First published on 10/01/2024; last updated on 18/01/2024
Author: Frédéric Leroy (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Those most loudly advocating for a drastic overhaul in the methods of food production and consumption frequently invoke the authority of The Science, enticing us with the prospect of transforming the food system into a set of well-defined technical challenges that engineering can resolve, pretending to sidestep the subjective influence of politics. I wish to argue that we cannot do away with politics, or subjectivity for that matter, and neither should we.
Humans, as Aristotle asserts in Politics, are political animals: 'Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.' Building on the idea that humanity's nature is political at heart, Hanna Arendt has argued in The Human Condition that depoliticization, due to the rising hegemony of the scientific paradigm, may result in dangerous passivity and alienation from the world. To ensure a democratic future, we depend on political participation - there is no way around it.
The danger of too much science and too little politics
Excessive reliance on scientific models invariably leads to inhumanity, according to Arendt. Humans are not seen as the plural beings they truly are, but as uniform and dispensable raw materials. They end up as members of an animal species governed by natural laws, to be uncovered by scientists and translated by governments into an optimization of society. Such Utopianism traces back to Plato, and has plagued humanity ever since.
In his work, and particularly in The Republic, Plato posited that ideal states should be ruled by philosopher-kings who possess absolute knowledge, to guarantee the maximum possible happiness for all citizens. The modern update of this view is that even philosopher-kings will need to outsource their decision-making to the perfect rule of science, computational procedures, and algorithms. Some of the horrific results of such technocracy have been described in James C. Scott's 'Seeing like a State', subtitled 'How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed'.
In examining the consequences of Plato's arguments, Arendt contends that scientism has led to the erosion of the linguistic fabric that humans normally use to construct coherent and holistic worldviews, decide upon courses of action, build narratives, and generate meaning. While Arendt does not deny the tremendous value of science as such, her takeaway here is that it should serve as a support, integrated into a richer conversation. The reason we are political to begin with is precisely because we are equipped with language. What is missing in modern decision making is a thoughtful reflection upon our actions and a creation of robust values to aspire to.
That said, we could not entirely abolish politics even if we wanted to. Bruno Latour, a philosopher of science, has demontrated that science is never a neutral enterprise. It is contingent on a network of actors, institutions, and funding bodies. Scientific knowledge emerges through negotiations within these networks and cannot be isolated from the broader political landscape. Rather than trying to eradicate politics from scientific discourse, we must recognize its integral role, understand its nature, and reclaim it.
Politics, power, and desire
Politics revolve around the pursuit of power. Different political perspectives tend to propose very different strategies and interventions, but ultimately they are all converging on a similar quest. A pursuit that stems from a will to power, which, as Gilles Deleuze has argued in his book on Nietzsche, is the unfolding of desire as a productive force. This is exactly why critiquing someone's political views goes beyond mere disagreement and leads to contentious clashes; it is perceived as an assault on the very core of one's desires and an attempt to thwart the fulfilment of those aspirations.
A desire for power is neither inherently good or bad. The measure lies in the outcomes and our collective valuation of those results. But if we opt to give politics a place at the table, it becomes imperative that we take sides. At the same time, this implies that values will need to be defined. What this does not mean, however, is that anything goes (to avoid chaos, adherence to the core principles of the scientific method must be maintained consistently).
Psychotypes beyond 'left' and 'right'
Here is where things get tricky: the traditional idea of left versus right in politics no longer adequately captures how values are created. Instead of oversimplifying matters into the binary of old-fashioned political colours, we must bring in a more timeless psychological dimension. In the end, all known political perspectives are nothing more than socialized symptoms of underlying psychological disparities and how those connect to desire.
Humans navigate the world with distinct psychotypes, thereby shaping their perceptions and interactions based on individual psychology. The landscape of personality can be as intricate or simple as we choose it to be. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator dissects personalities into sixteen types based on four dichotomies: extraversion vs. introversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving. The Big Five Personality Model is based on openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. Other alternatives are provided by the DISC Assessment (4 personality traits), RIASEC (6 traits), Enneagram (9 traits), 16 PF (16 traits), and StrengthsFinder models (34 traits).
Active and reactive
Let's simplify. When we want to address psychotypes and how they relate to value creation (and thus politics), it suffices to revisit Nietzsche’s work and differentiate between just two categories: active and reactive. The former is a free-spirited person, typified by qualities such as strength, creativity, and the ability to affirm life, embrace desire, and shape one’s own moral codes and destiny. The reactive type, in contrast, is associated with feelings of distress, powerlessness, resentment, and a clear tendency to adopt values that are received from societal norms, rather than asserting an own will.
Deleuze has aligned the active type’s intent to increase power with Spinoza’s concept of conatus, the striving of each individual to persist in its being, and with an affective state of joy. Joy is the increase in one's power to act and persevere in existence. It is creative, open-ended, and it maximizes options - an ethical positive, and therefore good. The reactive type, on the other hand, is associated with sadness, which relates to restrictiveness, a decrease in one’s power to act, and a hindrance to the conatus - a moral negative, a bad. Reactivity leads to a constant battle against perceived threats and, ultimately, to a cycle of resentment and negative affectivity.
The above is not dissimilar from Arendt's concept of action, a political dynamic continuously shaped by new beginnings. However, what Arendt calls for is not so much a matter of individual Nietzschean heroics, but rather a pluralistic coming together of active individuals in the public realm to create a world through shared words and deeds. As Alexis de Tocqueville had already highlighted before, it is important for democracies to maintain a functional balance between individualism and civic engagement. Ultimately, this may be the only effective antidote against the sterility and passivity of utopian schemes and their totalitarian monocultures of thought.
Back to the food system: taking sides
With this opinion piece, I hope to have clarified my political (and moral) stance in the food system debate. It amounts to defining goodness in terms of an ability to prioritize life, strength, and health, embracing interventions that multiply rather than restrict opportunities. Interventions that increase diversity will ultimately also lead to more resilience. My perspective is inherently humanistic. It has the intention of fostering an environment where humans can thrive. At the same time, this implies that we will need a planet with healthier animals, plants, soils, waterways, and air.
Rather than advocating for 'less' (whether or not watered down as 'less but better'), my maxim is to radically pursue 'more of the best'. As such, it is antithetical to (neo)puritanism and the degrowth movement, which stem from the rejection, or even hatred, of exuberance. Its adherents typically find solace in mobs, where all individuality is suppressed and everything is bleak. An aversion to standing out, or allowing anyone else to do so, leads them to delegate decision-making to an abstract Utopian technocracy. Beware of those preaching temperance with zeal; they are not to be trusted. The true motive is to despise what is vibrant, not to contribute to making this world a better place, while being unwilling to admit this.
Political stances on diet, the cornerstone of health, clearly illustrate this clash of Nietzschean psychotypes. The active position is to enjoy foods that one not only finds tasty but also give rise to the healthiest responses at the individual level. Food cultures emerge from a mosaic of dietary choices, which then leads to rich exchanges and, possibly, negotiations and adjustments to create a maximum of opportunities at the community level. That is when personal heroics also become action, and therefore politics.
The reactive counterpoint is to do the exact opposite, by promoting either bland or uniform food options and then trying to impose that as universal dietary advice on everyone. It is no coincidence that the 19th-century New England legacy of 'whole grains good, meat bad' still tends to typify this position today, even in academic Boston. There is also a reason why red meat in particular is singled out as the worst of all foods: its redness symbolizes blood, life, strength, passion, and sensuality. To self-denying, life-hating souls tormented by resentment, these are indeed the worst possible insults.
Conclusion
In the food system, we will have to return to 'thinking what we are doing', as Arendt put it, and do so together: 'Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves'.
We must insist on a conscious and conscientious application of the scientific method. It is only by wholeheartedly embracing the dynamic, creative, and expansive aspects of scientific inquiry and dialogue, rather than being intimidated by despotic philosopher-kings and their rule by 'Science', that we can genuinely emerge as political and moral agents.
