Knowledge and Ideology in the Anthropocene

Our civilization’s collective knowledge is flawed because it wrongly treats shared understanding as just a sum of individual knowledge. This failure is tied to ideology, which supports harmful behaviors like overconsumption and extraction. To fix this, we need social tools—like critical theory and social movements—that can change our cultural systems and disrupt these damaging ideas.

There are two different types of knowledge in this definition: • knowing that – for example, I know that there is a dictionary, and I know that the dictionary defines knowledge in this way (a fact about which I have information); • knowing how – for example, I know how to use the dictionary to look up this definition (a skill).

thought’s “essential feature is not […] propositions but symbolism, and that this symbolism is largely of the same kind as that which is familiar to us in mechanical devices which aid thought and calculation.”

On the most fundamental level, our brain makes sense of the world using generative or predictive models.

a generative model predicts the causes for what we perceive.

a third type of knowledge appears to be more fundamental than the two we’ve encountered so far: knowledge of, or what the dictionary describes as “the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject”. We can now define this understanding more technically as having access to a generative model of a subject.

Explicit models are consciously articulated, interpretive descriptions of our environment, and we pay active attention to them in order to use them.

Knowing how is based on models, too – implicit models, in this case: non-conceptual, embodied representations of our environment that we use unconsciously.

Holland (1995, 33) takes up this label to “distinguish two kinds of internal models, tacit and overt.

We can think of technology as “a programming of phenomena to our purposes”, a “purposed system”.

a cultural technēA term coined by Haslanger (2017, 2018, 2019, 2021). :

a network of social meanings, tools, scripts, schemas, heuristics, principles, and the like, which we draw on in action, and which gives shape to our practices”Haslanger (> View Highlight> )

These are “the sources of our practical orientations, that is, the social preconditions for thinking and acting”Haslanger

The most common hypothesis why it is failing is this: Humans just can’t comprehend complex systems, nonlinear change, and long causal chains because they’re not evolutionary equipped for that – it wasn’t necessary in our original cognitive niche.

But it is fundamentally flawed: It assumes that our civilisation’s collective model (the one that is failing) amounts to the collective adoption of individual models (the ones that are constrained by our cognitive capacities) – and we have just seen that this is not the case.

Meadows’s strategy disregards how collective knowledge is actually realised – a social system’s model is an emergent result of its components’ interactions, not the collective adoption of explicit individual models.

Tags: story/deep-narrative

Why is our emergent collective model of the world, realised in (social and material) technology and, more fundamentally, our cultural technē, failing?

it was possible to develop and promote adequate explicit models of our world – but they have been consistently marginalised by ideological oppression.

As a mechanism, it works like this: Adhering to and amplifying the dominant ideology promises individual benefits (wealth, power, status) while deviation is threatened with punishment (exclusion, loss of status). This shifts dispositions in ideology’s favour and constrains behaviour in a way that is useful to the wider system, i.e. the civilisation the ideology stabilises, without needing to resort to more dramatic measures like physical violence.

Ideology can therefore be described on two levels: On the level of the system, i.e. our civilisation, extractive and consumerist ideology emerge from this evolutionary process as implicit strategies that constrain the behaviour of institutions, humans and other system components in the service of maximising overall growth and thus dominance. On the level of interactions between the components, extractive and consumerist ideology are a cultural technē captured and distorted by the interests of institutions, humans and other system components that profit from its current configuration.

We’re not too stupid to keep our civilisation out of crisis, we’re too self-interested and blinded by ideology, in the service of a growth-addicted, extractive wider system that we create and that constrains us.

We’re not missing cognitive capabilities, but the space to unfold them without ideological constraints.

What we need to win this space is not more individual knowledge, but the collective knowledge how to disrupt and transform ideology: social technology to change our cultural technē.

Three main components of this social technology are critical theory, social movements, and alternative institutions.

Erik Olin Wright describes the tasks of emancipatory social science: “elaborating a systematic diagnosis and critique of the world as it exists; envisioning viable alternatives; and understanding the obstacles, possibilities, and dilemmas of transformation”

“changes to the epistemic practices are required in order to loosen the grip of ideology”Haslanger (2021), 55 . Part of this epistemic critique is emancipatory conceptual engineering.

What we therefore need are paradoxical memes: Ideologies and institutions that can, promoted and prefigured by social movements, outcompete extractive counterparts by opposing and reversing extraction.

If all three components – theory, movements, institutions – are working and mutually reinforcing, we have the knowledge we need: a working and resilient social technology to change our cultural technē.