Digifesto

The third chapter of Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason (which by the way is apparently available here as a PDF) is titled “The Revolt of Nature”.

It opens with a reiteration of the Frankfurt School story: as reason gets formalized, society gets rationalized. “Rationalized” here is in the sense that goes back at least to Lukacs’s “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in 1923. It refers to the process of being rendered predictable, and being treated as such. It’s this formalized reason that is a technique of prediction and predictability, but which is unable to furnish an objective ethics, that is the main subject of Horkheimer’s critique.

In “The Revolt of Nature”, Horkheimer claims that as more and more of society is rationalized, the more humanity needs to conform to the rationalizing system. This happens through the labor market. Predictable technology and working conditions such as the factory make workers more interchangeable in their jobs. Thus they are more “free” in a formal sense, but at the same time have less job security and so have to conform to economic forces that make them into means and not ends in themselves.

Recall that this is written in 1947, and Lukacs wrote in 1923. In recent years we’ve read a lot about the Sharing Economy and how it leads to less job security. This is an argument that is almost a century old.

As society and humanity in it conform more and more to rational, pragmatic demands on them, the element of man that is irrational, that is nature, is not eliminated. Horkheimer is implicitly Freudian. You don’t eradicate the natural impulses. You repress them. And what is repressed must revolt.

This view runs counter to some of the ideology of the American academic system that became more popular in the late 20th century. Many ideologues reject the idea of human nature at all, arguing that all human behavior can be attributed to socialization. This view is favored especially by certain extreme progressives, who have a post-Christian ideal of eradicating sin through media criticism and scientific intervention. Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is an interesting elaboration and rebuttal of this view. Pinker is hated by a lot of academics because (a) he writes very popular books and (b) he makes a persuasive case against the total mutability of human nature, which is something of a sacred cow to a lot of social scientists for some reason.

I’d argue that Horkheimer would agree with Pinker that there is such a thing as human nature, since he explicitly argues that repressed human nature will revolt against dominating rationalizing technology. But because rationalization is so powerful, the revolt of nature becomes part of the overall system. It helps sustain it. Horkheimer mentions “engineered” race riots. Today we might point to the provocation of bestial, villainous hate speech and its relationship to the gossip press. Or we might point to ISIS and the justification it provides for the military-industrial complex.

I don’t want to imply I endorse this framing 100%. It is just the continuation of Frankfurt School ideas to the present day. How they match up against reality is an empirical question. But it’s worth pointing out how many of these important tropes originated.