Our problem today is bad religion and bad reason, and our great need is for better versions of both.

Inclusiveness: Bad Religion and Bad Reason

by James Kalb

In a recent piece in Crisis I argued that secular and rationalizing ways of thought applied to the social environment soon bring us to inclusiveness. Giving people what they want equally, which is the goal of a liberal technocratic society, includes giving them equal social positions.

Inclusiveness is thus part of the modern effort to apply the technological outlook comprehensively, so that it applies to human relations as to everything else. The effort can’t succeed. We achieve rigor at the cost of narrowing focus, for example by excluding qualitative issues in favor of what can be measured, so we can’t make everything rigorous. In particular, social life can’t be understood as mechanism, human beings can’t be turned into components let alone equal components of an infinitely adjustable machine, and esteem can’t be manufactured and divided up equally.

The attempt to make social life technological and equal soon runs into intellectual problems on its own terms. The technocratic culture that demands inclusiveness also gives evidence, reason, neutral expertise, and science the highest possible authority. That’s a problem, because those things tell us that inclusiveness is at odds with basic features of human life. For example, they tell us that the sexes are not interchangeable, and not all configurations of sexual conduct lead to equally happy results for oneself and others. The solution to the problem is insistence that none of those things tell us what they tell us. If there seem to be conflicts, science has to revise its conclusions, because people care about their status and experiences more than they care about scientific rigor. If you raise objections, people say you are irrational and badly motivated, and they look for ways to silence you.

The reason the technological outlook is pushed beyond its limits in obviously unworkable ways is that it is seen as uniquely valid, and that’s important when it comes to questions of basic social principle. A social order needs to be seen as entitled to respect, and it becomes entitled to respect by expressing the accepted understanding of what makes sense. Today it’s the technological understanding that people find convincing, so the social order has to express that understanding. Otherwise people won’t be able to look at it and say “that’s right so I’ll go with it.”

That requirement means inclusiveness. Technology doesn’t distinguish good and bad purposes so the social order shouldn’t distinguish them either. Technology doesn’t distinguish beneficiaries, so the social order should be egalitarian. Everybody should get what he wants equally and be treated equally. Technology wants to control the whole of visible reality, because modern science aims at that kind of universal understanding, so social engineering should apply to everything in sight and the government should take on responsibility for the total social environment.

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