If We Can’t Go Back Then We Have to Overcome, Research Time, 19/12/2017

It’s a wistful book, What Is Philosophy?. There aren’t too many philosophy books that you can call wistful. But Gilles has his moments.

There's a moment about halfway through the book when Deleuze wonders whether the uniquely vibrant spirit of Hellenic culture could emerge in human communities again. The Hellenes lived with convivial hearts, where your ambition was to get rich enough to spend it all, leading your society through a jovial parliament of friendly, back-slapping rivals. Can it return?

There was once a young man who was very strong, with a good
heart, but who could not express himself in words. He could dream
about terrors that were coming to his people. Death and terror.
He wanted to warn them – he had to warn them.

Of course it can’t, because we live in a contingent universe where nothing can return exactly as it once was. But you can ask whether a human society can produce a similar cultural balance of brotherhood, ego, and intelligence.

But that spirit can’t return. Deleuze knows it. The question is why. When you ask why, you’re asking for reasons. Now, reasons are different from causes. A cause is a question of how, not why, but that’s a matter for semantics.

The distinction between why and how can help work out the difference between a reason and a cause.

Causes bring new processes about – they’re production processes. The universe being as complex as it is, nothing really has only one cause. That we ever thought causality worked that way was a matter of cultural stupidity – Western culture understood causality with images of billiard balls and clocks.

Compared to our contemporary understanding of complex systems – the sciences of turbulence, chance, and contingency – the West at the beginning of the imperialist era were worse than blind. They were foolish. Especially since the best ancient philosophical tradition that could help Westerners was about to get hit with a shotgun blast of colonialism.

But I’m digressing a little. Causes refer to the field of dynamic material processes whose activity constitutes the universe. Reasons refer to conditions – What about the world has to change to make a particular event more or less likely? Possible or impossible?

They were his friends, his family. He had to warn them, make plans,
do something to protect themselves from the coming horror. But he
could not speak well. He could only speak from his heart, not from
his mind. All he could say was, "The horror! It is coming!"

It’s what Bertrand Russell called the difference that makes a difference. Punny Brit bastard.

But yes, the question why hunts down possibility conditions, what kind of world there has to be for something to happen. So what’s changed possibility conditions so radically that the boisterous friendships of Hellenic culture can’t emerge in a new context?

Capitalism is one. The Hellenes never had to deal with the universal social solvent. Pick your flavour of capitalism. Industrial capitalism is a system whose products include mass manufacturing, revolutions in medical and communication technology, and pollution so thick and omnipresent that it’ll likely kill us all.

But the more relevant aspect of capitalism is the venture finance capitalism that I talked about yesterday – the one that converts the profit motive into billion-dollar piracy. Yet capitalism itself has that spark of freedom at the heart of all its processes – creativity in destruction. You have to raze to build again, even if the fires are horrifying.

No, Deleuze picks a worse fire than capitalism. However terrible the effects of unrestrained capitalist desire are, there remains a liberatory force in the structure of its system.

Held back from piracy and governed with heart, capitalism can lay the conditions for a free society – it’s the liberal vision of freedom. Maybe the liberal vision has become impossible now, but it could still have been – at least in its ideal, conceptual, philosophical form – a flight to freedom on many vectors.

Even for us, who think we're so smart and articulate, we find it tough
to talk about the real horror. We can make films, paint amazing
images of terror and its looming face. But look into the abyss itself
and it will do more than stare back. The abyss will make you as
empty as it is. Unless there's a friend to hold you back from the
ethical solvent of the desire for horror.

No, Deleuze is thinking of the Holocaust. We’ve become a people – humanity, that is – who kills by the millions. Worse than that, we’ve come to find it ordinary. Even worse than that – as if it could get worse – we’ve come to find it fun. It’s something we want, a desire for genocide. Mass murder has become a path to personal and community fulfillment.

Not that this happens very often. Anytime is too often, but there are rarely more than a few active genocides happening at a time. Most of them are slow matters of cultural displacement. This century, things are getting more terrifyingly frequent.

But a crime like the systematic murder and displacement of millions has become a matter of course. An ordinary thing. People run on this as a campaign platform in elections, win, then do it.

Can we be convivial friends in such a world? Deleuze doesn’t think we can, and I don’t think so either. Consider the magnitude of the destruction we bring on each other every day. Friends can’t smile and joke when faced with that kind of knowledge.

Philosophy in a culture where this horrific violence has become so ordinary can’t be so jocular or congenial. Philosophy for humans in the 21st century emerges from the tears of friends consoling each other over terrible losses, wondering how and why such things could happen.

Social Matter as Memory, Research Time, 16/10/2017

This weekend turned into a longer gap than I thought. I didn’t expect Friday to be so mental, but it ended up so full of stuff and so generally stressful that I couldn’t get much thinking done at all.

And while the weekend itself has been pretty packed full of stuff to do – catching up on marking, attending a conference on refugee integration, getting a bunch of work done for SERRC, and a pile of personal correspondence – I did at least manage to relax while doing all that.

Humanity's tendency to clear forests, I sometimes think, is rooted in
how bloody scary they are in the middle of the night. We've fought
against the prospect of our fragility with such success that we could
very well end up killing ourselves in the next few generations.

Thinking at least needs a moment. Just a moment.
• • •
The Polis was more than a city. It was more than the first democracy in the West, whatever democracy must mean if it includes modern parliaments, presidents, and these strange town assemblies.

Talking about the Polis as a primordial democracy is very inadequate to the deeper meanings of how Polis-era Greeks lived. That is, how they understood their lives, the nature of their society, their place in the world, and their relationship to time and history as individuals and societies.

The metaphysics of their societies, in other words.

A Polis Greek person’s relationship to nature. It’s about fear, really. People knew how fragile humans were compared to the power of natural forces, the forces of the Earth.

Powerful storms could wash away their homes. A few too many dry seasons, and your whole community starves. Even just getting lost in the woods would be enough to kill someone – dying of exposure, fatal injury, drowning, or even attack by predators.

All of this is still true, but the development and omnipresence of our industrial civilization has complicated our relationship with the Earth. And made it much more violent.

Most of our record keeping about history is totally unreliable. Danny
DeVito's character in Hoffa, a movie I loved as a teenager, never
existed. Bobby Ciaro was an amalgam of two different people
who couldn't work separately in the narrative.

Leave that to the side. Think about that relationship. The Greeks conceived of nature as immortal, cyclical as the entire universe. Even individual plants and animals were thought of as immortal because they understood such non-human organisms as interchangeable. Individually unremarkable, both in their existence and how they understood themselves.

Only humans were mortal – we had distinct, singular, unique identities and we knew we were going to die one day. That’s the condition of mortality.

The Polis was an institutional means to fight our mortality. The continuity of the Polis itself maintained the records and famous stories of debates, speeches, and displays in the assembly. The leaders of the community – those who were able to leave the hard labour of maintaining their lives and households to families and servants – had a shot at immortality.

Glory and fame in your community – the display of virtue in debate, speech, and leadership – was how a mortal could survive their own death.

How real can our modern myths ever really be?

The social institution itself was a form of memory, a way of making memory collective. Societies have always had oral histories, tales of the community’s past and remarkable leaders. The stories mutate over time, though, and become mythical. Real people morph and blend into different characters.

Hell, most Hollywood studios can’t even make a biopic without merging real-life characters and smoothing out their subjects’ messy lives into straightforward narratives. That’s just a matter of a few years of production. Think about the kind of mutation that happens to a society’s narrative memory over centuries of retelling.

Achilles wasn’t simply “brave and bold.” He was a person, with all the complications involved. But by the time he got into the song, brave and bold was all he was.

The Polis was an institution that kept the histories of its leaders – their remarkable speeches, their thundering arguments, their theatrical acts in the public square – rooted. The gathering of Polis leaders was a place of governance, but most people wanted to go there for the chance of mythmaking.

Myths that would preserve their memory without transforming them. Their great acts in public leadership would be preserved as the acts of men, not becoming literature or image. The stone of the city and the square made their memory material.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who do you think was most wise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join the government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each Together III: The Immortal’s Life, Research Time, 20/09/2017

When I first read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, I didn’t understand why she made Greek thinking and values a focus of her inquiry. Surely, there are other routes to forgotten ways of thinking in other traditions of humanity.

There are. Ten years ago, I was wondering why we’d choose to return to the Greek tradition for inspiration instead of philosophical ideas from ancient China, India, Africa, or the Americas. But I didn’t yet understand that Arendt herself wasn’t able to do so.

They weren’t her traditions. I mean that in a personal sense – she hadn’t ever really studied them. Her own expertise was rooted in the Western tradition, and that began in Polis Greece. It’s also true in a civilizational sense – Arendt was a European, whose work and thinking grew from the minoritarian place of German Jewish culture (Jewish German culture?).

Why doesn't Arendt talk much about the Jewish roots of Western
culture in The Human Condition? I don't think it's because she
treats it elsewhere – I actually think it's because she doesn't
know much about the philosophical elements of the Jewish
cultural tradition. Arendt was raised a secular Jew in Germany,
a very assimilationist culture. Her works that engaged with
Judaism involved meditations on the particular culture of
Jewish people in Europe, in Germany most specifically. That's
a very different way of engaging with Jewish heritage than is
capable through the ethical tradition of a majority Jewish
society.

I know now, and I didn’t understand then, that the best people to explain those other traditions were those who grew up in those other traditions. I’ve downloaded the classics of Confucius, pre-ordered the latest book by Leanne Betasamosake-Simpson, and I’m looking eventually to get hold of key Indian and African writers too.

I’m not about to argue that only people from particular traditions have the right to speak about those ideas. No, that would be a very limiting cultural relativism. Presuming that there can be no communication between

But you understand a culture better when you grew up in it. Because you can see all the subtle ways that complicated traditions of thinking impact everyday habits when you see those everyday habits in your everyday life.

Growing up in India, you can better understand how ancient ideas survive and shape cultural presumptions and ideas of modern India. An Anishnaabe will understand how their traditional ideas shape their culture today in the small details of ordinary life. Despite the genocidal destruction that culture has faced for centuries now.

So a European will have a better idea of how foundational cultures of the West continue their influence over everyday thinking of European-descended communities. One of the central influences of Polis Greek thinking at the centre of Arendt’s inquiry in The Human Condition is the yearning for glory.

What is glory? There are plenty of terrible definitions for glory in our society. But Arendt is interested in a peculiarly Greek sense of glory. No, let me rephrase that. A peculiarly Polis sense of glory.

This kind of glory is a matter of remembrance. Polis Greek culture and thought, as Arendt understands it, was focussed on a division of being between the mortal and the immortal – the linear and the cyclical. Nature was immortal in that it moved in cycles. The seasons would repeat just as they always have.*

Nature appears immortal to us, especially when it's big enough to dwarf
us. The tragedy of Polis Greece was that mortal humanity was aware
of our mortality and could only fight against it as best we could. The
tragedy of modern humanity is that we built our civilization presuming
nature to be immortal, and once we realized that it wasn't, we were
probably too late to prevent so much destruction.

* Forget that we now know this to be false. This is a function of modern human knowledge of the contingent and finite nature of the universe. We know that the universe had a beginning in time, is of a particular age, and will one day fade into cold emptiness. Forget about this for now. You might want to.

Each human life, in contrast to nature, was finite. But in that finitude, it was remarkable. Natural bodies like trees, animals, and mountains may be awe-inspiring, but to the Polis Greeks, such bodies didn’t have the singularity of human life. To be mortal was to be unique.

But there was a tragedy to this uniqueness because the unique is mortal. The immortal, the cyclical, consisted of indistinguishable identicals – trees, mountains, animals, all the beings of nature.**

** Again, forget that we now know this to be false, that all beings are unique, that all beings are fundamentally processes – contingent and singular at once. The Polis Greek understanding of mortality and time never understood this because the singularity of existence is a conclusion from several hundred years of modern scientific work.

Yet there was one way to escape this tragedy – engagement in the Polis. The Polis, according to the era’s Greek thinking, was immortal. It was a human creation, but its existence survived the lives of any of the particular people who lived there.

So by engaging in the political life of your Polis, you could distinguish yourself through your remarkable acts. You could be remembered in the histories of your own city-state. That’s the glory at the heart of Polis Greek aspiration – unique acts in the leadership of your community could make some part of you immortal.

You’d live far beyond your death in the memory of your own people. That was the immortal fame for which Greek people strove. It was why they gave up all the wealth they’d acquired and spend it all living in cities leading the people. For the only immortality accessible to mortals.

Of course, as you can tell from my asides this post, things were much more complicated. For one thing, Polises themselves turned out to be quite mortal. The rise of the imperial Macedonian state proved that much.

Now the question of our Greek heritage becomes this – How does our yearning for immortality survive in a mortal world?

Each Together II: The Ancient Trade-Offs, Research Time, 19/09/2017

Here's what we should preserve and revive in the polis-era political and social philosophy of Greece – the cultural blend of communitarian patriotism and individual freedom to debate and change important principles and matters of public morality.

Such an attitude to community and morality preserves what’s great about liberalism – the right to live as you wish – and turns away from what stinks about liberalism – how individualism can encourage turning away from public goods and moral obligations.

But I want to get some problems of Greek inheritance out of the way first. The most important obstacle – at least as I work my way through Arendt’s The Human Condition – is the precondition of becoming a citizen able to participate in public life. You had to be rich.

In our industrial era – choked as we often are by pollution – we think
of nature as a place of Eden. It's true that simply being in forest
environments improves our health. But to live without our
technological infrastructure would doom many of us to a short,
painful life. We forget this, as our industry is killing us too.

Being rich in a society like polis Greece is very different from being rich today. I don’t just mean that there’s so much more wealth to be gained in 21st century society. But there is that too. I’m talking about the very different relationship Greeks – and all people – had to the labour it took to stay alive than we do.

People in industrial societies today don’t have to work as hard to stay alive as we did even just a couple of centuries ago. I’m not talking about working for your living – needing to find jobs, build a career. I’m literally talking about working to stay alive. Growing food, milling bread, preparing and cooking food, fetching well water, sewing clothes, tending hearth fires.

In a non-industrial society, this is a list of the basic labour you need to do to stay alive. Literally. I’m definitely far from complete because I’m improvising this list for a blog entry and have never had to take care of myself to such a degree aside from the occasional camping trip.

You just aren’t going to have time to head down to the square and debate matters of governance, leadership, and public morality if you have to get all this stuff done. It literally takes all day. So you can only enter public life if you have other people to do this for you.

Political freedom and active roles in the leadership of your community require you to be rich enough to hire household servants. They can do all the work of keeping your place functioning while you take care of public service.

Polis Greek political freedom was grounded on the labour of others. Those others were understood to have no freedom. This is why – even though the polis Greek institution of slavery had nothing of the horrifying racialization we know today from the history of the United States – it was said that a free man would kill himself rather than become a slave.

For almost all of human existence on Earth, so much of our toil and
torture has simply been the intense labour we have to do if we
want to stay alive.

Labour – having to labour – yokes you to the Earth. You’re bound to service the natural processes of your own metabolism, of your house’s metabolism. Your whole city’s metabolism.

Arendt notes at one point, during the many times she returns to the concepts in Polis Greek social morality, one way their society differed radically from ours. In an industrial society, cities are the centre of production. They’re the centres of industry, where people and businesses gather for trade, manufacturing, and corporate management.

But in Polis Greece, cities were centres of consumption. The wealth was produced in the fields, as you’d expect from an agrarian society. You came to the cities when you’d built your wealth and you were ready to spend it so you could devote yourself to public life.

You had to walk away from productive life to live freely. Freedom, for the Polis Greeks, was primarily freedom from the brutal necessity of agrarian production, of metabolism. You’ve produced all your fuel, and now you were ready to burn it up.

So what kinds of fires were a rich Polis Greek going to start?

Each Together I: Democracy and Community, Research Time, 17/09/2017

So this has turned into a pretty hectic week. I think there have been a few too many long days, and I haven’t gotten a lot of rest. I’ve been reading, but it’s been tough to sit down and write this week.

I also want to blog a bit more when GF and I are in France later this week. Our Germany trip this winter was fantastic, but we kind of lost track of time. And daylight. This time, we’re just bumming around central Paris for six days, not going back and forth from Amsterdam to Berlin.

I feel like this will be the first contemplative getaway I’ve had since I was in Calgary a couple of years ago. And the first such getaway I’ll have had with GF Gilly.

For the last century or so, we've developed a special kind of social
alienation that keeps us separate from each other. Trapping
ourselves in pods that keep ourselves from other people. We've
developed a distaste for other people. I mean, it's not as if there
aren't a lot of folks in our social circle we'd rather not hang out
with. But we lose a lot from turning away from our communities.
Understanding polis-era Greek culture and values helps us get a
sense of what we can achieve together.

Meantime, I want to get back into some philosophical thinking. My piece that I published at the Independent in St John’s last month was a good template for the kind of philosophical journalism I’ve wanted to try out.

But work on my larger projects is still rolling along. I’ve gotten plenty of ideas down about Arendt’s most philosophical masterwork that I still want to discuss.

More than discussing it, I want to figure them out with you. The Human Condition is a book that’s dense with ideas, and while I know those concepts are important for the political thinking I’m developing for Utopias, it’ll be tough getting everything sorted.

I’ll start with one thing that puzzles me about this book. Arendt refers back, all the time, to the ancient Greeks. When I first read The Human Condition ten years ago, I couldn’t understand why she did this. Also, I thought that she did so in a way that valorized the Greek way of life, that she wanted us, somehow, to return to Greek existence.

Reading the book again now, I understand better what she was doing. For one thing, it’s much too simple to read her account of the polis-era Greek identity and concept of community as wanting our return.

Only a year after thinking this about Arendt, I was defending my interpretation of Nietzsche against a peer review critic who said the same thing about him. No, of course Nietzsche never wanted to return to polis Greek ethics and sense of selfhood. He understood that this was impossible, that you can’t return to something that’s been broken down.

When I was younger, I was never very fair to Hannah Arendt.
Not many people were.

Funny, how I found it so easy to understand that about Friedrich Nietzsche but it took me a while to see it about Arendt. Everybody has to learn, I guess. At least I managed it, a little.

Anyway, there are a lot of different reasons why her work concentrates on the polis-era Greek conceptions of political life. Those reasons are threaded through the whole book, and deeply connected to her critique of contemporary life and the conditions of 20th century capitalist existence.

But that’s a bit of a heavy topic to take up in a 600-ish word blog post that I write as a philosophical exercise and to unwind at the start of a busy week. So I’ll make a few initial reflections and move on.

There’s a lot to love in the political philosophy and culture of polis-era Greek society. When you look at the history of the West,* Greece is where that civilization began. Greece developed the most valuable idea of modern society – democracy.

* In this context, when I’m talking about the West, I mean the civilization that began from the waves of Greek settlement around the Mediterranean and later Roman Empire. So this includes the Latin, Germanic, Slavic, and Arab cultures.

Sounds great! Greece invented democracy. But it wasn’t the modern democracy that foregrounds individual rights. Greek democracy would never have had space for anything like Robert Nozick’s radio show argument – that our necessary liberties include the freedom to renege on our promises and obligations.

A lot of our popular conceptions of polis-era Greek culture are filled
with oversimplifications and misconceptions. Hell, until recently, we
didn't even realize that they'd painted their statues.

The first democracy was a thoroughgoing communitarian set of values. Today, a lot of us tend to associate these values with authoritarian societies. As in, there’s a dominant culture that we all have to defer to. That’s how a lot of socially conservative thinkers portray their values – communitarian means conformity.

But that wasn’t true for the polis Greeks. They were communitarians, but the values of the community were subject to change. That was literally the activity of the polis squares. People went there to face off and debate the moral values of their community, and the leadership decisions they should make when dealing with neighbouring nations.

It was an atmosphere of friendly rivalry. Individual ideas could square off and argue over a ton of different visions for how the community should live. Leadership proceeded by consensus, and consensus was achieved by convincing all the other community leaders of your path.

Most of the time, it was a matter of negotiation. Some ideas fall by the wayside and some are adopted. Some put away for a while to re-emerge later. Some outright rejected.

That old society where our first values of democracy began was a curious and fruitful combination of communitarian solidarity and individual freedom to contribute to the decision-making process of your whole community.

That’s a vision I think 21st century social democracy should work to restore in our public morality and politics.

But Greek civilization isn’t something we should resurrect. Nor should we want to.

A Real Spectre I: Why Read Who I Read? Jamming, 08/09/2015

Since the last time I posted on the blog last week, I took a vacation. The GF and I went to a music festival for Labour Day weekend to camp out and relax. The music was pretty fantastic, the people were friendly hippies, and it was unbearably hot outside. I do believe in climate change, though not for anecdotal reasons.

Derrida is known for being very difficult, but reading
his work is only tough until you realize that there's a
particular technique to his style. At least in the late-
period stuff that I prefer. The 70s were mental.

Since I last posted on the blog, I've also stopped reading that biography of David Foster Wallace that I spoke about a couple of weeks ago. I'll get into precisely why later, because I want to lend some context first. That context comes from the book that I replaced Max's biography with, Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida.

Why on Earth would I replace a straightforward biography of an author with the weird prose of the notoriously difficult Derrida? It's a legitimate question. When I tell people, even other people who've gone through graduate school in humanities, that I like reading Derrida, they look at me like I'm a crazy person.

In the immediate sense, Spectres of Marx* is important for the thinking that will inform my Utopias manuscript. Utopias isn't a Marxist project. I'm purposely stepping away from Marx because I believe that tradition is limited for many reasons.

* Notice that I switch between the American spelling of Specters, which this English translation uses, and the Canadian spelling which I personally prefer, being Canadian myself. This has no real significance, as it's just a joke about Derrida's style of finding significance in otherwise trivial linguistic differences. Calling attention to my joke as a joke, however, might be extremely significant. ;)

One reason is political. Consider the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Castro Brothers, and many other left-wing revolutionaries over the last century, all done in the name of Marxist revolution.

And consider the popular impact of Friedrich Hayek. If Utopias has any villain, it's Hayek, with his grim hostility to any attempt to organize people under common political interests, which he understands as having only one endpoint: the wholesale repression of all under the communist operation of the state. Even a labour union, says Hayek, is inherently oppressive and communist because it subordinates the desires of the individual to the common interests of the group.

It's so easy to forget that Marxism
dominated major periods of Western
politics. When the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, it was as if the
entire philosophy didn't matter anymore.

Another, related, reason has to do with audience. Only a dedicated Marxist is going to read a book that declares itself Marxist on its sleeve. All others would dismiss it.

This isn't an argument about sales alone. Though I'll admit sales has something to do with it. It's also about impact. I want the Utopias book, when it's eventually written and released, to be read widely enough to change people's minds about its political topics. I write from a left-wing perspective, but I'd like Utopias to be read by right-wing people because it'll challenge their beliefs. So I'd market it to them for the same reason I read Hayek.

It's important to know your enemy, but many right-wingers pushed Hayek on me hoping to convert me. Frankly, they're already immune to Marx because of the arguments of Hayek. It's no use telling a dedicated libertarian that Hayek's reading of Marx was too-simple, and missed much of his subtlety.

Hayek's argument against Marx was so successful precisely because he simplified his enemy so much. Road to Serfdom literally was Readers' Digest philosophy. That's where it was first published in the United States, and that's why it was so successful in its first release.

The third reason why I won't frame Utopias as an explicitly Marxist text is because Marxism itself is literally dead as a political program. Understanding this is why I'm reading the other book that I started just before my vacation: Francis Fukuyama's End of History.

Surely, you might think, I can't really believe Fukuyama's thesis. Even he doesn't really believe it anymore. And I've praised politicians over the last year, particularly Yanis Varoufakis, who openly admit to their inspiration from Marx.

Yanis Varoufakis looks leftward, but finds nothing there.

Well, in case you didn't notice, Varoufakis was soundly defeated and humiliated. It didn't matter that the Greek people rejected further austerity programs from the European Central Bank this year. It didn't matter that Varoufakis had designed a comprehensive plan to exit the Euro and resurrect a relatively stable Drachma currency for Greece.

He was broken, fired, humiliated, spat on, bitch-slapped, and told he was a stupid, stupid child for thinking that he could go against the international conglomerate of bankers that holds Greece's national debt and essentially controls the country. And yes, I am being over-dramatic, but it's rhetoric to make a point.

It didn't matter what democratic gesture you could make. The Greek crisis, and the destruction of Varoufakis, shows that democracy means nothing if powerful financial interests disagree with your democratic decisions. You vote for what your bond holders tell you to vote for, or you will all suffer. This is the primary political conflict of the West in the 21st century.

So Derrida doesn't give us a Marxist politics in Specters of Marx. He's probing how to fight injustices in a social world where Marx, and the revolutionary spirit he and his work inspired for more than a century, is thoroughly, fully, completely, and utterly dead forever. It's literally about the ghosts of Marx. To be continued . . . 

Europe’s Fall? Advocate, 15/07/2015

All the ideas I have for non-fiction books are fundamentally political. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a philosophical exploration of how environmental activism can literally forge a new self-image for our species. The Utopias project will explore how our dreams of building a perfect society inevitably fuel our most destructive politics. 

This photo was taken during Greece's rioting in late 2013.
If the government falls and the economy continues to crash,
there will be more violence in the future.

So all my writing has to speak to the fundamental political conflicts of my time. And in general, I think we should all think more about the political conflicts that span the globe. It’s easy to read a few quick articles about the Greek crisis, the war in Syria, or the American election and consider yourself informed. But have you thought?

I watched the humiliation of Alexis Tsipras and the people of Greece with terrible dismay and sadness. I felt crushed. It wasn’t just because the terms of the new agreement – mass privatization, new taxes, slashing pensions, no true debt relief – are so harsh, even the International Monetary Fund is critical. It wasn’t just that Anglea Merkel framed the harsh terms explicitly as punishment to the Greek people for defying the terms of EU technocrats. 

The history of Europe had long been about war, domination, violence, and empire. The European Union was founded as a way to overcome that heritage and build a political culture of brotherhood across the continent. Instead, it’s become the engine of one country’s dominance over the continent. The idea of European solidarity, after last weekend, is a joke, and the world is worse off because of it.

Even worse, the collapse of European solidarity has left its economically depressed countries (Greece, and also Spain, Portugal, Italy, the rest of the southeast) vulnerable to home-grown violent political movements. Racist government has already taken hold in Hungary, whose government plans to build a wall along its eastern border to stop the flow of refugees from the Syrian war and Serbian migrants. As Syriza falls, Golden Dawn will almost surely rise, and the politics of racism and violence against minorities will become a major force in European society again.

Vladimir Putin may look ridiculous to us, but his comical
propaganda is received as the word of a national hero in
his own country. A lot of us in the West have to face the
fact that we're completely ignorant about Russian culture.

All of this comes as Russia is growing increasingly aggressive in Europe. I’m not just talking about the civil war in Ukraine, but general belligerence toward countries near its border. Russian officials have threatened that Sweden will face consequences if its government joins the NATO alliance, as it’s considering. The Russian air force regularly flies military planes over Estonia.

Max Fisher’s investigation for Vox.com of Russia’s foreign and military policy influencers is enlightening about the genuine danger Europe faces. Putin and his circle among the military, his party, and ex-KGB businessmen and politicians genuinely feel threatened by the United States. 

Returning to the new century’s biggest fool, their fear goes back to the Bush Administration. The invasion of Iraq to cause regime change and build democracy at the barrel of a gun in the Middle East terrified Vladimir Putin. He knows he isn’t a democrat, and he remembers the Cold War. There’s a general presumption, Fisher discovered, in Russia’s political and military elite that the only reason the United States isn’t similarly destabilizing or attacking Russia for regime change is because of the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile. 

Russia’s current imperialist destabilization of independently-minded border states (Ukraine, Georgia) is about building a buffer of friendly, controllable regimes to keep the United States army from going after them directly. For Putin, Russia’s greatness depends on the military and economic subjugation of Europe, because he believes that Europe’s goal for its east is the collapse of Russia.

We in Western democracies forgot that Russia was a powerful, dangerous country since the end of the Cold War. Not only did Francis Fukuyama temporarily convince us that History had ended, but Russia in the 1990s was a basket case country whose economy had collapsed, whose state assets were in the hands of decadent oligarchs, and whose President Boris Yeltsin was a drunken buffoon.

We North Americans also forget that militarized, racist,
violent nationalism never went away in Europe. In
Eastern Europe, it continued to thrive, fostered by
economic and cultural isolation and the belligerent
influence of its national Orthodox Churches.

But Russians never stopped being afraid of the United States, never really considered Western democracies allies. This is why Russia is seriously considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons if NATO were to send its armies to defend its Baltic members from attack. The war that would result from this kind of brinksmanship would set the continent on fire and kill millions of people in months. 

However much Merkel’s government might be concerned with the growth of Russian hostility and paranoia toward Europe and the United States, she’s doing a terrible job of managing it. A fallen, chaotic Greece would be the perfect place for a Golden Dawn government to install itself as a military dictatorship after Syriza falls. 

Their white supremacist values would see the Golden Dawn Greek government likely withdraw from the EU and NATO (a Western, democratic alliance), disappear Syriza members and supporters, suppress more moderate opposition figures, and either deport or massacre Syrian refugees and Greek ethnic minorities. Such a belligerent, anti-EU government would be a perfect ally for Putin’s Russia.

The last century’s totalitarian movement arose, in part, from popular disgust with democracy’s inability to fight economic depression. We should be serious about the possibility that it could happen again. That’s why I’m writing my next book of political philosophy, to grapple with how easily democratic freedom can fall.

All Humanity Is One Process III: Free Yourselves, Jamming, 07/07/2015

Continued from last post . . . You know, one of the things that bugged me about how philosophy was done in universities was that disciplinary boundaries, even within disciplines, were very difficult to cross credibly. There were interdisciplinary departments, but the methods of research and writing in these programs very quickly settled into disciplinary norms themselves. Even the attempt to do interdisciplinary research quickly became a discipline itself.

I say this because it’s an interesting parallel from my old career to the way the Greek crisis is understood. Analyze it through a communications lens. 

Because a country isn't a family. It's a society.

The right-leaning messages that emerge from coverage of the debt crisis emphasize: 

1) that Greece is a country that had let its house get out of order, and 

2) that the country and government must impose a harsh discipline on themselves to make anything like a welfare state or even basic public services feasible again. 

The country is just like a person or a household, and the crisis is an economic matter alone. These messages come from European Union institutions themselves, and the analysis of pundits in the right-leaning media.

Contrast this with the left-leaning messages emerging more from online and traditionally renegade sources, or else from the Greek Syriza government itself and from intellectuals, like Slavoj Zizek writing in The New Statesman this week. The International Monetary Fund admitted two years ago that austerity didn’t help Greece at all, and sent the country into an economic tailspin. 

Amartya Sen wrote in The New Statesman last month that austerity strangles a country by throwing too many people into poverty and destroying aggregate demand. When no one has any money, no one can afford to buy anything. With no one able to support businesses, businesses fail and more people lose their jobs. Repeat ad nauseam until suicide. 

That the foundation of a strong economy is a weak state, a balanced budget, and a strong corporate elite is the scientific conclusion of Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School. This was the idea he expressed in Road to Serfdom that we’re powerless to escape or control the global fluctuations of supply-demand forces. Growing wages drives inflation as people have more money to spend, and inflation drives prices and interest rates up so high that debts become unpayable. 

When Amartya Sen speaks, people should listen.

So the only solution is to depress wages as far as employers are willing to shrink them to the levels a depressed economy can sustain. The prices of goods will eventually adjust to the levels that the populace can afford. Until then, people will starve and die, but there’s nothing to be done. 

If the government were to print more currency to pay people, it would just start the cycle of inflation over again. If the government were to increase production through public works, it would subsume too much of the economy under its own ownership, and that’s a totalitarian economy. 

The disaster of Greece shows that John Maynard Keynes and Amartya Sen are right. And at some point, institutional means to address the problem become inadequate. I’d say we hit that point now, thanks to #OXI.*

* When I use the hashtag, I’m referring to the movement, organized largely online, of global solidarity with Greek resistance to the imposition of austerity on a country whose people are already in horrifying poverty and economic depression.

The institutions of Europe today are the legacy of the era when we fought the most intense militarized state totalitarian governments in human history. The European Union was a means to build peace between cataclysmic enemies by integrating them economically. With everyone dependent on everyone else, war becomes impossible.

The economic orthodoxy that’s come to dominate European institutions and its technocracy come from the political ideas of Hayek, the Austrian School of economics, and the Mt. Pelerin Society. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other anti-Keynes and anti-state thinkers founded that think tank network to educate a generation of people in their ideology:

Yanis Veroufakis resigned as Greece's Finance Minister
because he had made the technocrats of the EU so
angry with him that they didn't want to negotiate as
long as he was at the table. But he can rest easy
knowing that the movement he started in Syriza's
cabinet will continue long after this week.

1) that dependence on the state for any kind of income or services whatsoever bred a vulnerability to totalitarian co-optation, and 

2) that humans are impotent before the dynamics of supply and demand, and

3) that collective action erodes freedom because unifying a population around common goals and strategies yokes people to abandon their individual identities and desires to conform to the group.

The takeaway message from #OXI is that political organizing for aggregate action among the population of an entire country (or Western civilization more generally) is a force of liberation. It doesn’t regiment a population into a strict, unified dogma, as Hayek and his like take all collective action to do. 

It’s the fluctuating, dynamic unity of people to look for and implement better solutions to their problems. When institutions dance to the music of a social movement, they’re no longer authoritative centres of power, but tools that people organize to direct so that those in power listen to their voices and follow their orders.

We educate ourselves, organize ourselves, inform our elites who’s really in charge in a democracy, and free ourselves.

Knowing Knowledge VIII: Making It Politically Explicit, Dialogues, 17/04/2015

Since Steve Fuller and I began our dialogue about his book Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History, the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective has been running previous episodes on their own site. Today, we discuss the last full chapter, about the power of counterfactual knowledge, understanding what could have been and what could be.
• • •

Dear Steve;

One element I want to focus on in my questions for you about the last full chapter of Knowledge is the political aspects of public knowledge and scientific institutions and inquiries. Speaking as a Canadian, one of the disheartening developments of my country's politics was seeing our Conservative government's assaults on state scientific institutions. 

Whenever I mention the more unfortunate recent
developments of Canadian politics on the blog, I do my
best to include an extremely unflattering, and I also
hope creepy, picture of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
I hope it contributes in some small way to overall
disgust for him in my country that will force him from
office this year. The tradition continues.

Statistics Canada's long-form census was made voluntary, meaning that all the detailed data it could collect in its last census period in 2011 incompletely represented the country's population, making it useless. State scientists in all agencies have had their autonomy to speak officially to the public hobbled, as any investigations which discover facts that would contradict or criticize government policy are effectively silenced.

All of this lies in the modern right-wing opposition to scientific institutions and scientists. The fundamental reason for this is that modern conservatives, driven by the core principles of new liberal philosophy, believe that scientists are hostile to democracy and individual liberty. Much of this had to do with the prominence of scientists and scientific societies in advocating for mass-scale social planning policies. 

Now, of course, scientists in our countries (Canada for me, your home of Britain, and your birthplace of the United States) are democrats. They're raised in democratic, socially liberal cultures where maintaining a population's freedom is a paramount political value. But our scientific institutions, societies, and cultures should face up to a danger in their origins.

The progenitors of Western science, as a social institution and tradition, were not raised in such thoroughly democratic environments, but in places where authoritarian politics was a live political alternative. You discuss how Francis Bacon and Auguste Comte often conceived of scientific laws as esoteric notions arrived in secret laboratories by societies of initiated specialists. These laws would be used by a society's ruling elite to legislate over a citizenry. The goal of discovering scientific laws was to control the citizenry of a country, just as knowledge of mechanics lets us control physical bodies. 

But the neoliberal hostility to institutionalized science doesn't engage with the primary virtue ethicist of science, Karl Popper. To Popper, the most socially important power of knowledge is emancipation. And scientific attitudes and discoveries have this potential at the largest level of the social order: knowledge is the power to upend your entire social order.

Auguste Comte, one of the founders of sociology.

I think the most brilliant and important idea in the entirety of Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History is that scientific knowledge is a force for progressive social, political, economic, and ecological change. Knowledge gives birth to revolution.

The dynamic of counterfactual reasoning, imagination, and investigation that you lay out in this chapter is itself a logic and metaphysics of revolutionary transformation: we can build an alternative world and understand the conditions and histories that would make it real. 

Such alternatives can become real because of the way you conceive of time. This is where your project actually converges with my next long-form project, Utopias. The academically acceptable way to treat the scientific epochs of the past has become, following Kuhn, as a strongly incommensurable mode of thinking, utterly alien and alienated from ourselves. We can only describe such epochs, never truly judge them. To judge them would be to port our own values into the past era, which, because our own values never manifested in that era, are illegitimate as grounds for judgement.

You and I agree that this epistemic incommensurability is false. From the perspective of ontology, it's false because history is continuous. The knowledge and cultural models of the past eventually developed into ours. Not with a sense of telos, of course, but simply out of contingency. We are products of the past, but not culminations. Likewise, the events of the present will produce the knowledge and cultural models of the future. 

My own take on your example from chapter six will illustrate where our ideas converge and diverge here. You argue that there is enough overlap in our cultural norms and concepts between North America in 2015 and North America in 1950 that, were we to travel back in time and explain the modern concept of sexual harassment to a young Roger Sterling, he'd be able to understand it. 

I should commend Matthew Weiner for making Mad
Men, for supplying us with so many examples of the
most theatrically egregious sexism imaginable.

Not only do I agree, I can take it even further. Even if there isn't enough overlap in the framework concepts of the present with some particular past era to create a single cultural conversation at once, we can still create a common cultural framework by understanding the continuity in historical development that physically bridges our eras. 

Take the ancient Greeks, a civilization that we all accept as culturally contiguous with our own, but which is radically different in many obvious and profound ways that make straightforward conversations about moral principles impossible. We can still create a common space between Aeschylus and ourselves if we all sit down and trace how his history and culture eventually developed into ours. 

From the perspective of epistemology, we don't even need to trace our histories to create this common ground. We need only understand the core principles of each of our eras, how we live them out in our technological and ecological environments, and explain them to each other in an abstract sense. This way, we can at least understand intellectually the morals, customs, religious frameworks, and epistemic presumptions of both our societies. 

It even works for conversations among truly alien peoples (which, if the most optimistic futures for the human race pan out, will happen in a genuine sense when we begin to travel to new solar systems and encounter organisms that evolved in alien biospheres). All we need to understand any way of life is understanding its epistemic framework principles and contexts of daily life.

The same would go for different scientific paradigms, their being different ways to approach the wider world. The larger question, which we'll continue to answer as we wrap up next week, is precisely whether we need a universally unified mission for science to be successful in these conversations across continuous history.

• • • 

Dear Adam, 

First, let me say that over the past few weeks I have looked forward to your posts – and have even prioritized responding to them in the face of other obligations. You have a good feel for the spirit of the book, so that even when we disagree, the differences open up to wider issues that can bring more people into the discussion.

As Stanley Kubrick has described, the Cold War not
only had its proxies in the space race, but more
suggestive suggestions as well.

I appreciate the credit you give me for arguing that science is a progressive force. And maybe I deserve it in this day and age. However, that just shows how much the world has changed since I was first a student in the late 1970s. In fact, this view of science was one of the few things on which the capitalists and the socialists in the Cold War could agree. It’s what made the ‘space race’ such an effective proxy for military engagement between the US and the USSR.

There was also a propaganda war over which sort of society enabled people to live the longest, healthiest, most productive lives. And all of this happened before ‘transhumanism’ became the name of a political movement – and before the latest round of technological promises and fixes had been unleashed in the names of ‘biotechnology,’ ‘nanotechnology,’ ‘information technology,’ etc.

I’m writing this piece in Glasgow, where a few hours ago I commented on papers by some younger historically and philosophically minded sociologists who are beginning to discover the science progressivism that was widely held by cosmopolitan, interdisciplinary public intellectuals such as Julian Huxley, whose achievements are now largely forgotten – despite only having died in the 1970s. 

For example, Huxley gave the ‘modern evolutionary synthesis’ its name and its canonical British formulation, was the principal author of the UNESCO “Statement on Race,” which depicted race as a social construct, and the coiner of ‘transhumanism’ for the prospect that humanity might transcend its evolutionary heritage.

Like so many other science progressivists, Huxley came to be portrayed as ‘eccentric’ because he took it upon himself to leverage his scientific credentials to affect the course of politics and even religion* under the rubric of ‘evolutionary humanism’ as an emerging ideology capable of unifying humanity’s differences – a Comtean Positivism 2.0 for more scientifically sophisticated and democratic times. 

Julian Huxley, an image of the progressive
scientist as the eccentric.

* He was partly responsible for getting the heretical Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin published in English.

To get a sense of how easy it could be to portray Huxley et al. as oddballs, consider a complicating factor about the Cold War, the legacy of which we still live with – and some of your other comments bring out. The Cold War was also the time when the so-called ‘linear model’ of the relationship between science and technology became commonplace on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In other words, scientists do their thing (relatively unimpeded) and then policymakers and other practical types do their thing (again, relatively unimpeded).

This led to the image of the scientist as a heads-down ‘organization man,’ which came under severe criticism – again on both sides of the Iron Curtain – in the 1960s. (The name Andrei Sakharov conjures up the Moscow version of the likes of Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg in the US.) The underlying assumption of this model is that science must reach a level of maturity before it can be applied effectively, no matter your ends – and that people other than the scientists are the ones to do it. This viewpoint is also presupposed by Kuhn, though he is only interested in the science side of the model.

From this standpoint, today’s Silicon Valley’s billionaire ‘visioneers’ such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are nostalgic for the lost world represented by guys like Huxley and the general Cold War valorization of science as the vanguard of human progress. They agree with Huxley – as opposed to the official Cold War line – that we can’t intelligently do science policy if we don’t already have a vision of the sort of being we wish to become. 

This is ultimately a hermeneutical point: You can’t say how science should develop without also saying where we want to go – even if both, at any given time, can only be understood imperfectly. My endorsement of the proactionary principle aims to reactivate this point, which leads me to agree with Huxley and the visioneers in rejecting the strong means/ends distinction of the Cold War’s linear model of science policy.

Elon Musk has built his reputation through his work,
but also through his evocation of a tradition of
creative innovation in science.

Nevertheless, the linear model still operates in science policy today, often as a flag of convenience to absolve both scientists and policymakers of full responsibility for their actions. Suppose a science-based policy goes wrong. On the one hand, the scientists can say that they’re not responsible for the policy, while highlighting the underdetermined and otherwise inconclusive character of their data. On the other hand, the policymakers can say that they’re working with the best science available, which always has room for error, which means that ‘hard decisions’ need to be taken. Thus, in the division of labour implied by the linear model, everyone ends up looking honest and professional.

I think what you describe as the ‘conservative’ (i.e. neo-liberal) political attitude towards science sums up this situation. After all, in many circumstances, the scientists themselves would be the first to admit the potential weaknesses in any practical inferences that might be drawn from their research. This even includes the fallibility of models used to forecast long-term global warming. Of course, scientists would not then use such fallibility as an excuse to kill climate change legislation. 

But remember, if politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ then there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with policymakers trying to take advantage of the uncertainty, even though it carries significant risk. To be against such moves is simply to be against politics.

What this means is that scientists need to be more explicit about their own politics and hence contest policymakers on political grounds. This will involve revealing the sorts of risks that they believe are acceptable and unacceptable to take. This point has special relevance to science and technology studies (STS), which in the post-Cold War period has been invoked to cut or otherwise politically realign the public science agenda. Because STS tends to deconstruct scientists’ legitimizing discourses and practices, it is not such a stretch for enterprising budget-conscious legislators to appeal to STS to justify cuts to areas of science that display significant long-term uncertainties.

Beyond climate change, humanity also produces
enough waste to drown many ecosystems in, well,
you can guess what. I explore the character of our
collective madness, with a little help from
photographer Edward Burtynsky, in my forthcoming
Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

Against this backdrop, Bruno Latour – quite remarkably – said that STS needs to row back from its deconstructive ways so as not to unwittingly legitimize the ‘bad guys’ like your conservative politicians. This is like saying that we need to stop genetics research on humans (but continue to allow it on animals) in order to prevent Hitler’s second coming. Indeed, such calls were being issued after the Second World War, and Julian Huxley helped save the future of genetics as UNESCO’s first scientific director by strategically detaching the science from the politics of genetics, as in the ‘race’ statement.

On the use of counterfactual historiography to forge common values to drive humanity forward: I put considerable stress on this because I actually don’t think that you can know the values of people from the past (or other cultures) without appreciating their decision-space. Your invocation of ‘common ground’ and ‘core principles’ (all of which reminds me of Alasdair MacIntyre) strikes me as reading the history too much on its face: i.e. focusing too much on what people said/did to the exclusion of what they didn’t say/do – but could have. From Social Epistemology onward, this has been a continual preoccupation of mine in terms of defining one’s normative horizons, typically discussed in the context of the role of silence in translation.

In other words, people in the past may have behaved radically differently from us because (a) they saw no alternative that would have allowed them to agree with us; (b) they really operated with radically different values. There is also the flipside of this problem, which normally leads us to create a lot of ‘false positives’ with the past, perhaps especially with the ancient Greeks. 

In other words, the reason why, say, the Greeks seem so much like us is that they weren’t presented with options that would have demonstrated just how different they really were – or perhaps we have forgotten the alternatives that they refused, which would have brought them still closer to our way of thinking. An obvious example here is the restricted scope of the ancient Greek conception of ‘humanity’, which is what made Christianity such an intellectual revolution in the ancient world.

Bruno Latour, the most regretful face of STS.

There is so much more that could be said on this topic, which gets to why I originally thought that history, philosophy, sociology (and psychology and economics) of science should become a composite field of ‘science and technology studies’. But alas, things didn’t turn out that way, but the ideas are worth pursuing, perhaps flying under a new flag of convenience…

Finally, on a minor point. Here and earlier you have referred to Karl Popper as a ‘virtue theorist’ of science. I don’t think that Popper was sufficiently ‘naturalistic’ in his approach to normativity to want to associate the falsifiability with a virtue of individual scientists, which they realize when they’re on their best behaviour, etc. 

Rather falsifiability is more an emergent property of self-interested, overweening scientists who nevertheless are forced to negotiate their differences with each other in order to move forward collectively. In other words, if falsifiability is a ‘virtue’ of anything, it is of a specifically organized scientific community but not of its component individuals. Scientists as individuals are motivated to overstate their own claims and cut down those of their fellows. But like the invisible hand, falsifiability is the overall result of this process. This is why institutional design in science is much more important than improving the mindset of individual scientists.