1.
In the post-fascist period of the
great Anti-Communist century, which I’d locate between 1945 and the mid 80s,
the liberal intelligentsia of the capitalist side engaged in a struggle with
the socialist bloc on my fronts, from documenting communist atrocities,
increasingly under the sign of universal human rights, to challenging the very
basis of central planning as a socio-economic program.
The latter, intellectually, was a
more fundamental struggle. In the face of the spike in the GDP of the Soviet
Union in the fifties, it seemed urgent to show that not only was the capitalist
system more prosperous in the long term, but, as well, that the communist
system was inherently mistaken in the means it took to ensure its goals.
It seemed, in the fifties, that
socialism could succeed in transforming the surplus labor value produced by the
working class into an articulation of socio-economic needs – an egalitarian
system of healthcare, education, and manufacture that returned to the laborer
the goods and services necessary to maintain his or her human worth. It was
easy to point out that this system did not encode the basic democratic freedoms
– but this was a more difficult point to make in the light of the empires that
the liberal – capitalist powers had spent hundreds of years constructing around
the world. It was difficult to maintain that Holland had democracy in mind in
its Indonesian colonies, or Britain was ruling the colony of Kenya according to
any system of elections. It was also difficult for the United States, with its
Jim Crow, to claim to be democratically spotless.
Still, the liberal intellectual
in the “Free World” needed to make the point that democracy and a capitalist
system that distributed the social dividend on according to a grossly unequal
system was the best of all possible systems for the population as a whole.
“Best of all possible” took on a less abstract aspect when the Western
democracies and the Socialist bloc wielded the missiles that, in the event of
war, could extinguish all human life on the planet. What was, for Leibniz, a
theological position was, for the Pentagon and the Kremlin, a practical
situation that could ensue in the near future.
2.
Among the intellectuals that
leaned Tory in the 50s and 60s, there was a phrase that came to stand for a
whole program of resistance not only against Communist central planning, but
against the state’s intervention in the so called “private” economic sphere in
the West – an intervention that included regulation, social insurance,
nationalized industries and other elements of the post-war lurch to the Left: “tacit knowledge”. The phrase is associated
with Michael Polanyi, the second half of whose book, Personal Knowledge, is
dedicated to the “tacit dimension’.
It seems to me, in the light of
our situation now and our general forgetting of what conservatism was in the
Cold War, that a brief discussion of the rise and comparative fall of tacit
knowledge would be interesting. Even fun! For those who find this kind of thing
fun, that is. Besides, in the family
tree that arose from “tacit knowledge” there is a large group of concepts that
land squarely in the New Left area.
Polanyi – brother to the more
famous Karl – was a chemist with a metaphysical bent. Tempered by the
experience of the soviet briefly established by Bela Kun in Hungary in 1919,
and the subsequent semi-fascist governments under Admiral Horthy, Polanyi was
already a celebrated anti-communist when he met Hayek at the Walter-Lippmann
Colloquium in Paris in 1938. Hayek, whose notion of spontaneous organization is
often associated with Polanyi’s idea of tacit knowledge, is not mentioned in
Personal Knowledge. This is partly because Polanyi became disillusioned with
the positivist turn of the Mont Pelerin society, as he saw it, which abandoned
one of the keystones of conservatism: tradition. Polanyi’s sense that a new
legitimation of liberalism had to encompass a strong sense of tradition and the
transmission of the cultural heritage. Polanyi, who had much more experience of
the practice of science than someone like Popper, was distressed that a
Popperian approach to science was increasingly part of the Mont Pelerin
package.
“Tacit Knowledge” was Polanyi’s
idea of the fundamental epistemological base not only of modern society, but of
all society: it even, in his view, was the basis of primate behavior, with its
emphasis on mimicry. For Polanyi, scientific Marxism ignores the
non-calculative aspect of the human unit. In place of the alienated laborer who
is simply waiting for the right 5 year plan to find all happiness, Polanyi
proposes something like the craftsman as the central emblem of the human – the
artisan. The experience of the artisan – which goes into the transmission of
artisan knowledge – is not originally expressed in a series of linear steps.
Later on, rationalization might diagram a craft in a clear series of steps, but
it begins as a series of hunches and feelings of the appropriateness or not of
certain routines. Later in the eighties, the vocabulary of complexity theory
will call this the emergent features of a complex system. Such systems are not
linear. They are sorites-bound.
This vision of social and
economic activity made for a different view of the bureaucratization of
economic activity. Management, instead of being a linear-directed activity, is
itself a craft, filled with hunches and jumps. The system must give as much
freedom as possible to such activities – which means it should free itself from
short – sighted unions and government regulators. Freedom is, in this sense,
closely tied to the capitalist system. The inequality in wealth that results is
a sort of side-effect, which is condemned to ephemerality, as new hunches and
innovations will raise others and cause the downfall of those who have
routinized their fortunes – mere rentiers.
3.
Personal Knowledge was published
in 1958. Polanyi was recognized in certain conservative circles, but in general
he was overshadowed by Hayek, who had a trans-Atlantic career.
But tacit knowledge, I think, had
a more interesting career in the non-Stalinist New Left. If we look at
Foucault’s tendency to blame the total societies of the school, asylum and
prison to a certain totalizing mindset, missing the liberatory moment charted
by writers like Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot – the moment of the
Other – we can see how Foucault ends up focusing on a souci de soi which is not
unlike tacit knowledge as Polanyi envisions it. We can see this tendency most
clearly in the work of Richard Sennet, Foucault’s American student. Other New
Left tendencies – for instance, the anarchism of James Scott in Seeing like the
State or David Graeber in Debt – have a very strong element the binary between
state regulation/tacit knowledge. And of course complexity theory is a strong
theorization of non-linearity – a position against scientism that Polanyi would
no doubt have approved of.
4.
On the right, in the post-fascist
phase of anti-communist struggle, Polanyi and Hayek were one variety of
conservatism. But by the mid eighties, their version had been overtaken and
submerged by Schumpeter’s defense of the entrepreneur, not as a transmitter of
tradition but as a disruptive hero, creatively destroying, with distinct echoes
of the fascist cult of the hero. In the 50s and 60s, conservative intellectuals
valiantly tried to separate themselves from the social Darwinism of their
forbears, which seemed all too ominously to lead to fascism. By the eighties,
however, these worries and the reasons for them were becoming anachronistic.
The Darwinian struggle for survival, properly colored, regained its narrative
value, and the softer notion of a freedom carved out of the social forces
institutionalized by the state to give the fullest extent possible to tacit
knowledge was given mere lip service – it was the man in full to which the
conservative intellectual heart was given. And thus, as the communist side was
defeated in the late eighties, the stage was set for the wedding of a computer
culture and the Right. The Right’s embrace of artificial intelligence and
cryptocurrencies, today, is a strong marker that the traditional toryism
invented in the twentieth century as a political contender against socialism
and the mixed economic models of Liberalism, a contender that never had a
serious political program but did have some ideological reach among the conservative
intellectuals, is as well and truly buried as its centrally planning enemy,
dead lions all.
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