Go to TOES97 Home Page
TOES '90, Houston, Day 1 Workshop, July 6, 1990
This workshop will explore how a political system based on episteme, stripped of a local techne (i.e., knowledge embedded in practice, tacit knowledge), is destroying the participatory basis of democracy, particularly in the Third World, where the episteme is an import from the West and the North. The people of Third World societies, often split into ethnic, religious, or other "communities," have lost the ability to live side by side, or even to communicate with each other.
Speakers:
A three-day series of workshops organized by
Regimes are crumbling everywhere, from Warsaw to Cape Town. Even where repressive regimes hold on by brute force, as in China, voices of the people are less easily stilled than in earlier times.
The revolution has played to favorable reviews across the political spectrum; only the ilk of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have felt vindicated by recent political events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. For them, as for many citizens of the once evil empire, the only alternative to Soviet-style socialism is American-style capitalism.
We take a different view. Alongside the massive political repression that has characterized the failed regimes of Eastern Europe and South Africa, we see failures in many other dimensions - environmental destruction, meaningless work, spiritual desolation, and decay of the family and civil society. These are as much the failures of "successful" liberal capitalism as of command socialism. Our common failures, we believe, are linked through the ideological domination of a single knowledge system, one that justifies both capitalism and communism (and, with a little stretching, apartheid too). In our view the problem is the ideological elevation to the status of a cosmology of a particular knowledge system - cerebral, disembedded, industrial, universal knowledge - what we call episteme. Until we understand this domination, all projects of social transformation risk going the way of Soviet-style socialism.
As a cosmology, episteme leaves no room, at least on the ideological level, for other, equally necessary systems of knowledge. As a cosmology, episteme gives us scientific management, which turns the worker into an appendage of the rule book and the machine for whom work has no meaning other than the paycheck at the end of the week; it gives us scientific forestry and scientific agriculture, which threaten to degrade the environment and exhaust the world's resources; it gives us scientific medicine, which transforms the person into a set of laboratory readings and poisons our bodies with chemicals as it prolongs life empty of meaning; it gives us scientific politics and administration, which transfers disembedded and disembodied forms of instrumental and rational politics to the Third World, aiding and abetting the creation and maintenance of authoritarian and repressive regimes. In short, we see the ideological dominance of episteme as the thread that connects apparently disparate practices and beliefs about work, the environment, and the body politic - practices and beliefs that threaten the sustainability of the present course of world development.
The problem, it must be stressed, is not episteme itself; there is a place in every culture for cerebral, disembedded, universal, instrumental knowledge as we enter the third millennium of the Christian era. The problem is rather the degradation of other systems of knowledge that has accompanied the elevation of episteme to the status of a cosmology. In particular, techne - knowledge embedded in practice, tacit knowledge, local knowledge, knowledge which refuses a separation of ends and means - has been put to one side, and with it our best hope for softening the destructive effects of episteme on ourselves, our work, our land, and our body politic.
We propose to present these ideas to TOES, and through TOES to all those who reject both the state and the market as solutions to our problems.
Go to second workshop in the series: "Ecological Sustainability."
Go to TOES '90 Program.
Go to TOES '97 Home Page.