is some sense that violence inflicted as a response to a prior act of violence should be proportionate.  To escalate the scale of violence, even in cases of self-defense, is usually seen as morally dubious.  The obvious current example is Israel’s response to the attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023.  The whole notion of “proportionate violence” is bizarre.  Who is doing the measuring?  Yet the moral intuition underlying the notion is real and strongly felt.  Even in a no holds barred war (such as World War II) some limitations on violence are still respected.  The Germans did not kill downed Allied airmen wholesale, or non-Russian prisoners of war.  How to understand where and how some limitations are imposed on possible acts of violence is extremely difficult.  There is no formula; there is a tendency toward escalation; and yet since 1945 no belligerent with nuclear arms has used them.  Whether that restraint is solely a result of a rational fear of retaliation is an open question.  In any case, whether with the notion of proportion in violent responses to acts of violence or in self-imposed limitations on the means of violence deployed in conflicts, there is a shaky, unenforceable, yet real set of constraints.  When those constraints are ignored, the violent actors lose any plausible grounds for justification.  And it proves both difficult and rare for any person or any regime to say “fuck it” to all attempts at justification.  The rule does seem to apply even in the most egregious cases: those engaged in violence will attempt to justify their actions. Violent actors will try to win the rhetorical battle in the court of public opinion. (In international affairs currently, that court is often the United Nations. Its lack of enforcement powers make it seem absurd in many cases, yet state actors still care about its verdicts.)

Because self-defense is almost always accepted as a justification, those who initiate violence have a much harder row to hoe.  For that reason, peremptory violence is most often justified in the name of preventing an even greater harm than the violence itself. The speech acts here are counter-factual; if I don’t act violently, these things will happen.

Presumably, violence could be deployed to bring a better world into existence (Soviet violence was perhaps an instance), but much more usually violence is justified as overcoming the threat certain others pose to the current state of affairs.  Still, preventive violence can morph into (or be merged with) creative violence.  The Nazis offer an example of such intertwining.  They preached (and practiced) violence against the threat posed by Jews and communists, but they also used the violence to create a whole new political order, one they claimed would be strong enough to combat those threats. In its own way, the current Trump administration is following that path.  It has designated a set of enemies (including the “deep state”) fit to be punished while also attempting to create a whole new form of government (rule by executive) justified as the only means to overcome the enemies.

Since the revulsion against violence, the prima facie assumption of its being morally wrong, is so prevalent, the demonization of enemies is required.  Such enemies must be deemed outside the moral pale.  This gets complicated, of course, in the modern state system, with its distinction between citizens and non-citizens.  Even the Nazis felt compelled to strip people of citizenship first before making them the victims of violence.  It remains to be seen how much the Trump administration will refrain from violence against citizens.  Or if it will begin to strip citizenship from current citizens. For now, Trump has declared open season on non-citizens, while only (?) depriving citizens of employment while not sending them off to prison. (But his “lock ’em up” fantasies might lead to that next step.)

But what about those for whom violence is not wrong, but actually to be celebrated as a sign of strength.  Easy enough for Arendt to make fun of such losers for mistaking a capacity for violence with real power.  Those losers still can cause severe havoc in the world.  And it’s also easy to pathologize these incels, spending hours and hours “gaming,” and frustrated by their lack of access to good jobs, sexual partners, or social respect.  It remains the fact that for some people (mostly men) violence is the means to self-esteem, to showing that they are here and can make a difference in (an impact on) the world.  The recruits for para-military and state thuggery are standing by.  And, as Christopher Browning’s work has shown, just the need to go along, to be accepted as a member of a group, can facilitate violence once someone else instigates it.  Fear of ostracism from the only group that is offering one membership can be sufficient motive to participate in acts of violence in good conscience.  The point: any attempt to come to grips with violence that appeals only to its rationality or to the justifications offered to render it compatible with morality will miss the non-rational and non-moral motivations that enable much violence.  From sadism and crimes of unreflective passion to conformism and ecstatic participation in group actions, the sources of violence are multiple and defy calculation along cost/benefit lines, or in terms of what can be morally justified.

To be continued. These musings are, in large part, only the preliminaries to considering the use of violence as a tactic of resistance to established regimes.  I will take up that question of strategy in subsequent posts.

The Strong Programme: Issues of Method and Advocacy in Presenting Intellectual and Political Positions

This post is a follow-up to the previous one: https://jzmcgowan.com/2025/03/11/moral-renewal/

In particular, I am intrigued by Alexandre Lefebvre’s desire to write a description of illiberal thought that does not verve immediately (or even eventually) into a critique of that thought.  Instead, the idea is to describe illiberal thought on its own terms.  With the pay-off being 1) a better understanding of illiberal views (because not biased, not looking out for “gotchas” as that thought is described) and 2) a way of understanding how illiberal views are appealing to illiberalism’s followers.  Since illiberalism obviously makes sense to millions of people now, it is better not to disparage its followers or insist that they are misinformed, stupid, malicious etc.  Is it possible, in other words, to be illiberal in good faith? And what would an outsider’s account of illiberalism look like if good faith on the part of its adherents was assumed?

I am trying to think through the implications of this approach to the thinking of writers/activists/politicians with whom I deeply disagree. For starters, I am entirely on board with the desire to stop preaching to the choir, i.e. to the endless conversations among progressives (for lack of a better term) about the horrors of the right wing.  I have become notorious among my friends for calling a halt to conversations in which we all sit around tut-tutting about the latest Trump outrages.  Such conversations follow completely predictable lines and feel smug, like the Pharisee in the gospel, to me.  Not to mention that it is incredibly rare for anything new or interesting to be said.

On the positive side, I am perplexed by the appeal of these anti-liberal guys to half the American populace.  (Russia and China didn’t get to vote for their anti-liberal overlords; Modi’s India is perhaps closer to the US in that regard, i.e. in having secured popular support.) So, yes, trying to provide an unbiased, straight up account of what these guys have to say for themselves is an incredibly worthwhile project. 

But I would want to couple that account with some more speculative thinking about why people buy into that worldview.  What about it resonates with them?  We all know the familiar memes that try to answer that question.  Status loss; owning the libs; resentment against cultural elites; feeling disrespected by those elites; loss of solid blue collar jobs to deindustrialization; the rise of women and people of color.  All true enough, but why would these erstwhile new deal democrats turn their backs on the social democratic regulations and institutions that produced a large middle class?  Why fail to see that the attack on social democracy, and on unions, was orchestrated and bank-rolled by those who were determined to redistribute wealth upwards?  Why, in short, do the ideals and actual achievements of social democracy now inspire hostility more than loyalty? 

All that’s familiar territory—and, it would seem, territory Lefebvre does not want to traverse since it is well-trodden.  Fair enough.  He wants to attempt something different: to enter into the mindset of various anti-liberals without any prejudice as to the truth or validity of those mindsets. 

His project resonates with the “strong programme” in sociology (it had its heyday in the 80s and 90s).  Its practitioners tried to achieve “epistemic symmetry”; that is, they wanted to approach all webs of belief as equivalent and contingent.  In other words, they wanted to avoid the starting premise that my beliefs are true, but the other guy’s are false.  Instead, the starting premise should be that the other guy is as rational or irrational as I am, that he has “reasons” for his beliefs just as I do for mine.  So in attempting to describe and understand his beliefs I should evaluate them along exactly the same lines that I would evaluate my own.

Here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry on the strong programme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_programme

And here’s a long quote from Barbara Herrnstein Smith that lays out the basic idea.  (From Belief and Resistance, Harvard UP, 1997, p. xvi, Smith’s italics).

“If what I believe is true, then how is the other fellow’s skepticism or different belief possible? The stability of every contested belief depends on a stable explanation for the resistance to that belief and, with it, a more or less coherent account of how beliefs generally are formed and validated, that is, an epistemology (though not necessarily a formal one).  The two favored solutions to the puzzle just posed seem to be demonology and, so to speak, dementology: that is, the comforting and sometimes automatic conclusion that the other fellow . . . is either a devil or a fool—or, in more enlightened terms, that he or she suffers from defects or deficiencies of character and/or intellect: ignorance, innate incapacity, delusion, poor training, captivity to false doctrine, and so on.  Both solutions reflect a more general tendency of some significance here, namely ‘epistemic self-privileging’ or ‘epistemic asymmetry’: that is, our inclination to believe that we believe the true and sensible things we do because they are true and sensible, while other people believe the foolish and outrageous things they do because there is something the matter with those people. . . .

[What would it mean/entail] to maintain ‘symmetry’ in analyses of scientific and other beliefs, those beliefs currently seen as absurd and wrong as well as those generally accepted as true?  Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, this commitment to methodological symmetry is not equivalent to maintaining that all beliefs are equally valid (objectively? subjectively?)  Such a claim would have to be, from a constructivist perspective, either vacuous (constructivism, by definition, rejects classic ideas of objective validity) or tautologous (to say all beliefs are equally subjectively valid is just to say that people really believe what they believe).  That commitment is equivalent, however, to maintaining that the credibility of all beliefs, including those currently regarded as true, reasonable, self-evident, and so forth, is equally contingent: equally the product, in other words, of conditions (experiential, contextual, institutional, and so forth) that are fundamentally variable and always to some extent unpredictable and uncontrollable.”

The model here would be Bruno Latour’s Science in Action (Harvard UP, 1987), which attempts to lay out all those variables that combine to make a scientific theory or a scientific “fact” acquire widespread consent.

I am very attracted to a project that aspires to methodological symmetry.  And want to cheer on any and all attempts to overcome the temptations to demonology or dementology.  I think such a project is very, very difficult to pull off—all the more reason to try it.

The Herrnstein Smith description of the enterprise is not, however, to provide a simple recapitulation of some one’s views.  Rather, she is describing what might be called a “transcendent” account of a view—if we take “transcendent” in its Kantian sense.  She wants also to delineate the underlying “conditions” (or factors) that combine to make a viewpoint plausible, credible, attract a substantial number of adherents.  It’s the William James point: truth is made; it only comes into existence through a process; it is not an inert, pre-existing, self-evident thing.

Since I spent my whole writing life basically describing and assessing the views of other writers, I was pushed to think about how my own practice over the years aligns with the “Strong programme”—and with what I take to be Lefebvre’s project.  The most obvious thing to say is that I have never come close to (and have never really undertaken) a “transcendent” analysis.  I have not considered the material, societal, institutional, and political bases that leads ideas or beliefs to be formulated, disseminated, and endorsed by various social groups.  I have speculated some on the professional proclivities of intellectuals and on the nature of their institutional base: the university.  But generally in that work [certain essays, and in Democracy’s Children (Cornell UP, 2002)] I don’t consider how their social positioning affects the actual ideas articulated or the belief/nonbelief attached to particular views.

Instead, I have (as philosophers tend to do) tried to 1) lay out what a certain writer thinks, 2) make sense of that thought in the places where it seems hard to understand, and 3) evaluate the plausibility of the thinking in relation to canons of consistency and rationality (very generally construed in terms of what renders an argument convincing) and what can roughly be categorized as “reflective equilibrium.”  That is, do the presented ideas make sense in relation to other things we know about the world, where those “other things” come from experience, from alternative views presented by other writers than the one being examined, and from a sense of what kinds of claims “hang together” as opposed to negating one another. (One key issue here is the role of “intuitions.” How much does my judgment of a writer’s positions depend on whether they align with my pre-rational, originary, intuitions about how the world works and what is right. William James leads us to suspect that a basic sensibility, a basic orientation to others and the world, comes first–and our ideas, our articulated viewpoints, only come second. Those viewpoints exist as after the fact attempts to rationalize, to make seem reasonable, convictions that aren’t based on reason at all. I think he is right about the grounding of our convictions in the pre-rational, but also think that the process of having to articulate reasons for our views–often in response to others who challenge those views–can lead to revisions of our beliefs and commitments.)

Granting that I have not done the work of a “transcendent” account, I still think my work can be seen as occupying four different registers of philosophical presentation.  1. In Postmodernism and its Critics (Cornell UP, 1992), I did offer overviews of various writers (Derrida, Foucault, Said as well as short sections on Kant, Hegel etc.) that could serve as introductions to people not familiar with their work.  However, my overviews were biased in relation to an overarching argument about the nature of postmodern thought generally.  Thus, I was at pains to show what these writers shared—and how they understood and used the work of their 19th century predecessors (hence the sections on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche).  So my descriptions of any writer’s work was “motivated”—and their work was evaluated (even as it was explained) within the framework of a contrast between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.”  In short, an introduction (to postmodern thought) with an attitude.  I was not an unbiased explicator, but I was trying to be a trustworthy one even as I acknowledged my biases.  So I was trying to accomplish a two-sided goal.  I wanted my readers to better understand the postmodern thinkers I discussed, but I also wanted to convince them of the political deficiencies of postmodern thinking.

2)  In my book on Hannah Arendt [Hannah Arendt: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1998) I took the more standard route of attempting to provide a synthetic overview of a writer’s whole career (although I will eternally regret that I didn’t include her book on totalitarianism in my account, an omission that made no sense at the time and much less sense now).  But the book is not mere description of what Arendt thought because 1) it strives to make sense of things in Arendt that are perplexing (such as her hostility to the “social” and the puzzle about what the content of political action could actually be given her views); that is, I try to put together the most plausible reconstructive accounts that would explain moments in her text that are particularly hard to make sense of.  And 2) I do evaluate her thinking, allowing myself to explain where I think she gets things wrong or makes assertions that are dubious or that contradict what she asserts elsewhere.  All of this, however, sticks closely to the logic and arguments of Arendt’s own writing, with very little (really, almost none) attention to the “conditions” in which Arendt wrote or under which her work circulated and found adherents/critics.

3) My work on the headnotes for the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, first edition 2001; third edition 2018) was much more straightforward textbook work.  The idea was to offer a short summary of a writer’s characteristic concerns and ideas, with a look at how that writer’s work responded to or was aligned with various traditions (or schools) in the field, and a very short synapses of some objections other writers had raised to the work of the writer in question.  The first person was strictly absent.  I was not evaluating this writer’s views.  I was simply explaining what they believed and how they were located in the field and what some responses to their work had been.  All judgment was left to the reader—or, perhaps, to the field. 

I don’t think Lefebvre is necessarily looking for this kind of textbook impersonality in his project.  But this does approach the suspension of judgment (along with eschewing any temptation to debunking or critique or moral condemnation) that he seems to aspire to.  One trouble, of course, is that textbooks are boring.  The “view from nowhere” style (neither an advocate, or even in sympathy, with the views examined, nor a critic of those views) can prove unreadable after a while.  Advocacy yields piquancy. On the other hand, the Olympian style of all-seeing and impartial Homer has a sublimity of its own to recommend it.  So non-advocacy can have its own style, its own sources of interest.  I think they are hard for a writer to access/deploy, but hardly impossible.  I don’t think anyone would really want to read the over 150 headnotes in our Norton anthology one right after the other.

4) I had one final mode that was pretty much present in all my books, but was absolutely to the fore both in American Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Pragmatist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).  These works were very much in line with a certain kind of philosophic practice—one that would be called (mostly by those hostile to it) “idealist” and “presentist.”  My goal in both books was to present a particular understanding of what “liberalism” and “democracy” “mean” in normative (or ideal) terms.  To what does an adherence to liberalism or democracy commit a person if those two ideals are understood in the way that I present? So the books argue for a certain understanding of liberalism and democracy, attempt to lay out the consequences of accepting that the presented understanding of these terms is normative and desirable, and to then consider how actual conditions in 21st century America fall short of the ideal.

In pursuing that goal, I raid writers for whatever ideas or arguments are useful to my making my case. (The subtitle of the pragmatist book is “making the case for liberal democracy.”) So I am not 1) offering an examination or explication of the various writers I do discuss and 2) am very partial in what I take from those writers—partial in both senses of the word.  I am biased in what I choose to focus on in their work and incomplete in my engagement with their work.  So, for example, I offer a very secular view of William James, ignoring all his mystical yearnings and interest in the para-normal.  I announce in my preface that I have no investment in offering an “accurate” reading of James’s work or of any of the other pragmatist writers (Peirce, Dewey, Rorty).  I am just stealing from them ideas and arguments I find help me toward articulating my own position.  Thus, in sharp distinction from my postmodernism book, in making my argument in these two later books, a charge of inaccuracy in my portrayal of various writers would be beside the point.  But in the postmodernism book, my whole argument would fall apart if what I had to say about Derrida or Foucault was not “true” in the sense of being a very plausible account of what they have to say.  Accuracy matters in the postmodernism case, but not in the other one. The two latter books stand or fall on the basis of how convincing my “case” is, not on whether I have gotten James or Dewey “right.”

OK.  So where does Lefebvre’s project fit amidst all these ways of skinning the cat.  I don’t know, but I think he wants to get as close as possible to neutral, non-judgmental description.

Is pure, neutral distillation possible—in the manner of an introduction for those unfamiliar with the terrain?  Lefebvre would do the hard work for us of reading/listening to various right-wing voices and then present us with an overview of their thinking, their commitments, and their beliefs.  The audience consists of people with only vague and incomplete ideas about the right-wing world view and right-wing aspirations.  So now, after reading his (projected) book, I know more about the right-wingers.

But . . . How much does it advance our understanding of those views if Lefebvre eschews any analysis or evaluation of them?  Wouldn’t he need, at the very least, to identify the “perks” of becoming the kind of person the right-wing perfectionists want you to be?  In other words, the right-wing views have their negative side (a critique of the liberal world “we” all swim in, where “we” hardly includes the majority of the world’s population) and their positive side (the blessings they say will accrue to people living in illiberal societies).  But those blessings are not very well articulated (at least in right-wing American discourse).  Only vague promises of more economic prosperity and retrieval of lost status are offered; their vision of illiberal man (akin to Lefebvre vision of liberal personhood in his liberalism book [Liberalism as a Way of Life, Princeton UP, 2024]) needs to be fleshed out since it is only hinted at.  Does Lefebvre just let these silences sit unnoticed as he offers his overview of their thinking?  In other words, his liberalism book draws out the implications of liberalism as a “comprehensive doctrine” even where those implications have rarely been noted or highlighted.  The implications are a neglected feature of liberalism.  Wouldn’t a writer be called upon to do the same in an exposition of right-wing views? (I have written a review of Lefebvre liberalism book that I will post in the next few days.)

Once a writer begins articulating unexpressed implications, it is very hard to avoid evaluation.  As Herrnstein Smith says, all positions engage in demonology—and that is what Lefebvre is striving mightily to avoid.  But the right-wing is addicted to telling lies about its opponents and to identifying scapegoats to explain current dysfunctions.  Muslims for Modi; Uighurs and Tibetans for the Chinese; Mexican rapists and drug dealing immigrants for Trump etc.  This isn’t a side-note for right wing views; it’s explicitly and persistently built in.  So Lefebvre is going to need a strategy for addressing those claims about the enemies within—and perhaps he is also going to need to do some kind of Latourian analysis in order to avoid arm-chair psychologizing and/or his own version of demonology/dementology.  In short, the goal of symmetrical epistemology is to not pathologize the right-wing views he describes. So he has to show how right-wing beliefs do make sense within a broad experiential and institutional context; but that shouldn’t mean (in my view) that he can’t point to the huge effort right-wingers make to disseminate lies and to foster animosities.

Similarly, I don’t see how Lefebvre can sidestep the fact that calls to violence are a feature, not a bug, of right-wing views.  Not pathologizing such views does not entail ignoring their real world consequences.  To understand why some people believe that some other people need to be deported, jailed, censored, or killed is not to condone such beliefs.  But that’s a line that will be fuzzy (I think) if repudiation of violence is not made explicit.  In other words, pure description of right-wing views would necessarily include accounts of right-wing hate mongering.  I guess one could just lay out the fact of such hate-mongering and leave it to the reader to pass judgment. But that’s not a position (i.e. neutral and non-judgmental about violent repudiation of demonized groups of people) I would want to occupy.  So, for example, can a writer just report the claims about Haitians eating cats in Ohio without also doing some fact-checking?

Maybe the easiest way to say all this is that right-wing views double down on the ”closed Society” that Lebrvre describes in his Bergson book [Human Rights as a Way of Life, Stanford UP, 2014.] For my synapsis of this book, see https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/27/alexandre-lefebvres-human-rights-as-a-way-of-life-on-bergsons-political-philosophy/

The right-wingers are stalwart opponents of “open societies”—their whole world view is built on the conviction that open societies are soul-destroying, depriving individuals of grounded communities, and upsetting the unanimity, the untroubled consensus in values and beliefs, enjoyed by tight-knit, closed groups.  Hannah Arendt believed that totalitarian regimes must lie, must strive to replace the real world with a fictional one, precisely because there is no unity in the real world—never was and never will be.  Plurality is a fundamental, inescapable fact about “the human condition.”  And her hopeful belief was that totalitarian fictions must inevitably collapse in the face of the fundamental fact of plurality.  That’s probably too optimistic; totalitarian fictions, underwritten by violence (by terror) wielded by the state can last a very long time. Historical examples abound. What such totalitarian regimes can never achieve is the moment of conflict-free harmony they claim to aspire to.  Instead, the violence is unending as ever new enemies (the ones responsible for harmony not arriving) are identified. 

My point is that  recognizing how seductive narratives of a return to lost idylls of unity can be is very different from refusing to say how the consequences of those narratives are catastrophic.  Right-wing visions must, like every world view, be disseminated through various channels that aim to persuade others of their validity, their desirability.  Lefebvre’s liberalism book is an attempt to contribute to the dissemination of liberalism.  His current project, it would seem, wants to stand above or beside any persuasive motive or effect.  He is just going to present what right-wingers believe, without prejudicing his account by taking a negative stance toward those beliefs. No demonology, no pathologizing.  As I have said, the attempt intrigues me even as I see problems with it.