The Reproduction of Inequality: Mechanism + Altruism

There are two important moments in the reduction of Enlightenment science to positivist-mechanism:

  1. The founding of the Royal Society in Britain. (See Margaret Jacobs)
  2. The rivalrous alliance between the US military and the US Anglo ruling class that emerged from WWII. See Michael J. Hogan (A Cross of Iron) and Mark Solovey (Shaky Foundations, MIT Press; Social Science for What, podcast part 2).

Characteristics of imperial Anglo-American positivist-mechanism include:

  1. Jettisoning of autonomous scientific community; military and business assume direction over scientific agenda. This dependency relationship is transformed into a patriarchal moral virtue.
  2. Rigorous focus on simplified mechanisms in isolation qua science tout court.
  3. Austro-Hungarian Empire inegalitarian governance expertise is relocated to AngloAmerican empire. In the US, this Antienlightenment infusion gives new wings to slavers.
  4. TBD

These reductions violate scientific epistemology in the following ways (TBD):

  1. Per Varoufakis 2011, there is no path forward from paradigm limits. Discipline is toggled between hard and soft premises, depending on whether evidence of limits is prominent.
  2. Compare Econ with Biology, which did transcend anti-epigenetics paradigm through pursuing that paradigm to its limits. Is the difference the degree of top-down disciplinary control? As well, there is still moral policing around a positivist-mechanist version of epigenetics, confining epigenetic knowledge to Mother-blame.
  3. Revisit Kuhn in light of Varoufakis 2011. Was he studying a specific form of scientific revolution, based in discipline & context?
  4. No knowledge goal internal to discipline (tasks and paradigm set by military and business) means Enlightenment science’s rigorous comparativism (with context, presuming scientific knowledge development across positionalities) is dropped in favor of closed equations as knowledge (See Varoufakis 2011).
  5. TBD

TBD: Interwar to Cold War history of American engineering: social composition, politics, academic politics.

Per Solovey, engineers including Vannevar Bush and Hungarian fascist/H-bomber Edward Teller worked postwar to exclude the social sciences from state funding (both the NSF and the military). The concern was that traditionally, the social sciences had formed to pursue egaliberte knowledge; under the military-finance alliance, the US was positioning to attack and reverse democratic socialism. Sneaking into NSF funding with Alpert’s quiet assistance, the social sciences worked around the engineers’ exclusionary organization, by excluding traditional Enlightenment research into comparative equality and inequality.

  1. Economics organized like engineering as a top-down fraternal hierarchy (cite). Their collective goal, per Clara Elisabetta Mattei, 2015, was to produce an inegalitarian positivist-mechanism, proving their worth to the US’s 20th century capitalist-imperial consolidation.
  2. Elite universities established an elite Sociology, modeled after Austrian empire philosopher Simmel’s intellectual agenda, and aiding the state in urban population surveillance.
  3. Area Studies, Security Studies, Anthropology: foreign population surveillance.
  4. Psychology: assisted military with foreign population control and domestic population control, military employee optimization.
  5. History: Novick 1988
  6. Creative Writing:
  7. Biology: Erik Peterson 2017, The Life Organic; Lucy Cooke 2022, Bitch.

Excluding Enlightenment science produced Counterenlightenment social sciences: Where the aim was not to help engineer inequality, the complementary goal was to manage the distribution of affliction across the working class–to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable” (as Ed Yong recently described his post-lockdown communication goal at The Atlantic). As women have entered the social sciences (and been excluded from Engineering and Economics), affliction management has been seen as patriarchal feminine moral virtue (See Elsie Parsons Clews’ and Virginia Woolf’s sociological critiques of this division of patriarchal labor).

Together, patriarchal engineering and feminine population management institutionalized inequality and reproduced inegalitarian dispositions. A key tool and virtue in inegalitarian engineering is isolating and immobilizing the population.

Case study one: Militarism (Hogan, Schrader); Carceralism (Gilmore, Davis, et al), including drugging of the incarcerated (Anthony Hatch, UMinnesota 2023).

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