Dataism and Capitalism (IV-A): Affirming the Reality of the World
What is the trust that is opposed to dataism? It is this: to trust that what we see as real is real, and to actively open ourselves to the reality of the world. Trust is epistemically basic.
Foto de Random Institute en Unsplash
Introduction
In Part I of this short series, we suggested that the connection between capitalism and dataism is a factor common to both money and data: the reduction of things and people to measurable, manipulable quantities. We explained how data does this by prescinding the quantities of things from their natures, negating contemplation, ignoring the intrinsic order of people and things. Finally, we suggested that, in the economic realm, dataism is but a technological extension of capitalism, understood as an economic system in which the accumulation of wealth by individuals is the motor of the economy. Throughout this article, we insist, this is what we refer to when we use the term “capitalism”.
In Part II, we focused on money and its inner logic. Money functions as a store of value, a symbol capable of representing all things in terms of their utility, which makes it appealing to our desires, so that it strongly (but never irresistibly) encourages us to set our hearts on accumulating the mere appearance of wealth, on accumulating money considered primarily as a store of value, as “utility”. In this last, we see the relationship between money and the manipulability of data.
In Part III, we examined both capitalism and dataism and identified their common root as a profound distrust: in other persons, in oneself, and in God. In modern economics, what is primary is not persons, but things, and it is to these last that man’s freedom is directed. It is in things that man places his trust. And the man who does so also denies that in himself which can perceive what is higher and deeper than his own bodily frame. Such a stance is echoed in dataism’s distrust of the experience of the real, its overweening emphasis on human measurement as both source and guarantee of (a limited, pragmatist) truth.
In this last part of the series on dataism and capitalism, we briefly outline the nature of the trust that can serve as a basis for both economic exchange and knowledge, the trust that Africans must foster within themselves in their ongoing encounter with Western modernity.
This first half of Part IV looks at trust as the basis of knowledge.
Dataism as a Culmination of Western Modernity
Dataism represents a certain culmination of two apparently contradictory movements of Western modernity: the radical Enlightenment (beginning in the 16th century) on the one hand, and Romanticism (beginning in the 18th century) on the other.1
The radical Enlightenment tends to represent nature as raw, passive material for technological manipulation, with man as both subject and object of the enterprise (once man is thought of as being part of nature). This tendency is easily visible in contemporary debates and trends, such as the exaltation by some of attempts to technologically “augment” the human person, or the notion and practice of “sex change surgery.” Romanticism, on the contrary, tends to depict nature as an “organic and divine vitality” to which man must reunite himself, and of which man must become the interpreter and spokesman by being immersed and getting lost in it. This we see, for example, in the pantheistic notion of “the Universe” as a quasi-divine agent of which we also form a part, an agent that passes judgment (referred to via the Indian term “karma”), that weighs people in the scales and finds them wanting. In short, as Marco Stango puts it, we are dealing with, on the one hand, a “naturalization” of the spiritual (i.e., of what lies beyond the tangible) and on the other hand, a “spiritualization” of the natural.2
Common to both movements is a negation of man’s openness to transcendence, to “that which lies beyond.” The radical Enlightenment attempted to demonstrate that man is part of nature (understood—at least at first—in mechanistic terms) and that, therefore, man needs to pursue happiness within a purely natural frame, determined by causes lying outside (and beneath) himself. As for Romanticism, this urged man to awaken to the “divinity” of the world, of nature and history, and to immerse himself in it and let himself be determined by that natural movement of events. To illustrate, we could say that on the one hand, man is urged to abandon himself to the motions of the blind chemicals3 that he is. Anything that suggests that this is not the ultimate horizon—reason, intuition, etc.—is itself but a product of determinate physical movement. And on the other hand, man is exhorted to realize that he is, in fact, inescapably determined by the mysterious motions of “the Universe,” Impersonal Nature, all-influencing, omnipresent, inevitable, and thus to become a quasi-divine avatar of the Universe. In both cases, the subjective experience of knowledge and freedom are nothing but a product of the inscrutable movement of indeterminate nature.
Both movements are discernible in dataism. No longer is the mind thought to touch the being of things, their essences. Rather, the appearance of things is a mere symbol for the things-in-themselves, a symbol beyond which the mind cannot penetrate. Having no certainty that there in fact is something like a “thing-in-itself,” fearing that we are all in fact “living in the Matrix,” dataism reduces the entire world to the subjective experience of the appearance of things. This subjective experience is reduced into measurable quantities, “bits” or information than can be transferred from one agent to another, unlike richer aspects of the subjective experience, aspects that, in fact, would refer to a “thing-in-itself”—aspects that are closer to the essence of a thing, including its qualities. The natural is spiritualized.
At the same time, everything in the world is reduced to information, because everything we can possibly know of it, all our knowledge, is subjectivized and reduced into quantity. Because we cannot go beyond the appearances of things, then, for all intents and purposes, these appearances are the world. The entire universe, then, is conceived of as information. And the more we perceive of the universe, the more we can “informatize” it for our own purposes, attempting to make more, and more deeply, transcendent realities part of our grand collective interface, thus immersing ourselves in—connecting ourselves to—the information that the entire universe already is. In this way, dataism represents “the spiritualization of the natural”. And in both movements, dataism represents a negation of man’s openness to transcendence. It is precisely as negation that dataism may also be characterized as distrust.
Dataism and Trust: Affirming the Reality of the World
To affirm that man can know the essences4 of things is not an affirmation that can be proven. In response to the question, “How does one know?”, one can propose an explanation of the process of knowledge. But an entirely different question is this: How do I know that I know? How do I know that what I perceive is real? Why should I trust my senses? Why should I trust my knowing? Why should I trust that experience is real? None of these questions has an answer. Or, better put, to ask the question is already to answer it. Either we accept our knowing and the question becomes unnecessary and meaningless, or we doubt our knowing by asking the unanswerable question.
When I speak of “knowing” here, I am not referring to conclusions deduced from premises. Such conclusions are justified by the premises that ground them and the relationship between these premises. Therefore, if one were to ask, “Why should I trust these conclusions?”, one could answer in response, “Because they logically follow from true premises.” It is also true that many premises are also, in fact, conclusions derivable from other premises. But ultimately, we must arrive at pieces of knowledge that are “first premises”, underived, but simply accepted—for example, the reality of the world around us (also known, loosely speaking, as the metaphysical principle of identity).5 Now, as we have seen, dataism implies a denial of or, at least, an indifference to, the reality of the world, of “things-in-themselves”. In this way, dataism is fundamentally distrust.
So, what is the trust that is opposed to dataism? It is this: to trust that what we see as real is real, and to actively open ourselves to the reality of the world. Trust is inseparable from knowledge, from truth. Even more, trust is a condition for knowledge. Trust is epistemically basic. And if we must actively open ourselves to the world, then we must entrust ourselves to it, surrender ourselves to the truth of it, to its nature and its “laws”. In obedience to truth, we must live the truth.6
And yet, this characterization of the relationship to the world as one of “trust” invites the question: Trust in whom? For to tenaciously accept the reality of the world, to recognize oneself as a being-among-beings, is also to accept that the world existed before we did, that the world is a “given”. Moreover, it is to affirm that the fundamental truth of the world is goodness, despite all appearances. It is to affirm that, when they are inevitable, the devastating power of the tsunami and the debilitating pain of a cancerous tumor are really and truly good.7 And it is to begin to sense, “behind” the contingent world,8 behind the fragrant flower and the fragile leaf, the shifting cloud and the star austere, One from Whom all its goodness flows. To attempt to divorce trust in truth from trust in a Creator is to attempt to divorce trust in truth from the trustworthiness of truth, the goodness of truth, the meaningfulness of truth. In a word, it is to attempt to make trust absurd. Trust in truth is necessarily an incipient trust in God.9 And as an acknowledgement of the goodness of the world and of oneself as a being among beings, trust in truth is an incipient affirmation that the world is a gift, and that one’s own self is a gift. It is an incipient acceptance of the gift of the world and the gift of oneself from the hands of God.
This, then, is the trust demanded of us Africans as dataism spreads: trust in truth, trust in God. We must actively open ourselves to the world beyond our screens, to the glories and shadows of the people that lie behind the flickering faces, the joys and rhythms and difficulties of the earth and the skies and the seas. We must seek to know ever more deeply what things are, not primarily to use them, but rather to contemplate them. Indeed, our very action must become contemplative, aware of the transcendent value of the things and persons that we interact with, that surround us. None of this is possible without practicing exterior and interior silence, that we may remain open to the real, and to the One from Whom it flows.
See Marco Stango, “A Modern Genealogy of the Metaphysics of Information”, Communio 50(3), 2023, pp. 553-586 (available here).
Marco Stango characterizes these movements as contradictory and puts forward an explanation for how the contradiction came to be resolved. However, this explanation lies outside the scope of this article. See Marco Stango, “A Modern Genealogy of the Metaphysics of Information”, Communio 50(3), 2023, pp. 553-586 (here).
Or particles, oscillations, etc.
See Part I of this series, “Dataism and Capitalism (I): Tracing the Connection”, for a brief discussion on what it means to “know the essences of things”.
Another “first premise” is the following: no thing both is and is not at the same time and in the same way (the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction—a dog is not a cat).
From this paragraph follow political implications of such magnitude that, even though they lie outside the scope of this article, I cannot resist at least stating some of them here. First, the highest truth must necessarily coincide with the highest form of trust as an appropriate response, a trust that is also entrustment of self to the truth. The truthful man, then, can be described not only as the one who knows, but also as the one who is faithful. Authority, then, comes from fidelity. Second, the deepest truths are attained by the deepest trust in the most authoritative (the most truly and deeply faithful) persons. Third, the deepest and most enduring political unity is attained not by an impersonal adherence to values, but by trust in faithful persons. Fourth, political transformation is achieved not by revolution, but by fidelity to truth, and recognition of the authority of truth and of the one who is faithful to truth.
And some have in fact made similar startling affirmations. One example is Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman who recounts just such an insight in the context of her experience of concentration camps in the 1940s.
This immeasurably deepens and enriches each of the implications about politics stated in note 6 above.