Ruminations 31: The Human Capacity for Self-Debasement Through Theory

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer)

The only way for the individual to become centered is to reduce society to a managed anarchy which is itself contrary to the social position maximizing behavior of individuals.   The paradox of this age-- a social world in which individuals can't help themselves (theory) to manage their management (act anti-systemically) for upward  advancement within the very systems that theory can neither explain completely nor which can be deployed for fully effective control. More to the taste of this age of academics is the 'scientism' of B.F. Skinner, one that inverts the relationship of people to their surroundings and suggests the infinite malleability of the former by the later.

Jonathan Yardley ends his recent review  of  Lucy Worsley, The Courtiers:  Splendor and Intrigue in the Georgian Court at Kensington Palace (Walker & Co, 2010;  402 pp, ISBN-13: 978-0802719874) with a well known but under-appreciated observation.

The human capacity for self-debasement in the search for glitter by association is deeply ingrained and hasn't changed despite the quantum leap from quill pens to iPads. The rooms in which the strivers now gather are warmer in winter and cooler in summer than was the King's Drawing Room at Kensington Palace, and the people in those rooms now smell a good deal better than George II's unbathed courtiers, but there's another stench that hasn't gone away, and won't. 

Jonathan Yardley, By George,It's a Royal Sex Comedy, Washington Post, Aug. 22, 2010 (at B-8). 

The under-appreciation is most evident in theory and among those who tend to discount the "human condition" in favor of explanations that are both more heroic and more remote from the collection of individuals who in aggregate account for the foibles of any particular age.  More to the taste of this age of academics is the 'scientism' of B.F. Skinner, one that inverts the relationship of people to their surroundings and suggests the infinite malleability of the former by the later.

Autonomous man is a device used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way.  He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes.  Science does not dehumanize man, it de-homunculizes him, and it must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the human species.  To man qua man we readily say good riddance. B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971 ISBN 0-394-42555-3) at 200-201.

The  homunculus, the "autonomous man--the inner man, . . . the possessing demon, the man defended by the literature of freedom and dignity" (Id., at 200) is an obstacle to the proper management of the human.  Thus bound within the cage of the observable, the human can be directed,  husbanded , and directed to the greater glory of the species.  And that control is not asserted by the environment, but through it by people masters in the art of environmental manipulation.  "Man himself may be controlled by his environment, but it is an environment which is almost wholly of his own making. . . . The evolution of culture is in fact a kind of gigantic exercise in self control.  As the individual controls himself by manipulating the world in which he lives, so the human species has constructed an environment in which  its members behave in a highly effective way."  (Id., at 205-06). . . . . Like the court of George II in the palaces around London, or the beehive teeming with officials that is Beijing or Washington, D.C., or in any place where human activity is aggregated--from school, to church, to company. 

But this is not a pretty picture.  And its connection with the realities of the basic human drives for self debasement in the service of individual glory or social aggrandizement  remains somewhat messy.  Theory that is devoid of the human element, those that tend to focus of macro management invariably underestimate the willingness of individuals to debase the system in their efforts at individual glory.  Observers of the human condition that fail to understand the very real frameworks within which individuals understand the risks and constraints of behavior--that is the paths to glory and its measurement in social terms--will underestimate the power of the complex web of micro-governance on the manner which determines the form and extent of human debasement from age to age.  The only way for pure theory to approach "Truth" is to take the human out of the equation--and here we move from theory to religion (whether in conventional or Marxist Leninist form).   The only way for the individual to become centered is to reduce society to a managed anarchy which is itself contrary to the social position maximizing behavior of individuals.  And thus  the paradox of this age-- a social world in which individuals can't help themselves (theory) to manage their management (act anti-systemically) for upward  advancement within the very systems that theory can neither explain completely nor can be deployed for fully effective control.  But none of this will keep people from seeking more effective means of control, to pervert control (and its rules) for personal glory, or to subvert it in the name of a competing methodology.