The progressive positivist paradox

Our world is thoroughly infused and shaped by the idea of progress and the movement towards goals and objectives, be they specific or all-encompassing, grand in scale or minute in their detail. The foundation of our belief in human agency and the achievability of these goals are the western sciences, which began knocking down age-old mystery after age-old mystery sometime around the 16th century with the European voyages of “discovery,” Galileo, and the 17th century scientific revolution of Newtonian physics. As the ever-expanding scientific frameworks allowed for more exact calculations of natural phenomena and the energies of our world and universe, making them measurable, comprehendible, and verifiable, the growing certainties of a positivist approach to the world and our (seemingly unified) reality allowed for a perspective based on a paradigm of measurable achievements that differentiated humans from their environments in that humans were finally able to fully, at least in our minds, master the natural world and use it to our ends. With the dawn of democratic nation states, modernity proper, industrialization, and, later, the theory of evolution, a system took shape that blended ancient religious doctrine with more secular humanist principles to afford certain rights to certain people, so that these new achievements could benefit society more broadly. “Certain people,” because these rights were initially only afforded to upper and, later, middle class men of European and, to a lesser extent, Asian, descent. The last two hundred years have been marked by an ongoing struggle of various peoples and groups to claim these rights. However, the nature and roots of the paradigm are such that as more groups come to the fore, they face a paradox nestled at the heart of what appears to be a zero-sum game. If worth is verifiable for a society in one way or another, or can be based on specific moral values, then claiming these rights means having to prove your worth within this positivist framework.

With the sciences illuminating both the visible and invisible world for most anyone to calculate and predict, human agency within this framework became of increasing importance. Human activity and humans themselves could now be measured and their efforts calculated with an eye on future goals for cities, states, nations. Interfering occurrences, natural or human-induced, could detract from the power of these measurements and the human ability to perform to their greatest capabilities. How these abilities were measured and who they were ascribed to were, first and foremost, a complete fiction of their time. For all its talk of freedom, tolerance, and the brotherhood of man, the Enlightenment was founded in a world rife with the subjugation of other peoples through colonization and slavery (amongst many other things). Sentences such as “all men are created equal” simply make no sense in a country founded with the ownership of other human beings as a cornerstone of many of its states’ economies. The “good” of the people and how it was to be achieved quite quickly became a contentious issue, initiating a tug-of-war that is still ongoing.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, with the 1848 revolutions, the abolition of slavery in various countries, the American Civil War, the rise of Marxism and socialism, and, later, the women’s suffrage movement, more and more pressure began to be put on the claims of equality and freedom. The worth of a human within modernity, the attributable rights that would allow someone to take an equal place within society, the measurement of masses of people to achieve objectives took on particularly perverted forms in the early to mid-20th century with numerous colonial massacres, the rise of fascism and the ensuing genocide of life deemed unfit for society, as well as communist planning that would sacrifice the lives of millions to achieve measurable objectives for the “good” of the nation and its people.

The ushering in of the end of colonialism and classical empire that World War II brought about, the exposed inequalities within the victorious Western powers, the waves of migration initiated in the aftermath of the war, as well as the values upon which the ensuing Cold War was fought, exposed increasing levels of hypocrisy within the democratic framework. What is referred to as the post-modernism of the 1960’s and 70’s can actually be seen as the theoretical and creative challenge to a one-dimensional interpretation of freedom, equality, and progress. Civil rights movements, feminism, gay rights, and other approaches, all challenged societal inequalities, and continue to do so, with the aim of forcing the democratic societies to make good on their centuries-old promises.

On the streets, however, the movements do not necessarily take on the theoretical foundation of progress, equality and so on (though many of their influential thinkers did, Foucault, for example). They instead push the point that these values have never truly been instated or lived. The argumentation being, that the world has been one made for men of western European descent, yet the positivist values in and of themselves are not dismissed. Within this approach lies the paradox and the trap that leaves democratic societies at loggerheads today, a world of never-ending dispute where all groups fight to lay claim to their rights as citizens, all have sufficient claims to have been wronged, and democracy is only trusted by the few.

An illuminating example of the paradox created by the struggle for recognition and rights within the progressive framework are gay rights. In the mid-1990’s, this was still known by many as the GLB movement, yet as the years have gone by and more groups fight for recognition of their place within society, and the movements themselves struggle to incorporate these new claims within the existing framework, this has become the LGBTQI* movement (though this is also disputed). Post-colonial thinker Boaventura de Sousa Santos makes an interesting point in this respect. In his “Epistemologies of the South,” he claims the idea of inclusion itself constitutes a problem, as it will always come at the cost of the exclusion of another group. To establish the identity of a specific group within our society, we must delineate it and ascribe characteristics and, ultimately, worth to the people of that group so as to make the case for their rights within our society. With the foundation of this system being a positivist, Western idea of science, and the measurability of worth and inherent value of persons, the ascribing of value to this new group automatically excludes any others who are not part of that group or any other that has been categorized to date. This is the conundrum that the contemporary political left faces. To make good on their progressive goal of baseline equality within this framework, they must first categorize and structure identities (and with them, a host of cultural-moral doctrines) to claim their promised rights. The above example is a simple one demonstrated by the much-disputed evolution of a simple acronym, though others, such as minority rights movements in countries with histories of slavery or genocide can awaken debates of essential rights and value that lead to even darker corners of the argument.

Disputes surrounding claims that all people are equal or that human dignity is inviolable should be a necessity in a democratic society, yet they also open up an endless stream of arguments and counterargument that have now, paradoxically, led us to a point where anyone can claim persecution or discrimination, including white men. You can laugh these off as absurd, but if you cannot diffuse the argument theoretically (as opposed to simply pointing at history and power dynamics), then they can keep claiming this in (their) good conscience. The positivist trap of ascribing and labeling worth that we have found ourselves in is likely to stem from the condition that our ideas of progress and equality were created piecemeal over centuries, and done so by white men of European descent using the tools they had at their disposal. Those tools were the sciences that were explaining all the riddles of the universe through values and formulas, and whose reality was proven through the written word. In the end, though, this has left us with a patchwork landscape of delineated interest groups, a world of minorities, an ever-increasing range of identities who squabble over the language and terminology through which they are trying to claim rights that were originally only meant for a few.

The rights of the few, or what are seen as such, constitute the trap the political right finds itself in. They must either admit that they truly want to see modern democratic values upheld in their truest form, with an open society aiming for equality, no matter what the times and culture have in store for them, or fall back on a more prejudiced original interpretation of these democratic claims – that these rights are only to be afforded to the few, be it along gender-based, racial or class lines. This is obviously not an explicit choice and there is a large spectrum upon which people will fall, but it does not take much to dig underneath the defiance to certain political movements to uncover what the exact issue is that people feel is at stake when granting specific rights to certain groups. The calculable and measurable granting of rights seems for many to present a zero-sum game, where giving rights to some will mean the loss of rights for others. If the left can argue that European or Asian men have held a disproportionate amount of power or privilege at the cost of others who now seek their rights within this system, then it is not too far-fetched for what is now one group among many – be they white, the manufacturing workforce, military veterans etc. – to claim they are a specific identity that now has the status of the overlooked or discriminated when they are ignored by the establishment, suicide or addiction rates in their population are simply disregarded, or they are upheld as the worst or most ignorant elements of society. The progressive society as we know it has come to a point where it forces people to take sides, delineate their identity, claim allegiance, or be cast out. Following the linear, progressive timeline we have been on, and vying for the interpretation of who “all people” are and what defines human dignity has led to democracy simply becoming a tribalistic battle for who will be the dominant group to force their values onto the other, without room for commonalities. Rather than come to terms with a sometimes hollow promise, and a complicated and dark past, the right either shuns a broader, humanistic perspective concerning values in that it zeroes in on an economic liberalism that will supposedly eventually liberate everyone (despite its founding upon slavery and the current exploitation of near slave labor in a wide range of countries), or it doubles down on the original promise to the few with all its prejudices.

These choices are as unnecessary as is the left’s need for the recognition of identity in its most minute sense and the morality of the word. As it stands, however, we live in a political world where different sects continuously appear and an ever-increasing number of value systems and codes are built, sworn enemies are chosen, and territory within society is staked out and defended until death or the next issue arises. With democracy reduced to a life and death struggle for values and identity, a near-religious belief in the group one has chosen, and a winner-takes-all approach to government, no truly satisfactory solution can be derived. In basing societal structures in the pursuit of monolithic progress through the recognition of the positivist value of one’s own identity, society splinters into a thousand pieces.

Tied to the idea of the delineated value of the individual that births monolithic identity are the endless additions to what can count as equal; the “pain Olympics” that ensue when recognition as a group is based on how one has been wronged and a related denial of a history of true suffering endured by other groups; endless language and spelling wars so as to control the speech of the other; the building of bulletproof cases against criticism through lived experience that disallow any discussion; or the negation of rights based on historical cases. However, understanding the environment of the original conception and its actual value as an objective for societies could mean opening up possible reconfigurations of perspective. Instead of all the myriad offshoots and effects and the kaleidoscope of necessary grievances emanating from a central value-based conception, this perspective can be turned inside out.

With today’s identity comes measurable positivist worth to claim rights, but identity is not something of inherent value – it just “is.” Additional identities thereby do not threaten a zero-sum game of limited value rights, they are just one of many under the same umbrella of rights. Outside of positivism, in a world of multiplicities that exists both in our physical reality as well as in our theoretical frameworks, these things do not need to be “valuable” apart from that their existence should be a given reality worth protecting. Shifting from the individual, subjective perspective to the perspective of the many, the recognition of the rights of many, the right to have rights, without being based in the inherent measurable value of the individual, almost seems like a return to the idea of democracy as we understand it today. There is the possibility of a more contemporary democracy, without hinging itself too excessively to its historic ancestors and the negative connotations of a slavery-based society ruled by the few as in ancient Greece, the severely class-based systems of early modern Europe with the nobility at the head, or the lobbyist and oligarchic tendencies of more recent forms of democracy. Understanding societies, even ones that appear quite homogenous, as encompassing these multiplicities – something which has become so apparent with increasing digitalization and the presence of social media in our lives – means moving away from past understandings of our societies, even those of the more recent past. To make good on the promises of equality of rights and access to specific services of government, with the understanding of the realities of our societies on the ground, is less about a culture of appreciation and more about a culture of understanding.

This may sound utopian, but it is more akin to simply taking stock, like someone realizing they might not be as good at something as they once thought. There could be an honest self-evaluation on all sides to the benefit of all sides. Of course, how this would be structured and what it would mean politically and economically is an endless debate in and of itself and maybe this is simply the debate we have been having these last 200 years. At the same time, it is hard not to look at the last two centuries and continuously see how we have measured humans, sometimes quite literally, included or excluded them from our more or less “open” societies, or see how theories such as evolution were perverted into social Darwinism to structure peoples into hierarchies of value and dominance climaxing in the Nazi euthanasia programs and gas chambers. Along this spectrum of worth, laws were passed, people were plugged into formulas for social and economic programs, and so on and so on.

With the dawn of social media, the debate of where the borders of inclusion within democracies lie has reached fever pitch. Here too, a paradox presents itself, in that, in a time when people have access to more information than ever before, when the realities of nuance, shades of grey and multiplicities in every area of life are their most apparent in history, our paradigm ensures that we can only makes sense of it through extreme delineation and a contrast of how our particularities line up with those of others in our community and in the world, and how we should subsequently align our interests. Everywhere, people feel under pressure to defend the borders of their identity, the knowledge constructs they are built on and the history that provides their group with worth within society. Established communities within society are left confused and feel attacked, with an endless back and forth ensuing in which everyone writes down their group’s history, stakes their claim, worth and influence throughout history to back-up their push for rights. However, if there wasn’t an outer border emanating from a central perspective, if, again, one turned the perspective inside out and there was simply an open canopy of democratic values that truly applied to all, devoid of specific cultural or religious markers and morals, and no need for the measurement of worth or specific identity-based economic viability, there would hopefully be no need for the visceral identity debate. As it stands, we find ourselves stuck in between a multitude of groups vying for the power of recognition in a zero-sum game rigged to favor the specific groups who happen to be in power.

The sciences that allowed us to understand our world, conquer ailments and improve the life quality of millions, were so awe inspiring that they lead us to believe this understanding was the key to everything in our world, harnessing it we could also harness nature and solve many conundrums that had plagued societies for centuries and were increasingly doing so in modernity. With the roots of this approach steeped in deeply unequal societies, be it along gendered or class-based lines, or based in racist colonial mindsets, meant that humans were integrated into systems according to their recognizable worth as understood by the dominant values of their time. Though those values have been debated and have shifted over the years, the foundation of inherent value as a spectrum of worth and basis for appreciation within society remains. The struggle to expand rights from a single group, either within society or globally, to one group after the next has taken place along the lines of worth and recognition. The paradox, and the ensured lost battle and unending debate, is guaranteed with the first step taken in claiming rights using that original logic. Moral positions, power dynamics, denial of history, microaggressions – a never-ending cascade of infighting and exclusion that only sees groups vying for top position and seemingly uninterested in a common good, or at least not one that is satisfactory enough that all can live under it. In claiming democracy’s promise, groups resort to the tool kit of a one-time (and often still) oppressive system and thereby further exacerbate the problems inherent to it. Those who have classically defended it also don’t seem much interested in the traditional democratic values and, be it through ties to a religious doctrine or economic interest, fail to see that an open society is one that ensures stability and thriving communities. Democracy seems surrounded by enemies that it has enabled to flourish. Democracy should be an open conversation, but it appears that most parties are so convinced of their own truth, their own reality, their own identity, their own inherent worth at the cost of others, that they see no need for discussion. We find ourselves in a bind, where the secular value of a human being has become a measurable thing, and even those who dispute the falsity of the original prejudiced system make use of its ideas, the snake bites its own tail, and we are left with imbeciles, sociopaths, and technocrats to exploit the situation and take power within our societies.