Anarchist India, Research Time, 30/09/2016

We in the West have a lot to learn from others. I mean, everyone has a lot to learn from everyone else – that’s just the nature of singularity. All of our experiences and life narratives are different, and we can all learn from each other. 

But speaking more specifically (and without empty hippie platitudes), I think Western progressive activists have a lot to learn from community organizing in India. At least, from my first tentative investigation into the curious new kinds of political associations that modern Indian society produces, we have a lot to learn.

We Westerners (as far as I can speak for a whole society spread over
four continents) tend to think of slums as sad, pathetic places. And
their people lead difficult lives. But revolutionary political creativity
can emerge from these places.

Yesterday, I wrote about how Western political thinking is stuck in a bind. In our political tradition, states first developed as civil organizations. Their purpose was to unify disparate people across wide territories behind a common mission and a common identity. 

The Western state was the material articulation of the spirit of the nation – such was the philosophy. And the institutions of the state were designed to build that communal spirit of nationhood in the first place. It was supposed to take real associations and societies of plurality and unify them, homogenize them. 

We’ve run into quite a problem with this, which is that national identity never matches borders exactly. People who identify with one nation live outside it, and we feel a strange legitimacy when a national state tries to protect nationals (even non-citizen nationals) outside its borders. Even when it results in aggressive expansion or subversive invasion.

The nation-state has been obviously obsolete since, as far as I’m concerned, 1945. So what kind of political institutions can be alternatives?

Chatterjee identifies – without using the phrase itself – the welfare state as a vibrant, functional alternative to nationalism and the nation-state. When the state and the government is a service provider, it focusses on identifying differences, not smoothing them into unity.

There are populations with different needs, different situations, and different histories. The state has obligations to help all these populations in its territory develop better lives for themselves. That results in a much more empowered citizenry.

Here’s an example from Kolkata: Rail Colony Gate Number One. This is a shantytown of about 1500 people in a Kolkata suburb on the side of railroad tracks. Everyone knows their settlement is completely illegal. They’re squatters on private land – political and ecological refugees, as well as economic migrants, from Bangladesh and East Bengal.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become the face of Hindu
nationalism, a label he's embraced. And while he's managed to
control the public image in the West of what India has embraced,
his power over a dynamic population of more than a billion is not
quite as considerable as the propaganda suggests.

Everyone – squatters included – acknowledges that they’re squatters, and so their community is legally precarious. It’s subject to forced removal at any time. But these very poor people literally have nowhere else to go. 

And that’s why the railway and municipal authorities let them stay – because they have nowhere else to go. Also, they’ve formed their own relationships with the surrounding neighbourhoods as care workers and day labourers. They’ve become economically integrated over the decades the Colony has existed.

The welfare state owes these people resources to live and improve their lives. Now, they way we think about the government coming to help in the West, we’d expect disasters to unfold. It’s become obvious in our culture that the government is a disconnected, distant, barely competent service provider. But that’s not what happened in Kolkata.

Community leaders in Rail Colony Gate #1 formed Jana Kalyan Samiti – The People’s Welfare Association. It’s an organization of community organizers in the shantytown itself, which coordinates with the government and other stakeholders in the neighbourhood for service provision and diplomacy.

As far as principles go, it’s an anarchist organization. Again, this has a very different meaning than mainstream Western ideas. We tend to think of anarchism as Black Bloc crust-punks who live in squats, beg or wash dishes for a living, and reject education or social advancement.

That’s a false picture of how anarchism as a philosophy works. In the Western academic world, anarchism tends mostly to be a negative argument about the oppressive powers of national governments and authoritarian institutions. 

But anarchism, in a positive sense, is network politics. Organizations arising from communities themselves, as people build networks that grow to become huge associations with core and periphery members. 

The leaders of the Rail Colony’s People’s Welfare Association are relationship brokers between the people of the shantytown, neighbourhood organizations, the rail company, and all levels of the Indian government. This Indian organization – to take it as one example – has shown us how to do anarchism right.

Politics as relationship brokerage for the betterment of everyone in the community.

The World Challenging the West, Research Time, 29/09/2016

I can’t quite remember how I got my hands on Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed. Was it from my friend The Wiz liquidating a bunch of his books before his move to the USA? Was it a book giveaway at McMaster? It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad I have it.

One unfortunate hole in my education was that, no matter how much I read of current and historical political thinking, it was all Western. In so much of the humanities academy, non-Western thought is a minor, largely neglected specialty subject. 

Yet ignoring non-Western political thinking and problems means ignoring the situations of literally half the world’s population. 

We in the West tend to have a hard time understanding and living in
multiculturalism, except maybe for a few cities like New York,
London, and Toronto. It's a new idea for us. But India has had so
many commingling cultures, ethnicities, and identities as part of
its society for so long, that they're truly experts on multiculturalism.

As a Western person who writes about political ideas, I have something of an obligation at least to look into and understand the core concepts that drive political movements in the rest of the world. We can’t just act as though the history and traditions that have shaped the Western political mind-set apply universally.

If you want to take a really aggressive view of that false universality, you can call it cultural imperialism. I prefer to think of the belief in that false universality as ass-ignorant insularity.

But there are all kinds of different ways for non-Western political ideas to diverge from the presumptions of Western thinkers and people. This isn’t a matter of West v East. 

Collapsing all the diversity of the world beyond the directly European descended cultures into a single category of East oversimplifies so much that it’s completely inaccurate. India, the subject of Chatterjee’s thought, is itself an immensely diverse country.

There are caste, class, religious, ethnic, and cultural divergences, all varying with location within the country, all the variety that such a massive society of more than a billion people can muster.

I had dinner with my old friend Bombay Blaque tonight, who’s lived in Mumbai for nearly two years now. India is a wildly diverse society, a land of so, so many.

So of all the difference that could exist, what’s the first one that stood out for me? Chatterjee introduces his book discussing a key divergence in European and Indian political histories. 

I'm only a couple of chapters in to Chatterjee's The Politics
of the Governed, and I already feel like I'll need to invent
a bunch of new tags for my entries about his work,
because understanding India requires entirely different
modes and categories of political thinking.

In Europe, the civil nation was the focus of the state’s creation. It was to create a political body and political discourse that would unite the people as such – not as inhabitants of a town, or subjects of a kingdom – as the people of a nation. 

So the public function of a civil nation – how people primarily encountered their state – was as a legislature creating their laws and civil contracts. That’s how we Westerners think of the primary function and purpose of a state, because that’s how we developed out own political culture and thinking. But that isn’t how the modern state formed in India.

In India, the modern independent state exists in people’s lives primarily as a service provider – the welfare state came before the civil state. So the state isn’t primarily the vehicle for legislation to articulate the general will of the people as a unified nation.

Instead, the state in much of the non-Western world breaks down when it tries to institute national unity. Its primary function is to identify differences – needs, situations, problems, inequities, social situations, and ecological relationships – and provide these differences the resources they need to thrive. 

Of course, the state in many parts of the world doesn’t come nearly close to satisfying all these obligations. But what matters to people’s conception of their state isn’t what it achieves, but its purpose. When the welfare state comes first, the purpose of a state is primarily redressing real physical and cultural needs and grievances.

As the West confronts yet another growing wave of violent nationalism in its history, we may have something to learn from a political philosophy where the role of the state is redress and welfare.

There’ll definitely be more to come on Chatterjee. And as many other thinkers from beyond the West as I can find.

White Privilege in Miniature, Research Time, 28/09/2016

I wrote last week about the Shallow Pond Problem. It’s a common problem in contemporary moral philosophy – a seemingly straightforward way to apply abstract principles to large, complicated political issues.

That’s what you want philosophy to do, right? Take complicated practical matters to the most abstract level, where you can apply simple concepts and arguments to the problem and get clear answers for intractable problems. 

Looks innocuous, doesn't it. But don't be fooled by its simplicity. Or
maybe I should say, don't let yourself prefer the simple.

The Shallow Pond goes like this. You’re wearing an expensive suit while walking past a shallow pond. In the pond, you see a child drowning. Obviously, the ethically correct decision is to wade into the pond and rescue the kid. It ruins your suit, but ruining your suit is acceptable collateral damage for saving a child’s life.

That’s the simple setup. Here’s the application to complex real-world problems. Because your slight sacrifice (wrecking your suit) is obviously a worthwhile price for a great good (saving a drowning child), then your slight sacrifice (donating all you possess but a subsistence income) is obviously a worthwhile price for a great good (donating it all to charities that provide live-saving care to the desperately poor).

I've known professional moral philosophy academics who find this argument seriously compelling. Peter Singer first put forward the argument in a professional philosophy journal, but it’s inspired other philosophy professors to become activists / lobbyists on behalf of global poverty relief.*

* Though like most human projects, corruption and hypocrisy have followed. 

How effective those projects actually are at work doesn’t undercut the moral imperative, which is entirely conceptual. 

From the first time I heard the argument, I had deep suspicions about it. But I couldn’t always put my finger on it. I think back to my earlier days in the academy, and I remember one common factor in all these times that I felt suspicious of a straightforward, clear argument. But I couldn’t argue against it myself because I couldn't root my suspicions in reasons. It was just a feeling at the time.

I learned how to explain and understand my suspicions as reasons when I learned one deceptively easy way to argue against such seemingly obvious conclusions. It’s deceptive, because I don’t think a lot of folks realize how easy it is to undercut an obvious conclusion.

He's a good writer in that he can easily suggest complex ideas in very
simple writing, but I want Appiah to dive into the complexity!
I know he can.

Cut up the premises.

Last time I talked about Kwame Anthony Appiah’s arguments around the Shallow Pond, I did it in a spirit of disappointment. Because it was an annoying example of the academic’s mistake – considering replies to others’ objections to your ideas as actual elaborations of your idea.

I wanted to read cosmopolitan moral / political attitudes and principles in application to policies and examples, or work through other social problems with a cosmopolitan lens. I wanted to see the idea become complex, not defend itself against arguments that are from a whole other world.

And I mean that seriously. There are many ways you can divide philosophical thinking into categories. However many ways you feel like splitting them up, however many principles you can think of for categories. 

But for the same of understanding what I (and Appiah too) think of approaches like the Shallow Pond problem, let’s think of methods and goals. Two categories of philosophical thinking:

1) Simplifying complex problems to develop obvious, straightforward answers.
2) Developing concepts adequate to real-world problems, so we can better understand very complex situations.

I don’t consider simplifying complex problems as a sensible way to live. Thinking that complex problems always have easy answers gets people into ridiculously horrible messes. 

That's really all Appiah’s response to the Shallow Pond problem is. Incredulousness. Do you really think you can solve world poverty by throwing money at it? It seems like you can, but in a world as complex as ours, everything short of real systematic change is nothing but a patch that falls away after a while.

Speaking of global transparency and corruption, Trump-connected
consultant Paul Manafort is only the most recently-visible one of
literally tens of thousands of people who become multi-millionaires
skimming the money from the activities of massively corrupt
national leaders and wealthy businessmen around the world.

Look at one project in Pogge’s Global Justice Program – advocacy for global financial transparency to stop illicit financial outflow from poor regions of the world. Whether through outright corruption or corporate tax cheating, more than a trillion dollars leaves the holdings of local economies in poor regions of the world. Ending global poverty has a simple answer – keep that money in the local region.

But think about what you’d have to do to achieve that. Yes, you can build a system of international law and well-funded international agencies to support it. Yes, you can advocate for laws against such financial chicanery in the countries most victimized, and local agencies that enforce those laws.

You also have to change global corporate culture so that people don’t naturally gravitate to behaving as tax cheats and money launderers in the first place. So that everyone in the culture feels shame when they fail to pay taxes or pay their hosts and collaborators their fair share. 

Donald Trump bragged that not paying his taxes and stiffing his business partners made him a smart businessman. He’s an ordinary part of an international business culture where this stance is also ordinary. Imagine what you’d have to do to change that entire culture.

So yes, the statements are easy. But understanding what it would take to achieve them is tremendously difficult. How to build airtight laws, how to shepherd those laws through the legislatures of many different institutions and governments (which requires understanding the cultural, moral, and political dynamics of billions of people), how to isolate a moral principle in a society and develop activist techniques to push that principle out of popular favour.

Thinking complicated problems are easy to solve because stating the solution is itself easy. It's a key sign that you haven't dealt with very many actually complex problems in your life. If you want a definition of white privilege that won't get anyone's ethnic hair up on their backs, explain it in this abstract way.

The statements are easy. But the world is complex. I prefer to work in the thought that adapts us to the complex. We can get the work done that way.

Theses on 2016 So Far, Jamming, 27/09/2016

I was originally thinking of posting some initial thoughts on the book by Partha Chatterjee I’ve been reading since last week, The Politics of the Governed. But I had forgotten that it was going to be debate night. 

Because my girlfriend doesn’t want to be stressed out by listening to Donald Trump scream for 90 minutes, I’m not watching it live. Frankly, I think she makes some very solid points. I don’t need this kind of sustained intensity of shit in my life. 

So I’m just following the highlights through a couple of live blogs from The Guardian and The National Post. You know, for all their reputations of being unabashedly left and right wing, respectively, they end up making fairly similar points.

But I’m not about to launch into a detailed analysis of the debate. I feel like so many other people have already said so much about this election and the resurgence of blatant white nationalism in Western society. They’ve said it better than I ever could. 

So here are some short reflections on my having lived through one of the most transformative years of politics and society of my life so far. Almost tweet-worthy. Aphorisms for the cacophony of the internet.

1. I’m not the only one to have felt like David Bowie’s death was an omen of the sudden collapse we’re seeing this year. An icon of joy in your own multiplicity dies terribly after a long, wasting illness that was kept secret from the public. Hope and imagination rotted from the inside.

2. My colleague Phil Sandifer is preparing his Theses on Trump for the expanded edition of Neoreaction: A Basilisk. This year could just as easily provoke Theses on Putin from some Russian writer – if Putin had not already intimidated him into silence and murdered him.

3. The form of the nation-state itself is sick. Trump and Brexit – both of which I’ve written about before – are only two signs of the collapse. If you understand history, you know that the nation-state was the incubator of all our modern forms of democracy. But if you understand our current moment, you see that it’s become an obstacle to democracy.

4. The story of the 21st century will be written by migrants and refugees. Huge waves of economic migrants in search of work and prosperity, as well as refugees fleeing wars, government oppression, ecological disasters, or most often all three at once. How the relatively safe regions of the world treat these migrants will speak to our solidarity and ethical resilience in the face of great tests. So far, we’re largely failing.

5. Hope is deceitful. Many people who supported Bernie Sanders for President in the United States have turned to Gary Johnson, from a social democrat and communitarian to a radical libertarian who’d turn the populace into chattel for the richest of the rich. The ones who marched for hope did so alongside people who only wanted to tear the country down. 

6. Progressive protestors and activists have spent the last few years since Occupy Wall Street clamouring for the heads of financiers. But that’s the battle of the recent past, looking to punish people who committed terrible economic crimes and swindles. If we really want to stop massive crimes against ordinary people before they’re committed, we must turn on Silicon Valley.

7. The ghosts of the past, even from generations ago, will not die. The white communities of the United States still live largely with no consciousness of the twisted legacy of slavery. Dictators kill thousands to maintain their thrones. Former spies lead petty empires.

8. Voting has little to do with ideals. You throw volunteers and activists at an impassive and rigid electoral system and you get a choice between Clinton and Trump. She, at least, can be lobbied and pressured. He will criminalize dissent – even against racism and basic injustice.

9. Donald Trump would build the greatest kleptocracy the world has ever seen. He would suck America dry of wealth.

10. The poor, the desperate are humanity’s great hope. They travel across the globe in the hope of a better future – such audacity embodies hope. I am not poor and desperate – I’m just a hustling millennial Westerner. But I can still hope.

The Frustration of a Blind Audience, A History Boy, 26/09/2016

In the early days of the blog, I wrote a long post about how Edward Said changed my mind radically about the masterwork of one of my favourite authors, Albert Camus. This week, I came across a couple of books that made me reconsider his work again.

Algerian writer Kamel Daoud wrote The Merseault Investigation, retelling the Arab’s side of the story of The Stranger. In short, it’s the narrative of the brother of the man Merseault killed on that beach – his own life as a Muslim African Algerian, marginalized in his own country.

My first exposure to Camus' work was when I bought a copy of The Plague
as a kid, knowing that its author was among my father's favourites.

And Ryu Speath’s piece also reviews Alice Kaplan’s book of literary history Looking for The Stranger, a research work that tries to reconcile the two competing views of Camus’ most legendary achievement.

When I first wrote a long-ish post about Camus, I discussed what Said brought to my understanding of The Stranger that I hadn’t thought of before – Its context as a work by a white Franco-Algerian. 

I’d always dealt with discussions of The Stranger in classrooms, instead of with how any artwork should be read. You should discover a work through a friend’s referral, or your own research because you like affiliated stuff, or it seems interesting when you stumble across it.

The Stranger’s reception when it first dropped was as the narrative statement of French existentialism – the most profound intensities of philosophical confrontation of humanity’s pretences with our finitude, pettiness, and mortality. And that was how its ideas were always discussed when I was in school.

There's "the absurd man" as the universal – reflected and described in the surreal imagery of Franz Kafka, the conceptual profundity of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the stark narrative of Albert Camus. 

One of the reasons my original post got so many pageviews was that I posted a link on a philosophy board at Reddit. This was long before I’d really discovered the depths of Reddit’s white supremacist and misogynist tendencies as a community – I was only ever a casual visitor. 

The Algerian War of Independence saw countless massacres, and was the
first major guerilla-terrorist uprising of a Muslim country against a
Western power. And under Charles DeGaulle's imperialist, nationalist
policies, the French government had it coming.

One commenter told me I simply didn’t understand the concept of the Absurd Man, because I was bringing all this information about real countries, histories, and populations to Camus’ abstract universal. 

So the two receptions of Camus over the 20th century were as a literary prophet of existentialism’s universality, or as a permanently compromised apologist for colonialism whose work continually erased the presence and lives of his Arab neighbours. How would we decide which was the right vision? Did it matter?

Is this basically just restating the basic idea behind “The Death of the Author”? Well, of course it is! But it’s an important enough idea that it still needs to be said. Our reception of Camus literally determines who he is – who he is in the whole world of humanity. How other people receive and understand us is central to all our roles in the wider human world.

It’s especially important for Camus, now that he can’t even get into fights with people over what his work could mean. This author is literally dead.*

* And part of why I find car crashes so interesting as narrative events. 

But just because who an author (or anyone) is depends on how we receive her, that doesn’t make the author entirely passive in this relationship. In this case, we can still uncover elements of Camus’ personality and positionality that can guide us to his intentions. 

And that’s what Kaplan’s book apparently does. When I read Said’s essay – both the general rejection of Camus in post-colonial literary studies and his own more nuanced take on The Stranger and other of the Algerian’s works – Camus was described as a white Algerian. His poverty was acknowledged, but he was still taken as someone who lived separately from the Arab population.

The war of independence brutalized Algerian culture and politics ever
since, with the newly liberated government consolidating a
military dictatorship and the only opposition being radical Islamist.

But that wasn’t actually true – among the very poor, which Camus was, there was a lot more social mixing with the local Arab population. The poor Franco-Algerian communities where Camus was raised suffered most during the war of independence and the ejection of French-speaking white people from free Algeria. They weren’t accepted as legitimate Algerians, despite having lived there for centuries, but they weren’t able to leave the country in mass because they were too poor. 

Said also depicted Camus’ opposition to Algerian independence and the anti-colonial rebellion in simple nationalist-colonial terms. But in Camus’ own correspondence and discussions, he wanted a more utopian achievement for Algeria and France. He wanted the two countries united in a post-national state where Arab Algerians, Franco-Algerians, white Europeans, and French Muslims could live together as neighbours. 

And it becomes clear what Merseault was originally supposed to be. When I finally got around to reading The Stranger, what struck me most – what I was never expecting from all the glowing depictions of the narrator as a literary voice of existentialism – was what an asshole Merseault was. 

Camus made him an asshole from the start. He didn’t want us to sympathize with Merseault – The Stranger’s narrator was a condemnation of French self-absorption and refusal to see people with any sympathy. 

Algeria's political environment today has no place for
secular-leaning, liberal intellectuals like Kamel Daoud,
who's risked his life to criticize the military regime and
Islamist opposition. In The Merseault Investigation he
writes of his country, "the beast fattened on seven years
of war had become voracious and refused to go back
underground."

The problem with its reception was that too many readers bought into Merseault’s self-lionization. They saw all Merseault’s dignity in absurdity, but were blind to the ethical (and political) implications of his actions – the only thing that could get the colonial French authorities to punish a white man for murdering an Arab was if he were already a pariah in the community.

So that’s the most recent serious reconsideration I’ve given to the point of view and ethics of this writer who’s been so important to me since I was a teenager. And this doesn’t diminish him in my eyes, no. 

All this complication, my picture of Camus, his work, all the meanings in his words, only makes the experience of reading him more rich and satisfying than it ever was before. I’m thankful to everyone who’s contributed to the complexity and the strangeness of this legendary writer.

A Refreshing Refusal of Universality, A History Boy, 23/09/2016

Years ago, when I was doing my Master’s degree, my supervisor* was giving a presentation on philosophy of language. This was the first moment in my education when I was just completely confounded by the reaction of a fellow student. 

* His avatar in this post will be Artie Shaw. Similar enough for people who know us to know who he is, but still doing the duty of a pseudonym. Also, he’d find it funny.

Shaking my head thinking, “Why would you even ask that?” Not at anything aggressive or offensive, but at such cross-purposes to the lecture that no one really knew how to react.

A universe of infinite variety and difference.

It was about a conception of counter-factual propositions as a synthetic a priori – knowledge that you learned entirely through thinking, but which involved reasoning beyond just logical implications of definitions. You had to think through imaginary empirical situations, what could have been.

This lecture was ten years ago, and I largely never again touched the Kripke-inspired philosophy of language that Artie Shaw was ploughing through at the time. So I’m probably messing up the substance of the talk entirely. 

But the point is – this use of the term ‘a priori’ referred entirely to counter-factual reasoning and modal logic, the quantification of possibility. In the Q&A, my colleague The Cartesian asked:

“But what about the universal?”

It was a sensible question from his perspective – The Cartesian was literally a Cartesian. He was steeped in terminology and tradition that conceived of the realm of pure thought as where you discover universal truths. And that’s not what philosophy really does anymore.

I mean, I’ve met plenty of working philosophy professors who still think this way about the discipline. But they tend to produce very unremarkable work on topics that are far removed from the concerns or our day. 

Either the write entirely scholarly material on the works of great philosophers from centuries ago. Or they write on the same problems those earlier philosophers did as if they were still vibrant topics whose answers could grip a society.

I had been leaning this way for a while, even at that young age. But that moment very suddenly pushed me to realize something very important. Problems of universal truth don’t really matter very much, aren’t interesting, and aren’t even productive. They just distract you from the really fascinating issues and ideas of the world.

So I had a wonderful chuckle at Anthony Appiah’s casual rejection of any possibility of truly universal knowledge in human societies. Can we say anything universally true of all humans? In the moral or ethical realm? Probably not. At least not in that traditional sense of the universal as essence, as applying without exception.

This does amount to a blanket declaration, but after more than a century of poking gaping materialist holes of contingency in all those old pretensions to the universal, I think it’s safe to declare it simply. Appiah writes from a solidly pragmatist perspective, and so do I.

There is no universal in human nature. 

Where we think there are universals, there are really just tendencies common enough that we haven’t run into any counter-examples. 

What’s more, we don’t even need shared universals to build empathy between different people. We’re used to the appeals to a shared humanity to encourage peace building. At least in the rhetoric. “Ain’t we all kin?” I sometimes think the idea of a humanity bound by what we have in common comes from spending too long swimming in the conformist language of the nation.

Differences are what fascinates us. If we meet people who are exactly the same as we are, they bore us quickly. Variety and surprise is the basis of our strongest relationships – they challenge us as we come to know them, and open our world to new possibilities.

Even in the most tense and violent places, exploring difference is the foundation of real peace. We’re diverse and unique, and that universal of no universality – the singularity of the world – brings us together.

Our Morals Live on Our Exchanged Breath, Composing, 22/09/2016

A short post tonight, as I’ve just been quite busy today and don’t have much time to write something long. Also, what I want to write about, I’ve covered a fair bit already. At a lot of points along the last few years of blogging my research and writing, I’ve talked about the fact/value distinction.

The most interesting things I read about it are arguments and explorations that make a problem out of this. But that’s always the most interesting thing to do with anything that most people in a field (or a society) believe obviously true – blow it up.

You can't just deny that some long-accepted principle is true. That would be the philosophical equivalent of just telling someone you dislike to go fuck himself. If you really want people compelled to take up your alternative, you almost have to write like a roast.

Develop reasons why a principle doesn’t work, or show how the world is more complex than the principle can allow for. I think one of the ways academic philosophy has been running out of steam is that we accept roasting a particular argument or some particular writer’s account of a core framework concept, with the same enthusiasm as we should reserve for the most fundamental critiques. 

They've been aiming too low, shrinking expectations. 

A highlight of Cosmopolitanism is Appiah’s critique of the fact-value distinction. He gives a concise account of how the distinction splits our propositions, and then shows how inadequate it is to everything that humanity does. 

To summarize, facts are one type of thing, according to the mainstream Western conception,* and values are another. Fact: A state of affairs in the world. Value: An individual’s moral/political wishes, preferences, and desires. 

* Always an abstraction that is never quite what each person in particular thinks, but abstract enough that it applies to the overall tendency of the community, and most reasonably smart people in the community will recognize it as pretty much what they believe.

There's nothing wrong with this basic conception of what facts are. But Appiah’s criticism is that concept of value – essentially, values are themselves a kind of fact. This is because values aren’t only the beliefs of individuals, which we can lock away from the world in our heads, most of the time safely.

Values are themselves a kind of fact. Social facts. Values are communicative concepts. Our discussions about values are themselves facts, and the discussions constitute the values themselves. 

Whether we agree or disagree, all that matters is the ongoing conversation – our communities bind together through our shared investment in the same process of developing and adapting our values. Riffing on his colleague Hilary Putnam,** our values aren’t just in the head.

** In another very sly radical argument. Concepts and meanings exist in thought and in constant communication between thinkers and actors, which includes moral and political concepts. From a conclusion about the nature of knowledge to a principle about the frameworks and foundations of our social moralities.

Values are held at the level of community. I don’t find anything inherently strange about a conclusion that knowledge and morality exist as social phenomena. It’s very difficult to wrap your head around if you still have the baggage of individualistic conceptions of concepts as possessions. “I am thinking this.” Hence some very long debates by very intelligent people.

But I don't find that individualistic conception of thought very difficult to discard. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Deleuze and Guattari over the years and I just think of everything in terms of fields. Maybe I had enough critical engagement with phenomenology over the years that I don't see a firm separation between mind and world anymore. 

People accustomed to traditions of thinking that don’t really engage with these topics (whether or not they’re stereotypically ‘continental’) seem to have the most trouble accepting that it makes sense to say knowledge, thought, and morality are all social phenomena.

Either way, it blows a lot of traditional Western philosophy and philosophical discussions to pieces once you accept it. It feels like you’re writing from a new beginning for a whole tradition.

It's About What Gets the Job Done – And the Job, Research Time, 21/09/2016

When I first read Cosmopolitanism, I wasn't impressed
by its very casual, seemingly superficial treatment of its
concepts. But underneath those long, almost nostalgic
fables of a casually multicultural world are some
very radical conceptual moves.

Despite my problems with Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, his book is filled with genuinely fascinating and useful ideas. They’re dealt with at a barely introductory level, but they're still very interesting.

One of these is Appiah’s pragmatism. I mean this referring to the tradition of philosophical thinking that began with that usual trinity of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey.* Appiah applies a pragmatism about the use of knowledge and frameworks of understanding the world to a globalist problem.

* Here’s another issue I have with academic philosophy in the English-speaking West. The widespread presumption that pragmatism isn’t a living tradition of thought, but that if you call yourself a philosophical pragmatist, all it means is that you write secondary material about James, Peirce, and Dewey. This irks me.

That problem is in one of the few directly useful examples in Cosmopolitanism. The encounter of a person familiar with scientific knowledge about infection and disease with a society of people who  believe primarily in witchcraft and evil spirits. 

It's an example that plays to just about every racist stereotype about indigenous people you can think of. That’s why, I think, Appiah chose it. I’ve heard quite a few well-educated, quite wealthy people use just these stereotypes to dismiss the validity of indigenous knowledge. 

Even what we think of as enlightened
progressive corners – like environmental
activists – indulge in such ridiculous
racist stereotypes of indigenous people
as "mystically in touch with the land."
As if they were magical spirit people
instead of people. It erases the real human
complexity of indigenous cultures as
the old horrifying adage about savages.

They say we have nothing to learn, for example, from indigenous medicinal practices because they’re based in oral tradition and inherited folklore instead of “the scientific method.” Of course, any basic reading in the history and philosophy is science shows that there is no such single “scientific method” applying to everything we call science. Apart maybe from “Pay attention!”

I came across this debate pretty frequently when I was researching for Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, because a major eco-activist narrative** is rediscovering indigenous American connections to the land that were overwritten and erased by America’s history of genocide.

** Crass oversimplification that it still is. . . . 

So Appiah’s example sets up a problem – a group of indigenous stereotypes*** believe that illness is caused by spirits and witchcraft. They also live near a polluted water source. They essentially need a boil advisory, but don’t know any of the science behind why you should boil polluted water before using it. So they still get preventable diseases.

*** Seriously, I don't think people like this have ever existed outside thought experiments like these.

Appiah's thoughtful Westerner explains, in as clear a format as he can, the germ theory of disease, and that boiling water can kill the bacteria that causes their sicknesses. None of this fits with any of the framework ideas of the community’s worldview, so they don’t understand it and don’t follow his good advice.

Then the thoughtful Westerner explains that the community’s water source has been infested with evil spirits that cause illness, and that boiling the water sends them away – see, the bubbles of boiling water are the spirits escaping. So the community is healthy again.

Above: The only person who deserves to be called a
savage. Jokes aside, Appiah smuggles into this very
light writing style an argument that makes an
audacious and brazenly unorthodox inference. He
reasons from a fact about the nature of knowledge
to an implication about ethics and politics. In this, he's
a real metaphysician.

You know, Appiah’s example doesn’t sound nearly so racist when he writes it in Cosmopolitanism. Ironic that a book whose purpose is explaining a political philosophy about embracing the infinite variety of humanity could fall into an example that trades in such condescendingly racist imagery.

The conceptual point is sound, though. We can solve most of the problems that constitute human life with a ton of different and incompatible frameworks for understanding the world.

Accept as fact that – following the research and concept-building of Claude Duhem and Willard Quine – reality under-determines how we understand it. It’s not a relativism, where there are many different truths. 

Now let your political and moral stances flow from this truth about reality. Even dealing with the types of people that confirm everyone of your racist stereotypes ignorant savages, they can still be your intellectual equals. They will look at the world differently, but their way of looking remains valid and practically sound.

Recognize as your fellow human even these people you’ve derided as ignorant savages for centuries. That’s the political implication of a pragmatist conception of knowledge. 

Wonderful Ideas Drowning in a Shallow Pond, Composing, 20/09/2016

So last week, I said that I’d read through Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism to figure out the details of precisely how such a cosmopolitan morality and politics would work. Etienne Balibar and I both see that general approach as the best alternative to the extreme nationalism that’s consuming European and American politics.

That nationalism is even creeping into Canada, through the dog-whistle racism and terrorism paranoia that’s already slipped into our Conservative Party.

As interesting a thinker as Appiah is, reading Cosmopolitanism left so
many blanks in the implications and deeper content of his ideas.

I’d had a copy of Cosmopolitanism for years, but never got around to reading it. I knew it was a book that helped establish Appiah as one of the leading political philosophers of the English-speaking world. So I thought I’d find a short, but dense and challenging book of interesting political and moral concepts. 

Well, the book was interesting and short. But Appiah’s presentation wasn’t ultimately very challenging at all. And it was actually very superficial. Most of the text was taken up by accounts of historical, social, and personal examples showing how complex and plural human societies have always been and always will be.

The entire book Cosmopolitanism was essentially an introduction, when I was expecting some deeper conceptual probing and analysis. 

I found plenty to think about, and I’ll write a few posts over the rest of the week detailing what I have been thinking about among Appiah’s ideas. But they'll be at a more basic level that I shouldn't have had to think about. 

Or at least, I don't think I should have had to keep my thoughts at such a basic level, given the reputation of Cosmopolitanism as a book. I’m not sure why Appiah kept his analysis at such a simple level here. I’d like my friends who are still more closely embedded in professional scholarly networks to get back to me about this, because I do feel at kind of a loss. 

Here are my hypotheses. 1) Cosmopolitanism was always intended for the mass market. So it would be read and cited by a professional scholarly audience, but it would also serve as a popular reference guide for Appiah’s thought. So he scaled back the complexity of his analysis, presuming that it would be too dense or dry for a casual reader.

One of the many elements of my disenchantment with the world of
academic scholarship was that their world of books has become
so disconnected from the concerns of the real world, while
simultaneously losing the profundity that's supposed to come
with deep thinking. So much academic discourse has devolved
into a debater's club that it's incapable of real progress.

In that case, I’d ask my friends with access to paywalled scholarly journals to send me some of the material where Appiah actually gets into the meat of his concept and its implications. But the scholarly-popular distinction may not be all that’s going on here.

2) The state of the moral-political debates among philosophy scholars actually didn’t get that deep. Most of the debates among scholars at the time revolved around particular duties individuals and governments would have to other individuals and governments around the world. 

Subjects included the nature, amount, and conditions of foreign aid delivery from rich to poor countries; which countries had the rights to control the movement and sale of ancient art and artifacts around the world; the proper structure of international forums.

The more profound ideas about the construction of cultures and culture itself, the nature of nationhood, how communication and exposure to differences shapes moral principles and ethical development – all these seem to have been black boxes in the debates.

In this case, I’d come at my university-connected friends with another request. Let me know what people were really talking about in this era, tell me what I may have missed at the time. 

I was only briefly introduced to these scenes at the end of my undergraduate education. I wasn’t yet an insider able to get the more detailed dope on these discussions. The fact that I don’t have access to paywalled scholarly publications anymore means that I can’t easily look this stuff up.

One more hypothesis.

3) Scholarly philosophy (at least in the English speaking world) has a very poor idea of what it means to elaborate a concept. They mistake replying to others’ objections for improving your understanding of the ideas.

It's like falling into the deepest catacombs of Borges'
Library of Babel and never even understanding that
you're stuck anywhere.

Here’s what I mean. After nine chapters, Appiah acknowledges that he’s really only introduced his concept of cosmopolitanism, but hasn’t really gotten that detailed. He opens Chapter 10, the last of the book, with a promise to do just that.

Instead, we get an extended treatment of Appiah’s reply to the Shallow Pond problem in utilitarian moral philosophy. In short, the Shallow Pond problem was, in 2006, often used to critique cosmopolitan moral ideas. It starts from a thought experiment.

You walk by a muddy shallow pond, wearing an expensive suit. You see a child drowning in the pond and you’re the only other person around. Even though your suit gets wrecked, you have a moral obligation to wade in and rescue the child. 

This gets abstracted to the principle that, no matter how much inconvenience and pain may come to you in the process, if you’re a rich person (or a rich society), you have a moral obligation to give all that you can – even to the point of destitution – to uplift the destitute and desperate. 

The Shallow Pond problem becomes an objection to cosmopolitanism when a writer takes it as a demonstration that all charity is ridiculous, especially charity to people who have very little attachment to you and your society. See, the Shallow Pond problem is inherently ridiculous because, as Appiah says and I agree, you can't reduce the complexity of today’s global economic system to have such a simple solution as rich people sending money to poor people.

A cosmopolitan’s obligations to people around the world is more like advocating for a better economic system. An end to pollution, authoritarian regimes and the kleptocracy they encourage, and all the horrible aspects of oligarchy that freezes enormous amounts of wealth in the private accounts of a few thousand people.

That's a lot more than just emptying your pockets to give to charities that feed hungry children or deliver them free water. That’s what the Shallow Pond problem makes economic justice look like, when it’s really a band-aid.

Falling helplessly into a shallow pond sounds like a
pretty good metaphor to describe a moribund academic
conversation, now that I think about it.

You’ll notice my summary of this Shallow Pond discussion doesn’t actually talk much about cosmopolitanism as a concept. It just responds to an objection, and ends up talking more about the objection than the concept itself.

And I noticed this mistake was widespread when I was in the academy. I’d regularly encounter professors who thought they improved a philosophical work by making objections to its ideas that shared pretty much no conceptual ground. They thought progress in philosophy was to become better and better at winning and defeating arguments. 

In which case, I’d ask my academy friends two questions. One is, like in the other hypotheses, if they could confirm that this really was the scholarly debate unfolding behind the paywalls. 

The other is whether I’d be able to convince any publishers – academic or popular – whether there’s a market for actually profound engagements with political ideas about how community building and social idealism is bound into essential human nature.

“Show Me Your Papers, Boy!” Composing, 19/09/2016

The past few posts on the blog have been me running over the horrors of nationalism from different angles and vectors. It’s not like I'm the only one. All the political instability the West is experiencing now – Trump and Trumpism, the rise of Russia as the globe’s worst meddler, Brexit and the wave of racism across Europe – has a nationalist expression, and is rooted in nationalism’s core concepts. 

Just yesterday, I was talking about Trump with some
friends who still find it hard to take him seriously. But
we have to – not taking him seriously led to his getting
the Republican nomination. If we don't take seriously the
threat of Trump and the American white nationalist
movement he leads, we'll have a kleptocratic
authoritarian regime in the White House.

When I eventually write and publish my second big non-fiction book Utopias, there will be some grappling with nationalism. The book will examine what moralities best facilitate community formation while optimizing human freedom – the tensions between individual freedoms and responsibilities to the neighbourhood. 

Here’s a walk-though of my thought process about one part of that moral investigation.

An important part of community formation is the exclusion-inclusion dynamic – who’s part of the community and who isn’t. When we say our society is a democracy (and try to build our institutions to make it one too), we mean that anyone who’s part of the community can access the levers of power.

Anyone in the community has the right to run for government office. In a technologically advanced, large society, you need a lot of money to run for office, which is why you need the backing of a political party. But anyone has the right to join a party where they fit in, and work that society to become a candidate for them. 

Or raise the money to run as an individual. Or however else you want to approach getting voted for a position. The point is, no one will say that a citizen of a democratic country doesn’t have the right to run for office.*

* Footnote. There are situations where you can disqualify yourself for that right, like a law invalidating you from standing for office if you’ve been convicted for some crimes. But even if you’ve lost that right, you still started with it by default, then messed up.

No member of a democratic state is illegitimate in her attempt to seek office or their holding the office. Now, one recent real-world example makes for an erosion of democracy.

The premise of Birtherism was that Barack Obama was illegitimately holding the President’s office – his lack of legitimacy was because he was black. 

Though he's no stranger to controversy for how he
expresses his ideas on race and black exclusion, Touré
has some illuminating insights about currents of
thought in Black American communities.

No birther – not even the movement’s chief cheerleader Donald Trump – ever openly said that a black person can't legitimately be United States President. But it was still a black President with an African name who faced this unique challenge. 

No matter how successful you are at denying that race was ever a factor in the extreme opposition Obama faced from the Republican Party – and even the most infamous manage something like a case – to oppose Obama by delegitimizing him as birtherism does inevitably makes race a factor.

As Touré explains in this clip discussing the birther movement, whether a birther has a racist intent doesn’t affect birtherism’s racial affects. Black American communities tended to see Obama’s election as a culmination of their finally gaining full citizenship. With all the work that remains to be done, having a black President is an institutional recognition of black citizenship.

Then Trump spearheads this movement that declares that black President illegitimate – taking advantage of his ethnically diverse heritage to sow suspicion about Obama’s identity and beliefs. “I want to see your papers, boy!”

Birtherism introduces a standard of legitimacy’s proof that only came up regarding a black person. It’s impossible to disentangle racism from this, even if racism isn’t even in every birther’s intents. Birtherism is a refusal to accept black citizenry. It’s the assertion of black exclusion from the community of citizens. 

Nationalist ideologies in action create internal minorities of the disenfranchised, the internally excluded. For all its ideals, America has long been an ethnically restricted democracy, a national community and a nation-state institution that excludes within it.

Introduced as "tough on crime" measures, it's no longer
a new idea to call restrictive drug laws in the United
States a new Jim Crow.

This exclusion’s most horrific and institutionalized form was slavery. But in those early days of the state, exclusion also functioned externally, through restricting migration to northern Europeans only, and ethnically cleansing indigenous people from land the government would annex.

Exclusion continued after the Civil War and the failures of reconstruction. Internally through Jim Crow and externally through continued migration restriction, though the latter eventually opened up to Europeans more generally.

Now exclusion continues internally through the carceral state and systematic police violence against dark-skinned minorities. The marginalization of the indigenous continues, though the territorial integration of the American continent means it’s become another internal exclusion. 

In the 21st century, systematic discrimination against Arab Muslim Americans has become a new internal exclusion. Popular paranoia and hostility to immigrants and refugees has become a new external exclusion.

Yet there remains a paradox in all these exclusionary vectors that American white nationalism powers. America remains the city on a hill, the shining beacon of democracy. But for the white nationalist, the democratic potential of America is only for whites. 

Nationalists say you can’t have democracy without limits, that you have to restrict membership in a community to safeguard the community’s freedom. But the whole spirit of democracy is about the collapse of borders between the privileged and underclass. 

That's why Barack Obama’s election was a victory for democracy – it was an erosion of privilege by a member of the underclass. He may speak and carry himself like an elite, but Obama’s skin marks him as part of America’s historical underclass. 

Oppose his policy, fine. But if you delegitimize his claim to the Presidency itself, you continue to exclude black people from the community of American democracy.