Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

This is the third and last part of this piece. Part 1 – here; Part 2 is here

Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels rightly anticipated what would happen when the fixed-fact nature of capitalist economics had colonized both the rich public sphere nurtured by democratic politics and the private sphere which is the realm of deep psychological recognition – a realm that provided that rich combination of esteem and belonging. In the Communist Manifesto, they wrote: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” It begs us to consider what the human condition is. It begs us to ‘face with sober senses’ the reality that is trespassed when we misvalue work; when we underestimate the productive identities of a human being; when we have allowed global elites to turn society into mass society and declare mass society to be a fact. What has receded is the reward of a good meal after a hard day’s labor; what has receded is the ability to input into a general will in the governance of our own lives as public beings. Our human condition and our freedom are eroded and degraded, which is why we feel both of these rather palpably today.

So what is the human condition and how are we trespassing it? Of course, for those of you who have heard of it, you will immediately think of Hannah Arendt, whose 1958 opus The Human Condition (free download), addresses these very questions. Arendt employs a description of the vehicle by which our human condition is transformed – the human artifice. The human artifice is the technological transformation of the public world which houses the human being from birth to death. According to Arendt, it is what separates human beings from animal life.  But the human artifice also usurps two important features of the human condition. 

First, it separates a human being from her political capacities. For Arendt, following the Greeks – and especially Aristotle – key features of the human condition are the capacities of speech and thought, which form a kind of essential characteristic of human beings in their public existence. The problem is that the human artifice is so technologically complex that the human being is no longer able to think about it with any clarity, nor speak about it with any meaning. And once that point has been reached, we have reached the stage of mass society, in which it has become a reality that cannot be questioned, and out of which any individual person becomes merely dependent on it. Human beings, in their public capacities, lose their capacities of speech and judgment – in effect, a loss of freedom. Although Arendt never spells this out, the only people who will be able to operate in this system will be technocrats, and the education system will be transformed into producing technocrats. This is one feature of mass society: the human artifice is so technologically complex that it colonizes the public world. It erodes the political realm, which is the home of freedom which is precisely the freedom to think together and to act in concert.

Second, the human artifice, through automation, frees a person from her labor. But this, Arendt argues, presents us with a completely terrifying reality: “What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.” And so the human artifice not only colonizes our public capacities but also our private ones. And we don’t have to look too far to see examples. The most technologically developed societies have the greatest decline in birth rates – where a woman’s labor is perhaps at its most productive. Or we have raised a society of laborers in which there is no labor to do. And this, perhaps, is most evident in the West now, in which more than two-thirds of working-age people do not have a University degree. Perhaps more pernicious, the ones that do are not people who know what they are doing but instead are credentialed to be technocrats in the human artifice.

And so, human beings are alienated both from their political capabilities of meaningful speech and also from the private activity of labor that most connects them to life itself.  The human artifice run amok is what mass society itself embodies and it overlays life itself.

The populist backlash is precisely a rejection of this runaway enthusiasm with the global economic order and the hegemony of liberal democracy. In other words, it is a recognition that the human artifice is more artificial than human.

It seems as if the human artifice is the human condition, but it isn’t. The human artifice, more precisely, expresses an inner hostility to the world – the Earth – itself. Arendt’s memorable description of the expressed desires of humanity at the launching of the first rockets into space in 1957 to escape the Earth, and to go beyond the limits of our human condition was a telling way to enter a discussion of the human condition. Because the human condition is the one that mass society overlooks – with its complex data sets, artificial intelligence, and its technocratic rationality.

 So what does all this have to do with the Centre-Left of the political spectrum? Because the Centre-Left is rapidly losing popular support in North America and continental Western Europe, and, in large part, because they have whole-heartedly supported both the liberal democratic hegemony and the global economic order which attempted to get beyond the human condition. 

Also, the Centre-Left has pushed education toward technocracy. At the former University where I was a “Pathways” instructor, the Vice-President of Academic and Research gave me the imperative that in any course I taught, or instruction given, I made very clear to learners how these activities related to getting jobs. He embodied a kind of rationale that went against “knowing what we were doing”. He allowed the mass society of the human artifice to overlay life itself. Of course, the University, under his direction, has increased the number of technocrats it employs exponentially while, at the same time, reducing the number of people who think about what the university is doing in their employ. And, of course, a faculty union has now been approved for the first time in its history. And this connects intensely to the credentialism I outlined in Part 1; education is essentially considered a key to social mobility which carries with it a strong moral sense.  

The Centre-Left, if they are to retain any power or credibility will be required to structure both politics and economics around the productive labor that fulfills our our private connection to life as well as to speech and thought.

This, of course, is the choice: Does the Centre-Left have a message about the value of labor or the human capacity for speech and thought? Can the Centre-Left also say something meaningful about the completion of post-secondary education? Can the Centre-Left say that completing a university degree is not essentially a key to social mobility away from labor, but is instead a central feature of people who speak and think better, of people who know what they are doing?

Jesus famously said as he was being crucified, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” The human artifice has essentially crucified the human condition.  And, like the calamitous natural disasters that characterize a planet in revolt against the industrialization that is characterized by exploitation of the Earth, so too, a populist backlash against a credentialed, technocratic elite is a revolt against the mass society that attacks the human condition at every turn.

How do we respond to the populist backlash? Do we take on the resentment and the potentially authoritarian governments of resentment headed by people like Donald Trump, Marie Le Pen, and Pierre Pollievre? Or do we, like Hannah Arendt, oppose the hatred of the world with amor mundi – the love of the world? Do we value the contribution of those who build into the world – who constitute it? Or do we merely destroy the technocracy that is the human artifice?

The answers of the Centre-Left are strangely absent.