In Meditation XVII of his âDevotions Upon Emergent Occasions,â John Donne poetically and correctly described a fundamental aspect of the human condition:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any manâs death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (Donne 1624, Meditation XVII).
In other words, human beings are, necessarily, social beings. They both influence, and are influenced by, other people as well as social institutions more generally. But as C. Wright Mills so aptly noted in his breakthrough 1956 study of institutional structures and power-relations in the USA, The Power Elite:
And as Jan Slaby and Shaun Gallagher have recently noted:The kind of moral and psychological beings men become is in large part determined by the values they experience and the institutional roles they are allowed and expected to playâŚ. Although men sometimes shape institutions, institutions always select and form men. (Mills 1956/2000, pp. 15 and 123, texts joined)
[T]he notion of a cognitive institution is itself a helpful tool for developing a critical stance that allows us to scrutinize current institutional practices. Critique here takes the form of assessments of an institutionâs modes of operation and de facto impacts, analyzed against the background of its official and unofficial aims, purpose and directions. How does the operational reality of an institution and its specific effectiveness measure up to the ideas and principles that have led to its creation? On a more general level, critique also implies asking whether some given institutional procedures improve (or impede, or distort) our understanding, our communicative practices, our possibilities for action, our recognition of others, our shared and circumscribed freedoms, and so forth. (Slaby and Gallagher 2014, p. 6)
So, in a nutshell: human beings are, necessarily, social animals (Donne); but although people âsometimes shape institutions, institutions always select and formâ people (Mills ); and âthe notion of a cognitive institution is itself a helpful tool for developing a critical stance that allows us to scrutinize current institutional practicesâ (Slaby and Gallagher 2014, p. 6).
Starting out with those basic ideas, and then adding some of our own, we do two things in The Mind-Body Politic. First, we work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions, by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind, and in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what we call essentially embodied minds. And second, we make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and our essentially embodied lives, for the better.
More specifically, we undertake a deeper, generalized, and explicitly political critical analysis of essentially the same set of social-institutional phenomena pointed up by Donne, Mills, and Slaby and Gallagher, from the standpoint of the philosophy of mind, and also updated to the second decade of the twenty-first century. Our particular focus is social institutions encountered by people living in contemporary neoliberal nation-states, insofar as those people are also essentially embodied minds, and specifically insofar as these social institutions select, form, and literally shape the conscious, self-conscious, affective, cognitive, and agential minds of those people. But this mind-shaping, and its correspondingly fundamental effects on our lives, can be for worse or for better. We argue that in contemporary neoliberal nation-states, standard social institutions mind-shape us and fundamentally affect us radically for the worseâhence they are, to that extent, dystopianâbut also that a careful critical analysis of this unhappy phenomenon enables us to formulate a positive theory of individual and collective social-institutional change that is radically for the better.
Clarity and distinctnessâappropriately scaled to the inherent difficulty/simplicity and murkiness/lucidity of oneâs subject-matter, of courseâare leading philosophical virtues, so we will start by defining some terms we will use frequently in what follows. For our purposes, a social institution is any group of people whose subjective experiences, feelings and emotions, thoughts, and intentional actions are collectively guided and organized by shared principles or rules that function as normsâthat is, evaluative standards, ideals, codes of conduct, and/or imperativesâfor that group. By democracy , we mean any social institution that is governed by the rule of the majority of people qualified to vote, who in turn elect or appoint a minority of those people to ârepresentâ and govern them.1 And by neoliberalism , we mean the political doctrine that combines:
- i.classical Hobbesian liberalism, according to which people are essentially self-interested and mutually antagonistic, hence require a coercive central government to ensure their mutual non-interference and individual pursuit of self-interested goals,
- ii.the valorization of capitalism, especially global corporate, worker-exploiting, technocratic capitalism (aka âbig capitalismâ), and
- iii.technocracy , the scientifically-guided control and mastery of human nature and physical nature alike, for the sake of pursuing individually and collectively self-interested ends.
In our contemporary world, the basic elements of neoliberalism in big-capitalist, democratic nation-states also smoothly implicitly generalize to âneoconservativism,â âcentrism,â and even to âstate capitalismâ in state-socialist or other non-democratic nation-states. Of course, there are superficial variations in political rhetoric and ideology. However, underneath all these superficial variations are the basic elements just mentioned: classical Hobbesian liberalism (and the corresponding view that humans are essentially self-interested and mutually antagonistic), the valorization of capitalism, and technocracy. This is what we are calling âneoliberalism.â
What Henry Giroux (2002) rightly describes as âthe dystopian culture of neoliberalismâ emphasizes market-based values, relationships, and identities, and defines individual and social agency through big-capitalist, market-oriented notions of individualism, competition, and consumption. In all contemporary neoliberal nation-states worldwide, every one of us belongs to, participates in, or falls under the jurisdiction of, a multiplicity of different social institutions, many of them overtly or covertly neoliberal and dystopian, and all of them overlapping and interrelated in complex ways, for example:
- families
- churches or other spiritual organizations, including cults
- schools of all kinds, including higher education and social arrangements involving research in the humanities and the sciences
- clubs or teams of all kinds
- social arrangements involving sports, leisure, and exercise activities of all kinds
- jobs and workplaces
- social systems for the production of material goods of all kinds
- social systems for the provision of services of all kinds
- economic social systems more generally, including banking systems and other monetary systems
- consumer social systems of all kinds
- medical social systems of all kinds, including social arrangements involving mental or physical health, especially hospitals and other care facilities, and social arrangements surrounding dying and death
- social arrangements involving the internet, the telephone system, the postal system, and other communication systems
- social arrangements involving the fine arts, performances and aesthetic appreciation, and crafts
- mass entertainment social systems of all kinds, including literature, music, movies, and television
- journalism and news media
- architectural and urban planning of all kinds, including social arrangements involving gardening, farming, landscape planning, and forest management
- social arrangements involving marine and water management
- social arrangements involving personal or mass transportation
- legal systems, including social arrangements involving incarceration and prisons
- the police, including private...