Digifesto

In my last post I noted that the contemporary American problem that the legitimacy of the state is called into question by distributional inequality is a specifically liberal concern based on certain assumptions about society: that it is a free association of producers who are otherwise autonomous.

Looking back to Arendt, we can find the roots of modern liberalism in the polis of antiquity, where democracy was based on free association of landholding men whose estates gave them autonomy from each other. Since the economics, the science that once concerned itself with managing the household (oikos, house + nomos, managing), has elevated to the primary concern of the state and the organizational principle of society. One way to see the conflict between liberalism and social inequality is as the tension between the ideal of freely associating citizens that together accomplish deeds and the reality of societal integration with its impositions on personal freedom and unequal functional differentiation.

Historically, material autonomy was a condition for citizenship. The promise of liberalism is universal citizenship, or political agency. At first blush, to accomplish this, either material autonomy must be guaranteed for all, or citizenship must be decoupled from material conditions altogether.

The problem with this model is that societal agency, as opposed to political agency, is always conditioned both materially and by society (Does this distinction need to be made?). The progressive political drive has recognized this with its unmasking and contestation of social privilege. The populist right wing political drive has recognized this with its accusations that the formal political apparatus has been captured by elite politicians. Those aspects of citizenship that are guaranteed as universal–the vote and certain liberties–are insufficient for the effective social agency on which political power truly depends. And everybody knows it.

This narrative is grounded in the experience of the United States and, going back, to the history of “The West”. It appears to be a perennial problem over cultural time. There is some evidence that it is also a problem across cultural space. Hanah Arendt argues in On Violence (1969) that the attraction of using violence against a ruling bureaucracy (which is political hypostatization of societal alienation more generally) is cross-cultural.

“[T]he greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have tyranny without a tyrant. The crucial feature of the student rebellions around the world is that they are directed everywhere against the ruling bureaucracy. This explains what at first glance seems so disturbing–that the rebellions in the East demand precisely those freedoms of speech and thought that the young rebels in the West say they despise as irrelevant. On the level of ideologies, the whole thing is confusing: it is much less so if we start from the obvious fact that the huge party machines have succeeded everywhere in overruling the voice of citizens, even in countries where freedom of speech and association is still intact.”

The argument here is that the moral instability resulting from alienation from politics and society is a universal problem of modernity that transcends ideology.

This is a big problem if we keep turning over decision-making authority over to algorithms.