THE SOUL OF REASON

The material presented here is taken from a working paper titled The Soul of Reason:  An Argument for a New Post-Modern Realism in Social Theory and Philosophy.  (D. H. Bowles 2020)

I.  Setting the Stage

Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men!  For though the world stood up and stopped this bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.
          Epilogue, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
          Bertolt Brecht (1941)

I first heard those lines delivered circa 1972, on a college theater stage in Rockford, Illinois, and they froze me in my seat, providing irrefutable testimony to the shock-value power of vulgar language judiciously and effectively employed.  Their gut-wrenching impact expanded to fill the silence of the theater for an infinite moment before the applause commenced, and it has continued to echo in my consciousness down to the present day.  Beginning with Election Night 2016, and in the months and years since, I’ve been living with the sense that we here in the United States (for whom Brecht wrote the play, and where it was intended to be originally staged) are now living through it, one excruciating scene after another.  To my mind, the striking resemblances of Donald Trump and his rise to power in the United States with Brecht’s character of Arturo Ui are plain, manifold, and chilling.  Now it could be that I am an alarmist in saying this, and the democratic institutions of our political culture are somehow strong enough to resist and ultimately survive Trump-Ui.  Many people believe and say so, and I hope to heaven they’re right.  I often sooth myself in the dark of the night with that very thought.  But many people also say that Trump is a symptom, not the disease.  I’m pretty confident they are correct in that, and it’s with diagnosis of that disease and a prescription for its cure (or, at least, its control) that this essay is concerned.

Since the rise of global neoliberalism in the 1980s followed by the ‘end of history’ circa 1990, political progressives and critical social theorists have commonly regarded it as their principal ideological antagonist, while the dominant public intellectual discourse has commonly regarded the ‘socialist’ ideologies of the left as thoroughly debunked and largely defunct.  However, the (by now) obvious failure of neoliberalism’s so-called ‘solution’ to the problem of distribution has changed that calculus in some surprising ways, not least by giving rise to a new global wave of ethnic nationalism and authoritarian sympathy; what we have historically called fascism can probably be accurately characterized as a more or less formal ideological construct of these sympathies and their institutionalization.  At the same time, there appears to be a new willingness in public intellectual discourse to reconsider various critical alternatives to neoliberalism, among which (casting a wide net) we could include the intellectual tradition of pragmatist and original institutionalist social and economic thought.

Prominent apologists have undertaken to defend neoliberalism against resurgent authoritarianism in terms of its foundational commitments to the social and moral ontology of individual liberty and rights.  In an essay titled “The Strongmen Strike Back,” published March 14, 2019 in The Washington Post, Robert Kagan observes:

. . . authoritarians are succeeding, but not only because their states are more powerful today than they have been in more than seven decades.  Their anti-liberal critique is also powerful. . . . It is a full-blown indictment of what many regard as the failings of liberal society, and it has broad appeal.

          It has been decades since liberal democracies took this challenge seriously.  The end of the Cold War seemed like indisputable proof of the correctness of the Enlightenment view–the belief in inexorable progress, both moral and scientific, toward the achievement of the physical, spiritual and intellectual freedom of every individual . . .

          The premise underlying these convictions was that all humans, at all times, sought, above all, the recognition of their intrinsic worth as individuals and protection against all the traditional threats to their freedom, their lives and their dignity that came from state, church or community.

          This idea has generally been most popular in relatively good times.  It flourished during the late 19th and early 20th century before being dashed by World War I, the rise of communism and fascism, and the decline of democracy during the 1920s and 1930s.  It flourished again after the end of the Cold War.  But it has always been an incomplete description of human nature.  Humans do not yearn only for freedom.  They also seek security–not only physical security against attack but also the security that comes from family, tribe, race and culture.  Often, people welcome a strong, charismatic leader who can provide that kind of protection.

          Liberalism has no particular answer to these needs . . .

What we frequently call the modern world begins with the emergence of new epistemological commitments to the validity and superiority of knowledge gained via rational thought and empirical inquiry during the Renaissance, and it proceeds through the Enlightenment with the emergence of what we will call the problem of human nature:  the assertion of a social and moral ontology grounded in strong existential commitments to the ideas of individual identity and interest, accompanied by certain individual rights of property and political franchisement; it reaches full flower with the emergence of capitalism in the Industrial Revolution.  Prior to the advent of modernity, pre-modern human society was typically characterized by commitments to what we could call a social and moral ontology of collective parochial identity and interest, in which development of the capacity for individual identity and interest was commonly suppressed, the idea of universal individual rights (either civil or of property) simply did not exist, and human history was profoundly characterized by an unmitigated tragic narrative of parochial conflict.

It would be fair to say that all ideological variations of the progressive ‘socialist’ critique of neoliberalism entail critiques of both: 1) the flawed neoliberal ‘solution’ to the problem of distribution, and 2) it’s flawed ideological commitment to the exclusive ontological individuality which characterizes the modern view of human nature.  In his defense of neoliberal modernity, Kagan (no surprise here) completely disregards the progressive socialist critique of its distributional inequities, but (correctly) identifies and acknowledges its flawed commitment to exclusive ontological individuality.  This, perhaps we can all agree, is at least some progress.

The authoritarian response to neoliberalism is characterized by a reassertion of the pre-modern social and moral ontology of collective identity and interest, which of course also entails the suppression of any existential commitment to ontological individuality.  On the other hand, the fatal flaw in progressive socialist thought has always been its failure to articulate an adequate post-modern conception of social and moral ontology capable of resolving the enduring tension between both 1) individual and collective identity and interest, and 2) competing parochial identities; this failure, in turn, has resulted in an ongoing struggle with increasingly extreme manifestations of the problem of relativism.

It will be my claim here that the problem of human nature can ultimately only be resolved through a solution to the problem of consciousness; and that this will, in turn, pave the way for compelling solutions to both the problem of relativism, and the problem of distribution.  It is this solution to the problem of consciousness that is characterized here, rhetorically, as the Soul of Reason.

II. The ‘Mutual Constitution’ Solution

Table of Contents

Conceptual Schematic of the Argument

Abstract

Download Working Paper (PDF)