Relativism and the epistemic errors of left-liberal identity politics

One of the common resources of left-liberal cultural identity politics (which I oppose from a point of view I consider more purely left) is cultural relativism. Cultural relativism holds that some cultures ‘oppress’ others because they have had more influence, but should have less. This results from thinking that social power, including that which works, or seems to work, by influence rather than coercion, is in itself bad.

Therefore, everyone and every social group or entity - the people of every place and language or form of life - should have equal influence (chance to speak, allotted speaking time, opportunity to be elected as a representative, etc.), because inequality of power is bad. Though of course this does not abolish the hated social power but only claims to distribute it fairly.

The ultimate problem of the left is that it lets right make sight, so to speak: It lets its commitments to what it believes good and just to override all others (including purely ‘rational’ - assuming ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ themselves are ideals or (as I think) social practices that actually exist, or that also matter). This is precisely what it means to be, or want to be, ‘politically correct’. This is not over-politicization, it is hyper-partisanship, where one has become so convinced that one’s faction (especially if there are exactly and only two, as in America’s two-party system, which allows its right and left both to move towards extremes, just because of the logic of having two factions that divide the world of thought between them) is in the right, that one ceases to need to think about much. In this kind of space, almost any statement anyone makes is immediately coded as having a political valence that makes it one of ‘their’ opinions or one of ‘ours’. And then we must fight, not talk openly as if we were also thinking.

This tendency makes the liberal-left particularly sensitive to certain relativist themes. Basically, the possible truth of thoughts is made relative to and dependent on the ‘who’ question: cui bono, who benefits from that thought, or on whose behalf is it being made, and who is making it. If relativism is true, there are “black” and “white” truths, neither of which could possible be more true than the other, because that would be unfair. But this only means that truth is now wholly determined by its instrumentalization on behalf of a social subject. There are not then truths, only interests.

But relativism is false, and this is why. It is revealed by asking if there can be any domain of thought in which the truth or falsity of statements can in no way depend on any trait of the speaker or thinker, or the subject to which the statement is attributed as enunciated by her or him or them. Such a field is mathematics. Now, it is well known that pure mathematics more or less originated in ancient Greece. In any case, like every other soclal practice and form of knowledge, it must have a history, and a sociology or, if individual persons are involved, a psychology. Relativism depends on the idea that the traits of the person enunciating a statement determine all or part of its meaning. (And therefore possible truth value). But this is clearly false in the case of mathematics. For while there certainly can be a psychology, sociology, and history of mathematics and mathematicians, they play no role in mathematics; that is, they play no role in determining the formation and evaluation (as possibly true) of mathematical statements. This, incidentally, is why “the Bantu Tolstoy is Tolstoy.” It is why there is universality even when some of the elements of the set of useful or true things have origins or modes of participation in totalities that are particular. In that case, the discipline of mathematics is a means of the hegemony and thus oppression of the world of non-mathematicians (which is most people anywhere at least most of the time) by those with this knowledge — and this is a truth ‘in’ mathematics that qualifies the truth and meaning of its propositions. But in that case, there are no true propositions about anything, although in place of this truth there is a history and sociology or way of characterizing the statements.

Foucault thinks that social truths are effects of power. Sure they are, but if they are truths, they are not only that, because they have power effects but are also truths, and if social truths are not effects of power only or merely, this only amounts to saying that all knowledge or the only kind that counts is sociology or a department of it. But both these possibilities is absurd. In fact, truths that are only effects of power are not truths but merely statements used instrumentally to obtain certain effects. If that were true, not only would there be no mathematics or science, there would also be no poetry or art. This would reduce every professional practice that makes use of a specialized knowledge with scientific pretensions to the character of a social technology or practice that aims only to achieve certain (social) effects. That there might be social institutions which operated in that way is a possibility in no way denied by these considerations. Thus, Foucault’s works in social and intellectual history did much to delegitimate the institutions of prisons and mental health practices. Now mathematics arguably is the science of Being that works by working out the possibilities of thinking about it. So then the question of truth might be, could we have a very clear way of imagining and thinking about things of any kind that is throughly grounded in epistemically validated principles and rules of logical derivation or inference, and yet not call these truths? I say no because a truth ultimately is a statement or even body of statements that is not only factually verified as correspondent to a situation it truly describes and so names. It also has to matter. That no doubt means it is relevant to our concerns, and perhaps relative to them. But it is relevant to them not just as given, but as desired, in the sense that what is wanted is what we believe ‘ought to be’. Now mathematics makes no reference to lifeworlds in their concrete particularity nor to anything about them. It abstracts from them; one could even say it subtracts from them. It is also like technology in that it is technique. I think that there are ways in which the most clear image of a situation and its possibilities, including ‘solutions’ to problems that might be recognized as part of it, is better in a way that is, intrinsically and necessarily ‘happier’.

Of course, it is all too easily said that many people wield political resentments in such a way that they don’t want to solve any problem, or understand anything better, let alone by thinking through it clearly. If we did not value understanding things better, we would have neither mathematics nor poetry; we would not have thought. Incredibly, people with authoritarian minds thing understanding is a form of obedience.

There is perhaps a question today about the utility of the sciences. There is no question about affirming or denying the utility of any idea, the desirability of putting it into use and operation, because of its provenance by language, culture, history or anything else. In that sense, there either are no truths but only power, which would be in a Hellenic and epistemic register a kind of Gnostic pessimism, or there are truths, and some cultural traditions have an analogue of moral luck that we might call epistemic luck. What do we do about that? Imagine a world (like ours) where if you want to be a violinist who is excellent in performing classical music pieces (whether composed in Norway or Nigeria), or you would like your child to be able to be, you need to belong to a certain social class. Now ask whether the violin itself and any of the musical pieces that could be played on it are in themselves ‘guilty’ of a social class or cultural ‘privilege’ and if the solution would be to abolish them. Maybe this would lead to a form of Maoism, which abolished all theater in China to be replaced by performances of a repertoire of exactly eight politically correct “Model Plays.” I have a better solution: make learning the violin and the possibility of becoming a concert violinist available to all. The only people left out completely in this scheme are ‘fourth world’ cultures that are outside global civilization, having neither written language nor states, money, bureaucracies, and social classes. Such worlds are disappearing, for better and worse (since they are different from ours, and all differences can be evaluated, they are necessarily either better or worse in all respects or, more likely, better and worse in some, respectively. What can be proposed for our postcolonial world culture is that we learn from them. This leads to things like anthropology and museums, which are absolutely forms of Western-influenced culture that owe their origins to colonialism, and the conjunction of it and things like universities. It is ‘our’ way of looking at a ‘them’ that cannot be included, because the inclusion of these lifeworlds, now well proceeding, much accomplished, and inevitable, necessarily so changes them that they are largely destroyed. Not entirely? That they were not entirely destroyed and need and should not be was the gambit of much of the constitutive nationalism of the former Ibero-American worlds; ask the Mexicans; Tenochtitlan is an ancestral site, not merely a buried and forgotten ruin. This is our globalism. We can be more than Western, we cannot be non-Western. This is not an option for any person living in the world today who is not part of a fourth world ‘primitive’ tribal culture without written language. Anthropology exists for the same reason mathematics does. The universal can be constructed; it is not always a false universality masking a mere particularly wielding a power claim.

The same logic explains another error of left-liberal identity politics: the confusion of the question of the meaning, value or use, and truth of artworks and the moral dispositions of their makers or those who participate in the scene mise-en-scène when they are performed or experienced. Art works cannot be guilty or innocent but only interesting, and ideas can be interesting, true, or both, but not guilty; only persons can be guilty of anything, and only persons are subjects to commands. Both persons and artworks and ideas enter into political processes, but in different ways, because the one is entirely virtual. Because of that, when you prick the actor, you don’t bleed, and when he is pricked, he doesn’t either, but he seems to.

The mistake is what Frege and Husserl called psychologism. Its origin is the belief that the meaning of a statement depends (holistically) on the context of its utterance and/or the qualities of the person enunciating it. But if this is the case, than there are no true statement. All there would be is a sociology, and more than that, all there would be is the history and sociology of knowledge. This would fit a world that thinks itself a universal archive or museum that makes available everything that can be represented but allows for no thought. The mathematician inhabits a very particular lifeworld that allows him in thinking to bracket out all the other demands of social life. There is a social subject that is coming into existence today that ‘wants’ to live in no lifeworld, and this subject is the fictive person modeled on that kind of worker who is a machine. We now know that computers can replicate only some kinds of mental processes; some things about brains are better. The social subject modeled on this machine will feel constantly threatening boredom and despair, because nothing matters. It will fear being unable even to select among various possibilities what to attend to. It can only select through algorithms, which are highly inefficient in basic form but made efficient by running at extremely high speeds, which is now possible, and cheaply. This subject can have available to it every fact about every thing anyone might wonder about. None of these facts are truths. This world has no gravity, but it is also is a fiction that haunts us as only something might that is a possibility of ourselves except that it is not even alive.