Posted by Thomas Scarbrough
Jean-François
Lyotard proposed that efficiency, above all, provides us
with legitimation for human action today. If we can only do something
more efficiently – or more profitably – then we have found a reason to do
it. In fact society in its entirety, Lyotard considered, has become a system
which must aim for efficient functioning, to the exclusion of its less
efficient elements.
This is the way in which, subtly, as if by stealth – we have come fill a great value
vacuum in our world with
pseudo values, borrowed from the realm of fact.
Philosophically, this cannot be done – yet it
is done – and it happens
like this:
The human sphere is exceedingly complex –
and inscrutable. It is one thing for us to trace relations in our world, as by nature we all do – quite another to know how
others trace relations in this world. While
our physical world is more or less open to view, this is not the case
with worlds which exist inside other people's minds – people who further
hide behind semiotic codes: the raising of an eyebrow, for instance, or a
laugh, or an utterance.
A million examples could not speak as loudly as the fact that we have a problem in principle. Like
the chess novice who randomly inserts a move into the grand master's game, as
soon as we introduce others into the picture, there is a quantum leap in
complexity. Small wonder that we find it easier to speak about our
world in 'factual' terms than in human terms.
Further,
in the human sphere we experience frequent reversals and uncertainties – war, famine, and disease, among many other things – while through the natural sciences we are presented with continual
novelty and advance. In comparison with the 'factual' sphere, the human
sphere is a quagmire. This leads to a spontaneous privileging of the
natural sciences.
We come to see the natural sciences as
indicating values, where
strictly they do not – and cannot. That is, we consider that they give
us direction as to how we should behave. And so, economic indicators
determine our responses to the economy, clinical indicators determine
our responses to a 'clinical situation' (that is, to a patient),
environmental indicators determine our responses to the state of our
environment, and so on.
Yet philosophers know that we are unable, through facts, to arrive at any
values. We call it the fact-value distinction, and it leaves us with only two logical extremes: logical
positivism on the one hand, or ethical intuitionism on the other. That
is, either we cannot speak about values at all, or we must speak about
them in the face of our severance from the facts.
We automatically, impulsively,
instinctively react to graphs, charts, statistics, imagining that
they give us reason to act. Yet this is illusory. While the natural
sciences might seem to point us somewhere, in terms of value, strictly they do not, and
cannot. It is fact seeking to show us value.
Thus we calculate, tabulate, and
assess things, writes sociologist James Aho, on the basis of 'accounting
calculations', the value of which has no true basis. Such calculations
have under the banner of efficiency come to colonise themselves in
virtually every institutional realm of modern society – while it is and
has to be a philosophical mistake.
Of course,
efficiency has positive aspects. We receive efficient service, we design
an efficient machine, or we have an efficient economy. This alone
raises the status of efficiency in our thinking. However, in the context
of this discussion, where efficiency represents legitimation for human
action, it has no proper place.
The idea of such efficiency has
introduced us to a life which many of us would not have imagined as
children: we are both processed and we process others, on the basis of
data sets – while organic fields of interest such as farming, building,
nursing, even sports, have been reduced to something increasingly
resembling paint-by-numbers. It is called 'increased objectification'.
With
the advance of efficiency as a motive for action, we have come to experience, too, widespread
alienation today: feelings of powerlessness, normlessness,
meaninglessness, and social isolation, which did not exist in former
times. Karl Marx considered that we have been overtaken by commodity
fetishism, where the devaluation of the human sphere is proportional to
the over-valuation of things.
Theologian Samuel Henry Goodwin summed it
up: 'We are just a number.' Through pseudo values, borrowed from the
realm of fact, we are dehumanised. In fact, this must be the case as
long as we take numerate approaches to human affairs on the basis that
they are 'indicated' by facts. Cold fact encroaches on the complex and
subtle relations which are represented by the human sciences – in fact,
by life as it is lived.
