History of Complexity Science, by Brian Castellani
It is an open question whether, in complex societies, motive formation is actually still tied to norms that require justification or whether normative systems have lost their relation to truth.
—Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 1973
Truth is nothing more than the positive value, the designated value of a code, whose negative value (reflection value) is untruth.
—Niklas Luhmann, Writing Science: Observations on Modernity, 1992
Democratic Legitimacy Posts I & II: Synopsis
For a couple of months now, I’ve been thinking about words like “crisis,” “breakdown” and “collapse” in connection with the sort of political legitimacy that generally supports liberal democracies.
In the first installment of this post, I sought to wake myself up, and confront some very idealist notions I’ve been carrying around about the ubiquitous Western, post-WWII commitment to democratic political institutions. Foremost among these is the assumption that most people are “constitutional patriots,” because they have rationally reflected upon the necessity of having the authority of the state derive from popular sovereignty by means of some version of the social contract. Putting aside my “A” in high school civics class, I set out to wrestle with the notion that the commitment to democracy on the part of the majority of the electorate might be much more conditional that I could have imagined.
Can the legitimacy of democratic institutions as such simply collapse? How do we need to understand democratic political legitimacy to explain how this is possible?
Seeking a more realist understanding of democratic political legitimacy, I stepped through an account about how mature democracies in crisis can collapse, written by the political historian Juan Linz. This was basically an account of how “semi-loyal” actors can manage to hoodwink at least a bare majority and come to power in a mature democracy under crisis conditions, and then deliver a country to anti-democratic forces.
But understanding that a deep enough crisis (social, political and economic) leads to a loss of legitimacy (for a given regime) doesn’t go that far to explain why people might want to “throw out the baby with the bathwater,” to withdraw their support for democratic institutions and a mixed economy as such, rather than call for various reforms, and just “vote the bums out” at the next opportunity.
In the second installment of this post, I decided to take a closer look at the meaning of legitimation as such (the coming-to-be of legitimacy) as a pre-condition of grasping the meaning of a “legitimation crisis” under present conditions of advanced capitalism. I considered what the interpretive sociology of Max Weber (famously) had to say on the topic, and concluded that while Weber offers no account of the legitimacy of state authority beyond mere legality (that a given action is codified in law), his merely functionalist account of legitimation actually points beyond its own limits, because he says that the functioning of legitimacy requires actual belief that a given claim to authority has validity.
Having started out determined to inject realism into my understanding of legitimacy, to reject a merely idealist philosophical account, so that I could get my head around something under the heading of a legitimation crisis, I still ended up recognizing, along with Jürgen Habermas, that “legitimacy functions by assuming an immanent relation to truth.”
As should be abundantly clear by now–and however annoying it may be–I require a theoretical framework in which to understand the present set of political circumstances. I have refused to accept the notion that political legitimation should just be understood functionally, as merely a form of domination. I also refuse to accept the notion that people living in mature democracies, unhappy with the direction of their country, could somehow simply stop demanding rational justifications for the legitimacy of state authority.
Most of the rest of what I wrote in the second installment was really intended as an exploration of how to push through this apparent impasse, where understanding the meaning of a legitimation crisis per se seemed to require both realist and also idealist elements—Realism, I wrote, demands that a crisis of democratic legitimacy as such should be possible; while idealism simultaneously demands that belief in legitimacy can and must be backed with justifications.
I ended the previous installment with some level of provisional acceptance of this idealist/realist bifurcation, and decided to adjust my angle of vision once again, changing the focus from “legitimation per se” to “legitimation crisis.” To do this, I introduced what I call Jürgen Habermas’ “historical-materialist” position, namely that societies can be understood to fall into types of social formation with respect to their “principle of organization” and that the sort of legitimation crisis that a given society can have is determined in relation to these underlying conditions.
The Liberal-Capitalist Mode of Legitimation Crisis
In primitive or kinship-based societies, Jürgen Habermas informs us, familial and tribal ties become undermined, and the societal steering mechanism becomes overloaded, when there is over-much contact and exposure to external influences. Where cosmopolitanism appears, hereditary prerogatives come under threat, and there is a new lack of legitimacy, because the age-old legitimation mechanisms lose their power. Such a scene unfolds historically in the Aegean in the age of Pericles, and is the basis for the war between Athens and Sparta (I’ve written about this in a prior post about Karl Popper and the Open Society).
Somewhere in an interview I once read, Habermas referred to Legitimation Crisis as his worst book.
In traditional societies, he continues, the class consciousness that can be seen as emergent in kinship societies under strain now becomes the main thing: the organizing principle of traditional societies is class domination in political form. Where ownership and distribution of social wealth is transferred out of familial forms to a bureaucratic apparatus, and the owners of the means of production rely on legitimating worldviews and ideologies, internal contradictions between state ideology and the underlying reality of privileged appropriation of wealth gives rise to explicit class conflict.
Per Habermas, we also see the rise of “subsystems for both social and system integration.” By this he means that there is a differentiation between activities that have to do with cultural consensus and economic and administrative steering of the society. Despite the fact that this differentiation has set in, however, the traditional society, with its economic system, remains dependent upon “the supply of legitimation from the socio-cultural system.” This is a critical point that must be grasped as we move from here to an understanding of the liberal-capitalist organizing principle and mode of legitimation crisis.
In the previous installment of this post, I took the anthropologist Joseph Tainter to task for not recognizing this difference between traditional and modern societies. Where Tainter says that diminishing return on investment is the common cause of collapse of complex societies, I snarked that I doubted that ancient Egyptians were busy calculating the marginal rate of return on the mummification of eight million dogs and cats (as discovered in a single archeological find in 2015). Clearly socio-cultural integration imperatives were driving this activity, and not the imperatives of economic steering.
The principle of organization distinguishing the liberal-capitalist society, Habermas writes, “is the relationship of wage labor and capital anchored in bourgeois civil law.” Under this principle, you get the free market and an administrative state that is there to manage the mixed economy–both empowering conditions of free market enterprise and otherwise respecting the freedom of individual market exchange, and through the provision of a social safety net broadly understood, protecting rights-bearing citizens from the vagaries of the market.
Where the sphere of civil society is thus differentiated out of the political-economic system, Habermas says, we find the primary aspect that makes liberal-capitalist society distinctive with respect to its mode of legitimation. Along with assertion of essential equivalence between the salaried worker and the employer in free market exchange, we get an effective “depoliticization of the class relationship and an anonymization of class domination.” Where we find ostensibly autonomous economic exchange like this, Habermas says, the political order is largely relieved of the pressures of legitimation.
To make this less abstract (I realize almost anything might help) this is the world of liberalism–both economic and political–in which we Americans and Europeans have lived, at least until the 1970s. It’s the world where, as Habermas writes, “bourgeois ideologies assume a universalistic structure and appeal to generalizable interests because the property order is self-legitimating.”
It is the world of my previously idealist philosophical standpoint about democratic political legitimacy by means of rational reconstructions of the social contract. It is the world in which someone like me couldn’t (until recently) imagine a crisis of democratic political legitimacy as such, and who still can’t imagine a better overall socio-political order, all things being equal, than a mixed economy under conditions of political liberalism.
Liberal Capitalism and Periodic System Crises
Under conditions of liberalism then, we can go about our business not having much thought about the basis of legitimacy and the process of legitimation in relation to our democratic institutions. We are all busy keeping up with the Joneses–as long as the administrative state is functioning properly, that is.
According to Habermas, under condition of the liberal-capitalist principle of organization, effective steering of the economy by the administrative state itself is also relevant to social integration, and failure in this domain gives rise to the distinctive sort of legitimation crisis that marks this type of society. In liberal capitalism, he writes, “crises appear in the form of unresolved steering problems.”
Writing in the early 1970s, Habermas is here referring to stagflation, conflicts over monetary policy, deficit spending, etc. Having transposed class conflict from the social system into the steering system in and through the mechanism of equivalent free market exchange, in liberal capitalism it nonetheless reemerges. It reemerges as the persistent failure to manage the economic crisis cycle, and this results in a legitimation deficit. Only here, the crisis is not a crisis of social integration per se–there is nobody in particular to blame, even at the ballot box. Endemic system steering crises take on the appearance of contingent natural catastrophes.
Crisis Tendencies of Advanced Capitalism
In the second part of Legitimation Crisis, Habermas attempts to forecast what will happen, with respect to legitimation crisis, under condition of what he calls advanced capitalism. By this he means where there have been vertical and horizontal market consolidations into oligopoly, and the state has become an ostensibly active player in the markets via economic policy, supporting various industries, and in that sense effectively picking winners and losers, etc.
It is not clear to me that he has a very good handle, writing in the early 70s, about how the rise of finance capital, capital mobility and oligopoly will lead to the present “neoliberal mode of governmentality” which I have written about elsewhere. To be fair, though, he says as much. These remarks should be taken as conjectures, he writes, because the data are not yet in about what is happening next. What I find really fascinating in this section, however, is the extent to which the advanced capitalist legitimation crisis turns out to be the lack of an explicit legitimation crisis (when by all rights there ought to be one).
The liberal-capitalist state, beset by system-level crises of economic steering, Habermas wants us to see, itself becomes subject to unresolvable contradictions (the competing needs of private capital accumulators and wage laborers in myriad domains).
In order to secure the prerequisites for the continued existence of the modes of production, and to satisfy the needs of the capital accumulation process, the state takes action. Through labor laws, anti-trust, and currency stabilization, it protects the market. It also meets economic prerequisites, like education, transportation, and communications. It supports international competitiveness through tariff and trade policy.
To vouchsafe accumulation, it innovates the legal system to support new forms of business organization, competition, and financing, banking, and taxation.
It also fills gaps, intervenes, and compensates (e.g., it protects key industries like mining and agriculture, addresses ecological damage, consumer protection, and labor disputes).
As with Tolkien’s dwarves in the mines of Moria, Habermas delved too greedily and too deep, and in so doing, inadvertently awakened something there.
There are two major implications of these things (for understanding contemporary legitimation crisis) both of which are intensified under conditions of advanced capitalism:
On one side, there is a permanent crisis in public finances, because the state has taken on more and more “common costs” in its effort to overcome the economic crisis cycle. In addition to infrastructure, education, and transportation, there is social security, housing, unemployment, and meeting the demand for various “unproductive commodities” such as space travel, advanced weapons, etc. Saddled with these requirements, the administrative state becomes increasingly schizophrenic, calling for higher taxes when seeking to provide various entitlements, and also, by turns, demanding cuts in spending and taxation in order to support market fundamentals and private capital accumulation processes. The upshot of this vacillation is a legitimation deficit.
On the other side, the state apparatus “no longer…merely secures the general conditions of production but is now actively engaged in it.” This policy intervention in the market, on behalf of private capital, Habermas claims, “re-couples the economic system with the political system” leading here also to a legitimation deficit.
Contemporary Legitimation & the Maintenance of Political Latency
Under conditions of advanced capitalism, once again, legitimation deficits arise because the administrative state fails to paper over all manner of contradictions that have been transposed to the level of system steering. Included in the “tendencies” Habermas wants to point out, there are characteristics of the administrative state itself which emerge to keep legitimation deficits from becoming a legitimation crisis.
Among these are various methods to screen administrative steering decisions from processes of democratic will formation (decisions are made out of sight by technocrats). In general, Habermas explains, the trick is to encourage a legitimation process that “elicits defuse mass loyalty but avoids participation.” In fact, he goes so far as to say that legitimation here is reduced to two requirements: first, encouragement of political abstinence by means of (and rewards for) total focus on career, leisure, and consumption. Second, affirmation of what he calls structural depoliticization (buying into narratives about how technocratic elites need to be calling the shots).
The basic point in all of this is that the re-politicization of the economic sphere (where the class compromises of liberalism are understood to be broken down) does not lead to a restoration of the “political form of class relationship” that held sway and was asymmetrically contested in traditional societies, under condition of legitimation crisis. Where the de-coupling of the economic and the political breaks down, we ought to see the reemergence of class consciousness—its them against us, the system is rigged, etc. Instead, we see a pulling out of all the stops, so to speak, to intentionally fragment class consciousness, and to attend to social integration at the points where it is most manifest, in order to maintain a general condition of political latency.
Luhmann regards a communication theory that analyzes legitimation problems with reference to redeeming normative validity claims as out of step with reality.
But one has to wonder, can these deficits without crisis, this political latency, be maintained indefinitely? Habermas is ambivalent, but in the end, it seems he does not really think so. Administrative planning produces unintended consequences, he says, and these weaken the justification potential of effects that have been “flushed out of their nature-like course of development.” Once their unquestionable character has been destroyed, “the stabilization of validity claims can only happen through discourse.”
In short, legitimation deficit causes people to get “woke” and demand to participate in the planning/steering process. In response, the administrative state managers take out their latency playbook and run the usual plays. “The more planners place themselves under the pressure of consensus formation,” Habermas writes, the more they get caught between two irreconcilable demands: excessive demands that the administration cannot satisfy under conditions of asymmetrical class compromise, and conservative resistance to such planning.
So where does this end up? Even if the state could somehow be successful in producing economic growth free of disturbances and crises, Habermas says, “growth would still be achieved with priorities that take shape as a function, not of the generalizable interests of the population, but of private goals of profit maximization.” In the final analysis, he says, “class structure is the source of the legitimation deficit.” As a result, he forecasts a kind of a creeping inflation of legitimation deficit: over time, efforts to procure legitimation through passivity (essentially through spot buying people off) still result in a gap between expectations and ability to deliver. The competitive democracy form of legitimation, he concludes, would then generate costs it could not cover.
At some point, the crisis tendencies of advanced capitalism, Habermas strongly suggests, shows it to be incompatible with competitive democracy. Assuming that the above argument could be verified, he writes, “we would still have to explain why formal democracy has to be retained at all in advanced capitalist societies.” If one were to consider only the functional conditions of the administrative system, he further muses, “it could be replaced by variants: a conservative-authoritarian welfare state that reduces political participation to a harmless level; or a fascist-authoritarian state that holds the population by the bit at a relatively high level of mobilization without having to overdraw its account through welfare state measures.”
Intermezzo
If Jürgen Habermas is correct, and his various 1970s insights on crisis tendencies have some value for the world that actually came to be (our world of today) then we have at least a partial answer emerging about the nature of the present crisis of democratic political legitimation (the sense in which large numbers of people appear unconcerned about threats to democratic institutions in a mature democracy).
Under the long shadow of the administrative state, with its decades of technocratic steering, discouragement of participatory democracy, and its various mechanisms employed to distract the general population from economic dislocations and steering crises, and otherwise fragment class consciousness, masses of people remain in a state of political latency, despite the fact that the class compromise of liberalism has been breaking down as fast as snow is disappearing from the arctic.
Put simply, if Habermas is correct, then they know not what they do.
Writing as he was at the height of the counter culture, Habermas was optimistic about the potential for movements and trends within the culture system to resist the state’s “procurement of legitimation” and thereby effectively reopen what I am here calling the wound of legitimation. It must be pointed out that there was as yet no mobile Internet or social media to contend with, however. Regardless, he is far from optimistic about the likelihood that advanced capitalism could somehow indefinitely outrun its legitimation deficits. He thought it most likely that despite the maintenance of latency advanced capitalism would in the end find liberal democracy too expensive to maintain. Enter neo-liberal governmentality (allegro).
Perhaps this has been a lot of words to get to the conclusion that the legitimation crisis that besets us today under conditions of advanced capitalism is actually the absence of a legitimation crisis that we really ought to be having, given that the class compromise of Keynsianism is now clearly being torn up and thrown away. But wait, there’s more!
In the final sections of this post, I will introduce another, even more insidious dimension of our present circumstance that can be found in the Legitimation Crisis of Jürgen Habermas.
Jürgen Habermas and the Balrog
Somewhere in an interview that I once read, Jürgen Habermas referred to Legitimation Crisis as “his worst book.” Until recently, I took him at his word at this. The book sat on my shelf, unread; every few years, I would take it down and thumb through it, and remark to myself with my inside voice, “this book is a mystery to me, I really have no idea what this book is about.” Or so it was, until the wound of legitimation crisis suddenly split wide open for me in 2016. Once I felt myself to be a “man in dark times” the logic of the book was more or less clear. Taken from the viewpoint of a “man in dark times” I would have to say that it’s probably one of his better books (many of the others piled in stacks could serve to barricade the door in an emergency however).
Habermas is famous for what I like to call his “methodological pluralism” which comes about because of his conviction that critical theory should be “located between philosophy and science.” By methodological pluralism I mean his restless forays into what he calls “the reconstructive sciences,” disciplines that attempt rational reconstruction of universal competencies, whether they be cognitive, linguistic, or interactive.
In his 1983 paper, “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” Habermas’s longstanding recourse to empirical social sciences gets explained in terms of a rejection of persistent tendency, long after the end of dogmatic metaphysics, to insist on itself as somehow fit to rule over both science and culture as a whole. Because philosophy should not be about “showing the sciences their proper place” he writes, it should not thereby “try to play the role of usher.” Along the same lines, he also thinks philosophy should also stop “playing the part of an arbiter that inspects culture.”
Consistent with this, going as far back even as Legitimation Crisis, therefore, Habermas seeks to mine systems-theoretic social science for resources to help him describe and explain the societal complexity of liberal-capitalist societies with respect to legitimation and legitimation crisis. I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that, as with Tolkien’s dwarves of Moria in the Lord of the Rings, Habermas delved too greedily and too deep, and in so doing, inadvertently awakened something sleeping there.
Complexity, Systems Theory, and Crisis
Habermas begins his book Legitimation crisis not with his analysis of legitimation, as one might think, but with an account of the concept of crisis. It is an odd beginning, in that he briskly traces a history of the concept arising from medicine and drama to the emergence of the social-scientific concept of crisis in Marx. Given that the book is mostly about the contradictions of society under conditions of advanced capitalism, one might suppose that he would tarry here for a while. Instead, (mercifully I must admit) he writes that he is not interested in “adding to the history of Marxian dogmatics yet another elucidation of his crisis theory.”
Habermas instead prefers to introduce what he considers to be a more useful concept of crisis, the one he says that is offered by the systems-theoretic approach of Niklas Luhmann. His entire analysis of liberal-capitalist and advanced capitalist legitimation crisis as previously described is heavily dependent upon systems theory—without it, he is bereft of his leading ideas about societal complexity–the changing relationships between aspects of social integration vs. system integration that are at the center of his analysis of contemporary legitimation crisis.
The problem, however, is that while systems theory may indeed be useful, it turns out that it actually has ideas of its own, ideas that seriously complicate things in relation to the wound of legitimation, even as it plays a role in the diagnosis. It is thus possible to read the entire book Legitimation Crisis as a kind of a desperate hit-and-run argument between Habermas and the systems theorist Niklas Luhmann.
The potshots start almost from the start. Crises, we learn from systems theory, are “persistent disturbances in system integration.” But what about the role and place of meaning and will formation in social systems as they relate to broader processes of system integration? The difficulty of “clearly determining the boundaries and persistence of social systems in the language of systems theory, he writes, raises fundamental doubts about the usefulness of a systems-theoretic concept of social crisis.”
Processes of democratic will-formation are a side-show, and we all know it in our bones.
So, there is an irreducibility problem here. Social systems are what Habermas calls symbolically structured lifeworlds. By this he means that they involve lived experiences of meaning that are culturally derived, and arrived at inter-subjectively, whereas when we speak of system integration, we do so “with a view to the “steering performance of a self-regulated system.”
From the lifeworld perspective, we thematize normative structures, like values and institutions. Whereas from the system perspective, we thematize “a society’s steering mechanisms and the extension of the scope of contingency.” Both viewpoints wrestle with contingency. But in one case, we do so by making meaning, and in the other case, we do so by managing complexity (the number of events and states within a system).
If we comprehend a social system as a lifeworld, Habermas says, then the steering aspect is screened out. While if we understand a society as a system, then the fact that the social reality consists of validity claims is not to be taken into consideration. This is not to say that systems theory, on its own terrain, cannot or does not take into account normative structures. The issue is just that it conceptualizes every social system in the context of a broader functionalism, and in this way only. So, its viewpoint is incompatible with how we normally tend to think about social integration (as a process where what we think, feel, and believe matters).
Perhaps it has occurred to you while reading this last bit that it resembles my previous “idealist/realist impasse” concerning legitimation (see previous posts, legitimation 1 and legitimation 2). This is because the disagreement that Habermas is having with Luhmann is pretty much the same argument he had with Max Weber.
Weber saw legitimation as something to be described in functionalist terms, as a mechanism of political domination, but one in which the element of belief in legitimacy was nevertheless essential for the description to be adequate. In contrast, Habermas argued that recourse to validity claims about the legitimacy of authority, recourse to the role of justifications, shows that legitimations must be justifiable norms, something more than just “functionally necessary deceptions” more than just stabilizations of relations of force, because it matters to us to live in a society where, when we assert that a claim to legitimacy has validity, we believe it because we actually think it’s true, because it has in some way passed the test of our rational morality.
Habermas and the Balrog 2
As Habermas allows us to see in a key chapter of Legitimation Crisis, Niklas Luhmann is absolutely contemptuous of his defense of the relevance of a universalistic morality for social integration in the context of a systems-theoretic understanding of society. As Habermas writes, “Luhmann regards a communication theory that analyzes legitimation problems with reference to redeeming normative validity claims as out of step with reality.”
Per Luhmann, continuing to try to “ground reason in the subject in this fashion” is antiquated, and leads to a systematic under-estimation of world complexity. The starting point cannot be the foundation of universalistic norms, but rather the “selection pressure of complex systems of action in a world that is contingent.” It is meaningless, Luhmann insists, “to want to increase the reflexivity of the administration system by tying it to the society through discursive will formation and participation.”
Complex societies, he continues, are no longer held together and integrated through normative structures. Their unity is no longer established inter-subjectively through the communications of socially related individuals. From a steering perspective, Luhmann asserts, “system integration has become independent of social integration accessible from lifeworld perspectives.”
If one appreciates the steady advancement in systems-theoretic approaches across all fields of endeavor over the last fifty years, including biology, ecology, psychology, mathematics, engineering, game theory, network theory, cybernetics, etc., the claim being made here must be taken as non-trivial. But what can it actually mean to say that being meaningful has become meaningless, and that society is, in some systems-theoretic sense, something distinct from the social? What are we really saying if we say that social integration as such is simply one among various societal subsystems?
Habermas acknowledges that the foundation for a universalistic morality would seem to have lost much of its force nowadays. But if it can be pointed to only as a kind of a fact of reason, with no further explanations possible or implications drawn, then it is hard to see, he writes, “how the moral-practical task of forming individual and group identities can be fulfilled.” What would be the meaning of democracy without the assertion of generalizable human interests? The concern here is for democratic homo politicus. If you are still unclear, it’s the same fear that gets raised in countless science fiction movies, whether they’re about the rise of the machines, or the invasion of body snatchers, the introduction of non-human replicants, or the possibility that we are living in a pseudo-reality, like in The Matrix. I remember when we used to watch these movies with enjoyment, warm in our bourgeois democratic living rooms.
If the steering imperatives of highly complex societies could necessitate disconnecting the formation of motives from norms capable of justification, Habermas claims, then legitimation problems per se would actually cease to exist. We would no longer feel the pain of the wound of legitimation because we would no longer be the sort of human beings that could feel the sting of it.
A Dystopian Literary-Philosophical Excursus
The confrontation with Luhmann sends Habermas into quite the chastened funk. Near the end of the work, there is this stylistically abrupt shift from the language of social science to an excursus on the critical theorist Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. But there is a purpose to it, because Habermas wants to add a footnote to all of this that’s only possible in a more dystopian literary-philosophical vein. Quoting from Adorno’s reflections on the possible demise of the “bourgeois individual,” he writes that it is actually “too optimistic to think that the individual is being altogether liquidated.” The disaster unfolds, Adorno writes, “not as the radical extinction of what has been,” but because “what has been historically condemned gets dragged along—dead, neutralized, powerless—and pulls ignominiously downwards.” The individual, Adorno tells us, will live on. But s/he will even be placed under protection. But his/her value is “that of a showpiece, to be sheltered in a nature preserve, enjoyed in leisurely contemplation.”
Via the Adorno, Habermas is attempting to describe a resulting form of alienation that must accompany the loss of what I have called the wound of legitimacy. It is further described, in the context of alienation, as a kind of pervasive inauthenticity. Quoting from the sociologist Amitai Etzioni, a relationship, institution, or society is inauthentic if it “provides the appearance of responsiveness while the underlying condition is alienating.” If you need a popular reference, imagine the callous pseudo-concern of elites in the Hunger Games. In a society where some sort of empowering political praxis becomes effectively impossible, social conflicts are dealt with through the rich abundance of the overarching system complexity. They are privatized by shifting them to the level of psychological problems; they are re-defined and treated administratively, simultaneously shunted aside and institutionalized, and in so doing pointed to as proof of the scope of societal tolerance.
It has been widely recognized that extremely complex systems tend to exhibit emergent properties.
Habermas pauses to imagine this particular ring of hell because of the extent to which Luhmann has him thoroughly rattled. Are we dealing here with reactions, uncontrollable in the long run, against the continued violation of normative structures that are at odds with the growing steering needs of the political-economic system? Or, he continues, are we dealing with the birth pangs of a fundamentally new mode of socialization? Either we are dealing with a class-specific phenomenon of retreat from universalistic demands, claims to autonomy, and expectations of authenticity, he says, “or we have a general movement against a form of life fundamental to the history of the species, in which the logic of social reproduction works through norms that admit of truth.”
Habermas says that there is not enough data available to him to assess what is happening empirically. Instead, he concludes by attempting to draw out some implications of Luhmann’s insistence that the steering imperatives of our highly complex society necessitate “disconnecting the formation of motives from norms capable of justification.”
In Luhmann’s systems-theoretic understanding of society, Habermas writes, the accelerated growth of complexity makes it necessary for society to convert to a form of reproduction that gives up the differentiation between power and truth in favor of a nature-like development withdrawn from reflection. But where the problem of world complexity has assumed the leading position, the problem of a rational organization of society, in conjunction with formation of motives through norms that admit of truth, has lost its object.
In a choice between a pluralistic, incrementalist process politics which limits itself mainly to conditional planning, and a rational-comprehensive system politics, Luhmann speaks for the latter, for “anchoring the required reflexivity of society in an administrative system shielded from political parties and the public.” If we have decided to privilege the imperatives of system steering under condition of societal complexity, then democracy becomes reduced from a form of life that takes into account the generalizable interests of all individuals, and becomes instead merely a method for selecting leaders and the distribution of rewards conforming to the system, a regulator for the satisfaction of what are essentially only private interests, and a framework for the achievement of compromises among ruling elites.
Cyborgs in Dark Times
As a reminder, Habermas has told us that as he was writing in 1973, the empirical data are not yet in. We can’t yet say whether, with the death rattle of the bourgeois individual, we are seeing simply a cultural development (people with every set of intellectual and political commitments walking away from moral and political universalism) or whether we are actually witnessing the birth pangs of a fundamentally new mode of socialization.
He more or less ends the book by reasserting the traditional view of society as a moral reality. At the methodological level, he writes, Luhmann subordinates all areas of interaction steered through discursively redeemable validity claims to systems rational claims to power. But should we rationally desire that social identity be formed through the minds of socially-related individuals, or should it be sacrificed to the problem of complexity? To pose the question in this way, Habermas says defiantly, is to answer it.
The problem however, as he has already admitted, is that virtually nobody actually does pose the question this way. Effective management of complexity through administrative steering to avoid system crises requires approaches, tools, and a range of decision potentials that are incompatible with liberal democracy. Processes of democratic will-formation are a side-show, and we all know it in our bones.
It is my contention, forty-five years after Legitimation Crisis, that the data are in fact in. We have every indication, in the closing days of 2017, that the entire domain of what we might call social integration, all the processes where people decide together who we are, what we believe, and what we should do, is just one of many subsystems in an overall system of managed societal complexity.
Watching the non-happening of democratic politics as collective will formation in relation to generalizable interests, we have every reason to believe that what we think and believe doesn’t really matter at this point; because the administrative-economic system has become decoupled from the social system, and the entire world of our cultural, social, and political disagreements is nothing more than a giant echo chamber in a data-managed bubble jostling around with other such bubbles, including those containing pork belly futures, the price of gold, and the cost of data storage systems built in Thailand.
Complexity, Democracy, and Emergence
Complexity itself may yet prove to be a sort of a ghost in the machine. It has been widely recognized that extremely complex systems tend to exhibit emergent properties (the results of unforeseen interactions among components that cannot be anticipated from their independent properties, but rather become clear through new relationships of dependency that are seen when they are placed together within a system). Life itself may be an emergent property of matter. The same could be true of consciousness. Or, for that matter, democracy. It is possible that despite central planning, societies continue to manifest democracy as an emergent property. The Internet, for example, has been pointed to as a development that has unforeseen democratic potentials. Maybe that’s why the open Internet is being shut down.
From all of us here at IDT, have a merry Christmas and a happy new year!
