Authoritarianism and Relativism Replace Science
Is who we care for and what we care about essential to a common good and a just society, or is caring relative to a given historical moment or context? After the Social Security Act (1935) and Medicare (1965) were passed into law in the United States, some felt the elderly could now take care of themselves. Poverty among retirees was believed to be eliminated and we no longer needed the extended or multi-generational household to care for older and dependent family members. Caring for the elderly was relative to a given policy moment and context, not essential to our being vulnerable, dependent humans. We no longer needed to care for the elderly; they were now policy-insured. What did Covid-19 expose about a relativist notion of caring for the elderly? The appearance was that Medicaid and nursing homes would take care of them. Simply put: our elderly were not cared for! We failed to regulate nursing homes. They died under the most shameful conditions and at alarming rates. It should be called senilicide: elder-genocide. Policies failed.
We claim (On Caring | The Project) that the nine modes of caring are essential. Why do we say, essential? We shouldn’t just appear to take care of the elderly. Caring is essential because we cannot exist, flourish, or be fully human without care. The need for care is not relative to culture, language, or a particular moment in history. Caring is as essential to existence as a healthy planet is to all existence. One can’t appear as if they take care of the elderly. One must, in fact, protect them. And we did not!
An essentialist looks for what we have in common across different contexts or realities. Some things are clearly not essential. Safe water, healthy food, and clean air are essential. Chocolate cake is not essential. And while race is not essential it may be felt and experienced as essential, even as it is socially constructed and embodied. And while gender is not essential, like race, it may be felt and experienced as essential and expressed as essential difference. Unlike race and gender, caring is essential, yet it is not felt as essential for many people.
Relativism, the reduction of appearance to essence, has polarized our politics. Essentialism asserts that much of what matters to us, community, government, and work, for example, exist independent of our cultural context or setting and independent of any particular political party (Democrat or Republican). Absolute relativism, on the other hand, argues that everything is concept dependent and determined by culture or language; there are no essences independent of our thoughts about them. What is real is what appears to be real. Relativism has become a commonsense philosophy so much so that it has infected our politics and judgements about the political. And often it disarticulates fact from truth: “That’s your narrative, not mine.” Translated: “there isn’t systemic racism, that is just a liberal\left narrative”; or, “the coronavirus is no worse than the flu.” The pandemic has revealed the dangers posed by relativism. The coronavirus (essentially a natural determination) didn’t become the flu just because we called it the flu! Covid-19 is essentially different from a flu virus (see CDC).
We’ll argue here that one possible outcome of extreme relativism is authoritarianism. When leaders in powerful positions simply demand the truth of their claims (Trump is an example), and when there are no alternative sources for validation of those claims (Science, for example), societies easily move toward authoritarianism. Power and the power to enforce it through violence is critical to absolute relativist positions. With absolute relativism, it’s all about who has the power to enforce (police and military) one narrative over another. Believe what I say, or I will shoot you; think extreme white nationalism and militia groups. We need a way out of this kind of extremism. White nationalist extremism is one dangerous example of absolute relativism.
A critical science of social work offers important insights into how knowledge claims are necessarily concept dependent (i.e., theory laden). Yet, and most importantly, this does not mean that our concepts CONSTRUCT reality (Sayer, 2000, pp. 32–35). This double determination offers a critical science of social work (CSSW) a way out of the kind of absolute relativism that is often found in various forms of constructivism (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, pp. 23–26) and social reductionism, or what Margaret Archer (1995) calls downward conflation: the reduction of individual agency to social forces, discourses, narratives, or structures.
Longhofer, J., & Floersch, J. (2014). Values in a science of social work: Values-informed research and research-informed values. Research on Social Work Practice, 24(5), 527-534.
Longhofer, J., & Floersch, J. (2012). The Coming Crisis in Social Work: Some Thoughts on Social Work and Science. Research on Social Work Practice, 22(5), 499-519.
With downward conflation we are faced with an impossible challenge: we are left with conditions for action but with no agents acting. Radical constructivism (sometimes called anti-essentialism) argues that the self can never be independent of our knowledge of society; the argument, in its most extreme form says that reality, or the self, cannot be apprehended apart from social constructions of it (i.e., in social work, see Heineman, 1981).
This position, most forcefully argued by Rom Harré, in his work Personal Being, suggests that the self is a mere concept resulting from human interaction (1986). For Harré, the self is “rather like acquiring a personal organizer (a mental filofax)” without ontological depth” (Archer, 2000, p. 96). Here, as with the sociologists of childhood and the critics of human development (James, Jenks & Prout, 1998), selves are mere constructions in discourse: there are no prelinguistic or nonlinguistic selves, and intersubjectivity either replaces altogether or supersedes intrasubjectivity (Smith, 2010).
We are, in short, “nothing beyond what society makes us, and it makes us what we are through our joining society’s conversation” (Archer, 2000, p. 4). I can be nothing more than a white nationalist because this is the conversation I have heard, thus believe. For the child, there are no prelinguistic sources for the development of a sense of self; bodies and psyches, moreover, have no properties or emergent powers of their own (Cromby, 2004; Smith, 2010; Williams, 2000). The child can’t resist a white nationalist narrative. The child, according to this view, simply joins the discursive community, and through participation in the society, the self, emotion, thought, and memory are made possible. Here, ironically, the child, through socialization, is mere material to be mechanically and deterministically worked on by the social order. Yet, whose social order? White nationalism? Instead of giving the child agency to resist and become something different than a white nationalist, the child is socially produced, not through interaction between complex inside and outside worlds (i.e., stratified levels with their own emergent properties, powers, and liabilities), but through a society’s discourse about the child. This, Margaret Archer calls downward conflation (i.e., reduction of self to the social, socialization, or discourses about the child). One is left to wonder how with this downward conflation if a child’s agency is possible, when as noted previously, the “effects of socialization impress themselves upon people, seen as malleable ‘indeterminate material’” (Archer, 2000, p. 5).
One could easily argue that the extreme right embraces downward causation; they want their political identity to be absolutely BELIEVED. With extremist views, individuals cannot resist and see the social order differently from their (hopefully never realized!) leaders, backed up by the threat of violence (the reason militia groups exist); to resist extremists is to be shamed, excluded from the group, or when violence is applied: murdered. Another example: only men and women can marry; ultimately it would take violence, as it so happens in many places around the globe, to enforce this view. What occurs between two individuals, same sex or not, is love: we argue love is essential. The object of your love (male or female) is not essential, it is relative or socially constructed; societies have very different norms about marriage, for example.
There is commonsense proof for the limits of social constructionism in our everyday caring practices. Social workers make any number of interventions on behalf of clients, but even so, we may still have no measurable effect on them; they may go on being just as they are, regardless of our theories, discourses, or analyses of them; thus, we have neither discursively produced them nor in any meaningful way affected their lives (Archer, 2010). They may still hear voices, they may still be severely depressed, they may still mutilate themselves, and they may still feel intractable pain. Theories of neoliberal welfare states haven’t changed staunch conservatives. It is in this way that with all caring practices, external and objective realities exist outside our theories (discourses) about caring. This, of course, makes social work, the human sciences, and the human condition infinitely complex, interesting, and sometimes impossibly difficult to manage or change. Our theories, we hope, influence our clients; they enter into their self-understandings, even when problems never go away or may even worsen. In short, our clients often, though not always, take up our conceptual schemes, yet they do not always, when returning to their everyday lives, feel and act differently with them. Nor do they take them up in uniform ways. This would obviously suggest that our social work conceptual schemes are not constructing the essential features of what makes our clients human. Some of what makes me a person is relative (gender, national identity, career choice, religiosity, etc.)—dependent on the particular culture and moment of history I live in—and a great deal is essential. I need, for example, to eat and in capitalist societies I must earn money to buy essential commodities: food, shelter, and health care. There is nothing relative about needing the essential commodities. Moreover, it applies to the mind and brain interaction. To be able to have complete attention, I need to feel safe: safety is essential. Your social class position, however, is not essential. It is relative to how class societies socially construct laws to keep some people lower class and others upper class. Class based societies are constructed by normative rules that keep reproducing a particular economic game.
Absolute relativism, “commits us to the view that it is our different human perspectives, as members of different communities of discourse, which makes things ‘true for them’ (Archer, 2000, p. 45). Here, as Andrew Sayer suggests, we have mistakenly reduced “mediation or construal to production or construction” (2000, p. 34). By this he means that our concepts do not construct or produce our objects of study, our clients, or their social and psychological problems. They mediate or construe them. And “although all observation is conceptually mediated, what we observe is not determined solely by concepts, as if concepts could anticipate all empirical questions, or as if theories were observation-neutral” (2000, p. 41). Our concepts mediate who can get legally marry but marriage laws do not create the essence of two people loving each other.
What is the significance of this very important insight for critical social work practice (CSWP) in open systems? Even though language, social institutions, and the psyche are constructed, they may also have, once constructed, essences, or generative properties. Surely this must be one way that gender and sexualities (i.e., heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality) and race and racism are produced, felt, and experienced. Race, for example, while clearly a social construction, is not always experienced, internalized, or felt as a social construction. Like gender or sexual desire, race may (i.e., contingently) be felt as essential, material, determinate, inescapable, or natural. This may on the surface seem like an unimportant or unnecessarily abstract debate, but it has very significant implications for social workers and social work researchers. If one practices, or conducts research, under the mistaken notion that a client experiences or feels race or sexual desire as a social construction (ironically, allying in theory and practice with the Religious Right and White Nationalism), one may fundamentally mis-recognize what is “real” for that client. Or one may fail altogether to pose the right questions. Or worse, one may shame the client (i.e., what’s wrong with you that you cannot manage, as researcher or practitioner, to grasp my reality).
Sayer (1997) argues, as well, that the concept essence may often be expected to do two different kinds of work: (1) to “identify the essence of an object in terms of properties which supposedly determine—or are indispensable for—what it can and cannot do; these are its ‘generative’ properties”; or (2) to identify the “features of an object which enable us to distinguish it from other kinds of objects; these are its distinguishing or identifying properties” (1997, p. 458). Though the two aspects, the generative properties and the distinguishing ones, may coincide, it may also be the case that “scarcely any generative properties of an object may be unique to it and its distinguishing features may not tell us much about what enables it to do whatever it does” (1997, p. 458). To have a common essence, therefore, objects must have universally shared attributes. Yet when objects share some features they do not necessarily share essential ones; the features may be accidental. Thus, every object has characteristics that coexist or interact but that could “exist apart from those which could not exist without a certain other feature” (1997, p. 459).
Instead, it is necessary to understand the attributes of an object and how they must exist in combination with other attributes. Then one must ascertain which can exist without them. Their respective generative powers also must be understood. Some psychic agencies have no powers to generate effects; or even worse they may be seen as dangerous fictions. However, what often substitute for the “fiction” of psychic agencies are the attributes of interpersonal relationships (Benjamin,1998, pp. 80–90). And as with all arguments based on downward conflation, we are left only with conditions for action but no actions. One can easily detect empiricism at work in many schools of relational, intersubjective, or interpersonal psychologies as well, especially where emphasis, though often unstated, is given to the roles of practitioner and client (see Wendy Hollway’s and T. Jefferson’s book 2010 for interesting discussion of relationality and epistemological issues). What they take to be real and knowable (ontological) are those aspects of interrelating (i.e., modes of interacting, modes of recognition, hierarchical roles, etc.) that lend themselves to direct observation or empirical investigation. Oddly, though many would think of themselves as existing in a tension with empiricism, their emphasis on the observable qualities of relationships lead them into radical forms of empiricism and the most modern of projects: their ontologies, inevitably flat and superficial; the self, transparent and superficially read from behavior.
Against the charge that essentialism treats all members of a class (gender, economic, childhood) as identical (homogeneous), Sayer argues that it may be the case that some members of the class share only some features. To know this requires empirical investigation; in short, no assumptions can be made about those features that are essential and those accidental. According to Sayer, the “claim that there are essential properties shared by humans does not necessarily render ‘accidental’ differences such as those of particular cultures unimportant, indeed, it may be the essential similarities which are trivial” (1997, p. 456). Sayer observes, “since the whole point of attempting to categorize is to specify what, if anything, is common in the midst of diversity, the search for common properties, including essences, presupposes diversity” (1997, p. 456). Here, Sayer uses racism to illustrate the errors in thinking that may result: first, attention must be paid to the tendency to assert nonexistent commonalities or to deny significant differences, where they exist. Second, we must avoid seeing insignificant differences or denying significant commonalities. With racism, Sayer argues, both errors can be found, that is, the assertion of difference where they do not exist and the denial of differences, where they do (e.g., cultural essentialism and stereotyping are common examples).
References
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