Desirability vs. Feasibility
Floersch & Longhofer, 2020
“Any criticism presupposes the possibility of a better way of life; to expose something as illusory or contradictory is to imply the possibility and desirability of a life without those illusions and contradictions...Naturally, society would be better if its illusions, injustices, conflicts and contradictions were reduced, but we need to know how this could be achieved. The desirability of a life without contradictions or illusions does not make it feasible” (Sayer, 1997: 476-477).
Criticism comes easy. Proposing a feasible alternative is not so easy. Many media celebrities, political pundits, and literary critics spend their energies criticizing; and many are paid handsome sums to offer up one criticism after another. And it’s easy to be lulled into nodding one’s head in agreement as the critic goes deep into the weeds about all that is wrong. Many of these thinkers operate from left brain processes: they get lost in the weeds and altogether fail to see the deeper connections and broader picture (see McGilgrist’s brilliant work on right/left brain dynamics and his speculations about our cultural crisis: The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world). But do you ever wonder why solutions or alternatives are less frequently offered and when offered they generally come in the form of pronouncements: “just do better, we can do better.” Maybe we get more pleasure in criticizing than we do in the hard work of trying, doing, failing, trying again, and succeeding.
In this post we turn to Andrew Sayer and his work on values and critical social science to think about the function of values or normative claims in imagining alternatives to current problems. It is with our values that we often stumble and criticism takes over; we are often too timid, frightened, or ashamed to articulate our values or to put them into action; and many fear they’ll be accused of foundationalism or absolutism (i.e., making absolute value claims). But are we not motivated more by what we care about than what we don’t? Values, we argue, are a force directing the traffic between desirability and feasibility and it’s at this intersection (highlighted in red below) where real change is made possible Where there is a collision between desirability and feasibility values are often the mediator. What do we want to do? What can we do? And what do we care about?
For example, what values are in play between the desirability of wearing masks (i.e., to prevent the spread of the coronavirus) and the feasibility of enforcing everyone to wear a mask? Is it possible to enforce the mandatory use of masks? How many ‘mask police’ would we need? Or, should we instead rely on the internalized values of each citizen to act in the best interest of the common good: wear a mask! Why should we wear a mask? Because we value the common good. Controlling the spread of the virus (highly desirable) in the United States has not been actualized (made feasible) because many do not share a common value: protecting ALL people, young, old, frontline worker, prisoner, nursing home resident, and on and on. The virus doesn’t make value distinctions. People do!
Here’s what Andrew Sayer has to say about this,
So, when considering any concrete example of a critical theory it is important to ask what the standpoint is from which its criticisms are made, and we are likely to want a more specific answer than ‘the standpoint of a better life’. We need to know enough about the critical standpoint and the implied alternative to be able to decide first whether the critique is justifiable. Since knowledge is ‘situated’ and often bears the mark of its author’s social position, this includes taking this into account: does it privilege the position of a particular group (e.g. male workers, advanced countries)?; does it imply a society without difference?; if it implies greater equality, on whose terms is equality to be defined? Secondly, it involves assessing whether the alternative is feasible and desirable. We have to ask whether remedying one set of problems would generate others (it usually does), and whether these would be worse than the original problems. As Billig et al. put it, social life is frequently ‘dilemmatic’, eluding attempts to identify and resolve problems in the straightforward manner assumed in many reconstructions of CSS (Billig et al., 1988; see also Toye, 1987). These tend to assume not only that the nature of the good and the bad is unambiguous, but that mechanisms producing good and bad effects are always separable (Sayer, 1997: 478-479).
Because the human sciences work in open systems where the influences (i.e., variables) are conscious actors and historical events are in continuous operation (i.e., psychology, sociology, anthropology, social work) we can offer only degrees of certainty, not predictions (and even the laboratory sciences struggled with closing systems). This leaves desirable alternatives with high degrees of implementation uncertainty. Couple uncertainty with disagreement about problem identification and its causes, the best we can do is to let our values lead the way. We must ask ourselves: what do we care about? And if the answer is no more racism, then, we must eliminate ALL the causes of racism even if in the moment it might seem infeasible. Currently, when it comes to systemic racism, growing evidence in poll data suggest that most acknowledge the problem of racism, but disagree about the causes.
Indeed, our values are often held hostage when we fail to agree on the causes of unwanted determinations. For many, it’s not desirable to change the economic structure generating inequalities like racism. Instead we reach for incremental change. We tinker. We call for reforming police. Our values—always attached to emotions—line up against racism but reason does not. What to do? In politics we turn to what is feasible, what can be done now to show progress: reform the police, community policing programs, eliminate housing discrimination, strengthen and enforce labor laws that make racial discrimination possible. But in a critical social work we must hold out for what some would call a utopian view: NO MORE RACISM. Sayer writes,
As Steele (1992) points out, arguments about the merits of utopianism frequently get confused by two different concepts of utopia. If utopias are treated as being infeasible by definition then that prejudges any questions about their merits; merely to mention the word ‘utopia’ is then to slam the door on rational assessment. If, on the other hand, we leave it open as to whether utopias can be feasible, we avoid excluding possibilities and enable a more rational assessment to be made. Considering utopias is therefore compatible with ‘science’ since it is consistent with asking counterfactual questions, conducting thought experiments and scrutinising critical standpoints. Indeed, as Steele puts it, political thought would be more scientific if it were more utopian—our emphasis (Steele, 1992, p. 374–5; Sayer, 1997: 477).
References
McGilchrist, I. (2019). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sayer, A. (1997). Critical realism and the limits to critical social science. Journal for the theory of social behaviour, 27(4), 473-488.