Making a History for Yourself, Research Time, 12/01/2018

So I also wanted to expand my reach into books about Gilles Deleuze, returning to some of the authors I made use of during my research for Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. But since Utopias has a more human political focus, I wanted to take the field from a different angle.

Basically, a decade ago, I started researching material that specifically applied Deleuze’s ideas to problems in environmental thinking and philosophy of science. Now, I’m looking for some more straightforwardly political applications – theories of institutions and revolutions.

When the truth lies in ruins, understand decay.

Some of the material I picked up explores the influences and roots of Deleuze’s ideas. A book of essays that I found really illuminating was called Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage. Twenty chapters, each about 20 philosophers, artists, and scientists who’ve influenced Deleuze.

Or at least, they’ve been mentioned in barely enough detail to merit someone writing an essay about them. I’ll hit you with my thoughts on a few or more.

There are some essays in that book that are totally obvious. For instance, the one about Plato. A critique of Platonic frameworks of thinking is the centrepiece of one of Deleuze’s most notorious books, Difference and Repetition. So of course there’s going to be an essay in a book like this about Plato.

So narrowing a comparison of Plato and Deleuze’s ideas down to anything sensible is never going to be complete. But if you want completeness and straightforward neatness in your life, don’t read philosophy.

Let’s just look at some lessons.

The way we’re typically taught Plato in early philosophy education,* the highest goals of his philosophical thinking revolved around coming to know the essence of things, the essential nature of the world. We tend to be taught the dialogues that revolve around “What is this?” questions – What is justice? What is piety? What is the good? What is love?

Plato's dialogues are taught as though philosophy is all about searching
for the universally true answers to fundamental questions about the
essences of reality. Yet all the dialogues that carry out such questions
end in more profound cycles of confusion. So why do we teach
philosophy as if we're really looking for genuine universal truths?

* All too typically.

But there’s a weird little schizz here. Those dialogues revolving around “What is X?” questions always end in aporia – you never settle on any definitive answers that escape critique. The questions of “What is X?” always end on unstable answers. It’s a mystery that you understand better, but it’s still ultimately mysterious.

Here’s where you reach clear doctrines that arise from Plato’s dialogues without being destabilized – Those are dialogues revolving around questions like “How much?” “Where and when?” “Who?” “How?” “In what cases?”

Those are questions that are about real dynamisms in the world. You don’t learn anything about universal or general aspects of existence by blatantly asking “What is the universal essence of this?” Those questions lead to aporias – you understand the question and the concept a lot better, but you don’t get any definitive answers.

You understand the fundamental aspects of the universe by looking at parts of the real world, tracing common features and the principles through which differences emerge. You get to real answers with specific questions – with an empiricist attitude.

Using Plato to learn about empiricism. That’s pretty freaky. That’s how you should use the history of philosophy.

New Starts and New Missions, Jamming, 28/12/2017

I still have a bunch of notes from going through What Is Philosophy?, and I’ve written up some more thoughts on some of the commentaries I’ve been working on. I find it rather curious that many of the major names in Deleuze Studies™ are based in Canada.

Something about this country these days that feels welcoming to a philosophical community who revolve their thoughts around the creativity of difference. Canada can be an oasis today from the nationalist extremism that’s burning Western democratic traditions to the ground.

The icons of a movement are more than people;
they're pastiches of imagery that express raw desire.

If we defend it, of course. Democracy must always be defended. Freedom has never not been under siege. To be free is to be under siege.

You could call these my final thoughts on 2017. I’m not going to attempt some grand summary of the year to date. I’m not paid enough to write this blog to attempt anything so massive as that. History, in progress, now feels properly overwhelming to people. India and Africa, for example, are just as full of events and madness as the West, to name only two examples.

I feel simultaneously hopeful, agitated, and afraid of the future. Personally, more opportunities are opening in my professional life – a new job in Ontario’s education sector with a proper middle-class salary, real responsibilities, and real respect.

I do want to put to keys and screen some plans I have for the future. A few things that are ending and a few things that are beginning. I want to do as much of what I can that I can, because I’m no longer struggling to survive.

For 40ish hours each week, I’ll be working as Education Manager for Anderson College, a small trades college – business, some medical sciences – in northern Toronto. Basically, I make sure all the programs run smoothly, and that we keep up with our programs’ accreditation needs as we maintain and grow.

It puts an end to five years of contingent, precarious employment as a teacher and communicator. I never fit in well among the more mercenary culture of communications and public relations firms, but my position at Anderson lets me use the skills and conceptual frameworks I learned for that field in my daily work. A lot of my job falls under internal communications, liaising between instructors and college leaders.

While this changes the schedule of my research work, it won’t be detracting from it. I’ve taken over at Digital Editor at the Reply Collective, and expanding the reach of this platform will be my major publication project for the next year. I’m working on a few content strategies, but I’m only just starting my outreach to promote the platform and bring in new contributors.

My work here feeds into my work at Anderson because one subset of social epistemology – the study of social and political aspects of knowledge production – is education studies. So one direction the research at the Reply Collective will cover (among many, many vectors) is education theory.

I might make a return to some of John Dewey's ideas about the nature
and purpose of education as a starting point for this new professional
direction in my life and thinking.

Beyond that, I want to use contemporary research in education to improve accessibility and quality throughout Canada’s college and university education sector. Here’s one medium-long term goal that I want to work toward from my position.

This year’s public college instructors’ strike in Ontario was an unmitigated disaster in terms of the union’s leadership. Essentially, they walked ass-backwards into an unwinnable strike that alienated most Ontarians from any empathy with college teachers for the next generation, minimum. But one of their major issues – aside from the horrible inequality and terrible compensations most college teachers live with – is curriculum updates.

Generally speaking, Ontario public college curriculums are horribly out of date. This is because the only people with the authority to update curriculums are high-level college administrators. But they don’t move to update the curriculum until government employment surveys reveal that their graduates no longer have the required skills to build careers in their fields.

Facing this massive mismatch of learning material and working conditions, the colleges undertake a total and expensive overhaul of whole programs. The instructors’ union wanted teacher input into this process to make small, piecemeal updates that would save costs overall. A continuing process of updating curriculum as industry conditions shift and fluctuate.

Such a process is ordinary for a private institution like Anderson College, and there’s no reason why it can’t be done in larger institutions. I’m ultimately responsible for the programs of just over 300 students. But such a sensible policy needs to apply throughout Ontario – tens of thousands of students.

My work as an education manager, students’ advocate, and global research hub coordinator has this larger goal of improving education for Canada’s largest province – ultimately for my entire country of about 36-million people.

That’s the journey I’m beginning as 2018 begins. At the beginning of this year, I had no clue I’d get here. Hell, a year ago, my day job was still at the delivery department of IKEA Etobicoke. I am beyond grateful, and I will not let the people of Canada down.

Kill Your Idols IV: Let Daddy Hurt You, Research Time, 10/08/2017

That’s probably my ickiest title in the history of the entire blog. We live in icky times.

But the past few posts about the ideas I had reading Perry Anderson’s book on Gramsci, comparing it to my own notes on the Italian have returned to the central critical question of Utopias. Why do we fight for our slavery as if it were our freedom?

One critical question we in democratic countries should always ask is this: Are we democratic enough? Or can we build a more free and prosperous society?

You know you live in a pretty damn democratic society when your
public broadcaster devotes money and a really solid time slot (at least
in its first season) to a show as weird and deranged as Kenny Vs
Spenny. Plenty of powerful countries devote their public
broadcasters to ridiculous propaganda.

Once we start taking that question seriously, we can ask another one, a matter of strategy and planning for our real-world activism for more democracy: What makes people love our country when we could be so much better? What’s the ground of a population’s loyalty to a country?

Antonio Gramsci found himself asking that when he was imprisoned by a government far more brutal than any government we have in Canada,* which inspired incredibly loyalty among Italy’s population.

* Well, non-Indigenous territory in Canada. Our federal government isn’t very kind when it comes to governing them. Our leaders have mostly blamed poor Indigenous people for the pathetic state of basic infrastructure that our government built.

We were taught all our lives since elementary school that Mussolini was a monster. But for most of the two decades he ruled Italy, Mussolini’s popularity as a political leader could go as high as Justin Trudeau’s and as low as Donald Trump’s. But that’s still the support of millions of Italian citizens.

Gramsci’s analysis is rooted in the powers of the state. It’s how, in part, he develops his concept of hegemony. He accepts the idea that one of the central powers of the state is violence. We all learn in basic political theory that the state is the only agent of legitimate violence in a society.**

One day, maybe we'll remember Donald Trump the way Italians
remember Mussolini. With ironic kitsch paraphernalia and
deranged media mogul politicians admiring his virility. Oh God.

** Too bad we’re never asked in those basic political theory to discuss why even state violence is legitimate in the first place. Seems an even more basic question to me.

But it’s all too easy to think of violence as the only function of the state that matters. Think back to the Russian state’s vulnerability in 1917. Hell, how about the Syrian, Libyan, Egyptian, and Tunisian state’s vulnerability five years ago!

When the only way a state can actually encourage the population’s loyalty is violence, it’s already lost. Or at least, there’s not much beyond revolution, or civil war, or both as the only ways forward. Violence and the threat of violence is a very ineffective weapon precisely because it’s so destructive.

Most of the work of loyalty building for the state doesn’t come through its violent institutions. The most efficient institutions of loyalty are the soft power institutions. Schools, naturally, are the most powerful – we learn the national anthem, basic stories about Canadian history and culture, Canadian values.*** We learn it all as children, impressionable creatures whose basic habits and personalities can still be moulded.

*** Maybe they’re left-wing Canadian values of universal brotherhood in infinite combinations. Maybe they’re right-wing Canadian values of more conventional patriotism. Still Canadian.

It has never gotten less subtle.

Plenty of other state institutions help take care of this value-building process too. Public broadcasters for news and entertainment, film development boards, and museums. Working together, schools and cultural institutions are powerful tools to weave patriotic loyalty into a population.

Deeply democratic cultures and governments let their state-run cultural and education institutions bring up problems the country faces – for instance, poverty or a past of crimes against humanity. But these institutions can also be used for pure indoctrination. Of course, they’ll work best if they’re subtle about it.

Still, indoctrination from such powerful institutions can sometimes be so heavy-handed it’s a form of violence itself.

When all these institutions of soft power and values training have done their work, you have a significant chunk of the population whose political reflexes are their belief in the unconditional good of the country.

Now what do you do with those people?

Lives Deprived of Flesh, Research Time, 25/07/2017

Yesterday, I wrote about an article I’m working on to be published at the Reply Collective. It’s a rather complex study of what philosophical creativity is. It includes an analysis of Rebecca Tuvel’s article on the possibility of transracial human existence.

I read the article, and I didn’t actually think it was very good. I think Tuvel had the right to write the article, contrary to a lot of the more intense opposition to her work. See, Tuvel’s critics made the mistake of thinking that her goal was ever to write anything at all about real transgender people’s experiences.

Tuvel’s article doesn’t ever discuss real experiences, and if her approach there accurately reflects all her work, she never does. She practices an entirely abstract conceptual analysis.

Would you trust anyone who had a simple, clear answer for everything?
That kind of person is usually a con-man, whether he's wearing a
plaid leisure suit or a televangelist's perfect makeup.

She contrasts and analyzes a series of abstract arguments from principles and claims. These arguments are about what it would take to change genders and races. They have nothing to do with the actual experience of real transgender people – if they did, their ideas would be nowhere so clean, orderly, and simple.

Too much of contemporary philosophy mistakes this simplicity and clarity for a superior way of understanding the world because it’s so simple and clear. But the world isn’t easy – it’s a messy, difficult, painful place, and the truths of lived experience are hard to understand in all their curving, multifaceted dimensions.

Any conclusion that you come to easily, you should suspect. Just as you’d suspect a salesman whose pitch is too slick.

When I read Milton Friedman, I feel the same way.

Hell of a record scratch right there. But I see the same kind of reliance on the ease of abstract arguments, turning away from real complexities that would make your conclusions more difficult to hold. A philosophy informed entirely by the most simple, abstract arguments is completely inadequate to understanding any exceptions.

Here’s an example from Capitalism and Freedom that makes for a wonderful illustration of Friedman’s over-abstraction. It’s part of a larger argument about how education should work, and how people’s preferences for their children’s futures affect educational outcomes.

His writing on monetary policy and the role of
currency in national economies is genuinely
enlightening. When he stays in the boundaries of
his scientific discipline, Milton Friedman is a
remarkably insightful thinker.

Friedman considers why wealthy people have fewer children than poor people. His reasons are – what’s the word? – kind of ridiculous. He says that a central reason why wealthy people have fewer children than poor people is because the advanced education that wealthy people often receive is more expensive and requires greater investment.

Poor people, meanwhile, have more children because their education will be paltry. Poor people, after all, will only ever do simple work like manual labour or front-line service work. Since they don’t need as much education and training as the children of wealthy families who become doctors, engineers, and Ivy League university professors, poor families can produce more children at lower cost.

Yes, this is what he says. Capitalism and Freedom, chapter six, pages 86-7 of my edition. This is seriously Friedman’s argument in one of his most popular books. How on Earth did a man who would put this argument to paper win a Nobel Prize?

He abstracts away from the real, complex situation of actual families to focus specifically on his arguments for how to improve America’s education system. In doing so, he turns away from letting messy reality disprove his most infamous premise – that all people act optimally rational all the time and that all families are precisely planned.

Turning away from real complexity toward the simplicity and ease of an abstract argument makes your thoughts into lies of distortion. The simplicity of Friedman’s abstraction in this example erases the real injustices of education access and family planning capacities across wealth levels.

The simplicity of Tuvel’s abstraction in her paper this Spring erases the real injustice and suffering that transgender people face. Worse, it implicitly equates them with the deranged saviour complex of America’s most famous self-alleged transracial person.

The imperative to “Keep it simple, stupid!” does not always apply.

Free Speech Martyrs in History I: The Greek, Research Time, 08/02/2017

So what are the justifications of free speech, when you go back to John Stuart Mill himself?

You can start with the standard Mill that everybody gets in their undergrad classes. Freedom of opinion and its expression, even and especially when it’s unpopular, is necessary for a functional society for the following three reasons.

We learn about the heroes and martyrs of freedom and justice as if
freedom and justice were the same. While they go together, and each is
the condition of the other's possibility, they aren't the same. Here's
Nelson Mandela, one of the world's most famous rebels against
injustice.

1) Some opinion contrary to the popular belief is actually the truth, and can correct a mistaken mainstream.

2) Some opinion contrary to the popular belief is false and the mainstream is true, but the challenge of those contrary ideas is needed to keep a popular truth from calcifying into an oppressive dogma.

3) Both the popular opinion and its challenger are true, and no one understands either well enough to see how they properly complement each other. But with enough work, determination, and hard public thought, the two sides of the issues can reach a new perspective where their alliance becomes natural.

Already, I’ve gone beyond the usual account of Mill’s justification of freedom of opinion. The textbooks* rarely go beyond Reason One: Some minority beliefs will turn out to be true after all.

* I really do think that humanities textbooks – the collections of excerpts and short essays, not the actual full books – are written under the presumption that students are stupid. This is why I never used a textbook in any low-level classes where I could make that call.

So this is the popular mainstream opinion about what Mill had to say about freedom of opinion. And it’s a pretty accurate view of the general popular dogma about freedom of opinion – don’t oppress my opinion, because it might turn out that you’re wrong, I’m right, and I’m entitled to my opinion anyway.

This is Kim Dae Jung in the 1970s, at a rally speaking against South
Korea's dictator Park Chung Hee. Kim spent his life as a crusader for
democracy in Korea, and went from serving several years as a
political prisoner to serving a five year term as President of the
Republic of Korea.

Except you aren’t entitled to it. Because only a few pages after going through these three reasons for freedom of opinion, Mill describes how you aren’t entitled to your opinion. It’s because every opinion should be open to critique, not just from other arguments and analyses, but from real facts that could disprove your opinion.

You’re free to form your own opinion, but you aren’t entitled never to have that opinion challenged or critiqued. That goes for mainstream popular opinion, and the opinions of isolated cranks and rebels.

But Mill is more often treated as a resource and a justification to shut down any oppression of opinion. On Liberty is, in many ways, an argument against silencing opinions. And there are many reasons why opinions can be silenced.

Mill lived in the 19th century, after all. There were plenty of dictatorships kicking around 1850s Europe – they were monarchies, but had either openly absolutist rulers or powerless parliaments. And there were plenty of oppressive theological disputes throughout Europe too.

So there were plenty of institutions and governments who were oppressing plenty of ostensibly free opinions. With all that in mind, who’s the first example Mill cites at length of a society harmed by the suppression of opinions critical to the mainstream?

A historically accurate depiction of Socrates.

The death of Socrates, the foundational story of Western philosophy. Mill depicts Socrates as the man who would have been a personal founder of a Greek Enlightenment, if the Athenian assembly hadn’t executed him for sedition against popular dogma.

The image of Socrates in the narratives of Plato – and the image that inspired the entire Western philosophical tradition – is the challenger of unquestioned dogma. And that dogma was false, or at least so simple as to become flimsy as moist tissue.

The least question could knock away the foundations of popular Greek moral dogmas. All it took was one reasonably insightful persistent critic – someone who wouldn’t give up pressing for deeper conceptions of what was taken for granted.

Socrates was a martyr for freedom of opinion in Mill’s telling. But look at the content of what he said and did. Socrates’ demand was that his society justify their moral beliefs – don’t just believe dogma because it’s given to you, because dogmatic belief leads to injustice. He was an advocate to build a more just, fair, enlightened society.

Which is different from freedom. Which is truth. . . . To be continued

Confronting the Need for Laws, Research Time, 27/01/2017

Here's a less intense – but still nicely humming – problem of modern politics. Dealing with libertarians. When I write Utopias, this will be a tough problem I tackle. Because libertarians and radical democrats should be perfect allies, despite their differences.

But the radical divergence comes over the question of governance. The libertarian ideal is to have literally no government – a society of autonomous individuals binding themselves as people through voluntary contracts.

The only true positive content to any utopia that wouldn't directly
collapse into terror: an imperative, "Be excellent to each other!"

Which is quite appealing, but doesn’t work out all that well when actually applied to real economies where there are massive inequalities.

Yet there is one common point that every democrat (radical or not) shares with every libertarian – A deep distrust of government as a constant danger to ordinary people, through oppression or corruption. Libertarians focus on the oppression. Democrats focus on the corruption.

Libertarian thinking presumes that government is inherently coercive, and so a vector for oppression. The historical fact that many governments have and do oppress people in different ways lends them some credibility.

But democracy is founded on the notion that government can be perfected – If the problem of real governments is their corruption, then you’re presumed that there can be a non-corrupt government. You know that it’s at least possible to imagine a functional, entirely benevolent government.

And if you can imagine it, you can at least work your hardest to inch progressively closer to that ideal.

Dig back a couple of centuries, and an overlooked Moses Mendelssohn offers an ideal for governance and political leadership that can overcome libertarian distrust of the state. A moral value at the heart of good governance.

No, Helen, there will be no Happiness Patrol.

Benevolence.

The most excellent form of government is the most benevolent – a government that provides the perfect conditions of social harmony, happiness, and peace. But this doesn’t come from the coercion of law. This isn’t the Happiness Patrol.

Mendelssohn describes a population so perfectly educated and enlightened that we’re simply kind and peaceful to each other. All of this would come from the proper education.

In the 1780s, this kind of naïveté was more than a century away from dying out. So you could imagine that a government could provide universal moral education alongside universal science and humanities education.

But consider the ideal of what education is supposed to be – It’s any process of human maturity. Growing up as a person, you’re supposed to become a better person.

Mendelssohn sincerely postulates, at the heart of his political thinking, the notion that humanity can become perfect. That we’ll all constitute a society where each of us will do the best for each other. The job of a good – no, an excellent – government is to encourage each of us to approach that moral and ethical virtue.

How we should lead out lives as people – to make the world a better place than when you found it – is how we should lead our governments. In such a world of angels, the police and law enforcement would be unnecessary. Even law itself wouldn’t be needed. People would naturally be good to each other.

If we can imagine that, and push ourselves in that direction as we grow older. Maybe be good enough parents and elders in your community that the young people around you are on the whole more virtuous than the old folks.

Belief in humanity’s perfectibility is the foundation of a positive utopia. As long as that vision of perfection is a society where we’re all excellent to each other.

Thought Is Supposed to Set You Free, Composing, 16/12/2016

Yesterday morning, I watched a short video interview with Emma and Peter Worley. They’re education advocates in the UK who run The Philosophy Foundation. Its mission is to introduce philosophical education into primary and elementary school curriculums.

Now, before you call them ridiculous, this isn’t a matter of getting a bunch of nine year olds to read The Critique of Pure Reason. Instead, he’s talking about getting kids actually thinking about profound concepts.

Emma and Peter Worley. They advocate for such a wonderful idea, but
I can't help but feel that they express something troubling.

The example they discuss in the video is a discussion of number. The teacher writes ‘2’ four times on the chalkboard in a square shape. She asks the class ‘How many numbers are on the board?’ and asks each kid to explain why they think the way they do.

You’ve got a bunch of nine year olds talking seriously about the ontology of mathematics in their own words. That’s awesome.

They pitch the idea as a brilliant way to get kids thinking critically about deep and freaky topics. Exercises in that kind of thinking gets them interested in knowledge, in discovering the world, making themselves smarter, sharper, more perceptive and nuanced thinkers.

That's the kind of philosophical work that I try to write – in my current giant research project Utopias, as well as my smaller projects like reviews for SERRC and different conferences. Same with my policy work in the NDP. Diving into the fundamentals of our questions, so we can better understand our world.

Sadly, when I think back on so much of the day-to-day bluster of academic philosophy departments, I feel like many in that community wouldn’t want that kind of behaviour in their classrooms.

It isn’t just the condescending attitude that too many professors can easily slip into regarding their undergrad students. Though it is that.

It isn’t just the growing focus on scholarly minutiae, where the need to publish in highly specialized, steeply paywalled journals pushes people to write more and more densely technical interpretive arguments. Though it is that.

The popular paradigm of the philosopher wasn't
a professional teacher or school administrator. He
was some rebellious contrarian who spent his
life talking with his people, no matter their
class, wealth, status, or pedigree.

It’s the fact that those densely technical arguments, in person-to-person interactions get to such heated intensities. But that aggressive, sometimes confrontational approach to professional conversation could produce a dangerous tendency.

Yes, often this is a part of the social atmosphere in philosophy departments that tend to drive women away from the discipline. Or worse behaviour. And this is an expression of the social force I’m talking about. But it goes deeper.

There’s always a tendency in academics for an inflated sense of themselves. You get a little arrogant. You puff yourself up when you’re in the institution. If you restrict your social life to the institution, you can start to take those peacock feathers too seriously. And you actually become that insufferably arrogant.

The conversation on subject matters in academic philosophy has a tone of professionalized aggression. We will meticulously analyze a colleague’s argument and consider it entirely proper to coolly tear that argument to shreds.

We are purposefully destructive to each other’s work, and respond to such acts with gracious thanks for those helpful criticisms. After spending up to a year preparing a piece of research.

To criticize a work exclusively as a search for problems with it is a destructive act. But professional discourse treats this as a force of progress – an idea improves as you test whether it can stand up to argument. But there is a relentlessness that refuses to quit.

When the relentlessness of academic philosophical criticism blends deeply with the self-inflation of the culture’s arrogant tendencies, the result is an almost sociopathic degree of professionalized aggression.

This is certainly not everyone in academic philosophy – it was very few. But this was a tendency of the entire culture. When it was brought to its highest intensity, it can produce a troll of Milo-like strength as articulate as Bertrand Russell.

When I get my philosophical arguments on, I lately try to think of them
as more like a rap battle where you actually believe what you say. And
no, I'm not going to post a picture from Epic Rap Battles of History
because those videos are terrible and horribly stupid. 

In the early days of this blog, I wrote a post about the worst tendency of the arrogant philosophy student. In the name of achieving the truth, he argues so aggressively against every idea he encounters that he becomes the nihilist sophist he hates.

Everything around him is wrong.

I wonder if this attitude, this style of talking and thinking, with others but always against them, is a condition of the drift of some former philosophy students I know to Men’s Rights Associations. To other reactionary avenues.

Certainly not the only cause. But quite plausibly a condition. Certainly not sufficient. Maybe not necessary. But tantalizingly present.

Maybe I feel so haunted by its presence in the voice of day-to-day academic philosophy because that was once my professional world. My chosen career path. Then I had to leave.

Maybe it haunts me because that style could have been a condition leading me down that path. Not the only condition. Certainly not sufficient. Definitely not necessary. But terrifyingly present.

Alienating Labour II: What Else Should We Expect If We Teach Like This? Jamming, 21/08/2015

Continued from last post . . . I think the humanities suffered the most from the inflationary expansion of class sizes in universities. In the sciences (and this includes the social sciences) early undergraduate classes teach you about the basic concepts and the history of the discipline. 

But they also teach you mathematical, statistical, laboratory, and real-world research techniques that very clearly require years of practice and expertise before you can do them properly. In the humanities, we only teach concepts as simple, technical terms (usually ending in -ism and defined in two sentences) designed to be easily memorized by rote and spewed back on the exam and in papers we expect to be written at 1.30am the day before deadline. 

Deep, nuanced education is tough in classes this huge.

It’s a function of the time crunch. As classes get bigger, professors have less and less time to spend with more and more students. So depth of analysis has to be sacrificed to maintain the breadth to give students the sense that they’ve learned any content at all. This approach is so widespread, it's become an institutionalized norm. I used to get funny looks from colleagues and superiors for even suggesting that there should be better ways to teach our material.

“Why would you bother? They’re just first-years!”

I saw so many undergrad textbooks when I taught philosophy that included, for example, introductions to Descartes as three-page excerpts from the Meditations that were meant to be taught in a single hour. Expertise in humanities disciplines requires throwing out these simple definitions to examine the ideas, the entire books that developed them, and their histories. 

Humanities disciplines don’t teach our research techniques at low-intensity undergrad levels because they don't have agreed-upon pablum definitions like Dualism or Utilitarianism. So someone who only gets a basic training in the humanities never gets the opportunity to examine the disciplines’ content in detail, or even the suggestion that there’s more detail to the tradition. 

When desperate humanities professors defend their departments from budget-slashing administrators as teachers of critical thinking skills and how to understand the complexity of society, their own course content for first and second year often stand against them.

Humanities educators’ condescending approach to humanities education* results in many people understanding complex concepts, thinkers, and traditional superficially at best and completely arse-backwards at worst. A wonderful example appeared in a Twitter fight between two major figures in the online Doctor Who community on one side, and a right-wing Gamergater type on the other.

* Not all of them, of course. I was lucky enough to have encountered many professors in my education who treated students with the respect that their intelligence deserved. I was especially fortunate that my first philosophy teacher, Jim Bradley, and my doctoral supervisor, Barry Allen, were this type of teacher. I was also fortunate to observe many examples of the worse. 

Whatever is valuable in Karl Marx's
writings and research, the atrocities of
the Soviet Union and People's Republic
of China (combined with the popularity
of Friedrich Hayek's powerful anti-
socialist writing in Road to Serfdom)
has made the philosophy irredeemable
in popular North American culture.

Basically, a sarcastic comment about a technical detail in the writings of Georg Hegel** was taken totally seriously. Then @ThalesLives wrote a completely serious post about why Hegel and everything he wrote – and therefore Marx, Marxists, and everything they wrote – was stupid and wrong. Please take a moment, click the link, read it, skip his invective if you want, then come back.

** A standard go-to when you want to crack a joke about over-complicated philosophy.

If my friends B.Rad and Bull Market, two of the biggest Hegel fans I know, read this, I don't blame you for being upset or for laughing so hard that you start hiccuping. @ThalesLives describes Hegel's thinking as entirely and simply defined by the old stereotype of thesis+antithesis=synthesis. 

It's a gross oversimplification of Hegel’s actual concepts and logical ideas, and he cites the authority of a single professor for the rightness of his argument.

Now, he does point out a solid problem with Hegel’s legacy as a thinker, which is that he designed his system of logic to be the philosophical framework of the entire historical and conceptual development of all human science. And it never bloody worked. 

That’s a problem that a lot of philosophy researchers have grappled with in a lot of books that, given what I currently know about him, I don't think @ThalesLives has read. Now, I haven’t read them either, but that problem isn't really what I'm interested in for my own work. And if I've sounded unfairly dismissive about this in the past, well, I’m sorry and I’ve learned my lesson.

So we have here, at least so it appears from his post and his dialogue with Phil and Jack, a textbook*** case of someone who has taken an oversimplified (mis)understanding of an incredibly complex thinker and tradition as a clear and obvious truth. It illustrates very well how humanities education has institutionally fallen down on the job, teaching dogmatic misconceptions instead of how to think.

*** Hehe.

Because the truth is, humanities education has it backwards. The discipline teaches simplified versions of its content at lower levels, which makes people believe that they understand some of history's most complex thinkers with a few definitions, a three-page excerpt, and a chat with a prof.

Humanities education should concentrate on its content as examples to teach critical thinking, argumentation, and interpretation. How, for example, to juxtapose and relate an idea or a subtle hint from one text with an explicit argument from the same author to see what strange new ideas we can generate. How to expand that idea into other ideas and practical implications, understanding what a concept permits us to think and what it obscures.

So we can end up, even with a thinker like Marx who's been the subject of forests worth of books and articles, like Jameson building an interesting use of his ideas that had never quite been discussed in his context before. What that idea is will come tomorrow or Monday.

That’s how we’d understand humanities expertise if it were taught properly in the first place. . . . To be continued.

Simulating the Impossible to Learn About Reality, A History Boy, 28/05/2015

Not the most accurate depiction of a typical psychology
lab. I did always find a lot of this movie funny, though.
I have an extremely dark sense of humour.

I think one reason why so many people buy Dan Ariely’s books is that he’s good at talking about the day-to-day process of experimental psychological research in a way that amuses a reader. He makes you laugh.

Given what happens during a lot of his experiments, simply describing them as they happen can put a smile on your face. Psychology experiments are utterly ridiculous, in terms of what they ask us to do. I very vaguely remember participating in one when I was a student, because my friend C, who was an honours psychology student, asked me to.

As I recall, and I don’t recall very well because this happened around 2007, I sat down at a computer while a face flashed on screen, and I had to push one button to indicate my positive or negative feelings about the face. The images of faces were mixed in with images of numbers. Bear in mind that I may also be combining this experiment I did with one I later read about. What it actually happened in the lab doesn't matter for the story, only that I did silly things there and talked about why they were so silly. 

After the experiment was done and her supervisor gave me my $16 for my time, C and I talked about how it worked. I made a guess as to what the experiment was meant to measure. She told me it was actually a pretty good setup for a psychology experiment. 

But her actual experiment was set up entirely differently. What I thought they were really measuring was actually part of what was supposed to distract me so they could observe my unintentional behaviour in reaction to the general framework of what I was doing.

Don’t ask me what either of us actually said.

I thought it was interesting that they’d develop this rather elaborate scenario whose content was so contrived and whose structure was so simple, but which also contained a distraction for your conscious attention from what they were actually trying to observe about you.

Don't you want this? Don't you want this
life?

Ariely describes one of his experiments, where he gives one group genuine Chloé brand sunglasses and tells them so, one group fake Chloés and tells them so, one group real Chloés and tells them they’re fakes, and one group fake Chloés and tells them they’re real. 

To a randomly selected half of each of these four groups, he gives a set of math problems with an answer key on the reverse side. To the other randomly selected half of each, he gives them the quiz without the answer key. How much cash the participant was paid for taking part depended on how well they did on the quiz. 

The experiment was to correlate people’s propensity to cheat (whether they’d take advantage of the answer key being literally in their hands as they write a quiz they’ll get money for) was correlated with wearing counterfeit designer goods and knowing you’re wearing them. If you know you’re already deceiving, will you deceive again?

I remember, on many occasions over the years, having conversations with friends and colleagues who knew nothing about psychology. They’d often say that the experiments were ridiculous* and useless because they were so abstract from real life.

* Well, they are, but scientifically so.

These folks had all taken psychology, though. Psych 1000, the course that’s loaded with mediocre arts students who have to take a science credit to graduate, but who don’t want to do math or spend extra time in a lab. So many people take an introduction to psychology solely for a mandatory credit, but who don’t give a crap about the subject. 

Yet because it’s the only science course that a vast majority of paying customers** bother with, there’s immense institutional pressure to pass them all. You can’t give them a rigorous course and adjust all their marks to pass levels because that would be dishonest as an educator. But you can fill the course content with relative pablum compared to what you learn in higher-level courses after you decide that the degree program is worth pursuing in itself. 

I play this game at least four times every day just on
my own.

** I mean students in our country’s highest learning and research institutions.

The issue is how many good students the psych department drives away through boring them out of their minds. If your first exposure to a discipline of knowledge is dumbed-down to a level where even the barely indifferent can pass it with all the effort of a stoned shrug, you won’t think it’s all that interesting.

I never took a course in psychology, though. I was a smart enough arts major that I did university-level chemistry in high school in a class of eight, where I got personalized instruction from a knowledgeable teacher. Instead, everything I know about psychology comes from reading books and articles by psychological theorists and practitioners. Some specialize in the discipline of psychology itself, and some specialize in others but study psychological theories and techniques for their own work.

Most of my psychological knowledge, I know from reading books and having conversations with philosophers of science who often draw on the history, methods, and theories of psychology for their own ends. Here’s something I learned from philosophy of science about why psychology experiments are so abstract from human behaviour.

The whole idea of an experiment isn’t to replicate the world around us so we can observe things as they really unfold. We can do that by wandering around the world observing things. An experiment is supposed to isolate one particular phenomenon from everything it normally interacts with so we can learn exactly what happens in that one specific process.

So you have to create a very artificial environment to learn anything specific about a process. In real life, no process is truly isolated, so you can never quite get a firm grip on what the essential cause of a phenomenon might be, or whether one kind of activity is happening, or another one that looks superficially similar but is very different. 

Psychology wants to do this with processes in human cognition, so of course their scenarios are going to sound weird and unrealistic. All experiments are unrealistic. Introducing realism would prevent us from learning the kind of knowledge that experiments can produce.

Damn Sociology II: The Contradiction of Neoliberal Statistics, Research Time, 24/03/2015

Continued from last post . . . There is a second level of depth in Road to Serfdom’s rejection of sociology and the corresponding rejection of sociological knowledge in new liberal politics generally. It has to do with how particular kinds of knowledge gathering affect how you understand the world and humanity generally. Or at least, how you presume such knowledge to affect sociologists.

Sociology as a scientific discipline emerged from the creation of statistical mathematics, and the application of these mathematics to the massive collection of data on citizens that European states had been collecting since the first government population survey in 1749 in Sweden under King Gustav III. Statistical analysis discovers general trends of behaviour or social activity, evidence for what the population wants and needs.

The Harper government's original reason for removing
the mandatory long-form census was that its questions
invaded the privacy of Canadian citizens. Apparently,
that duty is for the security services, not StatsCan.

Extrapolating a population’s tendencies for wants and needs, their desires, from statistical data is the cardinal affront to individual liberty, from which sociology can’t be redeemed. This is my theatrical way of expressing the irreparable hostility right-wing neoliberal politicians seem to have for sociology. Road to Serfdom is the expression in political rhetoric of the revival in liberal philosophy that developed from the Austrian School’s ideas in economics.*

* I’m indebted to Steve Fuller for filling in some of the ideas behind the hostility of Austrian School economists to statistics in sociology and statistical analysis in economic modelling of desire. There was a brief mention of Hayek in his new book Knowledge, but asking him about it directly for our long-running review/dialogue would be too much of a divergence.

Fuller’s interpretation of the Austrian School conception of statistics runs like this. A person’s preferences are unique to them, so each person’s reasons to make the same action as another person are inevitably different. That divergence can’t be expressed in a quantitative measure of the action that several individuals made. The sociologist only measures that everyone made the same action. 

Everyone’s reasons for coming to the same outcome never reach the quantitative sociologist. So the sociologist would see a false commonality and uniformity of thought, where there was really just the momentary convergence of irreconcilably different individuals. 

Worse, the sociologist imparts a kind of collective consciousness to the group of individuals. They perceive a false necessity in the organic movement of a culture instead of the true contingent agreement of unique individuals. That’s why sociologists advocate for state policies that manage a population of individuals on the presumption that their convergence in action indicates unity in everyday thought. Sociologically-informed policy therefore results in government activity that ignores the individuality, and therefore the basic liberty, of the population.

An elderly Friedrich Hayek,
fighting the same fights he did
fifty years before.

Now anyone who knows anything about the current theoretical mainstream of sociology knows that no one seriously believes that a measured trend in opinion is the expression of a collective consciousness. That’s ridiculous.

Nonetheless, it fits the strange intellectual heritage of popular libertarian thinking, where an essentialist conception of a phenomenon from its founding era is carried into the present. Hayek’s was a time of world-shattering conflicts with militarized collective states, the end of an era where societies were popularly conceived much more organically than we now know them to be. Libertarians are fighting a battle that they’ve already won.

What’s more, the dehumanizing power of statistical knowledge is more frequently used in institutions that are ruled entirely be new liberal political principles, where public institutions are run as if they were private industries. Take the university system, for example. 

I came across an article in the London Review of Books last week, where Marina Warner, an instructor at the University of Essex, described how the management priorities of her institution were being shaped by business norms that were improper to education. Much of this was similar to what we experience here in North America. 

She describes a university bureaucracy whose priorities were set by administrators who did not and had not ever worked as researchers or instructors themselves. Professors were informed that they were to spend their time, not writing books or articles or actually carrying out the research to do so, but writing grant proposals to public or private institutions to fund their research. They had to fill out timesheets to be submitted to administration, attesting that they were actually doing research.

The biggest problem for the university sector in the UK, according to Warner’s piece, is the means by which researchers’ performance is evaluated in the first place. The Research Excellent Framework (REF) is a statistical guide to account for research impact. Nothing wrong on the face of it, but it measures only those impacts that occur within disciplines, when humanities work is most impactful in its direct popular reception. Like Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

The Albert Sloman Library at University of Essex.

Research products in the humanities are most driven by an individual’s identity. A humanities scholar negotiates a field of study and concurrent research done by others, advancing ideas that they develop individually. It’s where research accords most with individual expression. The best products of humanities research are books and essays that develop perspectives and interpretations which are stimulating and informative to their readers, but which would have been completely different if someone else had written them. 

Warner gives the example of a literature scholar who splits what would have been a book about Shakespeare, Blake, or Moore into four academic journal articles to satisfy immediately the demands of REF impact assessment, which concentrates on the number of research products and their placement in professional, paywalled publication venues. The book could have achieved a genuine social impact and popular reception, but is devalued precisely because of the greater popular accessibility of books.

Grant money received is also a measure of prestige in the REF, though humanities research rarely receives large grants. The scientific research wing of a military contract could win an enormous grant because such research is extremely expensive. A humanities research project requires only a library and time. It doesn’t need the money, but it’s devalued on official impact matrices because it doesn’t receive the money that it can’t justify using.

University research is being removed from the public interest and literally dehumanized because its institutional priorities have been reshaped along a model of the private sector. It was private sector norms, not state governance and support, that ushered in a regime that marginalizes and delegitimizes the most singularly individual research in the name of scoring high on statistical impact frameworks. 

But the new liberal right wing whose ideas dominate so much of our political conversation doesn’t perceive this hypocrisy. There’s an even stranger paradox in new liberal thinking that I discovered reading Hayek of which this hypocrisy is an expression. That’s the neoliberal outrage that you can sociologically understand the production of knowledge itself. To be continued . . .

Networking Analysis, Jamming, 26/11/2014

Last night, I attended a set of brief workshops that are regularly organized by the Corporate Communications department of Centennial College at the Story Arts Centre in East York. Like all events related to corporate communications, it had a name that the cynical would consider just a little cheesy, Talk Is Cheap. Here are a few brief things that  this night of seminars and panels really solidified in my knowledge about the field of work I’m about to enter.

Critical stuff first. I’m not sure how much knowledge can be imparted in a single 20 minute workshop session that still includes a presentation. I attended two workshops that were much too short to contain all that they could contain. The most interesting one was a presentation of a representative of the Cision analytics company, about the metrics by which they analyze a blogger’s audience and overall influence. They use this data to advise their clients on who is the best person to form a corporate relationship with. 

Maps of the internet look cool, but they're even
cooler when you understand their science.

I’m incredibly interested in the science of networks, which companies like Cision use to assemble their reports and analyses. Like most of reality, networks don’t form according to human intuitions. They assemble themselves as hubs and surrounding links — the influencers and those who they influence. Multiple people are influenced by multiple noteworthy hubs, but these hubs are the key points in the dissemination of knowledge. Elitism, at least in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, is built into the fundamental habits of human social activity. 

While my career will start in the corporate sector, I ultimately want to bring this mode of understanding knowledge creation and social change into a social and political context, using the knowledge of networks to change people’s lives for the better.

My only real problem with this presentation was that it was packed with too much introductory material, as if all the audience had never learned anything about networks of influence before. It was built for an hour-long session. All that necessary introduction can’t be employed in a 20 minute session and still leave adequate time for audience engagement.

I think there needs to be more engagement with the fundamental concepts that underlie the business of communications in the education of this field. I know a lot of it already, but you’ll be a better practitioner of your field if you know the conceptual and material levels of its operations. 

On another critical note, the other 20 minute workshop I attended last night suffered from an unfortunate superficiality. I had hoped to get some more intense knowledge of the practice of media relations. Instead, I got 15 minutes of tips and instructions for dealing with the media from a position of institutional power (this presenter did corporate PR for a large public sector corporation) that my first introductory media relations class had already covered. “Some journalists will be hostile to what you have to say.” They certainly will. 

I was more interested in getting into the details of media relations, and perhaps getting some advice on how to engage media when you aren’t in a position of power. For instance, when you’re representing a small company that needs to engage the media to survive and thrive. 

Yes, I was interested to apply some lessons to future promotion for my theatre and fiction work, because we badly needed it on the first run of You Were My Friend. But these are important lessons that I never had the chance to discuss because the over-long presentation took too much time away from discussion, and most of the discussion was taken up by a confused student journalist from Centennial’s college newspaper asking for clarification on particular basic technical terms from PR work.

I guess I'm smart, you know.

Perhaps my most personally satisfying lesson came from the keynote, a three-person panel on social networking and personal branding that was almost entirely based around audience discussion. It also had the benefit of lasting just shy of an hour. The discussion was very enlightening, and I was pleased to see some thoughtful professionals on the panel who had clearly put some work into understanding the central concepts of their occupations.

Here’s the kicker for me personally. There were two interactive wall projections running during the presentations displaying people’s live tweets of the keynote. One of my tweets was about how all the trendy-sounding talk about personal branding is basically just about the expression of character in user-driven media. I tweeted other thoughtful reactions to the presentation, as well as a couple of joking comments about the danger that the cupcakes topped with red icing posed to participants with moustaches. 

Almost every other tweet from student participants was a generic ‘About to get started!’ or ‘Can’t wait to get started!’ or ‘Awesome seminar!’ Don’t be afraid to express a little personal singularity on your twitter account. It’s one thing to listen to people talking about personal branding for an hour, but if you keep thinking in superficial terms, you’ll never actually do it successfully. It’s about character.

The Most Profound Changes to Humanity, Research Time, 22/10/2014

I finished reading The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man by Karl Jaspers yesterday. It took a while, as my currently rather busy lifestyle finds me without the same amount of time per day of pleasure reading that I used to have. Still, it let me savour this strange artifact of another era. 

I mean it seriously when I say that Jaspers’ book, originally published in 1958, is a creature from an alien time. So many of the presumptions that animated the details of Jaspers’ conceptual investigation no longer apply. For one, the post-colonial movement, which was still in the process of liberating African states from European possession as he was writing, has flowered into a thousand different strains of economic co-optation, political interference, and internecine war. 

When Jaspers wrote, it was a popular opinion that the
human race would be destroyed in a nuclear war within
a single generation. That itself is quite foreign to a
contemporary ear, to say the least.

Let alone the economic colonialism now perpetrated by Chinese state-owned corporations building their own mines throughout the continent. Jaspers’ invocation to let the newly independent peoples of the world find their own paths have gone unheeded. His own analysis of the end of imperialism was quite accurate about the harms colonial institutions had done to Africa and Asia, but didn’t seem adequate to the challenge of the incredible economic inequities that remained between the exploited and former direct exploiters.

Jaspers’ analyses of politics we can now see to be sadly inadequate. He discussed the politics of the nuclear era in terms only of states and polities. His slipping from direct relevance here can’t be said to be his fault. The politics of his own times were still dominated by the importance of states, and it was difficult to conceive of how agitation against the state per se could be progressive, given the era of the welfare state and the military-industrial complex.*

* For a writer in 1958 whose life had been dominated by the rise of nationalist barbarism that created a totalitarian firestorm, I can definitely understand why the relation of a free and rational citizenry to their state would be the primary political consideration. Anarchism as a serious political movement had disappeared, its last serious advocates never surviving the Spanish Civil War. Its ideas wouldn’t return until the abortive revolutions of popular discontent in 1968, and remain on the margins of political life.

The globalized economy of the era of the internet and unfettered capital have blown the presumptions of decades of political thinking into uncertainty, and we’re still as a society trying to grip the realities of the liberating and enslaving effects of a networked world.** However, the centre-less communication and community-building possibilities of network politics give a central concept of Jaspers’ analysis here more serious breathing room than it did in the days when all political thinking languished in the inevitability of the state in every argument.

** Understanding the decentralized nature of network politics opens one’s mind, however, to a return to central anarchist concepts. The context is new, of course, but the basic message that there can be more to political organization than the state remains the same.

The last chapter of Jaspers’ book expresses the high idealism that philosophy can change the world. It does so when the profundity and rigour of philosophical thinking brims forth and is expressed in every person. One at a time, thinking according to the ethical path of reason results in a world where the spontaneous action of countless individuals acting on their own in communication with each other articulates fear of universal destruction in nuclear bombardment as the resolve of a global peace movement that organizes all people to help each other in a spirit of human friendship.

It sounds so saccharine, doesn’t it? Yet this is the central faith of the philosophical tradition, even as we saw all the countries of the world fall away from this ideal. Our politics are now dominated by hysterical fear and bullying nationalism. Name whatever example you want: a Russian leadership on the path to restore Czarism destabilizes and threatens its neighbours, the media of an industrial country with advanced state medical infrastructure soars into panic over ebola, a whole region from Libya to Iraq and Turkey collapses into a fractally sectarian civil war. Jaspers’ ideals have failed.

The global environmental movement is a giant advocacy
campaign for mass lifestyle change, and proceeds one
person at a time.

Yet the ideal that individual-scale activity can change the world one person at a time is absolutely necessary to any political activity that seeks genuine change. That’s precisely what a social movement is: individuals communicating to discover their common frustrations and reaching, in their aggregate and collective actions, the critical mass necessary at least for the political mainstream to notice them. The size of a movement in society that transforms us all, at least indirectly through the echoes of their ideals and their rage. 

This assessment of the power of philosophy to change the world is at the centre of my own work, especially my Ecophilosophy manuscript. It’s a philosophical analysis that stretches across source material from environmental activism and moral thinking, scientific principles from ecology, systems theoretical biology, and ethology, as well as a meta-philosophical argument of how philosophical reasoning functions in psychology and social movements. 

That’s a mouthful, but its ultimate point is that philosophical reasoning in its various forms can change people’s minds about how they live. The changing character and priorities of their lives can constitute a social movement that changes the consumption and production patterns of the world, I hope along more ecologically mindful lines. While the precise character of our global conflicts have changed, in this, Jaspers still has much to say. Philosophy can change how we think, and thereby how we live. When enough people transform how they live, they have changed the world.