I am fairly new to the Effective Altruism community myself, and something I’ve been asking myself regularly is : questions around what actions are to be taken in order to collectively act upon the world in the most effective way in order to achieve altruistic goals are not especially new, so how is EA different from what has been said and done on the subject before it appeared ? This is more or less the whole point of entire fields of political philosophy and strategy.
As I get more and more familiar with the EA community and its intellectual productions, I’m starting to get a better grasp as to how both approaches are framing societal questions each in their own ways, and what similarities and differences there are between these two framings. In my opinion, EA and political frameworks are somewhat similar but different, and complementary, lenses through which we can frame and analyze societal issues.
I am currently in the midst of similar questioning myself, and I’ve been trying to link my reflections with the theoretical framework of the highly influential 20th political thinker Antonio Gramsci.
”Cultural struggle” is a term I encountered several times as an intellectual and activist. It sounds to me like this could fit the Gramscian notion of “war of ideas” and its tangential concept of cultural hegemony.
Do you know if there is a nuance between what people call the “cultural struggle” nowadays, and what Gramsci used to call the “war of ideas” ? Is Gramsci one of the historical authors upon which you ground your theoretical work ? And are there other ways to theorize that cultural struggle that would differ from what Gramsci and people following him wrote ?
Thanks for the questions! I’m not a Gramsci specialist, but it seems to me that he developed the notion of the war of ideas and cultural hegemony within a specific framework linked to the class struggle (he was a communist). It seems to me that in many cases, and particularly in the case of the animal issue, we find ourselves opposed not only to the agri-food industry and the material interests of a fringe of the population, but also to the identity and community interests of each human, who is posited as dominant and privileged in relation to other animals, and who may think that his rights and the consideration he enjoys depend on his dominant (human) status—a status marked in particular by our consumption of meat, by our contempt for other animals. The cultural struggle, then, is not only between the possessing classes, who more or less have a monopoly on the dominant ideological discourse (cultural hegemony), but also between the identity interests of the vast majority of humans—which would also explain humanity’s immense inertia on the animal issue, its unwillingness to take it on board. It’s just one hypothesis among many, but it’s one that I personally favour. In short, all that to say that it seems to me we’re in a very difficult situation where the cultural struggle has to succeed in subverting things as deep-rooted as our human identity (as we would say white identity or male identity, for example). Well, my answer doesn’t really answer your question?
Yes, I think cultural struggle may be more general in the way that it is not linked to one theoretical framework only. If anyone knows of another theorized framework, I’m interested.
However, I’m not sure Gramsci would be unwilling to apply his ideas to this case. Cultural hegemony was mainly ensured by the clergy during feudal times, but they assured the hegemony of the landed aristocracy, not the clergy itself, for example. And the idea that hegemonic intellectuals need not be from the same class as the ones they favor by propagating ideologies (among other things) is pretty central troughout his work.
If we want to think of people directly involved in animal exploitation as the dominant—and hegemonic—class in this case, the fact that many institutions, like medicine, ministries, media and so on that are not directly involved are propagating the myths needed to ensure that the exploitation can go on would not be anything odd. And hegemonic ideologies usually pretend to be universal and tend to naturalize the status quo.
Lower class intellectuals like school teachers may not be the ones that directly profit from labor exploitation, or rent, slavery and so on, but they usually are propagating the mythos favoring the current dominant classes (except from specific transitional periods). And the natural superiority of humans is precisely the kind of naturalized state of affair and supposedly universal truth we’d expect to see in such ideologies. Divine rights were also supposedly “natural” (although they implied supernatural elements, but you get the idea), and religion pretended to represent a universal truth, for example.
Also, when you say “the identity and community interests of each human”, this would be ground to call humans a social class (or at least category, but back in Gramsci’s time, when class reductionism was still a thing, the nuance was not yet clear). And animal advocates could be seen as intellectuals linked to the social category of animals, even though they are not from that category themselves. And as you already know, I think altruism itself, by aligning some interests between different social groups, might be a basis to define a social category in a materialistic framework in itself in my opinion. So I don’t think it is such a stretch to call animal advocacy a cultural struggle between vegans and either carnists or the industry. And human identity being imperiled is something that can be interpreted as a hegemonic ideology naturalizing those social categories.
I believe the fact that Gramsci intended his theories to apply to different modes of production and being mainly about strategy in general rather than one specific goal allow one to apply it to many different cases, with many different goals.
Thank you for this much needed discussion.
I am fairly new to the Effective Altruism community myself, and something I’ve been asking myself regularly is : questions around what actions are to be taken in order to collectively act upon the world in the most effective way in order to achieve altruistic goals are not especially new, so how is EA different from what has been said and done on the subject before it appeared ? This is more or less the whole point of entire fields of political philosophy and strategy.
As I get more and more familiar with the EA community and its intellectual productions, I’m starting to get a better grasp as to how both approaches are framing societal questions each in their own ways, and what similarities and differences there are between these two framings. In my opinion, EA and political frameworks are somewhat similar but different, and complementary, lenses through which we can frame and analyze societal issues.
I am currently in the midst of similar questioning myself, and I’ve been trying to link my reflections with the theoretical framework of the highly influential 20th political thinker Antonio Gramsci.
”Cultural struggle” is a term I encountered several times as an intellectual and activist. It sounds to me like this could fit the Gramscian notion of “war of ideas” and its tangential concept of cultural hegemony.
Do you know if there is a nuance between what people call the “cultural struggle” nowadays, and what Gramsci used to call the “war of ideas” ? Is Gramsci one of the historical authors upon which you ground your theoretical work ? And are there other ways to theorize that cultural struggle that would differ from what Gramsci and people following him wrote ?
Thanks for the questions!
I’m not a Gramsci specialist, but it seems to me that he developed the notion of the war of ideas and cultural hegemony within a specific framework linked to the class struggle (he was a communist). It seems to me that in many cases, and particularly in the case of the animal issue, we find ourselves opposed not only to the agri-food industry and the material interests of a fringe of the population, but also to the identity and community interests of each human, who is posited as dominant and privileged in relation to other animals, and who may think that his rights and the consideration he enjoys depend on his dominant (human) status—a status marked in particular by our consumption of meat, by our contempt for other animals. The cultural struggle, then, is not only between the possessing classes, who more or less have a monopoly on the dominant ideological discourse (cultural hegemony), but also between the identity interests of the vast majority of humans—which would also explain humanity’s immense inertia on the animal issue, its unwillingness to take it on board. It’s just one hypothesis among many, but it’s one that I personally favour. In short, all that to say that it seems to me we’re in a very difficult situation where the cultural struggle has to succeed in subverting things as deep-rooted as our human identity (as we would say white identity or male identity, for example).
Well, my answer doesn’t really answer your question?
Yes, I think cultural struggle may be more general in the way that it is not linked to one theoretical framework only. If anyone knows of another theorized framework, I’m interested.
However, I’m not sure Gramsci would be unwilling to apply his ideas to this case. Cultural hegemony was mainly ensured by the clergy during feudal times, but they assured the hegemony of the landed aristocracy, not the clergy itself, for example. And the idea that hegemonic intellectuals need not be from the same class as the ones they favor by propagating ideologies (among other things) is pretty central troughout his work.
If we want to think of people directly involved in animal exploitation as the dominant—and hegemonic—class in this case, the fact that many institutions, like medicine, ministries, media and so on that are not directly involved are propagating the myths needed to ensure that the exploitation can go on would not be anything odd. And hegemonic ideologies usually pretend to be universal and tend to naturalize the status quo.
Lower class intellectuals like school teachers may not be the ones that directly profit from labor exploitation, or rent, slavery and so on, but they usually are propagating the mythos favoring the current dominant classes (except from specific transitional periods). And the natural superiority of humans is precisely the kind of naturalized state of affair and supposedly universal truth we’d expect to see in such ideologies. Divine rights were also supposedly “natural” (although they implied supernatural elements, but you get the idea), and religion pretended to represent a universal truth, for example.
Also, when you say “the identity and community interests of each human”, this would be ground to call humans a social class (or at least category, but back in Gramsci’s time, when class reductionism was still a thing, the nuance was not yet clear). And animal advocates could be seen as intellectuals linked to the social category of animals, even though they are not from that category themselves. And as you already know, I think altruism itself, by aligning some interests between different social groups, might be a basis to define a social category in a materialistic framework in itself in my opinion. So I don’t think it is such a stretch to call animal advocacy a cultural struggle between vegans and either carnists or the industry. And human identity being imperiled is something that can be interpreted as a hegemonic ideology naturalizing those social categories.
I believe the fact that Gramsci intended his theories to apply to different modes of production and being mainly about strategy in general rather than one specific goal allow one to apply it to many different cases, with many different goals.