The Whole Point of Politics, Composing, 16/04/2018

I’ve moved. It’s been a huge pain in the ass, but I’ve finally moved apartments. Close to everything I own is still in boxes, but that’s fine. I’ll unfold it all eventually. But I need to get back to writing, because I’ve been all over the place. And I’ll still be all over the place for the next few days.

Things are still being installed in my new place, I have to buy new furniture because this is the first time in ten years that I’ve lived in a place without a closet. It’s all getting to be a bit chaotic. Not in a bad way, because I actually feel more relaxed now than I have in a long while.

Spinoza articulated in the rationalist philosophy of his time
the foundational principle of Kabbalah that all existence is
an expression of God, and ontologically is God itself.

I just really want to be able to hang up my damn clothes.
• • •
Benedict Spinoza’s work had a very profound influence on my own thinking. I rediscovered him through reading Gilles Deleuze, and he supplied a way of reading Spinoza that cut through a lot of the austere worshipfulness that you see in more conventional Spinozists.

I think the most important element of this uptake of Spinoza is reading the Ethics as an ethical and political text. You wouldn’t think this would be difficult, if the title of the book is anything to go by. But because the book starts with a long argument about the existence and nature of God and material reality, the presumption is that it’s primarily about God and reality.

But the Ethics is, frankly, a book about ethics. More than that, it’s a book about the ethics of many bodies interacting together. The Ethics is a book about relationships, how we can manage our relationships with everything in the world around us to live better, more joyfully, without suffering, terror, or pain.

That principle – laid out in books four and five of the Ethics – is the foundation of the most radical Spinozist politics. I’m following Michael Hardt’s book on Deleuze’s early philosophical searching.

Here’s the principle that emerges from the Ethics when you emphasize the end instead of the beginning. The purpose of politics is to arrange our society so that all our encounters with each other and our institutions – or at least as many encounters as possible – are for the mutual benefit of everyone involved.

Universal harmony becomes the foundational principle of political science and practice. That should be the goal of our political work as people, neighbours, and members of communities that stretch across the Earth.
• • •
I’m also looking forward to getting back to work on my novel again, a version of You Were My Friend that I think will have the most legs. It’s interesting how the story is changing.

Madison’s character is, in just the first few sections that I’ve written so far, much more bubbly and energetic than I originally conceived of her. I think that’s going to give her arc – becoming overcome by cynicism – more of a kick than we saw of her in the theatre.

As I add more detail to the story, I think some of the good ideas that emerged when I was planning a You Were My Friend film project will get even more space to explore.

I haven’t gotten to the scenes with Madison's co-worker Jenna Chen, who inadvertently inspires her more mercenary sides. And I think there’s a lot more comedy potential to come out of Madison’s relationship with her on-off boyfriend Wesley the hipster with the stupid moustache.

I want to expand this story, this world, and these people. I think in my new place, I’m going to have more time and energy to do it.

Cracking at the Paradox of Fascism, Composing, 29/03/2018

Sorry it's been a while. I was actually in hospital for a few days since the weekend, but I’m back in reasonable health now. And as of yesterday, I have a new position as an instructor at a new college in Toronto. So the past few days have been really disorienting.

So getting back to this blog today is very much an exercise in grounding myself again. Returning to a regular research and writing routine, as a habitual part of my day, making sure that even on the messiest days, I’ve got a calm space.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said that philosophy had a therapeutic purpose – He wasn’t the first one to say so, of course, but he was the first one I happened to come across who did. Therapy wasn’t the only purpose, of course. But it could serve that function if you needed it – a minimum expression.

By Brunhilda

Meditation. Focus the mind. Think. An activity that sometimes is much too difficult.
• • •
Here’s a paradox for you. It’s a political and conceptual paradox. Call it the paradox of totalitarianism. Those who are most afraid of losing their individuality will shed it themselves.

It doesn’t make much sense on the face of it. But it’s an old problem in political philosophy – not always phrased explicitly, but quite old. Spinoza was the first to ask it.

Why would a person fight so strongly for their slavery as if it were their freedom?

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tackle that problem themselves, thinking of the political context of their own time. It was dominated by the same currents as ours. Globalized liberal capitalism was kicking into gear. Ecological pollution was reaching crisis points. States, corporations, and other institutions were developing far-reaching control into the everyday lives of citizens.

In the 1970s, what did people in the heart of capitalist countries fear? Communism. The creeping embrace of an ideology that fused us into a unified, undifferentiated mass. The state and related institutions had total control over your life, down to the smallest details. Individuality becomes forgotten. Conformity is all that matters.

Not all people, of course. But it was a cultural tendency, which the right-wing politicians of many generations opposed violently and intensely. The North American examples are clearest to me, because this is where I live and this continent is the epicentre of the current movement in this direction.

Joseph McCarthy, William F. Buckley, Andrew Breitbart. These are just a few prominent people who aggressively advocated against any political or social ideas that would reject or curtail our individual freedom.

Above is a perfectly reasoned argument.

Not about individual cases, of course, like criminals.* I mean in the sense of the civic contract, the way all citizens of a community regard each other – as individuals, free to pursue their own lives as they wish.

* Heavens to Betsy, we must never think of treating criminals with dignity! If we did, they wouldn’t be criminals. I kid, but sometimes I hear of something so sickening that sarcasm is my only way to keep from breaking down.

Here’s Ian Buchanan’s take on how Anti-Œdipus expresses the paradox of totalitarianism today. You become so afraid of an authority stripping you of your individuality that you suspect all political, ideological, or moral difference from your own individualist thinking.

If people have communitarian beliefs – like a notion that making a promise binds you to keep it – stamp it out as a betrayal. It’s taking advantage of your freedom to give yourself over to the enemy.

And in enforcing total discipline to defend yourselves against the enemy that would rob you of your individualities? There’s your answer.

On What There Isn't, Research Time, 22/12/2017

Here’s another takeaway from the chapter in What Is Philosophy? about the nature of science – Atheism is ridiculous.

Now, I’m not talking about the many different schools of thoughtful, philosophically rigorous, conceptually beautiful atheism that people have discussed and believed in for millennia.

Forget about Bertrand Russell’s arguments for skepticism. Forget Nietzsche’s disturbingly ethical rejection of Christianity, on grounds that it was a morality that made people weak and resentful. Leave the Hellenic Cynics behind.

He's just so smug. Frankly, all the trolling jerks and fascists are so
insufferably smug. Have fascists ever been quite so irritating as
they are today?

I’m going to come back to Spinoza, because of course I am.

Think about that shrill atheism of people like Richard Dawkins.* Dawkins own second, longest, and most annoying wave as a public intellectual began with his advocacy for atheism in the early 1990s. Deleuze was writing What Is Philosophy? He knew who Dawkins was, and would have heard talk of his new books.

* Canadian politics sidebar. Do you think Jordan Peterson might be shooting to become the Richard Dawkins for the revanchist set? Dawkins courted a populist college kid atheism of thinking religion was stupid. Peterson’s demo simply thinks the same about women’s rights. I think a severe category shift just happened.

Science and religion don’t need to be hostile to each other. They are pretty much all the time, but it’s not necessary.

I think the secret is in the ideology of Western science that’s grown up around it for the past couple of centuries. It goes – Science can investigate the entire universe, discovering the truth in the material world and proving religion empty dogma. The Galileo Myth, you could call it.

Galileo the person is totally absent from this mythic version of him so many of us learned, if not in school, then on PBS. His estate eventually licensed his image for use in the cleaned-up PIXAR-perfect movie version of his life.

The general method of science is to describe the world as it is in the greatest possible detail. Its domain is the entire universe.

Deleuze has the very rare clarity to say that this means science will inevitably fragment disciplines fractally ad infinitum – and that’s great! We need scientific knowledge to find out more and more about the world. We need scientific knowledge to help us figure a way out of this economic-ecological-political clusterfuck we’re in as a global civilization.

Pictured: A proper atheist. I only wish official portraits of
Spinoza depicted him as how brown he really was. The
man was born in Amsterdam to a family of Portuguese-
Jewish immigrants. Put him in a time machine, he would
likely fit in fine walking around Marrakech or east LA.

But that truth contradicts the today’s cult of populist atheism. Because populist atheism has two founding Myths – Galileo and Einstein. Well, more like Galileo’s Myth and Einstein’s Word.** E=mc2

** Fitting that the Man be Catholic and the Word be Jewish. Moses heard the Word and Christ had become the Man.

The ideology of populist scientific atheism has twin foundations. 1) Science’s truth stands against religion’s dogmas; 2) The most universal truth of science will be simple enough to put on a T-shirt.

I remember reading Stephen Hawking talk about the theory of everything having as simple a heart as E=mc2. These days, I can’t believe someone apparently so smart could be so naive.

When you understand the world in more and more detail, it doesn’t make things simpler. It makes things more complicated. There are so many domains of knowledge – what there is to be learned gets denser and denser. Each scientific discipline is a different domain of knowledge.

Real scientific investigation – discovering more about the world – will never unify all the domains because such an investigation moves in the opposite direction as simplicity and unity.

Empirical knowledge expands and proliferates – even the most arcane theoretical work relies on the empirical reality of having to make sense of our everyday world.

What about religion? God isn’t something you find like you find the Higgs Boson, building an experiment to detect God by a predicted ancillary affect. God isn’t even something you find like your car keys, remembering that they slid off the table where you threw them coming home and you thought you’d pick them up later.

You want to know how you discover God? Read Spinoza. Second time you read it, start with Book One. First time you read it, start with Book Five and go backwards. You find God in learning more about the world, and how to move with ease, happiness, and joy within it.

You realize that when a real atheist says, “I believe only in material reality,” he is literally saying, “I believe only in God.” Substance. Material reality, of which we’re each a flickering little quirky process.

Come Together III: In Perfect Harmony, Research Time, 17/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . An impossibility is an inspiration. It is Eden. Heaven on Earth. Rather, it’s Earth becoming Heaven.

That’s the movement Rousseau makes from the reality of humanity to its perfection. In real life, we’re a bunch of incurably corrupt, inescapably ignorant bastards. But in our perfected state, we damn near perfectly understand the common interest of our whole community, and are kind enough always to act on it.

Submitting completely to an authority that speaks with the voice of God
has never been a request that turns out well for anyone of whom it's
asked. Usually, it's a submission to slavery, as when Indigenous
Canadian children literally had Christianity beaten into them.

This is the mind-set of the individual when the will of a community is expressed as the general will. The harmony of thought across the whole society isn’t somehow imposed from above.* It’s a perfectly harmonized expression of every individual spontaneously.

* I haven’t read nearly enough Rousseau scholarship to say authoritatively whether my hypothesis is generally on target. Nor would I really want to, even if I had time. It’s not like I would have had time as a professor either – I’d have had budget meetings to attend with the associate vice-deans.

When he says that “Gods would be needed to give men laws,” he isn’t talking about God as a person standing over obedient humans. This isn’t any divine absolute despot, giving orders to which you submit.

If that were the kind of god that was on order, then Rousseau is quite the totalitarian. That’s what it means to submit all of human existence to the orders of an authority. But I’m taking Rousseau as a thinker of radical freedom, and it’s easy to do so if you just think of God in that line differently.

Remember that he’s said that the only true laws that a legislature could write were rules and institutions written as the expression of the general will. Only when the entire community (politicians and bureaucrats included) act in perfect harmony and love spontaneously is any legislation a truly legitimate law.

In any case less perfect than that, the laws are just rules backed up by threats of punishment (like jail time) or rewards (like tax credits). The law has only moral significance.

No ethical significance. The general will is the immanent expression of a community itself. Now you see it.** I’m using Rousseau in Utopias as part of a tradition of political materialism, whose fulcrum is Spinoza.

Well, hello there, good sir.

** And so do I.

I have one question for any of my scholar friends who might come across this. I may actually just write a former professor of mine who I remember has published academic articles on Rousseau. I’m not sure how believable this reading is. Maybe I should call it an appropriation. I feel like that’s a more accurate term for what I’m doing with the historical research for this book.

One of the problems with Rousseau is that he knew his audience too well. This is what makes it difficult – as a scholar or just an attentive reader – to be sure he’s really thinking what you think you read in his writing.

So when he uses terms like “the sovereign” or tosses off flourishes like that line above about gods, he sounds like he’s referring to monarchs and God the Father. Because that’s what his audience of reasonably intellectual literate people in 1760s Europe thought of when they heard those terms.

It’s how Rousseau’s own audience thought of power, authority, kingship, and the divine. This conception of divinity as a perfect material expression would have gotten someone strung up for some hardcore heresy.

Geneva was a Calvinist country at the time, and that is not a religious authority known to tolerate leniency. At the time, “Spinozist” was an insult you hurled at someone when you wanted to destroy their reputation. Materialism of Spinoza’s expressive, free kind was considered just as corrosive as atheism.

So how plausible would it be for me historically to make Rousseau a chain link in a semi-underground Spinozist tradition? Should I even care about plausibility to the scholarly community when I don’t even plan on making Utopias a scholarly book? . . . To be continued

The Skeleton of a Performance, Composing, 01/06/2016

A mostly graphic post today, and a late one. I delivered my panel on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity this morning, to a small but appreciative audience, with the commentary and input of my friends Sanja Dejanovic and Jenn Primmer.

Our discussion departed quite a bit from the slides that I made – which were always more my speaking notes than a strict guide to the performance. But I wanted to post them here, as part of the promotion of the book, and to mark the occasion. Maybe let me know what you think, readers.

Love Power II: A Tradition of Hope and Freedom, Research Time, 20/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . I originally wasn’t going to continue yesterday’s post about the power of love. But then I realized there was a little more to say. At least before I get into the most surreal and meta-textual episode of Trailer Park Boys Season 10 in Sunnyvale Psychochronography tomorrow.

One thing Antonio Negri* is doing in his exploration of the political power of love is looking through the history of Western philosophy to create a new tradition. He’s tracing a path through the history of European and American ideas to find better alternatives to the cynical political ideas that have followed on from Thomas Hobbes’ capitulation to humanity’s worst impulses.

I've been listening to a lot of Curtis Mayfield while I write
these last two posts. It's plain to see why.

* And the originator of this idea, Louis Althusser.

I mean, it’s almost to be expected that Hobbes, who lived through the English Civil War, would develop a political philosophy that understands humanity in terms of our most violent impulses. 

But Spinoza, the genesis of Negri’s history of a political philosophy of love, lived through the uprisings and repressions of the Dutch people through the turbulent rule of the House of Orange. Jan and Cornelius de Witt, leaders of the republican revolutionaries against the Dutch monarchy, were personal friends of Spinoza. Spinoza’s own life was in danger from the same royalists who murdered the de Witt brothers. 

You might think that suffering defeat as a democratic, republican revolutionary at the hands of brutal monarchists would have made Spinoza a pessimist about human nature too. But he was stronger than that. 

Belief in the power of love to be the fundamental principle of human society sounds corny as all hell. As Negri says, it sounds crazily naïve. It sounds especially naïve now, given our current political climate defined by hatred, resentment, and violence at so many different levels of human life. 

But believing in love as a fundamental political principle isn’t as simple as any belief that human nature itself is fundamentally good. That would fail to explain all the horrors and cruelty of human history. You’d be right to call that idea stupid.

But the idea that there’s a fundamental, unchanging human nature, and that it is evil, cruel, egotistical, and violent is just as naïve. Just as naïve and dumb as the belief that there’s a fundamental, unchanging human nature which is good, kind, open-hearted, and peaceful.

There being an essential human nature at all in this ethical sense is really the heart of the problem. Throw this belief away. 

Love will win.

But humanity isn’t a blank slate. We may not have a fundamental nature, but we still have our tendencies. And love is the active force in constructing human nature. The problems arise not through love or the privation of love. It’s the corruption of love.

There’s an old Christian idea that evil is the absence of good. Well, evil and cruelty is a lot more insidious than a sick call from our better conscience. Corruption isn’t the absence of love. It’s the power of love converted to make us cruel instead of making us kind.

Here's an example of what I mean. Understand nationalism this way. When it’s functioning properly, love leads us to care for our neighbours. We build relationships with them, look out for them, and help them out when we’re able. This is a good thing to do.

The problem comes when this drive for social solidarity becomes corrupt. One common way it becomes corrupt is when solidarity develops a boundary. When it isn’t an outreach, but a way to separate and divide people. That’s when love ends up creating nationalism and racism. 

When love and inclusion of one implies hatred and rejection of another, love itself is still driving you, but it’s become corrupt. Like any kind of malfunctioning organ or tool, love then has to be repaired so that the feelings and drives that used to create nationalism and racism lose their tendency to exclude. Until they become all-inclusive, as they’re supposed to be.

Philosophy is political medicine.

Colonial Enterprises: How Legitimate Is a Resistance? Jamming, 18/11/2014

Thinking about the politics of post-colonialism, colonialism, and one’s complicity in or resistance to colonialism is an immensely tricky subject. Anything that you could write or say on the subject is bound to make someone angry. In that sense, it’s ideal for contemporary online media: blog publishing is driven by encouraging reader anger because rage is most likely to generate shares and clickthroughs. I didn’t make this system; I’m just learning about its details as part of my education in modern communications.*

* Mind you, this isn’t actually part of my program at Sheridan College; it’s part of the supplementary reading that I’m exploring while I work through my program.

So I thought I’d put together a short set of reflections on how I’ve engaged with the issue in my thinking. I’m not sure how these concepts will apply to the larger philosophical book projects that I’m slowly working on. The Ecophilosophy manuscript is a very separate topic, and while utopian elements are built into the ideologies of many anti-colonial resistance movements, their relationship to the vision of the mechanized man of Marinetti and Jünger’s imaginations at the centre of biopolitical totalitarianism is complicated. Mechanizing humanity is an inherently Western cultural idea, after all. 

But after going through Spinoza’s political writings (in reaction to my engagement with Robert Nozick over October and November), I realized that a core question of his work in the 1600s had become essential to understanding contemporary anti-colonial struggles, many of which had or plan to replace the current regime with one that’s even more oppressive. Why do people fight for their enslavement with the devotion they should apply to fighting for their freedom?

Negri: Imperialism vs Empire

While I now have the entire Empire/Multitude/Commonwealth series on my shelf, I haven’t really gone into Antonio Negri’s Empire since 2008. It was always on my list to revisit for the Utopias project, and I think I’ll start through that in December. 

One thing that stood out to me, and this was Negri’s major conceptual innovation in Empire, was that he distinguished the nature of the economic and cultural globalization of our current era from the empire-building of the past. States and control of territory through military occupation and governance were no longer the driving processes. Economic domination was occurring without direct state sponsorship. The result was a much more networked, centreless form of economic intensification. 

Negri clearly identified what had changed, what caused this radical change, and what its implications were. I learned from Negri that you could never denounce the West and its governments in this decentralized structure as directly or obviously as the sole cause of exploitation on Earth. In current times, you see the leaders of states that have been liberated from Western colonial control still carry out openly colonial practices in the Victorian mode. Yes, for the most part, the royals were the vassal governors and puppet rulers of Western colonial regimes. But to say that the ruling class of monarchist authoritarian states who buy African nature reserves to hunt for sport are more legitimate governors than a democracy founded on values of communitarian solidarity because 'colonialism' is a schizophrenic political blindness to a reality that makes nonsense of your knowledge categories.

The network had become much more complex, which made moral and political culpability a more difficult matter to settle, and maybe made it a non-issue if even nations who materially benefited from these arrangements had enough people who were otherwise disenfranchised. Blame would be the wrong question to ask.

One thing I've learned about Israeli society is that people
in North America don't often take seriously just how
different it really is from here.

The Vilification of Israel

When I read that late-period Karl Jaspers book a couple of months ago, it featured a quality that I find amazing to read today. Jaspers was a left-wing figure who lionized Israel as a bastion for democracy and a nation leading the world to the elimination of racism. Israel was founded by secular socialists, some of the most intelligent people of Europe in union with the Sephardic Jews who had lived in the territory for literally millennia. It was a democratic country building a strong tradition of communitarian anarchism through the kibbutz movement.

Today, however, Israel is identified largely on the global left with the terms ‘racist,’ ‘apartheid,’ ‘colonialist,’ and even ‘genocidal.’ I find far too many people for my comfort in the Western educated left thoughtlessly parroting the conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial regularly spouted by Saudi-sponsored Salafist clerics and radical militarist organizations. The government of Israel has certainly not been innocent in its hand-wringing disenfranchisement of the people in the Palestinian Territories after the Six Day War in 1967. But it is still a democracy where dissent is possible. 

In any other country in the Middle East, a socially conservative government with xenophobic tendencies, like the Netanyahu-Lieberman coalition, would have rounded up their opponents with the secret police, and would never have been seen again. That includes not only Assad, El-Sisi, and the House of Saud, but the monarchs of the Gulf sheikhdoms and the ever-so-Westernized royalty of Jordan. Instead, the Israeli government’s internal opponents fight them constantly in the Knesset, and the peace movement still continues its struggle against reactionary and xenophobic nationalists.

Violent Radical Islam as a Liberation Force

Nationalism is a danger in any state, because the mere existence of a state institution encourages a national identity to grow around it. That excludes people by its nature. The state is bureaucratic tribalism post facto rationally justified, after all. If we do it reasonably well, we get a democracy with a decent public health and welfare system that protects people’s rights.

So why does a movement that ostensibly fights against oppression choose a fundamentalist religious ideology, the most violently tribal extremism** humanly possible, as its banner of presumed liberation? It’s the ideology that its leaders and popular supporters seek to replace Western domination.

** Not only do you commit terrifying violence against a perceived oppressor, but that violence is justified by an absolutized transcendent authority. Not only do you act only on the material authority’s orders, but you act on your god’s orders too. That’s multiple dimensions of self-enslavement.

But it’s trading one form of enslavement for another. And because the topic is the subject of such a wide range of controversy and the resulting hyperbole, I don’t know if I could ever figure out a straight answer on the particular question that at the same time understands both the humanity of its practitioners while understanding how they can act so inhumanly.

To Mistake Piety in Your Own Slavery as Liberation, Research Time, 17/11/2014

When it comes to those early periods in the modern tradition, how I engage with those texts very much depends on how the major thinkers of the period of my specialty (Nietzsche and the following Continentals, Russell and the following Analytics) engaged with those thinkers. When I read Spinoza, it’s having had the tutelage of historical works by authors like Gilles Deleuze and Etienne Balibar. Essentially, they have made Spinoza a political thinker for me above all, meditating at length on what is probably the most important question for our times.

Why do people fight for their enslavement with the fervour they should apply to fighting for their freedom?

Deleuze and Félix Guattari made this the fundamental question of Anti-Oedipus, and Balibar’s book Spinoza and Politics puts it at the forefront of his analysis from the beginning. Anti-Oedipus examines the question from contexts of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, as well as from larger questions of politics and economic relations. None of these books settle the question with a clear answer; if they did, they never would have become such brilliant books of philosophy. They would have become footnotes to be discarded when the question recurred again in politics, as this question always does.

Probably the most impressive totalitarian regime in
human history.

Spinoza’s examination of the question in his political writings may actually have more relevance for the modern situation than Deleuze and Guattari’s calculation. They adapted the question to wondering why people so strongly desired to be rigidly diagnosed into psychoanalytic categories, boxed in to immutable definitions. And they asked why people so strongly desired the mass enslavement and will to self-destruction of totalitarian regimes.

Spinoza, speaking to the conditions of his earlier time and his experience as an advocate for liberal secular politics at a time of religious wars and the political marriage of monarchy and theocracy, framed the question in terms of religion. Why would a person so rigidly define their existence according to the orders and rules of ecclesiastical institutions to the point of annihilating their faculties of critical thought, when such thinking is how we become free?

This context is immensely important today because it’s now so similar to our current global politics, particularly in the Middle East. The ongoing war devastating Syria and Iraq right now is the strongest explosion of resistance against the militarized monarchist states whose armies and secret police have enslaved their populations for decades or longer.

Yet the movement that would replace these would enslave the Arab, Levantine, Persian, and Magreb peoples under an even tighter yoke. Many of the military (think of Egypt) and monarchist (think of Jordan, the UAE, and the small Persian Gulf sheikhdoms) are police states, yes. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia mandates Salafist Islam by all but the gun, and although they violently oppress Shi’ite and Sufi minorities, at least being a Sunni Muslim is enough to avoid serious police state violence.

An Islamic State rally. Well, I guess you have to start
somewhere.

The Islamic State movement, the most hardcore of similarly oppressive fundamentalist Islamic political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, would in practice be an even more dangerously terrifying totalitarian regime even than Hitler’s and Stalin’s versions. Uniting the oppressively violent extremes of Taliban-intensity religious certainty with the apparatus of a Ba’athist or monarchist police state and contemporary computer surveillance equipment would give Islamic State authorities the power to control every social aspect of an individual’s life to the fractally smallest detail.

Yet hundreds of thousands of people in the Islamic State armies (leaving aside the drive for total social control in the extreme wings of the slightly less insane fundamentalist movements) fight to the death to install a regime that would mandate rigid conformity to theocratic principles, and enforce those principles through totalitarian state violence.

Spinoza’s analysis in his political writings shows how people would develop such a hideous desire. He analyzes an ancient theocracy to show how a mutually empowering social cohesion can develop from an entire population sharing a single religion when that religion’s sole authoritative institution is inextricably bound with the state itself.

The religious state institution mandates very particular behaviours in all aspects of life, a mass similarity and familiarity that encourages, along with laws preventing one from being permanently divested of all property and means to support oneself, an atmosphere of brotherhood and camaraderie.

The problem with this is that internal brotherhood of this intensity, achieved through a totalizing social identity with the community of fellow-believers and the state, creates a terrifying xenophobia. The resulting external conflicts must always go the way of the religious state, because the people’s hatred of outsiders would tend to such extremes as to make the feeling universally mutual among peoples.

That was just one example, though. In this case, it was the first kingdom of the ancient Hebrews in Jerusalem, an analysis that would have, shall we say, ruffled a few feathers. I have no idea if it’s accurate as a depiction of the first Hebrew state in Jerusalem before the Babylonian conquest, and it can only be tangentially applied today. If the Taliban regime of Afghanistan is any indication, I doubt an Islamic State based in Baghdad would put much focus on internal camaraderie. As well, the ancient Hebrew Kingdom ruled by men like David and Solomon never had access to the regulatory institutions and tools of governance that we do, which would allow a government genuine control of every miniscule action, and even thought, of a citizen.

But Spinoza at least got the ball rolling on this question, even though it took a while for people to make the question of the people’s desire for their own enslavement a central question for political philosophy again. I don’t think we’ll forget it again anytime soon.

Thinking the Divine III: The Diversity of Humanity, Research Time, 06/11/2014

Continued from last post . . . The more I read of Spinoza, the more I understand his having been perceived for so long as an apostate. It wasn’t just his rejection by the politically powerful of his own era, the violence he faced in his own life from a monarchist government that he tried and failed to overthrow with the De Witt brothers. It wasn’t really until the late 19th century that an accusation of sympathizing with Spinoza lost its power to ruin a career or a reputation. The posthumous controversy surrounding Gotthold Lessing’s belief in Spinozist ideas is probably the most prominent example in history.

One reason for the long-running hostility to Spinoza lies in his attitude to truth about the divine. He was called a pantheist, but while the term ‘pantheism’ literally describes God as being everything, pantheism retains something of a personalized God that exists in all things, while Spinoza is describing reality itself as inherently divine.

While this is his conception of God in both the Ethics and the TTP, it isn’t religious, but philosophical. Religion is a separate domain whose purpose is to guide people along the best path for them to a life of virtue and justice. Because people are all individually very different to the point of idiosyncrasy, a religious pathway that would guide one person effectively would be laughable, nonsensical, offensive, or just plain dull to another. So there can be as may religious faiths as there are people, each finding their own take on the tradition(s) that speak to them best. It is a deeply pious reason for religious diversity.

This is another point that was universally controversial from Spinoza’s own life for centuries later, that the diversity of religious faith is legitimate. In the West of Spinoza’s era, Christianity had long been seen as the literally true articulation of the nature of God, the only religious truth. People murdered each other over their divergent theological interpretations even within Christianity. If you were not a Christian, you were regarded as either a heathen or a human devil, or sometimes not even human at all.

Bill O'Reilly: spokesman for the persecuted.

This is a matter of controversy for the modern era as well. I’m not just talking about the radical Islamic movements who have become such a factor in the ongoing Middle Eastern war, although that’s the most obvious example. I recently saw a conversation on Facebook that a friend of mine in Texas had started about the attitude among powerful Christian communities and organizations that Christians are being systematically persecuted in the United States. 

Materially speaking, they aren’t at all. But conservative Christians genuinely feel that having to use generic, secular terms for the December holiday season or having to acknowledge the legitimacy of Chanukah and other religious celebrations threatens their way of life. And they deeply believe that public tolerance, and even acceptance, of lifestyles they consider sinful like homosexuality is an assault on them.

As the society of the United States becomes more openly pluralist, and secular language becomes the default mode of discussion in that pluralist context, what a conservative Christian could once accept as the obvious truth is revealed as a perspectival belief generated through historical cultural processes. Humility as a culture is necessary to deal peacefully with growing cultural and religious diversity in your community. 

None of that humility was happening in the Holland of Spinoza’s time, and it wouldn’t start happening in Europe for centuries. And recent anti-Semitic violence, turning what would have been legitimate protests at the military policies of an allied state into hideous racist assaults against ordinary Jewish people who had nothing to do with the government of Israel, indicates that the Christian-descended populations of Europe aren't as humble as they have come to think they are.

So in the context of a civil war, as well as a culture of religious polarization, and the fact that the Amsterdam Jewish community had only just fled persecution and expulsion in Portugal to resettle in a place with just persecution, combined to create a political climate where Spinoza’s scathing critiques of established religious beliefs in the name of pluralism (as well as his contention that the mitzvot of Jewish orthodoxy were morally unnecessary) resulted in it being less trouble to cut ties with a known agitator against the authoritarian monarchist government.

Jewish religion isn’t interested in proselytization, and isn’t even all that big on conversion. The basic idea is that the Jewish path is right for people of that lineage and who arrive at a Jewish relationship with the divine on their own power, but other people are better suited to other paths. Messages of religious diversity and pluralism inherently help minority cultures like the Jews. But while reason itself may be universal, the world isn’t always ready to hear those messages. The world of Spinoza, and the Jewish community that rejected him as more trouble than he was worth, certainly wasn’t.

Thinking the Divine II: The Satisfaction of an Easy Answer, Jamming, 04/11/2014

Continued from previous post . . . Last week’s post about the Spinoza that I’d been reading ended with a ridiculously jarring transition, from talk of Spinoza’s theological arguments against Biblical literalism and in favour of more nuanced concepts of the divine to the definitive feminist conflicts of this year. Here's how that transition works. 

Biblical literalism, really literalist belief about the teachings and texts of any religious tradition, doesn’t deserve the name of religion. Spinoza doesn’t call literalism religion; he calls it superstition, and he’s right. You believe that magic voices, magic tablets, and magic causality is how the world really works. How does God act to a superstitious mind? He reaches down with his finger and stops the sun from moving long enough for his favourite military commander to defeat his enemies. 

Literal depictions of God are for fables and parables, not
metaphysics. The holiest among us sits at the right hand
of God. Your right hand, Hashem, glorious in power.

Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is a weird, difficult read for a reader with modern philosophical sensibilities. The entire first half is a slog through Scriptural interpretation, mostly concentrating on the Pentateuch, the books of Moses, what Jews call the Torah and what Christians call the Old Testament. Spinoza spends over 100 pages cataloguing passages in the Bible that make no sense on their own and make less sense when compared to other passages that contradict what they say. Math in genealogies describe four or five generations passing in just over a decade. A prophecy that a king will die in peace comes true as that king is forced to watch his children’s throats cut by an invading army before being murdered himself. 

Spinoza’s Ethics is a difficult book, because it’s an extremely dense philosophical work that’s written in the form of a long set of geometric proofs, corollaries, and marginal notes and interjections. It covers everything from the fundamental nature of reality, God, and nature, to the basic psychology of organic creatures and humans in particular, and offers a materialistic path to enlightenment that’s more inspirational than the easy answers of money-grubbing, superficial television preachers could ever be. Those shysters peddle superstitions. To achieve enlightenment, you have to think.

What does all this have to do with contemporary feminism? It’s about the concept of the easy answer. Who doesn’t love an easy answer? You have a question, someone gives you an answer, you understand that answer perfectly, and it makes you happy. 

Superstition is like that. What made the world? A magic man in the sky built the whole mess in a week. A guy writing a book of chronicles and prophecies thousands of years before the invention of contemporary astronomical technology said it, it’s easy to read, so it must be true. I’ve spoken with too many philosophers who think that an argument is self-evidently true if it’s easy to understand. This is one of the things I hate about modern academic philosophy.

Now, here’s a moral question. What should I do about inequality? Here’s an easy answer: treat people nicely when you see them. To take one example from a conversation I had with a friend a while ago, if you go to a gym, don’t ogle or hit on women. They’re there to work out, so are you, so be respectful and nice. You’ve done your duty. There’s your easy answer. 

That’s a moral superstition, that all there is to making the world a better place is to be nice yourself. The problem with easy answers is that the world doesn’t really work like that. It isn’t enough to be nice to make the world better. It isn’t enough to be the one guy in a gym (or a CBC studio) who isn’t being a jackass. 

If you have the power to act to make the world better, you should figure out how your situation makes your act most effective and do it. It’s the material articulation of what in Jewish theology is called tikkun olam. It’s not enough to read about, for example, female video game designers being harassed after a jilted ex-boyfriend writes a whiny post about his breakup with one and feel sad about how messed up people are. That’s the easy way out. At least get in one Twitter fight with some “ethics in journalism” morons; send some supportive messages to some of the prominent people who take most of the heat. You can't fix the whole mess on your own, but you can make some beneficial gestures from where you are now.

If a statement denouncing Biblical literalism as the idiotic superstition that it is, which the TTP is, got Spinoza excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, then so much the worse for people who made their beliefs about the fundamental divinity of the universe so simple and easy. The world isn’t actually simple or easy, and we shouldn’t rest satisfied with such answers just because they put our mind at ease. A mind at ease is a mind in atrophy. To be continued . . .

Thinking the Divine I: Pushing The Limits of Understanding, Research Time, 28/10/2014

This weekend, I started diving into Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the radical political-religious work of philosophy with probably the coolest-sounding name in the Western tradition. I’m still going through the early chapters and weeding out some of the fascinating philosophical ideas from the scriptural analysis. 

Cornelius de Witt, along with his brother Jan,
were the republican rulers of Holland and close
friends of Benedict Spinoza. They were
considered dangerous radicals in 1600s Europe
for ruling Holland as a country without a king.
The House of Orange eventually overthrew
them, murdering the de Witt brothers and
many figures in their government, forcing
their supporters like Spinoza into internal exile.

I can definitely understand why TTP was so provocative in the 1600s; just what I’d expect from a radical anti-monarchist in that era. Benedict, I’d say you’re a man after my own heart, but you’ve pretty much got it already. His argument in these early chapters is essentially against Biblical literalism, an argument that many devout people in my own era need to hear and take seriously. At first, it sounds like an argument against religious belief, but it’s actually a very pious perspective: how the divine manifests to us depends on our ability to understand God.

We’ll never be able to form a genuinely adequate understanding of God. In a Spinozist perspective, humans only consist of two attributes of the divine, thought and matter, so can only understand divinity in these contexts, not any of the infinite other ones, whatever they might be. But our ability to understand divinity can improve with our intellectual abilities. Basically, as we better understand the fundamental structure of the world, we are capable of a more nuanced understanding of the divinity whose expression is reality.

Spinoza describes the early tales of Exodus, particularly the intellectual capacities of the Hebrew tribes of the time. We shouldn’t be too impressed. They had such a difficult time grasping the basic idea that their god could be immaterial that as soon as their main prophet Moses too an extended break from shouting laws at them for some sustained transcription with the divine presence, they all freaked and started dancing around a cow statue.*

* I think if I had learned religion through descriptions like this, I’d have been a more dedicated believer. Still wouldn’t have been able to take Christianity, though. I’d probably just have figured out that I felt most comfortable with Jewish theology a little sooner than I have.

Why would you freak, Hebrew masses? asked Spinoza, if he had been able to get into outdated hip-hop slang. Because their society hadn’t yet developed a ubiquitous intellectual and educational capacity to understand a God that wasn’t incarnate (let alone substance itself) and a morality that didn’t have a basis in an authority analogous to a king. Only a simpleton, relatively speaking, goes this line of thought, is moral from fear of divine retribution if you slip up. Only a fool believes that the basis of morality is your people’s god barking orders at you.

But if this is all you can believe in, then this is the best understanding you can come to of the divine: a giant policeman in the sky who’ll beat you senseless for all eternity with a transcendent billy club if you don’t follow his orders.** Spinoza spends the early chapters of TTP arguing very well against this juvenile conception of religion and morality. A more advanced understanding of morality behaves ethically for its immanent, worldly benefits: a peaceful society of free people who help each other when they’re in need. 

** This idea that how God manifests to you depends on your intellectual and ethical capacity to understand divinity is actually fairly common in more contemporary Talmudic scholarship. I don't know enough of the history of the scholarship to know if it was specifically an eventual reaction to the critiques of Spinoza in the TTP. I first learned this in my mid-20s from my friend Arnold Bennett, a retired documentary filmmaker who lived just outside St. John's, and who I knew through Jockey Club, the regular discussion group of Memorial University's philosophy department. Arnold regularly got into arguments with the local rabbi at the synagogue in St. John's over theological matters like these, but he knew his Talmud to a comparable level through independent study. He died nearly four years ago now, while visiting his family in Washington DC.

We are sorely in need of this kind of behaviour today, and Spinoza’s approach to ethics, integrating ethical improvement with improvement of how you understand the physical world, is especially important in our modern world. I’m thinking especially of the conflicts of the contemporary feminist movements, particularly the #YesAllWomen and #NotAllMen debates on our social media platforms, and the hideousness of #Gamergate. To be continued . . .

What Are These Words For? A History Boy, 06/09/2014

Another one of those memes about the books most influential in your life has been going around my Facebook friends, and I thought I’d spell out the list more clearly on the blog, because I think it would be interesting. It’s also a good way for me to get a sense of my own influences as my own writing career finally picks up a little. But the reason these books were each influential on me kind of overlaps. So I thought I’d make several sub-lists of factors and group the books under them.

The Whole List, in chronological order of my discovering them

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle 

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot 

- Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Series

- James Joyce, Ulysses 

- Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason 

- Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain 

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

- Graham Greene, The Quiet American 

- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

- Philip K Dick, Ubik

- Benedict Spinoza, Ethics

- Kojo Laing, Search Sweet Country

- Alan Moore, Swamp Thing Vols. 1 & 2

Amazing Worlds

• Cat’s Cradle, Foundation, Ulysses, The Savage Detectives, Ubik, Search Sweet Country, Swamp Thing

The many are modifications of the one, but are no less
individual for that. Swamp Thing is something of a Spinozist.

These books opened my mind to the possibility of worlds that were very different from my own, threading narratives of a few particular people through a setting that was so complex to be an actual ecology. Foundation saw this enormously complicated galactic human civilization that was so much more than a simple metaphor applying to a single story, which too much science-fiction in the Golden Age was like. It also helped that I was maybe 13 years old. 

Ubik did the same thing, but escaped the epic register of which Asimov was so fond, and rooted a strange story in a humanity very much like our own, with shysters, criminals, nagging bosses, and loveable schlubs. The film version of Ubik in my head will always feature Seth Rogen as the protagonist Joe Chip. It was the first Philip K Dick I’d ever read.

Cat’s Cradle and Swamp Thing found strange corners within our own world to build their fantastic settings. Ulysses made the ordinary fantastic, and once again, brought the epic to the scale of ordinary folks and their personal and political struggles. Bolaño and Laing brought foreign lands that I’d never visited before to my own mind, and made them feel so familiar, it was almost as if they had physically taken me there.

Yearning for Justice

• The Idiot, Soul Mountain, The Quiet American, Swamp Thing

I felt in these stories a powerful force straining against and overcoming political and social oppression. Alan Moore used fantasy and horror to explore the struggles of humanity with the ecology where we developed, and the paradoxes that our fear of nature’s power and yearning to protect ourselves from its wrath may destroy us.

The Idiot is a profound story of one person whose basic kindness struggles against the more heartless perspectives of the people around him; the tragedy is that his virtue ultimately lacks the strength to combat the worst that humanity can offer. Soul Mountain is the story of one such person who succeeded, despite the violence and backwardness around him and in his own heart.

Graham Greene taught me never to trust the conclusions of anyone who looks at the world and says, “I know exactly what’s going on. It’s quite simple!” Ruin and death lie in these words.

New Ways to Think

• Cat’s Cradle, The Critique of Pure Reason, Soul Mountain, Beyond Good and Evil, What Is Philosophy?, Ethics

Philosophy isn’t just a matter of searching for the truth, and it isn’t just a matter of criticizing the ideas of others. It’s also about developing new ways to understand the world. Studying Kant first taught me how to explore a system so complex that it’s literally like rewiring your mind as you understand it. After my old philosophical mentor, Jim Bradley, walked me through the Critique of Pure Reason, I felt like I understood not just how to read philosophy, but how to philosophize.

When he was young, Vonnegut could still
laugh without crying.

Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Spinoza ended up doing the same thing for me, and taking me to places where I wanted to go anyway. I’ve read other philosophers than these three, but concepts at the forefront of their works are the biggest concrete influences on how I do philosophy myself. Beyond Good and Evil introduced me to the strongest critiques of morality, and I never took another moral philosopher or preacher (even an atheist one) as an authority again. Deleuze introduced me to an entire new paradigm of doing philosophy, geological or ecological philosophy, and What Is Philosophy? was the first of his large books I’d read. Spinoza was the ethicist of immanence that started it all, and was the first to make explicit the inter-relation of all the domains of philosophy, which common academic practice keeps separate.

Gao wrote a literal exploration of the multiplicity inside each of us as individuals. Vonnegut developed a playfulness to his own voice that was so utterly unique that the world is richer for its existence. And Cat's Cradle, his first book that I read, came early enough in his life that it had not grown too cynical to inspire.

Excitement for Writing

• Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Soul Mountain, The Savage Detectives, Search Sweet Country, Ethics

Moby-Dick was one of the first novels I ever remember reading. I first had an illustrated copy for children when I was maybe eight years old, and it fascinated me. I don’t know how many times I read it. I ended up having to buy multiple copies. That illustrated edition I left in a box in my grandmother’s house when I moved out and it was destroyed in a fire over a decade later. Then I bought an old second-hand copy, but that was too badly water damaged after loaning it to a friend. Then I found a cheap edition at a Coles in Hamilton and have had that on my shelf ever since.

Ulysses, Soul Mountain, and The Ethics were three books I read that redefined for me the limits of what language was capable of. I’m now leaning toward a definition of those limits as limitless. Bolaño taught me a way to express a character that was wholly new to me. Most importantly, reading The Savage Detectives inspired me to start writing fiction seriously myself. And reading Search Sweet Country two years ago nearly made me stop because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write such beautiful, poetic sentences as Kojo Laing.

Singularity in Art

• Cat’s Cradle, The Idiot, Ulysses, Soul Mountain, The Savage Detectives, What Is Philosophy?, Ubik, Search Sweet Country

Gao spent many years in rural China, on
the run from the oppression of the Deng
government and the Communist Party. So
did I, you, and she, as well as he.

They used to teach me in high school literature class that a good character is consistent. What a load of shit. A character that’s true to what a person is will be paradoxical, self-contradictory, and utterly inexplicable. This isn’t the same as randomness, which is genuine sloppiness. A character truly adequate to human nature will contain genuine multitudes, and there will always be new complexities to discover. No one explanation for their behaviour will ever suffice to complete them. A person is impossible to complete. 

Characters who genuinely embody this impossibility of completion are Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin (and Stepan Verkhovensky, and Nikolai Stavrogin, and the Karamazov brothers), the narrator(s) of Soul Mountain, and Joe Chip. Vonnegut’s very narrative voice embodies this singularity. Laing did this for the entire city of Accra, as did Joyce for Dublin and our culture's most popular Greek epic.

The Savage Detectives showed me something different: the impossibility of, no matter the depth of your research and how many different angles you find to view a person, ever truly understanding them to the depths of their souls. After 54 narrators, we understand so much about Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, but in all that multiplicity, there is no essence. Of course, that’s the point.

Deleuze and Guattari’s work did this for the authors themselves, channelling their ideas and styles of expression and argument through so many different prisms and contexts the philosophy seemed adequate to the world if only because it approached a similar complexity (not in the dismissive sense of a reader’s confusion, but in the ecological sense of new details emerging from every new examination). The freaky thing is, Guattari wasn't even involved in writing the book; he was too sick with depression and heart failure. Deleuze writes as if he’s channelling his old friend, and when you read it, it seems that he’s really there. All of him. All of them.

Genuine Freedom Is Beyond Active and Passive, Composing, 03/09/2013

Re-working a dissertation project into a book results in some very interesting editing. Some chapters get total overhauls, some only minor edits. Chapter five, for the most part gets a minor edit. It has the most tortured history of any part of the dissertation. The original version was completely lost when the hard drive it was on crashed. It was the only dissertation chapter that didn’t have a backup yet. But it was for the best, because my newer version was better. It still needed a complete overhaul before it would fit coherently into the rest of the project, though. I was writing too much about my critiques in philosophy of mind, where the concept of autopoiesis I was using for my theory of subjectivity had its highest cachet. So by the end of the dissertation project, there were three chapter fives, only one of which saw the light of day, and the first of which no longer exists.

Now, there’s a fourth chapter five. It’s mostly the same as the third chapter five from the dissertation, but there are some edits. The most radical so far is entirely re-working a key paragraph. Its original form was very confused. I think my supervisor knew what I meant, but it wouldn’t fly in a book for public consumption. The current version is very clear about what I think the power of our self-conception is relative to whether we’re free.

I think the ability to change, whether or not those changes can be predicted mathematically, constitutes a radical freedom. Existence doesn’t tend toward stability or equilibrium, but dynamism and flux. Every moment is open to the radically novel. So every single body in the universe is, in this sense, free. But self-consciousness gives humans a very peculiar power: the power to enslave ourselves. If we conceive of ourselves as separate from the world, an island of stability in a dynamic universe, we achieve more than just alienation from nature. We also make ourselves passive because we have no sense of our relationships with the fluctuating fields of affects that connect us to the freedom of all bodies. Imagining ourselves as self-contained egos separate from nature’s dynamisms destroys our natural freedom. But when we conceive of ourselves as connected with these fluctuations, our natural freedom gains deeper dimensions, because our power of self-awareness lets us investigate and come to know the conditions of our freedom.

Benedict Spinoza was excommunicated from
Judaism in his lifetime, which sounds
incredibly serious. But in the Amsterdam
Jewish community of the time, the same
person could be excommunicated and taken
back three times in a month, depending on
who bribed who.

So yes, I’m a Spinozist. I de-emphasize the determinism of Spinoza’s philosophy, because determinism is just an ontological implication of the ability to predict motion with mathematics. Ultimately, it’s inconsequential — just because future developments of motion are knowable doesn’t make them any less free. Imagine a couple who’s been together so long and knows each other so well, that they can predict precisely what the other will do. This doesn’t make either partner less free; it just makes them known.

So about that Spinozism, then. I think of myself as updating several central insights of Spinoza’s philosophy into the era of contemporary science. I don’t consider myself a Spinozist in the sense that I think every word in The Ethics is an exactly correct description of the eternal nature of the world. But I consider myself as part of a tradition of thinking about freedom and knowledge of which Spinoza is a central figure. I once identified myself as something of a Spinozist in conversation with a professor emeritus at University of Toronto, who I consider the closest analogue Canadian philosophy has ever produced to Yoda. (Readers who know me well will understand what a profound compliment this is.) He then proceeded to probe whether I thought that everything that can be imagined has a material existence. It was very elfin of him, and I could tell he was only having me on. 

But it shows exactly why I try to avoid identifying myself as an -ism: I have no idea what other people’s conception of that label is, and I end up painting myself into conversational corners where I’ll be accused of contradicting myself just because my own very specific and singular philosophical views are disparaged because they don’t conform precisely to another’s conception of a descriptive term. I often find conversations like this prevent people from discussing philosophy, and just devolve into counter-productive bickering more often than not. So I just try to talk about figures from the past who have influenced me. People can’t read as much into that.

That passage is pretty Spinozist, though.