Constructing the Self and Reality: An Interview with Jason Blakely
I've earlier noted the advent of this fascinating and important new book, which I read with great interest. The author, Jason Blakely, kindly agreed to an interview about it. Here are his thoughts:
JB: I am a political philosopher by training. While studying for my PhD in political science at UC Berkeley I became fascinated by basic questions of how to think about human agency and the explanation of behavior. I currently teach at Pepperdine University in Malibu
AD: What led to your writing We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power?
We Built Reality attempts to turn the tables on mainstream social science by reading psychology, sociology, political science, and economics as forms of meaning-making or hermeneutic creation. This reveals many surprising things about these disciplines—perhaps the most arresting being that they are forms of world-making and intimately tied to the story of our time.
On a more personal level, the earliest seeds of this book go back almost fifteen years to when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. At that time the human sciences were an urgent and controversial topic on campus with many rival schools of thought participating in the debate.
For one thing there was still a strong living institutional memory of Michel Foucault having spent time at Berkeley. Foucault’s research agenda and style of thought inspired many philosophers on campus, including Judith Butler and Wendy Brown who were both formidable presences.
In addition, philosophers coming out of the analytic tradition of linguistic analysis—like my advisor Mark Bevir and committee member John Searle—were thinking intensely about philosophy of action and social ontology. They were joined by phenomenologists including Alva Noë and the legendary Heideggerian philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. There were also world-class interpretive social scientists like Robert Bellah and Paul Rabinow. In the midst of these very different thinkers I found myself trying to gain my bearings. This book is still the fruit of coming to terms with the debates over the human sciences at Berkeley, specifically from within the hermeneutic tradition.
AD: Your introduction seems to be building a case that what Alasdair MacIntyre almost 40 years ago memorably called the “systematic misinterpretation” of the social sciences has only become more widespread. Is that a fair view of where we are now? And if so, what has led us to this moment where what MacIntyre almost gleefully mocked in his inimitable way has actually gotten worse?
JB: Yes, we are certainly awash in naturalistic approaches to both the study and governance of human beings. At the same time very few working social scientists openly avow philosophical naturalism. This appears to be a bit of a paradox. But it is partly resolved when one recognizes that social science operates in our societies as a form of authority with attendant social practices—it is a kind of power.
MacIntyre was enormously insightful in this respect. I have written elsewhere about how MacIntyre in the 1960s participated in the British New Left, which included figures like Charles Taylor, Stuart Hall, and E. P Thompson. This group was far ahead of its time and saw deeply into the technocratic tendencies of our culture and politics.
One reason for the persistent dominance of these naturalist and often pseudo-scientific schools of thought is precisely that they are embedded in practices and institutions. They are not foremost or even chiefly disembodied or ideational. Indeed, actual research agendas—like behaviorism, sociobiology, geno-politics, cognitive psychology, neoclassical economics—tend over the long term to implode under their own contradictions. But both the ethical attraction of naturalism and the practices of arranging institutions by claiming a top-down science of management persists. So there is a deeper strata of meaning that orients people to this scientistic way of thinking even as specific theories come and go.
AD: Your introduction speaks of how “social science can undergo a strange metamorphosis in our societies and become its opposite, ideology and superstition” (xiv). This is a wonderfully bracing claim that I think it exactly right, but I also think it might raise a few eyebrows, so perhaps you might unpack it a bit for us.
JB: One of the insights of hermeneutics is that human agency is marked by the ability to take on and embody theories. We have the potential in certain respects to become more like our theories. This is in stark contrast to the natural sciences. A sunflower exists in some isolation from the theories of botanists. Not so with human beings. Our social scientific theories can build new worlds and practices of selfhood.
In the book I call these “double-H effects.” A clear example of this that is at least passingly familiar to most people is the case of Marxist theory and its relationship to the social and political reality of the Soviet bloc. But what we fail to recognize is this is true of many of our social, psychological and political theories. Modern societies have many ways of inhabiting social scientific theories. They can become blueprints for institutions, inspiration for types of self, beliefs guiding practices, and so on.
AD: You also go on in the introduction—and indeed throughout the book—to document how “social science rarely simply neutrally describes the world, but rather plays a role in constructing and shaping it” (p.xv). Give us a couple brief examples of this if you would.
JB: One example I cover at length in the book is what I call “homo machina” versions of selfhood in psychology. I think there are various streams of popularized or vulgarized psychological theory that are embodied through the self-help genre.
Self-help in our society is not just some eccentric or distasteful literature that intellectuals should consider unworthy of attention. Self-help is central to the cultural life of many people in our society. In some cases, it encourages its readers to build a kind of ethical self that treats private emotional life and relationships with others as a kind of mechanics. In other instances, it reinforces managerialism in the workplace and government.
A second example that receives extended treatment in the book is “homo economicus” or a form of selfhood that vulgarizes and inhabits a kind of ethical identity derived from the idealized models of neoclassical economics. This is the whole phenomenon of a neoliberal self but viewed as a popular or folk tradition as evidenced in cultural artifacts like Freakonomics or Fredrich Hayek’s more popular writings. I think there is a highly complex and interesting relationship between the mathematized abstraction of economic modeling and these supposedly lower, vulgar forms. My book suggests that a hermeneutic or interpretive approach helps us see the complex philosophical, social, psychological, and political linkage points.
AD: You introduce an interesting phrase and concept, “double-H effects” as when you speak of how “Double-H effects make social science profoundly unlike the natural sciences” (p.xxviii). Tell us a bit more about what you mean by these effects.
A double-H effect happens when our interpretation of reality penetrates our identity or social practices. Our attempt to interpret reality then has the potential to radically alter or change that reality. Often times this can have inadvertent and unexpected consequences. Or at least that’s one of the cluster of theses advanced by the book.
The double-H effect is one route into understanding the radically different ontology that is characteristic of political reality. If you can see that double-H effects can happen among self-interpreting, linguistic creatures like ourselves but not other beings then you are a long way down the road to grasping what differentiates the social sciences from the natural sciences.
AD: Perhaps it’s only because I’ve been immersed in Fromm and Adorno the past six months, but I hear regular echoes of them in your introduction and again in chapter 6 when you speak of the abuses of authority and power that lurk behind certain claims of social science. Is it part of your argument in the book that scientism is in significant ways authoritarianism in disguise?
Perhaps there is some repressed influence there. Certainly Adorno was mandatory reading with a number of the critical theorists who taught me at Berkeley. Nonetheless, I tend to think of myself as working instead within the humanism of Gadamer, Charles Taylor, and others. My problem with Adorno and the Frankfurt School more generally is what I perceive as a tendency to slide into overly structuralist conceptions of politics that neglect human agency and local cultures.
In terms of the relevant form of political power I prefer the term technocracy as denoting rule by experts. I prefer this term because I think technocracy can and does combine with any number of ideological traditions—authoritarian, socialist, liberal, communist, feminist, ecological, fascist, etcetera.
Hermeneutic philosophy of social science can do damage to any political tradition that relies very heavily on technocracy. It can do so through the backdoor so to speak—unmasking the way it has an inadequate philosophical anthropology. Hermeneutics does critical, eliminative work while also allowing for a certain amount of political pluralism. Technocracy is off the table philosophically speaking but then the question is what is the strongest remaining humanism?
AD: You reference the psychologist Phillip Cushman on the empty self that shows up in consulting rooms, and this puts me very much in mind of the Anglo-American literary scholar and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas who in the late 1980s started writing of what he calls “normotic illness,” the chief symptom of which is the “blank self” which denies having any sort of unconscious or inner life at all and tries desperately to conform to an external construction of compliant citizen and cheerful consumer. I’m wondering if the origin of such selves is not also a deliberate creation, much as you say “the very discovery of economic man was part of the creation of economic man. Perhaps it would be best to say that free-market economists did not unearth the world but helped to contrive it” (p.43)? It seems to me that the wild popularity of pop psychology and the self-help books you discuss plays a huge role here in creating these vacuous selves of exceedingly shallow inner life?
Yes, that is an excellent observation. I am interested in what you are saying and delving deeper into it. In the book I do suggest that self-help has a long historical genealogy extending to Thomas Hobbes and machinist notions of selfhood developed in the early modern period. This is not to say Hobbes was a self-help writer which would, of course, be insanely anachronistic.
But I do suggest in the book that there is a cultural history that serves as an important background to individuals thinking about themselves along these flattened and shallow tendencies we see in self-help. An entire set of anthropologies is assumed by the self-help genre—a certain stance towards relationships, depression, happiness, efficaciousness in careers, charisma in social groups. It flattens the potential poetic depths of human inner life. Edgar Allan Poe is replaced by a kind of car manual for driving the road of life. This is, in fact, the replacement of one poetics for another. It is not actually the discovery of the “real” mechanics of being human.
AD: There’s a very interesting article in a recent New York Review of Books on the uses and abuses of the “scientific method” by late-19th and early-20th century Anglo-American industrialists to maximize efficiency and productivity at their factories. You note several times that such a “method” is itself a creation, and not a singular one: “Although philosophers generally reject the idea of a single, unified scientific method, the notion has gained a grip on the popular imagination” (p.73). Why does such a singular conception have such a popular appeal?
This is an important question that probably evades a single or reductive sociological answer. Different people have different reasons for falling into the thrall of method and ethnographies would need to be conducted to capture the relevant tales. At a general level Charles Taylor’s work on sources of the self is probably about the best answer we have at the moment in terms of the broad philosophical and historical outlines. One might also consider how an obsession with controlling reality through the fixed steps of a method shares some family resemblances with prescientific cultures and their use of magic. Granted the actual semantic content of the modern cult of method is very different from magic as it is part of a set of meanings only made possible by the scientific revolution. I suggest all that in the book. One antidote to this bewitchment by method lies in Aristotle’s conception of arete or skilled human action. This is one of the many things I learned from the Heideggerianism of Dreyfus and his students on Berkeley’s campus—the relevance of Aristotle via phenomenology to contemporary philosophy of action. The notion that you can ever become truly excellent at a practice by simply carrying out a fixed set of steps or a method is a myth.
AD: Loathe though I am to give any aid or comfort to people today protesting efforts to contain a pandemic, I do nonetheless wonder if the reason some of the less densely stupid among them are so objectionable (refusing masks, demanding the “right” to go to bars, beaches, etc) is because they recognize in some inchoate and clumsy way, as you put it, that “many people who believe they are doing science are in fact doing ideology” (p.84). What prevents scientists from seeing this and guarding against it?
I am also distressed by the lack of thoughtful attention paid to scientists in our society on questions ranging from epidemiology to climate. Nonetheless, many people in our society do intuit however haphazardly and self-destructively that scientific authority is too often overstepping its bounds. We are not very good at discerning the limits of scientific authority. I believe that in addition to poor education in science this is tied to the crisis of the humanities and the liberal arts.
Not enough citizens—be they laypeople or scientists—appreciate the centrality of interpretation and stories to our shared political life. They do not see that while the natural sciences should be respected in terms of our understanding of the physical world, this remains philosophically distinct from the stories and narratives that structure our lives. All public policy incorporates some story that includes a highest set of goals or aims. There can be no expert science of these stories. They remain accessible to laypeople and scientists alike and so are rightly subject to democratic deliberation and contestation.
Unfortunately, there is a tendency to replace genuine democracy and open discussion over our stories with technocratic management. Often specialist languages and jargon are used to block out ordinary people from the political process. An example of this covered in the book is the response to bailing out the banks as “too big to fail” after the 2008 economic recession. When this happens genuine, deliberative democracy is replaced by a form of managerial society that claims the name “democracy” but in fact represents something very different. The resultant backlash can create a situation where rightful scientific authority and technocracy are confused with one another. We are currently living through the steep costs of the chaos born of that confusion.
AD: You open your chapter 5 (pp.89-90) by reminding us of the deadly effects of scientism on Eric Garner. In 2020, we would add to his name that of George Floyd and others. Your point here is that “scientism had revamped the dominant mode of American policing,” leading to “racialized, authoritarian, and militarized dimensions of this massive shift in policing culture” (p.99). Can you unpack all this a bit for us?
Thank you for this question. For personal reasons I felt the deaths of George Floyd and Eric Garner very profoundly. While studying technocracy I noticed that violence is exercised in a very strange way in our societies. We have a highly theorized, rationalist form of justifying the exercise of force. There is a certain discourse and culture of dispassionate science that informs everything from our use of drones in the Middle East to our deployment of militarized SWAT teams in poor and brown neighborhoods.
In the chapter on policing, I trace the way that a set of social scientific theories spearheaded by political scientists like James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray helped rationalize and justify the militarized police tactics of the law and order movement. Policing practices like zero-tolerance, stop-and-frisk, and racial profiling all received elaborate theoretical articulations several decades ago. These theories often developed seemingly colorblind concepts like “disorder” and the statistical analysis of criminality that when enacted within the American political context had highly discrepant racial outcomes.
The new racial caste is far subtler than Jim Crow. The theories and practices normally do not explicitly state racial distinctions. Instead, there is an elaborate set of theoretical and practical developments that are de facto racialized. They appear to be mere colorblind “sciences” on the page, but in practice they are tied to the mass incarcerations outlined so vividly by scholars like Michelle Alexander and Elizabeth Hinton. My contribution here is to focus on the discursive role of the social sciences and the double-H effects involved in building a world which has seen a great increase in authoritarian and militarized police tactics. Such tactics once in place, as we are now discovering, can later be deployed on people regardless of color or social class—journalists, protestors, political opponents—are all now coming under the shadow of a form of authoritarian policing first waged on poor racial minorities in American cities.
AD: Cognitive psychology comes in for scrutiny at several points in your book (and not a moment too soon in my view!) as do psychiatry, psychopharmacology, and the ideologies undergirding them all. Though you didn’t address this directly, I want to press on you an example I am especially leery of thanks in part to the outstanding and hugely important work of people like Jonathan Shedler: the predominance of “evidence-based” claims in psychotherapy—especially the dominance of cognitive-behavioral manualized treatments today so that therapy patients can be rushed through a treatment in a dozen or fewer sessions. That phrase “evidence-based,” it seems to me, is too often an example of everything you describe in this book—scientism in action and an ideological masquerade. Am I wrong?
No—I am highly sympathetic to your point. I think you are right and there is a lot to learn and explore further in these domains that my book leaves untouched. Furthermore, we are only scratching the surface when it comes to the possibilities of a new hermeneutic psychology. At the philosophical level, a frequent problem with manualized therapeutics is the repression of the interpretive features of human agency. Yes, we can still learn much from the different techniques developed by therapists as well as from psychologists who have taken a more medical approach to mental health. But we need to be very careful to not eliminate or hide the hermeneutic features of human life. The particular meanings, beliefs, and cultures that inform an individual life are also essential to mental health.
Unfortunately, my sense is that many of the dominant modes in psychology are reductive in just this way. They operate on the basis of an inadequate anthropology. We need to recover the way that human emotional life is always constituted or completed through the medium of meaning and culture. We are meaning-making creatures and any adequate psychology or therapy needs to have this fact about us firmly in view. This is something that I think psychotherapy—for all its flaws and tendencies to sometimes veer into naturalism—retains more deeply than many other paradigms of psychology. Yes, sometimes the meanings themselves are ahistoricized or crammed into silly just-so stories from, say, the Greek mythological past. But nonetheless psychotherapy is one school that houses the potential to address the complexity of human meaning making—its memories, identity formation, repressions, and stories. I will not say it is the only school of psychology that holds this potential. But it has retained interest for me for this reason.
AD: I was glad to read that “Gary Greenberg argued that uniformly treating depression and anxiety as diseases contributed to an ideological agenda in which a sense of malaise or discontent with a reigning social-political order was stigmatized” (p58). I think this stigmatization is exactly right, and is certainly born out by the very strong criticisms advanced in a powerful recent book, Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or against Psychology by the Mexican clinician and scholar David Pavón-Cuéllar who seems to despair entirely of American ego psychology in this regard. I’m wondering about one possible reason for this, which you seem to hint at: research funding, much of which comes from governments and pharmaceutical corporations, both with vested interests in buttressing the “reigning social-political order.” Is that an assessment you would share?
Again, I am sympathetic to your suggested line of thought. Although I also think it is important to see the bottom-up features of psychological culture. Part of the point of the chapters covering psychology in the book is to suggest that there are folk naturalisms, so to speak. These folk naturalisms are cultures of scientism that emerge out of particular identities. The wild popularity of the self-help genre that we have been discussing is a vivid example of how the problem is not simply imposed top-down by a particular class onto another class. Without negating it, the hermeneutic picture is more complicated than power exercised by one group on another one. In other words, many people are not simply coerced or bamboozled into this kind of psychological practice. They find it ethically attractive. So the depth of the problem lies deeper in the culture.
AD: If so, one possible way beyond this—and almost everything else your book describes, if I am reading it rightly—comes only at the very end of your book when you ask “Where are the new humanists?” Well, where are they?! Do you see any examples on the horizon we should be paying attention to? How do you (or do you?) see a revival of humanists and the humanities today in playing a part in rightly recovering the role of hermeneutics that you discuss several times in the book?
Humanistic culture still exists in beleaguered pockets in our society. I was taught by heroic humanists beginning in public school in Colorado. I had teachers of literature who conveyed to me that an irreplaceable form of human knowing was opened up by literature and poetry. They spent a great deal of time impressing on us the importance of Shakespeare, Zora Neale Hurston, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, and others. Later as an undergraduate at Vassar College I was the beneficiary of tremendous humanistic learning in the ancient Greeks, the history of philosophy, various world literatures. The liberal arts are also frequently safe havens of humanistic understanding.
As many people are beginning to recognize, one major problem is that humanistic study is not only being largely defunded but characterized as useless and a waste of time by a society sick with economistic modes of being. We have lost a sense of the profound value of interpretation for democratic and political life. I do not view it as coincidental that our current crisis of democracy and failure to read political reality in America—everything from “fake news” which is also a problem of political literacy to the inability to properly identify authoritarian politics—coincides with the crisis of the liberal arts. We Americans are unable to read our own political situation very well. We do not know what we are living because we are effectively bad readers and interpreters of culture and politics. This is a problem of education. We need to pursue more radically than ever before the right of all citizens to a humanistic education—to the arts worthy of free persons. How different would our society look if its poorest members also received the lavish gift of the liberal arts and a humanistic education?
AD: Sum up the book for us and your hopes for it. Who especially should read it?
I hope in the course of this interview, and through your excellent questions, the general outlines of my project have become a little clearer. As for my hopes for the book, I think that books are strange things. Once you write them they have their own destiny. This is because books only retain relevance through readers. They leave the author behind, so to speak. I hope this book is helpful not merely to intellectuals but also to tenacious citizens interested in how we arrived at our current predicament. I feel a particular affinity for all those amateur lovers of history, politics, philosophy, and literature. The liberal arts are not some bizarre, inaccessible hobby reserved for the rich like yachting or polo. The art of interpretation is central to how well we weather the coming storms. The book was written for other humanists and particularly those who are still willing to learn something new. I have had a number of young people contact me since the book was published and say they found it exciting. This is very gratifying. If an egalitarian humanism linked to American democracy is ever going to happen it will have to be attractive to up and coming generations. They will need to desire and pursue it. That desire must be awakened.
AD: Having finished We Built Reality, what projects are you at work on now?
I have been slowly working for several years on a genealogy of naturalism and a historical-philosophical recovery of humanist sources.
Thank you for such an intelligent and thoughtful interview.
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