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2009
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Was Ist Wirklichkeit?There was a time when Immanuel Kant was not a mysterious, semi-divine name, but simply a writer living in Eastern Germany during the late 1700s. He wrote some straightforward essays in addition to philosophy, and in those he expressed himself a lot more simply and clearly than in his subsequently legendary philosophical works.
I remember my pleasant surprise when I read one of these, a short book entitled, "What Is Enlightenment?" -- "Was Ist Aufklärung?" in the original. Not only did its author write so that anyone could understand him, but he even answered the question in two words, in all-capital letters, at the very end of the essay. Admittedly, given the time and place, he brushed it up a bit by putting it into Latin: SAPERE AUDERE. That is, the movement across the European Continent that was winning so many intelligent followers was the imperative, to dare to know. If you undertook to find out things, no matter what the difficulty, then you were a member of the Enlightenment.
So, with some accrediting of Mr Kant for the inspiration for my title, I talk today about, What Is Reality?
Reality is a social construct. We subjective human beings enter a discourse with one another about what we experience, and it is that continuous shared discourse that constitutes "reality" for us. If you hesitated to accept the validity of this description for all of reality, I would suggest it is certainly true for the special case of political phenomena.
That is, our discourse, the sharing of our experience, both with one another and with the common flow of opinion, is what constitutes the reality of politics. The political reality then changes with changing perceptions, without being grounded in any absolute objective "reality" outside of the relative experiences of the people who are participating in the political group of interest. We should not wonder "What's the Matter with Kansas", for the decisions at the polls by its citizens are reflective of their world, not necessarily that of ours (we urban coastal progressives, that is). How and why those different perceptions flourish is the question -- one which we would do well to address -- rather than to ask What Went Wrong.
After all, the former is how history is conducted. Even so distinguished a historian as Martin Malia, in addressing surely the largest question among scholars of Russian history, how did the Russian Revolution produce a Stalinist dictatorship, is reprimanded by the reviewer -- a scholar of more modest accomplishment, at an institution of limited prestige -- in the largest-circulation U.S. scholarly journal addressing Russian history. Chester Dunning, of Texas A&M University, writes in the April 2007 issue of Russian Review:[H]e makes interesting points about the evolution of European radicalism and the origins of Leninism, but his keen interest in intellectual history and the development of socialism as an ideology results in an ultimately unsatisfactory explanation of the Russian Revolution. Malia firmly believed that Marxist ideology -- not Russian history -- was primarily responsible for Red October [the poetic way of referring to the Revolution -- MM] and the nature, shape, and history of the Soviet Union. So utterly convinced was he of socialism's pernicious effects that he essentially ignored Russian cultural, social, economic, and even political history in his interpretation of the origins of the Boshevik victory. The resulting denatured and perfunctory description of the Russian Revolution seems strangely detached from Russin history and incredibly condescending toward Socialist Revolutionaries, peasants, and workers.
The same feature of human social construction of reality thas a significant rôle in science; for this I would like to adduce as evidence of the claim the classic account of the epochal observation of massive bosons, at the Centre European de Récherche Nucléaire in 1983 by John Krige in Isis of September 2001: In this essay I want to describe the decision to embark on this [hunt for massive bosons] at CERN and to track, at a micro level, the changing epistemic status of truth claims as they were produced and circulated among physicists at the research front, migrated across the interface between teams and the laboratory directorate, and were relayed out from CERN and across the Atlantic
Two teams of researchers at CERN had found, in January 1983, preliminary evidence of the W boson and that of the Z boson. Krige continued directlyConfidence in the results sprang from two sources. The first was the so-called Standard Model of weak interactions, which by 1979 had become more or less universally accepted. This model predicted the existence of the charged W particle (and a heavier, neutral boson called the Z) as well as some characteristics of its decay -- indeed, just those characteristics that the experimenters were seeing.
Second, the results seemed to be reproducible. Both teams [UA1 and UA2 -- MM], working independently -- in the limited sense that they had built different detectors and had not systematically shared their data with one another -- were coming up with similar-looking "candidate events" that seemed to confirm the validity of each other's findings. But this was not enough. For there was no consensus among the two hundred scientists involved in these experiments as to the significance of the results they had obtained. There were in fact differences of opinion over what conclusions could legitimately be drawn from the data not only between the two rival teams involved in the experiments, but within the individual teams themselves. (Emphasis added)
The one who in Krige's account transformed the interesting results into an unproblematic "discovery" of the massive bosons predicted by the Standard Model was Carlo Rubbia, the leader of team UA1: The last thing [Rubbia] wanted was for UA2 to steal in ahead of him with a publication. Indeed, he was so afraid that the rival team would get the credit for the discovery of the W, thereby also blurring his credit for the whole program, that he deliberately misled some members of UA2 about his publication plans. The morning after [Luigi] di Lella [the lead physicist of UA2]'s seminar at CERN Rubbia encountered him and two colleagues from UA2 in the CERN cafeteria. He suggested that both groups should think carefully before going into print and warned the UA2 members that "if you want to publish, it's your business, but if those events aren't Ws, your career is going to be ruined." . . . The UA1 paper was already with the editor of Physics Letters.
The Nobel Prize for 1984 went to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer, the accelerator physicist who collaborated with him. Di Lella subsequently held no grudges; he told Krige, "I know with Carlo, Carlo will beat you and he will use all kinds of tricks to beat you. You have to accept the man for what he is."
Sounds something like your typical politician, eh?
Please don't believe that I recommend anything other than the highest integrity in poltical advocacy. No, I allege that if high-energy physics has a large component of social construction of reality, then politics has an even larger component. Immanuel Kant himself said that we can only discuss the phenomenal world, and that ultimate facticity -- "das Ding an sich" in German -- is forever beyond our grasp. We can learn, we Greens, from the success of the rather slippery Carlo Rubbia that assertion is a large fraction of the valid world picture. Deep inside ourselves we know that we are the political party of the future. Let us cease being reluctant about asserting that fact -- it is a fact -- and start to build a political party to make our aspirations a reality. A socially constructed one, of course. |
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