A Disturbing Example of Eternal Recurrence, Research Time, 28/06/2017

I’m making a joke with this title, but it does genuinely allude to a curious feeling I kept getting as I read The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton will describe a major national debate that was gripping the country in the 1780s.

And it will be pretty much the same ideas tearing at the country as Americans face today. I have a feeling this idea will appear somewhere in the Utopias manuscript – How can we believe in progress if we can’t even solve problems with literally centuries of effort?

Mike Pence is experiencing an odd recurrence of his own. I don't
know how meaningful this coincidence is, but I find it funny. Pence
once represented Indiana's 2nd Congressional district, the same as
Earl Landgrebe in the early 1970s, one of the most dedicated and
slavish Nixon loyalists.

I don't want to lean too much on the old idea that eternal recurrence is a straight-ahead ontological principle either. There’s too much about what we know of reality itself – I’m talking actual cosmological and physical knowledge – for me to say that cyclical time is the truth.

I don’t mean the idea that cyclical time is true, like a fact. I mean, the idea of cyclical time being the truth, a fundamental definitive aspect of a whole way of understanding the world. Let’s leave that stuff.

If Nietzsche is an inspiration for Utopias, it’s in how he tells us what real social progress amounts to. His story of the donkey, lion, and child is the model. A donkey accepts his lot and lumbers along though life. A lion throws off his shackles in rage. A child looks around those ruins and builds a new world.

We want to recognize that we can fix the injustice in our world, not just labour under it in hopelessness. You have the power to overthrow an unjust culture and society, but to lock down your victory, you need to build a new culture together.

American history can make you seriously pessimistic about this power. Despite centuries of activism, no one can even manage to throw off the shackles of racism. They only overthrow one version to see it replaced. America isn’t a slave society, but they went through nearly a century of Jim Crow and instituted mass incarceration.

Can we imagine for ourselves a force so
powerful in our souls that we can throw off
the burdens of the cosmos itself? Must we
always be donkeys before the cosmic
insignificance of humanity?

The return of injustice happens when people can’t or won’t build a culture of justice.

Specifically, what freaks me out in this instance of Hamilton’s wisdom? He describes the argument, as Americans were fighting over the country’s new constitution, against the federal government having strong taxation powers. It’s the same libertarian argument I hear so often today against government taxation powers.

Not the consistent, nuanced, and complex libertarian argument you’ll see coming from think tank philosophers. I’m talking about the mass media talking point – which drives so many ordinary folks to the voting booth and the public squares – that the federal government must be starved of taxes.

The argument: Federal government powers will inevitably be abused, used to oppress people instead of set them free. Even if the federal government avoids corruption by authoritarians or thieves, it will still oppress people by crushing local cultures and individual citizens under a single ideology and identity for all Americans.

In the 1780s, opponents of a strong federal government made an argument of cultural diversity. Not cultural diversity with our divisions today – differences of religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender. Back then, it was the cultural diversity of the peoples who composed the Thirteen.

Rhode Island, Maryland, New Jersey, and all the others. These were each distinct societies, deserving of their independence from the homogenizing identity of “America.”

Today, we call it state’s rights. Am I onto something?

Teaching the Metaphysics of Physics, A History Boy, 08/03/2017

I’m a big nerd and I sometimes read Nietzsche for fun. If you’ve seen any of the archives in my blog or any other writing before, you know I’m a big nerd. So I cracked open my epub of Human, All Too Human a little while ago, and I read something that brought back some sad memories.

Here’s the passage, from among the first aphorisms of the book.

“That is why there is in all philosophies so much high-flying metaphysics and such a dread of the explanations offered by physics, which seem so modest and insignificant; for the significance of knowledge for life has to appear as great as it possibly can. Here lies the antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible profundity and significance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further – and does in fact acquire it.”

I don’t want to talk about the context and ideas Nietzsche himself was confronting when he wrote this in 1880. I want to talk about an idea for a course I had a few years ago, because this paragraph set off a bitter memory.

Nietzsche's work has been influential and
inspiring to me, but he can be such a
downer sometimes.

The year after I finished my doctorate, I was still looking for work as a university teacher. My own department at McMaster posted two per-course positions. One was a third-level course in the theory of knowledge that my colleague P landed without a problem – it was literally his exact area of research expertise.

I applied to teach the fourth-level seminar on metaphysics. It had previously been a very doctrinaire course on the problem of freedom and determinism, but the university let that professor go the previous summer. So the department was looking for a new direction.

I applied, and came up with a proposal for a course that challenged students to think about philosophy’s right to get metaphysical in the first place. It combined metaphysical thinking with philosophy of science a little, but in a way that encouraged creativity. And in the fairly small class size of a senior-level seminar, we could have gotten really deep with it.

My course would have revolved around the question of what metaphysics can do for science. Metaphysics debates in academic philosophy journals revolved around questions like what universal terms like ‘blue’ refer to, or whether objects were bundles of universals or had an underlying property-less substrate.

But if you went to a physicist with any of these questions, he’d laugh in your face because they make no sense. The really important questions in physics revolve around things like Bell’s Theorem in quantum mechanics, which implies that spacetime literally isn't contiguous in some contexts.

I also wanted to talk about ideas in the intensive sciences like hydrodynamics, ecology, and other fields dominated by nonlinear mathematics because of their unintuitive implications about the nature of reality. And I wanted to contrast this with orthodox approaches to metaphysics that relied almost exclusively on intuitive logical reasoning.

We would have read Tim Maudlin’s Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics, Henri Bergson’s The Creative Mind, and Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Alongside short readings from David Hume, Bertrand Russell, contemporary analytic metaphysicians, Aristotle, Lucretius, and McMaster’s own Head of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre Nicolas Griffin.

The experiments that gave Bell's Theorem its real-
world example are complicated, but here's basically
what they mean. An electron doesn't get a specific
spin until it interacts with an energy field that sets
it. If you launch two electrons from the same
source in opposite directions, they'll still end up
with complementary spin – even though
information about each other's spin would have
to travel faster than light to reach the other. Their
states are entangled without local causal interaction.
That's not literally faster-than-light communication.
It's something much weirder: a demonstration that
contiguous local space is our false intuition.

But the department had already hired one of the previous year’s doctoral grads. And a Rochester-based professor with a couple of years’ more teaching experience had applied for the metaphysics seminar.

Later that winter, I saw his course outline from an undergrad friend of mine who was taking the course. He found it hideous, and he was right to. It was literally just a survey course in the standard canon of Western philosophy’s metaphysics. Twelve great philosophers in as many weeks. A week on Plato. On Aristotle. On Hegel. On Bradley.

There was no time to explore any problem in depth. Barely any time to do anything but get the most basic and mainstream account possible of a thinker whose ideas about the nature of reality produced commentary and reflection for literally centuries.

Even the professors who hired him later admitted that he was a mistake, turning a course far below the complexity level the curriculum required. But he had the most teaching experience of anyone who applied. So they hired him.

Since I was sent into these memories from reading Nietzsche, I find it ironic – or maybe fitting – that I still feel a little resentful over these events.

It was a very personal rejection, because I knew everyone who had made the decision. I’d worked with them for the previous five years. It was the start of a year of rejection from entry-level positions across the region – rejections in favour of people who had already been working, who had more seniority – that effectively killed my career in university teaching.

I was never able to build the teaching experience that would have made me competitive in the university teaching market. I haven’t worked in a university since Winter 2013.

Today, I feel like I can achieve more as a professional writer and communicator working on books and films on the side, than I ever could have strapped into the grind of university-based humanities scholarship. But that achievement is still all potential, all in the future.

Because it’s taken me four years to get from my old career bottoming out to my new one finally getting some momentum. Those have been four stressful, painful, difficult years. If I didn’t have my GF with me for most of that time, I honestly can’t say if I’d have had the strength to haul myself out of where I’d fallen. It's taken me quite a while – thanks to depression, bad luck, having to deal with crap bosses or low paying work – to get my shit back together.

And if that academic career had actually worked out, I never would have met her. And I don’t think I’d be able to accept life without her.

Even on a smaller scale of thinking, I still feel a sense of regret. That would have been a fucking great course. And I was a fucking good philosophy teacher.

A Lesson in Political Psychology, Research Time, 21/11/2016

Over the next few years in my different writing and art projects, one of the things I’ll do is try to understand the political phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I’ve been doing that on the blog for the last few weeks as I read some noteworthy radical democratic political theorists in the leadup and immediate aftermath of his election.

A traditionally realist depiction of President Trump,
in a contemporary fresco.

As my next big book Utopias comes together over the next few years, reckoning with the nationalist movement and whatever terrors his administration unleashes will provide the book’s context. So, aside from my general interest in global politics, I’m thinking through a lot of the most thoughtful accounts of what Trump means for human society.

One of those comes from Laurie Penny. Ever since reading her book Unspeakable Things a couple of years ago, I considered her a brilliant philosopher as well as an insightful and incisive journalist.

It’s weird in a lot of modern contexts to call someone who doesn’t work as a university academic a philosopher. But I think it’s increasingly necessary for philosophy as a tradition, given the pressures of academic institutions on creativity and social leadership beyond the community of university researchers.

Even in those circumstances, more and more university professors are too overburdened and underpaid to be leaders even in their community. Like too many people whose careers have been wrecked by casualization or automation, the sectors that are supposed to produce knowledge devote increasing amounts of energy to mere survival.

So it’s up to journalists and artists to understand and develop the concepts that bring us to such incredible danger and can save us. To understand nationalism and develop a path to liberation.

Penny’s article “Against Bargaining” is one example of the public, open-access, mass market philosophy that people who oppose racism, bigotry, nationalism, and autocracy need to read today. We need it to feed our minds and keep us sharp. To focus ourselves on the differences that make real differences, the basis of accurate, worthwhile action.

The only reason Nietzsche wasn't a democrat
was because in the 19th century, it worked as
a mass politics, a dangerous kind of social
movement. Today, democracy is about
grooming people to be the ideally best people,
the bravest and most proud. Democracy has
become literally true aristocracy.

After reading Unspeakable Things, I called Penny a Nietzschean, and “Against Bargaining” continues this theme in her work – Donald Trump’s ascent and all it represents (and unleashes) is the most violent explosion of social resentment I think I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Nietzsche wrote about resentment as a seething, creeping social force. It was the cultural attitude that uses hatred to turn weakness into strength. But this isn’t the emboldening hatred of rage at an oppressor. It’s the petty small-mindedness of slimy disgust at anyone who dares to present themselves as your equal.

That’s one context of the attitude of resentment. It’s resentment triumphant, the decadent society of 19th century Europe, Europe at the heart of empire. Imperialism that was popularly justified by a morality of white supremacist racism.

The idea refuses to die. At least in some contexts. Homogeneously white affluent communities within spitting distance of more economically and ethnically mixed districts is one context. Places where no one knows enough non-white people to move their thoughts beyond stereotype and fear.

That petty attitude is also, at an individual level, the perspective of the abuser. He blames you for the violence he inflicts and you accept his narrative. Look at how many nice liberal journalists have written thinkpieces on how multiculturalism and identity politics caused President Trump.

You know what multiculturalism is? It’s living in a mixed community – walking down the street and passing by couples and families of as many possible ethnic and gender combinations as you can get out of a randomizer.

You know what identity politics is? It’s the assertion that your life and cultural heritage has value, especially if that life and heritage has been devalued and abused for generations.

It’s my fault that I’m being hurt because I stood up for myself and demanded that I not be hurt. If I’m compliant, then I won’t be hurt. I’ll be silent. I’ll be good.

To be good out of fear of an authority’s punishment isn’t goodness. It’s fear. The psychology of the abuse victim is to mask the outcome of overpowering fear as moral virtue.

In the face of hard years of violence from the
state and the mob, we'll need to find the
strength to smile.

Here, the psychological has become political. The most dedicated foot soldiers of Trumpism are the online trolls – abusers and harassers who are entertained by provoking more emotionally vulnerable people into mental distress. And who believe their own bullshit when they defend their violent actions as the exercise of their rights to free speech.

A movement of people who’ve learned to take pleasure in the psychological pain of others have taken their own will to violence to a mass-scale group phenomenon. Hence Penny’s astute observation – that the vulnerable people who are taking Trump’s ascent best have been those who have already overcome abuse.

People who’ve already worked through the self-cannibalizing philosophy of blaming yourself for the violence you suffer. We are facing today a political movement that literally wants to bludgeon dissent and difference into silence and invisibility. They see disagreement and ethnic, religious, or sexual difference as obnoxiousness.

Maybe you could call it getting uppity.

It’s our duty not to believe them and remember that rights to freedom aren’t meant to defend your attempts at violence. It’s to defend your attempt to be.

Doom Prophets II: A Catalogue of Terror, Research Time, 18/02/2016

Continued from last post . . . Antonio Negri gives a list of apocalyptic prophets at the end of Empire. They may not be purely prophets of doom and death (at least not all of them), but they’re philosophers who articulate the sense that something is ending, and that the end will be terrible.

Why is it valuable for us to go back to the first prophets of modernity’s apocalypse? Because we’re still living through that apocalypse. And people are still driven to monstrous acts by apocalyptic visions. 

Too often I've seen the language of success
masking a dream of domination, that
you can only live well by forcing others
to suffer and die. So you should learn to
love the suffering, pain, and poverty of
others. This ideology of success on the
corpses of others will kill us all. It's
killing us already.

The end of modernity has come, and it was a kind of cultural apocalypse, because so much of Western culture was forged through the ideology of modernity. The secular values of our civilization have been adrift since the First World War, since we could no longer lie to ourselves seriously about the nature of empire.

Western culture needs a vision of peace, universal brotherhood, and the creative power of the people to replace modernity. Because in our century of scrambling, all we’ve done is fall back into old patterns of oligarchy, religious fundamentalism, the cutthroat values of new liberalism, the violent resentment of bullying culture, and a politics of global war.

Maybe if we start looking through the first prophets of modernity’s burnout, we’ll find a path forward. Negri made one list, and I’m modifying it with some additions of my own.

The obvious first one on the list is Friedrich Nietzsche. Most of the time, I concentrate on the productive aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The Nietzsche revival post-1960s. His conception of humanity and life as having as its highest power creativity. 

But Nietzsche was also a profound critic of modernity’s currents of nationalism. You can see this most clearly in his writings that critique the decadence of German culture in an increasingly violent nationalism and anti-Semitism. 

This is a core message of The Case of Wagner and Beyond Good and Evil. The rise of an aesthetics of bombastic, overpowering nationalism and imagery of racial pride started a process where the popular morality of German people eroded and destroyed all that was noble within it.

The irony is that Nietzsche’s notebooks were edited, after his final collapse in 1889, by his virulently nationalist sister Elisabeth to make him into a prophet of the nobility of racism. Which is why Nietzsche needed a revival in the first place.

But the value of his writings for understanding the end of modernity is immense. Nietzsche hits the most profound diagnosis of the self-immolation of modernity’s essential concepts, ideologies, and moral ideas. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, the most
profound philosopher-prophet
of the implosion of Western
modernity.

Where to go from the end gets even trickier than Nietzsche’s difficult and sometimes bizarre writings. Negri discusses Carl Schmitt as a major apocalyptic figure of modernity. And his concept of politics as total war between existentially threatening cultures, peoples, movements, and states is practically a blueprint for the destruction of humanity.

Hell, in the age of nuclear weaponry, it's a blueprint for the destruction of Earth. Still, you’ll probably see some posts about Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political later this year as I dive into the bloodbath. Most important is trying to understand why a person could believe that such a bloodbath would be the only sustainable way forward for Western society.

The experience of the First World War and the vision of human nature that its most insightful survivor expressed seems only to confirm terror and mass destruction as the only way forward after modernity’s promises collapse under their own hypocrisy. 

Ernst Jünger’s work will probably fill that role in the Utopias book, a vision of humanity’s future as blood-drenched machines whose individualities disappear in a mass-movement of violence. A vision that understands itself as noble, which is more terrifying than the vision itself. 

But there are more ambivalent responses to the end of modernity. . . . To Be Continued

Real Revolution Is With Thought, A History Boy, 10/11/2015

SPOILERS

first and foremost, as I’m leaping into some discussion of the last Doctor Who storyline to make a point about my own political philosophy.

When I wrote yesterday’s review of The Zygon Inver(a)sion, I felt like it didn’t quite reach a point that it should have. It never got to what Bonnie the Zygon actually did when she turned away from revolution and became a new Osgood. 

Bonnie never turned away from revolution to stand her rebellion down and become a peacemaker. The words of the Doctor made it clear: the real revolution is turning away from violence and retribution as a go-to response to injustice. 

Osgood started as a joke character for the 50th Anniversary
episode in 2013, but Peter Harness made her one of the
most philosophically interesting characters of the whole
Peter Capaldi era. She embodies progress, newness, and
divergence in so many ways. She's beyond conventional
concepts of identity, species, individuality, politics, and
ethics. Quite impressive.

Bonnie started The Zygon Inva(er)sion as just another fighter. She ended The Zygon Inver(a)sion as a true revolutionary because she fundamentally changed her values. 

Yesterday, I spoke about the message of peace in The Zygon Inver(a)sion, how the leader of a violent rebellion can be forgiven. She was violent without a doubt, a radical in every sense of the word. 

She led a retaliatory massacre of all the humans in her new hometown in America, killed several UNIT troopers and kidnapped enough to infiltrate the organization with duplicates, and worst of all, victimized an innocent Zygon who wanted nothing to do with her insurgency to make him a catalyst for spreading fear and violence between humans and Zygons.

Any peace settlement would require her punishment. Bonnie even says at one point that she can’t endorse peace, because she’d never be allowed to live if she surrendered. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if people call for the death of an insurgent leader who acted with such brutality. It’s a popular idea in the West to execute terrorist leaders without trial, including even their families in drone bombings. 

It’s similarly popular to imprison terrorists without trial and torture them. Even with a trial, they’re usually put in solitary confinement for life, tortured for decades by locking them away from any human contact. 

It’s a popular law in my country of Canada to strip those who’ve been convicted of terrorist crimes of their Canadian citizenship, and deport them to whatever country still holds their alternative citizenship. Even if they’ve served their time. 

Though Justin Trudeau won his majority government
with the banner and hashtag of #RealChange, he and
his party embody a politics of draping the imagery of
progress over the status quo and pandering to the
worst instincts of Canada's population.

When Saad Gaya is released from prison, as the law still stands, he’ll be stripped of Canadian citizenship and deported to Pakistan, a country where he’s never lived. No matter how much he may genuinely regret and renounce his actions as a terrorist plotter. The Harper government wrote this law; the current Trudeau government was critical of this when they were in opposition, but supported many other invasive and dangerous anti-terror laws.

We kill, maim, torture, and imprison terrorists, their families, and their supporters because we believe it is right to punish people for their crimes. We think it’s appropriate, moral, and just to bring equal or greater violence on the perpetrators of violence. Retribution is the most popular model of justice in the world.

It’s wrong. That simple. Retribution is wrong.

It perpetuates the cycle of violence that the Doctor denounces in The Zygon Inver(a)sion, but humanity’s desire for retribution also does much worse to humanity itself. It makes us think that it’s moral to bring violence on people. 

We often think of morality as a set of rules endorsed by authority. This is the vision of morality in most mainstream religions. God is the ultimate authority who polices us with divine punishment through the afterlife or karmic misfortune. God’s rules for our action are morality, for no other reason than the authority of God.

This is what lies behind the popular belief that atheists can have no moral centre. This is why people hate atheists: they believe that because an atheist doesn’t believe in a God who will punish them for breaking moral rules, they’ll do whatever violence they can get away with because they don’t believe in moral right or wrong at all.

Part of what I've come to love in
Doctor Who since understanding this
idea is that the Doctor's ethics
largely correspond to the progressive
conception of Nietzsche's thought.

There are atheists who believe this, but not many. They aren’t real atheists at all; they’re nihilists, believing that without the traditional ground of authority, there’s no motivation to be moral.

But being ethical has nothing to do with morality. This is the fundamental insight of Friedrich Nietzsche, and a further expression of Doctor Who’s Nietzschean character. Bonnie has given up her moral values that would answer violence with greater violence. Having sincerely done that, she’s forgiven.

That forgiveness of her crimes gives her the space to become a peacemaker, managing and negotiating conflicts that arise among her people and between her people and their majority community, humanity. 

The real revolution was this ethical transformation: she’s changed the whole mission of her life. The immediate metaphor was in changing her form to become a twin Osgood. But her transformation was ethical. She changed her entire purpose in life from revenge, retribution, and punishment to repair, healing, and peace-building.

Any revolutionary movement that doesn’t have this model doesn’t deserve the name.

It Is Accomplished VI: What Does This Title Mean? Research Time, 01/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . I didn’t mean to continue this series of posts into a sixth part. But last night, I was thinking about how I've drifted from the main topic of the first post to the more confessional tone of the fifth. 

The book project that so much of my last two years of reading is building toward is about utopias, our dreams of a perfect society. That entails quite a few questions. One of those is, What moral norms and political institutions are perfect? Another is, What does perfection mean anyway?

The world changes. And if we ever achieve a perfect society (whatever the hell that is), the world it exists in will keep changing. So to accomplish a perfect society is never really a finished task. The perfect society for one set of circumstances is going to run into problems as circumstances change. So perfecting humanity is an ongoing process of self-critique and change.

Awesome. But what does this mean for how utopia has traditionally gone? 

I remember some of Frederic Jameson’s insights when I think about this question. Utopia in the Western tradition of thought has roots in Christianity, the world’s first major eschatological religion – the first major religion in the world to conceive of time as having an endpoint that was also a fulfilment. 

At the end of time, goes the Christian Revelations, will be the Kingdom of Heaven. When the self-deceiving incomplete secularism of the Enlightenment* got hold of this idea, then the end of history will be the Kingdom of Eternal Happiness. Marx called it communism, Fukuyama called it liberal democracy.

One of the clearest expressions of our having caught up
to Nietzsche's ideas about the joy of having no God
and no inherent purpose for ourselves and the universe
is Rick and Morty. I'm serious. Its core message is that
"Nobody exists on purpose; Nobody belongs anywhere;
We're all going to die." Then they travel adventuring
around a multiverse of incredible diversity and
excitement.

* I’m simplifying to an absurd degree here, but this is the shorthand for how I interpret a lot of modern secularism, as all the same structures of Christian philosophy, metaphysics, and morality, but with some placeholder where God normally would be. Existentialism tried to get us into pure secularism, but they still lamented the loss of a God figure. Sartre's atheism was pretty dour. Just read Nausea. It took us more than a century to catch up to Nietzsche, who understood that a world without (the Christian sense of) God or perfection is actually pretty amazing.

Jameson showed that whatever you called the Kingdom of Eternal Happiness depended on the social circumstances of your time. Whatever the major problems facing your society were, your utopia was the world in which those problems were solved. 

When a social problem is big and pervasive enough to cover all of society, or all of civilization, the problem feels universal. For most of Western history, utopian visions really have pitched themselves as solving eternal problems. But I think we've moved past that as a society.

Think about the latest statement of utopian political activism: Naomi Klein’s Leap Manifesto. It calls for the kind of radical and all-pervasive transformation of Earth's civilization that you expect from a utopia. But it doesn't pitch itself as the perfect society. 

It’s actually not nearly so ambitious as the Communist Manifesto’s ambition to build the eternally perfect society. Total universality is so 19th century.** Klein’s Leap Manifesto is a document to solve a present problem, digging ourselves out of the current trap we're in, our stumbling accidental mass-suicide called the Holocene Extinction.

** The craving for total universality is so 20th century.

Thankfully, we're all historicists now. Well, not nearly all of us. There's still plenty of absolutism in both religious circles and atheistic ones. But historicism has been around long enough, and is properly understood by enough people, that it’s become ordinary. 

Our knowledge can reach universality in scope and reference, but our quest for knowledge always begins from our position – our priorities and frameworks of thought of our current societies, circumstances, and personalities. Even how we understand our relationship with the divine. A historicist doesn’t even have to be an atheist. She just can’t be an absolutist.

Today’s solutions seed tomorrow's problems, so we can never let ourselves become complacent.

Alienating Labour III: The Better Way to Free Yourself, Research Time, 24/08/2015

So getting back to this question of labour, and what it means to be alienated from it. There have been a couple of tangents, one circumstantial, which was that I had to answer Steve’s question about my thoughts on protest politics. The other tangent, about shitty instruction in humanities, was organic to my writing, if aided by circumstance. 

And once again, Zeppo is erased. Still, it was basically
Zeppo's joke to be eraseable. I'm convinced that Zeppo
Marx was the most revolutionary comic genius
of his era. That's a blog post for another day, I think.

I realized that while I was discussing the mediocre accounts of Karl Marx’s philosophy that I learned as an undergraduate, two friends in the international Doctor Who community were having a ridiculous conversation with a Gamergater troll who, in a fit of misplaced spite, wrote them an incoherent account of Hegel’s philosophy, and why that made all left-wing politics idiotic and stupid.

You see, another thing I don’t like about the dumbed-down content of too many undergraduate courses and textbooks in the humanities is that a student doesn’t have room to experiment with the ideas. They have no opportunities to pull something strange from the text, only learn a standard, simplified reading that they can easily recall in a few sentences.

Humanities education is meant to confuse you, and its core skills should be techniques of thought and analysis to understand your way through confusion. 

So a good humanities education will expose you, not just to a single standardized reading of a historically remarkable work, but an idea that emerges from your thinking on it that will, in turn, make you think in a different way.

Frederic Jameson finds one such idea in the work of another Fred, Friedrich Schiller. In particular, Schiller developed a concept of play, from his reading of the major Critique works of Immanuel Kant. Kant developed a very regimented conception of how human faculties of reasoning were divided: there was the cognitive, the moral, and the aesthetic, which was its own category as well as a function which blurred the division of the other two.

Schiller took this a step farther, and conceived of the power of judgment as a kind of creative play. In Kant’s thinking, the cognitive is our power of recognizing the world around us, the moral is our power of knowing what’s right and acting according to it. The aesthetic is our creative faculty, how we’re able to understand the assembly of the world and change how things fit together. 

I haven't really read much of him myself,
but I do get the distinct feeling that
Friedrich Schiller was an extremely
intense person.

Jameson takes this idea as his template for what non-alienated labour would be. The standard textbook version of non-alienated labour remains reactive: workers instead of an investor class in control of production, working conditions that let people relax and breathe instead of working them to death. These are improvements, but they’re essentially the same economic structures as before, just with the beneficiaries flipped.

Instead, Jameson runs with Schiller’s idea: labour that doesn’t alienate us is creative labour, fun labour. Labour that we can own as a singular product unique to ourselves. It’s the labour of art and artisans. 

It’s a brilliant idea. It’s survived in innovative philosophical systems for the next two hundred years. Friedrich Nietzsche’s figure of the creator as a society’s genuinely revolutionary character. Frantz Fanon’s concept of the creative, multifaceted culture as the one that truly overcomes colonialism. Henri Bergson and and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of creativity and the new as progress. 

The idea that progress isn’t about perfecting some program and living in that social template forever, but about constant reinvention, and flexibility of thought and action to become wholly new kinds of being if the world demands it. 

This is the political centrepiece of my own work too, Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. If we have to answer a problem whose causes and conditions lie in our fundamental nature, then the occasion demands that we change our natures, literally change human nature, a directed, creative act of adaptation that practically amounts to revolution.

Jameson, from his Marxist orientation and intellectual history, considers different images of industry transformed into artisanal work, images that depict such a world as perfect, utopian. 

It’s not just some intellectual distraction, the idea does move people in politics. It lies under the environmentalist movement, as I mentioned, as well as Italy’s Autonomia movement, and Occupy. The idea that we could solve many of the world’s problems by reorienting our industrial processes along a model of artisanship.

Well, I’ve heard worse.

It’s Only Newfoundland III: A Lion’s Roar, Jamming, 12/08/2015

Originally, I had planned to be finished with my reflections on Newfoundland and its political culture on Monday. I even started a new series of posts talking about the importance of science-fictional thinking and composition to understand utopias.

Overlooking a beach at Cape Bonavista, I also read a
tourism info stand describing the history of the cod fishery
in Newfoundland, an industry controlled by outside
authorities.

But my friend from the old country, The Good W, wrote me a comment on a Facebook link to the post that made me rethink whether I wanted to end my thoughts where I did. On Monday’s post, I was happy to describe the history of Newfoundland’s intense politics of resentment at the height of the Danny Williams era, and how uncomfortable that omnipresent political culture made me.

But The Good W went beyond the frame of my own experience, to frame Newfoundland’s cultural resentfulness in more sympathetic terms. In essence, Newfoundland (especially rural Newfoundland) has always been an exploited economy. 

A ruling class controls and accumulates most of the profits from an economy that revolves practically entirely around natural resource extraction. That ruling class is usually separate, geographically and culturally, from the people who eke out a living from the extraction work. 

In the colonial and independent days, that ruling class was in Britain and St. John’s. In the Canadian era, that ruling class is in Ottawa controlling the federal government, or are other interests who fall under the catch-all term, “mainlanders.” The need for charismatic national leaders arises naturally from the exploited position: such a leader refuses the politics of colonial-style conciliation of the exploited with their exploiters.

Resentment is a natural reaction to this kind of economy. Although Newfoundland is a white, European-descended population* that currently exists as part of a federalized democratic state, much of the population remains economically colonized. They’re dependent on a resource industry that they don’t control, and is usually managed without their interests in mind. 

* Whose own settlement has its history of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous population with the destruction of the Beothuk. Newfoundland and Hispaniola share the distinction of being the only settlements in the European colonization waves of whom none of the indigenous population or culture survived.

Danny Williams, Newfoundland's roaring lion. But
was he growling at the real enemy?

I understand where the politics of resentment come from, but they’re a model of politics that’s only successful when they’re overcome, not embraced. But overcoming resentment politics isn’t about reconciling with economic exploiters while maintaining the exploitive regime. Turnabout, when the exploited can lord his power over his former exploiter, is no end in itself.

Frantz Fanon’s words come back to me when I think about this problem of political culture. He’s most famous for being an inaugural theorist of what’s now called post-colonial philosophy. And his most famous argument was for the legitimacy of violent – sometimes horrifyingly violent – resistance to colonial occupation. He was a leader in Algeria’s independence movement, after all, which innovated many of the techniques of modern terrorism today, and used them against France and French people.

But what most caught my eye in The Wretched of the Earth was a critique of violent revolution as an end in itself. Put simply, once the immediate exploiter class was defeated, the cultural attitude that galvanized the population against the colonizers had to be overcome. 

It was a reactive mode, constantly fostering resentment at those who attacked and cut away your political and economic independence. If the battle is won, but the resentment remains a dominant force in the culture, people’s collective anger continues searching for more enemies. People turn on possible allies and each other. It’s a social-psychological account of why so many revolutionary societies turn to civil war.

The way out is a cultural overcoming in thought. Recognizing when the material political and economic conditions of your own world have changed so that violent overthrow of an oppressor class is no longer necessary. 

That unifying, one-dimensional cultural drive is replaced with a creative spirit. In freedom, you start again, building a culture more diverse than the forced unity of a battle against exploitation fuelled by resentment.

Fanon's greatest lesson was in the danger of letting the
spirit of revolution take a people just a touch too far.

There’s a nationalist song in the old country with a repeated line, “We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Newfoundlanders!” Nietzsche also developed a metaphor of the roar. It was the lion in Zarathustra whose anger and rage shattered his chains and threw off his burdens. 

Yet even though the lion was free of his burdens, he wasn’t really free. Because he had yet to free himself from his anger at the forces that burdened him. He was consumed by a need for revenge, to go beyond simply freeing himself, and make his former exploiters suffer in return. Punishment feels great when you’re carrying it out, especially when you do so in a spirit of retribution. But it’s still violence, and an unnecessary violence because you’re already free.

Many people in Newfoundland and Labrador aren’t economically free. They’re still dominated by corporate interests in natural resource extraction, dependent for their own prosperity on the mere salaries many receive from natural resources. Williams simply made sure that the oil companies were now firmly in charge of the economy, and used the rhetoric of emancipation from mainland Canadian domination to hide a new yoke.

The politics of resentment in Newfoundland are a distraction, a spirit that fights an exploiter class that’s already been usurped, instead of seeking the people’s control over corporate foreign interests. The lion roars at the ones who’ve already let go of the chains.

Some Freedoms Are Better Than Others, Research Time, 29/05/2015

I've been reading about the First World War because it was the moment when the central concept of totalitarianism was forged, and totalitarianism is the greatest enemy of the Utopias project. The core concept of totalitarian politics is the conception of individuals as entirely functional. There is no singularity to individual lives in totalitarianism, as the value of life is defined only through the service to the whole.

This is the logic that, as I write in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, is used to condemn the environmentalist movement for understanding humanity as systematically integrated and interdependent with ecosystems and the wider biosphere. This is Luc Ferry’s contention that environmentalist politics are eco-fascism because the absolute freedom of the individual is subordinated to the good of an ecosystem. 

A worker slowly begins the process last year of cleaning
up the Elk River chemical spill of 2014, when a
company's purposeful negligence of proper safety for
dangerous chemicals resulted in a spill upriver from
Charleston, West Virginia. Nearly a million people
were unable to drink their tap water.

Environmentalist politics does require us to compromise our freedoms. And these compromises are for the sake of our long-term, or even short-term, survival and overall prosperousness. We cause severe limitations to our freedom and that of many other people when we callously pollute major water supplies with toxic wastes.

Robert Nozick also said that human freedom must include the freedom to renege on social obligations to repay favours or give benefits in return for help you’ve received. That’s the substance of the radio show argument, that no matter how much good and joy others have brought to me, any obligation on me to repay that kindness is a form of oppression. My absolute freedom is violated by social rules that limit my freedom to be a selfish jackass.

Friedrich Hayek similarly said that any attempt to control individual freedom by pressure to contribute to a common social good or large-scale project is oppressive. Totalitarian, even. 

This trio, Hayek-Nozick-Ferry, makes for a fine demonstration that liberalism has become bankrupt. In the name of protecting individual freedom, they enable oligarchy, ethical indifference, and ecosystemic destruction. These are the major destructive forces tearing human civilization down in our era. When they defend such terrible regimes and the moral concepts that such regimes run on, they do so in the name of the liberal tradition.

Every political philosophy that achieves mass success and acceptance eventually grows decadent. Decadence is when what was once a source of creativity, nobility, life, and joy instead promotes misery, resentment, and destruction. All without changing its fundamental concepts. The world has changed, and what was once an absolute good now leaves blood on our hands. 

This is the teleology of Nietzsche’s vision of human history. A revolutionary idea arises, and we pig-headed humans run with it until we run it into the ground, and we become so devoted to the idea itself, that it must be absolutely, inherently good, that we blind ourselves to the misery its guidance now creates. Concepts have finite political lifespans. The prophet (Nietzsche) recognizes this. The revolutionary (internet feminists, black liberators, environmentalists, the sexual and sexuality revolution, Occupy) forges a new political order.

Hannah Arendt was the first to understand totalitarian
government as imperialism's playbook running in the
domestic sphere on the entire population.

The trick is recognizing which new political orders will actually produce creative, life-affirming change that opens up new possibilities for humanity. Because there are many others that will only speed the destruction. 

Totalitarianism was the first revolutionary reaction to liberalism, forging an image of a new kind of humanity. The problem was that it was even more destructive than liberalism ever was, more quickly and intensely. Before the 20th century, liberalism as a political philosophy was articulated most purely in the movements to abolish slavery and build democratic state institutions. 

Totalitarianism was a reaction to liberalism that, I think, came before the true moment of liberal decadence. If anything, I think it was actually the decadent stage of imperialism, when all the destruction that the empire-building powers were always able to offload to its colonies came home to work their horrors. And it used the greater intensity that modern technology was capable of, to push that destruction into an all-consuming inferno.

Sounds like a good metaphor, really. Totalitarianism as a political fluorine fire.

The First World War was the first such fire of imperialism brought to its highest intensity. Imperialism is something that the great industrial powers of Europe could get away with when all the violence was done to colonized people in lands very far away from the seats of their civilizations. You can even get away with it when you colonize a people in your own country, when a minority is racialized or enslaved. 

And when your own political majority population becomes the colonized, the machinery of imperialism turning on itself. The oppressors oppress themselves, destroying their own civilization through military violence instead of some other. Totalitarianism makes you into a self and an other at the same time.

I’m not quite sure what’s going to come of this. All I know is that I’m thinking. This is a long project in progress.

Another New Feminist Revolution III: Because She's a Great Philosopher, Composing, 15/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . Maybe now you can see why Laurie Penny’s ideas have so quickly become so important to my own projects. From my own position as a blogger with a small following, respectable pageview numbers, and a couple of books either out or on the way out, I’m trying to help change the world through my ideas. 

I’m not as successful as Penny, of course, because I spent my 20s in graduate school and she spent it hustling journalism. Also, I don’t think I would have done as well as she has, or even been able to formulate the ideas I have if I hadn’t taken the path that I did. 

I'm calling it right now: Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir,
Steinem, Cixous, Penny. She goes on the list.

I started my life as a pretty blinkered guy who thought that status quo was generally alright, and I’m becoming increasingly radical in my political beliefs as I get older. It’s supposed to run in the opposite direction, with youthful, naive radicalism calming down into an oppressive conservatism. The voice that asks contemptuously why you weren’t able to buy a house when you were 25 because I did in 1974.

But if we think that’s the voice of everyone in the previous generation, then we’re just playing into the hands of people who want to profit from the destruction of welfare state institutions. If a young person struggling with debt and wages they can barely live on sees a senior in poverty and spits in their face, “Now you know what it feels like, old man!” . . . Well, I don’t want to become that person.

I don’t want to become that person for the same reason I couldn’t let myself become a man who hates women and thinks that feminists want to torture men. Not just because it’s based on a lie, but because giving in to spite, anger, and revenge is the expression of weakness. 

It’s easy to deal with difficulties by hating the ones who had it easier than you did. The most difficult path of understanding and empathy is the more noble one, and it says a lot about humanity that we’re so hateful and resentful a species. It’s in this sense that I think Penny is very Nietzschean:* she understands that attitudes of resentment and hatred hold us back from progress as societies and as souls. 

* Do ignore Nietzsche’s intense sexism. I do. Nietzsche himself tells you to ignore his sexism, as he sets off those passages in Beyond Good and Evil with an introduction that essentially says that his sexist beliefs are the most contemptible, resentful parts of his own personality, part of what makes him less than the ethical nobility he aspired to be. Would that we could all be so honest with and about ourselves.

A dress that's making a new
activist in New Brunswick
every day. So some very
beneficial outrage for us all.

And as I’ve said, Penny understands the limits of anger. So much of the horrors in the everyday moments of modern life, especially the modern lives of women, find their genesis in systematic causes. When a harm is born from an intention, and the intention was itself the spontaneous genesis of the harm, then we have a reason for anger, revenge, and punishment. 

But patriarchy is a concept which distills a massive system of gendered oppression of both women and men. Women are oppressed in all the ways that we now know are obvious: they are objectified into things whose only value is in how they please others, particularly men. Men are oppressed in being twisted into hateful, raging, abusive, violent beasts, taught to blame women for the violence of their own desires, which only makes them even more violent toward women. 

A morality of retribution, of punishment for wrongs committed, is not appropriate to deal with patriarchy in this sense. We are all complicit in the socialization of gendered oppression, and we can’t punish everyone in society. Fighting systematic injustice requires healing, not punishment and revenge. When you have to heal the entire world, only restorative and reparative models of justice will work.

Advocating for the reality of systemic causation is the ontological and epistemological aspect of the current fight against new liberal ideology. My own government in Canada, the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, is the most pure embodiment of new liberal thinking I’ve ever seen, and that I think the world has ever seen.

The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs recently said in Parliament, completely believing his own words, that when an Aboriginal woman is murdered, it is simply an isolated crime, and that when an Aboriginal teenager commits suicide, it is simply an isolated failure of a single family. This is an example of the refusal to see systemic causation. 

The politics of restoration, healing, and love as community organizing within flexible social networks is the endpoint of my giant work of political philosophy in progress, the Utopias project. It’s the set of principles that we have to pick up going forward if we’re going to fight and defeat the injustices of our own era. 

And I’m not delivering this from some lofty position. Then I’d just be one more cis-gendered straight white man with an awesome beard authoritatively telling people how to fight authority. 

I really would like to see some future Doctor Who lead
actress influenced by Penny's style for her costume. It
would be perfect for the aesthetic Doctor Who will
likely try to go for in the 2020s and 30s, when the
current largely female fanbase starts working in
television production, just as Davies' and Moffat's
generation of fandom did.

Laurie Penny has arrived at the same organized anarchism of healing in love through the mess of her own experiences as a journalist and activist, wandering like a vagabond Doctor through the marginalized places of our society and describing them to the safely housed masses. 

That she and I have come to such similar ideas through our very different paths and methods is a sign that my own thinking and writing can, in some small way, help articulate a revolutionary idea that is already in the popular consciousness. Maybe I can wake a few people up, or at least nudge them a little bit more, into changing how they conceive themselves and their lives, and changing how they live and treat people accordingly. 

That is what philosophy is for. I find it a little awkward writing about my contemporary as a research source. My education was in philosophy, a tradition of old white dudes stretching back centuries. But philosophy at its best has this uncanny power to change the world through thinking and writing, the influence of ideas to enlighten. In speaking with this highest power, Laurie Penny has shown herself to be a great philosopher.

A Change Must Come II: Why Is There Government If Not For Us?, Advocate, 08/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . Here is the radical opposition to governments dominated by Stephen Harper or his network of Conservative Party cronies. There will be some kind of social safety net, we’ll try as hard as we can gesture at preserving our country’s ecosystems, ask major industries to give a few percentage points more of their multi-billion dollar revenues to the public infrastructure of your host society, stay out of meddling in horrifying foreign wars, and not give police the power to arrest you on suspicion alone. 

To hear that these inoffensive policies would cause the world’s major petroleum companies to abandon the second-largest oil supplies in the world repeated as serious concern is insane and ridiculous. But this is the world that Fraser Institute policies helped build. The political movement of the new liberal think tank, the legacy of Friedrich Hayek more than anyone else. Philosophy’s greatest victory in the last generation. Ideas changed the world. 

Now that we know their power, it makes sense for new liberalism’s opposition to use the same method. The left has not won thanks to the dominance of Marxists in some culturally marginalized humanities departments in universities. The university is no longer the site where the intellectual has the greatest influence. 

I said yesterday that Chrétien was a
footnote to the rise of Harper. Hell,
maybe the ultimate legacy of Harper
will be so enormous that he'll be as
epochal as John A. MacDonald: a
whole new country rises from what
he did. But it needn't be his own
vision that emerges from his era.

University-based intellectuals are, if anything, completely marginalized by administrations that run public education institutions on the principles of private businesses. When they do work against the new liberal consensus that cutthroat markets are the only proper model for society to operate, they conveniently lose their funding and their jobs. The true intellectual engine of change is the think tank, and that is what progressives need.

Canada has some of these think tanks already, and I think the world needs more of them. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is the oldest and most well-known of the progressive think tanks, and Canada 2020 is another.* But the one I’ve made personal contact with before is the Broadbent Institute, having spoken to its representatives at the NDP federal leadership convention in 2012.

* Although, like the anti-poverty association Campaign 2000, they face the PR problem of having a clear future date in their name. I’m still disappointed that we still aren’t travelling to Jupiter or colonizing other worlds in our star system, and that hover-vehicles aren’t ubiquitous.

I don’t think I was ever going to be absolutely happy with the Broadbent Institute. It’s too closely linked to a political party to take its politics to a place that can truly overcome the new liberal model of politics. Being concerned with maintaining a single party’s victory in state elections will restrict an institution’s focus to shaping a single party. 

The victory of a single party all the time (or at least often enough to be considered a country’s “natural governing party”) eventually erodes democracy through the corruption of constant control of the state. The Broadbent Institute will always limit itself as long as it is so clearly the philosophical wing of the New Democratic Party.

It will limit its powers to bring about true change. The victory of the Canadian descendants of Hayek wasn’t only in electing Stephen Harper and his followers to government, though they were certainly happy about it. The think tanks and associated thinkers led by the Fraser Institute had their true victory in shifting the entire political conversation of the country to terms more favourable to their philosophy. 

A think tank (or network of them, affiliated through co-members, conference connections, and professional friendships among people allied in the business of political philosophy) will only achieve its greatest goal when all political parties think along their lines. Philosophical victory in politics is when all parties are variations on your principles, variations in the intensity and focus of the same political program.

The Fraser Institute was at the spearhead of this movement in Canada. They laid the groundwork for the new liberal political movement in my country by galvanizing the libertarian-leaning socially conservative population of rural Alberta as a partisan base. But the position papers they released and the connections they made throughout the government and business sector helped spread their ideas all over the mainstream.

This is why, even though the NDP has itself drifted away from its founding vision of true social democracy through good government, its breakthrough in Alberta is significant. In the heartland of Canada’s new liberal political movement, the party whose heart still opposes those politics conquered the old guard.

The 21st century's political revolution in
the West will be Nietzschean: all of us
talking with each other to create new
values. Ecce Homo.

A 21st century left can’t return to the old left politics of a strong state that holds public corporations and services in trust and manages them on behalf of the people. That kind of big-state socialism can’t exist anymore precisely because Friedrich Hayek and the think tanks that followed him were so successful. Socialism is dead, and we should all accept that it’ll never come back. 

Instead, a new left has to emerge from the confrontation with new liberalism. It’s already bubbling out of the protest movements that first flowered in Seattle and have reached their more mature form in Occupy, Internet-mobilized feminism, and #BlackLivesMatter. As I said in my photo caption replies to Steve Fuller this week, the politics of the new left are leaderless movements for liberations that were born through networks of protestors. 

This is how the new left overcomes libertarianism, its fear expressed in Hayek’s conception of left-wing statism as totalitarian in its will to micromanage the economy through institutionalized coercion. People empower themselves to confront corruption and provoke epochal change in social values simply through expressing, as many times as possible, the truth of their experiences of the injustices of oligarchy, gender, and racialization. 

It’s a utopia organized through a global conversation through which we create new values to live by.