Reaching for Respectability, Jamming, 08/02/2018

Sociology and I have an interesting relationship. Aside from the fact that two of my oldest friends are a husband-and-wife sociologist team, I’ve relied on sociological studies for a good number of empirical sources in my own work.

Sociological theory is also a pretty fertile ground for philosophical creativity too. Pierre Bourdieu, Max Weber, Randall Collins, Claude Lévi-Strauss are just a few sociological theorists who have been influential in philosophical circles.* I’ve gone to the work of these and other folks for my own research.

One of those artistically-rendered maps of the internet, allegedly
composed from every individual IP address.

* And departments, which overlap far too often.

Niklas Luhmann gets listed as a sociologist and social theorist – grappling with the concepts of his systems theory of communication and meaning takes up most of a chapter of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

Jürgen Habermas’ communicative action theories has influenced huge swaths of sociological and human rights theory. Bruno Latour is a philosopher whose actor-network ontology of social relations was so influential that he’s taught as if he were a sociologist.

I’m no stranger to this discipline. It’s my main transdisciplinary direction when I take a flight.

But some sociologists are dangerous. They’re shunned. Or at least considered creative thinkers whose strange directions were never worth following empirically. Gabriel Tarde seems to be one of them.

The essay about him in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage is pretty fascinating. Éric Alliez wrote it, and I’ve loved his essays on Deleuze whenever I’ve come across them. I’d describe his writing style as the most artful lack of restraint. So here’s the short version of what Deleuze saw in Gabriel Tarde.

An implicit theme of this book is to show the depth of Deleuze’s debt to Gottfried Leibniz as a thinker – aside from the essay on Leibniz himself, there’s Wronski and Tarde, identified as Leibnizian thinkers in their own spheres.

So when Deleuze was hunting for concepts of existence as fundamentally heterogeneous, he stalks through a shadowy Leibnizian tradition. What made Tarde’s ideas Leibnizian?

Gabriel Tarde

Gabriel Tarde developed a model of sociological thinking that preserved psychological dimensions of human life at that macro level. I’ve just terrified every sociologist in the room.

The first thing about sociology you learn – seems to be in all the introductory courses – is that its founding principle was that the social was its own set of causes. The social was a level of existence with its own governing laws and principles that could never reduce to psychology.

It almost sounds like sociology is justifying its existence – which was actually the founding process of sociology.

Alliez explained this in his essay – Tarde and Émile Durkheim were contemporaries. Tarde was a marginal figure, who made his name developing criminology. That work eventually got him appointed to a professorship at the Collège de France, the platform for his critiques of Durkheim.

Durkheim was at the centre of important intellectual networks in Europe – building the first French university department of sociology at University of Bordeaux, then joining the Sorbonne.

That institutional role as the leader of sociology’s installation in the French research university saw Durkheim in a curious intellectual pressure. Sociology was caught between a firm division – too empirical and mathematical for the humanities, too humanistic for the sciences.

Durkheim, in laying out the core principles of sociology, did so to make sure it would be recognized as a science. He worked to build a consensus in the French academic world for the reality of the social as a plane of existence with its own rules and composition processes.

In this context, Tarde’s theory was very dangerous – especially given the awful 19th century European tendency to see all causal connection as reduction. Tarde’s theory was that built the social and all its processes emerge from the collision of huge numbers of individuals.

Today, we understand that theory as emergence. But 19th century thinkers didn’t understand emergence at all – they only understood reduction. So if one process comes from another, you don’t need to understand the resulting process in itself – only its components.

That attitude would have led people to think that the social was unreal because it was a product of individual interactions. So Durkheim suppressed it.

Yet Tarde – and that underground lineage of thinkers that Deleuze drew so much from – seem to have won out. Our universe is heterogeneous, a world of changes, where was emerges can be radically different from what was.

How to Fake Being a Lord of Time, Jamming, 30/05/2017

So I said last time that I wasn't quite done with my thoughts on The Pyramid at the End of the World. That's true. I spent the first entry talking about the story’s narrative structure, Peter Harness’ recurring template for his Doctor Who stories.

But there were philosophically fascinating ideas throughout the episode, all surrounding the Monks. Look at what their central power is. They can simulate a world’s entire timeline so profoundly that the simulations can discover their true nature.

After you read this post, you may think to yourself that the Monks'
violence to time's creativity make them a profound villain for the
Doctor. They're literally fearsome mirror images of the Time Lords.

The simulation is so comprehensive that they can identify the precise minor accident – breaking a pair of reading glasses in a door – that’s the vital condition for a potentially world-ending mistake. They can use their simulation to affect the real world in that pivotal, almost-imperceptible way.

The imagery of their simulation machine is thousands of threads in a massive, loose rope formation – orderly tangles. The Monks interact with the threads by stroking and caressing them, manipulating where they appear in the bundle.

This way, the Monks appear designed as fearsome mirror-images of the Greek Fates, the Moirai gods, depicted as the daughters of necessity. The Monks understand the infinitesimally granular details of every timeline, every possibility.

Monks take the form of walking corpses because they see humanity themselves as corpses. As a mortal, caught in the processes of time, humans are always already corpses.

Mortals are bodies, moving according to a web of possibilities so dense that no one can move without shifting the entire pattern. This is a vision of time and process that preserves freedom and necessity at once.

The Monks don’t manipulate the universe as block time. Block time, the vision of time that Einstein thought relativity mathematics implied, is the universe as a single four-dimensional block of necessary movement. It’s a popular image, and it often appears in time travel fiction. But nothing in Doctor Who can consistently hold this view of time.

Here's a limitation of the Monks' power. They seem to depend, somehow,
on the consent of those they're manipulating. When they're going to
change the world radically, in a way that people will see, they need
permission. Somehow. But they have the ability to make minor changes
that people won't necessarily see at the time, which means they can
still destroy whole worlds, thanks to the fundamental interconnectedness
of all things. But I'd like to see how other writers play with these
villains in the future, how much they can do.

The Monks operate as gods of freedom in necessity. They understand that we each have real, material power to act in the world, that we aren’t moving entirely to a determinate path through our history. That power belongs to all objects in the world that change and move at all, like a pair of reading glasses.

Problem is, just as we have the power to create new states of affairs in the world, each of those changes has a tremendous gravity. One movement affects all the other relationships in the whole. One thread moves, and all the threads must move in kind.

Most of the time, a change makes little perceptible difference. As for a change at a critical point to cause increasingly high-magnitude affects? Like a pair of reading glasses getting smashed on the same day Erica’s co-worker shows up to work too hung over to see straight.

Chaos. That’s the time of the Monks. They’re beings that can manipulate chaos.

Yet to do so, they have to bring a external, alien determinism to chaos. The chaos of our profoundly interconnected and interdependent world is that all actions affect each other, whether directly, indirectly, conditionally, or systematically. But those actions themselves are free – the product of active movement.

The changes that a particular action causes don’t pre-exist the action. An action is a change in one body’s movement that affects all the surrounding processes, creating an all-encompassing chain of change. An action is the creative power of material.

But when the Monks measure and simulate all the different chaotic possibilities of a world, they manifest each of those changes in their strings – all at once, altogether. They turn chaos’ dynamic necessity of mutual affectivity into the ordinary block time where no active change is truly possible.

The Monks have robbed time and material themselves of agency. They’ve turned reality into a distinct and always-existing set of possibilities, chosen like a thread in a massive rope. Chaos, in contrast, is the free creation of futures through affectivity and change.

The villainy of the Monks lies in their destruction of the universe’s chaos.

Original Inequality III: Men of Substance and Matter, Research Time, 03/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . You read Rousseau and he truly is a deeply materialist thinker. One quite unlike any other thinker of his time. He describes human nature entirely in material terms, as the functions and actions of physical creatures. That includes our thoughts and feelings.

Yet we are still free.

He even gives a materialist account of depression in The Origin of Inequality. Not anywhere near the completeness of what you’d find today in the DSM of anything like that.

Until the dominant images of how we popularly understood scientific
principles changed, we couldn't really understand how a material body
could be free. The strong determinism of clockwork imagery could
even feed back from the popular to the professional who should know
that things are much more complicated. Or should he?

Consider the roots of depression and anxiety in your social and physical environment. Your life becomes complicated, filled with obligations, forcing you to keep so many plates spinning all the time. As these social, economic, and other needs and obligations proliferate, the stress of it all overwhelms you.

That’s Rousseau’s analysis of how an individual’s mental breakdown and depression happens. Even in 1755, people had nervous breakdowns.

He lays out this example in an argument about how appropriate our overstuffed societies are to the best-quality lives for humanity. All these are moral and political questions, questions about the happiness of our minds and the freedom of our souls.

Each time he offers an answer, it’s rooted in material existence. The craziness of life in contemporary society – the proper balance of healthy food and everyday exercise – biological and ecological interplays of forces.

From these networks of forces and colliding processes, human freedom emerges. And Rousseau is writing this in 1755.

The stress on your body and your brain from massive overstimulation
on a near-daily basis eventually cause breakdowns. It happens to
plenty of professors in the academic world, especially now that even
protected tenure-track researchers have become overworked by
administrative demands as well as their research and teaching.
Some remarkably successful public intellectuals have left the
academic career they may have been taught to dream for, simply
because of this Kafkaesque bind.

See, at the time, Western thinking was stuck on the problem of freedom and determinism for centuries. In the Enlightenment era people typically thought of nature as a mechanism just like clockwork. Physical movement was fully determined lockstep, as precise as the gears of a clock.

But humanity was the exception. We were free from mechanism, and figuring out how this exemption from causality actually worked was a major problem of philosophy from about the beginning of the Renaissance until the mid-20th century.

The problem always bugged me, and when I learned enough about ecological science and the physics of intensity, I was finally able to put it away. Because there is no contradiction between determinism and freedom – causality is always multiple and conditional.

Rousseau’s vision of a humanity that’s both entirely material and essentially free isn’t nearly so nuanced as I could get from studying scientific and mathematical concepts in 21st-century physics. But it’s in an entirely different headspace from the entire Western intellectual scene of his own time.

I think if I had come to Rousseau at this point in my life, but was an academic, I’d write one of those short monographs that puts an unintuitive twist on it. Like this interpretation of Rousseau as a materialist of freedom.

But I’m pretty sure by now that it’s the branded interpretation of some Rousseau scholar toiling away entirely behind academic paywalls. And I’m just not in the financial position to spend the labour I’d need to write such a book that would only appeal to academic publishers.

I’d rather deal with these ideas in a more mass-market venue where accessible prices and tones of writing can connect with more people. Ultimately, I’d make more of a public impact and make more money from my own writing.

If engaging the public is part of the mission of any humanities field, that question of accessibility has to be at the front of your mind. It’s how your work can do its best work in the world, and how your work will best build a heritage. . . . To be continued

Classical Liberal Metaphysics, Research Time, 05/01/2017

So I cracked open the old Kant again. This is what you’ve done to me, Utopias manuscript research.

Not that I don’t enjoy reading it. That old collection of Kant’s moral and political philosophy books and essays is a beautiful mixtape of ideas and arguments.* I don’t really care that the language sounds dry. It’s conceptually rich. Nerd, I know.

* The Cambridge Edition Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary Gregor.

The kind of chemistry that was happening in Kant's age, at least
symbolically speaking.

I just had a brief look today at a small essay that Gregor included at the very start. Just a book review, but it illustrates the intellectual context Kant was writing in. And it gives a clue of how the way people thought about the world in general affected how they thought about morals and politics.

Kant is one of the foundational writers of philosophical liberalism in its classic apex. So the ideas generally in the air of the late 18th century shaped the democratic philosophy that emerged.

A core idea – and one that animated Kant’s entire project in moral philosophy – is that causation is the same as necessity. If there was any cause to an action, then that action was necessary and could not have been otherwise.

For morality to function, human behaviour had to be an exemption from this otherwise universal law of strict causal necessity.

Kant developed the best ontological case for that exemption. One that didn’t rely on postulating a special case like “vital force” or “divine essence.” That just presumed what you were trying to prove, but gave it a different name.

Kant made the exemption from necessity on the terms of causal necessity. He gave in on every conclusion that humanity was a part of nature and that nature moved entirely by causal necessity. He asked what we’d have to do in going about our everyday thinking in our ordinary lives.

The Western image of nature in the time of Europe's industrial
revolution was as a clockwork mechanism – precise and unvarying
in all its movements.

We decide. We consider alternatives. We choose. In the rolling phenomena of everyday life, he found the exemption from nature’s strict causal necessity – regular old thinking.

That’s why we remember him as one of the most creative philosophers in the whole Western tradition.

But he only did it because everyone else writing about nature as strict causal necessity adopted a boring fatalism that not only contradicted the validity of morality, but rendered much of everyday human thought utterly silly. Why bother even thinking as if we had choice? Just accept that our wills are passive mechanisms entirely determined by the causes of our actions.

Liberalism was born in a moment when – speaking of ontology, the nature of the world itself – there was a stark conflict between moral responsibility and the belief in ethical progress on one hand, and on the other, an image of humanity as a clockwork robot with delusions of grandeur.

Freedom was under threat in scientific and metaphysical discourse. The industrial revolution was beginning – a transformative shift in technology made possible in part by our powers to use fairly simple mathematics to engineer complex, precisely moving machines.

Too often, defences of human freedom against allegations of our
necessity just repeated the dogma of belief in a vital force or divine
essence in humanity. The dominant Christian morality of Europe at the
time – believed by the masses and enforced by powerful state
governments – already made humanity a unique exemption from
the world. We were more like God than natural creatures, since God
made us free to choose our actions.

There was no choice in nature, only precise relationships, reactions, and transformations. A particular quantity of water became steam at this exact rate under this particular temperature and pressure. No variance. No exemption.

All signs in biology pointed to the human body having basically the same mechanisms and organs as other natural animals. So if humanity was a natural creation, it would move with this same lack of variance. Pure necessity.

Freedom under threat from a totalitarianism of ontology.

Now, contemporary science accepts way more complexity in the world than these simple relationships you can describe in such simple mathematics as Pressure times Volume over Temperature. PV/T. Most real systems – anything more complex than those 18th century lab conditions – require non-linear mathematics to describe them.

These are mathematics without single solutions – they only give ranges of possibility. The more physical variations possible in a system, the more possible solutions any mathematics describing them will have. And the more sensitive those systems will be to wild transformation from generally innocuous changes.

Freedom is a matter of ranges and limits. We know this now. But the people who were first developing liberal philosophy – the political thought of absolute freedom – did not.

True/False & What Else? III: Terror in Powerlessness, Research Time, 09/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . Louis Althusser is the first author I came across to have discussed that undercurrent tradition of political thinking. The materialist democrats – Baruch Spinoza, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Karl Marx.

Now, I discovered this not in one of his books of philosophy, but in his autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever. This is in many ways a very disturbing book – I recommend it highly. 

Althusser wrote two autobiographies. The first was a fairly straightforward description of his life up to his general retirement from teaching in the mid-1970s. The next was The Future Lasts Forever, a blur of memories, traumatic terror, fragmentary recollections of the collapse of his subjectivity, and philosophical reflection on society and individuality.

One major concept of horror is that unspeakable terrors
exist under the comforting fabric of ordinary life. I've
been thinking a bit about horror tropes lately.

He was prompted to write that second, much more fascinating, autobiography by a need to set the record straight. See, Althusser had a catastrophic mental breakdown in 1980 and murdered his wife Helene Rytmann, strangling her. He was in such a state at the time that the French courts declared him unfit to stand trial. 

So not only did Althusser never face punishment for the killing, but there wasn’t even a detailed investigation into the causes of the act. He was remanded to a psychiatric institution and stayed there for about four years. 

When he was released, he wrote The Future Lasts Forever to set the record as straight as he could, and at least take some of the power over his public image back from the tabloid press. 

It wasn’t a matter of mounting a counter-argument to the press’ allegations that Althusser was a killer who got away with it. You can't really take that book as anything but an unfolding portrait of a broken mind. It was a demonstration that Althusser as a subject was in a far different, more disturbing world than the terms of sensationalist hackery could understand.

Some of his claims I can’t take seriously. I can’t consider his claim that he never finished reading Capital, never really studied much Marx in the first place, as a straightforward confession. He writes and interprets with too much creativity to plagiarize or spin his wheels. 

The Althusser of The Future Lasts Forever is a collapsed person, shattered completely. You don’t read that book looking for facts – you read it looking for the moments of lucidity. 

What kind of horror does a person experience when they
try to reckon with their own mental breakdown? When
that breakdown was so intense that he strangled his
wife and lifelong companion to death?

Their emergence is the most terrifying tragedy in the story, the moments when he realizes the magnitude of what he did, even if he’s talking about something else entirely.

One of the many terrifying threads in that autobiography was his devotion to that tradition of political philosophy – materialist democrats. In this tradition, the world was incredibly complicated, unable to be reduced to any simple schema and have your ideas remain at all adequate. Politics was rough and gritty. 

Society could be transformed, but it would mean literally revolutionizing the terms in which that whole society lived and understood their own lives. 

And what was Althusser’s contribution to that? To me, he makes for a profound challenge. By removing agency from individuals, he made each person a function of their society. 

He presents a conundrum that I don’t really see any way out of, unless you simply reject his terms. If individuals are functions of their societies – expressions of an ideology – then you can’t really be a revolutionary. Even though he was a communist activist his entire life. 

When he’s talking about the structure of an ideology – the social imaginary and moral framework of a people – Althusser provides some valuable insights. I'm going to get into that next post. 

But the paradoxes of his thinking – when you look at them on the large scale of his entire corpus and life – are all vicious. Such a deterministic structuralism – macro determining the activity of the meso – just can’t fit with being a revolutionary. You can't think that changing the world is possible if you think that the world always has agency over you.

Even with being a philosopher. It's an individual's conceptual creativity that lets us understand events and processes of universal importance. Individuality as an organism can't be denied without a kind of willful ignorance of real life.

The parts have to shape the whole just as the whole shapes the parts. Activity is a feedback loop among all constituents. Either everything is active, or there’s no activity at all. Passivity – being the object of an action – is only relative to the action itself. Not determining, but overpowering. 

Individuality can’t be escaped. The belief itself would be a false ideology. But what does that even really mean? False ideology from true ideology? Or is it more complex than that? Of course it is. . . . To Be Continued

We Ended Racism So Now We Fight Racism, Research Time, 24/01/2016

Part of what I think is wonderful about the contemporary wave of protest movements is that they’re teaching people about systemic causality. Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and social network feminism all discuss how you can have racism without racists. 

When I was young, I felt alienated from anti-racism
movements because I thought my being white made me
unwelcome in their struggle. That's why I'm glad part of
the outreach of anti-racist movements today makes an
issue of how white people can join without being
condescending, without being some pathetic dork
shouting, "I can't be racist! I listen to Kendrick Lamar!"
But white people can fight white privilege by using
their existing privilege to amplify the message of
peace. I'll always love Kendrick, though.

Systemic racism: A system of institutions and social relations that are generally taken for granted, but which have a massively disparate impact on one group of people over another. 

This is the kind of racism for which punishment and blame make no sense. It’s another thing that reactionaries don’t understand about these movements: they don't seek to punish white people. The goal is education, empathy, and progress toward institutional and social change. These movements seek reparative justice, not retributive.

But that’s not to say that the type of racism whose proper response is a slap to the mouth doesn't exist anymore. 

Antonio Negri has a lot of interesting things to say about racism, as you'd expect from someone whose philosophy comes from such a post-colonial perspective. Better I should say post-post-colonial.

A major goal of Empire the book is describing the difference between the old model of imperialism and the new centreless globalization of empire. One aspect of that I’ve discussed before, the difference between state-driven overseas conquest (imperialism) and omnidirectional market integration (empire). 

Another difference is how people think about race. Modernist racism, the racism of imperialism, conceives of race as a biological category. Race is baked into people’s essences. The difference between whites, blacks, east Asians, and Amerindians is either eternal, or moves at the speed of biological evolution, in epochs so long they may as well be eternal.

The imperialist way of thinking about race considered different races literal sub-species of humanity. They were ranked in power and potential with the same certainty as Linnaeus. 

Only a few decades ago in America, the marriage that
produced Barack Obama would have been illegal. It's
not that progress isn't possible; what's disappointing is
how fucked up and weird institutionalized racism used
to be, even compared to the gross injustices of our era.

Reacting to this, anti-racist activism focussed on how racial differences were the product of culture. Dividing lines between races were cultural conventions, and behavioural and linguistic differences between races were cultural variations among communities all over the globe.

The roots of race lie in the contingency of cultural development, according to anti-racism in the imperialist period. But we can't continue speaking this language, because racism has adapted to that critique.

Racism now speaks in the language of cultural determinism instead of biological essence. The contemporary racist of the imperial / globalization / networked era accepts that racial difference is a function of culture’s contingency. 

But those cultural differences make it impossible for different communities to integrate and co-exist without violence. Here’s an example from contemporary politics.

A lot of the rhetoric against allowing Muslims to move to European and North American countries revolves around cultural differences. 

Muslims, so goes this perspective, are anti-democratic because they demand that all people live under their strict religious laws. All Muslims want to control women, consider rape ordinary, and think nothing of murdering their daughters for minor moral infractions. They accuse Muslims of being inherently violent.

Not only is none of this bullshit true, but it's rooted in stereotypes about the uniformity of Muslim culture. It treats Islam as a total cultural determinant of more than a billion individual personalities. 

These peaceful gun-toting militiamen held a peaceful
protest outside a Texas mosque about a variety of issues
for which they blamed the existence of Muslim people
in America. So that's pretty horrible.

We combat this kind of racism, rooted in ideas of cultural determinism and uniformity, by throwing the singularity of unique individuals in the face of racists. We drag people kicking and screaming into empathy. 

I don't want to say for certain, but I’m pretty sure that an attitude of empathy and genuine understanding is the ultimate cure for racism that, unlike the reaction to biological racism, can't be turned back against the cause of radical liberation.

• • •

One of the things I love about living in Toronto is how ethnically mixed the city is, and how much ethnic mixing goes on in the city. Walk around Toronto, and you won’t just see couples whose love would have been illegal in the days of anti-miscegenation laws. 

You’ll see couples who those old laws wouldn’t even know what to do with. And the kids that those couples produce will contribute to a city’s population that's truly post-racial, and increasingly incapable of racism. They won't even know what race is. 

In a society where love is possible between anyone, the existence of race is impossible.

What Haunts Us II: Ghosts of an Imagined Freedom, Composing, 11/11/2015

Continued from previous . . . You see, this Utopias manuscript I’m working on, which I spend a lot of blog space writing about the research for, is fundamentally about freedom. That’s the political message of any utopia worth calling such, this declaration, “When we achieve this, we shall at long last be free!”

And the project is basically exploring what that means. Part of what it does – in the early bits that I haven’t been researching or posting much about recently – is challenge the approach that academic philosophy takes to the problem of freedom.

Unfortunately, one of the most successful popular images
of science is the one the encouraged us to think of
everything science described as the gears of a clock
fitting precisely together and moving with perfect
regimentation. It turned out totally wrong, but it caught
on so easily that too many still think of science this way.

Those early chapters will tear down how the mainstream of respectable academic philosophy treats the problem of freedom. That respectable vision of the freedom problem is the either-or of freedom and determinism (or mechanism). 

The notion survives in strange forms in political contexts. Remember what I wrote a couple of weeks ago, when I was reading Leo Strauss denounce social science. Social science, he said, presumed to seek the mechanisms behind political action. 

In other words, he thought that a scientific understanding of society and politics would necessarily imply that the political doesn’t unfold through the free action of men.* The realm of human action to secure our freedom would itself not be free.

* And with a perspective like Strauss’, it is always men.

That metaphysical exploration of what we think freedom is, what it actually is, and what it could be, leads to a confrontation with the modern West’s strongest voice for freedom above all else. Libertarianism.

Our politics has many progressive movements whose goal is freedom: Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and modern feminism. They have the advantage of using social science and sociological philosophy to build the core concepts to understand the systemic oppression they target.

But the modern era has a curious paradox at the heart of these liberation movements. A powerful reactionary force against them is the libertarian movement. These are people whose political philosophy is the most thorough individualism conceivable. 

Hayek's influence similarly lies with his popular
impact, through the Readers' Digest serialized
version of his Road to Serfdom, how it was first
released in the United States shortly after the
end of the Second World War.

That individualism inherited the right-wing hostility to social science. It's a hostility toward any way of understanding the world that accepts the reality of causes bigger than individuals’ choices and actions. 

That perspective sees any organized community action as collectivist, collapsing the unique desires of each individual to a single political program, universal to anyone. Put like that, it sounds reasonable. But what about when I say the key example Friedrich Hayek had in mind of community action becoming totalitarian was a trade union?

It's an individualism whose refusal to see causes beyond each person’s own choice even blinds them to racism. Not the racism of the self-consciously hurled insult. I mean systemic racism, the responsibility we have for our unconscious presumptions about people, or the disproportionate impacts of institutions.

Here’s an example from some libertarian friends of mine. Because George Zimmerman was afraid for his life at the moment he pulled the trigger, his killing of Trayvon Martin couldn’t have been influenced by racist beliefs.

Those beliefs, and the social atmosphere that makes young black men a presumptive object of suspicion, conditioned the shooting. But a libertarian couldn’t see that, only the beliefs that motivated that precise choice.

At least, two libertarians couldn’t see that. The famous C & G. When they broke their friendship with me, my post about it blew up. It still has more pageviews than any other post I’ve written. 

The main reason that post blew up was because I stuck a link on Reddit, in its Libertarian forum.

They were living examples of the right-wing tendencies in libertarian thinking that helped solidify my analysis. They were very ordinary, quite doctrinaire libertarians. And even though they made a show of their liberal-minded openness to different ideas, the break in our friendships came when they realized that I couldn’t be converted. 

A moment from the terrible Atlas Shrugged movie series.
A common joke was that the films' libertarian funders
contradicted their own principles in bankrolling the full
project. The first film was a colossal financial flop, so a
true liberal capitalist would never have financed a
second film. But the producers were more interested
in demagoguery than living by their principles. Says a
lot about Ayn Rand too.

I was no longer worth talking to after that. It demonstrated the hypocrisy of the modern right in miniature. They cared a great deal about protecting freedom of speech, but had no tolerance for the notion that others were right. 

I’m not about to judge much from the example of two libertarians among a political identity that includes millions across North America. But my friendship with C & G was a year-long case study in libertarian thinking and discourse styles. 

More than a research case, they were also friendships that broke after two years, a long time to talk to someone pretty much every week. I never agreed with them, and never did, but when I see libertarian arguments in video or writing, I hear their voices, even though they never spoke with me face to face.

They’ve become characters, as distinct as any that Virginia Woolf or Mordecai Richler might draw. Characters that stick close to me as I research the philosophy of the modern right. Haunting me.

A Science of Humanity II: Living Without Purpose, Research Time, 26/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . So there’s something weird about this idea that all natural motion is a strict mechanism. Yes, it’s wrong. But it was still pervasive in the culture, since mechanism – A causes B always and forever – was the dominant way of thinking about scientific law in the 19th century.

Probability was an innovative concept, and really weird to people. Normally, we only see one event at a time, so we think of the bat hitting the ball in a particular way that the ball has this arc. Only when that event repeats itself a few hundred times can its variations become visible. Our perception doesn’t really work that way.*

Leo Strauss and a lot of others who distrust modern
science never understood the revolution in scientific
thinking where we realized that probability and
variation weren't failures of knowledge, but the way
the world really works. Every pitch is unique.

* A note on my sci-fi ideas. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were some creature that did see every motion unfolding in its actuality and its possibility at once? That would be a weird kind of creature to describe. Very difficult to imagine their thoughts.

Mechanism had an incredibly easy metaphor that anyone could easily turn to. Clocks. Each part of the universe fits together as if it were the gear of a clock, and we each move with complete necessity and rigidity.

Leo Strauss clearly thought about science this way. Because he describes the social sciences as describing humanity in a totally unfree way. The sociologist’s guiding presumption was that every aspect of human society and thought could be explained with mathematical laws of the same necessity as a clock’s gears.

If you want to read more on how the 19th century prominence of the clockwork metaphor messed with people’s attitudes about knowledge, go read The Taming of Chance by Ian Hacking. I don’t really have much more to say that isn’t just a riff on that.

What he pulls out of that image of man as pure mechanism more interesting. The idea that the social sciences all presume that Man is not free.** A science of humanity means complete mechanistic knowledge of humanity. 

** I hate these old-fashioned, patriarcho-normative turns of speech. But it’s good to remind ourselves that they were common currency in intellectual circles not too long ago. It’s also a good marker for a perspective I find obsolete.

Plenty about humanity is mechanistic. But our knowledge
of our mechanisms is power over them.

So if all of reality – even human existence and thought – runs according to a mechanism, then we have no responsibility for our actions. This is true whether we’re individuals or the whole cosmos. 

In philosophy, the individual scale of this idea is the moral argument against determinism. Because a totally mechanistic humanity would make morality nonsense, it can’t be true. 

But Strauss is looking at this conclusion from the cosmos, and seeing more cosmic meaning in it. If everything in the universe is a mechanism, then the universe – humans included – has no purpose. It’s simply a mechanism that runs as it does because there’s no other way to move. 

The universe, being entirely a mechanism, has no inherent purpose. Nothing in it has any inherent purpose either, including humanity. We’re all just mechanisms, after all. So there’s no true right or wrong – no natural human rights, no should, must, or ought. Only mechanistic machinery moving as it must.

Must and is become the same thing.

This is what Strauss believes science does. He’s not the only one. He’s the tail end of a long tradition of people who think scientific knowledge narrows the sphere of morality until it winks out of existence. Again, read The Taming of Chance. But follow his false belief to get to the heart of this argument against the benefit or truth of social science.

Human reason needs some minimal amount of purpose to the universe, something that escapes blind mechanism deceiving itself with delusions of grandeur. Human reason’s moral investigations are about discovering natural human rights, the universal and necessary political rights for human societies. 

If no such rights exist, then all moral thinking is absurd, meaningless, nonsense. Strauss thinks that a science(s) of humanity would narrow the field of human thinking to nothing by making all human thought and action a product of mechanism. Without choice and agency, there can be no rights, no good, and no justice. Only stuff that happens.

But that’s not the only reason why Strauss hates the social sciences. And so it’s not the only reason floating around modern conservative politics why sociology has become something you commit like a crime.

There’s also the matter of history. . . . To Be Continued.

“You Remembered Being Me Watching You Doing That!” Doctor Who: Before the Flood, Reviews, 12/10/2015

Quite a lot going on in Before the Flood. There’s a common issue, but you have to consider things separately to see it. Consider a few questions.

The Doctor's empty ghost is a beautiful and haunting
image. But I could guess how the Doctor survived his
apparent death easily. That's short-hand for the
problems of this story, Toby Whithouse's whole
approach to narrative, and why he isn't really suited to
write contemporary Doctor Who.

1) Is Toby Whithouse a very original writer? 

2) Who is this War Minister?

3) What sort of crime is violating the boundary between life and death?

4) Did we need a lesson in time paradoxes?

SPOILERS

first, then answers.

1) Not really. Let's look at the different ways he's unoriginal.

A) I’ve already mentioned that his stories tend to conform to old, worn-out or wearing-out conventions. Like The Game, Whithouse’s underwhelming Cold War action drama, one more tired old story of angsty male anti-heroes brooding through their moral compromises. 

I mean, you can make a story about that kind of character if you really want to, but our culture's Frank Miller phase is over, and Whithouse (as well as the fans of Sin City) has yet to realize this.

Now, Before the Flood wasn't particularly angsty in that sense. There was one scene where Cass asked Clara if the Doctor taught her to be so callous with risking others' lives, and where Bennett asks the Doctor whether he used O'Donnell's killing merely to test a theory. But those scenes don’t sit at the heart of Before the Flood’s narrative.

Maybe they would have if Steven Moffat wasn't the script editor.

Given where Capaldi’s Doctor is as a character, he's already dealt with that level of angst. It could be acceptable, if tired, in The God Complex, since all except a small part of the Matt Smith era carried the weight of the Time War. 

However striking the Fisher King's design is, it hasn't
really grown beyond the shadow of H. R. Giger. This
story's second Alien reference.

The Doctor had reason to be in an angst-driven character narrative, but Whithouse’s story was proof that Doctor Who could take this concept no farther. With Before the Flood, Whithouse has given us another red flag for Doctor Who's narratives. 

B) I’ll have to take back my endorsement after last week. Whithouse in the second half returns to the worst tendencies of the base-under-siege story, after spending the first half doing wonderful and interesting new things with that setup. He just returns to the worst features of generic monster suspense stories.

The Fisher King is a terribly generic monster, nothing but murders and bombastic dreams of conquest. Only his abilities to make electromagnetic echoes of the dead make him at all remarkable. But that distinction belongs to the ghosts themselves. 

The Fisher King is a beautifully intricate, grotesque, haunting monster suit. But there's simply no personality other than “Send signal, summon invasion fleet, destroy Earth, enslave humans.” 

Similarly wasted is Prentice the Tivolian, who gets a single scene of irritating all the characters before being shot in the face. David Walliams in The God Complex at least got a whole story's worth of dialogue to explore the character. Though I think the only reason he was so interesting was because David Walliams played him. 

Tivolian culture has a lot of potential for storytelling and character development. I could tell some wonderful stories about a people for whom cowardice, surrender, and betrayal to the stronger power is a virtue. I could tell a wonderful story about a monster who resurrects ghosts from a traumatizing death, weaving together elements from the Fisher King myth.

As Jane Campbell says at the Eruditorum Press review of
this story, it would have been much more interesting if
Bennett had died in a botched attempt to chase the
monster away from his Unspoken Love™ O'Donnell,
giving in to his alpha-male idealism at the cost of his
own life. We would have had more time to follow
through on its tension and plot fallout if Whithouse
hadn't chopped 4 minutes off the front of the episode
with a lecture about the Bootstrap Paradox.

C) Then for the generally unnecessary detail of the two nerdy introvert men having unspoken loves for the women with which they work closely, and one of them being eventually and blatantly reciprocated. 

Bennett’s lost chance with O’Donnell, her not surviving the story, works as a good moment for his character, and for Clara’s. It lets her express how she moved on from Danny's death at the end of last season. Her and Bennett's brief conversation lets the details of his relationship with O’Donnell stay silent, so we can fill in the blanks as we prefer.

Because after talking to Clara, Bennett tells Lunn to express his own feelings for Cass, whose last act in the story is passionately kissing Lunn. This narrative of a man’s passionate unspoken love for a woman he can’t bear to approach about it used to be a central model for a romantic story. 

It isn't anymore. That’s the story of a man who does a great harm to the woman he loves. Because it isn't love: it's blind, single-minded obsession. Unspoken love isn't a paragon of romance anymore because from the perspective of the woman, it’s a creepy, hovering attachment. 

It’s only in the last few years (much too late, by any margin) that I've fully understood that the Unspoken Love story isn't romantic, but a stalker narrative. And I don't think Whithouse has at all. Given the importance of a critical female audience for Doctor Who today, this isn't the direction for the show to travel.

Oh yes, and O’Donnell – the most interesting and charismatic character among the base crew – is fridged so her bland, nebbishy, unspoken lover can brood over her. There's actually a very nice scene between Bennett and O'Donnell just after they arrive in the past, which let me imagine that perhaps they really were an open couple. That way, O'Donnell's death would have had some proper narrative punch, instead of the distasteful scenario Whithouse actually gives us.

2) After more than a decade of carefully seeded clues for the hidden villain of the finale nearly every season, O’Donnell’s brief mention of the War Minister is a clear flag. 

One brief line of Prentice's sketches another interesting
element of Tivolian culture that the story has no space
to follow through on. They're so wheedling to the
invading armies who conquer them, that the empires
eventually get sick of dealing with them and leave.
Their apparent submission is actually a strategy of
resistance. Not passive resistance, but passive-
aggressive resistance.

But it could just as easily be a false flag. It’s mentioned in a list of continuity points, including previous season flag Harold Saxon. The Doctor even says he expects he’ll meet him eventually. 

We in the audience know that this is a standard Doctor Who trick (Bad Wolf, Torchwood, Saxon, “You are not alone,” disappearing bees, the crack in time, Lake Silencio, Clara’s echoes, the soldier theme). We expect it. 

One thing Steven Moffat said about his plan for this season is that he wanted to change Doctor Who around, run against expectations. Part of this meant returning to multi-part stories and cliffhangers, as one-episode 45-minute stories were becoming ordinary. 

But the Doctor dismisses the mention of this War Minister, saying he's sure he'll run into him eventually. Capaldi’s Doctor is more openly meta-fictional than any previous one, so I’ll take his dismissal as a sign that this is just a red herring, playing with the expectations of the audience.

3) It’s an ethical wound in this case. A violation of a person’s whole existence. Terrible enough, and more terrible than breaking the coherence of your own history. 

Not in its effects, of course. Whole timelines are erased, as in the last time the Doctor crossed over a piece of his own timeline in Father's Day, which Whithouse obviously evokes without doing anything new with. More unoriginality there.

It’s not so much that the Fisher King's desecrations of people’s deaths has a larger importance to the fabric of the universe than the integrity of your own timeline. The Time Lords probably wouldn't care. But the Doctor lives by the principle of trying to make the universe a more ethical place, so he’s much more invested in righting this violation.

The whole thing turns out to be a bluff to trick the Fisher King into standing outside so he can die when the town floods and the Doctor can hide in his suspension capsule. I totally knew that was how the Doctor would create a ghost projection and survive, by the way.

4) The opening sequence was a good primer. But it was totally unnecessary to the resolution of the story. It’s a cool narrative framework, but a footnote to the narrative itself. It served to take a few minutes off a story that was running low on plot and made for some more meta-fictional commentary from the Doctor.

I can imagine Steven Moffat being so disappointed on
receiving Whithouse's script for Before the Flood,
spending so much time pedantically explaining the
Bootstrap Paradox when he'd written a better story
about it nearly a decade ago. And it was only
seven minutes long.

Bootstrap paradoxes do play with our expectations of how reality works, however, which is nice. The Doctor didn't know what words his future ghost would say to Clara before he saw them through her phone. Having simply remembered the words, he never thought of them himself. So who did?

Bootstrap paradoxes only appear to be problems because we often think that ideas are generated only through people’s conscious thought. But the story had been playing with that since the beginning. The words that turn a person into a ghost on their death act as active creatures themselves, ideas that exist independently of conscious thought.

So the solution to the bootstrap paradox is to throw away our presumption that all ideas must have a thinker to exist. Accept the notion that a thought can arise from a situation itself – the narrative itself invented the sequence of words that the Doctor’s ghost said. He remembered having heard them, so he spoke them from the suspension chamber. 

It’s the same as the central problem in the plot of Moffat’s Time Crash. You can watch the whole thing at the link. It only takes seven minutes. The Doctor never needed to figure out how to fix the TARDIS malfunction that threatened to blow a hole in the fabric of spacetime and brought Peter Davison’s and David Tennant’s Doctors together. 

Tennant remembered being Davison, watching Tennant fix the TARDIS. They were both part of a narrative in which the narrative – not the people in it – was the active force. 

If the story had explored this idea in more detail – how to act when you’re passive before pre-destination – we’d have a second part of this story that could live up to the innovations of Under the Lake. As it is, all we have are blogs like mine – and any sci-fi stories I may write about bootstrap paradoxes down the road – to explore it.

Instead, Toby Whithouse has written another story with a lot of really interesting ideas, but which ignore their true potential. I don’t think I want him to write Doctor Who anymore.

What Is Life? There Is No Mystery, Jamming, 20/12/2014

I follow quite a few people from the world of Doctor Who on Twitter. In most cases, I get a wonderful glimpse into the thoughts of one of England's crankiest men (mid-1980s Doctor Colin Baker), notices of plucky theatre productions and charitable drives (1960s and 1970s companions Frazer Hines and Louise Jameson), and steadfast promotion for television shows so terrible that it constitutes a model case of entertainment industry professionalism (Karen Gillan's enthusiastic promotion of her absolutely terrible American sitcom, Selfie, which I badly hope doesn't ruin her career, as she's a wonderful actress who just needs material that measures up to her talent).

But Christopher Bidmead is perhaps the most rewarding single Twitter feed among my Doctor Who list. Bidmead is a science writer who was the script editor of the show in its 18th season (succeeding Douglas Adams, the toughest act to follow). He only held the post for that single year, but there was no other year like it in the entire history of Doctor Who. The stories produced in his short tenure skillfully combined thoughtfulness with suspense, adventure with science and philosophy, and some impressively weird imagery.

Saturday morning, Bidmead shared this video, which I thought I would share, even at risk of its being a too-long-didn't-watch at a length of an hour.

It's a lecture by physicist Jeremy England about how to define life according to the terms of physics. It was quite fortuitous for me that Bidmead would link this video after I just wrapped up the most sustained philosophical argument on my own blog. I was quite honoured that SK, one of the regular semi-troll commenters on Phil Sandifer's website visited my old post about the Star Trek episode "The Measure of a Man" from this May after Vaka Rangi linked to it in his discussion of that story.

The Star Trek episode is a cheekily over-dramatized trial, where Starfleet must decide whether Data has any rights, or if, as a machine, he is the institution's property. SK kept hammering me on the old point in philosophy of mind, that because Data is a machine, his entire person is a series of mechanical movements and reactions. And because he is determined entirely by physical causes, he does not truly think and express those thoughts, only precisely reproduce exactly what a creature (who is not a machine, so not subject to strict physical determinism) would say.

This juvenile way of thinking about physics and physical determinism is one of the central reasons why philosophy of mind doesn't get that much respect anymore in the scientific community. The conception of physical determinism as strictly linear A-causes-B-causes-C hasn't held much water in the physics community at least since James Clerk Maxwell. The development of the dynamic branches of physics and their cascading effects on the fundamental concepts of every other science is either forgotten or unknown in the general population, who still think of determinism after the fashion of Isaac Newton and David Hume's billiard ball analogy.

Throughout my time as a university-based philosopher, I regularly interacted with people WITH PHDS who said the scientific concept of emergence was nonsense, or who seriously described in professional contexts the neurological activity that constituted personality as "the mind stuff that brains do." My colleague in Texas, Levi Bryant, still regularly vents his frustrations on Facebook about a trend in philosophy to revive old-school vitalist biology, whose key postulate was that there had to be a fundamental force of nature, vitality, that animated organic bodies to be exemptions from the universe's strictly deterministic causality.

All that said, it is very difficult to use the fundamental concepts of physics to understand life. In their mathematical descriptions, all physical processes are fundamentally reversible. Yet living processes never flow in reverse. England's talk discusses how entropy, one of the fundamental concepts of Maxwell's thermodynamics (the revolutionary field that ultimately crushed the Newtonian model of linear causality) can be used to define what life is.

Living bodies, described in the terms of physics, are bodies whose internal processes tend to maximize the efficiency of entropy production.

Of course, the meaning of life as a whole goes far beyond the principle. Reductionism is a stupid way to think as well. But if you're wondering what physical principle might be held in common between me, you, a tree, a lichen, an ant, a trilobite, a paramecium, a plankton, a bivalve, and a herpes virus, entropy efficiency maximization is a pretty reasonable notion.