Ars Ethica: Political Quadrants and Ethics of Superiority

    There is an old joke among research psychologists, that the discipline suffers from "physics envy".  Alluding to a pronouncement of Freudian analysis, and thereby casting research psychologists in the position of emasculation, the assessment is marshaled to account for the recourse research psychologists often make to numbers to bolster the validity of their claim to psychology as a "science" on par with the "hard" sciences (the "hard" and "soft" distinction between disciplines already conveying a gendered discursive assessment that the "physics envy" quip exploits).  Reading Rabinow and Bennett's Ars Synthetica, I found myself wondering if we were not here presented with a case of computer science envy, or more specifically, invoking the connection with MIT, artificial intelligence envy.  Indeed, the extensive formulaic tables given in this text are reminiscent of the knowledge structures conceived of by A.I. researchers intent on representing (and implementing) in computer code the representation of real world knowledge in human minds.  As with such A.I. research, which seeks to represent a Cartesian mind apart from a body, and which has proven less successful than building "artificial life" from basic embodied (albeit robotic and/or virtual) components (perhaps an inspiration for the MIT "parts" initiative), one is left to wonder just what all this abstraction accomplishes or can accomplish.

    Yet, just when all hope of Rabinow and Bennett's project uncovering anything interesting is nearly lost, they enter into a trial run of their "diagnostic".  Here we are presented with three primary figures in relation to embryonic stem cell research:  embryo defense, human protection, and future abundance.  The description and analysis of each of the three would seem to map (using Mary Douglas's and Paul Rubin's respective nomenclatures as projective reference points) to the Hierarchist/Efficiency, Egalitarian/Insurance, Individualist/Efficient-Flattening quadrants of ideocosmological phase-space.  Further, insofar as the authors' invocation of a conception of in vitro stem cell remediation as an expression of "capacities [that] do not violate living systems" appears to represent their own views, and not necessarily the figure of future abundance, we would have the fourth, Fatalist/Insured-Flattening quadrant.  (Interestingly, where the other three quadrants are well represented in anthropological encounter, and in other analyses--of data from Pew Center for the People and the Press--appear each to account evenly for a third of U.S. voters, this last quadrant is dismissed by Douglas as a potential not realized in actual cultures, and likewise shows in said data analyses as a largely unpopulated portion of the map.)  The figural analysis offers additional material, however, as the discussions of variant figures reveals how political-discursive strategies aligned in their conclusions may nonetheless emerge of or straddle neighboring quadrants.  The figural variation of "duty to heal" from Jewish tradition, for instance, while aligned with a future abundance figure, would seem to be situated more in the Egalitarian/Insurance than the Individualist/Efficient-Flattening quadrant.  This speaks to the importance of identifying underlying heuristics determinative of an ideocosmological topology, as different ecologically rational needs/drives often articulate through strategies that appear, at the level of ontology, superficially similar.

    This all said, it is unclear how much the diagnostic tables actually contributed to the uncovering of these figural variations, or if the same variants might have been revealed without recourse to such diagrammatic abstractions.  Nonetheless, I found myself eagerly plunging into the text further, hoping to find the same figural analysis applied within the space of synthetic biology, only to be disappointed when none appeared.

    Instead, we are treated to repeated complaints about the unwillingness of life scientists to "collaborate" with the authors' project.  The authors' learned the language and the science of the life scientists, but lament that the life scientists are uninterested in doing the same.  Implicit here is an appeal to mutuality and equity, reminiscent, if I may be a bit judgmental, of playground politics:  having made an effort on their part, they are expecting to be met halfway by the other children--despite the fact that the other children never asked to play.  Here, one wants to take the authors aside and suggest, drawing on the most basic insights of nonviolent communication, that in a situation where one does not like the strategies being actualized by another party, it is perhaps not the most effective approach to demand of that party that they use your preferred strategies instead, simply because you would have them do so.  Where the authors do approach an understanding of the feelings and needs that might contribute to the attachment, on the part of life scientists, to certain strategies (as investment in career paths, for instance), there seems to be no willingness to go deeper, let alone to hold and honor the needs apparent in those commitments as real and valid for those life scientists.  (Although the discussion of trust and confidence, in the context of familiarity, is promising, it seems isolated in a text otherwise inattentive to such needs.)  Instead, we get the sense that Rabinow and Bennett would prefer that life scientists just transcend such petty concerns as an economically and intellectually fulfilling life-path out of a recognition of the overriding importance of conformance to strategies of "ethics" deemed essential to a 21st century science for all concerned.  Somehow, an ethics that relegates the needs of others to "blockages" hardly seems to be one conducive to "flourishing".