And the radical Rousseau mused in the 18 th century, that humanity was corrupted by the institutions and that a free and fair life was possible (as did the utopian socialists and anarchists that followed him). He, too, got the handle of yet another developmental imbalance : when people’s psychologies develop ahead of the culture and systems in which they live—i.e. when they grasp for greater universality than what is supported or expected by their current society. This is where you find the “righteous rebel”, the post-conventional ethics of sensitive citizens, beautiful souls and daring minds who experience severe alienation in the society they are part of: so barbaric, so insensitive. But he too was “true, but partial”. What Rousseau described was, again, a developmental imbalance. He too overgeneralized his own experience: thinking that all people were “by nature” as his own moral-philosophical intuition indicated.
This is the source of Rousseau’s ressentiment , the French word for “resentment” as employed in psychology and philosophy. Rousseau and his game denying left-wing descendants are stuck with a bitter non-acceptance of reality, with a perpetual denial. They don’t recognize their critique is only an expression of a developmental imbalance. It is a kind of violence against reality itself; but reality always fights back with full force and the denier is always defeated—by logical necessity.
Fukuyama, F., 2014. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Foucault died of AIDS in 1984, before the neoliberal turn in Western politics had taken proper hold. Today, after the Reagan-Thatcher era, and after the 1990s, most observers would find these visions less inspiring. Today, it seems more feasible to accept this growth of intimacy of control, but to always keep a critical stance towards it.
See: Zamora, D., Amselle, J., Behrendt, Christofferson, M. S., Rehnmann, J., Wacquant, L. J. D. 2015. Critiquer Foucault. Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale . Paris: Aden.
Maybe, in a few decades, the word “freedom” will no longer sound cool and magical, but rather like the word “duty” sounds to us today. A while ago “duty” was hailed as something sacred and inherently good. Maybe the same fate awaits “freedom”: Perhaps future people will think it sounds old and a bit silly.
This is a compelling idea. But I still feel we are not quite done with freedom yet; that we first have to expand it before it can be left to the side. Maybe, in the future, the term will be obsolete and exchanged for other terms that have less of lingering pre-modern religious beliefs left in them. (cont.)
But, dear reader, bear with me and let us save the critical reappraisal of freedom for the future. Let us remain, for the moment, lovers of freedom.
Let’s take an example of such an “emotional regime”: What about the perpetrators of “honor killings”—for instance, when the daughter of a traditional Muslim family living in a Western country is killed by the father because her sexual liberation, in their minds, has brought “shame to the family”? Mustn’t these honor killers be driven by unimaginably intense emotions of shame, contempt and moral outrage in order to feel compelled to (and justified in) killing their own daughters? It’s less likely these fathers of traditional families walk around full of guilt and shame every day of their life. Rather, the extremely negative emotions emerge and manifest themselves only when the traditional family system is challenged by the daughter’s lifestyle choices and boyfriends. Up until that point these emotions lay dormant and simply excluded a lot of possible ways of acting and thinking.
When the taboos are breached, the negative emotions surface and erupt: first you shame your daughter, and when that doesn’t work, you guilt -trip her, and when that doesn’t work, you threaten her—and when that doesn’t work, you feel completely helpless and frustrated and kill her. Because of the cultural-psychological limitations of the traditional Muslim father’s relation to sex, sexuality, reproduction and femininity, freedom is undermined. Lacking emotional development limits freedom. This is of course not to point out Muslims in particular, it’s just an example of how emotional issues feed into the lack of real freedom in people’s lives. Many other groups have problematic relationships to female sexuality too.
But the point here is that we are all, in some sense, like the violent Muslim father: All of us have issues that we just cannot deal with without feeling shame, without feeling contempt and guilt-tripping others and, ultimately, without being afraid, vulnerable and even threatening. We may not be killing our daughters for perceived insults to our family honor, but we are all intermeshed in a complex emotional economy in which we envy, shame, guilt and subtly threaten one another—and we always feel justified in doing so. If there is an apparent developmental difference between the traditionalist Muslim and the liberal parents who support their kids’ sexual education and encourage exploration and independence, can there also be yet higher developments of freedom? Are we emotionally limiting ourselves and one another in other, subtler, ways?
Up until recently homosexuality was such an issue. There was something shameful, disgusting and ridiculous about the homosexuals. Today, issues of being fat, being cool or not (being a nerd), being ugly if you’re a woman, general social status at the workplace and being successful, offer examples of toxic topics. Other examples are animal rights and the abuses of industrial farming, gender equality issues (of the feminist or masculist brands). All of these still remain subject to intense shame, guilt and fear mongering. If you scratch the surface of these issues in almost any social setting, people tend to freak out with strong negative emotional reactions. The machinery is there: controlling us and shaping our every interaction, even when it comes to what we allow ourselves to think in the privacy of our own minds.
The developmental perspective is per definition non-moralistic, non-judgmental. It is what comes instead of moralism, instead of blaming people. Higher stage is always explicable, always due to a privilege of some kind—social, genetic or other. It is never a measure of “the worth of your soul”.
The reason that people flip out under the pressure of too much freedom is not, speaking from the viewpoint of behavioral science, that we’re bad people, it’s simply that we’re not built for it, not prepared for it.
The point with understanding developmental stages is never to insult or deride, and always to understand how people can be supported, to see the causal, impersonal mechanisms that make higher freedom unbearable. There’s no God, remember? We killed Him. Or at least there’s no God in the sense there is a supreme perspective from which we judge the inherent value of people. There’s no final umpire, no ultimate judge. So don’t judge people for escaping the terror of freedom. We are simply unprepared.
See: Wilson, D., Dragusanu, R., 2008. The Expanding Middle: The Exploding World Middle Class and Falling Global Inequality . Goldman Sachs: Global Economics Paper No: 170.
“I got to talk to people from the Qualia Research Institute, who point out that everyone else is missing something big: the hedonic treadmill. People have a certain baseline amount of happiness. Fix their problems, and they’ll be happy for a while, then go back to baseline. The only solution is to hack consciousness directly, to figure out what exactly happiness is—unpack what we’re looking for when we describe some mental states as having higher positive valence than others—and then add that on to every other mental state directly. This isn’t quite the dreaded wireheading, the widely-feared technology that will make everyone so doped up on techno-super-heroin (or direct electrical stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centers) that they never do anything else. It’s a rewiring of the brain that creates a ‘perpetual but varied bliss’ that ‘reengineers the network of transition probabilities between emotions’ while retaining the capability to do economically useful work.”
See: Alexander, S., 2017. “Fear and Loathing at Effective Altruism Global 2017”, pub
lished online 16 th of August at Slate Star Codex . (www.slatestarcodex.com)
About deteriorating emotional intelligence, see: Yalda, T. U. et al ., 2014. Five Days at Outdoor Education Camp Without Screens Improves Preteen Skills with Nonverbal Emotion Cues. Computers in Human Behavior , vol. 30, pp. 387-92.
About ADHD, see: Swing, E. L, et al , 2010. Television and Video Game Exposure and the Development of Attention Problems. Pediatrics , vol. 126:2, pp. 214-21.
Cultural capital entails having a certain Bildung ; that is, being familiar with and knowledgeable about topics and areas others consider refined and interesting. It’s when your understanding of the world and way of reasoning exceeds that of the average person; when you can talk about things others find valuable and worth listening to; when your taste in art, clothing and music is admired by others. Academics, hipsters and artists generally have high levels of cultural capital, and it’s certainly tradable for other kinds of capital (which is a defining characteristic of any form of capital): It can of course be traded for cash if people pay you to speak or buy your books, artworks or expertise, but it can also be traded for social and sexual capital by making you a more interesting friend or attractive lover. However, simply having a degree in liberal arts or just being a graphic designer won’t do much. What characterizes cultural capital is that it must be valuable and desirable to others, and a person with high cultural capital must be someone who deeply understands and embodies the spirit of their time.
The reason I don’t bring up cultural capital as a fundamental form of inequality is that it is a more complicated matter, and its type of hierarchies and inequalities follow another logic altogether than classical superiority/inferiority of the other ones. Its role in the transformation of the world economy is also more fundamental and profound, I believe, as it will eventually replace economic or financial capital as the dominant force to coordinate human agency—or at least, that’s where the attractors seem to be pointing.
Cultural capital can be viewed as the mediating factor between information and emotional energy. Only if you know how to use information to elicit emotional responses can you control and coordinate behaviors, “speak to the soul to electrify” and so forth. Cultural capital is about symbols, and information is symbols, and symbols must be ritualized and invoked sensitively in order to be effective. That’s what cultural capital does, and that’s the reason it will grow in importance and eventually come to rule the world economy.
So if I suggested that Hakim’s “erotic capital” is a kind of sub-category, I believe cultural capital is a kind of super-category, destined to shift the interplay of all the other forms of stratification. More on this in my other book Outcompeting Capitalism .
It should be noted, of course, that the role I reserve for cultural capital is an even greater and more fundamental one than Bourdieu did. In my own schematic picture, cultural capital is the source of the creative class and/or “the triple-H population”, hipsters, hackers and hippies whom I mentioned in Book One. We have gone from a modern society like that of France in the 1960s—the context in which Bourdieu crafted his theories—to a global postmodern state of affairs, saturated in perpetual media images and visual symbols, to an emerging metamodern world of a birthing attentionalist internet economy where cultural capital begins to reign supreme and financial capital slowly but surely is brought to its knees.
At the bottom of postindustrial society you don’t really find a wide “proletariat” any longer. You find people who are just disenfranchised in a general manner; who are in an economically, socially and otherwise precarious situation. They are perhaps best denominated with a term made famous (but not invented) by the economist Guy Standing: the precariat . However, on the low end of informational and cultural capital you also find a lot of people who are relatively economically comfortable, but never really get to participate meaningfully in the postindustrial society of social media spectacles and exciting events. These growing groups are continuously reduced to a position of consuming the ideas, images and spectacles produced by others, hence Bard and Söderqvist call them the consumtariat .
Regarding the “regressive” voters of present-day USA (who voted for Donald Trump), there has been much discussion whether they constitute an economically disempowered segment of the population. Is this a revolt of the lower classes, or is it the bigotry of the privileged?
The answer is clear: They are not all economically poor, but they have lower cultural and informational capital than “progressive” voters . Trump voters largely belong to the consumtariat, the relative underclass of a postindustrial internet society.
Hence it is clear that the class struggles of our day and age have already shifted. It’s not that financial capital and economic class no longer matter —it’s just that it’s no longer the only game in town and that other forms of class distinctions are growing in importance. Rightwing populists can help these groups take back the spectacle, the center stage of society—at least for a while—and thus reaffirming the sense of meaning and empowerment that flows from it.
Once pressures from immigration became too large for Sweden, in 2015, the whole establishment of the media and political leadership turned overnight and the borders were effectively closed. To circumvent the power of the instituted norm system, they all had to make the shift simultaneously so as not to be exposed to charges of racism and bigotry. Because this large-scale coordination was so difficult to achieve, the country reacted only in the eleventh hour—under the leadership of the pro-immigration Green Party and the nominally multiculturalist Social Democrats. In this light, the recent dramatic rise of the nationalist Sweden Democrats is perhaps not so surprising.
Many other contemporary political scientists share the general picture of a US democracy in institutional decay.
Fukuyama, F., 2014. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
See: Somers, B., 2016. Samen Leven. Een hoopvolle strayegie tegen IS. Belgium: Houtekiet.
Lower states:
1. Hell
2. Horrific (phenomenological reality breaks down)
3. Tortured
4. Tormented
Medium states:
5. Very uneasy
6. Uneasy, uncomfortable
7. Somewhat uneasy, “okay”, full of small faults
8. Satisfied, well
9. Good, lively
10. Joyous, full of light, invigorated
High states:
11. Vast, grand, open
12. Blissful, saintly
13. Enlightened, spiritual unity
Gebauer, J. E., et al , 2018. Mind-Body Practices and the Self: Yoga and Meditation Do Not Quiet the Ego but Instead Boost Self-Enhancement. Psychological Science , vol. 29, 8, pp. 1299-1308.
Also, see this 2004 forecasts for reference—things have gotten way worse since then: Pacala, S., Socolow, R., 2004. Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies. Science, vol. 305(5686), pp. 968-72.
(a) First the group recognizes that training is required to make rigorous developmental assessments. [This is actually the biggest step. Does the group recognize a real expertise gradient and learning curve, or does the group think anyone can do it after a weekend workshop?]
(b) Then the group self-selects into those who want to gain this expertise and those who are interested but feel their time is better spent elsewhere. Some in the group are trained, others are not. Maybe everyone is trained, but this is unlikely in terms of dispositions and capabilities; also inefficient.
(c) Now the group must (re)build trust between those who are “experts” and those who are not. This requires an agreement on the norms that ought to govern the use of developmental levels as an aspect of political reasoning and practice. For example, I would a
rgue […] that assessments of developmental levels ought *never* be used as “admission” or “expulsion” criteria… that is one of what would probably be about 12 or more norms concerning how assessments of developmental level (made by experts) ought to factor in the life and thought of the group… This final step (c) is worth doing regardless of what plays out with (a) and (b).
https://medium.com/@Seth_Abramson/on-metamodernism-926fdc55bd6a
Marx’s (admittedly anthropocentric) environmentalism is described in the 2000 book by John Bellamy Foster, titled Marx’s Ecology . This book challenges the popular reading of Marx as being tied to an industrial-materialist thinking, as in Jean Baudrillard’s 1973 book The Mirror of Production.
You probably know how the story goes from there; Stalinist “diamat” (dialectical materialism) insisted that you primarily need to change the economic system, and all else will follow; the Italian radical Antonio Gramsci felt that culture and cultural “hegemony” (the dominant, taken-for-granted culture) explain why people don’t become socialists; “humanist Marxists” focused on people’s psychologies and personalities (Erich Fromm) or on social-psychological aspects like alienation (Joachim Israel) or blamed the TV (Theodor Adorno) or even the book clubs (Habermas—even if he, of course, later updated the view of society to something much more resembling the four fields I present here); and a few crazy people like Jean-Paul Sartre focused on agency, upon revolutionary action itself. And then you had some few geniuses, like the early Soviet thinker Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1927), who, in his foreseeing attempt at a “systems science”, intuited a shift of perspective towards a more holistic one that includes all four fields.
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