Continuum, Positivism, and Authority.

[StylesGrant]

About 80% or more of the people here who do know of the plot in a fair, thorough sense of a Canadian series called Continuum (which I am guessing probably not that many, its a series on Netflix) will probably not agree with the show. It's too easy to cop out and lump it in with I suppose Elysium or Avatar (Which I would defend avatar but that is a whole other story so not now thank you). 

 

The Canadians were smart with this one, they do not really go to great lengths to portray a good guy in the series. It is laid out raw and nasty for the whole 3 seasons and only builds on the truth towards the end. It focuses on the debate between crypto-currency, transhumanism, anarcho-capitalism, corporatism, socialist and marxist revolution, agorism, and debates over civil rights related to. . .the types of issues Chomsky focuses on, more than any TV series or movie I've ever seen. 

 

To me the show is a gritty critique on power relations and the social psychology of hierarchy and technology and capitalism. The show doesn't make power positions look good at all. I've really only seen one other sci-fi that did this as a series and that is Farscape. But Farscape is very fantastical and fictional, whereas this is set relatively contemporary. 

 

This show is not just a marxist or progressive critique on corporate power. It is a critique of social manipulation, propaganda, demagoguery, and behaviorism. It does focus on the militarization of police, private defense, security technology, espionage, surveillance state, ...a very chilling critique of the war on terror, a smarter, accurate approach to 'alex jones' subjects. Its an accurate critique on what you might call crypto-fascist or subtle tendacies towards totalitarianism. 

 

Honestly, if the show were just a bit darker, and deeper, if it had a touch of the Coen brothers or the style of Gattaca and Blade Runner (sadly even the Matrix didn't quite achieve the depth and cerebral somberness of Blade Runner)....if this show could continue on for like 10 seasons and not tip to far in favor of the demagoguery of the revolutionaries and their techno-Bolshevism or the pro-corporate zuckerburg outcome... to serve as a cautionary tale of how dangerous social ideologies in themselves are.

 

I also consider the show to be a scathing critique of Rand's objectivism, overwhelmingly. 

 

 

Behind this show is another underlying concept that isn't stated, but its implied - the collective appeal to expertise, i.e., Positivism and its positive reactionary corollary of objective truth.

 

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/sidewinder/science-ideology-beyond-positivist-versus-relativist-antimony

 

 

While we’re on the subject of the difference between (analytical) theory and ideology, we’ll take a brief look at the relationship between science and ideology. See if you can see what’s wrong with the following statement:

 “This statement is both objective and non-ideological and therefore good.”

The problem here is that to say any statement is “good” or more “valid” than any other is itself a value judgement. In other words the statement is self-contradictory because it is both ideological and non-objective. Although when stated baldly, the equation non-ideological = good is obviously fishy to anyone with a passing acquaintance with the difference between normative and factual statements. Yet this “positivist” value judgement (more of which in a minute) is a surprisingly common, if unstated, assumption amongst a great deal of science and engineering practitioners.

 

 

(Here “{}” refers to the empty set - i.e. there is no pure empiricism that doesn’t involve human observers, with their necessarily ideological filters, because empiricism is necessarily a relation between observers and the observable. [Capital] is in angle brackets to signal that it is an emergent effect of our system of social relations, rather than an entity or conscious agent - hence it’s relative autonomy from the ideological sphere - that is, while it shapes ideology, it is not itself directly a product of ideology)

 

Grand. So what’s positivism again? Crudely put, positivism is the belief that ideology and truth are mutually exclusive, That what is ideological is false and what is true is not ideological. In other words empiricism has the power to transcend the ideological and metaphysical blinkers on people’s worldviews and render them moot.

Leaving aside the obvious internal contradictions (e.g. when something previously held to be true is later shown empirically to be false, does it thereby then become ideological? where does the ideological content come from? was it always there?, etc) this position has two main corollaries. 

In the negative, a naive positivist position holds that once a theory has been contradicted by empirical evidence, that theory no longer contains any useful information. 

In the positive, if a posited theory is verified by exhaustive evidential testing, then it is “the truth” and its validity is ipso facto proof of its non-ideological character.

The key thing to note is that whatever popularity positivism may have amongst scientific practitioners on an ideological level, at the level of practice (praxeology) scientists are routinely driven to use non-positivist critical thinking methods to problem-solve.

 

But really knotty code problems needs critical introspection as to what you are not seeing, what your hidden assumptions are. This is the art of critical thinking. 

Neatly wrong

To put it another way, in response to H.L. Mencken’s oft-repeated aphorism that “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” positivism holds that the only thing of note about such a solution is that it is wrong. Whereas critical thinking examines carefully what it is about this specific wrong solution that makes it plausible, and above all “neat”. Deconstructing the plausibility of a popular false solution identifies the cognitive and factual errors behind it, which is useful in itself. But more useful still is gaining insight into the existing deep-rooted, affect-grounded, frames that make it “neat”, the latter a coded signifier for “does not produce cognitive dissonance with my current worldview/ideology”. Understanding what’s “neat” about a false solution starts to outline the true shape of the edifice (paradigm) we need to crack to make progress.

The obvious next step is to apply that principle of critical thinking to positivism itself. Given that positivism is “wrong”, what is it that makes it so plausible and commonplace?

 

Progressive authority?

However the cognitive components behind the bias that many practitioners have towards seeing the scientific method as primarily positivist, are probably overshadowed by the greater reinforcing effect of the socially pervasive ideology of liberal progress. 

Again, to appreciate the insidious negative aspects of the ideology of liberal progress, we have to have an understanding of its advantageous side, that makes it neat and plausible. 

From the Enlightenment onwards, the negative corollary of positivism - that once a proposition has been falsified by empirical evidence, it can be dispensed with - has been a highly productive means of freeing thinking from the shackles of theology and superstition, the dead weight of tradition, and the authority of classical speculative and anti-empirical metaphysical thought. In this sense, “negative” positivism put the free into free-thinker. The appeal to replace authority and tradition with evidence-based reasoning opens an era of libertarian thinking.

However, if the progressive aspect of positivism’s negative corollary is the tearing down of the authoritarian blinkers of ancien regime thought, the reactionary aspect of the positive corollary - i.e. the assertion of, if not the absolute truth of empirically-grounded theory, at least it’s freedom from ideological or economic distortions - is an attempt to set up new positions of authority in their place. Not so much individual positions of authority as collective ones. That is to say that authority is claimed in the name of the weight of consensus of the practitioners active in a given scientific or technical field. 

In other words as scientists and technicians we accept that we can be individually wrong but only in relation to other practitioners in our own field. Collectively the agreed (or majority) position of the body of recognised practitioners in a given field cannot be challenged from anyone outside of that field because they simply do not have the knowledge to do so in any credible fashion. 

Now that may be a bit of a caricature in some ways. of course individuals differ in how open they are to dissenting voices from the “outside”. Further there is a huge difference in barriers of entry to different fields, Some fields are impossible to do cutting edge experimental work outside of the established research institutions. Other fields are basically open to anyone who can do the maths. Nonetheless, the general pattern of making a collective claim to authority on the basis of the “scientific consensus” in a given field is a commonplace.

In the case of defending the consensus around the issue of climate change against the big oil-funded climate change deniers, we can see the need for establishing the legitimacy of your position as evidence-based as opposed to the obvious venally-inspired propaganda of the opposition. The problem however, is that in a capitalist society where the competition for legitimacy is routinely settled by recourse to established authority and power, the distinction between claiming legitimacy and claiming authority, tends to be obscured. This naturalises the slippage from arguing for the legitimacy of the empirical scientific method itself to backing the claim to authority of the recognised practitioners of a given field. 

This results in the recasting of fields of inquiry as social “force fields” that can claim social authority. 

Boundary policing

If the positivist claim to non-ideological status is a cornerstone of the passage from scientific legitimacy to scientific authority, then it also increasingly both creates and polices a divide within science itself. At first sight this boundary simply reflects the age old debate about the different character of “physical” science versus social science. However on closer inspection the boundary that partitions disciplines today into two separate, even opposing, camps is both more recent and the authority that polices it comes from a surprising source.

An illustrative case in point is the discipline of social psychology. In the immediate post-war period social psychology was a single inter-disciplinary field engaging both psychologists and sociologists. Today there are two fields bearing the same name, one in psychology the other in sociology. The sociological version inquires into the interactions of individual psychology with the structures, values and culture of society. The psychological version specifically rejects consideration of such “ideological” factors and concentrates on how individual psychologies are affected by awareness of being socially observed. The latter version also emphasises its rejection of grand overarching theories in preference to specific and focused findings and experimental research. (The resonance with postmodernist rejection of meta-narratives is instructive). A similar division also occurs in framing analysis, which began as an interdisciplinary field, was developed by sociology, and now has a specifically non-sociological psychology version, as developed by Tversky and Kahneman. Their version has, in turn, opened a new interdisciplinary connection, this time to neoclassical economics. 

In fact this connection is emblematic of a trend since the 1970s and the rise to dominance of political neoliberalism. In which the methodological individualism of the rational expectations theory of neoclassical economics (which, lest we forget, describes itself explicitly as “positive economics” or non-normative, value-free or “non-ideological” economics) has become the hegemonic pattern by which “serious” science is marked out from its ideologically-contaminated social or “pseudo-science” pretenders. Psychology is not the only field to break off from an interdisciplinary engagement with the wider social sciences to align with []. In the field of genetics Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene theory - and its correlate rejection of group selection - has in recent years come under attack from various sources as an importation of neoclassical methodological individualism into evolutionary biology. An attack to which, spluttering aside, Dawkins has yet to come up with a credible response to. 

The irony of this contemporary boundary between “proper” and (by implication) “improper” science is that it is effectively policed by reference to a social science, economics, that in other contexts many if not most science practitioners find of at best dubious empirical foundation if not outrightly laughable as a “non-ideological” discipline.

But if the contemporary interdisciplinary “colonialism” of neoclassical economics is being observed and critiqued by practitioners from evolutionary biology, psychology, medicine and other life sciences (not to mention other social sciences and heterodox economics) we should not mistake this particular neoliberal instance of positivism for the general tendency itself. The ideology of positivism has been an inseparable component of liberal progressivist ideology since long before Auguste Comte gave it a name.