Whither Capital IV: Sabotage or Complicity, Research Time, 04/06/2018

So Cultural Studies – the academic revolutionaries – knew they had to battle for a kinder world on the field of culture. The question now was how you’d do it.

Well, they had a long-standing channel to communicate with the public. They were researchers, writers, regularly published in respected journals. So they would research, write, and reveal the hidden vectors of oppression and routes to liberation in the most unexpected places.

You probably know where I’m going with this. I know where I’m going with this. And I don’t want to condemn the discipline, I really, sincerely don’t. But the field’s focus on the analysis of pop cultural properties isn’t exactly the most effective form of cultural change.

Now, those analyses really do have the power to change minds. They can help illuminate how subtle moral conditioning and ideas worm themselves into what we typically think are innocuous entertainments. But there are two problems with that.

Is it responsible to rest with merely describing what is wrong with your
society, when you depend on those fundamental wrongnesses to make
your diagnoses? I don't know, actually.

First and most obviously, this can’t be the only technique in the toolbox for social change. Some folks specialize, and that’s great. I work for some other channels of social change right now, and plenty of channels are active. My first critique is an institutional one if nothing else.

You know what I mean. They may have trained themselves writing for paywalled research journals. But the most effective pop cultural criticism projects since the start of the discipline have been in streaming tv and blogging.

The blogging project was explicitly defined as a magical ritual, on top of that. It would have been seriously questionable to a tenure committee.

But Slavoj Zizek’s documentaries about how to understand cinema psychologically and philosophically reached huge numbers of people. Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum has become a leading edge in popular understanding of Doctor Who, and a gathering point for the global sci-fi trans and queer communities.

Cultural Studies as an academic discipline writes powerful critiques of exploitive institutions, institutions that have state, economic, and social components. These are complex institutions like global trade networks, the mining industry, state military colonialism to wipe out indigenous people and cultures. Institutions like universities that perpetuate the financial exploitation of students, and the class stratification of societies.

Now you see the problem, don’t you. Here’s an academic discipline based around developing multi-faceted critiques of exploitive institutions. But its home is in an increasingly exploitive institution – the post-secondary education system.

Culturally, universities foster cultural conservatism by elevating wealthy donors and families in their support networks. Universities force levels of indebtedness on more and more people to the point of macro-economic catastrophe.

Universities protect networks and organizations like nationwide fraternity houses, which foster gendered violence. Researchers who are elevated to high-status positions in universities rapidly become corrupt and hypocritical – imagine a global justice and anti-colonialism advocate who rewards young female scholars from South America with career opportunities in exchange for sex.

Wait, you don’t have to imagine that last one. It’s Thomas Pogge of Yale University.

Cultural Studies was complicit in the institutions it was critiquing, because it could only function in the network of those institutions. Now, this discipline grew from the generation of researchers who grew up in the first period of mass-level university education. For the first time, working class and minority researchers were joining the university sector.

But it was still a sector built for the wealthy, male, and mainstream culture. No matter how much you may criticize the elites, if you have to play by elite rules to do it, your critique will always be incomplete.

Mapping Thought II: Can the Ideal Save Us? Research Time, 24/04/2018

So that's a look at the history of philosophy. What about the philosophy of history? A concept develops in response to a particular, singular problem as it arises in human society. The concept itself then develops historical power.

We don’t often think of concepts as having historical, material power. It’s an unfortunate tendency of the way the Western tradition of thought has separated thinking and the mental from the material, physical world of institutions and acts. But concepts do have material power.

Concepts are the components of people’s education and socialization. Let’s go back to our example from yesterday, the concept of the social contract.* It’s a concept, and so a matter of thought. But it’s thought that guides action in a very complex, profound way.

Does the violence of revolution overcome our ideals of freedom,
even as it overcomes whether we can actually use that revolution
to achieve anything like freedom in our own lives?

* There’s going to be a pretty intense interrogation of the concept of social contract, particularly its authoritarian characters, in Utopias. Not sure where in the book I’ll put it.

As a concept that sits at the heart of so many approaches to political thinking throughout the Western tradition, the different iterations of and approaches to the concept affect how we think about our relations to each other and to our state institutions.

Those thoughts inspire our actions. More than that, they drive our actions from central locations in our understanding of our social world.

Now I want to ask one more question – Do our concepts still have value when the events and movements they inspire become violent, corrupt, or self-destructive?

I’m going to step my example away from the social contract, and toward the more general concept of freedom. Freedom is a concept that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and has over centuries – And I’m just restricting my thinking in this case to my general knowledge of the Western tradition, what I know best.

Horrifying things have been done in the name of freedom. A contemporary example is Operation Iraqi Freedom. A classic example is the French Revolution.

The French Revolution was the subject of speculation by some of the leading philosophers of the time, who became some of the most influential philosophers down to the present day. So those complex examinations and investigations of the French Revolution have incredible influence on the Western tradition of philosophy as it stands today.

Because the truth is, just like the absurdity of a popular heartthrob like
1950s Marlon Brando playing Napoleon, the political events that saw
imperialism and wars of conquest emerge from the French Revolution
were contingent events. It need not have happened that way. Every
material event need not have happened that way, and only did
because of a complex interplay of events and relationships. The
slightest disturbance in this networks can have massive effects. So
should we resign ourselves to the fragility of our ideals? Or hold
onto them because that possibility of real success always remains?

The problem is that the event itself betrayed its motivating concept. The French Revolution was the successful overthrow of an absolutist monarchy in favour of a system of government that was more accountable to ordinary people. But the revolution itself quickly descended into the first major purge of modernism. The Terror was the assembly line of execution that continued for years after the overthrow of the monarchy.

Beyond this, within a decade, France was ruled again by a dictator. Napoleon was something of an improvement over the decadent, incompetent monarchy of Louis XVI, in that he actually introduced a system of law that governed even the practice of the state. Civil law was an improvement. The attempt to conquer Europe and the Mediterranean coast of Africa, not so much.

The same is true for so many other revolutions and revolutionary periods in politics. Civil war and Stalin’s system of governance by secret police destroyed any potential for genuine freedom to come from the Russian revolution, for example.

Same goes for the absolute dictatorship of Fidel Castro, the corruption of the United States with slavery and its cultural legacy, the revolutions of Simón Bolívar, José de San Martin, and Bernardo O’Higgins that descended into squabbles among warlords, and the deranged mass mobilization schemes of Mao Zedong, among many others. Revolutions in the name of freedom either fell into corruption or were quickly overcome by revanchist reactions.

So what’s the good of revolution? Paul Patton’s answer, riffing on the concepts of Gilles Deleuze, was the preservation of the idea of freedom. The total realization of the ideal freedom in the world is impossible, just as no one ever really signs a social contract. But the idea, the concept itself, is its own reason for existing – to inspire us to fight the reactionary forces that would take even our partial freedom away from us.

Is that alone worth it? I don’t know.

Paradoxes of Democracy I: Undermining Trust, Research Time, 21/03/2018

So I’m working on a white paper on democratic governance for a small Toronto think tank this week. It’s a format I’m still getting accustomed to, but I’m hammering out the first draft right now to get my ideas and arguments clear. Then I’ll wrangle it into the step-by-step format the group needs.

The bulk of the paper is a discussion of the reasons why popular mobilization is both central to democracy and an incredible danger to it. Since online social media is a powerful facilitator of revolutionary mobilization, I’m going to propose a brief policy framework to make sure such mobilization doesn’t too easily get hijacked by reactionary or fascist ideas.

A little late, I know. But all policy ultimately becomes catchup in a contingent world.

See, when I’m talking about revolutionary mobilization, I’m not just talking about the Arab Spring, or Black Lives Matter, or the Stoneman Douglas movement for gun control. I’m also talking about pro-Russian conspiracy mongering about Ukraine, and Pizzagate.

The fascists of kleptocracy. One successful for nearly a decade in that
mode. One is still getting started, so might actually be stopped.

You typically can’t equivocate these. My own sympathies are clear. I’m no fan of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, but if you’re going to understand the mobilizations on their behalf, you have to do something that a lot of us on the progressive side are uncomfortable with.

You have to understand why a fanatical Trumpist believes themselves on the morally right and just side of America’s political conflict.

Get yourself into the headspace of someone who really believes that Barack Obama installed authoritarian communist loyalists throughout the United States government, which Hillary Clinton systematically looted, and that Donald Trump is the saviour of American virtue fighting corruption at all levels of society.

No one is mobilized without believing their own mission to be the right one. In this example, they’re part of the group of Americans defending Donald Trump while he cleans up the corruption of the Democratic Party.

I think completely differently. But I share faith in a virtue – that democratic society demands governance based on trust. Trumpists have seen a betrayal of that trust, and are fighting to restore it.

The framework of their revolution is admirable. It’s the content I have a problem with, but the content has its own problems.

I Guess Stronger Together Was It, Jamming, 23/10/2017

A story first, then some philosophy.
• • •
Sometimes, a politician hits on the right idea at a time when she can never do anything about it. Hillary Clinton had led a political life of equal parts naiveté and the most awful ethical compromises for state power.

I think there's a good heart and an ethical soul in Hillary Clinton. I
firmly believe this. But I'm also sure that she no longer knows how
to express that soul. She had to hide her values as First Lady of
Arkansas and the USA under vicious attacks that made her out to
be some feminazi monster. Now, her quite reasonable
feminism is actually mainstream.
But she spent so long and in such intense circumstances training
herself to speak in euphemism to placate millions of sexists and
racists, she can't sound believable about what she truly and
deeply believes.

But then she put a fundamental truth about human nature on her campaign signs – that we are stronger together. It’s as if she knew she’d go down in flames – never consciously, only as a last moment of ethical instinct from the most ancient parts of her brain.

Everything about her political career was rooted in noble, true instincts, but she and her husband both were the worst judges of which compromises were worth making. Believe deeply all your life in the power to heal racism in America, then pass the 1994 crime bill and welfare reform packages in the name of compromise across the aisle.

Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party was just as revanchist as Donald Trump’s. Gingrich just had some tact, so he could trick naive kind people into thinking that he didn’t wish we could just have Jim Crow back.

It’s the same about this mess with Uranium One blowing up on right-wing media. FOX began talking about this complex web of business deals, as if it shows the fundamental corruption of the Clintons. But to me, the centre of the story lies here.

Bill Clinton walked into a meeting with Nursultan Nasarbaev – President For Life of that bastion of liberal freedoms and government transparency Kazakhstan – while Hillary Clinton was US Secretary of State. Bill sincerely believed that he was arranging nothing more than a contribution to a public health project somewhere impoverished.

Bill and Hillary Clinton would never have imagined such a meeting as a pay-for-play. Corruption was the worst thing a powerful person connected with government could do – it would break the people’s trust in you to do the right thing by them. Surely, no leader of a country would take on such a burden solely to enrich themselves.

Nasarbaev lives in a world where every meeting is a pay-for-play, a corrupt deal to enrich yourself. Enriching yourself was the reason you joined the government.

Some people are raised believing that joining government means becoming a public servant – that you have a duty to your constituents. If you take that so much for granted that you can't conceive of people who join government for very different reasons, you should stay home. You won't be able to deal with these people.

• • •
Hannah Arendt wrote about a particular concept of freedom – freedom from interference, self reliance, autarky. Freedom as the ability to turn away from our obligations.

This is a freedom we all have. But it isn’t a freedom we should want. It’s the freedom to turn away from your friends and neighbours. We’re all free to decide that we should live only to enrich ourselves.

But living that way leaves us bankrupt. Humans are fundamentally social creatures – our personalities are inherently inadequate and broken if we don’t get enough contact with other humans as infants and small children. We’re each deeply interdependent on everyone else in society for our mental and cultural health.

To have a morality that turns away from everyone else – when freedom is freedom from obligation – embraces the withering of a human organ as a great ethical good.

It sounds absolutely mad. Of course we’re stronger together than we are acting only on our own. Someone who’d gladly turn his back on everyone around him would be a monster of a person.

Don’t forget that another way of life as possible – never forget that humans are very good at making ourselves monsters.

The Power(less), Research Time, 01/06/2017

Yesterday, I wrote about how the larger work of forging a unified American identity across all 13 states was a key purpose of the country’s federalist project, the United States’ second constitution.* But Alexander Hamilton had both lofty and brutally pragmatic reasons for wanting American federalism to succeed.

* Another reason why I find modern originalist jurists’ slavish devotion to a virtually Salafist originalism of the 1789 American constitution. That constitution was itself the second go-around of the American government’s structure. The Founding Fathers wrote it with the knowledge that they were fallible.

Grover Norquist is a well-spoken man who I respect as the most honest
and straightforward of the contemporary right wing. I mean, I reject
and am appalled by almost everything he stands for. But he doesn't
pussyfoot around the bush, and I respect that. It's a breath of fresh air.
It's the air of an ambition to build a one-party state. Still counts.

Actually, let’s compare and contrast some contemporary Americans with the originals. One of the biggest arguments to justify a lot of the Republican Party’s reactionary program has been “state’s rights.”

Giving more power to the states, and away from the federal government, is a major goal of the modern American right. They understand the presence of the federal government in local affairs as a massive intrusion on your life.

Now, it’s not as though a lot of people aren’t under threat by the federal government of the United States. I’d say we’re a generation particularly suited to understanding, in systematic and fairly rigorous terms, all those hideous powers of the government.

That’s what the mass incarceration system does – millions of people imprisoned for years on laughably minor marijuana offences, their careers after release ruined by laws and popular fears of hiring convicts. The growth of the private prison sector is just one dangerous (and sometimes confusing) addition to this long-festering social cancer.

The surveillance state does it too. This is more indirect, because its presence in people’s everyday lives is more of a hovering aura than the direct violence of gunshots and prison walls.

But the Republican right wing rarely focusses on this. Having to pay taxes, I think. Environmental protection laws. Workplace safety laws.

Yet what does the hippest Founding Father write? He says that an expanded federal government that can act on many local levels is a massive decentralization of power. It seems totally counter to the problems of today.

Now look at his examples of serious problems facing the country in 1789. It all comes down to a very Machiavellian answer – corruption.

Alexander Hamilton may finally have lost.

Hamilton describes local mega-rich (for the time) industry leaders. Plantation owners and factory chiefs. Men who, practically speaking, own their entire towns – or else, they hold everyone in their grasp through wealth and influence.

That's one original danger to American democracy – local oligarchs. A strong federal government would counter-balance their power.

The other danger Hamilton discusses are local state officials – mayors, appointees, legislators, and governors – who use their positions to exploit their people. Maybe they’re kleptocrats, for sale to the highest-bidding local businessman. Maybe they’re tinpot autocrats building a personal fiefdom for their ego.

These are groups who corrupt the practices of government and business for selfish reasons. People who’ve lost their sight of the public good, or who never cared for it in the first place.

The greatest danger America faced in 1789 – when the gun barrels of the War of Independence had barely cooled – was corrupt powerful people who’d abuse their power and public trust for their own gain.

So you'd need a powerful federal government to overcome the local schemes of on-the-ground businessmen and corrupt local officials.

Hamilton’s words are insightful and powerful. Maybe there was something to originalist legal theory after all. But I’m left with a question.

What happens when the corrupt men take over all the levels of government?

What a People Are Ready For, Research Time, 16/05/2017

Here's another troubling parallel from Machiavelli’s writings to our own time. Late in Book III of the Discourses on Livy, he talks about what kinds of government are best for different cultural characters.

It’s a pretty common refrain in his writing, generally. But I’m thinking of one of his returns to this question produced a very disturbing answer. He asks what kind of leadership is suited to free people, and what’s suited for a subject, beaten-down people.

Free people make up a population who chafe against any authoritarian attempt to control them. Such people live by norms of free expression, free association, mutual respect, and dedication to the public good.

They need a government that respects them. A free people won’t want to be ordered around by authorities – at least not without good reason.

I never want to live in a society where I have to act as though
someone like Bashar Assad would be my potential boss. Worse
even than that is something even more horrible – a mind-set
that takes such a possibility as something utterly ordinary.

Free people won’t revolt against paying any taxes at all, for example. At least not free people who have the robust dedication to the public good that Machiavelli described as the popular attitude of Republican Rome. It’s a very current example today, because there’s such a powerful American movement for a flavour of libertarian philosophy that seeks to shrink the entire state to almost nothing in the name of freedom.

That's not what I mean. I mean that a free people in this sense will gladly go along with the orders of their government if the government is explicitly answerable to them and shares the same zeal for the public good.

So far so wonderful. Naturally, it all teeters on the edge of collapse.

Remember that Machiavelli conceives of human societies as having a life cycle. Societies with the best starting and development conditions for the best human life will be fantastic places. For a while anyway. But all societies grow corrupt – small inequalities interact to magnify each other until we live in an oligarchy.

Machiavelli argues that a subject people are best suited to a tyrannical government. They have no devotion to the public good, to the betterment of their community. They’re power-hungry would-be killers – a subject people are a society of thieves.

Those thieves don’t need a government that answers to them. If the government answered to a society like that, it would turn into a kleptocracy. The seats of government would be occupied by people dedicated to raiding the treasury and enriching themselves through backroom deals with powerful businessmen.

That doesn’t sound familiar to anyone today, does it?

And as far as Machiavelli knows, a society at that point of degradation won’t be able to heal itself from a state like that without a complete renewal. It would be a wholly new society, having transformed itself so radically to change from a corrupt oligarchy to a society of free people. So what’s the hope for us?

There’s a curious comment in that chapter. Machiavelli writes that such oligarchies – dens of hundreds of thousands or even millions and billions of thieves – are prone to revolution as the public grows disgusted with their tyrants.

In that revolution, maybe renewal can be found. You can make a whole new society.

A Gift For Monstrous Men, Research Time, 11/05/2017

Here’s an analysis from Machiavelli that has some troubling relevance for 2017, as if we needed to be troubled any more than we are already.

In yesterday’s slightly rambling post, I commented on a couple of chapters from Book II of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. It was about how the growth of oligarchy and the corruption of institutions wrecked the people’s faith in democracy.

Yet their freedoms to speak and organize still existed, allowing the faithless and resentful to organize a full overthrow of the democratic institutions they felt were worthless. That was disturbing enough because of how similar the political and social situation in the United States today is to that five century old description.

This is Donald Trump with his friend and longtime business partner,
Uzbek billionaire Lev Leviev, a diamond magnate who rose to the top
of the business class of an autocratic police state dominated by a single
ruthless man. Donald would be envious.

There's a set of chapters in Book III that I find even more disturbing when I watch the open kleptocracy of the Trump family.

Machiavelli writes that a kind, virtuous person dedicated to the public good in their work and life can only thrive in particular circumstances. So what kind of society lets such a good, generous person rise to the top? Where do the nice folks finish first?

Your society has to be dominated by values of equality, respect for everyone, and the fair submission to the rule of law. Not only must we profess that, we actually have to live by those values.

The most successful businesses are the ones who never cheat or cut corners, and provide services and goods that are primarily benefiting society. We have to live diligently, frugal but with an aesthetic sense to appreciate fine things. No one is greedy and no one cheats.

Police and security forces are never out of line, never too rough, always serving and protecting all people equally. No racial biases (conscious or not), no systematic pressures on minorities, no corruption, no allowing solidarity among cops to defend the violent or greedy. Everyone answers to the law not because it’s powerful, but because it’s just.

As I describe this, I find it very hard to believe that such a society has existed for centuries. Machiavelli describes Republican Rome in those terms, but even there, I doubt such harmony was ever universal.

Such a society is utterly unrealistic, but that near-impossibility is the only kind of community where our ethics would actually be adequate to the world. Where doing the right thing always resulted in your benefit, fame, and wealth.

But even the money didn’t matter! Everyone considers more income than would make you and your family pleasantly comfortable utterly unfair and gauche. We would all actually be satisfied with enough to live a nice life, and spend our excess wealth and power on the public good. That would bring everyone happiness.

As a society corrupts itself, says Machiavelli, such virtuous people dedicated to public good find it more difficult to thrive. It’s a downward spiral from the first misstep to ruin. Virtuous, good people have more trouble in society the more greedy people surround them. The greedy’s name for the good is the sucker.

The more corrupt, monstrous men dominate and hold powerful positions in a society, the more public life will be a gift to the monstrous.

A Problem That’s Gone Unsolved for 500 Years, Research Time, 10/05/2017

Thinking about democracy these days brings up its paradoxes. Try googling the phrase ‘paradox of democracy,’ and you’ll find a ton of different paradoxes. Social and institutional forces in a tension that threatened to pull the whole edifice of the country down around its knees.

Something essential will disappear from human civilization if democratic values and governance disappears again. There are good signs – Canada’s still robust multiculturalism, for example.

Look at South Korea’s election yesterday! Their democracy was under its greatest threat over this year, under Park Geun Hye’s corrupt administration. The daughter of the Republic of Korea’s most brutal dictator, in the thrall of the same family of demented gurus.

The new President of the Republic of Korea on the night of his election
victory. Moon Jae In's victory, to me, signalled the idealism that still
exists in South Korea's people for democracy, freedom, and peace,
despite the deathly serious problems the country faces. Hell, Korea
faces its literal near-extinction as a society and people through the
prospect of a short-range nuclear war. But they weren't so afraid of
this that they turned to authoritarian tactics in the name of security,
like the people of one of the world's oldest democratic societies.

Her impeachment and imprisonment led to an embrace of democratic idealism, a rejection of the ineffective steel eyes of the last ten years of hawkish leadership. Moon Jae In, and the new tradition of Korea’s Democratic Party, have the ideal of peace on the peninsula at heart. They’re pragmatists, but let that ideal govern their approach.

That stance earns the name ‘democratic.’

One paradox that jumped out at me reading Machiavelli is the paradox of tolerance. The snarkiest but sadly in-progress tension ripping at democratic values in the West. We’re facing a youth subculture of disaffected, resentful racist, sexist, gleefully disgusting punks who demand to scream their bile as an expression of absolute free speech.

Milo might have been fired, but taking out a figurehead won’t crush a whole cultural movement.

The question of tolerance is an old one. Must a democracy, in the name of universal freedom and tolerance, also tolerate the free expression of advocacy to end democracy?

Karl Popper’s answer was no. And we lean back on the idea in The Open Society and Its Enemies as a defence. But that reference alone doesn’t stop the subculture. That community continues to fester and grow.

It’s a serious threat to our optimism that this idea has existed since Machiavelli’s time. He deals with this when he talks about some of the reasons why democracies collapse.

A democratic government, even the city-states in Machiavelli’s time, were more vulnerable in some ways than the autocratic cities with their princes and military rulers. Democratic government is open – there is always free speech, freedom of association and thought.

The leaders and influencers in the world's older democracies, in
growing numbers, reject democratic methods and ideals in their
governance and missions. Most disturbing about reading the
Discourses on Livy is Machiavelli's idea that the erosion of
democracy and freedom is a natural process in the development
of human societies. For someone raised in an atmosphere of
modernist optimism, it's difficult to face the fatalism of a more
medieval mind.

So that includes the freedom to advocate the end of democracy, and plot to overthrow it. You will always find discontents with the order of things. Sometimes, those discontents are democrats themselves, wanting a more free society. Those are the good ones.

But you can definitely have discontents and malcontents enraged at the freedom of people around them. That was Machiavelli’s problem just as it seems now to be ours.

Yet Machiavelli’s problem was just a little different. Malcontents against democracy didn’t arise in isolation from wider events. The societies that developed anti-democratic movements arose when wealth and power consolidated enough to turn a government into a practical oligarchy. Only a few powerful people really had effective power over the state.

That betrayal of our institutions was the leading edge. There wasn’t yet enough free speech oppression to shut down all criticism. So a generation arises in the wake of democratic institutions having been corrupted, but which still has their personal freedoms.

But they’ve come to associate their institutions – still democratic in name – with corruption and opposition to the people’s freedom. That hypocrisy of the democratic name and its oligarchical control drives the hatred of democracy.

So, Niccolò, how do we combat this self-destructive social trend? . . . . . . . Oh, you mean we don’t? This is just part of the natural causes of a democratic society’s death?

Okay, you’re a very insightful doctor when it comes to diagnoses. But you’re no help at all with cures. Unless I really am asking to cure a natural cause of death.

Renewed? Yes You Could Say We Need to Be Renewed, Research Time, 05/05/2017

Because sometimes, I want to start a more meditative post about
strange and troubling political philosophy with a Doctor Who
reference. "Renewed? Have I? That's it, I've been renewed."

Enough confessionals. I’m back to cracking sidelong jokes about Doctor Who while I talk about extremely weird political philosophy.

These days, most political philosophy is about principles, right, and law. It all exists along this one plane of moral ideas about how society should be. All well and good, and some fantastic ideas come out of that way of talking about political existence.

But what could we learn from another approach? Political philosophy from an ontological approach. Machiavelli does that. I mean, he’s writing an analysis of a historical text, drawing pragmatic and idealistic political principles and guides from ancient Roman and contemporary Italian examples.

That's what it says on the tin. But the concepts he develops in doing so aren’t so much about principles and reasons for actions. The most innovative concepts in Machiavelli’s political guidebooks are of social solidarity and patriotism not as a principles, but as a force.

It’s easy to slip into what sounds like fascist territory. Machiavelli slips like that occasionally. That’s what separates a good reader from a sloppy one – a sloppy one will see the slip as the truth. A good reader keeps in mind the scope of the whole book, so knows a truth from a slip.

He writes that a good leader for a community will be “devoted to antiquity.”* It definitely sounds a lot like a seductive Golden Age that only ever existed in xenophobic fever dreams of a pure and potent society.

* Chapter 2.39, page 239 of my beaten up second-hand Oxford paperback.

But remember what Machiavelli spends the entire Discourses on Livy doing. He recalls and analyzes antiquity – it’s his own devotion to it. In antiquity, he finds the principles of a sustainable, empowering, democratic solidarity, which inspires his devotion.

He describes that solidarity as a force – the physical power of personalities dedicating themselves to the health and happiness of their entire community. The patriotism that unites a community in real and constant acts of mutual devotion to each other’s good and the public good.

But that force’s power wanes over time, for a huge variety of causes. Turmoil from war, factionalism growing bitter in the community, growing inequality that divides a society between oligarchs and those without dignity. A society like that is decadent.

Appropriate to read Machiavelli while that paragraph basically describes most of human civilization. So a pretty pertinent question is how we get ourselves out of this mess. It won’t be easy. The environmentalist slogan applies just as well to planetwide decadence.

The original Founding Father James Madison (far left).

The answer is, broadly speaking, renewal. That’s what Machiavelli means by devotion to antiquity. It’s what the lawyers of our time should properly mean by “originalism.” Not that grotesquely pious over-literalism about a country’s constitution. I mean the time when the forces of constructive patriotism that first brought your society together.

What James Madison called the one time Americans** from all over the country actually managed to agree on something tremendously important.

** Yeah, I know. Just the white ones. But you can’t even get all the white people in a society to come together anymore. Thank God.

How exactly do you go about renewing that energy of free, spontaneous, active solidarity? Machiavelli doesn’t have much of an idea, as far as I can tell. Neither do I, of course.

But part of what I want to do through writing, publishing, and promoting Utopias over the next few years is crawling close to a few answers.

To Be Incorruptible III: Our Best Wishes in One Voice, Research Time, 20/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . Before you can know if an institution’s structure and rules will lead people to make the best decisions, you have to know what kinds of decisions would be the best.

It sounds like I’m moving in circles. I’m not. I’m looking for presuppositions. The questions that need an answer if you’re going to develop a clear answer to the question you asked in the first place. So what makes a decision good for a community?

This is a question of the common good of a community. Well, what constitutes that common good depends on how we understand good. Are we thinking like a typical utilitarian? Not when we read Machiavelli. Nowhere in the Discourses on Livy does he perform the callous mathematics of a too-simple utilitarian.

His examples of noble behaviour discuss plenty of sacrifices. He praises, in multiple places, the decision of a Roman republican ruler executing his own sons when their actions and personal ambitions put the republic at risk of invasion or tyranny. Machiavelli is no stranger to cruelty to save the common good.

But this isn’t an everyday cruelty. The libertarian right is today’s most popularly powerful philosophy of freedom thanks to modern think tank networks. Think of how they and their founder philosophers think of cruelty in the name of the common good.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that 'Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?

For a libertarian, cruelty in the name of the common good is described with images of a Stalinist omnipresent communist state. Bureaucratic arms control whole industries, billions and trillions of dollars worth of people’s property is expropriated and collectivized. Even on a less grandiose scale, the act of collecting taxes is akin to theft.

This isn’t the kind of common good Machiavelli talks about when he describes the cruelty of necessary sacrifices. The sacrifices of Roman and Italian republicans are rare – they occur only at times of domestic instability, coups, wars, invasions from imperial war machines.

The common or public good, as Machiavelli describes it throughout the Discourses, is for everyone in society to stand before each other in equal dignity. Now, this does require some financial levelling. He describes the corrosive effect on society of too large a class of the idle rich.

These are people whose riches are so great that they encourage laziness and self-absorption. The super-rich are isolated from any association with anyone other than those they employ to serve them. Their money even isolates them from the need to be kind to others. Even the smallest altruism required for minimal participation in civic life disgusts them.

Such people are socially cancerous – their personalities degrade and insult the dignity of everyone around them. The only goods that matter to the idle rich are private goods, that which makes the rich richer. “It is not the private good but the common good that makes cities great.” That’s in Book Two, Chapter 2.

Contrast the private, egomaniacal goods that the idle rich seek with the public goods that democratic citizens seek – You see more clearly what the public good is.

Whatever the situation of your community, whatever problems you face in your economy, society, infrastructure, whatever – If you think with altruism and work together with your neighbours and compatriots, you’ll understand the public good and work toward it.

That altruism is the expression of the best patriotism. As long as altruism is at the heart of community action, you’ll fend off corruption and corrosion.

If you think only of your own personal good and see others only as means to your advancement, enrichment, prestige, and pleasure . . . The word you’re looking for is ‘tyrant.’

Now, this is fine for a clearly defined community. But at the borders, who is and isn't your compatriot gets slippery.

A Discourse on Manitoba, Composing, 10/04/2017

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. It’s a book of commentaries on different events in the history of the Roman Republic, where a concept, principle, ethical guideline, or virtue becomes clear through examining a few examples from ancient Rome or his contemporary northern Italy.

I thought I’d try writing today’s post as a piece of writing in the same style.

I work in political activism and in organizing my local social democratic party, the NDP in my part of southwestern Toronto. So I’m interested in news and developments throughout the party around Canada. Here’s a little discourse, inspired by Machiavelli, on one lesson to be learned for democratic spirits everywhere.

Growing Accustomed to Power Encourages Factionalism and Weakness; Their Only Remedy Is Total Defeat

At a party last night, I met someone from Manitoulin, who told me
that she knows people so broken by their family's experience in
residential schools that they don't even know what indigenous nation
they come from – whether they're Cree, Ojibwe, or Iroquois. Wab
Kinew has come through this generations-long crime against
humanity as a strong, virtuous leader. He has the potential to
restore Manitoba's NDP to greatness, and maybe even begin the
long nation-building process of reconciling indigenous and
settler cultures in Canada, so that we can ask their forgiveness
as a people for our attempt to destroy them.

How the New Democratic Party develops in Manitoba is particularly important to the party as a whole. It’s part of the party’s heartland in the prairies, and the only voice in state government for progressive policies and philosophies.

As a province, Manitoba has a lot of disadvantages. Few industries are there, the economy has never been strong beyond Winnipeg, and many of its indigenous communities – a considerable minority of the population – suffer horribly from the trauma of Canada’s genocide machines of the residential schools.

During their 17 years in power over the provincial government, the NDP achieved a lot to build a more fair and equal society throughout Manitoba. Gary Doer was a wise and moderate premier, designing a more fair tax code to invest in healthcare and education institutions.

Doer’s great virtue was knowing how to consolidate the security of his party’s electoral victory in 1999, making modest yet transformative changes to the government to help Manitobans become more prosperous, defending themselves from economic downturn with government services they could rely on and lowering the tax burden of the poor.

Machiavelli’s analytic frameworks focus on the virtues gained from how you react to where fate has placed you. The roots of Doer’s wisdom were in his experience having taken over the NDP when they were in disarray as a party.

Howard Pawley had presided over a party that had descended into rebellion against him and his cabinet, and resigned in disgrace after an election defeat in 1988. Doer rallied the party members throughout the province, and his growing esteem in the eyes of the people slowly rallied enough of them to win after a decade in opposition.

Doer stepped down as Premier of Manitoba after ten years, a man loved by Manitobans and many more across Canada. Greg Selinger took his place. But Selinger had not been shaped by years of building his reputation through public leadership, nor had any years of rebuilding a party from difficult defeats shaped him.

Selinger had arrived at political prominence in the halls of power themselves. He’d grown accustomed to their comfort.

Greg Selinger was a man who was able to walk into power, and so
never understood how fragile power is when you inherit it from
inside its own halls. He may have won elections, but elections are
battles, just like the clashes of armies Machiavelli described. They're
determined by the virtue of combatants and leaders, but also by
contingent events and chance. An election is an institutional
legitimacy for your access to state power, but it doesn't give you
moral legitimacy in the eyes of the people. That takes politics.

Taking power for granted, he quickly revealed himself to have lost the virtues that his predecessor had gained through years of hard work rebuilding the nobility of the NDP in Manitoba, and building the nobility of his own soul. Selinger had never gained power.

The party membership may have voted for him to be their leader, but he had won the party itself no victories. Selinger became the Premier by designation, not victory over the people. Even those victories he did gain, he gained from the seat of power itself.

Selinger reversed his promise not to raise sales taxes, a decision that not only hurt the poor more than the wealthy; the act itself was a transgression against a vow he’d made to the people. The public coffers now had more funds, but they were raised on the backs of the poor and with hypocritical speech.

Selinger’s broken promise made the people reject him. Sensing their leader’s weakness, factions split the NDP caucus. Theresa Oswald, one of Selinger’s trusted ministers, joined with other party leaders to demand his resignation. But the rebellious faction never spoke of regaining trust with the people, instead framing their rebellion entirely in tactical terms.

Selinger’s popularity was so low, he’d be unable to win another election. They argued in terms of the NDP’s ability to keep power over the state, never about the true source of that power, the love and trust of the people.

That Selinger would lose 2016’s election was obvious, an inescapable fact. Now he’s resigned, and the factions themselves are adrift. Separated from the offices of power, they’ve lost the fuel that fired their faction’s engines.

Gary Doer understood that you only have a right to power when you
have earned it through the genuine trust of the people. That's not the
same as winning an election, even though election victory is the
institutional test to gain state power. Just because you can pass one
test on our peaceful battlefields of electioneering doesn't mean you
have a right to the power you gained. His remarkable actions as a
spokesperson for an enlightened, kind government for Manitoba
as opposition leader and Premier earned him that right, when they
earned him the respect of the people.

Now that the power of state control is farther from their grasp, the leaders of Manitoba’s NDP can now focus on the true task of politics – organizing and rallying the people to win their love and trust.

Wab Kinew is an NDP politician that, to my eyes now, holds the greatest promise for this, since there’s a dedication deep in his heart to forge an entirely new social compact between Manitobans and their state.

He’s a flawed man, but has the potential for greatness because of the idealism and strength of his soul. He’s survived the fires of Canada’s century-long genocide against its indigenous peoples without breaking. Such a person has potential for greatness, and the opportunity to rebuild a party whose fundamental values lie in prosperity and progress for all offers a long path of growing nobility.

Restore virtue to politics and you’ll earn the love of the people, who will join you for transformative acts that will bring prosperity, happiness, healing, and hope to all. This is the message of Machiavelli’s Discourses.

Patriot Acts, Composing, 06/04/2017

I’ve seen the term patriotism misused for such wretched, hypocritical, violent, utterly self-absorbed political stupidity that it’s easy to forget how important it once was.

How has the concept of patriotism been ruined for me? If I went into detail, we’d be here for days.* There’s George W Bush’s Patriot Act. Freedom fries. The dour and dorky monarchism of Stephen Harper’s War of 1812 propaganda. Danny Williams’ ignorant, oil-soaked nationalism. The ongoing trajectory of Trumpist white nationalism.

* Instead of just one day at a time.

There was a time, however, when patriotism was a form of liberation. That was Machiavelli’s time.

Nothing to see here, folks.

Throughout the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli discusses patriotism as the community spirit of a city’s populace. Patriotism is the fundamental social glue of a community. It feels strange to a democratic thinker of the 21st century.

Yet that’s how patriotism does work. He explores the nature of patriotism from a lot of different perspectives throughout the book. Here’s one that I think sets the concept in the most stark, visceral terms. It also helps understand how patriotism can be a force for good, and why it isn’t anymore.

Patriotism, says Machiavelli, is the spirit of devotion common throughout a community, that inspires the members to risk their lives and be prepared to die for their community.

Machiavelli lived his entire life in a long period of war, conquest, and strife in Europe. Italy’s proud principalities and republican cities were constantly under attack from the massive armies of three expanding European states. France, Spain, and Switzerland dwarfed Florence, Genoa, Milan, Torino, and all the others.

That’s the political context where Machiavelli explains the virtue of patriotism. A patriotic people, in this sense, will provide much better troops than the mercenary armies that Italian principalities often hired. Those mercenaries were usually overrun by the superior force of imperial armies.

The Italian cities that could defend themselves drew their armies from their populace, as Republican Rome did. Mercenaries fight to survive a battle and get their paycheck. Patriotic citizens with their backs to the wall are prepared to die to defend the freedom and glory of their country.

Today we have our gangster kleptocracies. Putin, Yanukovich, Manafort,
Kushner, Trump, and in my home country of Newfoundland, Williams.

Patriotism is the vigorous fire in your soul when you stride into battle prepared to die for your people. In the 1530s, it was a virtue. It was required to defend the existence of your city, its culture, its independence from growing empires and gangster kleptocracies like the Borgias and Medicis.

I’ve thought about Machiavelli’s concept of corruption, which he applies to cities, cultures, and countries. But then I contrast today’s perverse, oppressive conception of patriotism with the genuinely liberatory power of patriotism in Machiavelli’s day.

And I wonder, can a concept become corrupt?

Corruption has several meanings in Machiavelli’s thinking. One is the ordinary sense we give to the word today, of a political class defined by bribery, immoral acts, and hypocrisy. But there’s also the sense of decay, the malfunctions of aging, processes that normally give life flying into self-destructive whirlygigs and spirals.

As he uses the word corruption, the two meanings blur together. Not in a sense of confusion, but of being two aspects of the same phenomenon. Corruption is the mortality of a culture. As a society marches generation through generation, the devotion to public good fades away in its most prominent, powerful people and families.

As a people take their freedom for granted, they lose their feelings of brotherhood, see only self-interest where they used to see public good. The children of privilege, if given enough generations, become the arrogant resentment of greed. Gears shudder. Fanbelts fly. Oil drips and drips along the pavement.

Or perhaps, as I quoted John Dewey the other day, the solutions of today simply become the problems of tomorrow. The patriotism needed for survival of small cities against ravenous empires becomes poisonous and violent when expressed with cluster bombs, ICBMs, and sarin gas.

Or are even these ideas two aspects of the same process?

Real Republican Freedom V: Crush the Corrupt, Research Time, 05/04/2017

Continued from previous . . . If all institutions of life are mortal, will inevitably corrupt themselves and decay into tyranny or chaos, then why not give in to despair? The only response to this question is to reframe it.

As corruption grows among the elite of society, the power and freedom
of the people fall into disrepair. The people are abused and degraded by
the rich and powerful and told that this is freedom. Eventually,
they're not going to take that shit anymore.

Because in that formulation, there’s no way out. If you think your actions and your society will only be valuable if they build institutions or achieve some greatness that truly will last forever, then you’ll be disappointed. An inescapable fact of material life is mortality – not just for organisms, but for planets and stars themselves.

The answer to that existential despair at mortality is to accept your limitations. We don’t have the power to control events thousands or billions of years from now. But we can give our successors a better starting point than we did. We can anticipate the problems they’ll face and get started on the work of dealing with them while we can.

The only pithy thing John Dewey ever said was that the solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow. So at least put a little effort into your tomorrow and its problems. The struggle will continue – struggle is life itself. Victory is never final, but is always the security of your own generation and handing over a good situation to the next.

Now, even at the much more modest scale, we’re still fucking up pretty royally. So what can Machiavelli’s writing tell us about how to avoid those fuckups in our political institutions?

The most important lesson, which returns in many different contexts all over the Discourse on Livy, is to avoid corruption. What is corruption? It’s a state of political affairs when the state is run through bribery and access to powerful offices instead of objective and transparent laws.

Humans are not capable of building institutions that can survive a
supernova. If we were, we'd have a whole different set of problems
to solve as a civilization.

In such a society, people with any kind of power aren’t accountable to the people, but to whoever is giving them their kickbacks. And if it’s widely known that bribery and lobbying is the real motive of any ostensibly public service, all faith in the fairness of society will be lost.

Corruption sets in most easily as the go-to mode of governance when only a few people have regular access to the powerful offices of the state. This is why oligarchical, one-party, monarchist, and dictatorial states are often the most corrupt.

People settle into their positions of power and take them for granted. This goes beyond the perspective of the high-ranking career civil servant – if they maintain their democratic ethics, such virtuous civil servants can be inspirational guardians of freedom.

Institutions designed according to civic republican democratic values – especially encouraging public accountability and participation in political institutions – guard against corruption. So many people are involved in decision making and discussion that corruption becomes impossible. A bribe is useless when the bribed still faces huge hurdles to fulfill the wishes of his secret patron.

Another way to safeguard against corruption is to prevent anyone in society from becoming too popular. It’s possible for someone to hold a position of such incredible prestige that it’s literally untouchable. Think of monarchs or royals in Machiavelli’s day. Or our contemporary monarchs and royals.

FYI. Here's another corruption scandal we don't hear too much about in
Western media. The Prime Minister of Malaysia Najib Razak (son of
one former PM and family friend of another former PM) is under
investigation for stealing nearly $1-billion from a national infrastructure
development fund. Something to watch for in the United States if
Donald Trump's infrastructure plan moves forward.

But there are also prestigious positions in more democratic societies that enable vast corruption and abusive practices. Consider any of the scandals or abuses of the people perpetrated by the elite of America’s financial sector, and the piracy of Silicon Valley bro culture companies.

They’re able to get away with so much because their positions as wealthy venture capitalists earn them a large cachet of social power. That prestige is a presumption of untouchability, and it constitutes a large clique of worshipful people among the general public.

“No one so wealthy and who’s achieved so much success could possibly do anything wrong!” Too many people believe shit like this. Wealth, success, and prestige actually enable corrupt behaviour because it creates this aura of untouchability around people. Not only does it encourage corrupt behaviour, it encourages people to let him get away with it.

From such corruption emerges the collapse of a people’s freedom. The most clear sign is the increasing paranoia and hostility of a republic’s authoritarian leaders.

Oh shit.

To be continued

Real Republican Freedom II: So What Is the Law For Anyway? Research Time, 29/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . When I was reading the anarchists – Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Colin Ward – I was meditating on the excess of law. How the very framework of some kind of coercive rule-following institution put pressure on human freedom.

Which those institutions do. I’m not about to say this isn’t an essential feature of legal institutions. When rubber hits road, there’s nothing protecting citizens from police violence except self-restraint on the part of police officers themselves.

We tell stories to remind us that institutional authority can be abused
so that we stay angry when we see it happening. We can't let that
level of corruption become normal, so we tell stories to remind
ourselves that such people are villains.

Think about it as a deranged, cartoonish image if it helps. As a fable told with fantastic imagery and intense drama. Imagine Nicolas Cage as a werewolf hunting the streets of New Orleans with fiery blood.

If that predatory human is really hunting your streets, though, don’t you want police and law enforcement institutions around to protect you from them? Leave aside the issue of violent crime or exploitive behaviour. Think about the truly dangerous criminals – the ones capable of bringing down your society.

Machiavelli is thinking about that last type of criminal. When he discusses the corruption of a virtuous government in Discourses on Livy, he has some very clear examples in mind. He’s talking about military dictators of small countries who raid the treasury, bankrupt the whole place, and flee to let the country be overrun by an expanding foreign empire.

This was the type of people running the independent states of northern Italy in Machiavelli’s time. As a politician, he was directly concerned with preserving a strong government in Florence that could preserve its independence against ambitions of conquest from France, Spain, and Austria.

France, Spain, and Austria in the early 1500s were absolutist monarchies expanding European empires through military conquest. Remember that situation whenever you read Machiavelli. His materialism and pragmatism was so deep and thorough because the times required it.

The problem of how a community protects itself from predators remains. Some predators are murderers, con artists, ruthless profiteers. Some predators join the police and the military. Some of those predators take advantage of a lucky situation to make themselves dictator of a whole country.

Because when the military takes command, the people's freedom
never comes out all that well.

So the best ways to prevent the downfall of your society to military dictatorship is to build strong institution. What makes an institution strong is public belief in its power, over and above the people who hold power through those institutions.

When a country’s institutions are more important to the people than its leaders, a leader who tries to corrupt those institutions will find a revolution on his hands. A revolution to protect institutions before those institutions even become corrupt and turn their violent powers completely against the population has a much better chance of success than one that must start from a position of total submission.

This is why it’s easier to stop a democracy from falling than it is to actually topple one. You may not think this, because of such a long history of military coups against democratic governments around the world.

But most of the world’s democracies are very young. Even the oldest, where democratic values are deeply ingrained in popular culture, have powerful inequities and institutional habits of oppression and abuse.

It takes a long time for a culture to become democratic through to its communal soul, to that one common feature of all citizens. It takes a long time for a people’s fundamental community love to be for freedom and mutual respect, and for the institutions that protect those freedoms.

There are many different objects of patriotism – the ethnic nation, religious dogma, the royals, the leaders, the god-kings, empire. The only good objects of patriotism are ideals and institutions of freedom. Anything else is slavery and war.

And that message is from, of all people, Machiavelli. . . . To be continued

Real Republican Freedom I: Perí Genéseos kaí Fthorás, Research Time, 28/03/2017

Remember when I was talking about Rousseau? Well, I’m not doing that anymore. But there’s one thing I saw when I picked up Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, a common idea stood out.

So I’m going to tell you right now – I need a scholar.

The idea is the inevitable fall of any city, any society. All living things are born as pure and strong specimens, but then grow corrupted, decaying as the body turns on itself. From generation there is corruption.

That includes human communities like Machiavelli’s Florence, Rousseau’s Geneva, Livy’s Rome, and my Toronto. But cities don’t experience the corruption of individual organisms, of course. A community doesn’t degrade from cardiovascular failure, auto-immune disorders, or cancers.

Maybe just metaphorically. The corruption of a city is the erosion of public virtue – of dedication to public good, the health of the community, spirit of patriotic brotherhood among citizens.

No, being born into privilege and an ethically corrupt family doesn't
predispose you to selfishness and your own corruption. Of course not.
I mean, fuck, even Barron is playing with toy limos and sports cars.
The kid doesn't even own plastic dump trucks. What kind of
construction magnate's son is this? Oh, right – a construction
magnate who's never had to work for his living.

Here’s a narrative, from early in Machiavelli’s Discourses, of generation and corruption of a city-state. And it can happen remarkably quickly for a society. Maybe a century. The government is established and managed by a virtuous, intelligent, wise prince.

He consolidates power as a monarch, and his ethical personality results in a period of greatness – the people are prosperous, the city is famous for its good works. Then the prince’s sons take over the government.

Raised in privilege, the inherited rulers have none of the virtue and ethical sense of their father. They’re selfish bastards who steal from the citizens and squander the city’s wealth on their own pleasure. So the noblemen get together and stage a coup.

No matter how virtuous and dedicated to public good those nobles may have been, their children will be just as corrupt and self-serving as the princes. So the multitudes themselves overthrow the oligarchs.

Yet after so many years of repetitive corruption, so many regimes that have led to constant disappointment, there’s no faith left in leaders. No one bothers to respect or obey the authorities. Even when they run the city in their name, bitterness and resentment have taken over the public imagination.

No faith left that a leader wouldn’t be hostile to his people. And the republic is destroyed.

That cycle of generation and corruption is cyclical – in Machiavelli’s thinking, it occurs throughout human history, infinitely in both directions. What I’d like from some of my scholar friends is some perspective on how Aristotelian this was.

For almost the entire medieval period, Aristotle’s works were core sources for many of the subjects that are empirical sciences today – physics, cosmology, and biology. I haven’t focussed study on Aristotle since my undergraduate days, taking a few courses from Memorial’s resident Aristotelian scholar.

But I remember many of the basic concepts, and Machiavelli’s (and later, Rousseau’s) account of human societies’ inevitable corruption, collapse, and rebirth strike me as very similar to Aristotle’s ideas.

Would early 1500s Florence still have been shaped by that Aristotelian way of thinking about the world? Would those texts still have provided so many truisms of popular education? One of my historical scholar friends, do let me know, please. . . . To be continued

No Wit Today – Just Exhaustion, Advocate, 24/03/2017

There are some days when, like everyone who’s had to move from one career to another, I miss my old career. I was good at teaching, and I enjoyed it. I loved writing philosophy – it’s why I still do it independently, and why I put that analytic and creative skill to use in my current work as a writer, marketer, and artist.

But I read something earlier today that left a bitter taste in my mouth. John Searle is the subject of a viscerally disgusting set of sexual harassment allegations.

I don't really want to go over this in much detail. If you read the Buzzfeed article, you’ll discover all you need to know. I don’t want to discuss what Searle might or might not be found legally culpable for. Those are the kinds of discussions for law courts, which have much higher burdens of proof than straightforward ethical discussions.

I never really liked Searle's work to begin with, either.

The truth is, I’ve become increasingly alienated from the academic establishment. Although I regret the difficult and sometimes painful path I’ve had rebuilding my career after leaving the university sector, I find myself increasingly repulsed by the arrogant and grotesque behaviours the institution seems to encourage.

Not all professors, of course. Not all professors I knew in my academy days look straight through me when they see me on a campus or at a conference. Not all professors conduct blatantly dishonest job searches. Not all star professors in their fields regularly abuse their prestige and offices to prey on young female students.

The professors I knew who don’t do any of those things are wonderful people who I’m glad to have known. But I’ve also known enough who’ve done all these things. On the small scale my own life, I’ve met the arrogant, I’ve met liars, and I’ve met bastards.

I see how the prestige of an academic position feeds personal arrogance. I’ve seen the institutionalized untouchability of a prestigious office erodes people’s sense of ethics.

Now it seems I can’t go a year without learning of some other American university-based philosopher faced with civil claims or forced to resign over what in each instance are credible allegations of using his office to prey sexually on young female students.

Four years ago, it was Colin McGinn. Just over a year after that, it was Peter Ludlow, who when I met just a few months before his fall, was one of those academics who looked straight through me when he discovered I held no position.

Last year, it was Thomas Pogge, a multidimensionally hypocritical case of an ethicist praised for his selfless approach to political thought. Well, he had also been using his office and research institute to manipulate and seduce a long string of young female scholars from the Global South.

The same reporter carried out the investigation into Searle, and the lawsuit by Joanna Ong that he propositioned her multiple times, then cut her salary and fired her for refusing him. Yes, Ong’s suit alleges that he did, indeed, make that very joke.

The What It’s Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy blog exists, chronicling everyday sexist bullshit throughout the discipline. It’s beyond tiring, and I don’t even work there anymore.

I look at this institution that I had wanted to be part of, that defined a career path for me for a decade. It’s past being decadent. It’s past being sad. I feel a kind of sickly contempt at that institution. I don’t even know how I could have thrived there if I’d stuck out the career.

If I had seen something like what Searle and Pogge were apparently doing, would I have done something about it? Or would I have looked the other way? When I think about what my own livelihood would have depended on, what the established norms and moralities of my institution were, maybe I just would have been content with not doing such reprehensible acts myself.

Or maybe after many decades rising through the hierarchy of that world, growing entirely accustomed to its cultures and the power of an office, maybe I’d have done worse than turning away my eye.

I think it’s a profound and important ethical truth about humanity that when we think we’re incapable of monstrosity is exactly when we’re most vulnerable to becoming monsters.