Who is it that exercises social power to-day? Who imposes the forms of his own mind on the period? Without a doubt, the man of the middle class. Which group, within that middle class, is considered the superior, the aristocracy of the present? Without a doubt, the technician: engineer, doctor, financier, teacher, and so on. Who, inside the group of technicians, represents it at its best and purest? Again, without a doubt, the man of science...
And now it turns out that the actual scientific man is the prototype of the mass-man. Not by chance, not through the individual failings of each particular man of science, but because science itself-the root of our civilisation-automatically converts him into mass-man, makes of him a primitive, a modem barbarian. The fact is well known; it has made itself clear over and over again; but only when fitted into its place in the organism of this thesis is does it take on its full meaning and its evident seriousness...
It would be of great interest, and of greater utility than at first sight appears, to draw up the history of physical and biological sciences, indicating the process of increasing specialisation in the work of investigators. It would then be seen how, generation after generation, the scientist has been gradually restricted and confined into narrower fields of mental occupation. But this is not the importantpoint that such a history would show, but rather the reverse side of the matter: bow in each generation the scientist, through having to reduce the sphere of his labour, was progressively losing contact with other branches of science, with that integral interpretation of the universe which is the only thing deserving the names of science, culture, European civilisation.--José Ortega y Gasset (1932) The Revolt of the Masses (anonymous translator), pp. 108-110.
One the least flattering elements to science of Tomas Kuhn's philosophy of science is his insistence that most normal science is akin to puzzle-solving of a very specialized kind. And as Kuhn reminds his audience, "it is no criterion of goodness in a puzzle that its outcome be intrinsically interesting or important... intrinsic value is no criterion for a puzzle." It follows from this view, that science -- broadly viewed as a social institution -- selects for a certain kind of narrow, to-be-disciplined ingenuity. Of course, that's compatible with, as Kuhn hastens to add, a whole range of nobler motives in the scientist to join in science and stick with it. Kuhn's treatment of science is a functional analysis not psychological. But at bottom, science flourishes on a socially useful mental mutilation--and if you think that phrase too strong, Kuhn himself, more modern (and so medicalized) uses the euphemistic language of "addiction.
Kuhn leaves unaddressed whether society, which, let's stipulate, largely benefits from the fruits of scientific activity, owes the scientists any concern. Certain kinds of addiction may well be compatible with individual happiness after all. But if one takes a more expansive view of human flourishing, there is something disconcerting about the picture Kuhn draws for the scientist qua individual.
Writing a generation ahead of Kuhn, Ortega y Gasset emphasizes a mental mutilation (notice the 'barbarism') in the vicinity of puzzle-solving: hyper-specialization as an effect of the cognitive division of labor. To underlying claim is pretty clear: in order to advance on the research-frontier, one must focus on increasingly esoteric material disconnected from most other features of one's discipline and the other science. Kuhn himself captures the idea in terms of the effect of 'subdivision.'
Now, earlier in the (short) book than the passage I quoted (from chapter 12), Ortega y Gasset had offered an earnest plea for the continued significance of pure science as the fount of all technical advance (see chapter 9). And on his view this requires that the larger society embraces a set of ideals and mores conducive to people wanting to become scientists. (He recognizes that with rising affluence would be scientists have lots of other opportunities. Although his real interest is in culture.) So, Ortega y Gasset is not a critic of science or scientists as such.
But, anticipating James Burnham and echoing themes also familiar from Hayek, he thinks both that modern "men of science" ((112)) his is a very gendered view) are the exemplary element in (to use Burnham's terminology) the ascendant managerial class, and that their mental mutilation -- their hyper-specialization -- makes them wholly unsuitable to the task of political and cultural leadership. Because while the "specialist "knows" very well his tiny corner of the universe, he is radically ignorant of the rest." (111) He is an "learned ignoramus." (112)
The problem is, however, that while most specialists understand their own limitations and stay in their lane, the ones that stray into "politics, art, religion, and the general problems of life and the world" are likely too impressed by their own skills and smarts. (I need not remind you here of the pontificating popular scientist who makes elementary philosophical blunders and seems oddly unread.) Interestingly enough, Ortega y Gasset is not especially interested in the policy failures this may engender. Rather he thinks once these kind of people are empowered to shape society, they will fail to reproduce a culture worth having. And while he understands himself as a liberal democrat, this part of Ortega y Gasset's project is clearly very indebted to Nietszche's musing about the last man.
What Ortega y Gasset, himself a scion of Marburg Kantianism, failed to foresee is that in his own age, philosophy would also turn professional under the leadership of Carnap and Ernest Nagel, And that we, too, have become increasingly a discipline of specialists. So, by his light (and Kuhn's) we, too, are likely to be mentally mutilated.
Because alienation is associated with Marxism, I am using 'mental mutilation.' Ortega y Gassett's interest in the political significance of mental mutilation is anticipated by Adam Smith. I don't know whether Smith was the first person to diagnose mental mutilation as a side effect of employment, but his version of it remains striking (recall):
In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. Adam Smith Wealth of Nations WN 5.1.f 50
Smith is explicit that the structural cause of the underlying problem is the division of labor. And while the example of those who are confined to a few very simple operations is a limiting case, ,Smith leaves no doubt that social advancements come at the expense of most of our individual capacities. Unlike most members of 'team progress,' he thinks, as he puts it in the next paragraph, that people in 'backward' civilizations actually have better trained and cultivated judgments, including most notably political judgments:
It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures, and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people. In those barbarous societies, as they are called...Every man too is in some measure a statesman, and can form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society, and the conduct of those who govern it.
I used this very passage (recall) in responding to an essay by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and could re-use it in light of their recent The Dawn of Everything. They attribute something like this insight to Marshal Sahlins, and it informs a lot of the most glorious passages in their book when they describe the statesmen and women of native society in colorful detail. I mention the book, because one effect of their argument is to make me see that for Smith what we may call republican self-government (of the sort promoted by Graeber and Wengrow) of society becomes every more problematic as the division of labor advances to encompass all.* And so there is a sense in which we should not be surprised by the near disappearance of such practices of deliberative self-governing citizen assemblies (that Graeber and Wengrow like): it's a prediction that follows naturally from Smith's theory. Our representative assemblies should then be viewed as a necessary, second best.
That Smith is also concerned with the effects on self-government is clear from the next paragraphs where he holds up as exemplar "Greek and Roman republics." (His main interest is, however on 'martial spirit.') Notice, that size of population or scale are not the issue on limits of self-government. (This is rightly attached by Graeber and Wengrow.) Rather, it's the division of labor that makes us collectively smarter, but individually stupider.
Now, Smith himself thought that to combat life-long mental mutilation, the state should creative conditions in which kids needed to be taught alongside literacy, the "principles of geometry and mechanics." And in context it is clear that he thinks this, can promote self-government. It's unfortunate that Smith does not explain what the virtues of geometry and mechanics are such that they combat mental mutilation, but he does think that even in extreme division of labor the kind of principles one can discern in them would be regularly re-activated.
Before one suspects that Smith's criticism of the 'working' classes is meant to open the door to the interest of capital, Smith himself thought the merchant classes could not be trusted with government because they would be too self-interested. But he takes for granted that landowners and philosophers have room to take in a wider frame and develop good judgment (an important theme in Sam Fleischacker's interpretation of Smith). But since Smith's philosophy of science is broadly proto-Kuhnian, and the Wealth of Nation pretty much starts with the observation that philosophy has become incorporated into the division of labor, he cannot be sanguine about its future.
As an aside, even though Kuhn draws attention to the analogy between political and scientific revolutions, he himself thought that judgments were paradigm relative: "neither a decline nor a raising of standards." So, for Kuhn the problem that is immanent in his work never fully arises.
Writing just as the Great Depression is about to start, Ortega y Gasset's analysis implicitly suggests that Smith was too optimistic. That as the market grows and the division of labor becomes wider, as society becomes complexer, we should not expect good judgment among what passes for the educated classes at all. Because our universities will increasingly churn out hyper-specialists (including specialists in 'governance'); and even where there is book-learning as part of a liberal arts curriculum, political judgment can never be properly cultivated in a society like ours because all of us are always too distant from the conduct of those who govern us until it's too late.*
I should stop here. Yet, I want to add one more comment. The reservoir of nineteenth century bourgeois culture has been emptied. Despite the political implosion of Europe in the 1930s, liberal democracy recovered while the cognitive division of labor (and the economy) expanded greatly. We now have lots of tools that even expert practitioners have to black box (and arguably contributed to causing the Great Financial Recession). Yet our political process muddles through. This raises the suspicion that there is more judgment in our society than Ortega y Gasset has any right to expect, or that judgment is not needed. One cannot help but suspect that the unfolding environmental crisis will test both options severely.
*This is basically Schumpeter's point (who like Burnham and Ortega y Gasset also drunk from the Pareto cool aid).
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