In this post I want to express a suspicion about the use of certain academic concepts in some species of political rhetoric. That's not a noble enterprise, which is why I do it on the week-end. And before I express that suspicion I also want to claim that I do not wish to cast aspersion on these concepts as proper in a scientific, juridical, or academic context. I am not here to police academic speech, and I am willing to grant that all the concepts I discuss have genuine explanatory value and latch on to features of the world. I know some think that the very distinction I am presupposing in a context of utterance here is incoherent or redolent of a medieval double truth doctrine, so be it. But I am really only interested in what follows in political rhetoric.+
Anyway, here's the suspicion: I suspect a lot of social phenomena that are called 'structural' or 'institutional' in character are done so in order to avoid pointing fingers at particular fellow citizens who can be held accountable or who are ultimately responsible for the state of affairs. I suspect 'implicit bias' and 'capitalism' also have this function in contemporary political rhetoric.
In fact, I suspect such terminology is used to avoid antagonizing particularly powerful opponents, who may be colleagues or superiors or democratic majorities or influential social elites (etc.). (Sometimes this is entrenched in law: the European Central Bank is "collectively accountable" which in practice means the governing board members can barely be sacked.)
That is, I treat the use of such terminology as an expression of awareness of being in a (at least temporary) political minority or vulnerability. So, the category of concepts I have in mind are about social phenomena in which individual decisions are subsumed under social categories that prevent individual accountability. And by 'individual accountability' I am thinking not just of particular individuals in charge of social institutions, but also of democratic majorities.
Of course, such usages are also context specific, and don't always involve oppositional political activity. In Dutch political culture, for example, "governance culture" seems to have a similar function, and it is often used by leading figures to prevent individual accountability. Recently the government even admitted that the tax authorities exhibited ""institutional racism" [google "The Dutch childcare benefits scandal" for background], but don't expect senior civil servants or their political pay-masters to pay any social price. Here, the political elites (see what I did there) use such a category to name a real problem (which they had tried to cover up for years) but without individual accountability.
I don't know a good term for these, so I'll use 'systemic categories of human agency.' Of course, say, implicit bias is a very different kind of phenomenon than governance culture. So, I am not suggesting these systematic categories have much in common or are even part of same political rhetoric generally. (I already noted that their use is not the same when government uses such categories or when social movements do.)
I am not claiming, of course, that the suggestion of the preceding paragraphs -- that certain scientific concepts become central to particular kind or style of political rhetoric that is deployed, in part, in order to prevent naming individuals as responsible for a certain state of affairs -- is the only or main motive for the use of such concepts in political life (that would be reductionist). So, for example, within Marxism there is a train of thought that rejects moralism as itself exhibiting a certain bourgeois outlook and where the deployment of such systemic categories are part of a larger scientific and political strategy aimed at transformation and revolution. For the Marxist, the aim is to get rid of a certain class (and that is a form of accountability that does reach particular individuals).
Perhaps, the use of 'systemic categories of human agency' also helps rationalize the public sphere and make it more amenable to reasoned public, democratic deliberation. And, in fact, I do find there is often a technocratic impulse lurking behind the use of such categories.
Since such 'systemic categories of human agency' are now deeply entrenched in political rhetoric, I don't expect to offer you a decisive reason to abandon them. Clearly a lot of smart people think they are needed to mobilize people in the name of noble causes. And undoubtedly often merely replacing a particular person with another who faces the same incentives and institutional constraints probably does not make much of a difference.
After all, one does not win popularity contests when one insults many of the jurors. So 'systemic categories of human agency' help evade certain fights in the service of higher order change in democratic life. But I also would hypothesize that as a category, their frequent use makes people feel less capable of influencing political change -- because impersonal and abstract -- and that they end up entrenching the very status quo they are aimed at. And my sense is this may not be a bug, but a feature of their use.*
+Obviously that evades a problem of definition of political. Soit.
*I thank Jamie Mayerfeld for some encouragement of this post.
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