Episode #169 ... Bruno Latour - We Have Never Been Modern 28:40

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So the guy we're talking about today is Bruno Latour, a philosopher, a sociologist, an anthropologist, a man who in the year 1993 releases a book that gets the philosophical world a-talkin', a book that some people believe solves one of the most important heated debates in recent epistemology. The title of the book was We Have Never Been Modern. Now, to understand what he means when he says we have never been modern,

Let's talk about modern for a second. We've talked about it on this podcast for years, ever since we did our first episodes on Kant, maybe even before that. What does it mean to be a modern person? You know, you can use the word modern to describe something in normal, everyday conversation, and it more or less just means that something was recent, that it happened close to when we are living right now.

But in the philosophical context of what we're talking about here today, when talking about human subjectivity, the word "modern" is going to describe an attitude of thinking, or even a way of being, that emerged hundreds of years ago near the beginning of the Enlightenment. So with that in mind, the question we really are asking here is not what does it mean to be a modern person, but what does it mean to think like a person who is a product of modernity? You can imagine people living during the Middle Ages. The people of this time thought about things very differently than people do today.

They thought differently because nearly every cultural input they received from the cradle to the grave was different. Just as an example of this, historian Mark Block famously talks about feudal society as being a place where it was practically impossible to be an atheist. Not that the laws of physics precluded anyone from ever holding that idea in their brain, but that given the fact that almost every way that people were taught to view themselves had to do with the relationship to God and God's decrees for conduct on this earth.

Effectively, it was just impossible for the average person to come out of an average upbringing thinking of themselves as an atheist. Well, smash cut to modernity, and we have Nietzsche fearing almost the exact opposite of that. He's fearing that the world is becoming a place where it becomes almost impossible for a thinking person to see themselves as an instantiation of God. And this is just one example of what we're talking about here today.

Just as the premises of the Middle Ages dictated a lot of the premises people used to make sense of the world around them, there are premises that underlie modernity that dictate our thought as well. You can spot them if you look for them. In fact, for Bruno Latour, the fact we're even able to spot them is exciting evidence of the fact that we've actually been moving into a different era of history.

But more on that later. We all still have remnants of modernity that help us make sense of the things around us. And I thought it'd be fun here today to play a little game. It's a game I like to call, uh, on a scale of one to 10, how modern is your thinking? Alternative title I've been working with is on a scale of one to Jordan Peterson. How badly do you need to rescue your father from the belly of the whale? Actually, he's more pre-modern, but come on, it's funny. Anyway, here's how the game works. Give yourself a point if you answer yes to any of the following statements.

Do you believe that science is the best way of arriving at knowledge about the world around you? Give yourself a point. Do you believe that science and politics should be two completely distinct, purified realms of study? That scientists should study the objective world of nature, the world of objects, and that politics should deal with the subjective world of human culture, people making deals and arrangements, the world of subjects? Do you believe that these two things belong in their own separate realms of expertise? Give yourself a point if the answer is yes.

Give yourself another point if you do not believe in a literal, supernatural God that has commands that we should be building our societies around. More than that, give yourself a point if you think we're living in a fundamentally new kind of society in modernity, one that's distinct from those pre-modern societies where the people projected their humanity onto the natural world around them. They didn't have unbiased scientists channeling nature, bringing this level of progress that we have.

Give yourself another point if you believe in the idea that progress is linear. And I guess another point if you believe that modernity is the path to that progress. That the more experiments we run, the more science and technology progresses, the more we progress as a species. That since the beginning of the Enlightenment,

We've solved most of the big problems humanity has faced throughout history. Look at medicine. Look at advanced agriculture. All we got left are a bunch of complex, nuanced problems to deal with, and that's in part a testament to how far we've progressed. We are clearly on the right track here. Now, I could obviously keep going, but I think you all get the point. You score more than four points on this list, and congratulations, you are a product of modern thought.

Nothing wrong with that. But I think Latour would say that if you find yourself so embedded in these beliefs that they seem practically self-evident to you, where you have a hard time even imagining any other way reality could be, maybe try to be self-aware of that fact and do some digging. Just to be clear, the problem here is not with using the premises of modernity to make sense of the world. The problem, just like it was with the people of the Middle Ages, the problem is having too much faith in the premises of modernity.

Because the reality is they haven't exactly produced the world they promised to produce if we just bowed our heads, had faith, and ate the Jesus cracker. Modernity has seemingly led to some of the greatest disasters in human history, and we've got to be willing to take our subjectivity to task if we want to remain intellectually honest. This is what philosophers have been doing for almost 150 years, trying to figure out what went wrong and how we should be moving forward.

So just to keep the tempo here, we have the premises of modernity. Latour sometimes calls this the modern constitution. We have the problems created by modernity in the modern constitution. And then we have the reactions to the problems of modernity, trying to find a way to move forward. And in this group there's a couple of big ones that Bruno Latour is going to reference a lot. We have on one hand the post-modernist reaction to modernity. Done tons of episodes on them but loosely classified. The idea is we need to get beyond the mistakes of modernity.

And on the other side, you got scientific realists that think, yes, we've made mistakes, but that what we need to do is fix the mistakes and stick to scientific observation as the way to arrive at objective knowledge about the world. Now, these two groups fighting with each other has become a mainstay of our age. It's like the moss that grows on the north side of a tree. It's like grandma fighting with the neighbors every day. It's like a compass. In fact, at one point, the postmodernists and the scientific realists actually went to war with each other.

It's been called the Science Wars of the 1990s. The battlefield was epistemology. How do we know what we know? And both sides came to the battlefield with some pretty heavy artillery as to why the other side was full of complete morons. Doubt it, and you can see this war still playing itself out in comment sections all across the internet.

Post-modernists, believing that knowledge is a social construction, may look at a scientific realist posting a comment and characterize them as a complete idiot. That they're essentially like a religious zealot on behalf of science. Understanding reality to them just means to understand how a bunch of atoms and molecules relate to each other.

That what? What, you don't realize how everything down to the language you use, the concepts you're studying? Human reality is more than just a bunch of atoms. You don't realize how much humanity you're projecting onto the natural world? You're no different than your supposedly primitive ancestors, a postmodernist might say. But then on the other hand, a scientific realist on one of these comment sections might see a postmodernist and think that they're an idiot as well. Wait, so knowledge is entirely a social construction?

Like what, all these different ways of socially constructing reality are equally valid? We can't have any reasonable way of determining how one way of understanding reality is better than another? And what, scientists, when they conduct these scientific experiments, aren't accessing anything at all that exists subjectively in the universe? Clearly scientists are in contact with something enduring that's out there. To deny that is just a border on insanity. And you can spend your life battling in these comment sections, poised on one side or the other of this oversimplified debate.

Like an atheist that spends their entire life arguing against people that believe in God just because it's a debate they know they can win. They're addicted to it. They just love that feeling of winning. And you can waste the same amount of time entrenched in this epistemological battle against a cartoon of a postmodernist or a scientific realist. These two groups keep on arguing with each other. And to their credit, it's certainly not for lack of effort. There's been a lot of work done in the field of epistemology trying to find some sort of connection between the two.

How can we bring the best of both worlds together? Why does it have to be one or the other? Countless books have been written, and yet they still continue to argue. And Bruno Latour would probably want to pop in at this point and say, hey, by the way, if you're ever expecting these two sides to come to any sort of ceasefire in this war that's going on, you may be waiting around for a while. They're looking for the solution to their disagreement in entirely the wrong place. Which, by the way, just a general lesson we can take about life here from Bruno Latour is

Whenever there's a big problem that people around you are trying to solve, and they've been trying to solve it forever and can't seem to arrive at any solutions, try looking not to where everyone seems to be disagreeing. Try looking to where everyone agrees. Because sure, it would stand to reason on the surface that a problem in epistemology is going to have an epistemological solution. But Bruno Latour thinks the real problem between the postmodernists and the scientific realists is a metaphysical problem.

They both agree on a metaphysical premise that we've put way too much faith in since the dawn of the Enlightenment. And we can see it in a lot of places. We can see it in Kant's Copernican Revolution. We can see it in an early disagreement between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle about whether the truth should have to pass through the laboratory or whether it can be arrived at collectively by culture. It's a metaphysical premise we're proud of that runs deep into the heart of the modern attitude. What I'm talking about is the assumed separation between human and non-human entities.

Put another way, the way this distinction manifests in the sciences is that this is the purification, as Latour says, of the world of objects, which are to be studied by scientists, nature, and the world of subjects, which are to be studied by politics, culture. Written into the Constitution of Modernity is the tacit agreement that the best way we're going to arrive at a progressively nuanced understanding of the world around us is by separating nature and culture.

politics shouldn't be brought into the sciences, culture is a realm all its own to be studied. That the best way to progress is by purifying these respective fields. This is a hallmark of modern thought. This is something most people just take for granted. And this is the metaphysical agreement that the postmodernist and the scientific realist need in order to be at odds with each other. Specialists on either side of this polarity of nature and culture. But what if that polarity didn't actually exist?

What if the modern separation between nature and culture never actually happened? What if instead it's just been an illusion? An illusion that's allowed us to intellectually justify a faulty way of conducting science, an incomplete method of analyzing culture, and has led to a structure to society that is destroying the world as we know it.

Well, in that world then, the postmodernist and the scientist would quickly realize that they have very little to argue about. Because all of a sudden, they're on the same team. All of a sudden, there'd be no reason to assume that we need to keep culture completely separate from nature and vice versa. In that world, to Bruno Latour, it's not that we need to get beyond our modern constitution in any postmodern sense, or that we need to preserve our modern constitution in the scientific realist sense.

Neither of these is solving any problems with being modern, because when you look at the reality of the world to Latour, we have never been modern. When a postmodernist and a scientific realist argue in the comments section about knowledge, they're really just a bunch of confused people, entrenched in the modern attitude, arguing about how to find some sort of peaceful common ground on the battlefield of being completely, metaphysically wrong. And if the modern constitution is broken, maybe it's time for us to have a constitutional convention to Latour.

But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on a second. For me. Let me just try to wrap my head around this. So the whole way that we break things up, human versus non-human, as Latour is saying, in the sciences, it'll be culture on the human side and nature on the non-human side, right? This whole dualistic way of breaking things up, all of that's been wrong from the start. Well, what's going to happen there? What happens when you shift something that's that fundamental in this, this Jenga tower we've been trying to keep up in the sciences?

What does that change about the way we see the world? It can be hard to even envision what that would look like in practice. But we'd have to start, Latour says, by trying to look at everything in terms of it being on an equal metaphysical footing. Pretend nature and culture don't even exist as categories for a second. Human and non-human, not even a thing anymore. Pretend that all there is out there are just entities, or actants as Latour is going to call them.

Now pretend these actants are all metaphysically equivalent to each other and that none of these entities can be reduced to any other entity or explanation. This could be a rock, a tree, this could be a person, but it could also be an idea, a word, a political party, a bank account, an image,

All of these are examples of actants. Now picture a world when viewing all of these through a lens where they are metaphysically equal. Not subjects, not objects, not nature, not culture, just actants that join together to form what Latour calls collectives. Collectives of actants that through their connections to other actants gain force in the world.

The process of understanding the world then, through this worldview, requires, among other things, for us to study where these actants go, how they combine together, when collectives break apart, how collectives emerge out of earlier collectives. This forms the basis of what Latour would later call his actor network theory. Now one interesting thing to note here is that when you start to remove pieces of that modern constitution, like this purification of nature and culture, other pieces of the modern attitude start to unravel as well.

For example, take the idea of linear progress. The idea that the more experiments we run, the more we advance through technology so that we can harness nature around us to our benefit, the closer and closer we'll get to some ultimate goal of whatever, colonizing the galaxy. You know, the same sort of modern thinking that led to parts of Europe colonizing the globe during the Age of Exploration.

Under this actor network theory, there's less of a definitive end goal or end of history that's being aimed for. You're more or less just studying actants and how they relate to each other and change. Just interesting to consider different looks at the world once you get a bit outside that modern attitude we're all born into. Something else interesting to consider is that when viewing the world through a non-dualistic lens...

something weird starts to happen. The fact that as humans we can move around and talk and manipulate the environment really starts to matter less under this worldview. And what you start to realize is that even things that can't move around and don't have a human voice can have very real impacts on everything that's possible for us on the human side of things. Tons of examples of this. You want to build something as a person, but there's a giant boulder in your way, so you can't do it.

You want to change things politically as a person, but you don't have the money to influence politics. Or there's laws against speaking out. You want to go outside and see your friends and hang out, but there's a virus going around and you need to stay inside. Point is, human and non-human are intrinsically connected. You can see it the instant you change that modern assumption that I'm a human, I'm one thing, and out there, well, that's nature. That's the supply cabinet. That's the place we gather stuff to do our bidding as human beings.

Now more on that in a second, but no doubt at this point, there's got to be some people listening out there with some concerns about treating everything on an equal metaphysical footing. Let's address some of those concerns because I think they certainly are legitimate. It's like I hear you. I hear you Latour about this new potential way of viewing things metaphysically. But why? Actually, before I ask why I would ever want to do something like that, how would I ever do something like that? Like what do you want me to do? Walk around viewing people as entities rather than people?

Seeing things in terms of their relationships to other things? What am I, robot Mark Zuckerberg? And he'd probably say back, "Look, just calm down for a second. It's not that weird." Bruno Latour makes the point that it's really not that foreign of a concept if you think about it. It's not like if you remove the human/non-human distinction, you're all of a sudden living on an alien planet.

We already do see the world in terms of what he calls hybrids all the time. And to illustrate what a hybrid is, he uses the example of a newspaper. But keep in mind, this same thing applies to news stories no matter where you get your news. He starts out just sitting around his house describing his experience of reading the morning paper. "Oh, well on page four," he says, "we got a story on the hole in the ozone layer today." Things are not good, apparently, in the early 1990s when it comes to the ozone layer.

They talk in the article about aerosol measurements. Then they go from chemistry to talking about the CEO of Monsanto being charged for crimes against the ecosphere. A few paragraphs later, it's about heads of state that are getting involved. Then it's about the meteorologists and why they don't agree with the chemists. Later on, they're talking about moratoriums and third world countries and all the rest of it. Now, this is a normal newspaper article, he says. We read these sorts of things every single day.

But consider for a second what you're actually reading when you read one of these articles. He says, quote, the same article mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions. A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics. Then later on, the horizons, the stakes, the timeframes, the actors. None of these is commensurable, yet there they are caught up in the same story, end quote.

Then he just goes off. He starts listing news stories on the rest of the paper. He goes through page by page, lists all the stories he's going to be reading about that day. Page six, we got a story about AIDS. Page eight, there's a story about computer chips being owned by the Japanese. On page 12, he says, quote, the Pope, French bishops, Monsanto, the fallopian tubes and Texas fundamentalists gather together in a strange cohort around a single contraceptive, end quote. An article about birth control and global religious groups. Now, here's what he's getting at.

If we were to look at each element of this story individually, which is to say if we were to look at each thing under the premises of the Enlightenment, where there's a purification between the scientific issues and the political issues, each one of these things would require a different expert from a different field to be able to weigh in on them. The fallopian tubes might need a biologist to weigh in, the bishops may require a theologian, the contraceptive may require a doctor. But that's not how we actually experience reality. We never have.

In practice, we read about these highly complex issues all quilted together into these hybrid articles, as he calls them. And none of this is confusing to us. In fact, it's something you're so used to doing, you do it every day in between getting dressed and having a bowl of Captain Crunch. We don't deal with isolated scientific data or isolated cultural analysis. The two are always blended together into these hybrids, as he calls them. Hybrids of nature and culture.

So there is no real separation between science and politics, or economy, or law, or religion, or technology for that matter. And by the way, that's a good thing. Latour gives an example at one point. When you try to separate nature and culture in an attempt to try to understand the world better, like if that's your strategy, that's like trying to understand war by getting a bunch of people and a bunch of weapons, putting them in a room, and then putting all the people on one side of the room and all the weapons on the other side of the room.

No, it's not going to work. Understanding human society is understanding the relationship between human and non-human beings. Just imagine talking about the hole in the ozone layer purely from the perspective of ecology, he says.

You can't do it. The very concept of the hole in the ozone layer that we're studying is a collective of both cultural and natural entities. There's a sense in which ignoring the cultural significance of the ozone layer, looking at it only through scientific terms, would be missing out on a huge piece of what the ozone layer even is, why we're even studying it.

So his point is we already do this all the time. We already see the world in terms of these blended hybrids. So to the person from before who's worried they're going to start seeing leprechauns or something if they switch up the modern constitution, don't worry about it too much. And if I remember correctly from before, that person was first going to ask how we can see the world in a new way and then was going to ask why they should be doing this at all. And yes, I realize that person from before was in fact me. I am talking to myself, but I'm self-aware of it. So it can't be that bad.

Anyway, it's a fair question. Why change anything? Generally speaking, why fix something that's working? Why fix the human-non-human distinction? It seems to have gotten us a lot of stuff over the years. We have planes and cars and vaccines and all the rest of the science and technology that's made our lives indistinguishable from the pre-modern societies of the past.

And I think Latour would want to ask a follow-up question about the degree to which the modern attitude is working, and for who exactly it is working. And I think he'd want to draw your attention to what may go down in history as a revolutionary year for human subjectivity. The year is 1989. You know, you can imagine the people living during the Middle Ages again. And as we talked about before, they had a totally different set of presuppositions they were building their reality from.

And it's not like they were being forced what to think, but the way they thought definitely allowed them to be more receptive to certain ideas, more charitable to certain questions, and more likely to think in a particular direction. Again, we have to suspect that that same situation applies for our modern attitude as well, and the year 1989 really served as a slap in the face to that reality for Latour.

1989 is the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Follow the Berlin Wall. Latour says this was a year of triumph for the West. The victory of liberalism, victory of capitalism, of Western democracy. But the triumph is short-lived, he says, because this moment in history becomes the first time in a while that Western culture can stop worrying about some global political crisis, take a step back, take an inventory of the problems that we now have to solve, and wow,

Every single one of them, essentially, has to do with humanity and its relationship to the planet. Pollution, overpopulation, deforestation, climate change, resource management, pandemics, the list goes on and Latour says it is no coincidence. This is part and parcel of the modern attitude. This is what happens when nature and culture are falsely seen as being two purified domains that operate independently.

This is the attitude that we structured our societies around. And when 1989 hits, people start to think, man, have we completely messed this up? What have we got to change about our thinking moving forward? Latour writes about it beautifully here. He says, quote, "...after seeing the best intentions go doubly awry, we moderns from the Western world seem to have lost some of our self-confidence. Should we not have tried to put an end to man's exploitation of man? Should we not have tried to become nature's masters and owners?"

"Our noblest virtues were enlisted in the service of these twin missions, one in the political arena and the other in the domain of science and technology. Yet we are prepared to look back on our enthusiastic and right-thinking youth as young Germans look to their graying parents and ask, 'What criminal orders did we follow? Will we say that we didn't know?'" Structuring our societies around the premise that there are two types of entities, human and non-human, and that they exist on a different level of metaphysical worth,

practically ensures that there's going to be a dynamic that emerges of self versus other. And when it does, it will not just be trees and rocks that will be seen as the other, as the objects for human beings to harvest and do their bidding with. Invariably, Latour says, groups of people become the objects to harvest as well. People that happen to be born living on top of the wrong substance buried in the ground. People that happen to be born with the wrong skin color or gender. Wherever you can find people who are voiceless,

They will be treated more or less the same as the voiceless trees and rocks of the world. There's a further cost though when it comes to our relationship to science and technology. For hundreds of years it was possible to think of scientific and technological progress as being completely separate from culture, as operating in its own unique domain of study. When a new piece of technology came out, it didn't necessarily have the ability to change the lives of everyone on a global scale. We were dealing with vacuum pumps and calculators at that time.

But the more advanced the science and technology get, the less useful it is to understand them in isolation. Latour says that technology is not just, you know, as some people say, a disinterested tool that can be used for either good or evil. It's not just a tool. Technology carries with it a type of latent morality.

And it's not good enough to just understand it on its own. We have to have the ability to understand how that technology is going to impact other actants once it's released out into the world. How will it affect existing technologies? How will it affect the way people live their lives? How will it affect the rest of the planet?

To think of science, technology, and culture as distinct separate realms from each other is not just some cute mistake anymore. Oh, you're so adorable. Thinking like an outdated modern person again. This may be an adorable mistake in the world of vacuum pumps and calculators, but in a world of gene therapy, facial recognition, and atomic bombs, to not have a way to study and understand the relationship between science, technology, and culture is downright immoral to Bruno Latour.

Something like climate change, early in the 20th century, was something we could delude ourselves into believing was purely an ecological issue, to be studied and dealt with solely by experts in the field of ecology. But Latour says climate change is no longer just a question of ecology. Now it's become a question of survival.

If the goal that we're shooting for on this planet is human flourishing, then Latour thinks we have to understand that the flourishing of non-human entities is an absolutely essential part of that as well. And he's not just talking about planting trees and sticking your disgusting reusable straw everywhere. He actually floats the hypothetical idea of there being what he calls a parliament of things. You know, in the same way a parliament brings in representatives to speak on behalf of various constituencies, various groups of people with different interests.

A parliament of things would aim to give voice to a different kind of voiceless entity. People could come and speak on behalf of the interests of these non-human entities that can't speak for themselves, but nonetheless play an important role in the politics of the flourishing of the planet. Just one interesting idea of many.

You know, there's so much more to cover, even just in this book, We Have Never Been Modern, let alone in the rest of the work of Bruno Latour, who, thankfully, is still alive and well here today. God bless him. Highly recommend doing your own reading on him, or even just harassing me to do more episodes on him. Because more so than most other thinkers out there, Latour always gets me to question, how will people be thinking about things in the next couple hundred years? And why will they almost certainly see me the same way I see people in the Middle Ages?

Every time I scoff at something that he says and then later think, wait, could that be the way people are going to think about stuff? This is one of the things I love about philosophy. And there aren't many things more difficult to see past than this modern subjectivity that we're all born into.

But something else I love about Latour that he doesn't seem to get much credit for is just how optimistic his theory of knowledge is. You know, in the world of the other metaphysical premise, where postmodernists and positivists practically want to kill each other, even if you win that argument, you're still left at the end of the day trying to answer skeptics about how we can ever know anything for certain. The world of things in themselves always lies beyond that veil of subjectivity. But in Latour's work, there's a little more hope, I think.

To Latour, scientists are not studying the raw, isolated phenomena of nature. The more accurate description to him is that scientists are entering into relationships with non-human things, forming connections. So maybe robot Mark Zuckerberg is onto something.

Maybe we need a social network for actants. Maybe if we study how scientists form these relationships, and how those relationships form together with other relationships to create these verified social facts that we all acknowledge as true, if we can do that, then maybe we can gain a lot of information about how knowledge works from a new perspective, one that doesn't rely on us being certain about accessing the intrinsic structure of the universe. By the way,

No disrespect was intended to robot Mark Zuckerberg in any way throughout the course of this episode. I can't burn bridges. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.