We Live in Technocratic Times
Can we conform to consensus while remaining authentic?
Waiting for my turn at a mass vaccination centre, I felt — for the first time in over a year — that I was part of a society. It felt a bit like voting day: people from all walks of life, coming together to partake in a civic duty.
Yet, I was also aware that at the same time, people were out in the streets protesting against vaccine mandates and lockdowns. It would be easy to say that they were refusing to be part of a society — but we all know it is not so simple. They are a society unto themselves; they feel some solidarity as they collectively defend ideals in which they believe. Or perhaps they’re just afraid and feel solidarity in fear — understandable, in times like these.
I grew up amid contradictory cultural influences. My parents divorced when I was young and I moved from my mother’s to my father’s house every week. Between the two, I encountered evangelical Christianity, New Age Spiritualism, and atheism. I met progressive hippies, conservative Christians, and neo-Nazi bikers. It made me curious about different ways of looking at the world. I took an interest in understanding why people saw things the way they did and took pleasure in moving in and out of different worldviews. I was a good postmodernist child of the 90s.
Strengths emerged from this. Sometimes dipping into some niche perspective could offer a fresh take on an issue.
But now, I experience significant doubts in the merits of this fluid relativism. We live in a world that — for a host of legitimate reasons — demands we accept consensus. I’m not just referring to vaccines and public health; one could also refer to the environmental crisis, widening socio-economic inequalities, and deepening political divides. These demand, if not total willingness to believe the consensus, at least a willingness to act of the basis of it, even if we hold our own diverging private views. For unique and contingent reasons, it seems this is what is required at this historical juncture in order to be part of a society.
Stirring up from the soil are all kinds of heterogeneous objections — a rough assemblage of viewpoints that refuse to conform. They are unsure why they should trust the consensus views — especially when they are publicly articulated by the same people they have always been taught to question (and who have betrayed them in the past).
Their alternative realities might once have intrigued me. But in times like this, I feel impatience and frustration.
How can we be authentic in times that demand conformity? Are we really faced with a choice between a subsuming technocracy and a plethora of voices that seem grounded in a desire to believe whatever is most convenient?
Is there a third stance? In academic circles, a triad is sometimes invoked: technocracy-populism-democracy. It is tempting to pass off the current refusals to conform as populist and to aim for a more democratic response. But in this moment, the boundary that separates democracy from the other two seems watery.
The technocracy with which we are confronted is not the neoliberal technocracy with which we are more familiar, in which the technocrats were partisan economic ideologues, whose claims to represent the common good were always tenuous. The current wave of technocracy has a more legitimate claim that it acts on behalf of collective interests. Still, how do we relate to it? And how do we respond to the resistances it generates, which we must encounter in our daily lives, amongst our friends, neighbours, and loved ones?
