Peter Emmerson

  1.3 Idealism and Control

I find the argument from Elias that the emergence of formal science is related to long-term social changes convincing. To re-cap, his model of the civilizing process traces the gradual emergence of more and more people with greater levels of self-control, that eventually becomes so habituated it appears instinctive or natural. This self-control evidences itself to the person involved, as a split in their self-perception or identity, which provides us with the facility to talk to ourselves: such cerebral activity is not a sign of madness so much as evidence of the civilizing process. As a type of psychological make-up this is not new: the great theometaphysicians of ancient times clearly had this facility; both the highly influential models of Plato and Aristotle contemplate a world where the absolute truth exists, but at a distance from our factual existence.

Elias focuses his analysis of the continued development of such a psychological type by correlating changes in language use associated with self-control that occurred during the middle ages in what we now call France, in particular, the arrival of the concepts ‘courtoisie’ and ‘civilité’. What is interesting is not the existence of self-control but the manner in which its use has expanded and deepened since that time: hence the civilizing process. The growth in self-control is, argues Elias, a feature of the development of scientific ways of being. However, from my perspective, this change in the patterning of social experience has taken place in close partnership with the dominant theometaphysical mode of analysis, which prioritized discourses which speak of truths and ideals. As a result it should not be surprising to find scientists espousing logic and mathematics and imposing such models on the relative uncertainty of the external reality they were investigating. For such people there are two worlds; one of truth lodged in the mind, the other of error located in factual experience to be made sensible by transposing it into something stable and reliable, using the truth-finding techniques of verbal and numerical logic (pure mathematics). It is not that long in European terms that we have been able to openly question such a model without the threat of severe sanctions.

The world of truth offers the possibility of singularity, a state of mind where absolute detachment from reality is possible and where stability, certainty or uncertainty can be established – a place inhabited by what Elias termed Homo clausus (closed, isolated man). The drawback is that such a perception is at odds with our daily factual experience where change abounds, making the position adopted by Homo clausus untenable because as Darwin pointed out: that which doesn’t change becomes extinct. So why cling to such a way of thinking that leads only to the end of the species? The answer I believe is that idealism has survival benefits even though it exists as a complete contradiction. Its contradictory status belies a deeper need for control.

  1.2 Contemporary Forms of Idealism: theometaphysics

As I was driving down the A1 in December 2009 I listened to an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze which sparked the thoughts that produced this essay. The programme employs a number of prominent commentators to discuss contemporary ethical issues. The participants on this occasion were a mixture of people with expertise in science, philosophy, theology and politics including ex-cabinet minister Michael Portillo and eminent stem-cell researcher Lewis Wolpert. Part of the discussion analysed the possibility of being morally neutral as regards science and was I assume (I didn’t hear the start of the programme) linked to the furore that developed in relation to the alleged manipulation of data by climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. What intrigued me was that Professor Wolpert seemed to believe that his values did not interfere with his science. In the same programme Mr Portillo gave the impression that being political could separated from being moral. I find such beliefs in these well informed and highly influential people very surprising, as it is questionable whether they fit with the facts. This essay is an exploration of the continued popularity of these views and why we should view them with suspicion.

My argument is that such perspectives are related to the uncritical use of ideals. Idealism has an ancient heritage which I believe is correlated with people’s need for control and security in a world that is threatening and difficult to predict. A belief in the existence of absolute truth regularly accompanies methods of dealing with the world quite probably related to its capacity to bolster feelings of certainty and safety. I am reminded of a 1995 tv programme presented by the biologist Richard Dawkins in which he expresses incredulity in reaction to the views of believers in ‘creationism’ from Alabama, USA. What he didn’t speak about was that such idealism is not limited to the views of ordinary Americans, but is present in the views of professional scientists who are also prone to make-believe; it is just that their fantasies are usually more mathematical than biblical. Idealism is everywhere, entangled in our culture and too often heavily disguised as science.

From my position there are three ways of looking at the world that provide ideals: religious or theological; philosophical or verbal logical, what used to be called metaphysical; mathematical or numerical logical, often partnered by scientific, which when all rolled up together form the basis of absolute truth in our knowledge. These methods of identifying the truth of things attract apostles who investigate their potential in the search for the definitive meaning of life. The importance of these three techniques of truthfulness varies in relation to the problems people are confronted with; nowadays we tend to tackle problems scientifically thus mathematics is pre-eminent. These true forms of knowledge all have one thing in common: they are idealistic. Let’s take the scientific idolization of mathematics as an example.

Mathematics is an approximation to the facts; it is a tool to aid the measurement of weight, height etc. The problem is that if studied with little reference to the facts, on what is called the ‘pure’ level, it can produce systems of analysis that have the entrancing possibility of providing truths or proofs; it can be used to calculate certainties. However, these certainties don’t actually exist: Pythagoras’ triangle is an example: it is a triangle that exists only in the human mind where perfection is possible – an example of a Platonic form. Real triangles, made by engineers, cannot emulate such feats of precision. Engineers deal in approximations not proofs. Proofs are dreamed up in the minds of people I call truth-finders, they are ideals.

Such ideals in themselves are not a problem, they are just games. They do however have dangerous side effects because they lead to very beguiling outcomes: they offer the prospect of certainty. Certainty is very appealing on the personal level; it can offer us solace in a life full of pain and danger. In addition, it has utility in the competition for survival. Privileged groups recognise the benefits of truths as tools for continued domination and employ experts in the search for ideal forms of knowledge such as theologians, philosophers and mathematicians, the truth finders, to justify their right to govern. Certainty, as Plato pointed out, offers stability. Stability is extremely attractive to elites in the battle to retain their position at the top: I have a God-given right to rule; I earn millions in bonuses because the market has judged me the best. Those in charge have an interest in reinforcing their authority by getting truth-finders to transpose their views into certainties, which by definition cannot be questioned and in time come to be seen as given, natural, logical. Ideals can be used as tools for domination; they are what might be called knowledge technology.

My essay is an exploration of ideas that dispute the belief in the possibility of being exact, other than in the truth-finding territories of religion, formal philosophical and mathematical logic. The notion of objectivity as knowledge that is rational or correct is examined. In relation to my argument that nothing outside of religion, philosophy and mathematics is stable or truthful, then it is only in these areas of analysis that objectivity really exists. However, as we know, it’s use is not restricted to idealism as a tool for truth-finding: many scientists or lawyers for example would claim objectivity in their method and judgements. In this sense to be objective is not to be tainted by human values, the opposite of subjective. I want to suggest that this is an ideal state of existence impossible to achieve by real people, developed by truth-finders to support their view that stability in the form of absolute truths exists beyond the religious, philosophical and mathematical horizons. Consequently, I would dispute the possibility of anyone being objective about sensory experiences and that we can somehow ever dissociate ourselves from our values, even when acting as a scientific truth-finder like Lewis Wolpert; the noisy influence of prejudices can be turned down or up, but never silenced. The latter, objectivity, is an occurrence that happens only in religious, philosophical or mathematical utopias. Relatedly, being moral is being political is being scientific, because, as with other perspectives available to us, they are interconnected. However, such a view of the patterning of knowledge is not very palatable because it is disturbing for people’s peace of mind and has the potential of de-stabilizing the networks of social influence used by elite figurations!

I have tried to plot a pathway through the webs of social influence that have patterned certain aspects of European history using a model taken from Auguste Comte and Norbert Elias. However, I want to condense Comte’s approach by amalgamating two of the his three fields of human knowledge: theology and metaphysics. The latter is in turn modified to include both forms of pure logic; verbal and number (philosophy and pure mathematics). As far as I can see they are just different species of a common genus – idealism. Hence, I want to use the term theometaphysics to represent the confluence of ideals of a supernatural or formal logical status. This rejects the argument that the attempts at transforming theometaphysics from Descartes onwards were anything truly radical, suggesting that these were just re-branding exercises in response to the onslaught from secularizing forces such as business-oriented figurations and their allies, which demanded a greater emphasis on mathematics.

This re-branding of metaphysicians is I suspect partly an attempt protect vulnerable forms of truth and its acolytes (theologians and verbal logicians) from the rise in influence of more material forms of knowledge such as science and its ideal partner, mathematics. Nevertheless, philosophers are part of a discipline that owes its raison d’etre to idealism – if they move too far along the continuum towards realism, they turn into scientists. Philosophers owe their status to their forebears as successful truth-finders, whose style of analysis dominated formal discourses on knowledge in the past, and still heavily influences our discussions today: the discussion on The Moral Maze being just the tip of the iceberg. My belief is that since the 17^th century and probably as far back as the Renaissance, their status has been under threat from what were then called natural philosophers or what we now know as scientists, who because of their involvement with the factual world, have a tendency to being anti-idealist.

 1.1.2 Figuration: a process concept

At this point I want to explain the use of ‘figuration’. Norbert Elias developed this word as one of a number of concepts designed to distance sociological knowledge from its mystical and metaphysical forebears, which tend to produce unrealistic, static models of human experience and can disable the scientific enterprise. Figuration is a notion that attempts to locate sociologists more adequately with life, modelled in terms of social structural processes. The emphasis is on the word process in order to gain better access to the movement characteristic of day to day existence. Non-figurational concepts like ‘class’ and ‘society’ refer to social structures and are inadequate. A structure is expressive of solidity and stability and gives the wrong steer by understating the energy and, as Zygmunt Bauman might say, liquidity of real social experience. My proposal is to bin structural concepts such as class which inherently paralyse social networks and are therefore scientifically unfit for purpose. This could provide us with more adequate tools of analysis, and so reduce the need for intellectual trickery to shoehorn people into sociological models. Figuration offers an opportunity to explore something better suited to facilitate the study of ever changing social networks.

Elias draws our attention to another advantage of using concepts of structural process such as figuration. The structural form of analysis because of its inherent inflexibility, tends to produce rigid contrasts, one important example being the separation of society and the individual. Such a schismatic approach to modelling social life evokes an artificial picture, suggestive of discreet categories of group and personal experience. Such a perspective, argues Elias, is more about the intellectual tradition that dominates western culture than factual accuracy. In a more general form structure is often equated with sociology and individuality with psychology. Where the latter is concerned people are viewed as separate, isolated beings governed by instinctive, internal forces that motivate survival thoughts and practices. This so-called agency perspective, which in its most idealistic and extreme form argues that people have free-will, conjures the impression that the forces regulating togetherness are of secondary importance. Such psychologism is untenable as Popper has pointed out, because it relies on an infinite reduction to the origin, a programme of research to identify the very first cause – was it the chicken or the egg? – impossible. Elias is with Popper, and for that matter Marx on this, that the place to start is the social. Figuration is a concept designed by Elias for social scientific analysis that assesses the flow of interdependencies that occur between people in social networks. Elias has demonstrated how this approach dissolves thorny problems such as the division between ‘society and the individual’ (structure and agency): the intellectual tradition that is responsible for this unscientific model can be left to parent those areas it was designed to fit – religion and philosophy.

Figuration is therefore a concept developed to go beyond the limitations of the latter, to provide greater access to the facts because figuration has a greater degree of what Elias calls ‘reality congruence’, ie. it is more scientific. It can take account of both structural and personal experiences because it guarantees that we look for processes that bind people together with varying levels of dependency. These relationships of interdependency involve power, which again is a process in which the balances change. Whilst I suspect we need to abandon the use of the concept power for the same reasons already alluded to with respect to class and society, Elias points us in a direction which may be fruitful. By improving the degree of consonance between the conceptual tools used by sociologists (and social scientists generally for that matter) and their research material, I believe we can increase our potential to explain social matters.

Let’s consider briefly the example of Marx’s great breakthrough which analysed the relationship between class and social conflict. My argument is that the pioneering work Marx carried out has not been fully exploited partly because it has been bogged down in fruitless theometaphysical (see 1.2 below) debate about the definitive nature of the two classes of capitalism (the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’). Whilst this too is probably associated with ingrained academic habits that can be traced back via Hegel to the ancient Greeks, I think it is also connected to Marx’ uncritical use of the concept class. Class is a notion far too profoundly steeped in supernatural and philosophical ethers, geared to finding the absolute truth and stability: social experience is thus perceived as if it were some reified, solid thing. What is ironic about Marx is that having criticised Adam Smith and others for not recognising the ideological content of their ideas, he then proceeded to fall into the same trap himself by failing to spot the damaging effect that an idealistic concept like class had on his own model. Figuration is a more realistic concept that I feel can help us avoid the traps that caught out the likes of Marx, by offering the prospect of a more scientific analysis with greater access to the fluidity of social experience, and at the same time, moving us beyond such ossifying debates as class.

  1.1.1 Some general points about Elias’ work

 Elias developed the ‘civilizing process’, as a model to be tested, which if nothing else, offers a more realistic understanding of the growth in rationality so much at the heart of Weber’s work. For the latter rationality was a version of the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’, an ideal that existed in the mind to be transposed onto different social experiences. Thus, when explaining the character of western capitalism, Weber linked general characteristics such as the search for profit, which is not peculiar to the West, with specifically western variables such as free labour and Protestant beliefs. In this way historically located activities are described in terms of general or ideal concepts which in turn define the perspectives of social science.

For Elias the process of the development of this style of thinking can be traced back even further, associated with the emergence of a new word, ‘courtesy’, which he correlates with social changes experienced by medieval knights, who were schooled in violence and had few predators. In a very short time many knights became what we would call redundant and plied their trade as troubadours at the courts of the great lords and ladies. They found themselves in a state of dependency having to control their emotions and become more servile in order to stay in contact with the great Lords who held the purse strings and who held court.

By the sixteenth century Elias detects the rise in use of another word ‘civility’, synonymous with the formation of the court aristocracy. Civility is indicative of a deepening level of self-control which because it is inculcated in childhood, becomes part of the aristocratic character or, as Elias prefers, ‘habitus’. Habitus is a process word Elias uses instead of personality in order to portray human identity in more developmental terms, formed predominantly by experience, but, interdependent with biological predisposition. He believed that human beings are different to all other life-forms with respect to the level of control they can exert over biological instincts. For the figurations close to Louis XIV self-restraint is no longer something to be imposed by the physical presence of others, it is a normal feature of aristocratic make-up. Elias writes of the small day to day activities of the exercise of power as the King’s figuration manipulates the fortunes of the high aristocracy and the emergent high bourgeoisie who had little choice but to be compliant, if they wanted to remain attached to the royal figuration and the benefits it could provide.

The civilizing process is correlated with the changes in the balance of power, that occurred in relation to the formation of nation states and the levying of taxes needed to fund grand schemes such as monopolizing access to the means of violence and the training associated with their use. Aristocrats were not war lords, they were skilled social operators who worked behind a front, as Goffman would say, in the competition for royal patronage. Naked violence was shunned in such social networks as processes formed that relied on social manipulation rather than open resistance.

Elias describes how such figurations with their civilized habitus have slowly extended beyond the elites, pacifying wider social networks as the level of interdependency has increased. Civilized people experience themselves internally as two people, much in the Freudian sense, one governed by short-term desires, the other who assiduously manages such urges to avoid damaging censure or disaster by carefully studying longer-term possibilities: you may lose the battle by retreating but win the war. This is not a top-down determinist pattern of social change, it is about people making life choices to accommodate power and survive.

People viewed in the manner suggested by Elias, never cease to be involved in change. Life’s experiences are modelled as processes that have no beginning nor a definitive end: the civilising process does not prescribe some state of ideal being in the form of a civilized person, it just tracks changes in the habitus of certain figurations over a long period of social development, sometimes quick, more often slow, and certainly not inevitable. The civilizing process is a model that was derived from a scientific study of history that has learned from the mistakes of Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons; that it is necessary to be more ‘reality congruent’. The proliferation of the scientific habitus since the 17^th century is a feature of the civilising process.

Elias is at pains to emphasise that there was no planning involved in the development of self-control: the civilizing process is not connected to some ethereal dialectical spirit or zeitgeist moving in mysterious ways functioning in relation to some pre-installed design system or set of laws – his science is a programme of exploration using a theory to be tested by historical evidence. However, Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber or Parsons would no doubt have made this claim. The difference is that the scientific sociology of Norbert Elias has stripped away any pretence towards offering up absolute truths. Elias’ science is sensitive to its limitations, has no claim to objectivity, does not attempt to suggest that it can define the causes of anything as yet. All that process sociology can establish at present is that sociological variables are interdependent with one another in a web of possibilities. The best we can do, he would say, is attain sufficient ‘relative detachment’ to make statements about the manner in which the processes involving social structures and functions interrelate with one another. By using models such as the civilizing process social scientists can use the past to build insights into the present so that modest claims about contingencies can be drawn, rather than bold causal statements. Consequently, the future is difficult to tell.

The science that Elias espouses is aware of the sheer size of the task because of the immense complexity of social processes which need a new, more reality congruent, dynamic language to analyse them more usefully. There is no singular in this exercise, there are just figurations of people who can use their self-control to become relatively detached enough to do science, people who can turn down the volume of their emotions and values sufficiently enough to do physics, chemistry, biology, sociology. Even though the problems are different in the latter, linked to the greater difficulty in attaining the necessary level of relative detachment to study them scientifically, I believe it is worth taking on the habitus of what Elias calls Homines aperti (open people) that should allow more valid conclusions to be drawn in relation to understanding human problems.

This is not to suggest that in using Elias’ approach the problem of how to produce more valid and reliable sociological evidence will be solved, but it does hold out a sociological way of moving on from the impasse that emerged during the 1970s as Parsonianism and Marxism hit the buffers. Elias’ model can give us a scientific diagnosis of the problem and a means of moving beyond it. The key theme of this essay is geared to one possible reason: that too many sociologists have nowadays become more susceptible to idealism and turned down the influence of the scientific ethos on their work, not taking sufficient account of what Elias called ‘the detour via detachment’. I want to help change the emphasis here. There is long tradition in western cultures that life is about the pursuance of perfection. Thus, much of our thinking is habitually utopian. These habits die hard. I want to argue, that the problem with sociology, and probably science generally, is that it too insensitive to the damage done by idealism.

1.1 Grounding

 I want to begin this essay by referring to the influence of sociologist Norbert Elias. As far as I can see his work on the nature of human knowledge is at the limit of what we can rely on: thus, I start from there. His books, The Civilizing Process vols I & II, The Court Society, Involvement and Detachment, The Symbol Theory and What is Sociology? provide most of the material from which I have developed these ideas. I want to argue that they offer a basis on which sociologists, and for that matter scientists generally, could extend their understanding and improve their ability to help sort out social or natural problems. Elias built on the findings of his predecessors, something no doubt true of many writers. However, Elias did not just reform their ideas, whether philosophers, historians, natural scientists or social scientists, he radically reworked them to produce an alternative more viable analysis of what science is and what a social science could and should look like. In this respect his work is like no-one else’s since it has survived and prospered where his main rivals in Marxism (with its emphasis on class conflict) and Parsonianism (which gives precedence to the importance of value consensus), were found profoundly wanting. Unfortunately the continuing interest in Elias’ work has been accompanied by a cataclysmic crisis in sociological confidence where scientific modes of analysis are concerned, that may explain the continued under-exposure of the model, since the dethroning of Parsons and Marx.

It is my view that there has been a de-sciencizing process going on in sociology that needs to be resisted, especially as close scientific relatives, biology and psychology, have been visibly prospering underpinned by the Darwinian model. It is my belief that the flood gates were opened for the anti-science figurations of sociologists correlated with the theoretical vacuum that opened up as the two giants collapsed during the late 1960s and early 70s, allowing sociology to be re-colonized by a band of truth-finders whose interests were about linking sociology to the humanities, by strengthening the bond with its parent, philosophy. From what I can see this was a serious mistake as sociologists are seen as offering just another learned opinion rather than providing scientifically backed models for testing.

This begs the question – what would a new scientific sociology look like? This is where Elias comes in. I’m not suggesting that, as yet, his model offers a social scientific equivalent to Einstein, Heisenberg, Dalton or Darwin: a giant of the contemporary sociological universe, Tony Giddens, has commented on the small likelihood such an outcome. However, he may be wrong. At least Elias’ model takes a sociological approach rather than falling back on the parent philosophy for answers to its problems: Elias offers a scientific way out.

My essay is a modest contribution to this process by focussing on the problem of idealism. There are three interrelated aspects of interest here. Firstly, idealism makes scientists susceptible to utopian flights of fancy such as the pursuit of the absolute truth/error. Secondly, that the practices of science become distorted by the pursuance of idealistic notions such as equality and justice. Thirdly, that an excess of such ideals creates an environment where scientists are very susceptible to over-stating the value of their findings. My argument is that we can use Elias as an anchoring point to keep sociological voyages of discovery tied to realistic destinations and practices, where all is relatively uncertain.

De-idealisation and the development of Relative Uncertainty: an aspect of the Sciencization Process

Preamble

This essay does not claim the status of a conventional learned academic article. It is a beginning, an exploration of some of my ideas, posted here because I work outside of the normal academic nexus. Whilst this has advantages, giving me the relative autonomy to pursue my interests, it does leave me vulnerable where critical discussion is concerned. I therefore offer up my essay in all humility, for I am very much aware of my fallibility, my relative uncertainty. Where you believe me to be mistaken tell me so. My hope is that the essay has fertility, and can be the ground on which further, more significant produce can be grown.

The analysis examines certain aspects of the changing use of ideals, especially the truth. As far as I can see ideals are an expression of our ability to think about perfection, the search for which has had enormous influence over human affairs. One very important example concerns our thinking about what is right and wrong, otherwise known as morals or ethics. For example, the Ten Commandments can be seen as a set of statements from the Old Testament that tell us about what God knows to be true. They are ideals that provide us with a point of reference on how to think and behave, whether you believe in them or not. It is likely, even if you don’t believe, that you will have a similar set of beliefs that you hold as truths.

This ancient pattern of belief in ideals still holds enormous significance for us today. However, I want to argue that there has been a gradual decline in the influence of ideals. This decline is plotted in this essay in relation to three interrelated processes: the rise to prominence of more and more people interested in pursuing a business-oriented approach to the problem of survival; the gradual spread of beliefs in the benefits of democratic systems of government; the dramatic growth in scientific practice and knowledge over the last 300 years or so.

For the method used to carry out this analysis I am much indebted to one of the greatest sociologists, Norbert Elias. Elias’ approach takes the social group as its basic unit of analysis. Groups, or what he terms figurations, are regulated by processes that involve complex sets of interdependencies that bind their membership together. Life is about change and the means by which we study it should be consonant with that fact. The essay is an attempt to apply this model to the problem of ideals such as truth.