Empiricism vs Truth. posted by Richard Seymour

Having expatiated before on the irrationalist roots of the Enlightenment, I am wary of banging on about it. However, there does seem to me to be something distinctly naive about the modern, classically English faith in empiricism. Noam Chomsky characterised empiricism as a kind of superstition, a cult which had overcome rational discussion of systems, structures and so on. We don't know much, but we knows what we sees.

This tendency to trust only what we can directly perceive with our senses is, of course, rooted in the 'scientific revolution' (1500-1700) in which the Aristotelian system was displaced by a new system, a sort of amalgam between neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Paracelsianism and, finally, Cartesianism. First, the geocentric and geostatic view of the universe was displaced by Copernicus, and Galileo. Then the 'four elements' view of nature, in which like was, apparently, attracted to like, was displaced by the mechanistic view in which two 'elements' - motion and matter - combined in various configurations, weights, colours etc to make the material world. With this came a change in intellectual authority - because the Aristotelians had favoured intellectual coherence over empirical validation, often at the cost of the latter, it became - in a scientistic era - a simple matter to scoff at system-building, structuralism and so forth. Proof, from the Book of Nature, was the order of the day. Somehow, Aristotelian texts Popper's attack on the
'enemies' of the 'open society' falls precisely into this supersitious empiricist mould.

Here's the punchline. The direct impact of this naive empiricism on our day to day lives is that the class war is more likely to be ideologically lost because we lack a way of conceptualising and articulating the way in which the ruling class operate. To that end, I offer Seumus Milne on "The Secret War Against the Miners", (republished in John Pilger ed., Tell Me No Lies: Invesigative Journalism and its Triumphs, pp 311-2, London, 2004):

In a resolutely empiricist country like Britain's - where 'practical men' prefer to shun the bigger picture and eminent historians can take delight in claiming that world wars break out because of the requirements of railway timetables - it is hardly surprising that many people feel unhappy with any suggestion of behind-the-scenes collusion and manipulation of events. To suggest anything else is regarded as somehow naive and insufficiently worldly. Among journalists in particular, it is an article of faith to insist on the 'cock-up theory' rather than the 'conspiracy theory' of history. Real life is, of course, a mixture of the two. One side-effect of this dogmatic insistence that events are largely the product of an arbitrary and contingent muddle has been the chronic refusal by the mainstream media in Britain - and most opposition politicians - to probe or question hidden agendas and unaccountable, secret power structures at the heart of government. This is in striking contrast to North American journalism, which, for all its failings, does at least maintain some tradition of investigation and scepticism about the activities of its country's rulers. As Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, two authors who have attempted to unearth some of Whitehall's dirtier secrets, have commented: "For the most part the areas which the British state does not want examined are still left alone by our serious papers."

The result is that an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power in Britain is habitually left out of standard reporting and analysis. And by refusing to acknowledge that dimension, it is often impossible to make sense of what is actually going on. Worse, it lets off the hook those whose abuse of state authority is most flagrant. The security services in Britain, as elsewhere, exercise unaccountable power through the control and manipulation of privileged information. It is a world of what one American writer describes as 'parapolitics': of "the conduct of public affairs not by rational debate and responsible decision-making, but by indirection, collusion and deceit ... the political exploitation of irresponsible agencies or parastructures, such as intelligence agencies".