Cognitive inadequacy: history and the technocratic management of an artificial world

Abstract

History is the dominant form of human self-comprehension in a world dominated by global capitalism: it is this system in ideal form. But this is an artificial world constructed against nature. It is governed by the disciplined studiousness that sustains the social historian-function. It is maintained by the history-focussed behaviour of the technocracy (administrators, experts, technicians, and – not least – academics) that manage it. But historical judgment is by definition faulty, its comprehensive managerial stance cognitively inadequate. As the examples cited here demonstrate, civilization based on it looks catastrophic: history compromises the very human existence it is meant to reassure. Nurturing its illusions, automatically imposing its disciplinary authority, history exposes its own redundancy.

Keywords:

• Historical comprehension
• cognitive inadequacy
• self-disorientation
• conceptual contentment
• customary certainty

Acknowledgements

This essay forms the basis of a shorter paper extracted from it presented at the symposium on Pasts Without History: Politics and the Practical Past organized by the Centre for the Philosophy of History, St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London, 21–22 June 2016.

Notes

1. With, for example, half of the world’s wealth owned by 1% of its population, as The Guardian reported in October 2015: http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/13/half-world-wealth-in-hands-population-inequality-report (accessed May 20, 2016).

2. As in the market of historical artefacts, historical value (the measure of the value of symbolic capital) and cash-value augment each other (cf. Davies 2016, 37, 38).

3. In separating the historian from his or her expert managerial function but in having recourse to its managerial resources such as history-focussed behaviour or the categorical coordinator ‘tradition’, MacIntyre subverts the role of history crucial to his argument for the personal quest for the good life (cf. MacIntyre 2010, 216ff.).

4. Duplicity, the deliberate conjunction of separate values, a lesser and a greater, is a typical sophism. It is, therefore, an indispensable managerial device. So minimizing personal bias or subjective interest by contrast amplifies the methodological integrity that with its unachievable comprehensive scope allegedly produces ‘historical objectivity’. Another example would be the dichotomy in Enlightenment discourse between Man as a citizen obliged to act according to the de facto laws of the state and Man as a human being supported by the a priori and unachievable moral law of Nature. The separation needs to be enforced so that when they are sophistically conjoined the greater value (lack of bias; natural law), being desirable even though unrealizable, projects as realistic, feasible, and normal the occurrence of the lesser value, thereby excusing its cognitive inadequacy or moral failure.

5. The text paraphrases the following passage: ‘l’idéologie de la séparation peut aussi être fondée sur la séparation capitalistique de l’homme avec son produit, ou plus généralement de l’homme avec sa vie. […] Le capitalisme a reproduit avec une force supérieure la séparation de l’homme d’avec son monde, d’avec son corps’.