Becoming Is the Alchemical Ontology, Jamming, 05/07/2018

The other day, I was revisiting a short book by my colleague Elizabeth Sandifer. Recursive Occlusion is a little book about the mysticism of Kabbalah and Tarot, in a framework of exploring the Doctor Who story Logopolis.

Her work has always been a bit strange, which is one of the reasons I like her work.

Anyway, it reminded me of one of the original thematic images of her ongoing epic work of commentary, TARDIS Eruditorum – the solution to alchemy as material social progress.

The vision of progress we’re talking about here is fundamentally rooted in freedom – overcoming the bullying authoritarian attitude of social, political, and moral conservatism. Fundamentally, it’s the freedom to transform – to live differently than others, experiment with different kinds of relationships and identities. A constructively queer identity – opposed to nothing but the refusal to accept difference.

Against the Day is a beautiful book. It
depicts, a tad fancifully, a time in human
history that amounted to a technological
and ethical crossroads. The years between
the 1889 World's Fair and the outbreak of
the First World War was a moment where,
but for a few contingencies, we could
have ended up living in a very different
world. Would it have been better? I
have no idea, and I don't think Pynchon
does either. But given where we've
ended up, any possibility is worth
trying. Or at least imagining.

To jump from this to ontological thinking seems utterly barmy, but it can be done. Jussi Parikka gives it a very good shot when he weaves his concepts for a geological philosophy using, among other tools, artistic criticism and commentary.

Alchemical thinking is an attitude of awe, fascination, and love for the powers of substances to transform into one another.

Parikka illustrates this with images from Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which is one of my favourite novels. He chooses images that show a transition in society that’s ethical at its core, but also political, moral, economic, and ecological. It’s the transformation of alchemy as our attitude to the world, into chemistry.

He interprets these images to mourn how contemporary attitudes that embrace industrial technology refuse the need for magic. The transformation of one substance into another now requires no mysticism, no ethical consideration at all. You routinize it, regularize it, and industrialize it.

The shorthand that’s often used for this is the transition to full capitalism. But that’s not quite accurate. Parikka describes a transition that I think has already changed by now.

Alchemy was a research discipline that included mysticism and ontological philosophy alongside its empirical studies of how to transform substances. Chemistry – and the capitalist economics that fuelled the institutions of industrial chemistry – stripped the divine and philosophical from its research discipline, replacing it with a techno-industrial framework of understanding and practice.

Parikka gives us a quick description that offers a shade of Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt. As work became labour, alchemy became chemistry, and a practice of mysticism becomes an assembly line.

Yet care wasn’t entirely stripped from chemistry. You could argue that ethics was transformed, but that the ethical still emerged from the practice. We were offered “Better living through chemistry,” after all. The goal of industrial chemistry was to build a better life for people, to build some kind of material social progress.

There are different capitalist economics in place now. Ask the folks who used to work at Dupont Labs, until a few years ago. We might need other concepts.

The Limits of Your Universe, Research Time, 09/11/2017

Philosophical thinking sometimes puts you in a tricky place. For example, I’m doing the research for a big book of political philosophy. That research comes mostly from Western traditions of thinking. But it’s going to discuss ideas and concepts that are universal in scope – applying to people no matter their civilization or culture.

Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Now put a bunch of philosophers in the room and see if any discussion of universality can make it out alive. Cultural relativism is a common foil here, especially for Westerners like me who know the Western tradition best.

Thanks to the conceptual framework of colonialism that polluted Western thinking for a good few centuries, it’s dangerous for any Western person to apply their writing on a universal scale. Let me give you an example.

Hannah Arendt focussed her energy on understand the core concepts
of Western thought. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Actually, I’ll just link back to the example I gave yesterday when I was writing about something different. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition examines how a set of cultural presumptions about humanity’s relationship with the world and our place in it developed over time.

She talks about it on the terms of those presumptions’ core concepts themselves. Really anal but important thing I want to call attention to – I don’t say ‘in terms of,’ but ‘on terms of.’ In the same sense that, when you ask someone for an eyewitness account, you say they described the incident on their terms.

Her historical references for this analysis are entirely Western – from Polis Greece through Medieval Christian Europe to the Scientific Revolutions and their growing intensity until the Nuclear Age. But the philosophical problems that all these cultural dynamics influence and change refer to existential questions about humanity itself.

Here we have a culture speaking for all of humanity – the West. And it sounds for a second like the argument we’ve all heard before.

European navies and armies spent a few centuries ruthlessly conquering every other civilization on Earth. Our education systems and most of our cultural traditions have trained and raised* most of us Westerners to think as if we deserved to conquer them. Western ideas were universal – everyone else’s were local. Westerners were Man – everybody else were just a bunch of people.

One of the first great thinkers to see the real end
point of decolonization was Frantz Fanon. In The
Wretched of the Earth, the revolution throwing
the colonizers out is only the beginning. A society
can stay on a war footing for much too long. It
has to begin its own cultural renaissance of
creativity and freedom. Only then can they truly
be equals with the bastards who once conquered
them. Rub that freedom to develop your culture
as you want in their face. That's the real victory.

* Respectively.

The typical reaction is to declare this whole pretence to the Western way of thinking being the true universal a general crock of shit. I’m speaking, of course, about the 20th century left. This is the set of progressive attitudes that the paranoid nationalist right believes is the only left.

That old-fashioned progressive attitude is over – in the 21st century generation anyway. The attitude that appears to be shaking out from our culture right now is what I’m about to describe. Basically, it’s the endpoint of cultural decolonization.

At the end of the day, The Human Condition describes one way to think about humanity. It’s a continuous cultural development – a general trend among many different communities.

But those communities grew similar in this broad set of problems – over humanity’s place in the world – that they all developed similar responses at similar times. They shared a lot among each other. Enough to become Europe.

There are other densely integrated communities throughout the world that interacted much more intensely among each other than beyond for long periods of time. They developed their own traditions of thinking about these broad problems – over humanity’s place in the world.

The Western way of thinking is not the one way, standing apart from the many.

The Western way of thinking is one way among many.

In the 21st century, these many civilizational traditions of thought are now interacting more intensely than they ever have before. Let’s all bring our ideas to each other and see what new thinking results.

The Shock of Your Own Inadequacy, Research Time, 06/11/2017

No, this post isn’t about the first time you experienced erectile dysfunction and get your minds out of the gutter.

Really, I’m taking a second pass at the idea I was talking about earlier this weekend. That idea of alienation coming up in The Human Condition. It’s useful and intriguing, and I want to make sure I have a good handle on how to express it. I think I have a better grasp on the how right now.

When I was a young boy, I read Steven Hawking's A Brief History of
Time. There, I read that the ultimate goal of science was to develop
a theory of everything, a mathematical system that could explain
and predict every phenomenon in the universe in simple formulae.
Hawking should be ashamed of writing such propaganda.

Mathematics are, in some context, important to all sciences. Calculus, geometry, statistics, plain old arithmetic – whatever. If you want to give a quick and dirty one-sentence* definition of science, call it ‘Systematic knowledge emerging from understanding mathematical descriptions of things, systems, and processes.’

* Inevitably inadequate, but making an accurate-enough gesture for us to say that, yeah, it’s true I suppose.

Put that in your introductory-level philosophy of science textbook and smoke it.

Okay, that was the last joke. So Hannah Arendt tries to explain how a profound alienation from nature, the world, and our experience can arise from how central mathematics is to our knowledge.

The mathematical tools of the different sciences give us a better ability to understand natural processes – atomic energy fields, cellular and organic processes, ecological development, cosmological events – than we can get from our ordinary observation of the world.

Go to the typical grade school example – which I don’t think ever gets unpacked the way it really deserves – of geocentric vs heliocentric models of the solar system. We look up in the sky and we see the sun and other heavenly bodies circling us.

But describing their actual motion in our sky takes some convoluted math. So Copernicus, Erasmus, and others developed a heliocentric model with simpler math. It was always an as-if hypothesis just to ease up on the headaches astronomers suffered.

If I could focus on one of the many philosophical and metaphysical
screwups of Christian thought, it's that the common interpretation of
Noah's myth in this tradition is that creation exists for us as we are.
The meaning of the rainbow is that everything is illuminated already.
I much prefer the Jewish tradition, which is much more honest about
how we still have to work for our knowledge.

Mathematics is a technological creation – it’s a human tool, a complex assemblage of symbols and rules. So any knowledge that we produce with mathematical tools isn’t a direct encounter with the world – mathematics mediates our knowledge of the world.

That was fine when we were just coming up with imaginary models to simplify our models of a more complex world – the migraine-inducing calculations of planetary paths in the geocentric model. But then it turned out that the mediated abstract models of visceral experience were true, and our ordinary experience of the world distorted how nature really was.

Arendt talks about Galileo and the astronomical tradition that followed him, but Robert Boyle and the Royal Society’s development of the experimental laboratory was equally important. Mathematics was the symbolism, and the laboratory was the institution and site, of mediated knowledge.

Mediated knowledge was much more effective, more powerful, than knowledge through direct experience of the world. Necessary conditions of humanity’s industrial revolution included that mediated knowledge.

Our own tools, techniques, and technology were the medium of that knowledge. This was a profound cultural shock to the Europeans who developed the modern epoch of mathematics and the institution of the laboratory. My debt here is to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller’s philosophical history of knowledge.

The power of mediated knowledge over direct experience of the world
was such a shock to Medieval Christian European society that its
success felt like falling back into the Cave. A God whose nature
requires complex mathematics and wrangling results out of a
laboratory to understand isn't nearly as kind and close to us as
Medieval Christian thinking held. All the philosophical attempts
to overcome mediation in knowledge – I think of Hegel's Absolute
and popular evangelical literalist disdain for science – you can
understand as desperate refusals to accept a distant God.

Before this cultural realization of the power of mediated knowledge, Europeans had a view of the world in which every moment of ordinary wandering through the world brought you closer to God.

The medieval Christian conception of worldly knowledge was that our world was creation. Creation was God’s expression, and humanity was the element of creation who God made creation for.

Creation’s purpose was for humans to understand it and live harmoniously in nature. So the popular conception of nature in European Christian culture was as an open book. Creation was something through which we understood God and our relationship to Him. We’re built to understand creation intuitively because creation was made for us.

The success of mediated knowledge demonstrates that creation wasn’t made for us. The most accurate knowledge of the world emerges from using these complicated tools, technology that requires years of training and education to use properly. The world is much more opaque than an entire sub-continent’s culture of our ancestors understood.

People in Medieval Christian European culture thought of themselves as Fallen, that they had to work to understand God and creation again. The success of technology – mathematical symbols and the laboratory – in understanding the world demonstrates to a Medieval European Christian that we’re Fallen much farther than we thought.

We may as well have Fallen into hell.

Is Alienation Inevitable or Escapable? Jamming, 05/11/2017

Alienation is a word with many different meanings. We use it – the ideas and images it evokes – to unpack a lot of fairly different concepts. That versatility makes the word very useful, but also very dangerous because it’s so easily misunderstood.

Here are a few examples.

What we take to be a hallucination, an illusion, is in fact the real.
What appears solid is a practical instinct that more careful
observation shows has very limited scope and application.
Real knowledge shows us that everything is connected,
interdependent, flows into each other, can sense each other.

When I brought Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to Palgrave a few years ago, one of the proposal reviewers kept talking about marxism. Now, I was using the word ‘alienation’ in an environmental philosophy context.

It’s a book on environmental ethics. But some folks, they see a word that has some deep marxist associations and they fly straight to marxism. The conversation with the reviewer turned out fine.

A lot of academics are surprised when I write back to journal and book line editors telling them their reviewers didn’t know what they were talking about. But it’s surprisingly effective.

So what’s underneath all those different definitions of alienation – the orthodox marxist, the popular lefty, the environmentalist / ecological, and other philosophical approaches? Think about it this way – What’s the experience or the state of mind that all these technical conceptions of alienation describe different aspects of?

There’s a passage in The Human Condition that, as far as I can tell, nails this description. Arendt talks about the peculiarly modern chasm between the nature of the world and our experience of it.

The last few centuries of research institutions have discovered more about the universe than we’ve ever known before. We’re able to observe planets orbiting stars all over our galaxy. We’re investigating the smallest, most elusive particles in our universe.

We’ve developed such comprehensive knowledge of how life works on a molecular level. We’re on our way toward a similarly comprehensive knowledge of life ecologically. All of that builds our medical knowledge. We understand the processes and flows by which our planet holds itself together and pulls itself apart.

Confronted by the ALie Nation
The subjects and the citizens
See the material religions through trauma and numb
Nothing is related
All the things of the earth and in the sky
Have energy to be exploited
Even themselves, mining their spirits into souls sold
Into nothing is sacred, not even their self

And I’m being way too quick about these different venues of knowledge. Only listing them to blow your minds a little by reminding you of how powerful our knowledge has become.

We’re learned an enormous amount about the universe. But it’s put pretty much all our experience to the lie. When we walk on the Earth, it feels solid to us. But our ground floats on a globe of molten rock – liquid. Objects feel solid, but they’re composed mostly of empty space, kept separate by electromagnetic fields.

Really, it would be more accurate to describe reality as the interaction – integration, interpenetration – of fields instead of objects. That we’re a dynamic reality where everything is constantly in flux. Alienation rises in us because our reality feels different to us.

We experience solid bodies. We experience stability, not flux. Flux, change, dynamism all tends to disturb us. But that’s the way the world really is.

So we’re left with another example of the traditional distinction in Western philosophy. Really, it’s the distinction that defines Western philosophy – one problem running through the entire tradition. Appearance and reality.

That chasm is our fundamental alienation. Something that we’re supposed to or actually do experience as a harmony turns out to be a chaotic discord. The solidity of the world is an illusion. No, not an illusion – a lie that we tell ourselves and convince ourselves from our earliest experiences.

A lie into which we’re socialized from birth. Our knowledge that gives us so much power also shows that the harmony we felt with the world is utterly unreal. As Arendt quotes Werner Heisenberg, all we have are our instruments and ourselves.

Expecting the world to be one way, we discover that it’s totally different. The ways we understood the world – so common that it feels intuitive, that we raise our children instinctively to believe in the world this way – are actually nonsense. Our subjectivities schizz from the world.

How do you heal this wound in our knowledge and self-conception? It may be as easy and as difficult as throwing that false instinct away. Understand the world as energy, flux, flow, and interdependence, multiplicity without hierarchy or rank. See what you can become then.

And We Could Move the Earth, Research Time, 03/11/2017

Archimedes is a part of the Western cultural imaginary about the nature of science, knowledge, and scientific power. Get me a lever long and strong enough, find me the right place to stand, and I can move the world. That’s the image.

Now, I’m about to take over as Digital Editor of Social Epistemology. So it’s not like I actually believe this is the way science and scientific knowledge actually works.

Human knowledge, technology, and power have definitely moved the world. It’s moved the world into a distinct geological epoch – the Holocene era, blip in the planet’s history that it is. It’s moved the world into remarkable extinction event as well, as we drown so much of the Earth’s creatures in our toxic waste.

But scientific knowledge doesn’t need to understand the world from some point of perfect objectivity to do its work. The view from nowhere not only doesn’t exist, but it was never necessary in the first place.

I write this so that I can draw out of Hannah Arendt’s writing about this idea something that I can use in my own philosophical work. She talks about an “Archimedean moment” in the history of Western science, from which we realized that view from nowhere.

Yet I think she also understands that this “Archimedes” image doesn’t refer to scientific practice itself. Scientific practice and technological development is far more complex than the popular image of it all.

That’s where I pick up Arendt’s thread on this image of Archimedes. The popular image of science remains this ludicrous, inaccurate one of the view from nowhere. The point of pure objectivity where our knowledge is pure in its truth.

Even that popular image misunderstands Archimedes’ words,* ignoring their directly practical character. Knowledge is how he moves and changes the world, not simply understanding it in some purely abstract sense.

* I doubt Archimedes himself ever said anything precisely like that. Same with the Eureka! moment. The idea, the image, the cartoon that appears in our popular culture is most important. 

No, what matters is the image of the Archimedean point or moment. The image that fixes our belief in human knowledge as aiming for pure objectivity is part of our popular culture. It isn’t true about the nature of knowledge, but it’s popularly believed to be true. We shouldn’t confuse the two.

Arendt writes about how that popular belief has informed popular attitudes about science and knowledge for centuries. She cites a philosophical explanation of Galileo’s experiments. But she could just as easily be talking about the public relations campaign of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society to keep their research from being swept up in the violence of England’s politics at the time.

I also want to keep an eye on Arendt’s explanation for what Galileo’s experiments actually did, her philosophical account of it. Copernicus’ sun-centric model of Earth’s system was conceived and used simply as a mathematical tool. It was a way to simplify planetary mathematics.

Only when Galileo made his telescopic observations of the planets did Copernicus’ model turn out to be so inconveniently true. He didn’t prove it true like a demonstration of logic. He discovered facts which established heliocentrism as a fact.

His telescopes were the long and strong levers that, in popular consciousness at least, moved the world. Which seems to be where it really counts.

Do We See the World or Our Maps of It? Research Time, 31/10/2017

I’ve had a pretty tough day this week, and as I’m writing this post, it’s only Monday. Monday night while I compose a quick Tuesday morning post.

But while I have a lot of work to do for tomorrow for different projects, I need to get some thoughts down here today. If only to collect my thoughts at the end of that long day.

Spoiler for the Edgar Wright film The World’s End – when the body-snatching aliens leave Earth at the end of the movie, they send a planet-wide EM pulse that fries every piece of electronics in the world.

Every hard drive, phone, appliance, and presumably also all the machines keeping people alive in hospitals. Millions die, and the world collapses into a dystopian nightmare. Nick Frost’s ending narration describes his little farming community in England, where they know nothing about the rest of the world.

Nowhere in the world knows anything about anywhere else. How could they? They couldn’t communicate with anyone. In my business communications classes, I talk about the different norms and possibility spaces for web conference conversations, global phone calls, and emails that can cross the Pacific in minutes.

At the end of the movie, that world is all over. The whole world is a mystery again.

A map of the Earth drawn in 1570. We've come a long way since then.

In one of the later chapters of The Human Condition – chapter 35, if you want me to be exact – Hannah Arendt talks about how the world has been made less mysterious. Exploration, settlement, globalization, the simple act of mapping – global cartography with more and more detailed measurement.

Yet those maps are still maps. They’re representations, abstractions. They cut away so many details of living experience to achieve that crystal clarity of the map. Anyone who’s lived anywhere can point you to the clear difference between the experience of wandering around somewhere and studying it by a map.

No matter how detailed that map is – doesn’t matter if the Google Street View car is leading the way and feeding all its new data to your phone in real time – it’s never as detailed as real experience.

Yet the map has incredible power. All our scientific representations have remarkable power to change our world – any reckoning with modernity, the all-too-brief Holocene Era, the Holocene extinction, has to develop an adequate concept of that power.

It’s a paradoxical power – incomplete, inadequate to the complexity and visceral nature of real experience, yet able to encompass such a more comprehensive grasp of the world’s real complexity. Consider for a moment how difficult it is for a single human to wrap their head around all the content – let alone the implications and broader meanings – of our data sets about the world.

We need our computers to interpret these massive amounts of data, to sort them and organize them so we can create our graphs and illustrations. The raw statistical data of our measurements of the world are, on their own, too much for a human consciousness to process. We need our tools.

Those tools – maps, data sets, interpretive algorithms – are how we squeeze meaning from all the information that’s beyond the powers of human consciousness to experience.

Arendt calls it the view from nowhere. Thomas Nagel did too, and wrote a book about it. But what it really is, is the view from the machine – a computer and its software programs is obviously a machine, but even a simple map is a machine. It returns to a fundamental tension in human existence.

Our experience is the most intense way we have of engaging with the world – plunging forward, arms out, grappling with the complex mess of this web of events. But our power in the world only comes from stepping back from that complexity, letting our machines wrestle with reality and shape it into a form that our consciousness can wrap itself around.

Our most powerful actions are a result of delegating our own powers to machines.

Stretching Our Intentions Through Time, Research Time, 26/10/2017

Here’s an interesting argument that I found in The Human Condition. It’s another example of how Hannah Arendt’s thinking blends ontological and ethical matters in ways that work.

She describes a foundational aspect of our experience of time – how we develop our most visceral conceptions and feelings for the time beyond the present. This goes beyond just remembering and imagining. Both of those are acts carried out in the present.

Remembering refers to the past and imagining can refer to the future, but these acts don’t connect our intentions and worldly activity beyond the present. These acts remain in the present – they don’t extend our action beyond the moment.

So we aren’t really experiencing the past and the future, only calling possibilities and memories before our thoughts. We can experience the past and the future, but it takes a much more intense act than speculation.

When I was partying in my early 20s, I had a
friend who, at the height of his drunkenness,
would scream, "I can see through time!"

Experiencing time beyond the hazy boundaries of the moment is a matter of physical reach there, spreading ourselves four-dimensionally.

Forgiveness and promising. These are the acts by which we physically reach into the past and future – essentially moral and social acts.

Forgiveness is to free someone from the consequences of a past act. It erases that old action from your relationship with that person. An action whose direct intention reaches into the past and changes it.

It may just be in the context of this one relationship between a few people, but it’s still changing the past – nullifying an event, deadening its consequences.

Promising is, parallel to forgiveness, the act of changing the future. Now, the future doesn’t yet exist – it literally hasn’t happened yet* – so you aren’t changing some pre-existing future.

* Please do not bring general relativity or any of the implied conceptions of time – block time, timeless time – into this conversation. I’m just talking about the human experience of time in the flow of our movement.

No, you're changing what would be into what can be. A promise is a reach into the future to create it – an act of manipulating existence into a particular shape. Our intentions in our promises push our actions forward in time as the promise becomes a goal, an attractor for our action.

These actions are possible only through social relationships – building bonds of trust, reliability, and obligation. Communities are constituted here.

But the constitution of communities and friendships are bound up with the extension of our experience beyond the present moment and into a smeared duration of practical awareness. Building our social bonds requires stretching our intentionality into the past the future – extending our presence from the present into a long stretch of time.

Self-conscious creatures become social through stretching their intentionality along entirely new vectors. Promising and forgiving makes us four-dimensional creatures. These acts make us more than timely – becoming temporal.

I Guess Stronger Together Was It, Jamming, 23/10/2017

A story first, then some philosophy.
• • •
Sometimes, a politician hits on the right idea at a time when she can never do anything about it. Hillary Clinton had led a political life of equal parts naiveté and the most awful ethical compromises for state power.

I think there's a good heart and an ethical soul in Hillary Clinton. I
firmly believe this. But I'm also sure that she no longer knows how
to express that soul. She had to hide her values as First Lady of
Arkansas and the USA under vicious attacks that made her out to
be some feminazi monster. Now, her quite reasonable
feminism is actually mainstream.
But she spent so long and in such intense circumstances training
herself to speak in euphemism to placate millions of sexists and
racists, she can't sound believable about what she truly and
deeply believes.

But then she put a fundamental truth about human nature on her campaign signs – that we are stronger together. It’s as if she knew she’d go down in flames – never consciously, only as a last moment of ethical instinct from the most ancient parts of her brain.

Everything about her political career was rooted in noble, true instincts, but she and her husband both were the worst judges of which compromises were worth making. Believe deeply all your life in the power to heal racism in America, then pass the 1994 crime bill and welfare reform packages in the name of compromise across the aisle.

Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party was just as revanchist as Donald Trump’s. Gingrich just had some tact, so he could trick naive kind people into thinking that he didn’t wish we could just have Jim Crow back.

It’s the same about this mess with Uranium One blowing up on right-wing media. FOX began talking about this complex web of business deals, as if it shows the fundamental corruption of the Clintons. But to me, the centre of the story lies here.

Bill Clinton walked into a meeting with Nursultan Nasarbaev – President For Life of that bastion of liberal freedoms and government transparency Kazakhstan – while Hillary Clinton was US Secretary of State. Bill sincerely believed that he was arranging nothing more than a contribution to a public health project somewhere impoverished.

Bill and Hillary Clinton would never have imagined such a meeting as a pay-for-play. Corruption was the worst thing a powerful person connected with government could do – it would break the people’s trust in you to do the right thing by them. Surely, no leader of a country would take on such a burden solely to enrich themselves.

Nasarbaev lives in a world where every meeting is a pay-for-play, a corrupt deal to enrich yourself. Enriching yourself was the reason you joined the government.

Some people are raised believing that joining government means becoming a public servant – that you have a duty to your constituents. If you take that so much for granted that you can't conceive of people who join government for very different reasons, you should stay home. You won't be able to deal with these people.

• • •
Hannah Arendt wrote about a particular concept of freedom – freedom from interference, self reliance, autarky. Freedom as the ability to turn away from our obligations.

This is a freedom we all have. But it isn’t a freedom we should want. It’s the freedom to turn away from your friends and neighbours. We’re all free to decide that we should live only to enrich ourselves.

But living that way leaves us bankrupt. Humans are fundamentally social creatures – our personalities are inherently inadequate and broken if we don’t get enough contact with other humans as infants and small children. We’re each deeply interdependent on everyone else in society for our mental and cultural health.

To have a morality that turns away from everyone else – when freedom is freedom from obligation – embraces the withering of a human organ as a great ethical good.

It sounds absolutely mad. Of course we’re stronger together than we are acting only on our own. Someone who’d gladly turn his back on everyone around him would be a monster of a person.

Don’t forget that another way of life as possible – never forget that humans are very good at making ourselves monsters.

The Utopia of the Mass Grave, Research Time, 19/10/2017

There’s a common right-wing argument against utopian thinking, which is rooted in the libertarian impulse for small government. The emotional ground of that argument is an appeal to the horrors of totalitarianism.

Stalinist* Russia and Nazi Germany are the real-life outcome of what the modern libertarian (and generally conservative) right-wing considers socialist utopias. Now, for my purpose at the moment, I don’t want to argue over the facts of whether secret police states are the logical, conscious, or unintentional end-points of socialism. I want to talk about the structure of the argument itself.

Rick Sanchez, hero to those who don't know that he's actually
there to be laughed at.

* That is, Russia when it was run by the NKVD in the 1930s-40s.

You can see the structure very clearly in a straightforward reading of Plato’s Republic. Put all the metafictional and metaphilosophical readings of Plato’s work to the side. They don’t matter for the sake of this argument.
• • •
The most straightforward reading of any book is usually the most popular, if only because it’s the easiest to make. Same reason why The Catcher in the Rye inspires so many jerks** – Holden Caulfield’s voice dominates the narrative. Literally, because he’s the first-person narrator of the whole thing.

** And at least one murderer.

The easiest way to read the book is to let the dominant, most charismatic perspective – and the perspective that’s always justifying his actions in his own moral terms – dominate your own thinking with its charisma.

I sympathize with pragmatic libertarians who are careful and complex
in their justified criticisms of state power. But the more dogmatic folks
– and yes, I'm mostly thinking of the Rand disciples – are surprisingly
dim planners of the most obvious failures.

Same reason why so many misogynist, immature jerks love Rick and Morty – you hear Rick justifying all your worst inclinations, but you don’t realize that his words are meant to indict themselves. You have to step back from the text – get metafictional about it – to get the point. But that’s a step beyond just going with the flow.

The same problem happens with The Republic. Going with the flow of the text, without getting meta about it, it’s Plato arguing for the ideal structure of a community and its institutions. Its content is absolutely horrifying – rigid caste system and community-wide family structures. Now think about the book as a model for your own political action.

How do you build a better society? Sit around with your friends and colleagues, figure out a hypothetical structure for society that you think would be perfectly harmonious. Then, when you control your state’s military, police, nationalized corporations, bureaucracy, tax authority, organize the entire society according to that exact plan.

Change the entire country – from law to culture to thought – in a generation.

What a paradise it was.

Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. You’ve conceived of politics as a craftsman or engineer conceives of a problem to be solved. Conceive of the best possible end state, and move your society toward that state using the quickest and most intense means.***

*** Of course, the quickest means is rarely the quickest possible means.

Thinking of politics that way – as a pre-planned organizational structure to which you want all of society to conform – enables massive state violence. Consider the end, and its perfection justifies all means to achieve it.

That was Pol Pot’s revolution. The plan was the purest communism, stripped even of basic identity, and the action was to impose that structure with brute force of arms.

You don’t keep the means-end calculation out of political thinking just by declaring a few methods – like mass murder, forced starvation – beyond the pale. You’ve just drawn a limit on the same sociopathic concept to mark where you start to feel nauseous.

If you want your audience to understand the actual ethics that you
threaded into your show, you have to make your most charismatic,
interesting character its voice.

The answer is to avoid means-end thinking in politics altogether, because to conceive of a balance between the virtue of goals and the force of methods is inherently unethical. It nudges us to believe in sacrifice or contribution to common goals as a burden – the limit marks what burdens we consider too much to bear.

The calculation itself of what goals justify which methods is totally perverse because it makes you think of your neighbours, friends, and community members as raw material to build a masterminded social machine.

Making resources of those you should respect.
• • •
Now, for this post, I’ve been following an argument Hannah Arendt makes in The Human Condition. Chapter 31, if you want me to be specific. When she's talking about Plato in this way, she isn’t talking about what Plato actually intended, or her genuine account of The Republic’s meaning.

She's talking about how most people received it. Students who read maybe a chapter in an elective survey course where they got a C+. Media provocateurs who take their straightforward or half-cocked reading way too seriously.

Arendt is talking about the popular reception of Plato – an example to give insight and structure to a popular concept that creating a perfect society is the same as creating a building. Make a plan, bend some resources into shape. To draw attention to how perverse this everyday way of thinking is.

To demonstrate the need for change in human thought itself.

Fear Makes Snitches of Us All, Research Time, 17/10/2017

When I was in my last year of undergrad, I took a graduate course about Hannah Arendt. It was a beautiful course, with a professor who’s still a valued colleague and a friend.* It was my first exposure to her work, and to work about her work.

* Who I don’t talk to often enough. Nobody talks to anyone as often as they should, but maybe that’s what people who don’t talk enough say.

Human social solidarity is broken by tyranny, when your government
forces the people into paranoia, fear of each other, incentivizing
betrayal over friendship.

One of Arendt’s concepts was the centre of complex debates in the commentary – common sense. What exactly was this concept of Arendt’s? I think I read more about the concept than Arendt’s own writing on it in that course.

That was only one of many ideas in commentary, when the course itself focussed on understanding modern international human rights law and responsibilities with Arendt’s concepts. So the course never made time for the whole of The Human Condition.

When I read her discussion of common sense in the context of reading that book, I had what I think is a good handle on it. Not enough to end all dispute in Arendt commentary, of course. That’s not my goal, thank God.

No, I just want a concept whose structure and mechanics I can understand and use well enough for my own argument on the same broader question – How can we live together in peace.

So you have my take on Arendt’s concept of common sense. Literally the style of life of self-conscious social creatures – we live in the world as if that world is shared. Not only that, we need to live in a shared world for the sake of our mental health. Social life is exercise for an essential part of the human organism – our minds and personalities.

In one of the first climactic moments of Doctor Who, he said, "Fear
makes companions of us all." Only fear of what's outside. When you
fear the ones who are trapped with you in the cave of skulls, you'll
never get out alive.

Daily life includes camaraderie, friendship, the exchange of meaningful, significant conversation. Humans need the act of bonding, the constitution of solidarity, to be our complete selves.

Our highest state as a society will be when all 7.4-billion of us are open to becoming a single, global community. Humanity’s most complete selves. Between us would be a literal common sense – the sense of living in common, as friends, as part of the same society, in all our differences.**

** Excepting, of course, the paradox of tolerance – not really a paradox, because this utopia would be a society not of tolerance, but acceptance. The refusal to be friends must never be accepted.

This utopian asymptote – universal solidarity and friendship – was how Arendt saw totalitarian structures of government and society extending back thousands of years. We’re accustomed to seeing totalitarianism as a new invention – that’s how Hannah Arendt saw things in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Totalitarian governments like Hitler’s, Stalin’s, and Mao’s was the most intense form of it in history. But the fundamental principle is the same as in the time of the ancient Greek tyrannies. Break solidarity, isolate people with fear.

The Soviet Union's NKVD, the secret police institution that ran the
government with Josef Stalin at its head, I think of as the best
example of totalitarian and tyrannical government for my ideas in
Utopias.

The institution of the secret police was how the modern administrative state did tyranny. Short of full-on totalitarianism, that’s the modern form of tyranny. But the basic function is the same as in the smaller communities of Polis Greece.

The tyrant is isolated from the people – they fear him, and hide from being noticed by him. The people hide from each other, avoid being noticed even by their friends. Any friend could become an informer on you, even if you hadn’t done anything. To inform is a weapon, to bring down the tyrant’s police on someone you want out of the way.

Democracies are practically the inversion. Ideally, leaders should fear the people, because the votes of the people can cost them their jobs. At the least, citizens want to be seen by their leaders – we lobby them, complain to them, yell at them that they’re doing a crap job.

In a democracy, where we can bring our institutions to our heel, we can create the space in our society to build bonds of friendship. Our interactions along these bonds create common sense – our intuitive sense of common ground with our neighbours. Near and far.

When these bonds are broken, we become weak. We’re less than what we could be. That’s the destructive power of paranoia, of the secret police.

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?

What Does It Take to Control History Itself? Research Time, 11/10/2017

When I come up with titles like that, you can tell I grew up watching a lot of Doctor Who. But I’m actually going there by the end of this few hundred words, I think.

I noticed a curious passage in The Human Condition, where Hannah Arendt – in her abstract conceptual approach and her historian’s style of evocative writing – starts talking about network effects.

Even something as ordinary as a timely trip to the bathroom can have
amazing consequences that are impossible to predict.

Not in any technical sense, of course. The Human Condition came long before Bruno Latour and his sociological actor-network theory, or the popular knowledge of neural networks in artificial intelligence research, or any of the networked communications infrastructure our civilization depends on today.

Arendt is talking about the capacity for a small act in any human society to have outsized effects. Consequences spiral outwards from any action, always expanding their power well beyond an actor’s intention.

What do we think of before we make any relatively significant action in our lives? I don’t necessarily mean only the obvious decisions about whether I should marry this person or bomb this country. Those are events with clear meaning and many unintended consequences.

She’s talking about events like conversations about important topics with a friend. Politics, love, business, family – anything that you’d share with someone you trust.

She's even talking about utterly trivial events like picking up a package from the post office, bumming a ride home from work with a friend, going to the bathroom.

Any event can have unintended consequences because we can’t perceive – in the moment of our action – all the indirect and systematic affects that can flow from it. We can’t see the entire web of causality – forward and backward, molecular and molar – at once.

That’s the power and gravity of human action, according to Arendt. Any one of our actions could occur at what turns out to be a critical juncture of causes and processes. Even our most trivial action can have knock-on consequences that transform the world.

That would be a fantastic novel to write, actually. Also reminds me of what I’ve read about Laozi.

What would it take to grab hold of chaos? To bend chaos to your will and make sure that only what you planned would happen.

Confronting History as Chaos, Composing, 10/10/2017

So a lot of my research so far for Utopias has been about political philosophy and thinking. Here’s another look at how I’ve approached the research for it.

Like I’ve said, there are three parts. The first one is about the human relationship with time, how we understand and engage it in our daily lives and in our larger self-conceptions of society and history.

The second is about how we can use the different aspects of that relationship to understand the dynamic processes of reality – the constructive, productive power of time.

Just around the corner, the limit.

The third figures out what ways to understand time best harness humanity’s most constructive, sustainably productive powers. Doing that also identifies what those powers are – the powers of enthusiastic, free solidarity in all sectors of human society.

I’ve been researching the third part mostly for two reasons. One is that the political philosophy concepts are where I needed the most work. I wanted to improve my knowledge about a particular direction in democratic theory.

A processual way of thinking about the development of communities, states, and societies, skeptical of all dominations, hopeful about the power of pluralism and freedom.

I’d already developed my concepts for part two writing Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. We understand ecological matters – and the general development of the universe – best when we think in terms of processes and dynamics.

My expertise on part one’s subject – humanity’s relationship with time – is a blend of the two positions. I’ve done a lot of the research about process already, but not yet about how we come to (mis)understand ourselves – historical, narrative humanity.

Analyzing how we understand history and humanity's development
through asking What Happened? is also a pleasant chunk of Gilles
Deleuze's writing. I actually see many similarities between his and
Arendt's concepts, even though there seems to have been no
influence between them.

Reading Hannah Arendt’s work is very enlightening, given that this is the setup of the project. I consider her a predecessor – in my pretentious moments – because The Human Condition is simultaneously about how humanity really develops over time, and the different ways we understand that development.

We understand our development by asking What Happened? Then we figure out the best ways to get answers. Once we have enough facts, we make a story – great actors, pivotal events, the power of humanity acting together. That’s our history.

History is what we tell ourselves when we answer the question What Happened? But that’s a retroactively written history – history with themes, great characters, running currents, a kind of unity. Whether it was a secular unity, or a Providence, Zeitgeist, Invisible Hand – it's still unity. Events as they’re unfolding have no such unity.

Events are chaos – maelstroms of colliding processes and forces. Military institutions like states smacking into each other. Terrifyingly complex economic and industrial systems span the globe, but emerge from thousands and millions of individual acts.

The system transforms those acts, but this feedback loop between a huge system and its constituents physically constitutes human civilization. There’s incredible variety here, a huge diversity of powers, processes, stories, lives. The history of humanity as it actually unfolds is an authorless history.

Despite the convergence I see in their concepts, Arendt and Deleuze
had utterly different philosophical approaches, styles, and thinking.
I think part of that is rooted in Deleuze's relative privilege compared
to her. Deleuze rode out the Second World War in relative safety,
losing only his brother, a resistance fighter. He was 20 by the war's
end. Arendt escaped the Holocaust and was a political refugee for
many years in her life.

Arendt makes very clear how utterly terrifying it is for human history to be truly authorless. Those metaphors about maelstroms are appropriate. We tell ourselves coherent histories – whether in scholarly books, or popular films and novels, or epic poems and myths in Athenian squares thousands of years ago.

It’s meant to give us a means to grapple with the chaos of time – to turn events into history through understanding. Sometimes, it works, and we understand the world in the best way to thrive.

Often, we lose track of how the world develops, clinging to old certainties out of inertia, or because we’ve culturally bathed in them for so long that it becomes difficult to conceive of anything different.

A complete conception of the real development of events is totally incoherent because of that chaos. Every simple story is too simple to be true – in the real complexity of history, all contraries are compossible.

But it’s seriously difficult to conceive of that kind of world. It takes complexity in thinking, and the ability to confront the terror of a rudderless reality.

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

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

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

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

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

Call this gathering my thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

** Arendt’s philosophical concept of work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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