On Reason, Freedom and Democracy

The classical social scientists, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Simmel and the others were concerned with issues that reflected the characteristics of their time: in how history was being made in the era in which they were living, and who was doing the ‘history making’. They were also concerned with how the biographies of people (the ‘nature’ of ‘human nature’) were being shaped due to social forces and structures within which lives were being enacted. That is, they were interested in troubles of people being linked to social issues/problems of structure. This was part of the ‘cultural orientation’ of their studies, something that is missing from present day sociology. Following antiquity, the pre-modern era was termed the “Dark Ages” by Europeans quite provincially because it was a time of Oriental ascendency. That was followed by the modern era in which the classical social scientists worked, and now we live in what C. Wright Mills called the “fourth epoch”, the post-modern era (Mills 1959:66). In this era, according to Mills, both liberalism and socialism have collapsed as adequate explanation of the world, in that those explanations and images refer to the modern era. The modern era was one in which the values of freedom and reason moved together and were equally cherished. In the post-modern age, new social structures have evolved that resist such an interpretation of reason and freedom, in that even though there is increased rationality of the functional sort, substantive rationality has diminished and so reason declines and individual freedom diminishes by being circumscribed by bureaucratic rules and procedures. The link between private troubles and public issues has therefore been lost for the vast majority as great bureaucratic organizations have ‘invaded’ the lives of individuals transforming those lives into narrow circuits and forcing people to implicitly live within them through necessity.

When a personal trouble affects a large number of people in a population its cause is linked to social structure and institutions, it becomes a public issue whose cure is not in individual therapy or character development rather it requires for its cure alteration of a social structure.
Science in such a system, that confuses between private troubles and public issues presenting public issues as mere human shortcomings requiring individual treatment, is presented as a “technological Second Coming”, as the long awaited messiah that will cure all ills of humanity. However, the problems that science has created (like the Atom Bomb and the means of wide scale slaughter and destruction, overpopulation etc) cannot be solved by science but require socio-political solutions.

Living within a bureaucratic society eventually leads to ‘self rationalization’ (according to Karl Mannheim), in that the individual shapes himself/herself according to the requirements of such a society (in order to get a preformed identity for status fulfillment). Such a life therefore is in contradiction to all that was understood as ‘individuality’ in the post enlightenment period, what remains is the symbolism of individualism but none of its essence. This means that in the post-modern era the control of a person’s destiny moves from the individual to the bureaucratic society in which he/she lives or the bureaucratic organization for which he/she works the best years of his or her life. The result of this kind of (what Riesman (1965) would say) “other directedness” has resulted in the emergence of wide spread alienation among the population.

Since culture is objectively diffused through rational organizations in the post-modern era, it is adopted by individuals as adaptation, as the 'only way out'. There is therefore cultural standardization, the emergence of a mass society and the resulting mediocrity of culture and a stifling of human creativity. This is neatly hidden away by the elite through the wide scale display of technological gadgets. Mills says about these technological gadgets, “Those who use these devices do not understand them, and those who invent them do not understand much more” (Mills 1959:175). We have today great computer code writers that can write books worth of complex computer code but cannot compose a decent paragraph or make a coherent argument about their social condition or their society (Washburn and Simon 1997). On the other hand we have people who use these technological gadgets for convenience or status purposes without understanding the logic behind their workings or the purpose of their use within a society.

The system enforced culture and self-rationalization by people living narrow rule-rigged lives within bureaucratic routines has resulted in the rise of Cheerful robots: people programmed (by others) to have narrowly defined identities, where everything human is manipulated for pecuniary ends including emotions, but these ‘enslaved’ robots are at the same time content with their condition due to adaptation, that is they are “cheerful” in their condition of robotic bondage.

In the absence of a self-educating, self-reflecting public and the resulting movements for social change, what we know as ‘democracy’ is one of form only and not of substance. Democracy itself must be understood by situating it within a social structure and the relationship of that structure to the individual’s biography and how the organizations that represent the so-called democracy have evolved through history. Values acquired through the system’s bureaucracies (“what people are interested in” (Mills 1959:194)) because of adaptation are anti-democratic as are those values that are proclaimed through dogmatic dictation (“what is to people’s interest” (Mills 1959:194) because a benevolent authority thinks so). Rather values should be based on choices that people arrive at through reason and for that you need ‘publics’ that are self-educating: only then is democracy possible.

Pluralists are therefore mistaken when they claim that America is a democratic country, for the essence of democracy in the current form of democratic participation does not exist, a freely thinking and deciding public also does not exist. The ascendency of the Power Elite requires the emergence of the Cheerful Robots, products of cultural manipulation, neither pluralism (with its democratic society) nor a ‘ruling class’ (with its alienated and discontent workforce) can explain the emergence of a cheerfully adapted mass society. The point being that the ‘nature of human nature’ in the current epoch of a McDonaldized society (Ritzer 2007) lends credibility to the idea of a Power Elite rather than pluralism or a monolithic ‘ruling class’.

The underlying material conditions of capitalism have been changed by incorporating a ‘permanent war establishment’ (after its collapse in the Great Depression and resuscitation through World War 2) within a privatized economy in the United States. The corporations no longer rule through a ruling class, rather they form an uneasy alliance involving the political military and economic domains, there now exists a Power Elite and no form of discourse on the global situation of the present can get very far by ignoring its existence.


References:
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press
Ritzer, George. 2007. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA : Pine Forge Press.