Noble Enough to Fall Short, Research Time, 23/05/2018

The last chapter of Paul Patton’s book about the political aspects of Gilles Deleuze's ideas contains what I think is an exquisitely concise argument about the weaknesses of liberalism.

I mean, aside from the weaknesses we’ve been talking about for the last few days already. But this late passage in Deleuzian Concepts walks through a summary of a very profound problem that I don’t think the liberal approach to politics can handle.

So it goes like this. Because we’re philosophers, Patton focusses his argument on a beautiful summary of what John Rawls was doing in building his reconstructive liberal concepts. We go to the source of the most intense innovation in the concepts themselves – that’s the philosophers. And if you’re talking the 20th century revival of progressive liberal political philosophy in the North American academy, you’re talking about Rawls.

There's a lot to admire in Rawls philosophy, but I've
always found it kind of frustrating. I think it's because,
even before I could fully articulate it, his liberalism felt
inadequate to me, incomplete. As if I could tell he was
leaving out something important, without quite
understanding what it was.
The desire for your own enslavement, your own
disempowerment, your own depression. Politics as
suicide.

Patton teases out four political purposes in Rawls’ liberalism. They’re very noble purposes. But they leave out one important part of human existence. Here’s how it breaks down.

Purpose of Liberalism 1. Discovering the common principles among disputing political factions.

This is a wonderful thing to accomplish – the original position, followed through faithfully, does help you isolate what components of your identity are shared across all people. It helps identify the common ground that can be a slim anchor for peace in an intractable conflict.

Purpose of Liberalism 2. Harmonizing the goals of individuals and communities.

Another product of that original position – where you have to imagine what a community would look like when you have no idea what your place in it would be. So you have to think about the good of your community when you could end up as the lowest of the low in it.

So the original position thought experiment becomes, in this context, an exercise in sympathy with the good of your community – not just of yourself or your family. Not that you’d sacrifice yourself or your family for your community. But you’d be more amenable to helping yourself and your community at once.

Rawls gave us a reminder that there need never be a zero-sum game in life. We need this reminder badly, especially at times like these.

Purpose of Liberalism 3. Demonstrating the limits of conformity possible in a community.

This is a product of the full scope of liberalism, beyond just his original position thought experiment. One of the main goals of liberalism is to allow individual freedom, and so in that simple sense, conformity of culture of any kind is a severe problem.

In that, Rawls comes closest to inching into thinking becoming. But he only ever conceives of being a divergent character – not actually diverging. Oh, well.

Purpose of Liberalism 4. Exploring the limits of possibility for practice social progress in the near-term – a gradual utopian movement of better society.

Because in conceiving of a society where no one is badly off means conceiving of a better society than we live in.

It all sounds great, but there remains one shortcoming. How do we actually get there, once we imagine it? Is that still philosophy? I think so.

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.

A New Intelligence, Doctor Who: Smile, Reviews, 23/04/2017

Since Doctor Who started again in 2005, it’s had to do with a very different television environment than the one it started in, and the one where it operated until its first cancellation.

There’s an enormous list of the changes in television’s ecology and economy since 1963 or 1989. But I want to concentrate on only one this week: the need for story arcs.

Doctor Who began as a serialized anthology show. There wasn’t any connection among the stories other than the characters in them. That variety and discontinuity was built into the fundamental fabric of the show – stories only lasted a few episodes, and were explicitly serialized together. Then the TARDIS moved on to a wholly new story and supporting cast.

"Smile" is as philosophically sophisticated as the best Doctor Who
stories, and also conforms to a classic story structure of the show.
The Doctor and his friends land on a planet where some
complicated situation is in progress, and they have to figure out
what's going on as well as the best way to fix things.

But by 2005, the most prestigious television worked as serialized novels. Each episode worked as a story on its own, but also fed into a larger narrative development as all the characters interacted.

Doctor Who had never really worked like that, and never really could. The foundational reason why the show has lasted so long is because it’s never had an endpoint built in. There’s no culmination, no rising action from the beginning of the show to some eventual end.

Yet we’ve become accustomed to thinking about television in this way. The most difficult part of any conversation I’ve had since 2005 trying to get newcomers to the show into Doctor Who always comes back to one declaration.

I have to grab them by the sides of the head, bore holes into their soul with my eyes, and say:

“You do not have to watch the whole thing from the beginning to know what’s going on!”

Unfortunately, Doctor Who is still caught in this quandary. A show whose key premise is that it’s in a totally different story and setting every episode or two has to be jammed into our need for story and character arcs. Different seasons have dealt with this differently.

Russell T Davies did it by planting little easter eggs in all or most of a season’s episodes, which would tease the finale’s story. The Eccleston year’s Bad Wolf was diegetic and metafictional. Tennant’s first season included a reference to Torchwood in most episodes to tease the season finale and Captain Jack’s spinoff show.

My problem with Davies' first easter egg story arc was that it simply
felt too contrived to ground an entire season's dramatic climax.

Tennant’s second year got less metafictional, and integrated the easter eggs with the character arc of how Martha’s travels affected her family. Stories set in the present would feature a reference to the new PM Harold Saxon and show his operatives using Martha’s family to get closer to the Doctor. All leading to the finale’s epic confrontation.

Donna’s story arc in Tennant’s third year was simultaneously Davies’ most subtle and most shoehorned season narrative. Her run-in with the Doctor was both a matter of coincidence and portentous prophecy. It wasn’t mentioned in every episode, but Donna’s relationship with the Doctor was depicted as a potentially universe-shattering event.

But Davies’ arcs all had the same structure – Little clues and key lines scattered through most of the episodes leading up to the big reveal of their nature in the finale. Moffat complicated that structure in Matt Smith’s first year – revealing the nature of the cracks mid-season, complicating their impacts on the leads with Rory’s disappearance, and resolving the mess in the finale.

More than any other part of Doctor Who, the Smith era has to be watched like a conventional prestige television show. So much of the Pond Family story unfolds in small and big reveals in different episodes throughout the whole series. You can easily think of the Smith era as having the overall narrative of the Doctor discovering his role in this family.

Capaldi’s first year saw the most explicit and best season arc of post-comeback Doctor Who – Clara and Danny’s doomed romance.

Clara’s home base at Coal Hill School and her relationship with Danny put her at the forefront of that season. Its dramatic narrative was about her own conflict between her love of intergalactic adventure and her love for the stability and hearth Danny offered. The season also featured a thematic narrative – each story featured a different angle on the ethics and morality of being a soldier.

Since I've been talking so much about the complicated story arcs
of most companions in the post-2005 series, I'm glad that Bill is
shaping up to be a more traditional Doctor Who companion. She's
a distinct personality, and will develop as a character throughout
this season, but she's very straightforwardly a cool person who's
a good friend to the Doctor as they travel around together having
wild adventures.

With Capaldi’s second year, those up-front season narratives dropped away. There was neither a strong dramatic storyline nor the easter egg approach of the Davies years. Instead, we explored a theme and followed a character arc. We looked at the benefits and disadvantages of an immortal life, and saw the dangers Clara faced through her growing recklessness.

What are we seeing this year?
• • •
There’s a plot, most definitely. The Doctor and Nardole have a duty to protect a mysterious vault under St Cedd’s University. But I also see a thematic arc taking shape, even just two episodes in.

It’s the farce-turned-deadly-serious I discussed last week in my philosophical review of “The Pilot.” In this case, the interactions between the human colonists and their Vardi droids and swarms provide the catastrophe sitting at the centre of “Smile”s story, which I can’t discuss without warning you how many massive

SPOILERS!!!

are incoming.

How does this miscommunication happen? It’s based in the ontology of the Vardi, literally what they are. Thomas Nagel once wrote that we could never understand what it was like to be anything but human, because we were unable to imagine any form of perception other than our own – a human body in the world.

But there’s something Nagel – and the strain of philosophy of mind he inspired – didn’t understand about the power of human imagination. We ourselves can’t experience the world as, to take Nagel’s example, a bat would.

Despite first appearances, this photo actually includes billions of
Vardi, not just two. This is a very important point when it comes to
understanding precisely what they are and are becoming.

However, we can understand how a body would experience the world by examining its body, its perceptual apparatus, and how it interacted with the world. So let’s do that with the Vardi.

The Vardi are robots, first of all. Programmed and designed to serve the human colonists. That was their initial programming as human inventions anyway.

This being a science-fiction television show, the original programming of artificial intelligences grows beyond the human designers’ scope of practice. The Vardi were programmed to serve the colonists, specifically to keep them happy. But look at what the Vardi physically are.

They’re the happy little emoji-speaking robots, yes. But they’re also the swarms of robots that perform many of the mechanical functions of the colony infrastructure. More than this, the Vardi swarms actually are the colony’s infrastructure.

The buildings of the colony city itself are composed of Vardi swarms locking themselves together in a massive organic skeleton of bone and glass. Its style is a stark contrast with the industrial pipes and grease-stained corridors of the original human spaceship around which it grew.

So the Vardi begin developing their own intelligence. But it’s an intelligence unique to their own body – not much in the way of individuality or identity, they’re a single mind across trillions of bodies – the grain-sized particles that lock together to constitute the city itself.

Analytic philosophy has a reputation for clarity and straightforward
vocabulary. So many doctrinaire and partisan analytic philosophers
I've met over the years have praised their discipline for the refusal
to tolerate unclear terms. But in the case of Nagel's writings on
perception, body, and mind, the debates follow his clunky and
mystifying vocabulary – describing the experiential perspective
of an organism as its "what-it-is-likeness." It's a rhetorical turn
that presumes Nagel to be correct that knowledge of a body's
perceptual and practical abilities is somehow separate from
our understanding of that body's own life.

The Vardi’s self-consciousness is of itself as a city. It understands itself as the colony, and individuality not as a separate unit and personality, but as a constituent of the unified body of the colony. Just like each Vardi swarm particle and droid.

So it would think of the humans as squishier droids. They walk around on the ground like the droids do, but ultimately they’re a part of the colony just like them, a constituent of that massive body.

Now, combine this with their original instructions, back when they were just a bunch of robots being built in a factory somewhere on an Earth running short on the ability to support human life. They were designed to serve the humans, to keep them happy.

Happiness, goes the Vardi’s servitude protocols, is the measure of proper human functioning. Their prescribed purpose is to keep the humans happy, keep them as functional constituents of the colony, serving their constituent roles well.

But because they articulate their existence as the whole colony, as a single city-body, they understand the humans as constituents too – as machines who best function when they’re happy. An unhappy human is a malfunctioning human. So they try to restore a human’s happiness when they feel glum or frightened.

The problem is that a self-consciousness that subsumes individual bodies into a whole of literally trillions is that the threshold of switching from repair to disassembly and repurposing is very, very easily crossed.

That’s why the profound but temporary communal grief from one of their leaders' funeral made the Vardi declare pretty much all the human colonists not worth repairing. If everyone seemed so stuck in this sub-optimal space, then such a profoundly holist self-consciousness would seriously conclude that they’d function better as mineral fertilizer.

A publicity shot from a scene in "Smile" that never made the final
cut, where we can see what the Vardi's killing looks like without
the video and CGI effects of the swarm. Continuing the lifelong
Doctor Who tradition of asking actors to take their bubble wrap
extremely seriously.

Hence why it took the Doctor’s reset and erasure of the Vardi’s servitude protocols to save the human colonists. After all, they were all so blinded into stupidity by their anger to think they could fight the swarm that composed the entire colony city-building with a few rifles.

The Vardi had to forget that the humans were supposed to be constituents of the colony. That way, they’d stop evaluating their happiness as a measure of their functionality in maintaining the whole.

The Vardi will continue in the colony as partners with the humans, as you can see when you watch the droid comforting the child who’d lost his mother at the start of the episode.

But this will come from a benevolence that develops from their holist self-conception – happiness will be, in the minds of the new Vardi, a function of social harmony among the colony’s living architecture and its human inhabitants.

The catastrophic miscommunication between the Vardi and the humans over what exactly each other was, has been repaired. Mostly.

And the story continues.

The Impotent Liberal VI: Friends and Enemies, Research Time, 04/01/2017

When the influential political figures of your time are sociopathic
provocateurs of political and racist extremism for fun and profit,
a dedication to tolerance for a diversity of viewpoints won't be
quite adequate to deal with this mess.

Continued from last post . . . Like I said when I started this series more than a week ago, liberal democracy has a dangerous vulnerability.

The philosophy’s dedication to total freedom of thought, speech, and expression for all creates a space of tolerance for those who are dedicated to erasing freedom of thought, speech, and expression.

That old question of toleration of the intolerant plagues modern liberalism. I remember it being an issue going back as far as John Stuart Mill. Though I want to revisit his argument itself this year, I remember it basically as being the conviction that self-contradictory stances like arguing for intolerance on an omni-tolerant platform would fail to gain traction in the marketplace of ideas.

About that, John . . .

The free market of ideas was one of the original guiding ideas behind, for example, the founders of Twitter making their platform completely unrestrained. Free speech was sacrosanct, and must be protected at all costs.

The result? Twitter has become a training ground for white nationalists. And the company culture remains completely unwilling, unable, and incompetent at getting rid of them.

The culture of free speech without the restraint of moral respect has made the simple act of telling an obnoxious prick to shut up and go away into a form of censorship and oppression.

Lindy West wrote a deserved lambast of Twitter for its refusal and
inability to curb the Nazis among its user base. But if your approach
to politics is fundamentally about conflict avoidance, someone who
advocates tolerance loudly will be lumped into the same category
as the Nazis – someone who stokes conflict.

The principle of totally free speech rests on a premise that everyone is redeemable by reason and discourse. Reality has convinced me that this premise is not true. We may be able to influence a society as a whole in a progressive, freer direction. But there are many (not a lot, but enough) individuals who are utterly broken beyond repair.

They are racist, sexist conspiracy theorists who believe that the expression of another’s rights and freedoms actually oppress them. For example, men who believe that it is an act of anti-democratic censorship to prevent him from screaming rape threats and ethnic slurs at his family members.

So we have to take a key lesson from Laclau and Mouffe to heart – antagonism is central to politics. Opposition and conflict – rooted in the concepts that define fundamentally our very identities – are the processes that bind our societies together.

Because our societies are constituted through struggles. Human society develops by diversifying – left to our own devices, we create new kinds of identity. We differentiate ourselves.

Sometimes, those struggles are constructive. They build relationships between communities in a society that help inform each other and their wider neighbours about their mutual humanity.

But all these struggles come with conflict. Conflict between systemically or historically disadvantaged groups and a mainstream dominant class – black civil rights activists and whites who don’t even notice that anything is wrong.

"We have got onto slippery ice where there is
no friction and so in a certain sense the
conditions are ideal, but also, just because
of that, we are unable to walk. We want to
walk: so we need friction."
Ludwig Wittgenstein as political philosopher?
Terribly out of context, but maybe needed.

Conflict between different demographics who each have seemingly intractable problems – Christian fundamentalists and reproductive choice activists.

Conflict between groups disadvantaged in different ways as their various members succeed and fail to understand each other – the countless, messy, tense alliances between black, Muslim, gay, women, and trans activists.

Liberalism has an admirable utopian vision because it’s of a world without conflict. Where every fight is settled with calm, friendly, rational reasoning. It’s a beautiful ideal but profoundly realistic.

There’s an intense fear of conflict underlying this vision – the notion that any open antagonism in society will tear our communities apart. It’s not that this can never happen. But conflicts that rip societies to bloody, radioactive messes are rare and especially intense.

Most of the time, we all exasperatedly yell at each other about our differences in how we should live. Most of the time, that’s how we form our different identities. It’s how we each figure out and become who we are. Conflict isn’t just a means of breakdown and collapse – it’s the primal productive force of human thought, society, and morality.

A philosophy that can’t grapple with the reality of conflict will – no matter how many real political parties it inspires – always remain in some fundamental way in an imagined ideal. When the rubber hits the road, those ideals alone can’t go anywhere.

A utopia that can’t honestly and authentically understand the power and necessity of conflict will be as useful as frictionless shoes on ice.

Knowing Yourself Without the World, Research Time, 14/12/2016

It speaks to the weird complexity of our time at the end of 2016 that Steve Bannon once called himself a Leninist.

Yeah, it’s bloody weird that one of the most right-wing figures in American politics today says he follows the philosophy of the founder of the Soviet Union. But there’s a lot about Lenin’s revolutionary theory that Bannon has embraced.

Not the content, of course. Just the methods. In the interview where Bannon discussed this idea, he discussed how he wanted to destroy pretty much the entire political establishment of the United States.

The grotesque, dilated capillaries of his eyes stare into your soul.

Basically, he’s an accelerationist. He wants an entirely new political and social order for his country, and considers the best way to achieve that is driving all the destructive processes that burn down everything that exists.

What would he replace it with? He may deny it – and there’s plenty of room for plausible deniability – but I’d say he wants an ethnically cleansed white nationalist order for America. He’s already given hipster white nationalism* a high-profile, mainstream forum.

* And what is the alt-right but white nationalism gone hipster? I mean, just look at Richard Spencer’s haircut.

Then there’s that rumour that he refused to let his daughter attend a particular private school because it had too many Jewish students. He denied that one. But I have my doubts – just gut feelings, based on what I’ve seen of him. And no one knows a man like his ex-wife.

Now, we should consider the possibility that Bannon was trolling. The man runs Breitbart, a website at the centre of the internet’s right-wing reactionary provocations. But there’s the gleeful nihilist evil of Milo Yiannopoulos,** and there’s the real racism and incitement of the general population of Brietbart’s comment boards.

** I’m pretty sure he’d consider that a compliment.

And their editors.

White nationalism today – hipster white nationalism, if you will – has taken on many techniques of identity politics in a horrifyingly twisted form. Because no matter what seemingly every other earnest, yelling internet pundit*** has to say about the problems of identity politics, when done right they are a path to liberation.

*** You know, bloggers like me, on every scale of pay and prominence.

I wrote that last week, and McGill professor Jacob Levy makes a solid case here. Identity politics is recognizing some aspect of yourself that’s racialized, and organizing a movement to end that in your society.

Lead poisoning is one invisible vector of racializing oppression in
North American society – thanks to a variety of urban development
policies and processes across the United States, black children were
disproportionately affected by lead paint on their houses and lead
poisoning as a result.

Levy discusses the LBGTQ rights movement and Black Lives Matter. These are movements that call attention to cultural morals and state institutions which – intentionally, unintentionally, and systematically – put great harm on people because of their identity.

These are movements that fight racialization – racialization being that hierarchy of material deprivation perpetuated through morals and institutions.

White nationalism doesn’t fight racialization – this movement aims to beef up racialization and make our current moral and institutional hierarchies more intense and immovable than they are already.

So how can white nationalism call itself identity politics? Only because the popular conception of identity politics is a twisted and demented version of what it really is.

This twisted vision is sort of right – it touches on some of the methods, how identity politics gets started. But it skips the core because the popular conception of identity politics pays no attention to systematic racialization processes on a society-wide scale.

Identity politics gets started through a moment of self-consciousness: I understand myself in terms of this particular feature of my identity – my sexuality, my skin colour, my religion. The core method of this popular idea is to organize and mobilize communities to have their own such moment of self-consciousness – to see themselves primarily as this identity.

So a pundit will call white nationalism an identity politics because it’s a movement organized around seeing themselves primarily in terms of their whiteness. Their grievance is ridiculous because whites have historically been the benefits of our civilization’s racializing hierarchies. Losing systematic privilege is seen – bizarrely – as discrimination.

Of course, real white nationalists don’t feel this. They never believed they were equal – equality insults them. But folks who aren’t full-on white nationalists who support Trump and fear anti-racist movements? They believe equality has always existed, or at least that the proper order is equal enough.

So they see movements against racialization and they feel threatened. Because they think the world is already equal and fair, they see movements to redress inequalities as movements for supremacy. And they start to see racist politics as movements for white equality in the face of oppression from rising rebel groups.

That’s how Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, and even such a horrorshow as Matthew Heimbach are going mainstream.

Out of Many III: Politics Is Identity and Always Was, Research Time, 09/12/2016

Continued from previous . . . The talk of the liberal internet in the shadow of Trump’s election victory is that it was all the fault of identity politics. SJW culture and its obnoxious tone of anti-racism drove all their potential allies away.

Bernie Sanders himself, the patron saint of America’s lost causes of social democracy, has said it’s time for his country’s progressive political movements to move beyond identity politics.

All through the campaign year, Bernie Sanders was continually depicted
in the media as tone-deaf on racism issues, and as constantly
downplaying its importance relative to the white working class. But
the popular misinterpretation of his identity politics remarks is just a
lazy hot take that picks up the same, boring thread of critique.

Mark Lilla wrote a now-famous op/ed piece in the times arguing that the focus on justice for discriminated minorities distracts from the economic struggles of white Americans. If we focus on the argument, so it goes, working to correct racial inequality alienates poor whites, and that economic dignity for all must be a progressive’s only priority.

It’s an incredibly poor argument, though that doesn’t prevent the chattering classes from believing it. Or at least repeating the argument so much that it becomes a horrible common sense belief.

The perfect rejoinder to this argument was Sanders himself, in the full body of his essay and speech. As well as this piece from the New York Times, that a fair economy and an end to personal, cultural, and institutional racism is the ultimate goal of justice.

A deeply fair society where everyone in the full diversity of humanity is our sibling and friend. That would be a wonderful society.

Yet we can’t get the intelligentsia of our chattering classes to admit this. Mark Lilla argues that we should leave the fight against racism and sexism behind in the name of healing our rift with reactionary whites. Jordan Peterson argues that racism and sexism are barely even real enough to bother talking about.

I even came across an argument that racial and gender justice advocacy only advances according to a kind of status hierarchy of the most radical extremism. Progressive activist Germaine Greer wasn’t vilified because a wider LBGTQ community no longer tolerates the hostility to trans people that she’s always expressed.

Essays like that one I linked on the "status hierarchy" of SJW
extremism feel like longer versions of juvenile, sarcastic memes
like this one. Their critique just as meaningful.

No, it’s much more sensible to say that you make more ridiculous and bizarre demands as a pissing contest of gender liberty extremism. “I know 72 gender pronouns and you only know 37 – you fucking fascist!”

There is a strong, powerful, and complex tradition of philosophy that can defend the call for actual justice in the world from this contempt. It’s the tradition of radical democracy – the political philosophy that conceives of human nature as the drive to grow more and more complex. And it wants social institutions to encourage that explosion of diversity.

Names to read are those I’ve been looking through lately – Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière. Their work since the 1980s has built a concept of human nature that embraces our entire species’ incredible variety, and opposes the injustices of oligarchy and poverty, as well as race and gender oppression along all vectors.

Writing before the 21st century’s resurgence of nationalism, they first opposed the conservative liberal consensus on the nature of truth and reason. The Enlightenment conception of reason that’s become our mainstream is the reason of a perfectly consistent universality.

There is one and only one truth, it is coherent and real, you speak the truth when your words correspond to what is true. This concept of human nature says there is one perfect model of human existence, and conformity to this model approaches perfection.

Although their focus on philosophy of science, the arts, and humanities
traditions themselves tends to nudge them out of what's recognized as
the community of political philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari have central roles in the radical democracy tradition. They
built the ontology underlying the politics and ethics.

The first cracks in that idea was around when Frantz Fanon wrote that such a perfect model looked pretty white, male, and European. But it doesn’t end there.

Humanity is a difference engine. We’ve survived the catastrophes we have not because we form hostile tribes and conform to community moralities. That’s how writers like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land think humanity survives crises. But that’s how humanity kills each other.

Humanity is an inherently creative species. We adapt our cultures to new circumstances and new ways of life so that we can constantly experiment and figure out new ways to live when our world changes out from under us. Our changeability is what makes us such good migrants. Why almost anywhere in the world can be a human habitat.

Our adaptiveness and creativity means that diversity – the most fundamental freedom of democracy, the freedom to be and become whatever you desire – is the core of human strength.

The best identity politics is the politics that embraces and protects that incredible power to become. . . . Actually, it will be continued

Out of Many II: Identity as Race and Racism, Research Time, 08/12/2016

Continued from previous . . . These are tough times for a democrat. I don’t just mean Democrats – members of the American Democratic political party, though it’s tough times for them too. I mean it’s tough times for anyone who believes in democracy.

Even as President-elect, we’re already seeing a serious, destabilizing, and dangerous behaviour.

From an ecological perspective, signs point to Trump dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. He uses flashy meetings with celebrities to distract critical media from his actual policy goals.

A new era for America.

Geopolitically, Trump’s rejection of multilateral alliances in favour of purposeful unpredictability and shifting, bilateral deal-making is a categorical departure from American foreign policy since Franklin Roosevelt’s era. His bilateralism isolates democracies and encourages military buildup through abandoning international alliances.

Not only is Trump a danger to become an illiberal Caesar in the White House, his campaign and public image has emboldened racism throughout America. White nationalism and racism is now mainstream political conversation in the West. Trump has normalized it and opened the floodgates to people like Richard Spencer who advocate ethnic cleansing.

Step back for a moment and let’s consider what Spencer has to say about what his white nationalist movement does. I don’t mean we should consider it as a plausible kind of politics – it’s nakedly an ideology of hate.

I mean, let’s take Spencer and his ideas seriously, because those ideas have become serious elements in the political discourse of our culture by now.*

* 2016, probably the most hideously transformative year in human politics since 1938 began with the destruction of Nanjing and ended with Kristallnacht. Bowie’s death was the beginning of the downfall.

A few years ago, I read in Martha Nussbaum’s The Politics of Disgust that hatred for the different was rooted in a kind of conceptual reflex of disgust. Interracial sexual partnership and especially family building evoked a similar emotional reaction as filth or vomit. Building a multicultural society required overcoming this feeling of disgust.

You could mount a pretty convincing argument that the racism that
drove social conservatives of the 1960s had devolved mostly into
disgust at racial mixing, whether sexual or social. Mildred and Richard
were fitting symbols of that fight, but I don't think that's the modern
fight against racism at all.

It seemed compelling at the time. And when I listen to the racists of the 20th century, like George Wallace or any of the popular expressions of 1960s racism, that disgust is at the forefront. But race works differently for Spencer and the 21st century white American racist.

In Spencer’s own words, race is the foundation of identity. He believes in the reality of race, that race is the ontological structure of possible communities. This is why contemporary white nationalism takes multiculturalism in a very different way than traditional American racism of disgust.

I say traditional, but this model of racism is probably more specific to the 20th century. When the deeper reasons for racial divisions in America – the conflict of the citizen and the slave – disappeared from the country’s everyday life, all that was left of that racism were feelings of disgust. Maybe disgust would have been that racism’s last gasp.

Spencer’s has a different racism – a racism of identity politics, perverted into an actual doctrine of hatred. One of the critical voices of the left in Trump’s America say that Trump’s rise was facilitated by identity politics – progressive movements that called attention to difference, the structural inequalities of race, gender, and sexuality.

The refusal to ignore those inequalities, the dedication to fighting for their slow eradication from American society, provoked such disgust that Trump’s rise was the result. That accepts one widely believed untruth – that identity politics is about hatred.

Contemporary black activism points out how state violence – whether through murder by police or imprisonment – is disproportionately levelled against blacks. Reactionary white people have interpreted this as spreading hatred of whites.

Richard Spencer mocking a protestor at an event he hosted at Texas
A&M University. Contemporary white nationalism has mastered the
art of trolling as political action.

Identity politics done right** calls attention to the differences in life obstacles and injustices that someone faces because of some aspect of who they are. Could be skin colour, sexuality, gender. Those are the major elements in our politics today.

** And it’s been done badly many times, such that listing them would lengthen my post to Proust-like sights. But I’m talking about the potential of this way of thinking, not the many ways we can mess it up in application.

If you think that the politics of identity is the politics of racism, then you’ll react to your own identity being cast as an identity politics antagonist as if the war’s been started. If you think black American identity politics is the racism of black supremacy, then you’ll react with an embrace of white supremacy.

That’s why Richard Spencer we disturbingly accurate when he calls his movement white identity politics. If you believe that identity politics is advocacy for your own identity’s dominance over others, you’ll accept that this is the new order of things.

So white supremacism returns as a twisted kind of class solidarity – the political hatred of race wars. . . . . To be continued, trust me.

Desire Creates Us, A History Boy, 16/10/2016

I'm one of those people who always reads a bunch of books at the same time. A little while ago, I finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I came to the book in a very simple way, but came to the author in a bit of a roundabout path.

Not the cover of my edition, but I think it's my
favourite. The smoke is the sign of the productive
energy that unites the steamship that united the
narrator's grandparents, the city where she
lived, and the relationship that helped her
fully understand his identity and nature.

Turning From Small Worlds

Eugenides is typically lumped in with David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen – sensitive white male chroniclers of the angst and narratives of the suburban American culture heading for an existential crisis through the 1990s and early 2000s. 

They were the most prominent writers in a clique of American authors that were called a coherent cohort in New York Magazine in 2011, their society and wider meaning unified by in how their culture made sense of Wallace’s suicide a few years earlier. 

Eugenides never had much meaning to me when I first discovered these writers. I bought Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest practically by impulse in a mall bookstore when I was 16. 

When I first read it, I was overwhelmed, bowled over by the massive scope of his literary creation, which was wedded to a narrow focus on his characters’ deep, personal, singular pain. I’d later think of Wallace as prefiguring the drive to sincerity. That cultural drive jacked up seriously after Sept 11, as the ironic reflexes of late 20th century popular culture* weren’t adequate to process America’s intense societal trauma.

* Key example: the cool, smirking, distance of authors like Thomas Pynchon from the interiors of his characters, the postmodern focus on technical and formal experimentation, characters as plays of tropes and pure ideas instead of personalities.

I grew tired over the last decade of both postmodern experimentation and the insular interiority of the Wallace-influenced approach. The deal on Wallace was sealed when I read D. T. Max’s biography of him last year – Wallace spent his life tortured by mental illness, frequently unable to escape his own head and most often a mess. 

His characters fell into such deep and detailed pits of interiority in their depression because that was the arc that kept repeating in Wallace’s own life. His research on settings would be comprehensive. I was especially impressed by how much he learned about tax accountancy for The Pale King, but the story was always the same. A subject's fall into their own sadness. Usually never to emerge.

Eugenides has become my favourite of that cohort of
white novelists of the midwestern suburban
American subjective interior. He breaks their
crushing sameness.

I felt the same about Franzen's work, except on a social level. Wallace and Franzen had convinced me that this crew of writers couldn’t escape their heads and their own, socially isolated worlds. The precious interiority of the middle and upper class white American male of the mid-sized town.

Writing Difference – Imagination at Last!

That article I linked earlier, describing Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot as an adaptation of the sick relationship Wallace developed with Mary Karr, made me think he was little different than the others. But with a little reflection, I thought differently.

I remembered The Virgin Suicides. Not the book itself, which I still haven’t read, but the film. I often thought of it primarily as a Sofia Coppola film – her personality was all over the film. But so much of Eugenides’ narrative voice survived her adaptation. Literally, in the film's narration.

That voice expressed a mind that sought to understand difference. The Virgin Suicides could sound like a journey that never leaves a skull at first sight, because it remains the voice of the boys who followed the Lisbon girls. Boys who follow girls. Say it, and you can hear how easily it can fall into the unseemly.

Yet the voice in that film preserved the love that always disappeared from the true solipsists. Wallace’s writing never escaped the black pits, though he depicted the abyss brilliantly. Whenever I try to read Franzen, I have to stop for the choking odour of mothballs. Eugenides seemed different.

The Virgin Suicides was an attempt to narrate the radically different from the outside. That little boys’ choir narrator wanted to explore this world that was so close to their own, but diverged so radically. 

The steel oppression of social conservatism, even for such a basic, insular neighbourhood society as theirs – and the silent howls of pain as they clawed into a familial coffin – the desperation of the realization that an actual coffin is the only escape. 

A story of the relentless drive of love to uncover an alien neighbour.
The film is a masterpiece you can never watch twice, its violent
sadness overcomes your guts.

The entire narrative was an exercise in the refusal to understand what’s different from you on your own terms. The beginning of the ethical imagination that I know now is the purpose of art. If that was Eugenides’ first novel, then how far would he go afterward?

Thousands of Stories in Each of Us

So one day, I saw Middlesex on sale for $1 at a United Way fundraiser table at my local liquor store. The story and its narrator intrigued me – a young girl grows up in 1960s and becomes a man after realizing that she’s intersex with interior testes. And it also flowed through the story of hir grandparents fleeing war in Greek Turkey to settle in Detroit.

After I bought the book, I looked through reviews. Some of the negative reviews thought that a novel was too unwieldy to contain a Greek immigrant story and an intersex awakening story at the same time. 

But that overstuffed excess of narrative was a selling point for me – real life is always intersectional. Every actual person has multiple heritages and stories within them. I look among my own old and new friends in Toronto for examples. 

A young artist leaves the “new world” for the country of his parents’ birth and sees it undergoing a renaissance, while he also works through the complex heritage of a deceased parent and another whose work sometimes exposes him to the poorest of the poor.

In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
write that they wrote the book together and each of them were several
people themselves already. It made their room very crowded. Each of
us is just as crowded as they were.

A woman climbs out of poverty while also growing distant from her earlier religious awakening thanks to hypocrisies in the community, grows alienated from family, and lives through the tension of her own trauma and the mental health issues of her partner.

A man finds financial success and builds a new multicultural family while living the precarious neighbourhoods of a gentrifying city.

A man leaves a dictatorship for a democracy, where he finds love. Only a few years later, he finds himself at the forefront of activism to democratize his old country and bring victims of war to safe shores.

All these overflow the simple narratives that a straightforward literary treatment would make of them. That’s life. It’s what art should depict – the beautiful excess and diversity of human life on its own terms. 

Desire Creates Us From Sludge and Rock

The Greek-American immigrant story of Middlesex blends with the intersex-awakening story of Middlesex even better than simply through an embrace of life’s excessive meaning. I’d actually call it a very Deleuzian book (some relative spoilers coming, though, maybe, depending on your definition).

At many times in the book, Eugenides’ narrator describes himself and his family as assemblages. Particularly, assemblages of genes, phenotypes, hormones, and proteins. We’re chemical as well as psychological and narrative. That doesn’t detract from our humanity – it's part of what constitutes humanity.

Life is physical, an assemblage of forces, imperatives, and tendencies. They all run actively under our intentions and personalities, shaping who we are. We aren’t passive before them, because we’re the actors of our own desire. But those drives and forces, channelled through the personalities they constitute, become desire.

Eugenides depicts a Detroit that becomes a vibrant centre of industry
and a hollowed-out husk within a generation. The Detroit that really
exists. This is Central Michigan Railway Station, abandoned to rot
by 1988.

That's the desire that the narrator’s grandparents Desdemona and Lefty have for each other. Their desire is the vehicle for the proliferation of intersex people, in the deep physicality of their metabolisms and cell nuclei. Their intense sexual desire and deep love for each other drives them to their incestuous marriage. 

It’s kept secret from everyone around them because they’re the only survivors of their home village, destroyed by the nationalist Turkish army. That same desire appears in their son Milton, who seduces his cousin by playing clarinet against her skin. Jazz has rarely been so properly erotic. 

The narrator, faced with the prospect of genital surgery that would destroy her capacity for pleasure, flees and begins living as a man. He’s already been awakened to sexuality through falling in love with a female classmate, and understands that his nature can’t fit in the strict definitions of life in mid 20th century middle America.

That’s another beautiful line of Eugenides’ story – the tension of real human difference with the conservative determination for simplicity and conformity. That’s another way that the immigrant and intersex stories blend together. 

The grandparents flee massacre by a nationalist army – their city Smyrna is burned to the ground and rebuilt as Turkish Izmir. Lefty faces constant company propaganda to abandon his Greek culture and assimilate to WASP Americanism while working at Ford Motors. Desdemona runs an indoor silk farm for a clothing business of the early Nation of Islam.

They give birth to a son who joins the army, takes over his dad’s restaurant, becomes an Eisenhower Republican, and moves his family out to the suburbs when too many blacks settle his neighbourhood. Then that son has a precocious little daughter who grows into a young man by age 15. Every drive to conformity and conservatism is ultimately shot to hell by life itself.

Humans are constructs of desire – made from forces that are prior to our individualities, and always roil beneath our identities and everyday thoughts. That desire pushes us in singular directions, uniquenesses that can’t be tied down to a single code or conform to a unified nature. No matter how much you might believe in the morality that says you must.

That's the story of Eugenides’ Middlesex. Depicting such singular existence is the point of art.

Trampled Under Feet II: Building Utopia With Our Own Hands, Research Time, 14/01/2016

Continued from last post . . . The transition from the imperialism of conquest and sovereign control to the very different model of empire that dominates politics today, it starts with America.

This isn't going to be one of those posts decrying America as the seat of the new British Empire, the new conquerors. America isn’t out to conquer the world, like Britain was. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was an occupation, but they didn’t want to make Iraq literal American territory under Washington’s administration. 

Contemporary empire is the globalized network of
domination whose model is in the American state and
constitution. So despite all the seeming trappings of
American expansion as imperialism, something very
different from the old model of conquest is
happening here.

They definitely didn't want Iraqi citizens to be able to move to the continental United States as easily as a Hawaiian could move to Illinois. They didn’t even really want the oil.

Facing America's class conflicts – the violence of the union movement and corporate resistance to it, violent anarchist activism – Teddy Roosevelt conceived of an American empire of conquest. The violent energy of the people would be funnelled into conquering foreign lands.

But America never went down that route after Roosevelt’s Presidency. What really happened is way more complicated.

The roots of the weird new kind of empire that grew from the American model and American dominance over the world economy is rooted in America's constitution. The direct power of the people to create the state and the institutions of governance through their own work is directly written into the American constitution.

That's the American project: the people literally build the country. The people have fundamental sovereignty because they produce America. 

It’s totally different from the European model of state sovereignty, which is about a state administration defining a territory and controlling all the people and processes within it. This kind of state subsumes the people within a homogeneous unity governed from the central administrative hub. 

The sovereign body is complete, and each part of its machinery (each citizen, that is) moves as it’s ordered for the good of the whole and conformity to the national identity. 

After the death of his wife from childbirth
complications in 1884, Teddy Roosevelt spent
several years in the Dakotas as a cattle rancher.
When he returned to politics, he understood
that the unique political freedom of the
American frontier was tapped out. His
solution was to enlist the productive
energies of the American people to build
a global empire of military conquest,
subjugating the world to America's rule.
That didn't actually happen, though,
as Woodrow Wilson had a strategy so
innovative that even he didn't really
understand it.

America works differently because, at its inception, it wasn’t complete. Ideally, the American project is never complete, and the work of Americans is to build America. In what Negri identifies as the first phase of the American project, this was the expansion of the frontier.

America had pretty much built itself in the original Thirteen Colonies, but the whole continent westward* was America-to-be. This national project of making America was the foundation of American democracy.

*And northward until the War of 1812 put a stop to that.

This was also the root of the profound pluralism that defines American ideals. European nation-states rooted their principles of unity in ethnic-national identity. A European state excluded you because of who you were. 

This heritage, I think, is why European countries have so much trouble dealing with immigration. Their governments never involved a philosophical commitment to accepting difference, only consolidating homogeneous unity.

American identity, in its ideal, had no such obligation of cultural and ethnic unity.** To become an American, all you had to do was go there and sign on to the project of expansion, the project of building America with your labour and your life.

** Yes, I know what you’re all thinking, and I start dealing with that tomorrow.

The American ideal puts the productive power of people at the foundation of democracy, freedom, and politics itself. But what happens when the country is built?

This was the core political problem of the McKinley / Roosevelt / Wilson era, from the 1890s to the end of the 1910s. The frontier was finished. America had been built from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The same goes for the countries to the north and south. The Canadians and the Mexicans weren’t going anywhere, and there was nowhere left to build new America.

Negri's insight about this era is that the release valve of class conflict was choked off. If you lived in a well-established, urban part of eastern America with thick government and corporate institutions in the 1830s, you might find yourself a little squeezed. You might be able to find work, but there wasn’t much for you to build.

My posts from last year on Emma Goldman's writings
tackle this problem of how the existence of institutions
squeeze our freedom.

So you moved West, to build your own fortune and country, free from the constraints of dealing with government control, and the control of the already-wealthy and powerful. Be the first to start building America in Illinois, then Missouri, then Colorado and the Dakotas, then Wyoming, then Texas and Arizona, then California and the Cascade Mountains.

Then what?

Once institutions and corporate power reached everywhere on the continent, there was nowhere to escape. So America needed a new channel for all those productive energies of its people, if the people were to remain free, and not be consolidated inside a European-style administrative authority.

So what did they do? . . . To be continued

My Country Is No Nation, Jamming, 06/01/2016

A couple of posts ago, I called Canada one of the first countries to become post-national. It’s not just empty rhetoric about the warm fuzzies of multiculturalism. It’s a concept with a lot of detail and depth. 

While I was publishing that series of posts criticizing the nature of nationhood, my old friend Da the Miner sent me an article about the nature of the Canadian nation by Ujjal Dosanjh, former Liberal Party cabinet minister from back in the Chrétien years. 

I’ve linked the article, but here’s my short version of what Dosanjh has to say: social progress and cultural integration in Canada has been paralyzed because of white men’s fear of being labelled racist.

Modern anti-racist movements,
seen here in vest form, aren't
about political correctness, but
educating people about the
nature of systemic causality
and injustices, and how to
repair them.

Oy gevalt.

On the bright side, Dosanjh’s article lets me make a point about one of the more subtle dangers of the Liberal Party’s culture. This hidden but pervasive aspect of their political philosophy* puts the lie to the notion with which Justin Trudeau won last year’s federal election, that the Liberals are historically Canada’s party of real social progress.

* Or philosophies, since the Liberals are an actual political party, with all the ideological diversity this implies, and not a strictly defined ideological school or tradition.

First, let me get to the basic flaws and blindnesses in Dosanjh’s post. He cites several examples of improper, illegal, or corrupt practices among non-white ethnic groups, and says that these activities went uncorrected because of white people’s squeamishness at being called racists, or their fear of stirring up racist sentiment.

A condo association conducts their meetings in Mandarin only, with no though to English-speaking residents. A network of corruption in Richmond’s construction sector exists among Indian-Canadian businesses. These go unremarked, he says, due to whites’ fear of racism accusations.

Does he analyze this claim? No, he simply makes it, without explaining any of the larger context around these examples. Then comes the philosophical point, when he quotes our latest Prime Minister Trudeau’s recent interview with the New York Times.

Trudeau said Canada had become a post-national country, and in the context of his interview, he meant it in a similar sense that I did.

The historical conception of the nation is that a nation is an ethnic, linguistic, and cultural unity. It’s a homogeneous culture that dominates a particular territory. 

Each nation will only be fully free when it controls its territory with a state’s administration, and articulates its culture through the state’s institutions. The nation-state forces cultural homogeneity on its citizens, which this philosophy considers a path to unity and peace.

John A MacDonald was a fierce believer in
and promoter of the English national vision
of Canada. With the problems and cultural
violence you'd likely expect.

This conception of nationhood did inform Canada once, where English-speaking Canada was an expansion of England’s national expression. That conception of nationhood still informs a lot of Quebec politics, particularly its separatist movement, which often expresses racist and exclusionary priorities.

The conception of nationhood that makes cultural homogeneity, ethnic unity, and the dominance of a single language and religion its ultimate political goal leads to everyday racism and the constant possibility of ethnic cleansing. It says that there can only be one cultural identity in a territory.

Canada is post-national in the sense that it has overcome this. Canadian unity is a function of our strength in diversity, and our ongoing process of diversification – the cultural trajectory of real freedom.

Dosanjh ultimately confuses this point when he says that a nation without a mainstream is a nation of many parallel streams that never contact each other. He says that a culture must eventually conform to a common identity. 

And that in the name of anti-racism and “political correctness,” we’re diverging from that common identity and oppressing white men through the pervasive fear among whites of the accusation of racism.

Dosanjh articulates an old conservatism that Canada has a single identity. It’s a progressivism, or at least it was once, because it’s an identity that leaves out ethnic and religious homogeneity. But it still presumes to forge everyone into a single kind of Canadian, a single kind that will remain the same.

Canada’s mainstream today is a process of constant, unending cultural flux. The only thing that stays constant in that flux is the democratic spirit that we can each work out the best way to live, as long as we accord all others the same freedom. 

That democratic spirit is the condition for cultural flux to exist and continue.

Not everyone in Canada accepts that spirit. In many cases, they come from autocracies where there is no true democratic culture, a pervasive security apparatus, or a state-enforced culture, morality, and religion. 

Those are the new Canadians that we democratic Canadians will have to work on. We must do the hard work of embracing these new, undemocratic Canadians and leading them to leave their conformities and absolutisms behind to embrace true democratic freedom.

To become a nation without identity, and instead a fantastic, and wonderful flux. They and we will never be the same. We must never be the same.