For the Rationality Debate

By Barbara Ehrenreich / in the form of an interview

 

Z Papers: You're supposed to be responding to a set of critics of Western Rationality and Science. First, is this your only experience with this view, or have you encountered it in your own interactions before?

Ehrenreich: No, I have encountered this point of view before, for example, about a year ago and I was on a panel talking about multiculturalism and in fact I was talking about the attack on multiculturalism coming from the right, the neo-intellectuals. And then afterwards someone in the audience, someone I know, in fact one of the authors of one of these papers came up to me and said, "that was fine, except I can't believe you used the word `truth'." And I was so shocked. She said it as if she were referring to some obscenity I had used. So I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Well there is no truth ." And I think I still have to stand by my gut response at that moment which was to say, "Then we have nothing to talk about." And I walked away. I couldn't figure out what would be the rules for communicating if we were going to start from the idea that there was going to be no truth.

So, if they can't really mean to curtail communication, what do you think the critics are actually aiming at? Are they really claiming there is no truth? Then would the claim itself be true? What basis would they or anyone have for claiming anything? So, if it isn't that there is no truth, what are they claiming?

I should say first that I would agree with the authors of these papers that reason and a rational notion of truth may not apply to all forms of communication we might want to undertake. They may not be appropriate for all types of communication we might want to employ. There are all kinds of things that we might prefer to communicate perhaps through poetry or through dance or music or something else, but as a general rule, when we're dealing with people who we're not really intimate with, acquaintances and strangers, and we're trying to communicate somewhat impersonal things, we have some ground rules called reason, and they lead to something called truth which of course will sometimes change with further investigation and further discussion incorporating points of view that weren't represented the first time. But we start with that. I

If I have a plumber coming because I have a leak in the basement, I would not expect him or her to start out by saying we're not going to use reason and we're not going to pay any attention to the idea of truth in analyzing where this leak is coming from. We're going to just consider various alternative points of view, intuitions we may have--I don't want that in my discussions with the plumber.

Well, the plumber may have an intuition about what's gone wrong. That's okay, yes?

But I would expect that intuition to be empirically establishable--testable.

So what's the difference between the plumber and a scientist?

Well, really, there's no difference. For most kinds of interactions, for example, the interaction you and I are having in this discussion, we have a set of ground rules. We have an idea of how to make a case, how to establish a claim. It doesn't mean we're going to always agree. We might have many reasons for continuing to disagree. But at least we have a way to get at agreement.

So you can be rational and be wrong?

Of course. The authors of these papers seem to confuse reason and truth. You can be very rational sometimes and come up with something which may not be true and you might find that out as you get further evidence.

The critics enumerate all sorts of problems with science, or with scientists, ranging from the kinds of policies scientists support, to the way they behave, and so on. Are they wrong in these criticisms? OR are the faults there, but with a different cause than the a flawed rationality?

There are, of course, many problems with science. I have been a critic for many years of misuses of science. Criticizing the use of so-called science, very often pseudo-science, to justify social hierarchies, for example, is one of the intellectual themes of my life. But I have never encountered a problem in science that could not be cured with more science, that could not be cured with more reason--by bringing in points of view that had been neglected, or data that had been neglected. Here's, I think, a striking example which might appeal to the multiculturally inclined, which is the effort to translate and understand the Mayan hieroglyphs. For years that effort was getting nowhere because most of the scientists involved, white European types, did not think there could be any possible connection between the glyphs in the Mayan ruins and the spoken language of contemporary Mayan. They just could not believe that these short, dark people could have had anything to do with such a complex civilization as was represented in the glyphs. Then one Soviet scientist did pay attention to the Mayan spoken language and he was the one who was finally able to crack the hieroglyphs to see that some of them were epigrams and some of them actually represented sounds and words in contemporary Mayan. So there you had science and scientists, which because of their prejudices could not see the truth, could not get anywhere, and it took someone else who did not share the prejudice to get at what I would call, in this case, the truth.

So in this case racist prejudice, or in some other instance sexist or classist prejudice, aren't part of science. They are laid on top. What?

Scientists have customarily been white men from some of the more comfortable classes of society sharing the prejudices of those classes and their gender and racial groups. So it's always a struggle to get past that when those biases intrude into their science.

Does science aggravate the problem? We all know that racism, sexism, and classism are in the society, but does the science make it worse?

Being scientific itself doesn't make it worse. Rationality, testing, can get through the biases, though with difficulty. But science makes it worse when it lends itself to justifications of social domination which there are endless examples of. A classic case is theories of brain size and phrenology which so fascinated biologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and which they used to prove that northern European types were superior to Jews, Africans, Italians and other people they saw as subordinate races. We know it is silly. And you could have pointed out it was silly at the time. But you do that by using science, reason, also. By drawing in more evidence. As I said, the cure is always more science, not less.

Let's take a different example one of the critics emphasized. Suppose someone comes along and tells people that they had to support marxist and leninist views on the grounds that they are scientific and science is the truth so that there aren't be any sensible opposition? Or suppose some Westerner takes the same approach in trying to gain acceptance for some agricultural theory among third world peasants? How do you react to using the label of science, the ideology of science, to bludgeon people into believing that certain views must be true?

First, of course, it isn't science. You argue for science by emphasizing that it has been and can be tested. People can make up their own minds about it. But second, I'd rather have oppressive claims presented as being scientifically based than claims for domination that were presented as being by design in their origin, or supernatural, If you tell me that white males have the role they have in our society because God wants it that way, it is harder to refute, most of the time, than if you tell me that it's because they're smarter, because it's easy to show that they're not smarter, that smarter doesn't mean much, or that whatever form of intelligence we may be talking about doesn't apply to running a society. I think you always have a little leverage when domination is justified scientifically. I would rather never see science used that way, because I'd rather never see domination. It's a perversion of science that has of course happened over and over, but at least you can refute it on its own terms if elites are going to justify social hierarchy based on science.

Again, in the realm of how people interact, suppose someone comes along and says white middle class feminists create a flawed activism because they have the wrong way of thinking--that is, Western Rationality. How do you react?

I would have a hard time with that, of course. You can say that there are many ways in which the feminist movement or the environmental movement have been limited by having disproportionate involvement by white middle class men, and so on, and that those movements would be greatly enriched in many ways by being more diverse in their constituency. But that's a very rational claim. If you are trying to create a movement to advance the interests of all women, feminism, if you only have the perspective of a certain class or culture of women represented, you don't have feminism. So you have to keep going. You have to try to bring in the truth of women's experience. But again, only by expanding the data, so to speak.

But what if the point that the person is trying to make is that the way of thinking of an anglo middle class woman is different from the way of thinking of a lower class black woman, or that the way of thinking of a Westerner is different from the way of thinking of an Easterner?

Of course there may be real differences in what people think about and how they organize their thoughts and the concepts they use depending on backgrounds and classes. But I would not surrender to a more elite class or race the idea of rationality. Why cede them that? It's a very disturbing assumption in these papers that rationality is something that inheres in the oppressor class, whatever that is, whether it's men or whites or westerners. How does anyone arrive at such a conclusion? Why would anyone want that? Rationality has often been a central tool of the oppressed. It is one of the ways you discredit the oppressor. It is how you demystify and expose.

I should add a personal note here. My family was originally blue collar poor, but intensely committed to rationality, in a very positivistic and what I see now as limited way. But they were militant about these things. And I came to respect this rationality as part of what gave them some dignity as against the bosses. They would point out that the bosses didn't work, the bosses sat behind desks. They would use rationality also to undercut doctors, preachers, and lawyers. I always thought about rationality not that it was something the oppressor had and my people didn't have but that it was something you were more likely to encounter among the oppressed than among those who were busily trying to justify their position in society, regardless of truth.

The same goes for the whole issue that is brought up in one of these papers concerning medical theories about women and the whole role of medical "science" in justifying sexist social arrangements. Well, these are cases of doctors being irrational and of women, women as indigenous lay healers, being the rational ones who drew on empirical experience. The women have more idea of experimental method than the doctors who might be highly educated but who really had no basis for effective medical practice. It was the poor people, the woman who was a lay healer, who represented more what I would call a scientific method--you tested things, you saw what worked, instead of just mumbling something you learned in medical school which was no doubt false if you learned it in the 19th century. So why hand this over to the oppressor? You've got rationality, and we have what? Only intuition? Only rhythm? Only feelings? No, we have those things and rationality too on our side.

You spent much of your own time discussing what you called the progressional managerial class and particularly its relation to workers. Many critics of science and rationality would probably say that what's going on in that relation is the imperial, domineering, colonializing attributes of western rationality playing themselves out. How does your view differ from that?

How have I criticized this professional managerial class. On grounds of rationality. Pointing out, for example, how they use science, monopolize science and sometimes twist it, to legitimize their own status. Here's a crude example. It's a requirement in medical school that you study organic chemistry and calculus. Now these are obviously fine things to study, but they have very little if anything to the practice of medicine and even with medical research, including even some basic medical research. Those requirements are there as hurdles to keep out less affluent people who haven't had as extensive preparation as people who are children of members of the professional managerial class. But I'm being rational in making this claim. I'm using, in fact, my knowledge or organic chemistry to say it has no required place in medical education, except that it's an interesting thing to learn. So the problem with the PMC isn't that they are rational, but that they monopolize it or use it to oppress others.

Another point that comes up frequently in the critical articles is a feeling on the part of the critics of science and western rationality are themselves without values and make their practitioners valueless, and the implication seems to be that somehow values should be inserted into rationality, or inserted into science. What's your reaction to that?

It doesn't make sense. Values should dictate, for example, what we fund in scientific research. And I personally would like to see less funding going into research on mental differences between the sexes and more funding going into how to educate people so that girls in larger numbers feel confident about math. But once someone has embarked on some research, you don't want values sneaking in. What you get then is Lysenkoism. Lysenko was a Soviet biologist who believed in and purported to prove that acquired characteristics are inherited. Your parent learns to play a sport very well, you inherit the acquired skills. And this went along with marxist doctrine that you should be able to get better from generation to generation. But this had a paralyzing grip on Soviet biology. They had a value and though nature didn't comply, they went ahead and acted as though it did. So no, you can't have values influencing what science deems knowledge.

In the critical papers, some of the claims did seem to me to verge on Lysenkoism. For example Marcus Raskin says, "In the reconstructive mode, moral and political fluxions would generate linked principles or `laws' about nature which themselves are statistical and approximate to social and political principles concerning freedom, empathy, etc." Now I don't know what that means unless it's that you're not going to be listening to nature. You can't listen to it because you have to come up with laws, apparently, that fit with your social or political principles.

Raskin says that all of knowledge, all of the body of insights from science or poetry or whatever, are stories, and that rather than create stories which have no values and that benefit us in ways we would like to be benefited, why not tell another story which embodies values and leads in directions that we want to travel? There doesn't seem to be any reason in Raskin's view of what knowledge is, or should be, to prevent him from doing that. He also offers as evidence for the validity of this approach the fact that scientists often say they are moved by beauty and elegance in determining what their equations will be or what their theories will be. But if they can be moved by beauty and elegance, RAskin argues, why can't I be moved by social justice in settling on what the truth is?

Well, you can be moved by beauty and elegance and turn out to be wrong. Science does produce stories. We do have narratives from science, but they are stories about something. They are not just any story you want to make up. And yes there is an aesthetic criterion, which is fascinating. It's a kind of Occams Razor kind of claim that truth usually turns out to be the simplest explanation, given whatever data you have at the time. The fascinating question is then why should that be so. And is there something about the way our minds work which is congruent with how things work "out there"? There were recent experiments showing that babies as little as five months old can carry out mathematical calculations, perceptually. So some elements of mathematics are very deep in our minds, not learned, but present from the outset. But no, you can't just tell any story you prefer, or it won't be about what we call nature. Nature is obdurate, It doesn't just flitter around to suit our preferences.

Why do you think it is that people, particularly people who are more often than not academics and spend a great deal of their time being very disciplined in their thinking and in their rationality, are now criticizing rationality and claiming that somehow we have to transcend rationality or science?

I'm trying to understand, but I don't know. Really my position is I can't talk to people who say we are throwing out truth. There is nothing more to say. So what I'm left with is why is this happening. Why are there people who just want to shut down communication on so many different fronts, because it is a withdrawal from communication to insist that we can't use reason. It's suggestive, perhaps, that a similar thing happened at the end of the last century to European intellectuals. There was a wave of romanticism. A rejection of technology and science that persisted into the 20th century and helped lay the groundwork for master race theories and the intense nationalism of the world wars. It was a wholesale abandonment of science and rejection of reason and a search for folkloric and nationalistic sources of pride among European people. I don't think it's something about the end of centuries that causes this to happen, but it is interesting that it happened before.

I think the more obvious answer, looking at our own time, is that these are very decadent times. The idea of truth is not very respected. I've been fascinated by the claims in the presidential campaign. They all lie, but George Bushes claim that Clinton raised taxes 128 times in Arkansas was really illustrative. Some people quite able to count things, like Michael Kinsley, pointed out that no, it wasn't 128 times. That number was arrived at by counting things that just weren't tax increases. So what was the response of Bush aides when confronted with the fact that this claim was false? There response was so what, it worked. It worked to say that. Alright, these guys are totally corrupt, so why should anyone care about that? But then watching television I see various pundits discussing this issues saying things like, of course it wasn't really 128 tax increases, and this isn't true, but is it really okay to use statements like this. And they're all stroking their chins and thinking about this. Nobody comes out and says George Bush is a liar. They're just slightly uncomfortable about the situation.

What you get from such commentary is the idea that truth is an optional quality that a statement may or not have, which certainly enhances a statement and adds luster to a statement, but its not necessary. We're accustomed to that. We listen to advertisements all the time. We know they aren't true. Now and then one is true, we say hey that one's true too, in addition to sounding good. So there is sort of an intellectual pluralism here. Say whatever you want. It's your point of view. That's fine. And it's a withdrawal from real encounters with other people, when you say maybe it's true maybe it's not, everybody has a point of view.

It has to do, and I see this in the people who contributed the papers, with not wanting to really engage, really struggle something out to the point where we both have to agree on one thing or another. We just don't do that in our society.

I think another part of the intellectual decadence of our times is what I would call MacRationality, after MacDonalds. It's the sort of rationality you encounter when you try to fill out your IRS forms. Take the square-root of the number you got on line 13 and add it to 3 times what you have on line 19, and so on. We're confronted with this kind of crazy bureaucratic, actually somewhat militaristic instruction all the time, and we resent it. And we confuse that with actual rationality. And sometimes in the papers they are confusing these things.

There's also constant ridiculous, spurious applications of what looks like science to political and human affairs where it doesn't belong, also very irritating. For example, a union official try's to figure out whether a certain group of workers would be good to organize hires a professional polling firm to go out and poll those workers. You'll get an answer. You'll even get an answer that you can quantify. An answer which may be good to a thousandth of a percentage point. But it's also an answer which means nothing because opinions people are likely to have about that issue will be very different when called by someone they don't know on the telephone, compared to if they are sitting around at a coffee break and talking with co-workers. There is no comparison, so you don't get anything useful from this type of MacRationality and it's very irritating but we shouldn't confuse it with being truly rational.

These examples tend to explain why the average person is skeptical to science and maybe even to rationality, but what about the people who write these articles? There is nothing different about what you are describing now from 5 years ago. These phenomena have always existed. Where is the source of the new trend? It seems to be associated with post modernism. It seems to come out of literary criticism somewhat. It seems to come out of ecological thinkers and anthropologists somewhat. It doesn't seem to come from activists on the street, so much. Is this wrong?

No, of course not. In fact, the real fight with false science, for example sexist science, has not been fought by women throwing post modernist mush. They've been fought with reason. Scientists say that women's brains are smaller and it means we're dumb. We can answer that. But the effective response has not been to throw Lacan at them or Foucault. Now why is this happening. There are sociological explanations. They're not original to me, but the sociological kind of explanation that I've heard among academics who are critical of this trend is that there is a crisis of professionalization in the last 15 or 20 years in the teaching of English and literature in particular.

What does that mean, a crisis of professionalization?

That there were hundreds of people for every job and it was very hard to justify that you were better than the other ninety nine people lining up for the same job. How did you define yourself as a professional. What was that body of knowledge which you could say you had with your PhD that somebody else didn't have? This led to the adoption of post modernism, and I'm really kind of embarrassed here because I never know what I mean by that (and I hope I won't offend anyone here), as a new form of "science," a quasi-science, to base the teaching of english or literary criticism on. And in fact, it's very interesting, if you think about the papers we're addressing. I kind of expected, or hoped, these papers attacking the idea of western reason would offer some very interesting, even poetic, kinds of contributions. That people would be offering whole different ways of expressing themselves. Instead we got was papers that reek of their own sort of scientism. That assume that everybody will understand very obscure phrases--"panoptic vision" for example. Now I happen top have read some Foucault so I have some vague glimmering of what might be meant. But when people are attacking reason and they've doing it with their own highly specialized, very inaccessible vocabulary, I think we're seeing an attempt to create a new kind of science, to justify their profession.

So the thing and the behavior that's being critiqued is often monopolizing certain knowledge, mystifying knowledge in such a way that other people can't have access to it, or bludgeoning people into believing something on the grounds how it could be false, it's science, or how could it be false, look at how technical and obscure it is--and now you're suggesting that that's exactly what's going on in the critical papers...

It looks that way to me. Here, I'm going to quote a sentence from Frederick Marglin's paper, "Disembodied and disembedded rationality fulfilled all the necessary requirements to become the internalized panopticon." Well, what does that mean? I haven't the faintest idea. And I think I am an intellectual. I think I'm well read. I think I ought to be able to comprehend what's going on in this type of discussion and that if somebody is trying to take on the pretense of western science they ought not mimic some of the worst aspects of it with jargon like this.

I don't know what the rules are for discourse, anymore, when that kind of thing is being bruited about as if everybody should understand it. I don't know how you ever determine what an argument is when you have abandoned reason. Should you listen harder to the person who has a better smile, or a better vocabulary? I don't know.

But the articles clearly don't abandon reason. They try to argue logically and offer some evidence. You might disagree with them, but in fact they don't abandon reason. What would it mean to abandon reason?

Well, there are other valid forms of human communication. Poetry or a song.

But permanently?

No, but there are these whole realms of human experience which are not well communicated or investigated by reason. They do not lend themselves to the rational form of communication.

But would a scientist deny that?

I don't think any scientist would deny it. But you see there's not much talking you can do about some of those parts of life. If somebody asserts to me that they are doing such and such because they were told to do it by the Virgin Mary who appeared to them, I would have to go along with that. There is no arguing about that. That's revelation. I might say well sorry, the Virgin Mary didn't appear to me, so it doesn't work for me, but we can go no further as two people with propositions that come from revelation. When somebody makes a claim on the grounds of reason, we two people have something to talk about. I see something sociable in reason. I see a kind of a lingua franca, where we don't have to have the same cultural assumptions or backgrounds and experiences but we still have this way that we can arrive at some common ground. And I hate to see people retreat from that.

What about the idea that some of the critics of rationality and science put forward that since you can't really predict with perfect accuracy, to try to propose something for the future must be dogmatic, sectarian, or authoritarian?

I hear this most frequently as a right wing theory about domestic policy. They call it their theory of unintended consequences. It goes like this. There is no point in trying to do anything--generally speaking, they mean for the poor--because anything you do is going to backfire. That's the law of unintended consequences. And the evidence they give is that in the 1960s there was a war on poverty and all it lead to was more promiscuity and laziness on the part of the poor. Therefore you can't do anything. And I think this has very widespread currency. Outside of the far right the mood is pretty similar. After the riots in LA there was very little serious discussion about what could be done and one of the reasons was this prejudice that there is no way to change things. Of course the same people, when it comes to foreign policy or obliterating a third world country have great confidence in reason and great confidence in their ability to visualize and outcome and proceed to that outcome and achieve it. This is propaganda. It is propaganda when you're told you can't think of how to make a better life for people because it's bound to backfire.

And for leftists to accept this, is truly upsetting. And to use the communist decline to somehow make the case is upsetting. Where were these critics when we were criticizing communism, when we were criticizing Soviet society, whether we were Trotskyists, or anarchists, or new leftists, or feminists. There is a whole body of explanation of what went wrong with communism and how from a very very early point you could have told it was not going to be anything like what we envision as socialism. So to take from the collapse of communism some conclusion that it's not possible to dream of a better future for humankind is to absolutely surrender to right-wing propaganda. Sure Havel is quoted to this effect in one of the papers, and that doesn't make me any more sympathetic to the view that you cannot think ahead and try to do things. That our whole purpose. To look at the problems, including our own problems--we're not disembodied--and to envision some kind of goal and trying to get there.

Of course we can't chart things precisely, like a detailed flow chart. Democracy is messy. You have to build in messiness, conflict, experimentation, and strife. But you keep trying. You do that. And there's no sense in calling yourself a leftist if you're not willing to project a vision of a better world and do your damndest to get to that, of course revising the vision as you go along.

Why is it just politics or economics? How does a multiculturalist who asserts that there is something authoritarian or finalist in having a vision that is somehow different from whatever there is now express being anti-racist. There's racism everyplace now.

I have no idea. I get very very upset with it. We know that huge numbers of people on earth are living in terrible poverty. Hunger in Africa. It's our responsibility to figure out what could be done, what is our role in it. When you shrug that responsibility off you are accepting these unjust and unnecessary deaths.

In one of the papers there's posed as the two alternatives one person who magically can predict the future redesigning all society or, alternatively, since that will cause even worse problems than we already have, we should go with the flow. Let history do its thing, but not try to conceive of a goal.

That's, I guess, a kind of free market laissez faire approach. And economically, in a free market system, those who already have a lot usually do very well. And those who don't have much, don't do well at all. You're accepting existing inequalities.

But the people who wrote these critical articles certainly aren't in favor or injustice and in favor of inequality. They work themselves to try to overcome these problems.

To give credit to the people who have written these papers, they all seem to want to have a more inclusive and multicultural way of approaching social problems, which is certainly good. But their way of getting to that seems to me to be to say we don't want any universal truths, just all these different points of view, each legitimate. Well, these people themselves we can trust to listen to the points of the oppressed. But as a whole approach to knowledge, there approach is scary because the next set of intellectuals or academics (or many of those now in academia) might come along and say why listen to the point of view of uneducated people who don't drive new cars. We're going to listen to the point of view of people who've made it, because it's probably worth more. So I'm not ready to opt for this relativism or pluralism the critics are proposing because it is lends itself so readily to oppression. If there is no truth we just have to rely on the existing set of experts and decision makers and their good impulses. I might like Marcus Raskin a whole lot but the next person writing on this subject might just prefer to listen to the views of the elite, and what's being argued here would say, why not?

Many people have a hostility to science and technology based on the oppressiveness that has been associated with them. You've said the problems are due to misuse or false science. So what's your view of the value of rationality and science?

There are truths in history, for example, and these truths motivate me, keep me up very late sometimes. There is a strange assumption in these papers that rationality and passion never occur in science. Well, maybe these people have never been intensely curious, never impelled to stay up to continue their reading and research, I don't know. But I think there are truths. They're going to change. Especially in history, because the information at our disposal is always so bafflingly incomplete. But we go as far as we can go. And I will hold to that word true. I would never surrender that there are only points of view. I think there is a truth about slavery. And some of my moral concern comes in too. There is a truth about the genocidal implications of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. And I don't want to give up that strong word, truth. I want us to have the information on our side, and to have wrestled up against something to get it. Not just to offer a point of view.

There is one critique of science lurking in these papers, and certainly in many other places, which does now and then give me pause. I do think about this a lot. And that is the assertion that science, I mean natural science now, only comprehends what is dead, or has to kill things to understand them. Having done biological research in my life I'm sensitive to that. It's still much easier to throw the rat in a grinder and extract the protein and study them with instruments than to study a living thing. And also what we mean by understanding in the case of biology is to reduce things to mechanisms that could happen without the whole organism being alive, chemical reactions and things like that. So, I'll say that bothers me. It's something that I keep thinking about. Is it something wrong with science, or with our words dead and alive, or what is this? However, what I see the post modernists coming up with instead to replace it is a view not just that nature is dead but that nature doesn't exist. There is no objective reality. What they seem to be throwing out is that there is something "out there" to know, something to understand. And I realize I may even be sounding a little religious in saying this, but my fascination with science has always stemmed from the notion that there is something different from ourselves, different from our own minds and inclinations, that it is our mission to understand. I'm making a sort of a moral statement here, a value statement, about what I think we're here for, in some sense. In these papers, there are attacks on the notion of autonomous selves. But what are we left with if we abolish a knowable universe, if we say there is only human points of view, human narratives. Then there is nothing but ourselves. I see this ultimately as solipsism, a stagnant, inward looking solipsism. Plus its no fun. It's fun to find out what's real.