“He Was the God of Abundance,” Research Time, 16/07/2018

Here’s a really interesting idea about how the concept of prosperity has developed in Western thinking. It’s an idea that I really wanted to work into my review of The Quest For Prosperity,* but that couldn’t quite fit the general direction.

* Forthcoming in about a couple of weeks.

A prominent idea in one concept of prosperity that you can perceive in Western culture over the last few centuries is to define prosperity as abundance.

There's a complex relation of our visions of abundance with our anxieties and fears. To live in abundance is to never want again – more than that, it’s the security of never having to worry that you’ll want again. Not only do you live in a situation where you’ll always have comfort, but you know that this comfort will continue – that it won’t end.

Pictured: A succinct expression of ethical, psychological, and cultural
economic anxiety.

This is the dream of abundance. But it was popularly believed, and as a popular image still exists in our culture.** The image functions as a response to individual anxiety, showing that anxiety is a central component of the concept.

** Probably also in a bunch of other cultures as well. The title is a way-too-layered joke about how abundance imagery operates in many non-Western contexts. Sassower sticks with the Western context, because that’s the tradition he knows best.

The concept of prosperity as abundance expresses anxiety – depending on the context where we analyze how the concept plays out in thought, it’s an individual anxiety, or a cultural anxiety. Anxiety is your motivation to achieve prosperity, and abundance is the dream of an end to the torture of daily life.

The anxiety of poverty – whether you live it or have to avoid it – fuels the intensity of how a person or a public discourse conceives of prosperity’s abundance.

This image of abundance has painted the goals of socialist movements from the 19th century to today. Raphael Sassower draws from the recurring image to understand this driving concept of abundance – prosperity as the achievement of comfort. As a political movement, socialism aims for the basic dignity of comfort for all, that no one need live in poverty, penury, misery.

It’s admirable. But I can’t roll with this concept in my own approaches to progressive activism anymore. Basically, it’s because the concept turns out to be more destructive when it animates our current political priorities. When you make universal prosperity your political goal, and you understand prosperity as abundance, then you presume that your world can be made to create that abundance.

Is this really all that matters to you? The temptations of consumerism are
pretty intense, but the question remains of whether this is even
something you can achieve without facilitating a disaster.

Karl Marx himself thought this way about the ultimate goal of socialism. As he conceived the material achievement of communism, it was a world where technological industry would produce prosperity and comfort for everyone. But we have to move beyond the thought of the 19th century.

Environmentalist political movements being as mainstream and powerful as they are, we largely have. If we think of prosperity as everlasting abundance for all people, then we rapidly run up against the carrying capacity of the Earth.

I don’t mean this in some cheap Malthusian sense – no simple ratio of resources to population to consumption intensity. I mean it in the larger sense that the exploitation of material resources for economic prosperity will destroy the means of physical comfort. We may relieve our monetary anxieties, but our health and quality of life anxieties will be worse.

If the ecological side effects of the technology to create abundance makes life a torture, that’s no prosperity. Just look at the water quality in cities that prosper economically from the high-paying secure jobs of oil or metal extraction, or steel foundries and oil refineries.

This continues to be a conflict in our society. Obviously from the extremist extraction politics of state leaders like Hugo Chavez, Stephen Harper, and Vladimir Putin. These people who’d build an entire economy around spreading the wealth of oil money inevitably and quickly come into conflict with environmentalists.

But the most telling – and depressing – such conflict among priorities of extraction and ecology is among the progressive set. Take the Canadian case.

Right now, the provincial leadership and membership of the New Democratic Party in Alberta and Saskatchewan support prosperity-by-extraction with similar zeal as Chavez. In each case, they’ve come into conflict with Indigenous activists and their settler environmentalist allies, who refuse to accept the bargain of the land’s utter destruction for the economic abundance of consumerist values.

More Than Mere Images, Composing, 11/07/2018

Over the past week or so, I’ve been thinking about different ways I’ve seen philosophical writers push themselves into more ambitious expressions. The results are beautiful and inspiring. The quality of the results are mixed, but that’s true of any attempt to overcome limits.

You’d be right to ask what limits I’m talking about, for a start. Well, these limits are based in the norms of academic writing, which tend to the self-destructive. Let me take a paragraph or six to explain how.

Academic training in the university sector tends to cause a lot of impostor syndrome. There are many causes for this, but I want to focus today on two causes.

One cause is that there’s no generally acceptable upper limit on how comprehensive a paper must be to appear credible. A writer must always prepare to face someone who calls their work inadequate because it doesn’t refer to a particular writer that critic is familiar with.

A powerful mystical experience can be had here, but only if you're
already open to it. If you aren't open to that phenomenological
communion, you might just see some potentially valuable
minerals that this damn National Parks act prevents you from
accessing, for the economic good of the people.
Image by Jorge Lascar via Flickr / Creative Commons

But research overproduction has made this impossible, especially combined with how long peer review takes. In the sometimes two years or longer between submission and publication, a study might become obsolete or out of date. If an article for a research journal was written in 2015, it won’t be able to include references to relevant stuff published in 2017, even though it didn’t come out until 2018.

So academic writers are brutally scrutinized by journal authorities through a process that makes their submissions irrelevant because publication takes so long.

Another, related cause, is how the training and publication peer review processes are so rigorous about the form of academic research writing. An essay must use a particularly narrow range of writing styles, tones, and ways of explaining ideas, if it’s going to pass the muster of a peer review process for a publication whose credits count toward tenure and job security.

Little to no experimentation is allowed, until you’re so deep into your career that you’ve likely lost your zeal for experimentation in writing at all.

So I have a lot of respect for writers like Jussi Parikka, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, and Jane Bennett, who base so much of their philosophical positions on imagery as a starting point. It’s a method that breaks with the dry prose style where bloodless argumentation and obsolete rationalist attitudes dominate.

Now the question is, like I said a few days ago – Can you open up the evocation of the image to find something philosophically experimental and innovative?

When I was researching Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I found a lot of academically-written environmentalist philosophy that depended on the power of the image alone for the strength of their argument. I did read one author, Scott Aikin, who dismissed the style of this argument in an insightful, if cruel way – He called it seeing a big rock and having an experience.

The lands where the different nations of the Nishnaabeg lived before
they were driven from their lands by the violent dispossession of
Canadian and American state institutions.
Map by DarrenBaker - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27884645

Thinking about this more mystical philosophical method now, I think the point was well-made, but without giving credit to a failed attempt to write philosophy differently than the academy typically trains you.

The naive environmentalist argument is that these experiences – farming, hiking, naturalistic observation, among others – is that there’s only one correct response to them in thought. But they made no argument as to why that one response is the correct one.

A few days ago, I started reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done. She produces a strong argument for why a reverent, respectful attitude to the ecological networks in which we live is the proper response to experiences of Indigenous ways of life.

That argument is rooted in the philosophical concept of grounded normativity, a central framework principle of many Indigenous North American philosophical traditions, particularly in her own culture, the Nishnaabeg of what is now called the Great Lakes region.

Simpson is building a remarkable philosophical edifice. It’s one of the most conceptually ambitious works I’ve come across in a long time. I don’t want to talk much more about this book right now, because I only just started reading it, and there’s already enough philosophical density to sustain centuries of commentary and uptake. It deserves such devotion.

As for Parikka, his reliance on images to express philosophical concepts is still vulnerable to the Aikin critique. More respectfully, it means that an image underdetermines its meaning. The Geology of Media does interesting things with media theory, and along with allied works like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, pushes against the tired restrictions of academic style. Reading Parikka, I want his next book to try even harder.

Data Thieves Seed Clouds to Rain Then Get Big Buckets, Jamming, 10/07/2018

That title is ridiculous. But it reflects how ridiculous a lot of popular imagery of the internet unfortunately is.

Virtual Reality!

Even worse is that I don’t just mean popular imagery. It’d be a lot more sane, frankly if we were only talking about how Tron and similar stories across many films, television shows, books, and other media popularized this silly conception of “cyberspace.”

It was another plane of reality, where we could live inside the computer and an entire world of energy opened up before us. The world of . . . Virtual Reality!

The leaders of the business sector really do talk about using VR technology to create parallel planes of existence – technologies that bring direct physical presence to distance. Palmer Luckey genuinely refers to the imagery of fanciful science-fiction to describe what virtual reality does.

Nothing about the internet exists on any other plane of reality. The same goes for the hard drives. The data of the entire internet is all coded onto physical disks somewhere. They are massive server farms.

Virtual Reality!

There’s nothing that distinguishes a VR interface communicating between Toronto and Shanghai from this reality. We’re learning how to communicate more aspects of our own presence to others without actually being in the same room, until there’s no real difference from our being in the same room.

Reading Jussi Parikka, I was chuckling at the passages where he tries to knock some sense back into us. Let’s not think any of this is really virtual in an ontological sense. Only our presence to each other is simulated – the physical things that we run our communication through still sits around us.

Wires. Wires everywhere. Where there aren’t wires, there are wifi and cellular data projectors. But it really is mostly all wires. The wires all thread together and connect into massive cables. The massive cables all connect to massive server farms. The server farms need electricity all the time – enormous amounts of electricity.

Virtual Reality!

Even more if you start earning money from Bitcoin and other blockchain-based currencies. Because cryptocurrency mining is probably the dumbest lucrative business in the world. You build a massive server farm, and dedicate its processing power to verifying cryptocurrency transactions. Your human workers sit around maintaining the server farm. Your company collects commissions on each transaction.

Providing you can afford the massive power bills it takes to run and cool a server farm huge enough to verify as many cryptocurrency transactions to make this profitable, you can make thousands of dollars a day by sitting around and making sure a computer doesn’t break.

Why aren’t I doing this right now?

My burgeoning entrepreneurial career aside, I want to make one last ontological point about virtual reality and the internet. We’ve become accustomed to thinking of cyberspace as a realm apart. Parikka’s point is that cyberspace is just as massive, heavy, smoky, and grimy as the old steam engines and coal-fired boot factories are.

Its by-products poison us differently, but they still poison us. There’s just not as much smog as there was a century ago. More pollution of water and soil, as lead, barium, and all those rare earth metals leak into the ground and rivers.

Waste never truly goes away.

Fearing for Our Lives / Reaped by Robot Scythes, Research Time, 27/06/2018

I told you I was switching gears. Quite literally to metal gears. Some of the analyses in Utopias will include some concepts from media theory, but the research discipline of media theory comes with some limitations.

In short form, it gets a bit idealist, ontologically speaking. Here’s what I mean. Mainstream media theory concentrates on the structure of media communications. You study the structures, conventions, and techniques of how media products are assembled.

Above: a metaphor.

So you come to think in terms of a multi-form semiotics – language, meaning, and how the structure of communication shapes language and meaning.

Quick illustration. You watch a video on someone’s phone. It’s shaky, clearly a phone held in the hand. Clear yet distant. The form of the video itself tells you what it is, displays its genuineness. Understanding the form helps you understand the message. Sounds familiar for some reason.

This is a pivotal aspect of media studies, theory, and the general means we use to understand our enormous ecology of communication. But we need to understand the literally ecological aspects of communication, and the geological too.

Information is conditioned by the physical media that carries it, but the process of manufacturing that media conditions the structure of our world. Some of the most destructive pollution generated in the mining sector is in the rare earth mines.

We dig complex minerals and intensively filter and treat them to separate all the different metals like yttrium, dysprosium, thulium, neodymium, and all the rest of the lanthanides. The result of those industrial mining procedures is rampant and horrifying pollution.

Above: a referent.

I picked up Jussi Parikka’s book The Geology of Media because I’d heard it was a solid continuation of many of the geological and ecological concepts that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed. Damn right it was.

Semiotics – the study of meaning and how communication infrastructure conditions the information it carries – is vital to understanding contemporary media and globalized communication. But Parikka’s work is essential in understanding the brute physicality of our media – a hurricane of metals swirling into an assemblage of mines, factories electricity, and language that is simultaneously liberating and disastrous.

You can’t have contemporary media – computer and smartphone technology, including all the accessories as small and seemingly inconsequential as headphones – without these massive machines of metal extraction and manufacture.

The environmentalist movement makes a big deal about fossil fuel extraction, industry, burning, pollution, and impact on climate change. But quite often, activists will post their critical messages using smartphones and computers built with another horrifically destructive industrial process – lanthanide mining.

Is there any way out for us? I honestly don’t know.

If I want to start a blog post with Judas Priest lyrics, then I will. It’s the closest I have to an answer.

Ambition to Change the World, Composing, 25/04/2018

So I’m going to take a quick break from going through Paul Patton today. The note that I want to follow up yesterday’s “Mapping Thought” post with, it has a lot to do with the ontology of virtual multiplicities. And I don’t really have the energy tonight to translate that out of mad crazy technical language.

So I thought I’d post a few thoughts about another project I’m working on, which will help me wrap my head around the shape of what I need to write.

This month, I officially joined the team at Ghubril Ltd, a startup think tank specializing in program evaluation for the global NGO and United Nations sector. We produce regular publications – policy papers and white papers – and sell subscriptions to receive them direct.

Explore the website, which I’ll link here again for the second time, and you’ll see the kind of subject matters we work on. We push progressive policy – we do research on different pathways to create a healthier, stronger, freer human civilization that lives in greater harmony with the ecologies of Earth.

This month, our papers all revolve around climate change and related ecological issues. In a way, I have it very easy this month, because I already wrote a book about all this.

My own paper for this month revolves around how you actually make a sustainable society permanent. It needs a complete transformation of the culture. And the best route there is activism. It’s also the slowest-moving of all the methods you could use.

President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic embraced by
Richard Nixon, who was Vice-President of the United States at the
time. Trujillo was one of the many brutal dictators the US
government supported as part of anti-communist geopolitical
strategy. He was responsible for brutal repression of dissidents, the
mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Haitians and other black
people from Dominican territory, and on a personal level,
regular sexual assaults against young Dominican women as if
the country's population were his own personal harem.
Trujillo was also a dedicated environmentalist, expanding
protected natural lands in his country and ordering a large-scale
reforestation campaign.

You can use the laws of your country, of course. But that runs into the problem that countries only have jurisdiction over limited amounts of territory. If Canada becomes the greenest* country on Earth, we’re still in a lot of trouble if the United States’ government grows more indifferent to ecological sanity.

* Political and economically.

And law is an inherently coercive tool as well. It encourages resistance, as part of the natural human instinct to rebel – against authority, against some perceived popular consensus. We’re all punks at heart. It’s just the content that varies. It’s why Paul Ryan can love Rage Against the Machine, and listen to the songs as if they’re about him.

The only way to guarantee that a society will change in a particular direction is the transformation of people’s very moralities. What Nietzsche called the transvaluation of values.

Now, I’ve known plenty of Nietzsche scholars in my time. And many philosophers who’ve followed in the tradition that Nietzsche began. But it’s very difficult to find concrete policy prescriptions for the transformation of popular morality. So I feel like I’m standing on my own here.

So where I’m still trying to punch through as a writer of a policy paper here is this. How do you explain the difficulty of activism as a strategy, while also making clear that activism is the only strategy that can be genuinely successful at all?

It means explaining the ontology of society. It’s not that sociological-scale events and bodies are entirely determined by the psychological and individual-scale. That would reduce the social causally to functions of the individual, which won’t work at all.

But the social is constituted through the relationships among individuals, across all the channels that humans use to communicate with each other. There’s a constant feedback loop of influence across the two scales, each individual being a quantum constituting the entire social field in action together.

From another angle, the difference between the social and the individual is epistemic, a matter of knowledge and investigation. The specific scientific techniques that investigate individual-scale events can’t work to investigate social-scale events. Same goes for techniques for social investigation and the individual scale.

So here’s where I stand. The concept that I’m working with is explaining how the individual / psychological functions as the quantum constituent of a social field. Meanwhile, the phase difference from individual to social – from quantum to field – requires different sciences to deal with each.

Which is fine. Now how do I explain this as a matter of policy prescriptions for process models?

I’m writing this at 23.00. I need to sleep on this.

To Be Free and Natural, A History Boy, 14/11/2017

I started this blog when I’d already developed quite a lot as a writer – especially in philosophy. A good chunk of that development came from reading Gilles Deleuze and using a bunch of his concepts and ideas in my own projects, particularly in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

That book isn’t a book about Deleuze – the book is about what the title says. But I use Deleuze’s concepts often in how I research and explore problems in environmental ethics and activism. Even – especially – when I’m not quoting or referring directly to any of his work.

If you’re going to give me a label based on any legendary philosopher’s name turned into an adjective, you could plausibly call me only a Deleuzian.

Influence is an agony.

Of course, given how most folks in academia use adjectival names, I’d prefer that you didn’t. Because when you’re in an academic context with philosophers and you call yourself a Deleuzian, they think that all your writing is commentary on Deleuze. And that your professional communication is advocating for a single interpretation of Deleuze that you hold to be the true, right one.

Replace the name Deleuze and its adjectives with the name and adjective of any primary material philosopher and you have a significant chunk of the entire field.

This is the closest thing possible to the opposite of what Deleuze would have wanted his follower philosophers to do. The man wrote it himself. If you want to follow in the footsteps of your heroes, don’t just repeat what they said, but do what they did.

What does a philosopher do? In the broadest possible and most essential sense, a philosopher creates concepts. What is a concept? That can take a while to answer. Answering and exploring that question is the major point of Deleuze’s last big book, What Is Philosophy? So you can go into plenty of detail, and discussion too.

But you can also say it very simply, and let the details do the work that details do – get technical, intricate, profound, meaningful in a professional sense. You can understand how a computer works without being a computer scientist. In the same way, you can understand what a philosophical concept is without being a professional philosopher.

Something else that too many academic philosophers tend to forget.

You can make a strong case that we're quite a lot
dumber than some of our ancestors. They lived at
least long enough to become us, and it's become a
conceivable possibility that humanity will end up
cockroach food.

I can give you a really quick and easy-to-remember account of what a concept is. It’s the one I see when I read What Is Philosophy? A concept is a framework for us to understand the world – how we order our thoughts and perceptions from our daily lives to the cosmos.

Here’s what I think is the most important part of how Deleuze understands this – the most important lesson he has for us. It’s why I realized his ideas were so important to building a genuinely progressive environmentalist ethics.

Frameworks to order our thoughts and perceptions is more than just a human thing. All organisms have to make sense of a chaotic world of perception – moving so that they stay alive. Hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution has produced some pretty complex ways to perceive and act. We’re one of those ways.

We can build a tradition – many traditions, actually – of conceptual craftspeople. We develop new abstract frameworks of making sense out of chaos that are much more complex and have many different powers than those of an australopithecus.

Any tradition centred on developing new concepts is properly called philosophical. Plural all the way down. That’s what I love about thinking in a way you could – if you really must – call Deleuzian.

It’s a wonderful framework for environmentalist thinking – a vision of humanity as an expression of nature. No essence. No immutability. No hierarchies. Contingency, change, and diversity. Environmentalist, ecological, and democrat to the core.

The Shock of Your Own Emptiness, Jamming, 08/11/2017

Sorry I never updated yesterday. It’s just been busy, hectic, a little stressful at times, and a long Facetime conversation with my colleague on the horror film project got away from me.

I was originally going to make another pass at the idea I was talking about over the weekend. How Medieval Christian Europeans* found themselves adrift and alone in the universe, once they understood how much they needed technologies to pry open the world.

Christian European culture experienced a profound culture shock as
people slowly began to realize that the only friends humanity
could have in the world were the friends we made ourselves.

* Arendt, in The Human Condition, talks about mankind and humanity here. But she’s only ever referring to a Western and European cultural transition – tracing conceptual continuity from Polis-era Greeks to Medieval Christian Europeans to Industrial Capitalist Europeans. That was her area of expertise, but it’s important to keep the concepts’ limits in mind.

Our intuitions and perceptions weren’t adequate to the way the world really was. The guarantee that the world was God’s creation and so was made for us disappeared. Culturally, Westerners came to a terrible realization – God was not looking out for them. They were on their own.

This is what proper atheists mean when we say that God is dead. These aren’t the reductive, arrogant, idiotic r/atheism crowd who thinks Stefan Molyneux is a genius. I'm talking about the atheists who understand that there could be and likely is a divine presence in the world, but admits to herself that God is indifferent to us.

That’s a much more profound atheism than the more popular, “Religion is stupid! And you’re stupid!” style of atheism. An atheism that God herself would respect. Atheism as a challenge to God – Why do we matter nothing to you?

Here’s another idea that Arendt traces from this shock – technophilia. Here’s how she does it. When we could think of the world as creation, our intuitive ways of exploring it – everyday experience and contemplative meditation – were adequate to that world.

An artist's rendition of Isaac Asimov's Trantor – a planet whose entire
surface was covered in a vast urban cityscape. A world made
wholly into a human creation.

Throw that out, and you realize that our only grip on the world is with our technology. It’s a tentative, desperate grip, but it’s better than nothing. When God is dead (to you), you can’t rely on any kind of natural harmony between humanity and the world. When you realize that there never was any harmony at all, your senses and thoughts feel very unreliable.

Here is where you understand that René Descartes’ thought experiment of radical doubt wasn’t arising in a cultural vacuum.

The image of radical doubt – a conception of our world as a fundamentally mysterious place, where we’re at a deep and serious disadvantage even for survival – was the beginning of existentialism. It was an empty world, where we had no friends but the ones we made ourselves.

Worse yet, if we were alone in the world, then we owed no one in the world our loyalty or trust but ourselves. So instead of looking after a creation that was made for us, we came to think of ourselves as masters of Earth. Chew up the world and build a human creation from it all.

If the world as it appeared on its own wasn’t really made for us, we’d make the world for us ourselves. Yeah, that’s working out well.

Slowing History Down, Research Time, 12/10/2017

Here I am continuing the short but dense post I wrote yesterday. The real unfolding of history – the complex web of interconnecting events and processes – is too chaotic for us to understand it as a whole.

Our histories simplify the world. Look at how we discuss history over centuries at a time. We focus on a few great leaders, the activities of governments, business leaders, and massive economic interests. Zoom in or zoom out from the village to the globe, and it's the same structure to the story of the place.

Human spaces are carved into simple patterns and clear paths. All
other creatures are driven from the space. Co-existence – even
though ecological co-existence is always kind of dangerous and
rarely peaceful – becomes impossible, or at least rare.

We can contain much of the immense detail of history, but only if we either stick to a single phenomenon, or a very short period of time.

I once knew a professor of history who concentrated almost all the research articles of his multi-decade career on a few key decades of industrial development in early 19th century Montreal.

It’s immensely impressive, but I’m reminded of an image I came across once. You can achieve incredible things in a narrow specialization, but ultimately you have to put it to use. But now you have to wonder if you need more than narrow or broad knowledge to act best.

If you do need that level of knowledge, you’re screwed because that knowledge is practically impossible at the speed of human life. We can build datasets that big, but comprehensively understanding that dataset takes way longer than any time we’d have to act on what it can tell us.

Here’s a place where Hannah Arendt’s discussions of Greek culture turn out to be pretty enlightening for folks living in the nuclear age. You can – with reasonable accuracy for such a big, complicated, chaotic assemblage – describe modern civilization as an attempt to grasp hold of the world by paring it down to the human story.

Raccoons are called human-adapted species because they've done so
well adjusting to life in human urban spaces. They're one of very few
success stories in humanity's industrial age.

Human geography is simple – like a European park, we shape our world into simple structures. Boxes with clear boundaries. Specific lanes segregated for different kinds of vehicles and directions of traffic. We build our cities in grids and circular patterns – simple shapes.

We bulldoze the complex patterns of multifaceted ecologies. To see the chaotic mess of wilderness disgusts many of us – unsanctioned plants are weeds. So we reduce the world to human structures – cities, highways, farms, parks – to simplify this complexity.

Then we’ll at least have a better chance of grasping hold of the world. It won’t be so chaotic, and it will have a pattern of entirely human design. The world won’t change so fast because there won’t be so many ways for it to change. In paving the world, we’ll slow it down enough to grasp it in our knowledge.

When we shape our society to make it last forever, we finally have a world that we can understand. It won’t escape from us.

Arendt finds this idea in the political thinking of Plato and Aristotle. They saw the greatness of humanity in building a world that lasted – a permanent world. It would be a world built by craftsmen, designers. That’s the image of the legislator, the mythical founder-leader who builds a city and a society just as an architect and team of masons builds a temple.

Laws and institutions exist to constrain human behaviour and
channel it in directions where it can be understood. If you
understand it, then you know how to control it without the
chafing violence of constraint.
Can we even achieve that level of constraint in human societies?
Why on Earth would we want to?

The designed order of institutions and laws would make the desperation of human action unnecessary. We wouldn’t need to fight with chaos to catch up with reality itself as it steamrolls us. Durable institutions are reliable, and human institutions are comprehensible.

We associate Plato and Aristotle with how the Greeks thought. They’re often the only Greek thinkers popular culture pays attention to. But they were rebels in their society – while they created concepts at the heart of our culture, they had little direct influence on their own for a long time after their own lives.

Most Greeks were creatures of the polis – the one durable institution in Greek society, built to hold the hurricane force of contingent, improvised action. These were the debates and duels of Greek politics.

The culture as a whole most valued fleeting glory than vain dreams of permanence. Instead of grasping for comprehensive knowledge, they were content to become the brightest light in the chaos for a moment.

Who do you think was most wise?

Out of a Depression Into a Flood, Composing, 06/10/2017

I've been thinking of a particular argument I want to include in Utopias. As I research different concepts – especially because my writing is so transdisciplinary* – I develop more details of a broad outline.

* Even when I write fiction, it’s transdisciplinary. I made it part of the latest small sci-fi project I’m part of. Now, I can’t tell anyone a damn thing about until December. But I’ll periodically tease this with ironic jokes about how I have to keep my mouth shut for months.

There's only over so much to consume. Earth isn't infinite; it only felt
that way when our powers to transform it were very small, or else
worked only on a very slow pace when they grew large. Not anymore.

Different parts of my research focus my ideas more, and I can expand different parts of the outline until the details are so fine that I may as well start writing draft passages. I feel like I’m about there now with a passage about consumerism’s conditions and causes.

Call this gathering my thoughts.

Do you remember a post I wrote earlier this summer about Hungary’s inflation crisis during the Second World War? The seeds of the argument start there, the most ludicrous crisis of economic over-intensity seen yet.

So to finance their total war production, the Hungarian government printed so much currency that the value of its currency ballooned from US$33.50 in 1943 to US$460,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in 1946.

Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, offered (among many things) that this fate of catastrophic hyper-inflation was inevitable unless industrial production slowed to a comparative crawl. His prescription to do so was to shut down state-financed industries and massively lower wages to take as much money supply out of the economy as possible.

Both paths, he said, involved terrifying human suffering. Millions would be reduced to poverty. But those were the only two futures he could conceive of – a world of hyper-inflated currency or a world with almost no money at all.

Keep building and building and building. Even highways wear away
and need replacing. Build it all on top of the ruins of the old. But in
just a couple of decades instead of centuries.

The actual solution was totally different, of course. All the free-market industrialized countries gave themselves a massive Marshall Plan. In Europe, Japan, and South Korea, American government and industry gave them huge investments to rebuild their countries from rubble.

In America, their whole economy was one massive Marshall Plan. They didn’t have anything to rebuild, so a culture of consumerism developed. This is when Arendt saw American economic life changing its focus from the value of work to the value of labour.

Ironically – or maybe intentionally – this was during the McCarthyite crackdown against socialists and the labour movement. But we’re talking concepts here.

So Arendt identifies how American industrial production – to prevent the disaster of over-production and hyper-inflation Hayek predicted – encouraged consumerism, planned obsolescence, and the culture of disposability to keep the economy moving.

She never mentions Hayek by name of course. These are the arguments I’ll set against each other to make a more general point.

Production that lasts – what Arendt, in her trilogy of concepts at the heart of The Human Condition’s analysis, calls work – is what made the world human in the first place. The infrastructure – buildings, roads, cities, warehouse districts, oil refineries – that stands for decades and reconfigures massive landscapes.

You eat to live. Something's always
going to eat you eventually.

Work** is the creation of the world as it exists for the sake of humanity – converting the ecologies of Earth into fully human environments. Naturally developing ecologies exist for the sake of all its constituents – this is why they’re so violent, because a lot of those creatures consume each other to survive.

** Arendt’s philosophical concept of work.

Arendt depicts work – the creation of a lasting human world – as an activity of great dignity. It is, as far as it’s powerful. And it’s impressive. When I was visiting the Louvre last week, what I found most impressive were the Babylonian and Mesopotamian ruins. After thousands of years, these massive stone building fragments – three-story-tall doorframe columns! – were even more awesome simply for having lasted so long.

The Burj Dubai, Taipei 101, and CN Tower would envy such luck of lasting for literally thousands of years.

Yet to build our permanent home, we have to carve it out of the ecosystems that actually keep us alive. For many thousands of years, human civilization never got that intense. There have been ecological crises that brought down major empires – soil exhaustion, water pollution.

But only in the last couple of centuries have we been able to clearcut entire countries. We’ve built dams so huge that the weight of their reservoirs’ water causes earthquakes. All the water on Earth is threaded with plastic molecules, heavy metals, sewage, oil slicks, radioactive waste.

This is what comes from valuing work that lasts. You produce work that destroys itself and takes you with it.

She Did Kind of Expect the End of Everything, Research Time, 05/10/2017

My musings yesterday got a little disconnected. Kind of went beyond “rough draft” and into “jottings on the asylum wall.” Okay, maybe not that bad. But it didn’t turn out to be as systematic as I wanted.

Here are some thoughts in reaction to Hannah Arendt’s longer discussion of human labour and industry. Even though she earlier wrote that humanity seemed far from maxing out our planet’s carrying capacity, she can see the danger coming.

Can we eat our whole civilization alive? When Hannah Arendt was
writing, that was almost literally the guiding principle of the entire
economy of industrial civilization in both capitalist and communist
societies.

Her concepts that she uses to analyze our society’s predicament come from Polis Greek culture, but she expresses them in universal terms. They become three categories of human production on a societal and global level.

Labour is the production of what we consume – human metabolism at work in the world. Work is the production of machines, infrastructure, and institutions that are built to last. Action is the production of acts themselves – deeds that leave no legacy except their memory and example.

Arendt’s analysis of how labour functions in 20th century industrial society – both in American-dominated and Russian-dominated societies – is the lynchpin of her critique of consumerism.

For the sake of maintaining such massive industrial productivity that we built to overcome the Great Depression, we were producing goods to consume them for our pleasure with the same speed as we’d consume weapons, ammunition, and human lives in war.

The problem was that consumption became the pinnacle purpose for production. So much of our production power was devoted to making things that we’d consume. They had high value in their use, but using them would also destroy them, so we had to make more constantly.

We were all, for our livelihoods, so dependent on the relentless pace of Western industry’s production that the system itself was becoming automatic. Its activity, as Arendt put it, was beyond the power of human decision-makers to stop.

Even an advertising man can have moments of profound insight and
a life remarkable enough to preserve in our community's historical
memory.

No matter how many people might decide that such an ephemeral, superficial lifestyle wasn’t for them, the machine couldn’t stop. The productivity of our economy was built around disposability.

However ethically empty economic life might have been under this arrangement, it did make for a great job creation plan. That was one aspect of the high-quality manufacturing sector jobs that drove the expansion of the middle class in the mid-20th century. We had to keep making those things to consume and destroy them.

The problem with our contemporary economy is much worse in particular ways. Now, so much of the extra value of our work goes to virtual sectors – banking, insurance, and stock investment.

A lot of the stuff we consume – games, information, media – is free or extremely cheap to buy. So there just isn’t as much money flowing through the production process as there used to be when Arendt was alive and writing.

And although she doesn’t say it directly, the economic cycle of ballooning over-production and over-consumption still has the effects of ecological destruction. Eating the planet alive.

In so many ways, our economies are unsustainable because nothing is built to last. We labour and enjoy, but we don’t build and act.

No One Expects the End of Everything, Jamming, 04/10/2017

As I was reading through The Human Condition, I made quite a few notes. I always make notes when I read philosophy, of course. Most of the time, they’re pretty trippy reactions to concepts. Elaborations. Arguments. Questions. Comments. Links.

Sometimes, it’s a joke. A meaningful, significant joke. A cruel joke. Definitely a cruel joke. The worst way to have an idea go out of date.

Much of human civilization is passing the point where industrial
life has more benefits than drawbacks.

Hannah Arendt writes, “Mankind as a whole is still very far from having reached the limit of abundance.” Chapter 16, page 124 of my English edition.

This is from the late 1950s, when human industry was kicking into its highest gear yet. This was the decade when we started pumping enough carbon gases into the atmosphere that we were kick-starting the sixth Great Extinction.

Here’s a thought that comes to me when I read this sentence of hers. Here we were, so close as a civilization to reaching the carrying capacity of our planet. Yet no one could see it.

Only 60 years after Arendt wrote The Human Condition, we were pushing up against the carrying capacity of our planet for an industrial civilization of more than seven billion people.

In 1960, the Earth’s human population had only recently passed three billion. The problem wasn’t nearly at the forefront of everyone’s mind. We all knew the danger of nuclear weapons. The Cold War loomed starkly enough that it was called the nuclear age.

Nuclear weapons no longer have that solemn dignity, as if we could control the finger of God with a big red button. Now, they’re the apocalyptic toys wielded by boy-emperors and man-children. What was humanity’s great achievement of divine wrath is now our grotesque stumble into drunken mass suicide.

None of this is predictable. Donald Trump is the President of the
United States of America. What the fuck?

Arendt could never have seen Donald Trump. If she had, she’d probably have dismissed it as a night terror. Even four years ago, the prospect of Donald Trump becoming President of the United States was an unbelievable proposition.

Humanity is dissonant when we try to tell the future. All we can do to anticipate the future is follow present situations and trends along their current dimension of progress. When we believed that every home would have an atomic oven. Or that passenger rockets would take us on trips around the world in less than an hour.

Maybe we can imagine some much more intense version of the present moment. Cyberpunk imagination brought us that.

Even when the predictions are accurate, they’re limited. Elon Musk is talking about doing rocket-based commuter flights from San Francisco to Japan in 25 minutes. But I think he just feels cheated that we never got the moon colony by now, like we all thought 60 years ago.

We’re living in a generally less intense cyberpunk future right now. Yet who in Larry Niven’s generation could have dreamt up cyberpunk? Let alone Jules Verne’s generation.

In this passage of The Human Condition where Arendt drops this line, she’s continuing her long analysis of how Western values have transformed from Polis Greece to the Atomic Age.

She can see some kind of radical transformation ramping into gear because her eye is on industrial production and the processes that enable it. Because she’s tracking the development of Western values, she has her eye on the growing frenzy of consumerism in the United States and the other free market industrialized regions.

Arendt had lived through the Second World War, and catalogued the many thresholds humanity crossed in those years. We know the most about what she wrote about its terror threshold. But she was also watching our economic thresholds.

The Second World War was the period of humanity’s most aggressive, intense, and massive industrial production yet. Fifteen years after its end, none of that industry had scaled back its powers and processes. War wasn’t eating it up – people were.

This was consumerism. The dignity of building goods to last was replaced by the relentless push to consume. Buy, wear out, and replace. That’s why my grandparents’ sewing machine could keep working for decades, but most everyday machines like that now have lifespans of a few years.

We’re supposed to throw them out and replace them. It’s the only way our industry could keep pace with the capacity we developed through total war. At the time, the buildup of consumerism was necessary – only the intense industry of the Second World War could bring human civilization back from the Great Depression.

The price was dignity in so many ways. Arendt follows the grotesquerie of consumerist morality. My work – and that of many others – has followed the grotesquerie of ecological destruction.

Humanity drowns in our own shit, and does so in D&G shades.

A Society of Workaholics, Research Time, 30/09/2017

I’m never too quick to condemn capitalism. Two reasons why. One is because everybody’s doing it. We’re in a resurgence of anti-capitalist activism, equally critical of our destructive industrial practices and the financial policies that crush billions of lives.

For good reason, of course. There’s plenty about the drive to ever-more-intense industrial production that’s probably making Earth uninhabitable for us. Climate change, yes. But even beyond that, just consider the horrible effects that basic pollution has on our ecosystems.

The goal that most of us have in our lives is to spend our energies doing
something we love. That's the heart of so much career advice, even
though there aren't many folks who can do that. Even in the fortunate
industrialized West, too many people spend too much time having to do
something they don't want to do. This seems a source of social tension.

Do you know how much plastic you eat every day? Tens of thousands of microscopic plastic particles are eaten by fish and crustaceans every day. We eat those same plastic particles when we eat those fish.

We aren't just drowning in our shit – we eat it too. That’s the second reason why.

But if we can correct the mistakes and self-destruction of mass industrial capitalism, we shouldn’t abandon markets entirely. One obvious reason is because state-run industrial endeavours have rent scars in the Earth too. Consider the destruction of the Aral Sea to water massive cotton farms on the orders of the Soviet government.

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is a critique of the industrial society human civilization had become – among the many things it is. That’s one of the many philosophical ideas she finds in comparison with the life and morality of Polis-era Greece.

This political problem is a question – pretty simple in the ordinary way we encounter it. Do you work to live? Or do you live to work?

Consider how the economy of Polis Greece worked. Yes, there are plenty of material differences that make directly emulating it ridiculous – the drastically lower population, that it was almost entirely agrarian.

Forget that – philosophy is about understanding what concepts can guide new action for our new situations. Isolate a concept – See what actions and processes its framework of thinking can lay out. See how it changes your conceptions of what’s possible.

I grew up surrounded by values like these about your work. You should
always feel that your work is dignified, a source of honour, pride, and
pleasure too. Work should be something that, even when it may drain
your energy, you enjoy it, and it has benefits beyond your own
pleasure as well. We want to make a living in a calling or a
vocation, not merely a job. Watch Mike Judge's Office Space, and
you see how he valorizes manual labour as honourable work.
That's true. But consider public service like community
leadership, or even teaching.

So look at how their economy worked. The whole purpose was to produce enough that you could live off its surplus for the rest of your life. Put a lot of effort, labour, and work into your life and career at the beginning. Make a huge enough surplus that you can stop working for a while.

You can now afford to pay other people to labour for you – run the household, make food, do all the little tasks of staying alive that take so much time. That way, you can devote yourself to what you’ve always wanted to do, what you’ve been raised to aspire toward all your life.

Join the government.

Of course, Polis Greeks didn’t have a government like we do. There was no welfare state bureaucracy. There was the military, tax collectors and financiers, scribes recording the debates of their leaders.

Leaders would plan new construction in the city, represent their community to other cities, make decisions about how the city as a whole would handle its business. But Polis Greeks didn’t consider any of this business of leadership to be work. They wouldn’t expect to be paid.

The whole reason why they were able to become leaders is that they’d already built enough wealth to live on without having to build any more. Surplus was to be spent on supporting your public life as a community leader and statesman.

What kinds of personalities do our values today of workaholism and
unstoppable accumulation create? I don't think I'm comfortable
living in a society where our most powerful people are the ones
deranged enough to think it's perfectly good to profit off the misery
of others because unstoppably growing wealth is the primary
good in your life. Is this a reasonable way to live? A good way?

That’s what they considered retirement. Rather, they had this phase of public leadership that came between your working life and your retirement.

Contrast that kind of personality with the attitude all too popular today about wealth. You just keep accumulating. There’s no stopping you. Just keep growing and growing and growing your personal wealth in assets. Own more and more and more.

Who needs $47 billion? Even the billionaires who become philanthropists never truly divest. They hold on to so much money and assets so their value can continue to grow and fund more philanthropy.

Why did you need to lock up that much wealth for yourself at all? Philanthropy moves faster when everyone else has the money in the first place through their own jobs and careers. This is the moral ideal at the heart of today’s mania for basic income.

But a basic income from the government is only necessary because the private economy isn’t providing it. It should, because that’s why anyone goes to work all – they want to earn enough to live, to retire comfortably, or spend more time in their lives as leaders in their communities.

We’re a society of workaholics. Why should we have to be this way? How else could we live if all of us chose to prioritize our lives a little differently? Imagine what our society would be if no one ever wanted to become a billionaire at all.

Look into the most abstract features of their souls. Now you’re doing philosophy.

Contradictory Heritage, A History Boy, 08/09/2017

I have a pretty stand-offish relationship with Theodor Adorno. I think it’s a result of my first exposure to him. That came through an older university librarian I knew by the philosophy department circles back in my undergrad years at Memorial.

He was the philosophy specialist in the library’s procurement, and his own PhD research focussed on Adorno. CD was a smart guy, and although I found him a little pretentious, he was a good person to hang out with. I have to say, though, he wasn’t very good at selling Adorno to me.

I reconsidered his work as I got older, but never really made the jump to studying his philosophy in full. Mostly, it was because I was working on a totally different tradition and approach in Western philosophy during my doctorate – informing environmentalist ethics through philosophy of biology and ecology, with a leg up from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the conceptual framework.

Remember, freshmen, there is no art without suffering.
No education without folly.
No philosophy class without a surly smart-ass.

But I think it was also because of his reputation. I’m not usually one to cower in front of a reputation, but with Adorno, I did. His work wasn’t just philosophy to me – it was an edifice. I came to that image through the Adorno specialists and students I knew – they treated him like a figure of awe.

Nein broke that image for me. He injected some levity into Adorno for me, and made him and his work more approachable. I don’t want to read some unapproachable edifice. I want to read a thinker.

So I’ll probably hit up some Adorno soon. I’ll soon be transitioning away from looking at left-wing philosophy as it’s more traditionally defined. But after a walk along the path that I’m heading for, I think I’ll go back to some Adorno, no matter how strange his work might be.

How strange might that work be? Well, here’s Perry Anderson’s take on it. This is probably what I admire most about Anderson’s writing and thought. He’s a historian of ideas who can genuinely grapple with the real strangeness of some ideas and still find witty and concise ways of explaining it.

Maybe it helped that I was already familiar with the context. I mean, I haven’t read much Adorno myself, but I’ve read almost everything else that influenced him. So it’s not like I have no idea what kind of concepts are flying around there.

Here are the concepts that Anderson throws down to explain the underlying ontology of Adorno’s philosophical writing. Same goes for the rest of the Frankfurt School more generally.

He describes Frankfurt School thinking as on the same plane as these following two philosophical frameworks. One is the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. Anderson describes this as adapting the metaphysics of Christian salvation to the human relationship with the material Earth. So the path to humanity’s redemption from our fundamental corruption is a kind of devotion to harmonious material nature.

Schelling is another German philosopher who I
could just never get into. Everything I heard about
his ideas, even from people who loved his work,
made me think I would hate it all. I haven't heard
anything much different yet.

The City of God becomes the City of Man when it’s no longer a city, but a forest. And we must treat it as such.

Two is Heidegger’s critique of technology, his account of the technological attitude as the rupture of man from nature. This rupture is the ongoing social, cultural, and philosophical goal of dominating the Earth – we dominate Earth to make commodities from it, and we define our lives through our commodities, our stuff.

In the words of the Frankfurt School’s marxist heritage, capitalism is the rupture of humanity from Earth, from nature. So a liberated society, in Adorno’s thinking* is a reconciliation of humanity and Earth.

* According to Perry Anderson.

It’s a beautiful vision. As someone who holds environmentalist political and ethics values, I definitely like it. Despite the way Anderson’s account tends to reify nature. Actually, that’s a serious problem for me. By pulling Schelling’s Christian salvation narrative into an immanent material relationship – humanity and Earth – you turn the planet into God.

Earth isn’t God. It’s Earth. If you believe it’s God, you’re making a serious mistake. God as a Christian concept was designed as the ultimate Other – the Fall means that humanity’s nature is utterly and totally anathema to the Divine. That we’re virtually like poison to divinity.

If this is really the underlying metaphysics of the Frankfurt School, I can’t even say they’re radical left anymore. To make a Christian God of Nature is making an idol out of a word that shouldn’t even be capitalized.

There’s an even deeper conservatism underneath the ideas of what the radical right today call the communist conspiracy of the modern era.

The Abject Humanism of It All II: The Problem With People, Composing, 20/07/2017

You want to know my problem with humanity? The poverty of our vision is the foundation of the poverty of people. Human vision is poor when, in this context, it collapses into a humanism.

Now, you can’t write in a philosophical context that you’re critiquing humanism without someone in the audience mentioning Martin Heidegger.* His “Letter on Humanism,” the most famous text where he engages with this concept. He spent virtually his entire career critiquing humanistic ways of thinking, in different words at different times.

* Usually an academic specializing in writing commentary on Martin Heidegger.

But Heidegger’s thinking can’t go far enough in the critique of humanism. His quietism, piety, and fatalism get in the way of understanding the most profound aspects of what humanistic thinking does in the world.

We consume our whole world as if it were a fancy meal in a restaurant.
This is humanity at its most pathetic – turning the cosmological into
a petty pleasure. Image by Brittany Jackson.

Consider this post a stab at my own critique of humanism. It’ll likely be translated into my full manuscript for Utopias eventually.

Humanism is, quite literally, understanding all experience as ultimately related to human ends. It universalizes human ends to all things.

That’s part of what Heidegger has to say. But his concerns are to restore a proper relationship between humanity and being in a sense very disconnected from the problems of suffering and destruction. Destruction – social and ecological – is for Heidegger a symptom of a greater ontological failure.

For me, the priorities are reversed – Actually no, not reversed. Merged. The Heideggerian way of thinking merges questions of being with social and ecological questions. But it subsumes the social and ecological into questions of being, because for him being is the paramount question of philosophy.

For me, screw that. If I could give my philosophical perspective a label – at least for today – I’d call it a pragmatist anti-humanism. We destroy our societies and our ecologies with self-absorbed humanist ideas that our chauvinist priorities are the only ones that matter for human action.

You want an example? Okay, go back to Friedman’s words about national parks. You can think of many reasons to create national parks and wilderness reserves.

As far as I’m concerned, the best reason to conserve significant tracts of wilderness is to keep complex ecosystems functioning. There’s a humanistic angle to this, because humans need complex ecosystems to maintain all the processes that keep us alive – atmospheric balances, dealing with air pollution, cleaning water, preventing erosion of our land, preserving the processes that keep our soil arable and our food growing.

But there’s also the priority of wanting more complex ecosystems because ecological complexity builds a robust biosphere. The complexity of our ecologies are literally what keeps the Earth alive. Earth is a body that literally dwarfs humanity, no matter how powerful we’ve become.

We’re one recently-evolved, self-destructive species on a remarkable planet 4.5 billion years old. Earth is a body with far greater dignity and majesty than humanity. Humanity are pests compared to the Earth. And we tend to be pests on the Earth as well.

Take seriously the material existence of cosmological majesty. Humans are petty, small creatures. We can do amazing things, and we have a lot of potential. Our science-fiction can be the vehicle of our ambitions to achieve our greatest potential. But we won’t achieve that potential until we understand our pettiness and purge ourselves of it.

Pettiness like Milton Friedman writing that the purpose of national parks and nature reserves is to provide good customer service to campers and hikers.

The Abject Humanism of It All I: Parks and Recreation, Research Time, 19/07/2017

So here’s something I came across reading Milton Friedman that I found really interesting. In the light of some contemporary politics and prosecutions around who has the right to do what on government-owned land in the United States, it’s worth thinking on.

He talks about the national park system in the United States, and how he thinks it should be privatized to individual businesspeople. So far, so doctrinaire. But think about the reasons why.

Friedman doesn’t position himself in any way like the activism of the Bundy family. He’s much more sedate, as benefits a professor rather than a cattle rancher.

He thinks national parks and federal nature reserves should be privatized because of general libertarian principle against government ownership of all that much. But he also thinks that private companies could achieve the same purpose much better.

Come on, son! You and your dad are goin' fishin'! Hyuk!

So what purpose does he consider national parks to have?

Camping. Hiking. Fishing. The enjoyment of the great outdoors. All that good old Outdoor Life Network stuff.

While outdoorsmanship may have been the original purpose of the national parks in Teddy Roosevelt’s mind, national park and reserve systems do a lot more than that now.

Friedman thinks about none of the ecological achievements of government or public trust in stewardship of the land. Setting aside at least some land from the reach of exploitation, if you do it with enough ecological knowledge and care, can mean the difference between a resilient ecosystem and total collapse.

Now, I don’t expect Friedman or that many other people writing in the early 1960s to have thought of this aspect of the problem. Rachel Carson was a lonely voice for a long time.

Even if you leave that critique to the side, there’s a blindness in Friedman’s thinking. It’s the blindness that anything in the world is only as good as its customer service value. No public service besides customer satisfaction.

That’s a world of incredible poverty. Maybe not poverty in terms of wealth and riches. But I mean poverty as a drab, trivial world. There’s too much of the human view in that way of thinking. Too much reduction. Too much humanity.

I think I’ll talk more about the problem of humanity tomorrow. It’s not like humanity doesn’t have plenty of problems.