Abstract
Social pathologies are presented as having four distinctive characteristics. Each of them is developed in different sections of this chapter.
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(a)
Social pathologies are the effect of anonymous social processes, that is, they acquire a logic of their own that becomes independent of the participating agents, and therefore, it is not possible to attribute them to an agent or group of agents. Hence, social pathologies become independent from the agents that take part in it.
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(b)
The second feature is the imposition of a type of practical rationality on a social space ruled by another type. This is so because there is a non-conscious transformation of the beliefs of the affected individuals who act in such a context, distorting the interpretation of its shared meaning.
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(c)
The third one is the undermining of the agents’ autonomy, imagination and reflection. Undermining the imagination enables a type of rationality to be imposed on social spaces alien to it.
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(d)
The fourth distinctive feature follows from the previous one, since one of the consequences of the weakening of imagination, autonomy and reflection is the stimulation of deceptive justifying processes, i.e., ideological processes.
Finally, I present “malinchism” as a particular case that illustrates social pathologies in the context of Latin American societies. Besides the undervalued self-image of Latin American people inherited from the Conquest and Colony that characterizes malinchism, it implies a methodological approach that can be projected to other specific cases equally affected by historical colonization.
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Notes
- 1.
Arendt presents a similar diagnosis of Modernity through what she calls “the rise of the social”, which among other features leads to replacing the action characteristic of political life with uniformed and conformist behaviour distinctive of “society”. This leads to a progressive loss of the quality of the political process and to a weakening of the state and government by the administration embodied in technocracy and bureaucracy (Arendt 1998: 40–43).
- 2.
This is not only a concern of Critical Theory, but is also posed by Michael Walzer, who, through the concept of complex equality, aims to counteract those effects (Walzer 1983:17–20).
- 3.
This process has been so pervasive and so prevalent in contemporary societies that even the contemporary attempt to reconceptualise modernity based on social acceleration cannot go beyond it (Rosa 2013). This concept, which provides an innovative perspective to explain late modernity, can be ultimately explained as an effect of the dynamics imposed by the institutionalisation of the means-ends rationality that, in becoming independent, also generates processes of social acceleration. Both the competition inherent to the economy, as well as the juridification that fosters it and the increasing imposition of technology on our daily lives, serve as the main drivers of the increasing complexity that leads to the aforementioned social acceleration (Rosa 2013), 73–6, (Rosa 2014): 26–7.
- 4.
This process is presented in a very clear way by Adela Cortina, who at the same time illustrates the distortion of the practical context whose object is the good life, as a consequence of consumerism (Cortina 2002: 82–9).
- 5.
The word “aporophobia” is based on the Greek word áporos, which means “poor” or “with no resources”. I introduce this term to refer to the rejection of poor people. In the Spanish-speaking world this word has been recently adopted as the result of the influence of philosopher Adela Cortina’s (2017) work.
- 6.
This argument is inspired by the distinction introduced by Modzelewski (2017) between emotions towards a fact and emotions towards an object, according to which the latter emotions are desirable in social behaviour because they are triggered by the evaluation of someone’s actions, whereas the former are fixed in relation to a person who is the recipient of the emotion, no matter what this recipient does. Social discrimination is understood as coming from this type of emotions that do not evaluate doings, but beings (pp. 297–309).
- 7.
Probably the best argument against monetarism understood in terms of tyranny has been presented by Michael Walzer through his concept of complex equality (1983: 17–21).
- 8.
The discussion of exploitation is so dense and vast that it is impossible for this work to look into it comprehensively. I simply aim to introduce a possible causal explanation of individual attitudes from the perspective of social pathologies. An overview of the problem can be found in Nielsen and Ware (1997).
- 9.
- 10.
Juan Fló makes a distinction between two ways of understanding ideology: one that provides a social group with a vision of the world, which therefore articulates its self-understanding and interests, and another one that is misleading and deceptive at the service of certain social and class interests, which he calls “ideological alienation.” This second form of ideology coincides with the deceptive justification I refer to (Fló 1967: 81–82). A similar distinction has been addressed by Geuss (1981: 15–22) as ideology in descriptive and pejorative senses.
- 11.
This position is compatible with an interpretation of the growing role that justification has had in Cohen’s work. In a 1968’s early article entitled “The workers and the word”, he states that “(…)
for all classes except, as we shall see, the working class, the fact that a gap exists between them and other classes means that they must lose contact with the truth if they are to develop a theory which will further their interests” (Cohen 2014: 276). In “Freedom, justice and capitalism” he argues that the clarifying role of justification, in particular philosophical justification, functions as a “powerful solvent for at least some ideological illusions” (1988: 291). Later he introduces the ideas of “comprehensive justification” and “justifying community”, which Cohen supposes absent in the talented that demand greater wages from the same productivity, (2008: 41–67) and that implies, to a certain extent, a functional failure that can be understood as blocking justification.
- 12.
I understand the guide for the intervention in societies from Apel’s part B of the discourse ethics, which provides a principle of responsibility. This commitment to responsibility constitutes the end (telos) to ensure the conditions of possibility for resolving conflicts discursively, that is, as established by the principle of universalisation that Habermas refers to as ‘U’. It implies guaranteeing that people can take part in dialogue by giving reasons to justify their positions (Apel 1993: 28).
- 13.
Mario Sambarino (1980) has presented a systematic argumentation to rule out any possible essentialism referring to Latin America’s identity, tradition and authenticity.
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Pereira, G. (2019). Social Pathologies: Distinctive Features. In: Imposed Rationality and Besieged Imagination. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26520-5_6
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