We Built Reality: How social sciences infiltrated culture, politics and power
by Jason Blakely (Oxford University Press, £64.00pb/$99.00hb/ €23.00pb)
Frank Litton
In a world of uncertainty one thing is certain: Ireland has changed significantly over the last 50 years.
The way to describe, or evaluate, that change is less certain. Jason Blakely’s well-informed and accessible account provides compelling answers to both questions.
He writes of the US and how the social sciences have descended from their ivory towers to infiltrate culture, shaping the frame of reference in which Americans identify problems and seek solutions.
What he finds in the US can be found here. Most would agree that one change has been the dilution, if not the disappearance, of all distinctively Irish elements in our culture. We have been ‘liberated’, set free in the modern world, which is, of course, the Anglo-American world.
So we can learn from Blakely. From the 1950s onwards economics has played and increasingly important role in policy-making; a fact universally welcomed, with good reason.
National narrative
Its voice grew louder as those urging versions of the national narrative grew weaker. Moral concerns dropped down, or out of the agenda displaced by scientific enquiries into social questions.
For instance, the journal Christus Rex that had been devoted to the application of Catholic social teachings ceased publication in 1971, when it was incorporated in Social Studies: Irish Journal of Sociology.
Of all the social sciences, economics has the strongest scientific credentials. Like all sciences, it advances by abstracting well-defined problems that are amenable to rigorous enquiry from the mysterious flux of reality. In its case the mystery is that of human agency and the competing and conflicting motives that move us and the constraints that shape them and the abstraction is that rational decision-maker, ‘economic man’. He knows his preferences and their ranking and how they might be satisfied.
Answerable questions follow: how should he proceed to optimise their satisfaction given his scarce resources? What arrangements best facilitate his optimising?
Questions of justification are once again cancelled and interdependence is once more reduced to questions of power”
Models are built to supply the answers to these and subsequent questions. These provide serviceable maps to policy-makers as they plot routes through dangerous terrains.
Problems start, Blakely argues, when this abstraction departs the economists’ study and enters the everyday world bearing the authority of science. Its perspective has no place for discussion of what our preferences should be. These express our values and values are beyond dispute. It is well suited to a world of consumers, allowing us say what we want and asserting our right to it. It makes competitors of us all and reduces interdependence to questions of power.
The discussions that would identify interdependence in shared understandings of human flourishing and allow us to be producers of a common world are ruled out.
While sociologists dispute with economists and do bring values into question, they treat them as facts about people; not as ideas of what is good and worthwhile that can be the subject of argument. They ask who holds what values and how they change. Answers are sought in social conditions.
Interesting, certainly and maybe useful, but questions of justification are once again cancelled and interdependence is once more reduced to questions of power.
Humanities
The humanities where ideas of the good that we might hope to attain and the complexity of our relationships are explored, are discounted because they lack the basis in science that economics and sociology can claim.
That claim is false. While it holds for them as disciplines, programmes of research, the image of ourselves and our society that they deliver to culture has no scientific basis.
It has no more claim to be scientific than the far richer images that we find in the humanities that are far better grounded.
Blakely reminds us that the way we imagine society has consequences for the distribution of power. The diminished image that the social sciences produce clearly empowers the ‘experts’ in those disciplines.
At a more general level, it protects and advances the interests of those that benefit most from capitalism’s globalising project.